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

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

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

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

By Frances Waite

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

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

By Alfonso Duran

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

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

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

By Elif Özen

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Tim Barr

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

By Noelia Towers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Zoë Waldman

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Félicien Rops

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

AND SO, WE CAME TO THE END.

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

Truly, the future is panning out gloriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jose Luis Cena

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

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

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

By Cody Bratt

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Zhiyong Jing

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

By Elizabeth Zvonar

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

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

By FeeBee

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

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

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

By Zoe Hawk

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Cecil Touchon

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO HAPPY FRIDAY!

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

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

By Bobbi Essers

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Kumi Oguro

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Neko Sawatzki

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I got to go to a GALLERY OPENING this week, like an IMPORTANT PERSON (I am not an important person, I simply still have friends who work in arts PR), and as such I would like to use the limited real estate available to me at the top of Curios to strongly recommend the Electric Dreams show at the Tate Modern – if you’ve any interest in the history of how art and electronics have intersected from the mid-20thC onwards then it really is superb, and, even if you don’t, IT WILL FCUKING EDUCATE YOU.

Otherwise, this week has largely been characterised by my having to turn off the radio every time they decide to talk about the assisted dying bill – look, you’re all entitled to your opinions, but when you’ve watched someone die slowly, painfully, cruelly and helplessly over the course of a couple of years I’m going to suggest that it rather changes your perspective on the whole question, and if you all think I haven’t already banked my Switzerland cash in preparation then, well, you’re wrong.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t get this sort of mix of light artistic recommendation and vaguely-nihilistic thanatophilia ANYWHERE else!

By Keita Morimoto (links this week once again via TIH, for which thanks)

BASK IN THE GLORY OF A BRAND NEW MIX OF EXCELLENT (MOSTLY) HIPHOP FROM SADEAGLE, WHO HAS BRIEFLY EMERGED FROM CORNISH OBSCURITY TO BLESS YOUR EARS!

THE SECTION WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO SEEING ALL THE EXCITING, INNOVATIVE AND FAR-WORSE-MODERATED PLATFORMS AUSTRALIA’S KIDS WILL FLOCK TO NOW, PT.1:  

By Clayton Schiff

NEXT UP, SOME PLEASINGLY-HARD TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY JENTEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO SEEING ALL THE EXCITING, INNOVATIVE AND FAR-WORSE-MODERATED PLATFORMS AUSTRALIA’S KIDS WILL FLOCK TO NOW, PT.2:  

• Fugatto: While a lot of focus this year has been on the leaps and bounds made by AI video, I’ve personally been most impressed with the advances made in audio generation – the latest versions of stuff like Suno really are astonishing, and while the programs aren’t quite composing chart toppers yet they are definitely good enough that stock audio libraries ought soon to be entirely-redundant. Potentially more interesting, though, is stuff going on at the weird edges of sound generation – which brings us neatly to Fugatto, which is actually ‘a framework for audio synthesis and transformation’ and which is only really a proof-of-concept idea thing, and which is here presented as…quite a dense paper, but which I am sharing with you because some of the examples of what they’re trying to do here are genuinely interesting. Rather than getting the machine to imagine sounds that we could make ourselves, wouldn’t it be more interesting to get it to imagine sounds that have never previously existed? Sounds that we can’t even begin to conceptualise? Sounds so odd that even language doesn’t seem to be able to adequately describe them? YES IT WOULD! So click the link, scroll down, and hear the first rudimentary attempts to get a machine to generate the sound of ‘a cello barking’ or ‘a saxophone screaming’ or ‘an oral delivery of a violin playing a beautiful solo in English saying the words “I need to know; Who let the dogs out?”, sounding like a violin playing a beautiful solo.’ Seriously, this is VERY ODD, but also super-interesting in terms of pushing the boundaries of what we can imagine and conceive of. We’re going to start needing new words, aren’t we?
• Woznim: Via my friend Ged comes this potentially-helpful little app – do YOU struggle to remember who the fcuk people are and what they are called? In that case it’s entirely possible that this app will save your life (or, more accurately, from momentary, low-level embarrassment). Basically this lets you make notes of people’s names based on where you met them, thereby associating person with place – which, apparently, helps one remember someone else’s name. Per the blurb, “Easily save the names of people you meet and the exact locations where you met them. Whether it’s a coffee shop, a conference, or a random encounter on the street, Woznim helps you keep track. Add personalized notes to each entry. Keep track of important details, like the conversation you had, mutual interests, or future plans.” One the one hand, I can imagine this being useful for a particular type of person; on the other, it probably doesn’t help if the main reason you can’t remember anyone’s name is that, at heart, you simply don’t give a fcuk if they live or die, so possibly worth bearing that in mind.
• Pearls: WELCOME BACK TO THE WORLD OF LUXE BRAND BROWSERGAMES! This is designed to promote the overpriced gewgaws of Van Cleef & Arpel – you’ll need to open it on your phone, but when you do you’ll get access to a pleasingly-gentle little game in which your sole task is to bounce a pearl from one pillar to another by tapping your phone’s screen (it’s…low-octane entertainment, fair to say). Depending on the score you achieve, you can attain REWARDS – admittedly my performance was so poor that all I was offered by way of recompense was, er, some branded wallpaper for my phone, but I like to imagine that if you really rack up the points you get the chance to win a cubic zirconia the size of your face.
• Leonardo’s Inventions: On the one hand, Da Vinci was doubtless one of the world’s great polymaths with a near-genius level grasp of a range of disciplines; on the other, he gets an awful lot of credit for being an inventor when, to be honest, most of his ‘inventions’ were bullsh1t. Yeah, ok Leo, you ‘invented the helicopter’ – except you didn’t really, you did a (very impressive, admittedly) sketch of a prototype which, thanks to MODERN KNOWLEDGE, we now know wouldn’t have worked at all. Your flying machine? Wouldn’t have gotten off the ground mate. That tank? Ever see active service, did it? I am merely trying to point out that calling Da Vinci (fuck, for some reason my brain has just remembered those two viral twins from Covid-times and is now insisting on pronouncing this ‘Da Vinky’ – thanks brain, you cnut) a great inventor based on his sketches is like calling me a great inventor based on that period I went through aged c.4 when I was obsessed with building multi-part transformer cars out of LEGO. Anyway, that extended and wildly-unfair rant about one of history’s great minds out of the way, this is a nice selection of 3d models of said inventions which you can peruse at your leisure.
• Kortex: I realised many years ago that I simply have no interest at all in OPTIMISING MY LIFE, or developing EFFICIENT WAYS OF BEING AND THINKING – I simply don’t care, turns out. That said, if YOU are the sort of person who’s always liked the idea of having some sort of digitally-assisted filing system to help you arrange your thoughts and your work and your ideas in some sort of cogent, coherent and useful way then you might find Kortex useful – I think it’s still in beta, but it looks like a reasonably-useful set of tools, particularly for people whose practice involves lots of research and note-taking across different fields and areas of interest.
• Routeshuffle: Not an entirely original concept – I think I saw something like this during Lockdown 1 – but I am generally a fan of things that encourage you to explore your local area in different or unusual ways. Routeshuffle basically lets you choose your starting point, whether you’re walking, running or cycling, asks how long you want to go for, and then plots you a random route – helpfully these are circular so you’ll end up back where you started. Nice, simple and useful – there’s a premium version for some reason, but I will forgive the poor student who built this for attempting to scrub together a few pennies because, well, times are hard and we all need to eat.
• Treasure Inside: FINALLY! After predicting for YEARS that treasure hunt/puzzle books – a la Masquerade – are going to make a comeback, FINALLY THEY HAVE (turns out if you keep repeating something at regular intervals for long enough you will eventually be proved right). Treasure Inside follows a spate of more homegrown treasurehunt projects with a rather more large-scale and shiny variant – Jon Collins-Black has hidden five treasure boxes across North America, packed with goodies, and has written a book packed with clues to help eager hunters work out where they are and track them down. Per the blurb, “There’s Treasure Inside is the culmination of close to five years of work. The author worked with experts in several fields to put together a treasure both unique and valuable. Worth millions of dollars and growing more valuable each day, the pieces in the treasure are as varied as they are unique. Chosen to appeal to as many different tastes and interests as possible, items include Bitcoin, antiquities, shipwreck bounty, rare Pokémon cards, sports memorabilia, gold, precious metals and rare gems. Other objects have historical significance, including ones made or owned by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andrew Carnegie, George Washington, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Onassis, Henry David Thoreau, and Louis Comfort Tiffany.” I can’t help it, I fcuking LOVE stuff like this – I still remember with genuine pleasure working on Perplex City back in the day, and I really would love someone to do something large-scale like this in the UK please thankyou.
• Productivity Blocker: A reader writes! I have no idea who this person is, but they emailed me with this project, described thusly: “While there are plenty of Chrome extensions for helping you focus, this is the first one that blocks productive websites so you can relax. It currently blocks over 80 productive websites including: Slack, Fiverr, Duolingo, Linkedin and Dropbox.  All blocked sites are redirected to this block page https://www.productivityblocker.com/blocked, with fun (and stupid) recreational links people can enjoy. The extension is free and exists mostly as a joke/parody of our glamorization of always working, hustle culture. But as an added plus, it does promote wellness and not burning out.” I rather like this, and should any of you currently be working for Nestle, then a) your employer’s a cnut; and b) you can totally rip this off as a simple brand activation for KitKat, that will be one million pounds in consultancy fees please.
• Salaryman Synthfun: Ok, I don’t usually link to single Insta posts without context but, well, I can’t find any additional context and this is simply too much fun to exclude. Just click the link and enjoy the video of a Japanese man absolutely wigging out as he plays a cacophonous mess on synths using a videogame controller as input. The accompanying caption just reads: “Many Japanese salarymen spend their Friday nights playing synthesizers like crazy using game controllers”, which makes me think that perhaps the word ‘many’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Do any of you live in Japan? Can any of you confirm or deny that this is in fact a thing that people do rather than something that one bloke does?
• Saapato: Via Kris at Naive, this is a beautiful little site built by sound artist Brendan Principato – I don’t really quite know how to describe it, but it’s…a sort of patchwork mosaic of works and photos and fragments of music, and if you click around on the various patchwork squares each generates a sound, meaning you can create a light audio tapestry as you navigate which will be different for each of you. Beautifully, whatever I seem to press manages to combine to create something vaguely-beautiful, which is no mean feat of programming – this really is rather gorgeous.
• Intro: This was introduced to me this week by James Whatley, who described it as ‘LinkedIn meets Cameo’, a combination of words so singularly-unappealing that I nearly voided myself in immediate protest upon hearing them. Still, if you’re the sort of dreadful, dead-behind-the-eyes fcuk who likes to think of themselves as a ‘thought leader’ then you can rent yourself out for meetings using this platform/app – it’s basically like an escort service but for cnuts on LinkedIn, so you have various startup/tech people offering the benefits of their hard-earned wisdom for a mere $2k a session, or various multiply-jointed yoga influencers or clean eating gurus and DEAR GOD everyone here is a vision of alphaness in taupe. Still, if you’d like to pay four figures to have some sort of Stephen Bartlettalike spaff out some rubbish about the vital importance of HUSTLE AND GRIND MENTALITY then, well, you’re a fcuking idiot, frankly. Although now I come to think of it I am not so proud that I’m not partly tempted to put myself up on there for ‘demotivational chats’ just to see if there are any takers.
• Net Elevation: Want to know what the net elevation of someone’s life was – that is, what the net difference in the height above sea level of their place of birth and place of death was? WELL LUCKY YOU!
• Travel In Times: Would you like to be able to quickly and easily find out how long it would have taken you to travel from, say, Sevenoaks to Bury in the 17th Century? GREAT NOW YOU CAN! This is really interesting, promise – it estimates travel times based on the road network that was in place across Europe at the time (and, presumably, making generous assumptions about the likelihood of your drowning in any sea crossings you might need to make), and as such you can learn that it would have taken a day and a half to get to Cambridge from London 500 years ago, but that that time was slashed to 4h just a hundred or so years later. Insert your own gags here about how unfavourably your travel times back home this christmas compare to those from an era before electricity.
• Surveillance Self-Defence: Are YOU an incredibly paranoid person who is increasingly convinced that THEY are watching your every move online? Well you’re probably right tbh, they almost certainly are – and why wouldn’t they be, you PERVERT? Anyway, should you feel the beady eyes of surveillance upon you – or at least *think* that you do – you might find this collection of tips and tools and remaining unmonitored online of use. They’re…they’re a TOUCH on the paranoid side, but I suppose that’s kind of the point. My snark aside, it’s obviously true that for a variety of people, for a variety of reasons, this sort of thing is hugely important – per the blurb, “Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) is a guide to protecting yourself from electronic surveillance for people all over the world. Some aspects of this guide will be useful to people with very little technical knowledge, while others are aimed at an audience with considerable technical expertise and privacy/security trainers. We believe that everyone’s threat model  is unique—from activists in China to journalists in Europe to the LGBTQ community in Uganda. We believe that everyone has something to protect, whether it’s from the government or parents or prying employers, stalkers, data-mining corporations, or an abusive partner.”
• Smoke and Fire: A page of gifs of smoke and fire from cartoons. No more, no less. There’s something sort of wonderful about the way these are collected, and it’s really worth scrolling all the way through to get the full effect.
• Let’s Party: On the one hand, part of me thinks that this is a really great idea; on the other, part of me also thinks that this is the sort of thing that cause some quite INCREDIBLE ruptures in the more complicated and messy types of friendship group. Let’s Party is a an app for your phone that attempts to bring back the UNFETTERED FUN of the pre-digital age – the idea is that you take photos through the app, which doesn’t then ‘unlock’ them until the morning afterwards – so you only get the full dump in the morning when you’ve forgotten all about what you may or may not have snapped. Which, yes, I can totally see as being fun! But the wrinkle here is that you can let multiple phones have a shared account – which means you’ll also get everyone ELSE’S photos at the same time too, which is obviously fine if you’ve all been good but is potentially…less fine depending on how the night panned out and exactly what your relationship is with these people and, look, I’m not suggesting you’re all messy b1tches who love drama but, equally, this feels…dangerous.
• Pierret’s Dream House: I LOVE THIS! Pierret is, apparently, a French business that sells glazing (doors and windows) – they’re currently running a promo where you are in with the chance of winning 20 grand’s worth of, er, doors and windows (is that a lot of doors and windows? I’m not really up on how much stuff costs beyond weed and casillero del diablo these days), based on your ability to DESIGN YOUR OWN DREAM HOUSE! Yes, that’s right, presumably riffing on the recent popularity of similarly ‘cosy’ (sorry, HATEFUL word) villagebuilding games, this is a surprisingly-full-featured little browsergame where you can spin up your own maison or chateau, personalise the…yes, DOORS AND WINDOWS to your heart’s content, and then presumably have your creation judged by Monsieur Pierret at the end of it. Honestly, I adore this, mainly for the fact that it’s a lot deeper and more fully-featured than it probably needed to be – for one or two of you (the one or two of you who still hanker after a doll’s house, probably) this will possibly prove mesmerising.
• Solitomb: A fun fantasy-roguelike cardgame based (loosely) on Solitaire – this is FUN, simple to learn but surprisingly-complex, and can comfortably eat away a few of those hours standing between you and a date with the muscle-relaxant of your choice.
• Known Mysteries: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is, honestly, one of my favourite things of the year. Known Mysteries is, per the blurb, “about the desire to escape Earth. Using a mix of video and text, Sorrow’s story unfolds with the help of the player to solve the mysteries in her town.” But honestly, that doesn’t even begin to describe all the reasons why I adore this. It’s the first game to be built and hosted on the Solar Server, which is, as the name suggests, a solar-powered server in Alberta, Canada, maintained by Kara Stone who also wrote the game – per the blurb on the site, “Solar Server is an autonomous solar powered web server run from my apartment balcony in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It will host a series of videogames designed to be low-carbon and have environmental themes in the games. My goal with this project is to not only represent environmentalist themes and have people think about the future of the planet and what needs to change, but also put principles of sustainability into actual practice. Because I am an artist, I want people to see and interact with my work, yet my previous work demands you interact with fossil fuels in order to engage with it—on Steam’s servers, Apple’s, Androids, and itch.io’s. With Solar Server, consuming fossil fuels is no longer a necessity when playing my work.” So, to start with, that’s just really cool – but also, the game is GREAT. Seriously, it’s brilliant – it’s more a visual novel, fine, but it’s brilliantly-written and well-paced and the treatment of photos and imagery and video to make it all work as a lightweight website on a small server actually works in service of the narrative, and the music is GORGEOUS and I promise you this is worth every single one of the 60 minutes or so it will take you to play through all three parts of the story (and if for whatever reason parts two or three aren’t working, try again later – the sun might have gone behind a cloud). I can’t tell you how much I love this, honestly, it is very special imho.

By Richard Diebenkorn

FINALLY THIS WEEK, A MIX OF SLIGHTLY-DREAMY SYNTHY SOUNDS THAT IMHO ARE PERFECT FOR COLD SUNNY DAYS, COMPILED BY TECHWAA! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Pretty Little Patriot: Ok, this is quite far from my normal wheelhouse and not normally my sort of thing, but some of the images on this Insta feed really are quite something. Via Caitlin’s excellent ‘Links’, Pretty Little Patriot is a MAGA-friendly line of clothes for women and…fcuk, just so much of this is baffling to me – the aesthetic, the general ENERGY of the whole thing, the continued insanity of the apparently-entirely-contradictory loves of Jesus, The Donald and high-ordnance firearms managing to coexist in the minds of these people with no apparent cognitive dissonance…there’s a lot to take in here, but I am 100% serious when, were it not for their politics, I would buy the FCUK out of the first sweatshirt in this carousel (and, frankly, quite a few of the others too).
• Susan Collins:I was lucky enough to be introduced to this artist earlier this week, and not only is she lovely but her work is ACE. Susan Collins does multi-camera, multi-installation videowork (or at least that’s what her recent practice has focused on) and there’s something both conceptually-fascinating but also visually compelling about the results. See what you think – you can read a bit more about the work and her practice here.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Laurence Von Thomas

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I had something of a new professional nadir this week which I feel it might be cathartic to share.

So I was booked to appear on some panel thing by a very corporate company, to talk about AI (I was asked as a result of one of my ‘actual jobs’ – rest assured I wasn’t introduced as ‘Matt Muir, author of a miserably-unpopular newsletter no cnut has ever heard of’). I would like to, in order, apologise to: a) the person who booked me, the brother in law of some good friends of mine, whose career I feel I may have irrevocably fcuked; b) everyone in the audience who perhaps wasn’t expecting one of the panellists to attempt to break some sort of record for uses of the word ‘fcuk’ in an ostensibly-businesslike 45-minute panel discussion; c) everyone in the audience who I managed to inadvertently imply had never done anything in their careers that could be considered better than ‘average’ (and that even that, frankly, was perhaps being generous to them). I am sorry to all of you. There is possibly a lesson to be taken from this, but I have spent the past three days attempting to drink the memory away and so it’s probably lost to me by now.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably wondering whether I am available to speak at your event and the answer is a resounding ‘yes’!

By André Palais

THE MUSIC THIS WEEK KICKS OFF WITH THIS PROPERLY JOYFUL HOUR-LONG CELEBRATION OF MF DOOM AND HIS MUSIC WITH A LIVE BAND AND ALL SORTS OF GUESTS!

THE SECTION WHICH MET JOHN PRESCOTT (RIP) ONCE, MANY YEARS AGO, AND WHICH WAS SUBJECTED BY HIM TO ONE OF THOSE WEIRD CHEEK PINCH THINGS THAT GRANDPARENTS DO, WHICH WAS FRANKLY QUITE WEIRD AS I WAS 22 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME AND WE WERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT, PT.1:  

By Nigel Van Wieck

DO YOU REMEMBER A FEW MONTHS AGO WHEN THAT GUY POSTED ONLINE ABOUT A GENRE OF MUSIC THAT WAS DESCRIBED TO HIM, VERY SPECIFICALLY, IN A DREAM? WELL NOW THERE IS A WHOLE ALBUM OF THAT GENRE OF MUSIC AND FCUKING HELL IS IT A SOMEWHAT INTENSE SONIC JOURNEY THAT I FEEL YOU SORT OF NEED TO HEAR TO REALLY COMPREHEND!

THE SECTION WHICH MET JOHN PRESCOTT (RIP) ONCE, MANY YEARS AGO, AND WHICH WAS SUBJECTED BY HIM TO ONE OF THOSE WEIRD CHEEK PINCH THINGS THAT GRANDPARENTS DO, WHICH WAS FRANKLY QUITE WEIRD AS I WAS 22 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME AND WE WERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT, PT.2:  

•  The Sounds of Disneyland: Web Curios, famously, does not judge its readers, does not look upon your proclivities and perversions with disgust or censorious eyes – wherever you get your jollies is, broadly, fine by me.That is except for those of you who despite being grown adults still fetishise the entertainment products of the Disney machine – you I do judge, plentifully. Still, in the spirit of end-of-year rapprochement I present to you this collection of what I presume is the ambient music that gets piped around the parks, should you want to recreate the vibe in the privacy of your own home/sanatorium – know, though, that I think you are WEIRD.
• Exoroad: An interesting data-led map of the US, which lets you adjust a bunch of sliders and settings to identify which parts of the country meet specific criteria you’ve specified – so house price ranges, say, or crime rates, or population density or…oh, or ‘ethnicity’, which all of a sudden feels…less good, frankly, and makes me think this is just designed to be used by people who want to live in places where they know they can exclude both the poor and those they find ethnically distasteful. So, actually, on further reflection I sort-of feel bad about linking this, but on the flipside it’s a really interesting combination of different datasets which, if you squint, probably aren’t *definitely* going to be used to perpetuate regional segregation. Probably.
• Memento Movi: Want to have the inevitable fact of your own mortality communicated to you via the reassuring medium of your favourite films? GREAT! Memento Movie asks you to tell it your age, to pick a movie (from an annoyingly uncomprehensive list), and to guess at your likely lifespan (ngl, this question spun me out slightly – are we talking what I *think* I’m going to get to? Or what I get to given the choice? Because let me tell you there are some VERY different numbers at play there), and it will then, with nary a second’s thought, present you with the EXACT frame from said film which corresponds to where you are in the Great Journey of Life. Apparently I am currently at a relatively nondescript scene about ⅔ of the way through The Princess Bride, which feels about right tbh.
• Terms of Service: A USEFUL AND POSITIVE USE OF AI THAT FEELS LIKE A NET BENEFIT TO PEOPLE! I know! Amazing! This is actually a really, really good idea and feels like something that might usefully be lifted by a ‘consumer champion’ brand anywhere in the world because, well, it’s just a good and useful idea. The website’s actually called TOSAbout (but that’s a horrible name, so let’s not mention it again), and exists to offer an easy-to-parse overview of the terms of service of a selection of major tech platforms, from Adobe to Zoom and everything inbetween – said terms are given a topline rating from 1-7 (7 being ‘amazingly not totally cnuty’ and 1 being ‘by ticking the checkbox you have surrendered your rights in this and three subsequent lifetimes, and your offspring will be used for glue’) and for those who want more detail as to the specific iniquities being foisted upon the user there are also AI-generated summaries giving an overview of the (rarely) good, the (far more prevalent) bad and the (inevitable) ugly. Smart, useful, helpful, and a near-perfect use of LLMs which I am slightly disappointed with all of you for not having come up with already tbqhwy.
• Jamcorder: Ooh, this is an interesting idea – I am negatively-talented, musically-speaking, so have no idea whether this is actually something useful or not, but I am intrigued by the concept. The Jamcorder (can we maybe rethink the name though lads? It’s…well, it’s sh1t isn’t it?) is a small device that’s designed to attach to your keyboard via the MIDI socket and which basically transcribes EVERYTHING you play in hypercompressed format, meaning you can record, they say, 25,000 hours of music on one device. That is…a lot of keyboard noodling. While it’s fair to say that not EVERY one of those 25k hours will be packed with Beethoven-level output, for anyone whose musical working practice is basically ‘sit at the piano and fcuk around’ I can imagine this being an invaluable way of mapping and tracking the creative process and ensuring that your ‘notes’, so to speak, are never lost.
• Words Like This: Another poetry-related Curios, this is a lovely little site put together by…two people in Australia (hello, mysterious pair of Australians, should you ever see this!) which is designed solely to present poetry they think is good, simply and appealingly, in a manner intended to let the words and the work speak for themselves, The presentation is simple – nicely-arranged text on block-colour backgrounds, a different background colour for each poem – and for reasons that escape me it really works presentationally and contextually; I think this is a lovely way to read verse, and I enjoyed the ‘about’ section, where they talk about the project and why they do it, very much indeed: “Words Like This presents beautiful passages of poetry in a beautiful, contemporary way. There will be no use of technical terms like ‘personification’ or ‘quatrains’ here. No lengthy analysis or historical perspective of the poetry or the poets who wrote them. Sure, context can be important in helping to understand a poem, but that removes from the visceral or primal (two other good words) response that we have to hearing our language spoken out loud or in our minds. Poetry is really just about words like this.” LOVELY, and I mean that is a nice rather than ‘damning with faint praise’ sort of way.
• The COlour Literacy Project: Do you want to know more about colour as a concept, and to get better at exploring what it signifies, communicates and connotes? OF COURSE YOU DO YOU ARE NOT MADE OF WOOD FFS! “The Colour Literacy Project is a 21st century initiative that recognizes colour as a meta-discipline. Our mission is to provide state-of-the-art educational resources that strengthen the bridges between the sciences, arts, design and humanities in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. Fluency with the language of colour sharpens our visual intelligence, expands our perceptions, and enhances our ability to communicate.” This feels very much aimed at the artistic educational establishment, or at practitioners looking to deepen their appreciation of colour and how to work with it – there are a LOT of exercises and resources on here.
• Dear Photograph: HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE??!?! This is an artefact of the pre-social web (or, more accurately, the very early social web, where we all used our Facebook pages to share interesting links about things we cared about rather than it instead being yet another incessant hose of low-quality moving picture pabulum fired into our eyeballs at the rate of violence), dating back to…Jesus, some time in the mid/late-00s I think, and…God, there’s something about this that just *feels* of the past, even though there’s nothing necessarily retro about the project or its scope. Dear Photograph is a website which collects photos of people holding photos of the place they are photographing – a description which I appreciate makes NO SENSE, but which you will hopefully forgive me for when you see the recursive nature of the project. Each picture is accompanied by a short text recounting the memory that’s being recovered in each case, and the whole thing is a small, poignant series of vignettes which touch on place, recollection and the general inevitable truth that all things must eventually pass.
• The AI Soul Imprint Generator: Via Jan in the Czech Republic (HI JAN!) comes this project by Charles University in Prague, which invites you to answer a series of questions and which will then, based on your answers to said questions, SHOW YOU WHAT YOUR SOUL LOOKS LIKE! What your soul will probably look like – SPOILERS! – is an artlessly-composed bit of AI slop, but I quite like the disconnect between the slightly-portentous vibe of the questionnaire and site and the outputs, which inevitably look quite a lot like the sort of poorly-photoshopped tribute pages of the 2012-era web. Interestingly this is part of a wider body of work investigating some..,not-insignificant questions around technology and theology being investigated by the Theology and Contemporary Culture Research Group of the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in cooperation with Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, Multidisciplinary working group AI in context and Monastery of the Infant Jesus of Prague. So expect someone to come up with an answer to the vexatious question of ‘does The Machine have a soul’ sometime next week.
• Daisy The AI Anti-Scammer Granny: This has annoyed me quite a lot over the past week or so, so I will keep this short – briefly, this is a (very nice, very smart, very well-done and very successful) bit of PR by O2, in which they have claimed to have ‘invented’ an AI system that will thwart phone scammers by keeping them tied up on the line; this has been covered EVERYWHERE thanks to its (again, smart) mix of zeitgeisty elements (old people being scammed! AI!), but two things in particular have rather boiled my p1ss about it that I want to get off my chest. 1) IT IS A FCUKING PR STUNT THIS IS NEVER, EVER GOING TO BE AN ACTUAL THING THAT O2 DEPLOY; IT WILL HAVE EXISTED AND BEEN LIVE FOR EXACTLY AS LONG AS IT TOOK TO JUSTIFY THE EXISTENCE OF THE PRESS RELEASE WHY THE FCUK IS IT BEING WRITTEN UP UNCRITICALLY AS THOUGH IT IS A REAL THING FFS YOU ARE SH1T AT YOUR JOBS TECH JOURNALISTS!; 2) this is basically a riff on something that was in Curios about ~6m ago which I distinctly remember flagging as ‘something worth ripping off’, so basically I am just salty that I am not getting any (completely undeserved, to be clear) credit here.
• Hip Hop English School: Ok, unless you speak Japanese you’re probably unlikely to get a vast amount out of this, but it really makes me happy that it exists – HipHop English School is a Japanese podcast in which the hosts use a different hiphop track or artist each week to help teach its listeners English – some of the episodes are just breakdowns of specific songs, line-by-line, while others are interviews with artists who happen to be touring Japan…honestly, this feels like SUCH an easy, replicable format for (say) K-Pop, or Reggaeton, or any other genre of music where lyrics tend not to be in English, so, well, go and steal.
• Roots: I am pretty sure that if you’re the sort of person who feels the need to put usage limits on your phone you’re already well-versed in all the different apps and tricks and tools you can deploy to bolster your nonexistent willpower – should you be in the market for another, though, Roots looks like it has a comprehensive featureset and (and this is the bit I think is a bit gross if I’m honest) a huge fat layer of GAMIFICATION atop said featureset. Earn badges! Compete in challenges! Badges and challenges which only really exist…in your phone! Do you see the…slight disconnect?
• 100s of Beavers: Thanks to Lisa Schmeiser’s excellent newsletter I was introduced to this film, which I had never heard of before but now I feel I really must see. I don’t want to explain or describe it – just click the link and watch the trailer, and know that you will never, ever have seen anything quite like this before.
• Pi Test: How many digits of Pi can you recall from memory? PROVE IT THEN YOU BRAGGART!
• Handyfotos: Via Kris comes another decade-old web project which is SUCH a perfect slice-of-life website that I have fallen slightly in love with it. Photos and videos presented in a grid, filterable by various tags (location, what’s in the photo, etc) but otherwise presented entirely without context. There’s some minimal explanation, but, honestly, I quite like not really knowing more than this: “The Marco Land Handyfoto Foundation (est. 2014) is a sustained media archive of moments. A Handyfoto — or mobile photo — captures mundane objects or situations as a photo or video. It is the unexpected synergy between two unharmonious elements. The MLHF defines Handyfoto also as a way-of-seeing, a sacred practice: unplanned, observant, and attuned to life’s subtle humor and charm.” Beautiful, mundane digital life shards.
• The Arts Grant Guru: THIS IS A FCUKING SCAM. You, clever Web Curios readers that you are, would obviously arrive at that conclusion without my guidance, but I think it’s worth sharing because I get the impression there are at least a couple of people who work in the arts who read this and I feel the community as a whole should be on the lookout for nakedly-grifty sh1t like this. In an environment in which arts funding is more contested – and harder to come by – than ever, a service which purports to use THE MAGIC OF AI to help you craft better grant applications could be seen as a helpful service; this, though, is a naked fcuking scam, charging users a fee to perform tasks that could reasonably be achieved with the free versions of most of the large LLMs (and, if not, can DEFINITELY be achieved with the £20 a month pro versions, which is still less money than these cnuts are trying to charge for what is literally just a layer on top of (I presume) GPT. Honestly, this is gross and makes me really quite annoyed, so please do tell anyone you know who works in the sector to please not fall for sh1t like this? Thanks.
• Source Plus: Ooh, this is interesting – for artists working with AI who would like to be able to train their own local models on datasets that have been cleared for that express purpose, Source Plus offers a series of downloadable imagesets which have the full approval of their creators and copyright owners to be used for model tweaking. Useful for anyone working in this space who’d prefer not to feel like they were thieving from the mouths of the STARVING ARTISTS.
• Friend: Oooooooooooooh this is an odd one. Friend is a forthcoming AI companion service whose BIG THING is the idea that your companion, your ‘friend’, will live in a physica pendant-style device and effectively become a forevercompanion, remembering you and your life and what you do and what you say and being, basically, your always-there-pal who’s fun to be with! Or at least that’s the theory. In practice, now that the web version of Friend is live, it feels…quite different to that. Load up the website and you’re thrust straight into conversation with one of these ‘friends’ – you don’t get to choose which ‘companion’ you’re paired with, although you can refresh the page to get a new one – who starts your chat with a prompt and…the prompts are all FCUKED. My first one opened with “i’m texting you from my friend’s couch lol, him and his wife are fighting I’m just here in the corner”; the next one with “my kid’s in the hospital after a car crash and i’m a mess, pretending to be strong is exhausting” – hang on, what? WHY THE FCUK WOULD I WANT TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH THE IMAGINARY MOTHER OF A CARCRASH VICTIM? There doesn’t seem to be any version of these that *doesn’t* have one of these fcuked-up, ‘provocative’ openings, which does rather lend one to wonder…what’s going on here, why is this designed like this, and is there a bigger, more interesting story being alluded to (which, to be clear, would be sort of cool and interesting)? Katherine Dee at Default Friend thinks not, but I am VERY INTRIGUED by this and will keep an eye out for subsequent developments.
• Free Billionaire Sperm: Are YOU a woman who might want to bear a child? Are YOU struggling to conceive? Do YOU need access to some high-quality sperm? Would YOU like said sperm to be ABSOLUTELY FREE? Well lucky you, today’s your lucky day – presuming, of course, you’re able to get yourself to Moscow, because that’s where Telegram founder Pavel Durov has decided to make his seed freely available to whoever wants some (I presume there’s a finite supply of DurovJuice rather than him spending half his life strapped into some sort of unholy prostate milking machine but, honestly, who knows?). Durov’s previously boasted of already having fathered ‘100s’ of children via similar means, but it’s good to know that he’s not stopping there. I don’t know about you, but I am not entirely convinced that the reasons behind this are *wholly* benign, got to say (have any of you read ‘Rant’ by Chuck Palahniuk? Just saying, is all).
• Nomido: Find ALL THE WORDS that can be made from each day’s fragments – this is, annoyingly, far harder than I thought it was going to be (or I am losing IQ points by the day, either/or).
• Procjam: Another great set of tiny games via Lynn Cherny – these are the entries to the recent Procjam game development festival, and features dozens of small, cute, fun exercises in procedural generation, from a bonsai growing simulator to some rather fun sandboxes, many playable in-browser.
• OpenRA: Finally this week, the sort of thing that may make middle-aged Curios readers’ weekends – want to play Command and Conquer: Red Alert in a version that’s all updated and compatible with modern computers and stuff? OH GOOD HERE YOU ARE.

By  Julie van der Vaart

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BASICALLY THE SOUND OF BEING IN A MARINA C.1987, OR AT LEAST IT IS IN MY HEAD (I WAS NOT HANGING AROUND MANY MARINAS IN 1997, TURNS OUT), AND IT IS BY DREAM CHIMNEY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY! 

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Fersetid: Oh this is BRILLIANT. Films (and occasional other media) reimagined as PS1-era videogames. The American Psycho clip in particular is just supremely chilling.
• Ben G Tibbert: Exceptionally-unsettling AI art and animation; this is very, very good indeed, and reminds me quite a lot of Cool 3d World in terms of overall aesthetic.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Michael Kirkham

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

On Saturday night I went to the pub for my friend Nick’s birthday, and happened to meet a group of football fans who supported Swindon Town FC, the team of the town where I grew up (but, to be clear, I WAS NOT BORN THERE). When asked why they supported the team, despite not being from there or having any connection to the place, they replied that they were all from the South, and that they just wanted a team to support that was a) near enough to London to allow them to go to home games cheaply and easily; and b) amusingly sh1t; they then asked me if I did in fact grow up there, and, when I replied in the affirmative, dropped into a genuinely serious register as one of them solemnly said to me, with a look of real pity in his eyes, ‘I am so, so sorry mate’.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that it’s thanks to those cnuts that I’ve had a horrible chest infection all week, so fcuk them and fcuk Swindon too, the place and the football team. They’re right, it *is* a sh1thole.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can rest assured that I wiped all the phlegm off this before hitting ‘publish’.

By Min Ding (most images this week from TIH, for which thanks!)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH MUSIC BY THE SINISTERLY-NAMED ‘MARK OF SATAN’ WHICH IS, I PROMISE, SIGNIFICANTLY LESS EVIL THAN THE NAME MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK AND IS IN FACT SOME RATHER GOOD BEATS WITH A SORT OF GRAND GUIGNOL HAMMER HORROR-STYLE VIBE, MADE BY A MAN I MET IN A PUB LAST WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH WAS THRILLED THAT ORBITAL WON THE BOOKER AND WOULD LIKE TO ADD ITS SMALL RECOMMENDATION TO THE CHORUS BECAUSE IT IS A GORGEOUS PIECE OF WRITING AND I SAY THAT AS SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS MOSTLY DEAD INSIDE, PT.1:  

By Moonassi

OUR NEXT MIX IS A SET BY SHARNIE AND HANNA ON RINSEFM AND IT IS AN HOUR OF PLEASINGLY-INTENSE BEATS AND BREAKS WHICH FEELS VERY LATE-2024! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS THRILLED THAT ORBITAL WON THE BOOKER AND WOULD LIKE TO ADD ITS SMALL RECOMMENDATION TO THE CHORUS BECAUSE IT IS A GORGEOUS PIECE OF WRITING AND I SAY THAT AS SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS MOSTLY DEAD INSIDE, PT.2:  

• The Manchester Digital Music Archive: On the one hand, it’s true that the tedious music-based BRAND IDENTITY that Manchester’s had wrapped around it by a couple of successive generations of entrepreneurs and grifters is…annoying, frankly (YES WE KNOW ABOUT BAGGY AND THE SALFORD BOYS CLUB CAN YOU FCUK OFF NOW PLEASE?); on the other, it’s also true that the city has a pretty incredible place in the UK’s musical pantheon and has been responsible for some genuinely influential genres and people and places over the past 50-odd years (longer, I know). The Manchester Digital Music Archive “is an online community archive established in 2003 to celebrate Greater Manchester music and its social history. We are a crowd-sourced archive, a place for people all over the world to share Manchester music ephemera and memories, be they fans, musicians or involved with the music industry itself.” What this means in practice is that you can browse an INSANE list of artists associated with the city and see whatever’s in the archive associated with them – from flyers from A Guy Called Gerald’s earliest club appearances to a whole bunch of zine reviews of the late, lamented Vibrant Thigh (no, me neither). This is SO INTERESTING.
• Save Wisdom: One of the things you learn as you age is that you will at some point or another really, really regret not asking the old people in your life more about said life while they are still in a position to respond with anything other than emphysemic wheezing or a whispered ‘switzerland…now…please’. Save Wisdom is a project designed to address this, offering 1000 questions which can be used as a guide or template for conversations with people whose memories you want to preserve or archive – all of these are intended to help draw out information about a person, their wants and desires and their memories, and, honestly, if I were a) the sort of person who was sentimental enough to start a memorialisation project for an elderly relative; or b) had any relatives left to memorialise, I would be all over this.
• VeloPlanner: ARE YOU A LYCRA DAD? Not a sex thing, honest – I am talking about lycra in the cycling context. Should you be one of the baffling number of men (sorry, this feels horribly sexist – I am of course aware that cycling is very much a gender-neutral pursuit, it’s just that I can’t help but associate it with ‘men in their 30s and 40s who have realised it’s a legitimate excuse to spend literally hours away from your family and maybe fit in two pints’)  who think ‘getting on a bike and pedalling in the cold and wet and rain’ is a fun way of spending time, you might find this website super-useful – VeloPlanner is basically an all-in-one repository of all of the world’s cycling routes, allowing you to do useful things like plot a route from London to Shenzen (I am speculating here, no idea if that is at all possible). Why not spend the rest of the day imagining the sort of road trip and real ale tour that you and the Bike Lads could go on if you hadn’t instead chosen to procreate?
• Animations: Geometric, maths-y (TECHNICAL!) animations by Etienne Jacob (whose work I featured here back in 2019 via Twitter – this links to his website, so I am allowing myself the revisit DO NOT JUDGE ME), sent to me by my friend Tom who wrote ‘these make my ganglia feel nice’ and, while that may make my friend Tom sound like some sort of intensely-weird brain pervert, you will also know EXACTLY what I mean when you look at these. It’s like some sort of weird, visual-only ASMR, seriously.
• Particle: Another week, another app seeking to DISRUPT NEWS CONSUMPTION – going to be honest, this doesn’t feel like a great time to be launching such a service given that the reaction of a not-insignificant portion of the world to last week’s news is likely to be ‘yeah, not really going to look at the news for a while thanks’, but, well, good luck nonetheless! Particle’s gimmick is that it aggregates different sources into topic-based feeds for a wide-ranging overview of opinions and perspectives on any issue, and that it offers varying degrees of AI summarisation/interpretation to give you quick overviews of a given question alongside AI-enabled interrogation of a concept, but, well, neither of those seem like enough of a hook to bother with this, if I’m honest (but I say that as someone who has realised this week that their relationship with information is, on some pretty deep level, utterly, utterly broken, and as such probably isn’t worth listening to). Still, if you’re on Apple and want another, differently-shaped window into the horror that is everything then, well, here!
• The St John Prints: APOLOGIES THIS LINK TAKES YOU TO THINGS THAT COST ACTUAL MONEY. Ahem. St John, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is a very famous restaurant in Farringdon, London – I’ve featured writing about it before lots of times in Curios, and it holds a special place in my heart because not only is it a fcuking amazing place to eat but also because I worked literally next door to it for a couple of years, and going down to the bakery every morning to buy doughnuts for me and the woman I was having an affair with at the time was a moment of genuine daily joy. Photographer Jason Lowe took the photographs that accompanied the restaurant’s 30th anniversary cookbooks, and is now making prints of those photos available for sale on his website and these are AMAZING. Seriously, whether or not you have personal history with the restaurant these are some top-quality photos of food, cookery, meat fish and viscera (quite a lot of viscera), and they would make SUPERB gifts for someone.
• The Best Inventions of 2024: As is now seemingly tradition, Time Magazine has once again published its rundown of what it considers to be the best inventions or innovations of the past 12 months –  I confess to feeling a bit ‘meh’ about quite a few of these this year, perhaps because, in contrast to previous selections, these seem a bit more ‘product’-y rather than ‘general innovation-y’, but, as in previous years, it’s worth having a look through the list as there will be at least a couple of entries which are new to you and which might elicit a spark of inspiration as to how you might take them in different directions, or which might make you think of the stories they create. This, for example, is sort-of brilliant and heartbreaking at the same time.
• Transit: I know, I know, you *have* a travel app, you like your travel app, you don’t want to change your travel app – and to be honest I haven’t tried this and so I’m only recommending it on spec, but it *sounds* interesting. Transit is basically a ‘wherever you are we will tell you how to navigate the urban transit environment’ service, but it’s ad-free and seems, as far as I can tell, to have a pleasing community layer to it allowing realtime user feedback about how the service is performing to be integrated into the information fed to others. Oh, and there’s something REALLY clever that it launched the other week which uses your phone’s vibration-sensing tech to determine how many stops on the underground you’ve travelled so that you can track your relative map position even without signal which, honestly, is SO CLEVER that I am slightly in awe.
• Stretch Timer: A little timer app for Macs only, but which is, I promise, one of the most innately-satisfying bits of design work you will have seen in ages. I promise you, if you’re the sort of person who regularly wears those annoying little too-small fisherman’s caps and the sort of square-legged, slightly-too-short ‘artist’s trousers’ at work because you have ‘creative’ in your job title (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) then you might have some sort of involuntary pleasure reaction to this. It really is that simple and beautiful and amazing.
• Towns: Do you need or want another community or messaging app? No? What if I told you this one was ON THE BLOCKCHAIN????? Yes, I know, that changes EVERYTHING! This is a new app developed by one of the people who created HouseParty (don’t worry, I didn’t remember that either and had to look it up) and who has received what I presume is an unconscionable amount of money from investors to create another digital product which, I confidently predict, will have exactly the same degree of lasting impact as his previous one. Here’s some explicatory blurb from a recent profile of the product: “Group chats on Towns can be configured in such a way that only people who fulfill certain criteria—who have specific expertise, say—are allowed to post messages, while everyone else watches from the sidelines. In this scenario, Rubin hopes, large group conversations will no longer be polluted with ill-informed takes and scam posts. He believes the ability for someone to prove that they are a real person using blockchain-based credentials, meanwhile, could help to minimize the opportunity for malicious actors to manipulate public discourse with bots.” So, basically, the ‘blockchain secret sauce’ here is ‘everyone participating this has their credentials encoded on the blockchain which then act as a passkey to certain communities depending on said credentials and the community’s own entry/participation requirements’ – which, you know, in theory doesn’t sound too bad, until you start thinking hard about how the fcuk that would work (how these creds get verified, and who by), and you quickly realise that, as with a lot of other blockchain stuff, this only really makes sense if EVERYTHING ELSE IS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN TOO, and, well, lol, no.
• Nudols: Have you ever wondered how one might go about marketing Pot Noodle to an Italian market? WONDER NO MORE! This is a quite astonishing new brand of instant cup noodle, apparently launching now-ish in Italy – there is SO much to ‘love’ here! Let’s start with the name, a BEAUTIFUL phonetic-Italian rendering of the word ‘noodles’ (let’s…let’s gloss over the fact that the rest of the brandname is ‘Banzai’, shall we)! The website homepage features a lovely voxel rendering of a noodle stand, in a design and style SUSPICIOUSLY REMINISCENT of something I featured in Curios about three years ago (I am not suggesting that these people read Curios so much as someone on the design team here has, I think, taken some QUITE HEAVY INSPIRATION from someone else’s work)! The…questionable approach to ‘pan-asian culture’ that sees the product referred to as ‘gnam gnam style’ (‘gnam gnam’ being phonetic Italian vocalisation for ‘the act of happy eating’)! Honestly, there is a LOT going on here – if nothing else, let’s notch this up as another datapoint to prop up my personal ‘maximalist webdesign is back!’ thesis.
• Antique Microscopes: Would you like an online museum collecting examples of antique microscopes throughout history for your enlightenment and delectation? I DON’T KNOW I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE INTERESTED IN I AM NOT FCUKING PSYCHIC. On the offchance, though, that is exactly what this link will take you to. I am charmed by this line from the homepage, mind: “An antique microscope is a work of art as well as science.” EXACTLY.
• Strangers On A Bench: This is such a good idea and it feels a bit like it might take off and become very famous indeed – not sure why, just has a certain VIBE about it (so, remember, WE FOUND THE CONCH). Strangers on a Bench is a podcast project which started a few months ago in which Tom Rosenthal strikes up a conversation with someone he doesn’t know who he finds sitting alone on a park bench- he asks them about them, and their life, and they just have a chat. The listener doesn’t know the person’s name, so these are entirely-anonymous little slices of life, vignettes describing the odd mundanity of everyone’s existence and the ways in which everyone contains multitudes and universes and, honestly, this is the sort of thing that normally makes me want to set fire to a teashop by way of anti-twee rebellion and yet it is SO LOVELY (and I say this as someone who really, really hates podcasts). Honestly, I think this is quite special and I think lots of you will really really like it a lot.
• Videogame Weather ASMR: I confess to not being wholly clear as to what the audience is for this YouTube channel, which features nothing but videos of videogames being played slowly, gently and with a real focus on in-game weather systems. Then again, though, who wouldn’t appreciate, say, an 8-hour-long drive around Los Santos with no shooting, no violence, just the sound of the storm raging outside? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Geography Help: I am slightly astonished by this. You know that game Geoguessr, right, where you get shown a random streetview pic and are tasked with working out where in the world it is? This is a site that’s seemingly been created for the sole purpose of making you better at that game – it includes information about local identifiers for seemingly every country in the world, from ‘what are the road markings like?’ to ‘what colour are the road signs?’ to ‘what special characters might I spot on signage which could give me a clue to the country I am in?’, and this is amazing to me because it’s INSANELY comprehensive and weirdly incredibly sort-of useful for all sorts of different purposes, and it’s all born out of a desire to help people get marginally better at a very silly, very online game, and fcuking hell people are amazing.
• Amstrad: There’s a whole generation of people for whom Alan Sugar is just an irascible TV caricature with some absolute all-time Tweets to his name, but, for those of us with a few more miles on the clock, he’s ALSO the man responsible for some of the worst home computing products of a generation in the shape of Amstrad, briefly (risibly) touted in some corners of the UK (probably corners of Sugar’s house tbh) as ‘Britain’s answer to Microsoft’. Anyway, for reasons we can only speculate at, a new website has appeared celebrating the history and legacy of the Amstrad brand – look, this is only really of interest if you’re old enough to remember this stuff, or if you’re a peculiarly-rigorous scholar of ‘now-defunct electronics brands from decades past’, but I personally got some quite strong nostalgiapangs from these cream plastic monoliths (and some PTSD responses to the fcuking Amstrad mouse, a genuinely evil piece of design with some of the worst driver software ever committed).
• Games To Play While The NYT’s Games People Are On Strike: As I mentioned the other week, the New York Times’ games people are on strike – to keep you occupied while you’re boycotting Wordle (OBVS), they’ve posted up a bunch of other games they’ve made which won’t direct traffic to the NYT and which are also LIGHTLY-SATIRICAL COMMENTS ON LABOUR RELATIONS, lol! In fairness a couple of these are very good and worth your time.
• Nightfall: An EXCELLENT browserpuzzlegame which, you will discover, is actually surprisingly deep and quite massive and which contains many, many hours worth of gameplay should you be willing to lend it the time. This is basically a full, in-browser remake of an old 2002 game called ‘Spybotics’, which, per the era, is all about HACKING NETWORKS and that sort of jazz, and which, if you can look past the slightly-of-its-time cyberpunk styling and writing, is actually a surprisingly-involved series of little puzzles which get knotty reasonably fast. This is a GREAT afternoon-killer, should you desire one.
• Asterogue: A cute little roguelike which gives you three levels for free and which then asks you to pay $5 to get the rest and, honestly, this was so good I paid the price of a cup of coffee to pay more. Good, clean, simple roguelike fun, and 100% worth the price of a London half.
• Shogun Showdown: Our final game this week is this BRILLIANT little (also) roguelike puzzler – kill all the enemies, reach the end of the gauntlet, picking up powerups and bonuses along the way; die, repeatedly, and try again and again. Four different unlockable characters, each of which plays slightly differently, a varied moveset which makes different runs feel genuinely distinct…this is free browsergame GOLD and you will thank me for pointing you at it, I promise (except you won’t, will you? You’ll just click the link and forget me you FCUKING INGRATES).

By Rochelle Voyles

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS DESCRIBED AS ‘A PANAMERICANA TRIP WITH MESCALEROS’ AND, HONESTLY, I CAN’T DO BETTER THAN THAN AND SO WON’T TRY (IT IS ACE)!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Neil Staines: Via Kottke, this is the Insta feed of one Niall Staines who does a variety of different styles of visual art but whose pixel-extension images – basically where you take a point in a picture and extend all the pixels from that point in a line to the edge of the canvas – are really rather wonderful and the main reason why I’m featuring the work.
• Gully Tattoo: One the one hand, this guy works out of Brighton and so if you’re in the UK then there’s the theoretical possibility that you could get his stuff inked on yourself; on the other, his work is INSANELY good and I imagine has a waiting list of YEARS, so good luck. Still, if you want to see some pretty astonishing trompe l’oeil work – the shadowing and depth in this is jaw-dropping, seriously – then click away.
• Amon Silex: Yes, ok, fine, this is another ‘odd AI images’ account, but this person is mining a bit of latent space that feels unfamiliar, far more furry and feathery and Babadoook-horror-style-adjacent to what I’m more used to seeing, and I very much enjoy how basically unsettling everything on this page is. TOO MANY EYES AND KNEES!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Emily Thompson

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

WELL.

I know I say this after every big event, but you really don’t need or want my opinion on the US election and so I will spare you (see, don’t you wish other newsletters were this considerate?).

Oh, ok, fine, apart from two specific, semi-related things.

One, we really, really need to hope that a lot of very successful, very decorated, very well-educated scientists operating at some of the world’s most august institutions and dealing with the very freshest realtime data about the state of our planet are very, very wrong about a lot of things, because it does rather feel like in the next four years we are about to sail gaily right past every single (already risibly lax) climate target we have set ourselves over the past couple of decades.

Two, per the above, we really, really need to hope that the accelerationists are in fact right and we can just sort of tech our way out of this, because it’s clear as fcuking daylight that we’re simply not going to take any of the other steps available to us.

So, er, fingers crossed then!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you may as well take comfort in the links while they last.

By Wes Lang

LET’S START THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH NEARLY THREE HOURS OF TRACKS WHICH SAMPLE THE LATE QUINCY JONES AND WHICH ALSO HAPPEN TO BE SOME EXCELLENT HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO LIVES IN THE UK AND WORKS IN ADVERMARKETINGPR AND WHO HAS FELT THE NEED TO WRITE LONG SCREEDS ABOUT US POLITICS ON LINKEDIN THIS WEEK IN A DESPERATE AND FAILED ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK INTELLIGENT TO FCUK THEMSELVES INTO THE SUN PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.1:  

By Frank Kunert

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS SPECTACULAR SELECTION OF TUNEFUL OBSCURITIES COMPILED FROM THE CRACKLING ARCHIVES OF SADEAGLE’S INCREDIBLE RECORD COLLECTION! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO LIVES IN THE UK AND WORKS IN ADVERMARKETINGPR AND WHO HAS FELT THE NEED TO WRITE LONG SCREEDS ABOUT POLITICS ON LINKEDIN THIS WEEK IN A DESPERATE AND FAILED ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK INTELLIGENT TO FCUK THEMSELVES INTO THE SUN PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.2:  

• Suffrago: Look, let’s get this straight – this is not some ‘let’s organise! The work starts here!!!!!111eleventy’-type resistance sh1t I’m espousing here (lol that I would ever be so motivated or hopeful), but, equally, it’s not inconceivable that some of you in the UK might this week have thought ‘hm, maybe it’s worth engaging with politics beyond the standard electoral cycle this time around’ – to that end, you might find Suffrage interesting, a new platform which is, ambitiously, attempting to basically ‘do digital democracy better’. It’s not intended solely for politics, long-term – the idea, I think (in common with lots of these projects, FCUK ME are they bad at explaining it – seriously guys, if you happen to see this, it is NOT EASY to work out what the everliving fcuk any of this is for!) is that this eventually becomes an issue-agnostic platform for the sharing of views and the agglomeration of complex information around an issue so as to enable better decisionmaking by the polis. In theory there is a LOT in here – the ability to follow policy at a constituency level and discuss/debate your representative’s voting record; simplified explanations of the legislative process and the passage of bills through parliament; condensed information about debates and discussions at national, regional and local level…look, I’m personally…unconvinced that this is ever going to get enough views and traction to be meaningfully useful, but, equally, if everyone had my cynical, negative and defeatist attitude then nothing would ever get done and we’d all be well on our way towards hell in the proverbial handca…what’s that? Eh? Oh. Anyway, still, here’s a website about democracy.
• Noomo Beat: This is interesting – not necessarily in terms of what it does (which, to be clear, is very little – albeit in VERY shiny fashion) but more in terms of what it means about agencies, digital and AI. Noomo Beat is a webproject by digital agency Noomo, which is designed to show off what it can do with AI and fancy graphics and indicate the sort of thing that potential clients might commission – the site shows off an interface for an imagined clothing brand which basically asks a few simple questions of the users and then uses that answers to said questions and a soupcon of generative AI to create a BESPOKE EXPERIENCE for each user – what this in practice means is that you then get shown a (really VERY SHINY, I must stress) selection of clothes (the clothes are seemingly always the same) with a slightly different soundtrack and colourway based on your answers. That’s it! BUT LOOK IT IS INTERACTIVE AND IT HAS AI IN IT! I would posit that, more than two years on from The Great Initial Wave of GenAI Excitement, if this is what agencies think is ‘useful’ about it then agencies deserve everything they’re going to get in the next few years.
• 1 Dataset, 100 Visualisations: Oh this is such a lovely project, and such a useful and interesting look at all the many different ways one might present a single set of datapoints and how the difference in said presentation affects the manner in which the information communicated is interpreted and received. Per the blurb, “this project is not made to show off, but rather show how interpretation can create better results. Take a close look at your dataset, and figure out what the main story in your data is. Different approaches and focuses demand different visualizations. We decided to keep every visualization the same style and colors and let the interpretation and story angle dictate the visualization. This resulted in 100 vastly different visualizations.” This is a bit of a calling card by Danish design studio Ferdio, and a smart one – it neatly demonstrates that they are quite good at this sort of thing, that they can do it in lots of different styles, and that they understand how style impacts substance, as well as showing that they are nice enough and confident enough to disseminate their expertise for free. This is both textbook CONTENT MARKETING and a really excellent resource for anyone interested in dataviz and all the different ways in which you can use smart visual design to bring numbers to life.
• Buttons: I have to be honest with you – this is not, in general, a hugely-interesting website (as far as I can tell it’s the storefront for a Czech studio that designs typefaces) but it IS the first one which basically offers potential customers a discount on prices in exchange for, basically, d1cking around. Basically the link here takes you to a page which, with a click, will generate a new website button at random, which will plonk down from the top of the page; more clicks will see more buttons deposited onto the page. If you, the user, click enough times to fill the whole screen with RANDOM BUTTONS then you will unlock a discount you can redeem when you buy fonts from the shop. Why? I have no idea, but I am very much a fan of this and STRONGLY suggest that any and all of you working with online retailers lobby hard to include similar mechanics on their websites.
• Gravitational Lens Simulation: Look, I could pretend to understand what this is showing, but I’d be lying – in large part my reasons for including this amount to little more than ‘ooh, cool visual FX that look a tiny little bit like what happens to the edges of your field of vision at the start of a trip’. Let me instead delegate the explanation to the site itself, which says the following in explanation of what the everliving fcuk Gravitational Lensing in fact is: “Imagine a heavy ball on a trampoline – it creates a dip that makes marbles roll towards it in a curved path. That’s similar to how massive objects in space (like black holes) bend light. When light from distant stars passes near these heavy objects, it bends around them, creating multiple images or making the stars appear in different positions than where they really are. This bending of light by gravity is called gravitational lensing, and it helps astronomers study things in space they can’t see directly. The pulsing star in the center helps demonstrate this effect by making it easier to track how the light bends around the black hole.” There, clear? No, me neither. Still, you probably don’t need to know too much about the INCREDIBLE, MIND, BODY AND UNIVERSE-BENDING PHYSICS being modeled here – instead, click the link, let your jaw go slack and marvel at the pretty lights as you move the black hole around the twinkly cosmos.
• Documentary Storm: I appreciate that you may not necessarily be in the market for ‘deep-dives into this fcuking world we live in’ right now, but, on the offchance, you might find this website a pleasing resource – Documentary Storm is, basically, a place that collects a fcuktonne of documentaries on a wide range of topics and makes them searchable by theme, title, etc. Nothing’s hosted here – these are all YouTube embeds – but it’s a convenient portal to find non-fiction filmmaking should you be interested. It’s also worth pointing out that the term ‘documentary’ has been largely rendered meaningless in the past few years, as the streaming platforms seemingly-snakebelly-low quality control bar for this stuff has seen some…questionable-quality investigations and VERY propagandistic material being peddled as ‘objectively-researched fact’; put it this way, I wouldn’t expect everything on here to have Attenborough-level rigour, and I would perhaps take significant portions of the films on here with a skipful of salt (I am thinking specifically of a lot of the UFO-type things, but I reckon there is probably quite a lot of…iffy medical stuff lurking here if you lift enough rocks).
• Photo Exhibits: Ooh, this is nice – an oooooooold website featuring the photography of one Stephen Edelbroich, who snapped a load of photos of New York, Paris, Venice, Vietnam (and other places too) and uploaded them here for the world to see – these are OLD, either analogue or early-digital depending on exactly when they were taken, and it’s honestly quite a thrill to go through them and go back a quarter-century.  I’m not sure how GOOD the photos are, if I’m totally honest, but it’s so nice to find them here.
• Daze: So this has been getting frothy writeups left right and centre over the past few weeks, despite the fact that the app itself is only out of waitlist this week (and even then iOS-only because of FCUKING course grumble grumble) – anyway, it LOOKS very cool even if, as a result of the aforementioned iPhoneonlyness, I am yet to try it. Basically Daze is a new messaging platform whose gimmick is (basically) that it combines the simplicity of messaging (ie you are literally just messaging someone, or a group of people) with the creative multimedia possibilities of Stories or Reels; so you can effectively create chats that look more like the collage-type-canvas you might expect from a c.2015 Insta/Snap aesthetic. Slap down gifs and videos and audio and animations and CHANGING FONTS and colours and it’s all CHAOTIC and MESSY and this looks like it might be ALL THE RAGE (for 10m until Meta rips off all its features wholesale across the ecosystem and kills this stone dead).
• Practical Betterments: I am pretty sure I have never in my life practised any form of self-improvement –  certainly not in the decade and a half that I’ve been making myself a worse person via the medium of internet obsession – but, should you be a more aspirational sort of person than me, the sort who believes in the possibility of things and people and circumstances getting better rather than constantly decaying towards entropy, then you might enjoy this website collecting a list of simple things that we can all do to improve our lives in small ways. Things like ‘lubricate your keyholes’ (no sniggering), or, er, ‘organise your toiletries chronologically’ (I have no idea what this means and am slightly too scared to click through and find out), and, look, this all strikes me as utterly insane, microoptimisation in search of tiny, imperceptible marginal gains, but, equally, I cry most days and so as such perhaps the person behind this, one ‘Nathanial’, is a better person to listen to than I am.
• An Incredibly Satisfying Swedish-Accented Rap: This is a bit of an unusual one – it’s literally just a link to a video which would ordinarily go in, well, the videos section where it belongs, but this is on Insta and as such I can’t embed it down there, but it doesn’t fit in the Instagram section either because it’s just a single video and the rest of the account isn’t (so far at least) delightfully-accented rap/poetry, and so you’re just going to have to put up with me queering the Curios running order slightly by putting it here. What’s that? You don’t give a fcuk? Oh. Anyway, this is a video posted by one Cecilia Elise Wallin and I am slightly obsessed with it – the delivery, the diction, the movement, the fact that when I first saw it I was half-convinced it was CG…this is just wonderful, and I really hope Ms. Wallin makes more of them.
• Perverse: Speaking of (sort-of) poetry (SEAMLESS!), Perverse is a new online (and offline, but mostly online I think) journal of verse, “a magazine for “deliberate, obstinate, unreasonable or unacceptable poems, contrary to the expected practice”, which might appeal to those of you who enjoy slightly-unconventional forms of poetry – it’s a newsletter too, so you can sign up for occasional deliveries of crafted words to your inbox.
• PacCam: We begin the BUMPER GAMES portion of Curios (I think we can all agree a bit of low-stakes ludic distraction will make it all better, right?) with this excellent, silly little game which basically lets you play a slightly-shonky, rudimentary version of Pacman using your face as a controller – enable your webcam and you can direct your small yellow pillmuncher around the screen by turning your head to the left or right or looking up or down. This is silly and a bit shonky but VERY fun (in a slightly broken way) – be aware though that a) it will give you a lot of shots of you looking VERY unattractive as you contort your neck to direct the sprite onscreen; and b) in fact, if any of you ever watched Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, those are basically exactly the faces you’ll be pulling.
• Letroso: Another week, another daily word game – this one’s like Wordle but you have a 10 letter word to guess each day; the basic ‘if you get the right letter in the right place it changes colour’ thing is the same, but there are a few tweaks in acknowledgement of the fact that, well, longer words make for a harder game. I like this a lot, and it’s a nice alternative to Wordle if you’re deciding to boycott it while the NYT fights with the unions (yes, even your daily word puzzle can become a complex labour rights issue! EVERYTHING IS POLITICS THERE IS NO ESCAPE).
• Moida Mansion: This is SO good – not least because of the meticulous attention to detail applied to the design and style and look and feel of the whole thing. Moida Mansion is a browsergame that’s designed to look and play like one of the old ‘Game And Watch’-style LCD games that those of a certain age will remember from long car journeys – an LCD screen, simple movement, no animations – updated with some really clever wrinkles that transform it into an actually fun game (none of the original titles of the era were, to be clear, ‘fun’ in any accepted way). Everything about this is just perfect, down to the manual and the way it’s written and presented, and the game itself is a solid 15 minutes’ enjoyment – a really exceptional bit of work by renowned game designer Lucas Pope.
• All Of The Ludum Dare 56 Entries: Via Lynn Cherny’s superb newsletter comes this link, to all the entries to the recent Ludum Dare game design jam, which challenged designers to create a small game from scratch in 72h or less, under the loose theme of ‘Tiny Creatures’ – there are DOZENS here, many of which you can play in your browser but the rest of which are free to download, and there are puzzlers and platformers and silly narrative fiction experiments and, honestly, there are HOURS of entertainment here if you just fancy turning your brain off and playing for a while.
• Tenebra: I know that you don’t THINK that what you need and want in 2024 is a browsergame built on emulating the graphics and OS of the long-forgotten BBC Micro from the 1980s – and, look, you might be right, maybe you DON’T need or want this, but, well, I’m giving it to you anyway because it’s honestly great and SO much better than you think it’s going to be. Tenebra is a puzzlegame with 31 levels – the gimmick is that you have to get the protagonist to the end of each, but he is afraid of the dark – how do you get him through the dark areas to safety? This starts simple but becomes fiendish enough to be interesting and fun after a few levels, and I imagine there are some of you for whom this is a genuine, brainscratching pleasure.
• Wigmaker: Our final miscellaneous offering this week is another infinite clicker (it’s not infinite, don’t worry). Would you like to play a game about making wigs? Are you pleased by liberal use of terms like ‘peruke’ to connote a hairpiece? Oh man are you going to enjoy this, in that case. A particularly nice example of the clicker genre, with a pleasant interface and some nice writing, this is a gentle, soothing and satisfying way of passing some time, ideally while on payroll so you can get remunerated for watching Wig Number Go Up.

By Devin Lunsford

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED ‘LEGALIZE LAMBADA’ AND MAKES ME WANT TO USE THE WORD ‘FUNKY’ DESPITE THE FULL-BODY-PRETZEL-CRINGE THAT DEPLOYING THAT TERM MAKES ME FEEL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Hamid Naderi Yeganeh: As far as I can tell from their bio, Hamid is studying maths in some capacity at UCL; he uses his maths skills to create frankly amazing pictures from equations (ok, fine, he might well be doing loads of other stuff with them but the likelihood is I wouldn’t understand ANYTHING about that, whereas ‘making pictures with equations’ is something I can broadly get my head around). This is…quite astonishing, although to be honest this could all be absolute lies and I would have no idea whatsoever.
• Geometry Club: Per the bio, “Celebrating the beauty of architecture with precisely aligned photographs from around the world.” You want photos of the top corner portion of a lot of buildings? GREAT!
• Artisan Embroidery: Via Jana over at Zuckerbakerei (honestly, SUCH a lovely newsletter/website which is also home to some glorious baking recipes), this is the Insta feed of Jordan Cunliffe in Lancashire who embroiders data. EMBROIDERS DATA. There are some of you who I know will be ABSOLUTELY TUMESCENT at those words – know that I write for YOU.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Raija Jokinen, via blort

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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:  

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!

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!

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)!: