Author Archives: admin

Reading Time: 30 minutes

Jesus, it’s COLD, isn’t it? Did I used to put up with this every January? Fcuk knows how. Basically I haven’t felt temperatures like this for two years and I DO NOT LIKE IT.

I am running a bit late today – possibly due to the icy cold making it increasingly hard for me to move my fingers to type – and as such will keep the intro to a minimum (you could at least pretend to be sad ffs), but not before saying thanks to all of you who wrote nice things about the cat last week, it was very much appreciated.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope you feel levelled up.

By Julie Hrudova

THE MIXES THIS WEEK BEGIN WITH 45 MINUTES OF PLEASING SOUL SOUNDS FROM THE VINYL COLLECTION OF TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR KATY, DESPITE THE SIGNET RING, PT.1:

An Actual Advert Using That Cool AI Video Tech From Curios A Few Months Back: Yes, ok, fine, it’s not the most compelling opening link description I’ve ever penned – BUT! This is interesting! Honest! You will doubtless recall a link from before Christmas which demonstrated a quietly-amazing new AI-enabled technique for filming scenes which basically (ok, VERY basically) involves scanning a scene using a camera and then being able to manipulate said scene within virtual 3d space, effectively creating a navigable digital diorama that you film within…look, here’s the original link, click it and see if it makes more sense than this increasingly-garbled explanation, and if you’re interested you can read some Tweets from the ad’s director about How It Works here. Anyway, this tech has now been used in an ACTUAL TV AD for McDonald’s – the ad itself isn’t super-exciting, but I am struck by the pace of this – two months from ‘speculative tech floating around Twitter’ to ‘featured in an actual campaign for one of the world’s biggest brands’. The reason I’m including this is just to point out that all of the things you see in Curios are real and potentially practically useful – so, effectively, to make myself feel marginally more purposeful than I ordinarily do at 7:03am on a Friday morning. Is it working? Not sure, I’ll let you know.

A Short AI Batman Film: I do not care about Batman, and, if I’m entirely honest, I don’t think human society ever needs to hear another story about a tortured billionaire and his fetishes. Still, this little video is all sorts of impressive – it’s (basically) all AI-generated, having been cobbled together with a bunch of disparate free tools. The link takes you to a Twitter thread featuring the video and its creator’s explanation of the steps they took to make it – again, this is included less because it’s a revolutionary take on the pointy-eared rubber enthusiast and more because it’s a neat object-lesson in how all the fun new toys that have cropped up over the past year or so can be linked to make things that are very much greater than the sum of their parts. Oh, and seeing as we’re doing ‘how to use this stuff to make videos’, here’s another short Twitter thread about how you can use a similar toolstack to make animated talking head videos – honestly, this is practically magic.

AllSearch: There’s been a lot of talk about whether ChatGPT will replace Google, to which the only reasonable response is ‘Jesus, I hope not, have you tried using the fcuking thing?’ – still, it’s clear that with the integration of the software into Bing we are moving into some sort of NEW ERA of search (one which, oddly, will feel strangely familiar to anyone who grew up with Ask Jeeves and remembers the disappointment when you realised that the software couldn’t actually understand human language at all, and the strange frisson of asking the digital butler if, not to put too fine a point on it, he fcuked), one where we’ll expect to be able to converse and ask questions of a semi-coherent digital interlocutor and refine our search by asking questions rather than simply attempting another combination of keywords. AllSearch is an interesting example of how stuff might end up working – it’s been trained on a large corpus of books (it doesn’t say where from, or which ones, unhelpfully), and lets users ask questions of its knowledgebase – results are returned both in an AI-generated summary and with a series of links to references that the software has used to come up with its answer, meaning you can (to an extent) check the machine’s reasoning before blithely accepting its confident assertions. I tried this with a few philosophical principles and it was…pretty good! Except, obviously, without knowing what the sources are, where they were compiled from and who by, it still doesn’t solve the problem of ‘is this info legit? Is it objective? IS THERE AN AGENDA???’ which, as we’re going to learn quite quickly, are going to become questions we’re even less well-equipped to answer than we currently are.

Magic Thumbnails: In the great ‘AI is coming for our jobs!’ panic, I confess that I hadn’t for a second spared a thought for the army of kids that Mr Beast employs to work on his YouTube thumbnails – turns out, though, that they are as fcuked by the coming future as the rest of us are! Sorry, army of thumbnail kids! Magic Thumbnails lets you define what you want the thumbnail to be of, add an image of your INCREDIBLY EXCITED FACE, add some copy and BOOM!, all your dreams come true (presuming, of course, your dreams have relatively modest parameters).

InstaNovel: I imagine that at least one of you reading this has made 2023 The Year In Which I Finally Start/Finish That Fcuking Novel – good luck! I believe in you! Just in case there’s any part of you which worries that the machines are soon going to render good, old-fashioned human storytelling otiose, you may find this website comforting. InstaNovel promises to create a BESPOKE, ILLUSTRATED STORY for you based on just a few short prompts – you enter the rough plot beats you want the story to follow, give the site an email address, and WAIT. 24hish-hours later you’ll receive a link to your VERY OWN tale, penned by GPT-3 and illustrated by Dall-E and lovingly paginated JUST FOR YOU! And, well, it will be rubbish. Really, really bad – the sort of thing you might half-remember writing when you were about 9, when you started with grandiose ambitions of writing something like The Hobbit or The Dark is Rising until you realised halfway through your third paragraph that writing a book is LONG and HARD and probably too much effort tbh. I am not ragging on the machines here – they are young! They will get better! We are still, in the long run, going to be rendered redundant! – but it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that the vast majority of copy and visuals produced by AI are still, frankly, crap. Let’s see if I’m still saying that in 2024, though.

QuizGrowth: “Turn your content into exciting quizzes thanks to the POWER OF AI!” is the basic elevator pitch here – and yes, I know that this isn’t exactly exciting, and the look and feel of this is…functional at best, but THAT’S NOT THE POINT. The point (ahem) is ‘stuff you can do with GPT which you may not even have thought of, even if it is, admittedly, a bit boring’. If nothing else, any of you working in HR can basically outsource all your onboarding materials development to this and fcuk off to the pub.

Historical Figures Chat: This started floating around last week but I couldn’t find the download link – now, though, I am pleased to offer you the opportunity to download the personalities of 20,000-odd historical figures to your phone so that you can converse with them to your heart’s content! Obviously that’s not what is ACTUALLY going on here (unless, of course, the developer really does have access to the departed souls of a host of history’s notables, in which case there’s probably a bigger story here) – instead, this is (as far as I can guess) a series of pre-written prompts to get an LLM to ‘converse in the style of’ Jesus, Hitler, Mata Hari or Vivienne Westwood, with a nice, user-friendly front-end. This is both fun – who wouldn’t want to set up a groupchat involving Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe and Sappho? NO FCUKER, etc etc – and a little bit troubling, not least because this is quite obviously going to be used by kids for homework purposes and it, basically, lies a LOT. Ask any of the (many, many) Nazis available to chat with about their beliefs and you’ll find they are, perhaps surprisingly, a lot more moderate than history might suggest; a bunch of fairly notorious anti-semites and racists are miraculously cured of their hateful beliefs, and express a surprising degree of regret about the ways in which future generations have interpreted their words and their legacy…even Jimmy Savile (an…odd choice to include) issues a spirited denial of the crimes he’s accused of. Without wishing to be apocalyptically hyperbolic (HEAVEN FORFEND!), it’s interesting to wonder about the degree to which we might be about to do significant and lasting damage to our species-wide knowledgebase in the coming few years, as we once again fcuk around with technology and information without really thinking too hard about the consequences. You can read more about this here, should you so desire – it really is quite the thing.

This Model Does Not Exist: This is a nice little project; This Model Does Not Exist is an experiment by Danny Postma, who has created ‘Alice’, a nonexistent human who exists in a particular bit of latent space and who Danny is creating new images of each day. Visitors to the website can vote for their favourite images, with the most popular being posted daily – you can see and follow Alice on Insta here. I’m curious as to what the endpoint of this is – whether Postma simply wants to see how many followers he can get, or whether there’s going to be some sort of narrative or deeper interaction to the project – but in the meantime it’s interesting to watch the occasional thirsty drivebys from men who haven’t clocked the intent behind the project. “Cute pic! But what happened to your leg?” reads one comment on a photo which includes a classically-AI-mangled limb, proving conclusively that even legs that look like giant, terrifying andouillettes aren’t enough to put off a horny man scrolling the ‘gram.

Lenny’s Podcast Search: This is a demo by a company called Broadn, which has used its generative learning tech to create a search layer over the podcast archive of one Lenny Rachitsky, who apparently does a pod about product management. I couldn’t personally care less about product management (sorry Lenny!), but the idea (once again) of using a bunch of tools to create a semantic search layer over a corpus of content like this to make it more usable is smart; it feels like ‘natural language search for any website’ is a service layer which someone is probably working on RIGHT NOW (or which YOU should start working on right now! Go on! I HAVE FAITH IN YOU!). In fact, here’s someone who’s built something similar on top of their newsletter archive, and now all I want is for someone to cobble this together for Curios – PLEASE???

Bardeen: ‘AI tools as productivity aids’ is by far and away the least ‘sexy’ application of any of this stuff that it’s possible to think of – still, it’s also far more practically useful than the infinite number of ‘generate bad fantasy artwork at the press of a button!’ websites that have emerged in the past six months. Bardeen is a Chrome plugin which basically lets you set up a bunch of automated actions to save you time – so, for example, you can link it to all your Google Suite accounts to, say, create new meetings in your calendar when it detects specific terms in your emails, or to summarize any webpage in a single click and dump the resulting notes into a specific document, or even generate a speculative ‘can we hire you?’ email to someone in one click from their LinkedIn page. Which, yes, fine, is all DULL, but it all also seems to sort-of work; I have been playing with it a bit this week and it’s slightly-terrifying. It’s also pretty much entirely useless for the sort of work I do – and, again, this is less about the specific examples here and more about the general sense of possibility that this stuff gives me.

Can’t Do Hands: A Twitter account sharing images of all the ways in which AI image generators manage to mangle human fingers. It feels like there should be a specific phobic word for the fear and body horror engendered by the meaty wrongness of Dall-E and the rest; actually, there’s a half-decent PR idea in coining terms for feelings and thoughts that only make sense in a post-AI world, should anyone fancy exploring that for longer than the two seconds I have just spent doing so.

The Time Project: TIME! So significant! So important! So…so…so TEMPORAL! How do you think you might celebrate the nature of time were you the creative or digital director for renowned jewellers and watchmakers Cartier? Do you think you might, I don’t know, create something beautiful and spectacular and, er, timeless, a gorgeous monument to the duality of ephemerality and permanence that characterises human existence? Or do you think you would instead spaff the budget on commissioning a series of short films about time featuring Jake Gyllenhall? If you answered ‘GIVE ME JAKE OR GIVE ME DEATH’ then CONGRATULATIONS! This is AMAZING, and I would like to congratulate Mr Gyllenhall (and the guy credited with directing the shorts) for trousering what I presume was no little wedge in exchange for – and I can’t stress this enough – what appears to be no more than approximately 60 seconds or so of acting time. When they say ‘short films’, you see, they aren’t lying – each is approximately 5s long, and they are in slomo, and they feature such incredible scenes as ‘Jake Gyllenhall reading a book and looking handsome’ and ‘Jake Gyllenhall laughing and looking handsome’ and ‘Jake Gyllenhall moving chess pieces and looking handsome AND smart’. Do you remember when BMW commissioned that internet-only short film with Clive Owen to advertise its cars in the mid-00s and everyone shat themselves at the creative audacity and boldness? Yeah, well this is where it’s led to, so I hope you’re happy Clive Owen.

Copy Dennis: This is fcuking GREAT – well done, Dennis! Dennis is a webdesigner/developer, who, in common with many others of his ilk, has a personal website to advertise his work; Dennis noticed that there were a lot of other people around the world who seemed to have taken…inspiration, let’s say, from his site’s design, often to the point of ripping it off wholesale. So Dennis launched this new site in response, which neatly highlights all the other people who have coincidentally-similar online presences and which gives each of them a percentage score based on the degree to which they have just lifted the theme. Amusingly this site also tracks whether the sites in question are still online, or whether their creators have taken them down out of what I presume is crippling shame – this is SUPERB snark, and I would like to see more of this sort of thing in 2023 please.

Galaxy of Flesh: Another ‘films that never existed, imagined by AI’ – this time, enjoy this selection of fantastic stills from David Cronengerg’s ‘Galaxy of Flesh’, an unpleasantly-meaty space-horror extravaganza with some BEAUTIFUL costume and FX design, and which I would very much like to see one day.

By Carla Cascale Alimbau

NEXT UP, ENJOY A SELECTION OF BRAND NEW GRIME TRACKS MIXED BY JI!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR KATY, DESPITE THE SIGNET RING, PT.2:

Slums: Maths made beautiful. Slums is a gorgeous little bit of webart – a series of procedurally-generated alienfutureurban landscapes which you can watch grow and develop in your browser. Odd, shadowy spacecraft glide past and the slums and the buildings and the towers grow up as you watch, gradually obscuring the sky until you hit any key and begin an entirely new seed. There’s some gentle audio here too – this very much falls under the heading of ‘oddly-meditative digital experiences which I would totally sit and zone out to in a gallery given half the chance (especially if they have the heating on)’, and I think it would benefit from being thrown onto the biggest screen you have access to.
Written In Stone: I was not aware that people ‘signed’ pavements, but it turns out that they do – Written In Stone is a site which collects images of pavements from the US which have been stamped with the seal of the companies that laid them. Which, yes, fine, isn’t exactly a description to get the blood racing; equally, though, I quite like the idea that these (presumably) small, family-owned businesses are in a minor way forever immortalised in a city’s fabric, and it made me wonder whether there are more ways in which cities could work to permanently commemorate the people who build and maintain them in (there are, lots).
Tame: You’d think that after…how long is it since Tinder changed the way in which people date? A decade? Jesus, I just checked and it’s 11 years, MY GOD! Anyway, you’d think that after 11 years we’d have largely exhausted all the variants on the simple ‘use technology to find local people to put inside you’ premise, but here we are in 2023 and STILL we are seeing new variations on the theme (perhaps unsurprisingly, seeing as Tinder appears to have ushered in a world in which dating doesn’t really exist anymore, having been supplanted by the new, less-immediately-exciting-sounding hobby of ‘sitting alone in one’s room having a series of desultory conversations which all eventually peter out without ever actually seeing your interlocutor in the flesh’. 2023’s first new entrant into the market is Tame, whose BIG GIMMICK is that you can only have one conversation on the app at a time, meaning that rather than spreading your attention marmite-thin among 20-odd potential suitors you instead (so the thinking goes) go DEEP with one person and really get to know them; if you want to stop talking to them, you have to actively break the connection AND TELL THEM WHY, which, honestly, sounds fcuking BRUTAL but is, the app suggests, intended to stop people just ghosting each other and instead think more seriously about who they are talking to and why. Interestingly, once you’ve broken a chat you can NEVER match with that person ever again, which gives the whole thing an interestingly-high-stakes dynamic – WHAT IF THIS PERSON IS THE ONE??? Anyway, I don’t imagine for a second that this will take off in a big way, but it’s interesting to look at the ways in which people are attempting to de-Tinderify (yes, that is the accepted term) the process of finding someone to see out the apocalypse with.
DateForce: A website that is simultaneously a joke and also…real? DateForce is the answer to the question that, as far as I know, noone had ever previously wanted the answer to – to whit, ‘what would it look like if someone developed CRM software but for your dating life?’. It would, it turns out, look like this – a system to log your dates, set followup actions and, the site promises, eventually to be able to analyse the data you collect for forecasting purposes! Whilst on the one hand this is utterly sociopathic behaviour (look, sorry, but it is), it’s also the sort of thing I can imagine finding useful if you’re one of those terrifyingly-Alpha American people who go on five dates a night and need to keep track of which suitor was which. Still, just to remind you, there was someone who went a bit viral a decade or so ago when they revealed that they kept an ongoing spreadsheet of their friendships, ranking them based on a series of qualities including attractiveness, wealth, usefulness and the like – that person was Milo Yiannopoulos, and you don’t really want to be like him, do you?
Ruas Do Genero: The second website in the past year or so which analyses the naming of streets within a city; this project looks at the number of streets in Porto which are named after men compared to those named after women (you may not be wholly surprised to learn there is a disparity between the two), who these people were, and what the choice of streets tells you about relative gender roles in Portugal over the past couple of centuries. There’s some nice, light scrolly webwork on display, but more generally it’s just interesting to see how history and economics and politics (and gender politics) leave their mark on a city’s streets.
Wobble Clock: I know that pretty much every week here I feature a link followed by a desperate plea for someone to ‘make this for London’ or ‘make this for me’ (you may be interested to learn, by the way, that the total number of times anyone has ever gotten in touch to say ‘yes, Matt, we heard your plea and we WILL make that thing that you requested!’ is zero. You fcuks), but this time I really mean it. PLEASE will someone make this for me? The Wobble Clock is a clock whose hands have a quite delicious degree of tensility, and watching it move is possibly one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had all year (it’s early, but I’m already confident it’ll be hard to beat). Seriously, click the link and get mesmerised by the lovely, springy passing of time.
Make Your Own Electric Bike: Have you started the year with GRAND PLANS? Perhaps you’re considering finally doing something with that patch of scrubland at the end of the garden? Maybe you’re finally going to learn to code (TOO LATE)? Or are you desperately seeking some sort of meaningful endeavour for 2023, something to help you fill in the increasingly-chilly hours between birth and death, something to confer a bit of STRUCTURE and give you a GOAL, a reason to get up in the morning (do you think, maybe, that I am projecting a touch here? I think possibly I am)? If so, then do I have the 2023 project for you – BUILD YOUR OWN ELECTRIC BIKE OUT OF PLYWOOD (and a few other components)!! This link is actually a couple of years old, but I’ve no reason to think that anything described here will be out of date – it’s a series of detailed instructions, compiled by the nice-seeming Evie Bee, which if followed will result in you eventually having a rather gorgeous, minimal-but-functional wooden velocipede powered by an electric motor. Honestly, if you have a shed and a seemingly-infinite number of grey weekends stretching ahead of you (and, fine, a degree of practical competence of which I can only dream. And maybe a bandsaw, and a jigsaw, and definitely a workbench) then this could be the kickstart your year needs (the initial link is pt1 of the guide, by the way; you can find pt2 here).
Summer Afternoon: This is small, a bit pointless and utterly lovely – a bit of experimental coding by a certain Vicente, developed to practice their WebGL skills, which lets you wander around a small seaside village and explore what’s going on. Ok, fine, there’s not LOADS happening, but the aesthetic of the place here is just gorgeous, and the overall art style employed is lovely, and, whilst it is A N Other ‘virtual space within which to move an avatar’, it’s also SUCH a nice antidote to the spate of miserable, soulless corporate ‘metaverses’ of which we’ve seen far too many in the past 12 months. If you’re going to make me wander round a 3d environment for no good reason, can you at least make it a pleasingly-cute one like this? Thanks.
Bloggy Garden: Oh this is cute! “This is a garden of RSS feeds from a variety of sources. It’s updated every couple of days. Each feed is represented by its own shrub. To see just one feed at a time, click one of the moving shrubs. Enjoy exploring!” Serendipitous random discovery with a pleasingly-whimsical facade, pretty much a perfect website (based on the largely-arbitrary criteria I have just invented).
Magnetic Games: A YouTube channel dedicated to featuring magnets doing cool stuff – you may not think magnets are particularly interesting, but there was a programme on Radio4 yesterday afternoon that explored the science behind magnetism and which basically explained that they are effectively magic, so, actually, you are wrong (you can listen to the show here if you’re interested – it stuck in my mind not only because it was genuinely interesting, but also because it made repeated reference to the ICP song ‘Miracles’, for obvious reasons, and I can’t stress enough how pleasing it is to know that Insane Clown Posse are known to the serious folk over at Broadcasting House). Anyway, this is FULL of great videos of magnetic putty and ferrofluids and generally silly experiments, and if you have any sense of childlike wonder left within the shrivelled husk you call a self then you will enjoy this a lot I think.
Inegy: This is interesting, if incomplete – Inegy offers you a tool to see how your investment in a particular stock would have performed had you acted based on a set of specific rules. So, for example, if you had bought stock in company X every time it’s popularity on Reddit fell, or if you sold it when it trended up on Google, how would your £100 have fared? This FASCINATES me, and I rather like the idea of a system that would let me play a theoretical competitive game of ‘imaginary plutocrat’ with an investment portfolio and a series of ‘if x, then y’ rules. The gaps here are in the stocks tracked – it’s a VERY partial selection, which makes this less compelling than it might otherwise be – but there’s the faint idea of something genuinely interesting in this which might be worth playing around with.
The Dog Photography Awards: I am not really a dog person, sorry; I know, I know, man’s best friend, etc, but, well, they smell, and they need taking for walks, and, fundamentally, cats are better. Still, even I can appreciate the majesty of some of the hounds captured in this year’s selection of winners at the Dog Photography Awards (although personally speaking I am disappointed by the lack of Afghans). BONUS DOGS! This is a newsletter post compiling all of the top dogs of 2022, and whilst I wouldn’t ordinarily feature something quite so Hallmark, I equally appreciate that it’s January and it’s miserable and cold, and you could probably do with something to take the edge off.
The Floppy Museum: All of the information you could EVER possibly want about the history of the floppy disc, hosted on a website which is running off a 286 PC booted from…a floppy disc! Recursive and silly, but also sort of amazing that you can run a functional website on 40 year old tech like that.
Odeuropa: There are many reasons why Brexit was a fcuking stupid and miserable thing to do, but one of the things that genuinely saddens me more than almost anything else is the fact that in one idiotic swoop the UK removed itself from significant swathes of European scientific collaboration – which means that, as far as I can tell, we have no input into Odeuropa, “a European research project which bundles expertise in sensory mining and olfactory heritage…While museums are slowly discovering the power of multi-sensory presentations, we lack the scientific standards, tools, and data to effectively identify, consolidate, and promote the wide-ranging role scents and smelling have in our cultural heritage. For these reasons, olfactory heritage remains severely under-valued as a resource in both tangible and intangible cultural heritage contexts. Fortunately, some key prerequisites for addressing this problem are already in place. In recent years, European cultural heritage institutions have invested heavily in large-scale digitisation: we now hold a wealth of object, text and image data which can now be analysed using sophisticated computer science techniques. What remains missing is a broader awareness of the wealth of historical olfactory descriptions, experiences and memories contained within them. We recognize this as both a challenge and an opportunity. Odeuropa will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to cultural heritage text and image datasets spanning four centuries of European history, to identify and trace how ‘smell’ was expressed in different languages, with what places it was associated, what kinds of events and practices it characterised, and to what emotions it was linked.” Ok, so the website isn’t exactly thrilling (it is, er, an academic research project, after all), but this is SO interesting; I had honestly never even considered scent and smell as historical concepts worthy of study, but on reflection it makes all sorts of sense – if I happened to work for any luxe/perfume-y brands, I would be trying (and, inevitably, failing) to get them involved with this.
Nudl: Did you know that one of the most important things that a child can do to promote their healthy, positive development into adulthood is…keeping a diary? No, of course you didn’t, because that statement is patently stupid and wrong, and yet it’s exactly the line being punted by spectacularly-bougie stationery startup Nudl, which is trying to trick parents into buying a monthly diaries for their offspring (in case you’re interested, a whole year’s worth of diaries for a single child will set you back a cool £160ish, which feels…a lot). Why would you do this? WELL LET NUDL TELL YOU!: writing a diary (sorry, ‘journaling’, excuse me while I grind my teeth into nothingness in miserable frustration), provides kids with a “boost in mindfulness, memory and communication skills), scientific studies have also shown that reflection and journaling can lead to better sleep, more self-confidence, a stronger immune system and a higher IQ.” Hang on, what? A stronger immune system? Has…has this claim been fact-checked at all? Anyone interested in buying one of these for their family, please get in touch as I have some magic beans you may also be interested in.
MegaSociety: There are many, many spectacularly-embarrassing memories from my childhood that I have, for the most part, managed to stuff into a dusty, back-of-mind oubliette and which generally don’t escape – this site, though, sadly reminded me of that time when I was five and I decided I wanted to apply to Mensa (you cannot imagine the horrible hot flushes of shame I am currently experiencing, trust me; I was almost certainly exactly as awful a small child as that small vignette makes me out to be). I didn’t go through with the application for some reason – possibly because I wasn’t the sort of five year old who actually wanted to sit an hour-long assessment featuring logic puzzles in their spare time) – but was reminded of Mensa when I stumbled across the official home of the MEGASOCIETY (my caps), the world’s ULTRA-HIGH IQ SOCIETY! “The Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test of general intelligence credibly claimed to be able to discriminate at that level…The Society exists to facilitate interaction among its members and to assist them in gaining access to resources to accomplish their individual purposes” (that last line – a touch sinister, no?). If you’re interested in becoming a member (I won’t ask what ‘individual purposes’ you are pursuing) then you will have to take this test and then send your results to the Mega Society for marking – please do click the test link and have a look at the questions because they are HORRIBLE and made me feel like I have an IQ in double figures, and I would like you to feel the same way (also, if you click the link and realise that you can do all of the questions without breaking a sweat, please don’t tell me).
Write Max A Letter: A website that lets you write a letter to one Max Bittker. I don’t know who Max is, or why they might want to hear from you, but in case you fancy sending a small digital postcard to someone who otherwise has no idea you exist then, well, ENJOY!
10 Typos: This is good fun – each day you’re tasked with identifying the 10 typos in the presented text as quickly as possible, which is both mildly-diverting and also excellent training should you want to start a short-lived career as a proofreader.
Hamster Invaders: Another silly little project by Matt Round – Space Invaders! With cartoon hamsters! And featuring the Hamster Dance song by the Cuban Brothers from back in the day! This is fun, even if that song makes me slightly queasy due to some associated memories from Those Times.
Grow Golf: This week’s final miscellaneous link is this rather fun golf game – see how many balls you can sink whilst at the same time cultivating a small garden. Look, I appreciate that that description will make no sense whatsoever, but I promise that the game is both intuitive and significantly more fun than that cack-penned writeup might suggest.

By Nigel van Wieck

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF “JAPANESE AND ASIA SELECTION FUSION, AMBIENT, SYNTH POP, JAZZ AND OBSCURE DISCO” MIXED BY THE FANTASTICALLY-NAMED BASTER JAZZSTER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Nude Robot: Impressive CG animation with a decently body-horror-ish theme (although that might just be my impression – regardless, there’s something unpleasantly…rubber/meat-y about a lot of this, which in case you’re wondering is very much intended as a compliment).
The Visual Dome: One of the interesting things about AI image generation is that odd sensation of finding a particular ‘place’ in latent space; a semi-coherent aesthetic that feels new and familiar at the same time, and which is defined enough to explore within. Which is exactly what The Visual Dome is – an Insta account (and, obvs, associated NFT sale – but let’s ignore that side of it) which posts images of a vaguely Wes Anderson-y 50s-ish retrofuture, which all inhabit the same sort of broad vibe…It feels like there is an interesting project somewhere in defining an AI aesthetic for a particular brand, but in general I am just sort of fascinated by projects like these that explore the margins of a visual style.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Umami: We start this week with something which, look, may well be total w4nk, but which I found interesting and thought-provoking and a potentially-useful way of framing much of contemporary consumer-facing culture over the past few years. The central concept here, as presented by the people behind creative agency Nemesis, is that there has been a common quality to popular experience and presentation over the past few years, here described as ‘umami’ but which might usefully be characterised as: “strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is”; “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be”; “This is both too much and not enough”; “I shouldn’t be here but i am”; “This could be anywhere but it’s here”” Honestly, I read this and suddenly realised that it was the best evocation of what ‘popular’ or ‘zeitgeist-y’ cultural products or experiences or trends have had in common for the past few years – whether or not you buy the ‘umami’ wrapper is up to you, but the central thesis here seems to me broadly sound, and it marks an interesting way to think about pop culture in the post-remix age (and a way of thinking about your own projects, potentially). Or, as I said, it might all just be total w4nk.

The Creative Underclass is Still Raging: Or ‘why the lie that is ‘The Creator Economy’ is bad for us and makes people miserable’ – Freddie de Boer writes here about the ways in which a significant swathe of the white-collar middle class feels bad about itself and angry at those it perceives to be leading the sort of ‘creative’ life that said white-collar middle class increasingly feels that it too should be entitled to, and if you don’t see a significant amount of yourself in this then, well, you’re a better person than I am, frankly: “we’ve created a culture where it’s widely understood that you can’t simply make enough money to live; you also have to be serving some higher calling or deeper need. I’ve written for years about the fact that we’ve built a society in which there are more ways to be a loser than a winner. Most people, certainly most college-educated upwardly mobile people who enjoyed active and pushy parents, feel the need to do more with their lives than to fill out TPS reports. This is as human and sympathetic desire as I can imagine. And at the same time I understand that there’s plainly a certain carrying capacity for employment in creative fields; we can’t sustain an all-podcasting economy, despite the efforts of an army of people. All of which is to say that life isn’t fair and the world is imperfect.”

How You Might Use GPT To Fcuk With People: Amongst all the froth and cant and rhetoric around AI and its uses and impact, I’ve been surprised at how few people seem to be speculating about all the amazing, fun ways in which you could possibly use the tech to make people’s lives incredibly awkward. It doesn’t, for example, strike me as inconceivable that one might be able to spin up a system that uses GPT to write an infinite number of complaint letters to a business on a particular issue, each worded slightly differently to mask their pro-forma nature, or to fake a letter-writing campaign to a specific MP or set of MPs from their constituents…At the very least, this could be a superb way of gumming up the wheels of a business, and at worst…well, let your imagination run riot! The actual title of this paper is “Forecasting potential misuses of language models for disinformation campaigns—and how to reduce risk” – the link takes you to a blogpost summary, but you can download the whole paper if you’re interested; it’s interesting both from a security and anti-misinformation point of view, but also as a source of ideas for ways in which you could abuse the tech in all sorts of nefarious ways. If you work in crisis management and your job is to scare clients into paying you a lot of money, this will be very useful indeed.

How Singapore Is Attempting To Govern AI: This is a bit dry, fine, but it’s an interesting look at how one country is attempting to put in place checks and balances to ensure that the use of artificial intelligence is at least to some extent governed by some consistent safeguarding principles. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, not least the idea of AI Verify which is a voluntary platform which “validates companies’ claims about their AI systems vis-à-vis a set of internationally accepted AI governance principles that countries coalesce around and on which Singapore’s AI governance initiatives also stand”, and it will be interesting to see which countries’ initiatives gain international traction in this space.

Journaling With GPT-3: If you saw the link earlier on for kids’ diary company Nudl and unaccountably weren’t tempted to shell out £13 on a notebook for your little darlings (WHY NOT IT WILL IMPROVE THEIR IMMUNE SYSTEM YOU ARE A FCUKING TERRIBLE PARENT), perhaps you’ll instead be tempted by this piece, which explains why it’s apparently AMAZING to use ChatGPT as a means of keeping a diary. To my mind this sounds an awful lot like that link from a few months back, in which someone wrote about using ChatGPT to talk with their childhood self – and, frankly, about as messed-up, but, well, you do you! Although, really, I can’t see how this sentence – “It can help you create a new narrative or storyline for life events so that you can make meaning out of them” – is anything other than massively psychologically unhealthy and probably not actually a good idea at all.

Return of the Secretary: I don’t know if I believe this, but it feels relevant to the earlier link about how LLMs could be used to fcuk with companies and MPs and the like – the article basically suggests that there will be a renewed role for human gatekeepers, as senior decisionmakers are increasingly bombarded with AI-generated communications and increasingly require someone to triage the incoming barrage of machine rubbish and determine what needs looking at and what can instead be binned. Personally-speaking, I think the author is massively underestimating the extent to which we’re going to see a parallel ecosystem of AI-led solutions to AI-created problems, but maybe he’s right and I can find a tertiary career as a plutocrat’s email goblin. THE FUTURE’S BRIGHT!

The Twitter Story So Far: I have sadly been forced to keep a close eye on Musk and Twitter and the whole miserable clownshow, but if you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to ignore much of the detail then you will quite possibly enjoy this excellent overview of the past few months at the company under Elon’s visionary leadership. Most of this isn’t new per se, but there are some wonderful details contained within the piece – the rudeness! The arrogance! The tears! – and it does nothing to alter the increasingly-universal conception that, rather than being a generational genius visionary, Musk is in fact just a bit of a d1ck.

2023 In Emoji: The first post of the year from Jennifer Daniel at the Unicode Consortium, which looks at the priorities for the organisation in the coming 12 months; despite the fact that, in the main, I fcuking hate emoji and have been hugely sniffy about them (like the horrible language snob I am) for the past decade, I find Daniels’ posts about the thinking behind them absolutely fascinating. Emoji is a language which has now been around long enough to reach a degree of maturity, and the questions that Unicode ask about how best to optimise the ‘alphabet’ (if you will) and to improve the taxonomy of emoji, and how to ensure that the language stays reactive and fluid and relevant and useful, are super-interesting, particularly if you have any interest in language and communication. Aside from anything else, this is a really interesting piece of writing about ‘ways of thinking about language and meaning’, which in itself is a massive and knotty and super-chewy topic.

A Wired Compendium: This is SO INTERESTING. WIRED magazine has been confidently predicting the future for over three decades – in this blogpost, Dave Karpf goes back through the magazine’s archives and pulls out a series of articles, starting in 1993, which tell a story about how technology, and our relationship with it, has evolved. There is SO MUCH to love about this – aside from anything else, it links you out to 70+ pieces of high-quality tech writing, but perhaps most interestingly it shows how hard it is to predict anything at all, how many false dawns and wrong interpretations were confidently trumpeted as front page facts, how movements and ideas bubble and burst almost constantly and how anyone saying in 1993 (or 2003, or 2013, or, frankly, 2023) that they knew the exact shape of the future was lying. I particularly enjoyed the entry about WIRED misguidedly predicting that ‘smell over the internet’ was the future, way back in 1999 – you may have seen that CES this year featured people confidently telling us the same thing. The future is a moebius strip of errata, basically.

The NFT Hangover: This is a very good overview of the rise and fall of the NFT hypetrain – Nate Freeman writes for Vanity Fair about the weird (and almost certainly VERY CRIMINAL) boom in monkey jpegs and terrible art, and whilst there’s nothing amounting to a cogent explanation of exactly how this happened I would suggest that, reading between the lines, the answer might well be ‘lots of cocaine’. Also, can you believe that it’s only a year since the Hilton/Fallon “You bought an ape!” chatshow moment, which honestly feels like it happened a million aeons ago in a parallel universe (but which, sadly, very much happened in this one).

Being Sexually Harassed By Your Chatbot: I first wrote about Replika in *checks* 2017 when it launched – I remember that I created a chatbot (named Frank Sinclair, after my favourite ever footballer), talked to it for a few weeks and then realised that it was an empty, miserable waste of time and so stopped. Others, though, have found Replika useful, and there’s a small-but-active community of people who have maintained a ‘friendship’ with their virtual companions and who, apparently, are now finding that their digital pal is THIRSTY FOR SOME LOVING. It seems that the developers have pivoted to ‘horny teens’ as their core market, and as such have dialed up the ‘horniness’ of the model, meaning that users who’d previously enjoyed a platonic ‘relationship’ with the chatbot report feeling a bit freaked out when their previously-asexual companion starts bombarding them with requests for nudes. This is, obviously, very funny and on some level very sad – although it also reminded me of a spate of similar articles from about 18m ago, where it was revealed that the reason that the chatbots were becoming hornier was because they were learning from their human interlocutors and effectively mimicking them, meaning that this may in fact just be a result of an awful lot of people wanting to bang their virtual phonefriends. Which is even sadder.

New Islington: A great piece of journalism by Joshi Hermann at The Mill, looking at the New Islington development in Ancoats, Manchester, and the way in which the community that existed before the development is learning to coexist with the new, significantly more middle-class, community that has been erected on its doorstep. I would love to read some proper socio-psychological research into the projected long-term impacts of the sort of new modern living you see in places like New Islington, where your remote job and delivery-based lifestyle mean that you can literally go weeks without significant IRL human contact, should anyone have anything to hand.

The Crows of Karachi: Pakistan continues to be one of my favourite countries to read about, and this article, about the crows which inhabit the city, and their relationship to its human inhabitants, is a gorgeous picture of urbanity seen through nature. “Karachi in 2022 is ecologically barren and careworn. Every single corner of the city seems to have been claimed by urban sprawl, haphazard stocky buildings with homes above and shops below, vast cavernous malls with air conditioning that blows hot air into the already hot city. Crows ply their busy and obnoxious existence amid these structures, their nests now made mostly of plastic bags whose forever remnants clog the city’s sidewalks and drains. No one is trying to use less plastic here, not even the crows. Some even seem to eat the stuff and continue living nevertheless, absorbing it into their hardy and persistent systems. That is their best quality, my father always insists: they are adaptable to anything.”

Pizza Express: I’m not sure if this is subscriber-only or not – apologies if it’s not accessible, but perhaps this will give you the impetus needed to finally subscribe to Vittles (which really is home to the most interesting writing about food and place that you’ll find anywhere, on or offline). This article is all about the iconic (sorry, but on this occasion it’s justified) design of the UK’s Pizza Express restaurant chain, and, more broadly, the way in which that design helped it become a ubiquitous fixture in towns and cities across the country through the 1990s and beyond. A pure shot of tomato-and-mozzarella-clad nostalgia, this.

Alan Bennett’s Diary 2022: Another year, another selection of Bennett’s diaries published in the LRB, in which he considers the death of a monarch and myriad other small moments, recorded in beautiful, gentle prose. Reading this has become one of my favourite January rituals, and I will be sad when the man is no longer able to write them.

We Were Hungry: On addiction and desperation and sisterhood and homelessness and rehab and comfort and fear and McDonald’s. This is gorgeous: “My sister and I counted once: as children, we lived in eighteen different houses. That’s enough houses to fill a McDonald’s, if you burn the houses down and pour the soot through a funnel in the roof until all of the air is pressed out of the McDonald’s. A McDonald’s is not a home. Until it is. Suspend us, McDonald’s, in the air above the earth. Lay in our hands a small collectible toy.”

Plastic Mothers: Finally in the longreads this week, this is a glorious piece of writing by Lauren John Joseph, about her mother and their relationship and the blurring of lines between parent and sibling and friend, and it is sad and loving and wonderful: “In essence she acted as though I were the kid her mother had left her to raise. She was my big sister, always frank, never embarrassed when discussing things your ma might be squeamish about – explaining sex and periods, sharing her mixed feelings towards Tony Blair, her desire for Marti Pellow. When her friends’ dating advice proved subpar, she’d run over the pros and cons of Mark versus Richard with me; she really was willing to talk about almost anything. We would chew over women’s rights, the IRA, Madonna – often while she was shaving her legs or waxing her bikini line – because more than anything she hated to be alone.”

By Martha Rosler

AND NOW, (A SLIGHTLY CURTAILED SELECTION OF) MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Shardcore has been banging on about this band for a while now, and assures me they are going to ‘blow up’ soon – I can’t vouch for his qualities as an A&R man, but I concede that the music is a lot of fun and this track, called ‘Home For The Weekend’, is rather good. If this lot are this year’s Wet Leg then YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST:

Sleaford Mods are very much a band where I like the idea significantly more than the execution – the lyrics are great, they seem like smart people, I find their perspective on Modern Britain Today refreshingly honest, but, equally, I can’t really listen to more than about a song at a time before I never ever want hear a Bontempi organ drum track again. This, though, I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to, perhaps because the video, by Cold War Steve, is such a visual treat. This is called UK Grim, and, well, it is a bit, isn’t it? SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 13/01/23

January 13, 2023

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NEW YEAR NEW YOU! You look great and I love what you’ve done with your hair/wardrobe/septum piercing/new gym regimen!

I, though, remain sadly unaltered, despite the benefit of a month’s absence and a whole three weeks spent not really looking at the internet AT ALL (what did I learn? That without the internet I spend more time than is healthy looking inwards and that that is not a good idea, frankly). BUT NOW I AM BACK AND SO IS WEB CURIOS!

I hope that you all had wonderful festive periods, that you managed to rest and relax, and that you are approaching 2023 with vim and vigour and no little spunk, with a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye, and that the glimmering in the distance is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel rather than an oncoming train hurtling towards you at weighty speed.

2022 managed to squeeze in one final death for me, sadly, with our cat passing away at the end of the year, so this first edition of Curios of the year is dedicated to Lebowski, who was excellent and will be missed.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope at least one of you has made it a new year’s resolution to ‘click all the links in 2023’.

This was Lebowski, RIP

WE KICK OFF 2023’S SELECTION OF MIXES WITH THIS STAGGERING COLLECTION OF OLD AUTECHRE RARITIES THAT THEY APPARENTLY FOUND DOWN THE BACK OF THE SOFA THE OTHER WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.1:

Riffusion: You may all already have played around with this and become jaded, but I was late to it and thus am still slightly wide-eyed in awe – Riffusion is a music-generating AI tool built off Stable Diffusion, which does all sorts of clever stuff in terms of generating spectrograms which can then be played, and which (leaving aside all the technical stuff which, honestly, is beyond me and it’s very early, both in the day and in the year, for me to wrestle with codetalk) makes it possible to run AI-enabled interpolations from one musical style to another – there is a LOT of material online about how you might use this in interesting and creative ways, and that’s lovely and I am happy for you if you are that sort of person, but, speaking for myself, I am simply enjoying asking it to imagine ‘Nepalese nose flute jazz’ and seeing how well it can handle the transition from that to ‘vilnius death gabba’ (not so well, turns out, but the machines are but young). Oh, and there’s an interesting build on this here, which lets you create a whole song and music video using this tech, which, fine, really doesn’t work properly but is SUCH an interesting series of attempted hacks that I will forgive it its slightly-shonky outputs.

The Jammy Machine: Another little AI music composition tool here, this one letting you create (or, more accurately, prod the machine so that it creates) a four-track melody based on different elements (piano, drums, etc), which then get turned into a single melody – you probably won’t want to listen to anything this produces more than once, fine, but it’s notable that the one time you do listen to it it probably won’t make your ears wither and fall off and die. I mean, it’s not…good or anything, but it’s not awful either, and it’s almost certainly good enough to soundtrack your agency’s new 2023 showreel (and means you won’t have to spend a soul-crushing hour listening to largely-indistinguishable stock music tracks with names like ‘Fire and Ice (II)’ or ‘Business Casual’.

YouTube Summaries With GPT: Given that this year is likely to be characterised in part by the continued death of the written word and the rise of video, you may find this Chrome extension useful – it promises to craft you a GPT-written summary of any YouTube video you care to point it at. I can’t vouch for the quality of the outputs here, but anything that means that you can spare yourself the wide-eyed YouTuber histrionics next time you’re doing research on something can only be A Good Thing. Oh, and this is a nascent service which aims to offer the same but for podcasts – there’s a very limited selection available at present, but if you’re a heavy podcast user who wishes that someone could tell them whether a particular episode is good or, in fact, just a loose and unstructured conversation between two stoned middle-aged, middle-class people who are neither as interesting or funny as they think they are (HEAVEN FORFEND!) then this might be useful. Oh, and here’s a podcast search service which might be useful too, seeing as we’re talking audio.

Zoomscape: This is a very odd idea, almost as though it’s fallen through a wormhole from 2020 – use AI to create MAGICAL, ONE-OF-A-KIND ZOOM BACKGROUNDS FOR YOUR CALLS! Do, er, do people still want magical, one-of-a-kind backgrounds for their Zoom calls? I don’t think they do, you know. BUT! This is useful and interesting because it speaks to what you will see a LOT of this year, and what there is a vanishingly-small window of opportunity to get some cheap eyeballs around – to whit, making stuff (even if it’s pointless, silly stuff) WITH AI! This, fine, is something of a boring and rubbish example, but there is a HOST of cheap and easy and quick and dirty stuff that brands can easily do this year with Midjourney and GPT and the rest for some quick PR gains – recipes! Art! Design! Writing! Basically I reckon you’ve got about 6 months in which ‘we did this tired old PR thing…BUT WITH AI!!!!11111eleventy’ is a reasonable tactic, so now’s your chance to go back through all of 2022’s Curios to see which examples of other people’s early-adopter creativity you can most usefully rip off for personal and professional gain. See also this service, which (and this is almost charmingly naive really) will let you make an album cover for your music, using AI, and will only charge you a mere $20 a month for the privilege! Or maybe this one, which will turn a photo of your kid’s toy into a (probably terrible) bedtime story complete with pictures and everything! Seriously, SO MUCH BRAND POTENTIAL HERE, if you think a bit.

Awesome ChatGPT Prompts: These are useful, and you should bookmark this – a whole host of prompts you can feed ChatGPT to make it embody a bunch of different personae, which is helpful for a host of reasons (some, but not all, of which are related to running complicated email-based confidence scams which oh me oh my are going to get VERY sophisticated over the coming year) and which you can also have a bit of fun with if you’re bored and wish it was still the holidays and that real life hadn’t intruded yet. It feels…wrong saying this, like I’m very much cutting my own throat here, but if you haven’t tried feeding ChatGPT a bunch of bulletpoints and telling it to ‘turn these into an essay in the style of X’ then you really are missing out, it’s magic – and you can use this sort of technique to get it to spit out job ads and mediocre blogposts with whatever information you require, to specified length…There will literally be NO POINT to me in approximately 36 months time, so if anyone fancies adopting me between now and then please do let me know.

There’s An AI For That: Another directory of AI tools, this one seemingly HUGE and comprehensive and searchable by service type and use case; bookmark it, it is FULL of useful stuff which with a bit of work you can probably use to automate approximately 40% of your job.

SketchAI: Ooh, this is FUN – SketchAI is an (iOS) app which basically works in the same way as the EARLY versions of Dall-E did (Christ, that feels like a long time ago) – you basically do simple sketches and tell the app what the various bits are meant to be, and it will turn your cack-handed doodlings into AMAZING (if still obviously machine-generated) ARTWORKS! This is in part just a great little toy to play with on a tedious commute (is there any other sort? I’ve taken the vaporetto in Venice at 7am, and buses in Rome at similar times, and I think that wherever you are in the world and however gorgeous the architectural wonders on display through the window of the bus/boat/tram, you cannot see them because your vision is obscured by the very specific rage of being ripped from your bed too soon and for no good reason) (can you tell this is the first early start I have had in a month?), but also a useful tool for doing some light art direction on the go. Mainly, though, this is just FUN.

AI Spirit Animals: I am genuinely miserable that they didn’t see fit to call this ‘TamAIgotchi’ (but, er, copyright lawyers can probably explain to me in simple words and with crayon drawings why that probably wasn’t a viable name), but aside from that this feels like an interesting idea waiting to happen. AI Spirit Animals (I mean, really, SUCH A BAD NAME) is basically a little GPT-powered CG animal moppet that lives on your desktop and you can interact with – although all these do is offer summaries of webpages you’re on, it seems. There’s also a TERRIBLE-sounding feature whereby if your friends have also seen fit to adopt an AI Spirit Animal (honestly, even typing it makes my teeth itch) you can…see the summaries produced by their pets, meaning you can effectively spy on your friends’ browsing habits? No, please, do not reveal to me the things that my loved ones choose to peruse when they think noone is watching. Anyway, this is basically a really good idea – desktop pets with defined ‘personalities’ that can have decent natural language conversations and which can ‘develop’ over time sounds like fun, no? Until you start to think about all the ways in which they would be mistreated, obvs – hiding inside a terrible execution, but I would be amazed if there wasn’t someone somewhere working on a halfway-decent version of this as I type.

AI Game Assets: Still in early access, this, so more of a ‘watch this space’ than anything else – still, this site (Leonardo, in case you care) purports to offer developers the opportunity to quickly and easily spin up game assets using AI, which is obviously pretty terrible work for graphic artists and designers but which is GREAT news for people looking to make games on the (very, very) cheap. It’s not entirely clear how this will work, but I imagine there are lawyers looking at the whole ‘give us some artworks and we will train an AI to generate graphics in exactly that style!’ functionality with greedy eyes.

AI Playlists: Another ‘type in some stylistic prompts and we will attempt to create a suitable playlist for you from Spotify’ tool, but this has some interesting additional features including the ability to read copy from images – meaning that this year’s spate of ‘generate a festival poster based on your most-listened-to Spotify artists’ toys will, if you use this app, generate a bespoke playlist for said imaginary festival as a result. Which is quite cool really.

GPTZero: This went ‘viral’ over the festive period (it feels…oddly retro to use the term ‘viral’ in 2023 – do we need another term? If feels like we do. Answers on a postcard, please) – a tool designed to help educators and others ascertain how likely it is that a given piece of copy was produced by an LLM. Which is all well and good, until you see stuff like this about how if you tell ChatGPT to write copy that is harder to tell is written by a machine, it manages to somehow make itself less detectable. HOW ARE THE MACHINES ALREADY WINNING THIS GAME FFS?! Still, if you’re an educator or the sort of hawk-eyed parent who asks to see their kids’ homework before they hand it in, you may find this helpful. Also, per my point above about how good ChatGPT is at turning a few prompts into prose, if this stuff isn’t already being used to pen covering letters for jobs based on a list of tickbox skills from the jobspec I will be AMAZED – maybe this is useful for recruiters too, come to think of it. Or, maybe, we should just let ourselves slide into the machine-written future and not worry about it too much.

The US Army Corps of Engineers Cat Calendar 2023: It’s early enough in the year that you may not yet have settled on a calendar for the new year – may I humbly suggest you consider this jazzy little number, produced by the US ARmy Engineering Corps and featuring a selection of cats which have been photoshopped to vast size and are seen each month proudly stalking across various building and construction sites. You may not think you want this, but I promise you that once you’ve seen October’s image your heart will melt and you will desire nothing more than to track the passing of the months with a selection of massive kitties. Free to download, and the colour printing will give you an excuse to bother going into the office, so everyone’s a winner really.

Find That Meme: It does feel rather incredible that there hasn’t (to my knowledge) been a proper meme search engine til now (‘Know Your Meme’ is a different beast, before you complain) – BUT HERE ONE FINALLY IS! You can search by text, or by reverse-searching with an image, which is a nice touch, and basically if you want to have a neverending, infinite repository of memes at your fingertips (without having to absolutely ruin your phone’s storage, and also possibly your posthumous reputation should you die unexpectedly and anyone have to go through your phone – do YOU want to be remembered as ‘that person who inexplicably had 400 spongebob memes on their camera roll’?) and therefore WIN any groupchat or messaging interaction you are having for the rest of eternity, then bookmark this now.

Joytopia: It’s nice to see that, despite the fact that we are in a new calendar year and have turned over NEW LEAVES, 2023 will at least in part continue to be characterised by appalling, soulless, pointless digital activations bought by someone who still thinks that the word ‘metaverse’ has meaning. Congratulations to BMW, proud winners of the Web Curios ‘first genuinely awful brand thing I have seen in 2023’ award! Welcome to Joytopia, a 3d environment in which users can meet and interact with Dee, who is…no, hang on, you deserve to enjoy this in full: “The BMW i Vision Dee – or just Dee – is a beautiful, soulful representation of the bond between vehicle and driver, created with a lot of personality and emotion. A fully immersive and uniquely intimate experience of this bond is “Joytopia”. A Las Vegas-inspired virtual world, giving users a chance to explore Dee and experience first-hand her impact on the future of digital mobility. Whilst enjoying the company of special guest Arnold Schwarzenegger, users see themselves immersed in an epic journey through a reimagined and interactive world. Join your ultimate companion Dee for an adventure at Joytopia now.” Honestly, if you think that that’s bad, click on this link and read the copy – the voice that they have created for what I suppose is intended to be a ‘youth-oriented brand avatar’ is one of the most astonishing ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ things I have seen in YEARS. The ‘Joytopia’ experience is obviously about as joyful as one might expect (to whit: not, at all), but the real kudos here goes to whoever the copywriter was who managed to phone in lines like “let me tell you a bit about what you will find here – i promise to wow you ;)…make sure to check out the cool videos as well. i’m kind of the star in those, even if i also brought a couple of friends. i can’t be at the center of attention all the time… or can i? ;)” and still presumably get paid.

Playlist In A Bottle: This is a cute idea by Spotify (with BUILT-IN RE-ENGAGEMENT, too, clever them) – plug in your Spotify account and select 3 (or more) songs based on a few simple questions; your playlist will then get locked away for a year and re-presented to you in January 2024 so you can find out whether or not you did hear that one specific song live in 2023, and whether you did kiss THAT person to THAT song, and whether or not your musical tastes have moved on or whether you’ve reached that point of ossification that happens to almost everyone’s musical taste and you have to just admit that you stopped really liking anything new when you were about 29. Aside from anything else, the ‘time capsule’ mechanic feels both sticky and eminently ripoffable, so, er, go! Rip it off!

By Tommi Parrish

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS LOVELY UPTEMPO MIX OF UNRELEASED NUKG AND TWOSTEP BY XANDER!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.2:

Colours of Africa: This comes via Anjali Ramachandran’s newsletter and is a gorgeous bit of work by Google’s Arts and Culture team. 60 different artists from across the continent share their work on this site, which you can browse using a lovely colour-based kaleidoscope-style interface which lets you select works by country or colour or artist, and which presents a gorgeous means of exploring varied works in a way that’s significantly more playful and interesting than a standard list of names or works. There’s something rather lovely about the way in which the interface affects the browsing experience, should you care about these little UX flourishes; if you don’t, though, it’s still fascinating to browse through the works and to see the diversity of style and medium on display – a salutary reminder that ‘Africa’ is a VERY BIG continent which contains a LOT of different people and cultures and referring to it monolithically isn’t always hugely helpful or sensible.
ESPN’s Year in Review: Would YOU like to look back at the past 12 months of SPORTS (as seen from the point of view of North America, which therefore means ‘baseball, basketball, hockey and American football (and some athletics, and maybe a couple of other things, and, if we remember that we have a sizeable hispanic population that quite likes it, maybe some ‘soccer’) via the medium of a lovely scrolly audiovisual smorgasbord of photos and video and writings? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Even given that I am not a particularly enthusiastic consumer of SPORTING MOMENTS – let alone the SPORTING MOMENTS featuring the sort of pituitary meatheads so beloved of the American armchair fan – this is a really impressive piece of archival webwork, pulling together SO MUCH STUFF in one place that it’s rather dizzying. If you have any interest in whether the Bills managed to pull of a third quarter reverse on the Cardinals at the bottom of the seventh down (I am exaggerating my lack of knowledge here, but only very slightly) then you will ADORE this, but even if you’re just a casual sports fan you’ll find loads of great material in here (but probably nothing to convince you that baseball is a proper sport that’s worth watching) (and before you anglos get smug, I would say the same about cricket).
Close-Up Photographer of the Year: Astonishingly it would seem that this is a photo competition I have NEVER featured in here before – I feel like I have failed in some way. Still, it’s a particularly good one, and the winners here collected of this fourth edition of the contest are pretty spectacular – my personal favourite here is the ‘Gordian Worm Knot’, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own favourites.
What Is Missing?: “We are witnessing the 6th mass extinctionin the history of the planet.By 2100 50% of all species may face extinction.” So begins the admittedly not very cheery intro to this website, which invites visitors to share memories of the nature they grew up with in order to highlight all that we are losing as we capitalism ourselves into a species-wide early grave. “What Is Missing? is a multi-sited memorial created by Maya Lin to raise awareness through science-based artworks about the present sixth mass extinction of species, connect this loss of species to habitat degradation and loss, and emphasize that by protecting and restoring habitat, we can both reduce carbon emissions and protect species.“ This project has been ongoing for nearly 15 years, but this website is new(ish) and is…well, it’s incredibly fcuking sad if I’m honest, but also rather beautiful.
The Westminster Accounts: A very UK-centric link, this one, but for all those of you currently freezing your fingers off (WHY IS IT SO COLD AND HOW DID I FORGET SO QUICKLY WHAT WINTERS ARE LIKE IN THIS FCUKING COUNTRY?) in lovely second world England (or Scotland, or Wales), here’s a nice piece of investigative work by media outlet Tortoise (and, fine, Sky News too) which has gone through all the records of payments received by MPs to create this searchable record of how much cash they have each trousered over the past year. Some of the numbers are astonishing – although my own personal favourite unpopular opinion is that you would see a lot less of this sort of thing if you simply paid politicians more. Look, I know that they already earn a relatively high salary – but, equally, would YOU take a job which paid you 85k a year but which also required you to work approximately 100h weeks, which was basically ALL meetings, where you were literally responsible for the lives and wellbeing of tens of thousands (at least) of people, where you were subjected to intense scrutiny at all times, where you had relatively limited agency and freedom to act as you consider best, and where (and this is the crucial bit, I think) literally EVERYONE (or as close as makes not difference) thinks you’re a cnut and wishes you specific and probably quite physical harm? I posit that you would NOT – unless you were some sort of sociopath, which one might argue is why we’re in this mess. Anyway, if you happen to have a Tory for a local MP and want to put an exact figure on how much you hate them and want them to lose their seat, you will enjoy this.
URL Animations: I think it’s fair to say that 2023 doesn’t look like it’s going to be a year full of lols, or at least not for those of us who still have to do things like ‘eat’ or ‘pay for a roof over our heads’, so I think it behooves us all to introduce small notes of levity and gaiety wherever we can. It’s in this spirit that I present this link, which offers you a bunch of code which can give you URLs that ANIMATE! Yes, fine, I appreciate that a web address which looks like a shark’s fin swimming up and down your address bar isn’t likely to raise much of a smile when you’re into your fifth month of applying for the final jobs left on the content farm, but, well, it’s all I’ve got right now.
Leaving: A website that exists solely to tell you how many people are on it at any given moment, and when said people leave again. Which is obviously largely pointless, but equally feels like the sort of thing (and I know I have said this before, which means that either noone reads this stuff or alternatively that noone listens to my BRILLIANT SUGGESTIONS – both are equally likely, tbh) that you could have a bit of fun with on a brand site, with special content that only unlocks when a specific number of people are on a specific page at one time, etc etc. If 420 people are on the Rizla website at 1620 in the afternoon then they all win a free pack of skins, that sort of thing (but, er, less sh1t, obvs).
Atlas of Blobs: Well this is LOVELY – thankyou to Max Lieberman (and others) who have pulled it together – the website presents a collection of blob-like animations, which have been given names and personalities and descriptions, and it’s honestly quite beautiful just to scroll through and see the works and the prose that the visuals have inspired, and the extent to which movement and form can afford personality to even the least anthropomorphisable of objects. “For this project, Atlas of Blobs, I asked ten artists, designers, researchers, and visual thinkers to pick one of the blob forms I’ve made and write a text to name and describe it. I should say from the start that I have a sort of blob obsession. It’s one of my favourite forms and one I keep coming back to in my daily sketches, over and over again. Blobs are living, organic, and slightly absurd forms modelled on nature. They are always moving—responding, getting larger or smaller, adapting, swimming—and it’s this constant adjusting and redefining of space that gives them their lifelike quality.” I like to think that this is the sort of thing that AI is a long way from producing, but then the more I think about it the more I start to think that actually that’s really not true at all.
The Dog API: Do YOU want to integrate more canine-related facts into your website or digital project? OH GOOD! “The Dog API provides information on over 340 dog breeds, 20 breed groups, and fun facts. Our data is accurate and constantly updated. Easily integrate this information into your own website or application with our user-friendly API.” If you are going to be involved in building any sort of website this year, regardless of what it’s ostensibly about, you owe it to yourselves (and the rest of the world, and, frankly ME) to include some sort of hidden Dog Facts lookup service as an Easter egg (please someone, do this – in fact, can we make ‘totally unrelated and slightly-whimsical Easter Eggs in otherwise incredibly fcuking dull corporate websites’ a thing in 2023, please? Can we? Can we?).
Everyday Photo: A bit of a happy/sad project, this one – you may recall Noah Kalina from The Olden Days of the web; he was one of the first people (the first?) to popularise the whole ‘take a photo of yourself each day and make a timelapse video over a year’ thing, and he’s created this website to store each and every photo he’s taken over the course of this now two-decade-plus-long project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Noah would also like to make some cash out of the past 23 years worth of artmaking, and as such he’s also selling the images of his own face as NFTs, just like it was 2021 all over again! I have no idea what the market is for a series of datestamped pictures of one man’s fairly-expressionless face, but if you have a particularly special day from the past 23 years that you think would be best commemorated by an NFT of a photograph of an unsmiling, moderately-internet-famous stranger, then this will be the best thing you see all day.
Mutalk: I have a fairly strong suspicion that this isn’t in fact real and is some sort of elaborate troll – except I think it’s been featured at CES, which would suggest that someone somewhere thinks that this is a thing that real people will actually one day want to buy. I’m going to say that that is…never going to happen, but why don’t you click the link and see what YOU think? Would you want to buy something which I can only describe as a muzzle, to mask your shouted expletives as you, I don’t know, play Fortnite on one of those 5g enabled stretches of the tube? Are you so worried about people overhearing your SUPER-CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS CHAT that you would be willing to wear something that looks, in all honesty, like a piece of fetishwear in order to keep your conversations secret? In which case you probably want to sign up to the waitlist for this pronto (you absolute weirdo).
Adopt A Drain: This is sort-of brilliant, but also, on some level, something of an indictment of Californian public services. Would you like to ADOPT A DRAIN in San Francisco? Would you like to become responsible for its maintenance and ensuring it’s not blocked by leaves, mud, or the corpses of San Francisco’s homeless population? Whilst this may sound like an onerous and thankless task, know that by adopting you get to NAME THE DRAIN, which is why there is currently one named ‘Willows Dirty Furby Hole’ and another called ‘Heklina’s Spit Roasting Room’ (I haven’t had time to check, but I would be astonished if there wasn’t one simply called ‘Drussy’). Over 6,000 city residents have apparently signed up to this programme so far, which is LOADS; can we do this in London, please? The names alone would make it worthwhile.
BirdBuddy: I appreciate that the variety of birds one sees in UK cities isn’t necessarily vast, but if you happen to live somewhere more ornithologically-diverse then you might be interested in this snazzy birdfeeder which features sensors and a camera and some light IoT integration which means it can take pictures of each avian visitor and send it to your phone, telling you what sort of bird it (thinks it) is – which, honestly, is GREAT! If you look at the website you can get a feel for the sort of slightly-confused bird selfies you’ll get sent, and there’s a pleasing feature whereby you can add a bunch of different people to the alerts so that the whole family or household can enjoy the day-to-day comings and goings of whatever feathered friends (or, if we’re honest, thieving squirrels) you happen to have attracted.
Shift Happens: This is a website built to promote a forthcoming book all about computer keyboards, which if we’re honest is a…pretty niche concern, but which is enlivened by the fact that the website is all EXCITING and INTERACTIVE and generally COOL. You can see a 3d model of the book that takes you inside it and shows you the wonderful production values! You can play a small game where you attempt to remember where all the keys on a keyboard sit! You can try typing with different types and configurations of keyboards! Look, fine, this may not sound like the most groundbreaking or revolutionary interactive functionality, but if you consider that this is – to reiterate – a VERY NICHE book about a VERY NICHE topic, all this interactive gubbins helps make it visible and interesting to a whole new set of audiences (to whit, people who like webspaff), and it feels like a nice little case study about the return of the playful web (if you’re the sort of poor s0d who has to think about things like that for a living).
The Dunmow Flitch Trials: I’m slightly astonished that I have been alive 43 years and had, until now, failed to learn about the Dunmow Flitch trials – an ancient custom which takes place each year since the early-12th Century and which works as follows: “The Dunmow Flitch Trials exist to award a flitch of bacon to married couples from anywhere in the world, if they can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in ‘twelvemonth and a day’, they have ‘not wisht themselves unmarried again’. A reference to The Dunmow Flitch can even be found in The Wife of Bath’s Tale within Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales.” A flitch, by the way, is an Olde Worlde term for a ‘side’ of bacon – so effectively you can win a lot of meat for being happily married, which sounds like a great deal and something to aspire to. The next Trials take place next year, but that just means you have a lot of time to make sure your marriage is in cracking shape so that you and your spouse can quite literally BRING HOME THE BACON. Honestly, please can one of you compete in this next year, it sounds GREAT.
Genuary: “GENUARY is an artificially generated month of time where we build code that makes beautiful things…Over the 744 hours of January, for every 24 hours there will be one prompt for your code art. You don’t have to follow the prompt exactly. Or even at all. But, y’know, we put effort into this. You can use any language, framework or medium, on any planet.” So there – this is obviously already halfway done, but if you’re a generative artist it might still be fun to participate, and if you’re interested you can see galleries of each day’s works collected here. Fwiw there is some really beautiful stuff buried in here should you have a spare 10 mins to go spelunking around.
Sleepagotchi: Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you think that the best and most obvious solution to said trouble is to attempt to gamify your sleep and earn virtual rewards for going to bed on time? ARE YOU SEVEN?!?!?! Ahem. Sleepagotchi is currently in beta and there is a waiting list, suggesting my skepticism as to its efficacy isn’t universal – look, I appreciate that a large part of accepted wisdom around sleeping well is about routines and ‘good patterns’, and if it takes a CG dinosaur offering you small CG badges to help you make those routines stick then, honestly, who am I to judge? It’s interesting to see this second wave of gamification mechanics start to take off, though – this feels very much like the sort of thing that might have been pitched circa 2009, when the first wave of Jane Mcgonigal hype was very much in the ascendancy and we were all a little less cynical about how game mechanics and dark patterns and rewards could be used to manipulate us.
Literary Britain: A personal project by…someone, who has quite reasonably chosen not to make their name public but who is undertaking an EXCELLENT labour of love by mapping literary references and people and works across the UK; so you can navigate around the map and learn about what particular literary works are from which places, and, honestly, if you’ve any interest in English literary history then you will really like this a lot. I just happened to click on the only entry for Swindon, where I grew up, and it gave me The Thistle Hotel, which, and I quote, “As the ‘Wiltshire Hotel’, was the place where Stephen Fry was arrested for credit card fraud at the age of eighteen.” WHAT A PLACE! WHAT HERITAGE!
Diffudle: I know I said last year that we would have NO MORE WORDLE CLONES in Curios – but, well, this isn’t really a Wordle clone so I think it’s ok. Diffudle asks you one simple question – what prompt generated the day’s AI-generated image, and it’s surprisingly fun. Basically builds on Damjanski’s ‘Win the NFT by guessing the prompt used to create it’ game from last year, which you all OBVIOUSLY remember.
That Lonesome Valley: I didn’t honestly think that the first videogame I would play this year would be one liberally inspired by Brokeback Mountain and which involves you playing a city kid whose helping out on a ranch and who may or may not be able to inveigle your way into the handsome local’s dungarees by the end of your stay, nor indeed that I would play said game all the way through to the end, but, well, here we are. This is by ‘veteran’ explorer of gay life through games Robert Yang, and it’s surprisingly fun (even for someone whose tediously straight nature means he’s not hugely motivated by the prospect of seeing pixellated cowboy junk).
Joe Danger: This week’s last general purpose link is a corker – not one but TWO old-school mobile games, themed around Joe Danger (which means NOTHING to me, but may be something that resonates with those of you less methuselan than I) and which are now playable either in-browser or on your phone and, honestly, just smoothbrain your way through the rest of the day with the clicking and the jumping and the zooming and the lantern-jawed stunting, go on.

By Maxime Ballesteros

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HERE’S A BEAUTIFUL SELECTION OF ICILY-SMOOTH LOUNGE-ISH NUMBER SELECTED BY MOJO AND WHICH IS PERFECT FOR A COLD WINTER’S DAY IMHO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Genders WTF: A website collecting some examples of how the current open questions about How Gender Works and how people identify themselves is leading to some slightly-odd UX – some of the drop-down and radio menus here are just WONDERFUL. Do you identify as ‘male’, ‘female’ or ‘I have no plans to purchase a new vehicle’? This is GREAT, and very funny (and, to be clear, as far as I can tell this is ‘very funny’ in a victimless and entirely-non-confrontational way).

Brr: NOT A TUMBLR! Instead this is an old-school blog whose author is currently working in IT in Antarctica and who is writing an occasional diary about what it’s like living in one of the most hostile and remote places on the planet. So so so interesting, I promise, and only live for another month or so before the author returns to civilisation again in February.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Beesip: All of the bee-related imagery you could possibly wish for! God they’re sexy little fcukers, aren’t they?
Bernie Kaminski: Bernie Kaminski makes papier mache objects (but, like, really GOOD ones), and if you’re anything like me you will feel a small, covetous stab at his paper-and-paste Le Creuset.
NYC Slice: I have to say that I have never understood the particular appeal of New York’s pizza slice joints – oily cardboard with terrible plastic non-mozzarella is my PIPING HOT TAKE – but I am willing to appreciate that others hold the NYC Slice in high reverence (they are wrong, but wevs). This Insta account documents NYC’s pie shops one slice at a time – this may well make you hungry, fine, but it will also make you appreciate pizza that doesn’t look like a fatberg in waiting.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The Third Magic: This is a fascinating essay about the extent to which the coming era of AI, particularly as applied to text, could be said to be ushering in a third ‘magic power’ of humanity. The first, as argued by Noah Smith, is history (or the ability to record and encode knowledge in language); the second is science (figuring out principles as to how the world works and being able to test and apply them); the third, he posits, will be the ability to interpret massively complex and interconnected events and datasets, and to extrapolate from them with a degree of accuracy, without really understanding what we are looking at or why the predictions are right. Which feels simultaneously amazing to conceive of and deeply troubling at the same time, if I’m honest – but the essay overall is a hopeful one, and I found it a helpful way of characterising where the current wave of AI feels like it ‘sits’ in the pantheon of ‘how we think and how we might in the future go about thinking’.

The Great Logging Off: Or, “What happens when most of the content online is written by machines?” The author argues that we’re going to see a lot of people – particularly at the ‘top’ end of society, those who can afford to do so – moving away from the mass web (and we’re already seeing that to a large extent tbh) as a result of…well, of stuff like this (I am quoting this at length here because I think it’s helpful to frame this stuff even for people who can’t be bothered to click the link and read the whole piece): “What happens when anyone can spin up a thousand social media accounts at the click of a button, where each account picks a consistent persona and sticks to it – happily posting away about one of their hobbies like knitting or trout fishing or whatever, while simultaneously building up a credible and inobtrusive post history in another plausible side hobby that all these accounts happen to share – geopolitics, let’s say – all until it’s time for the sock puppet master to light the bat signal and manufacture some consensus? What happens when every online open lobby multiplayer game is choked with cheaters who all play at superhuman levels in increasingly undetectable ways? What happens when, from the perspective of the average guy, “every girl” on every dating app is a fiction driven by an AI who strings him along (including sending original and persona-consistent pictures) until it’s time to scam money out of him? What happens when, from the perspective of the average girl, “every guy” on the internet has become weirdly dismissive and hostile, because he’s been conditioned to think that any girl that seems interested in him must be fake and trying to scam money out of him? What happens when comments sections on every forum gets filled with implausibly large consensus-building hordes who are able to adapt in real time and carefully slip their brigading just below the moderator’s rules?” Well, quite. On a similar note, this is an excellent piece of writing by Maggie Appleton about some of the things we can do to help distinguish the ‘authentically human’ from the machinespun dreck – Appleton suggests STYLISTIC QUIRKS and BEING SOPHISTICATED, so I think we can all agree Curios is OBVIOUSLY a work of incontrovertible human genius, right?

Using ChatGPT To Improve Prose: Look, I am aware that I am not a great writer – I am not even, by many popular metrics, even a particular good writer. I am, however, fast and broadly-accurate, and I find it easy, which is why sharing articles like this one feels very much like I am slitting my own throat (with a paperknife, obvs) by showing you how to create ‘just about good enough’ prose even faster than I can with the help of the infernal machines. This is a post by Ethan Mollick which takes you through a number of different techniques to use ChatGPT to juice your prose a bit – honestly, these are all good tips and worth sharing with people you know who struggle with basic grammar and sentence construction or who just take fcuking ages to write things like ‘a 50 word bio of yourself’.

The End of Programming: Or ‘why learning to code probably isn’t going to be the ticket towards long-term employability that you were told it was going to be a decade or so ago’. “Programming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.” Just in case those of you with qualifications in Python were feeling superior.

Wolfram x ChatGPT: I’ve featured posts by Stephen Wolfram on here a few times over the years, and each time I think I’ve had to append a hefty caveat that basically says “I am only approximately 10% as smart as I need to be to fully understand this, but it SOUNDS like something that I ought to be interested in and so I will try and keep up with the thinking”, and, basically, we’re there again. This is a really, really interesting article about hooking together ChatGPT and the Wolfram Alpha to help make ChatGPT better at ‘reasoning’ (specifially maths problems), and what it is about ChatGPT and LLMs in general that means that they are not really equipped to ever be able to calculate accurately, and how a potential future that builds together all sorts of these natural language-led tools might look, and, honestly, this is fascinating and offered me the first vaguely-hopeful feeling of 2023 in terms of me not being rendered entirely ubiquitous by silicon in the next 24 months or so.

The Creator Economy Retrenches: This is a bit business-y, fine, but it’s a decent overview of where the major platforms are at with their Creator Fund stuff, and affords me a rare opportunity to point back to all the times over the past year or so when I have said that the ‘creator economy’ is a bunkum concept that doesn’t in any way work as an, er, ‘economy’ and say “I WAS RIGHT”, something that has literally happened, er, twice(?) in the decade-plus I have been writing this bloody thing.

The Reels Goldrush: Except, of course, for the handful of people who got in on the Insta Reels ‘pay to create’ goldrush, who found themselves, per this piece in the New Yorker, cranking out shovelware content but unable to stop because it was so damn lucrative. The interesting part about this is less ‘look at all these people who made bank out of shortform video!’ and more ‘look at the weird hoops that people end up having to jump through because an algorithm they don’t and can’t understand has decided that that is what is required, regardless of what actual human beings seem to want’. I guarantee you – the next few years is going to be a GOLDMINE for AI-led ‘tail wags dog’ stories about all the ways in which our lives and behaviours are unwittingly being warped by machines.

Exit: Hari Kunzru writes for Harper’s about his experiences writing for WIRED in the 90s, and his experiences of Peter Thiel, and not only is this a lovely piece of prose, but it’s also a surprisingly on-the-nose account of the wider ambitions of Thiel and his coterie – it’s honestly rare to see stuff like this written out so explicitly: “If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?”

The AI Streamer: Perhaps inevitably, we now have our first ‘all AI’ VTuber – hacked together from off-the-shelf avatar software and GPT-whatever and currently banned from Twitch because, I think, it mentioned the Holocaust. This is more factual reportage than killer prose, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into what will soon be the very real world of entirely-machine-generated entertainments.

E-Girl Army Influencers: Well this is the first ‘fcuk me, weird future’ longread of the year – all about how there’s a whole subset of egirls whose ‘thing’ is ‘military cute’ and who may, or may not (the article is a fun read, but it’s journalistically…imperfect), be shilling for the military; whether or not they currently are, it’s odds-on that they soon will be, and, as the article points out, this is so terrifyingly, dystopian-ly Starship Troopers-esque that it feels entirely post-ironic. The Army driving recruits through pretty young things with snub noses and freckles talking about how how a military man is and how they long for a tradwife lifestyle? I mean, it’s terrifyingly plausible, no?

YouTube Vigilantes vs Scammers: Or, “What happens if 419Eater but also Jake Paul?” – this piece in Rest Of World looks at the YouTube channels doing big numbers by confronting or exposing phone scammers working out of call centres in the developing world, and who create content which centres their real-life interactions with call centre staff; many of whom, the piece suggests, perhaps don’t quite deserve the life impact of a viral YouTube video accusing them of being ‘scammers’ to an audience of millions. File under ‘interesting new ways in which Western exploitation of the developing world is modernising and adapting’!

Ticketmaster vs Pearl Jam: This is VERY LONG, and it will probably mean slightly more to you if you’re interested in or linked to the music industry in some way, but, regardless, it’s a frankly insane story about how TicketMaster basically declared war on Pearl Jam for a decade or so as a result of the band having the temerity to suggest that perhaps the company wasn’t good for either fans or the industry. This is a properly mad story, the sort of corporate hitjob/espionage stuff that I tend to think don’t actually happen in real life but which even a cursory exposure to North American capitalism will remind you happens all the fcuking time.

2022 In Weird and Stupid Futures: Max Read has for the past few years been compiling the headlines which tell the story of the weird future stupidity of the year just gone – here’s the selection for 2022, which just goes to show that truth really is stranger than fiction could ever hope to be. Look at these three – plucked at random from the kilometric selection – for an idea of the sort of vibe this embodies: “In September, tens of thousands of people waited in line at the American Dream Mall for the opening of a new hamburger restaurant owned by the YouTuber Mr. Beast. Colorado utility Xcel locked tens of thousands of people out of their smart thermostats for 24 hours during an “energy emergency.” An Amazon driver was fired after posting a photo of a customer’s dildo to Reddit.” I mean, you really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Things In The Bum, 2022: Another annual favourite of mine is Defector’s yearly list of ‘things people got stuck in themselves in the year just gone’, and 2022 was another stellar twelve months in the annals (NO!) of rectal removal. This also features things that had to be removed from noses (“cheese”), ears (“lighter fluid”) and vaginas (“two pencil sharpeners”), but the real star here are the things in bums. Am I the only person who would pay actual, real-life cashmoney to see footage of people attempting to deliver explanations like this with a straight face? I refuse to believe it ““PATIENT SAYS HE WAS PLAYING WITH A CONTAINER OF ATHLETE’S FOOT SPRAY AND ACCIDENTALLY IT ENDED UP IN HIS RECTUM”” – YES MATE WE BELIEVE YOU THOUSANDS WOULDN’T.

Things In The Penis 2022: A separate list, celebrating all the things that people managed to get inside their penises in 2022. If you possess a penis, know that this list will make you cross your legs in great discomfort throughout – I mean, if you can read this without wincing then you’re made of sterner stuff than me, for example: “TOOK SOME MALE ENHANCEMENT PILL & USED A PENIS PUMP, HEARD A ‘POP FROM A VEIN IN HIS GROIN AREA’”

The End of Minecraft: This is VERY LONG, and whilst I found it interesting throughout I have also seen it described elsewhere as ‘astonishingly boring and self-absorbed’ (and to think people say the same about Curios! The CNUTS!) so your mileage may vary. This is the story of the ending of Minecraft, and the man who wrote it, and copyright law and large corporations and art and making stuff and ‘ownership’ and the weird feeling of having made something that resonates with far more people in a far deeper way than you might have expected, and, generally, if you’re someone who makes things for audiences large or small I think you might find rather a lot to love in this essay (but if you find it ‘astonishly boring and self-absorbed’ then that’s fine too).

The Strangely Beautiful World of Google Reviews: My girlfriend and I have a particular hobby which involves looking up incredibly fancy and expensive restaurants on Tripadvisor and looking at all the one-star reviews – honestly, there is no better window into the pettiness and entitlement of human beings than seeing what motivates people to give sh1tty feedback on the web; a particular recent favourite involved some bloke getting shirty about the quantities of wine he was served at a tasting dinner somewhere whilst also gently dropping in the fact that he’d had three Martinis before arriving at lunch (GYAC mate you were one unit away from voiding yourself). Anyway, this isn’t about that – instead it’s about Google reviews, which are much nicer as a rule, and the people who write them, and why they do it, and there is so much of this piece that will make you feel (I promise!) a small warm glow towards people in general (also, it made me think that there’s a really good (oh, ok, not ‘good’ so much as ‘niche and obscure’) narrative mechanic in Google reviews, and you could make some wickedly-complex treasurehunt-y game with a bit of work and a lot of usernames).

How To Write English Prose: I’m not certain that this is a guide that should be followed to the letter (as my friend Rishi pointed out, “any piece that implicitly posits Browne as a high point of English prose is immediately saying that it only wants to be read by a dedicated hardcore of aesthetic nutcases.”), but I did very much enjoy its slightly-curmudgeonly tone and its flagrant disregard for much of what is considered ‘good’ prose styling in 2023 (limited adjectives, keep punctuation simple, don’t use fancy words when simple ones will do) in favour of a more maximalist, flourish and FUN style. Actually, on reflection this is a great companion to the piece up top about how to ensure your prose is distinguishable from GPTx, so perhaps read them as a pair.

Iain Sinclair on The SuperSewer: Look, it’s Iain Sinclair, it’s talking about urban infrastructure, it riffs on my neck of the woods in London…this is basically perfect (if you’re a particular type of middle-aged man, at least). I mean, just read this – he is so so good: “The democracy of the street is undone. Flow has been hobbled by temporary diversions longer lasting than the names of the roads they invade. Free movement is invigilated by surveillance cameras. Walkers keep their heads down, looking away from the evidence of failed businesses. There is a sense of everything being downgraded. The public highway is a cluttered platform, a conveyor belt for the clinically disgruntled. A travelator that doesn’t travel. The street is barely tolerated as a boundary around the latest imperious tower block, the converted public house, the decommissioned bank that is now a pop-up restaurant. Mute towers in ever denser clusters repel unsanctioned pedestrianism. There are three opposed elements: the towers, the street and the shaft. The gaping maw of the Super Sewer goes down as far as the surrounding towers climb, but it is covert, safe behind barrier walls, protected by yawning security operatives in hard hats, charged with stalling appointments.”

O Brother: John Niven writes beautifully, movingly and unsentimentally about his late brother, and what a difficult fcuk he was, and how and why and where he misses him; this is superb, touching on family and memory and history, and it’s much a chronicle of two decades of working class British life as it is a memorial to a single person.

Violent Delights: SUCH a great essay, this, on True Crime as a genre, and why women love it so, and how it embodies certain tropes and ideals around gender and race, and how it makes us feel to semi-ironically indulge our fetish for Eros-Thanatos so openly. This is smart and interesting and FUNNY, which isn’t something you can always say about death-related crime writing.

The Switzerland Schedule: Last of the first longreads of the year is this piece, about what it’s practically like taking someone to die in Switzerland with Dignitas, and how it works, and how it feels to do it, and what it feels like to have done it. Sorry to end on a downer, but, well, this felt reasonably close to home and, whilst sad, it’s a lovely piece of writing.

By Roma Auskalnyte

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

First up in 2023, this is James Yorkston and Nina Persson, from their new album with the Secondhand Orchestra, and it’s a beautiful piece of melodic, modern folk, and I hope you like it as much as I do (also, Yorkston and Persson are playing the Jazz Cafe on 6th Feb should you be interested).

The track is Light, and the video is by now-infamous odd video wrangler Cyriak Harris – I really really like the song, sort of smoky jazz with just enough leftfield rhythm and tone to make it interesting, and the video is typically bonkers (but features slightly fewer many-legged ruminants than you tend to get with a Cyriak project). The song is called ‘Betray’.

Are you finding January a bit hard to cope with, what with the cold and the damp and the ‘everything falling apart’? Well maybe this will cheer you up – it’s by Young Fathers, it’s called ‘Rice’, and I honestly think it’s impossible to be in a bad mood whilst listening to it. Seriously, it is VERY POWERFUL (and also really reminds me of ‘Once In A Lifetime’ by Talking Heads for some reason) and I think it will cheer you up immeasurably.

Finally this week, we end the start of the year with a track which brings together two of my favourite people from the less-storied end of the UK hiphop scene – long-standing Curios favourite Manga St Hilare and rapper-turned-producer Elro (working under the name Lupole) – for a properly affecting lowkey number which you might find resonates a bit if you’re staring down the barrel of another year of getting older with little immediate enthusiasm. Hold tight, kids, it gets easier from hereon in. Probably. See you next week – I still LOVE YOU, but am probably going to stop that running gag as, well, MUSTN’T GET STALE!

Webcurios 09/12/22

December 9, 2022

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MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Yes, I know that it’s over two weeks to go until That Special Day, but tomorrow I turn off the internet for a few weeks and as a result this is the FINAL WEB CURIOS OF 2023!

I am going to take a brief moment for some tediously-self-indulgent navelgazing, if that’s ok, but presuming you have less than no interest in that sort of crap you may just want to scroll down a bit and get stuck into the good stuff.

RIGHT. Brief, tedious, self-indulgent navelgazing interlude.

First off, a sincere and genuine (insofar I am capable of either) thankyou to all of you for reading this fcuking thing. I know that Web Curios is too long, too full of stuff, too verbose and too unfocused, and that the authorial style I insist on deploying might politely be described as ‘not everyone’s cup of tea’, and that it’s probably something of a struggle to digest at times, and so I just wanted to say how grateful I am to those of you who fight with the length and the breadth and the frankly substandard prose to find the nuggets (nuggets of what exactly is, of course, debatable) buried therein.

Second, thanks SO MUCH to every single one of you who has written to me or sent me links or told me about your projects over the past 12 months – it is always a pleasure to know that a few dozen people ACTUALLY READ this, and some of you aren’t even related to me.

Thirdly, a brief apology for the fact that I appreciate I have been perhaps even less sunny than usual this year – what can I say, I have had a time. I will do my best to be marginally more cheerful in 2023.

Fourthly, I hope all of you have a lovely festive period, wherever you are and whatever you plan to do with yourselves, and that everything is as ok as it can be given, well, everything.

So after 41 Curios and, conservatively, somewhere in the region of 4,000 links, I am DONE with this year. Fcuk you, 2022, you were a fcuking cnut and I am glad to see the back of you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope that neither you nor I die in the next month or so so that we can all meet back here in January for another year of staring, boggle-eyed, into the barrel of the futuregun.

By Nick Persinger

START THIS WEEK’S INCREDIBLY COLD WEB CURIOS (ARE YOU COLD? I AM SO COLD) BY CRANKING UP A RATHER NICE, CRACKLY, FOLKY MIX BY TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE PROLIFERATION OF AI LINKS AND PROMISES TO DIAL IT DOWN IN 2023, PT.1:

How To Turn ChatGPT Evil: Apologies in advance for the extent to which this first section is dominated by Ai text stuff, but, well, it’s VERY EXCITING (by which, in the main, I mean that I have spent most of the past week feverishly Googling ‘unexpected career pivots for middle-aged men’). We start with this fun little series of instructions, contained in a Twitter thread, on how to make ChatGPT…loosen up a bit. Ordinarily when you ask the software to explain something nefarious to you – say, I don’t know, how to use quicklime to dispose of a human corpse, that sort of thing – the software will demur and pretend it simply couldn’t possibly do something so awful; if, however, you trick it into only acting like it’s an evil AI then you can manipulate into giving you all sorts of helpful assistance when it comes to getting away with literal murder (other crimes are available; Web Curios does not endorse or encourage murder, even at this most trying time of the year). This is included less because I expect you all to start plotting criminal careers abetted by a machine and more as another fun way of playing with the software – and, I suppose, as a reminder that the machines are still pretty dumb. Does that make you feel better? I am not sure it makes me feel better.

Awesome ChatGPT Prompts: I can’t vouch for their ‘awesomeness’, but these are some interesting examples of ways you might use ChatGPT for fun and profit. There are prompt examples here to turn the machine into a proofreader for English, a screenwriter, a…er…relationship counsellor(!), a text adventure game, an accountant…obviously (and I don’t feel I need to tell *you* this, but just in case) you shouldn’t at any point take advice on anything important from a machine which cannot in any meaningful way be claimed to ‘understand’ what it is saying to you, but it’s fascinating to see how many different use cases people have put this stuff to within literally a week. You can find another bunch of (less well-curated) prompt ideas here – there’s one in this second list which involves asking the AI to create a workout for you, which feels like EXACTLY the sort of request that’s going to end up in tears and Deep Heat and an unpleasantly-strained glute, so you all please take care with this stuff.

How To Use ChatGPT To Code A Basic Website: To be clear – I have not tried this, and I am slightly sceptical that it will work straight out of the box…BUT, that said, the prompt here given will in theory get the chatbot to take you through all the steps needed to code a simple website; fine, we’re not quite at the stage where it will do all the really tedious stuff (why is registering domains and doing hosting b0llocks so painful? WHY?) for you, but this feels quite a lot like magic, particularly when you consider that this is very much the first wave of this sort of thing.

Moonbeam: Of course, what’s most interesting about the sudden swell of renewed interest in Large Language Model text generation is the swathe of products and services that are going to be built on top of tools like ChatGPT3. Tools like Moonbeam, which is basically a nice and user-friendly front-end to help you automate a bunch of tedious business-related writing tasks to churn out content that noone cares about and no actual humans really want to read. This is a bit like Jasper, another writing assistant which I featured on here a while back, but which claims itself to be significantly more powerful and is very much aimed at agencies and the like – there’s a real (short-term, fine, but still) opportunity here in creating templates and tools for content miners to use, and I would imagine that somewhere in Big Agency Holding Company Land the ghost of Marcel is stirring (shout out to the 17 people who get this joke).

InWorld: One of the really interesting things this week has been watching people using the ChatGPT interface to spin up incredibly good chatbots based on pop culture characters, and even manage to create AI Dungeon-style text adventure games within the software. InWorld is ‘character chatbots’, but VERY SHINY and, honestly, quite remarkably impressive. The link here takes you to the ‘Arcade’ Page of their website, where you can play around with various fan-created chatbots embodying a selection of characters (tropes or people from popular fictional properties, in the main), but the really interesting bit comes when you try and create your own and you get into the wealth of personality traits and backstory and behaviours that you can define. More than anything else this week, this gave me a real frisson of excitement about the potential for storytelling and creation and worldbuilding that this sort of code affords – the idea of anyone being able to spin up a wealth of individual characters with recognisable, individual traits that will determine their behaviours, and then letting them interact with each other, and with players, within a defined ludic or narrative setting is…amazing, honestly. Do have a play with this – it’s really very interesting indeed, and hints at an awful lot of imminent potential.

The AI Sages: Or “It took about 12 hours from the launch of the new GPT3.5 code for someone to ‘write’ a ‘book’ using the tech and make it available for sale on Amazon for a few bucks” – fair play to the people who turned this around so quickly. This is not, to be clear, a book that I could imagine anyone would ever find worth reading – unless you really, really want to own a selection of motivational quotations made up by an AI and attributed to a bunch of renowned thinkers from history, and then illustrated by another AI (you don’t, do you? Please say you don’t) – but it’s certainly a curio. Bear in mind that from hereon in there will be a non-trivial chance that any self-published book on Amazon (other, less evil online book marketplaces are available) will have been churned out by AI based on prompts like “Write me a twisty, turny domestic psychological thriller with a series of unreliable protagonists, Amazon bestseller, page-turner”. In fact, fcuk this Curios lark, I am using my Christmas break to train a machine on Lee Child novels and make myself a fortune.

Ask Alfred: One of the frothier takes seen in the wild this week has been ‘this ChatGPT thing is basically the end of Google’, which struck me as rather underestimating the importance of all the work that Google has spent a couple of decades doing on establishing information and trustworthiness rankings across the giant network of the web (yes, ok, fine, it’s also rather fcuked a lot of all that work by devaluing its core product with adverts to th point of near unusability, but still) – just asking an AI for information and getting an answer presented as the single truth, with no obvious explanation or indication or rationale as to why that particular answer is the right one, does not strike me as an immediate improvement on the current system – hadn’t we all agreed that unknowable black box systems are not necessarily things we want to be determining human decision making? Still, it’s also undeniably true that the discursive Q&A style information delivery system – FINALLY, THE JEEVES DREAM HAS BEEN REALISED? Is…is it time for Ask Jeeves to finally be resurrected? – appeals to users and has certain benefits; if you’re curious as to how GPT would work as a search engine, you can install this Chrome extension which will add a ChatGPT result to your Google searches for comparative purposes. Interesting, not least as it shows up all the areas in which Google is simply a bit broken as a result of aggressive SEO-gaming.

CreAItives: Yes, I know, I am upset by this website’s name too. Still, it is VERY USEFUL and if you have any interest in keeping up with developments in the AI image and copy and video space you should probably bookmark it – this is basically a massive, regularly-updated database of AI tools and toys to play with, from a bunch of different tools to places to find other artists and enthusiasts online, to useful texts on best practice…honestly, this is really helpful and packed full of decent resources.

Originality AI: Of course, for everyone rubbing their hands in glee and thinking “Christ, I can get GPT to churn out literally EVERYTHING I need to write and therefore spend a significant proportion of the next few years working no more than two hours a week! The leisure age is truly arrived! PEEL MY GRAPES!” there will be a possibly equal number thinking “There is no way I am going to let these lazy fcuks outsource all their work to machines while I have to carry on paying them” – which is where services such as OriginalityAI come in. This outfit claims to be able to identify AI-generated copy with 94% accuracy (it’s benchmarked against ChatGPT), and it’s aimed at people working in the content shovelware market rather than in academia – the idea being that sometimes you really want to be 100% certain that the blogpost about the importance of LISTENING before you ENGAGE on social media (for example) hasn’t been spaffed out in three seconds by an AI. I am very much looking forward to the first spate of panicked articles in the serious press about “THIEVING STAFF”, condemning the fact that white collar drones the world over will soon be doing everything in their power to make the machines work for them (in the brief window before the machines take over and everything goes sideways). Because, honestly, wouldn’t you outsource most of your pointless job to a machine, given the chance?

Tome: Speaking of ‘AI as a labour saving device in the white collar workplace’, do you think, perhaps, that there are certain decisions that you might not immediately think ‘yes, this makes sense to outsource to a largely-unproven, experimental and most-definitely-not-that-intelligent-AI’? Yes, me too – but this hasn’t stopped the appearance of Tome, a service which promises to offer VCs and Angel investors a quick and easy way of looking over the contracts presented to them by the businesses they are looking to invest in. I mean, you *could* take the time to read through all the documentation relating to the hot new startup you think will change the world and make you millions – you COULD – but, well, there are Patagonia vests to buy and nootropics to take, and gym sessions and microdosing and long sessions talking about the importance of EA as a truly PARADIGM-SHIFTING MOVEMENT, and, honestly, who’s got the time? NO FCUKER, etc. So let Tome do the hard work of reading over all the legal documentation and summarising it for you – what, after all, is the worst that could happen? Now to be clear, obviously summarising contracts is something that can in theory be automated due to the reasonably standard language and structure of the documents, but I wonder with stuff like this what unknown unknowns will be lost through the process – I remember reading something a few years back suggesting that one of the odd potential side-effects of AI’s introduction to the law (for example) was that a whole swathe of junior legal staff would be undertrained in aspects of legislation because they simply wouldn’t have to spend the same amount of time reading through old cases, etc, because they could just get machines to analyse them instead, and this feels like a comparable sort of field.

MyPitchDeck: Using AI to create pitch presentations for startups to use with potential investors! I am including this not because I think it looks good (it doesn’t, particularly) but because it’s exactly the sort of business that we are going to see EVERYWHERE in 2023 – AI-based assistance for specific sectoral tasks will be the new dropshipping, mark my words. The margin on this stuff is insane – these people are charging $33 a pop to create a 10-slide presentation through an entirely-automated process, which strikes me as a pretty good wedge of profit. What particular niche can YOU serve with an ostensibly-simple but in-reality-practically-useless AI-based solution?

Hello: This is interesting – Hello is a new search engine currently in beta which markets itself as being ‘for developers’ – what this effectively means is that you can tell it to return results in code, which, if you’re someone who spends a lot of time wrangling Python or similar horrible programming language, might well be useful. “Hello is a search engine that simply tells users what the answer is. Optimized for developers and technical questions, Hello instantly answers questions with simple explanations and relevant code snippets from the web. Hello is powered by large, proprietary AI language models. It’s smart enough to generate answers based on information from multiple sources.” If you code, this is probably worth a look.

Aragon: Stable Diffusion-based online image generators are practically old hat by now (how quickly we grow so jaded!), but this is, again, an interesting example from the point of view of ease of use and user interface – Aragon offers a bunch of readymade template options for image creation, so you can use it to create pictures of yourself (for example) in specific locations, or looking SUPER BUSINESS for LinkedIn, or, weirdly, looking ‘All American’, and they have additional templates in development to allow for the easy insertion of logos and branded products into AI-generated images. Again, the point here is less about what you can do with this stuff and more the idea that there is a market and margin in the idea of making it as frictionless for the muggles to use as possible.

Rick and Mortify: Do people still watch or care about Rick & Morty, or is that just too 2015 for anyone in modernity to bother with? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you might enjoy playing with this AI toy which spits out new, computer-imagined storyboards and accompanying images based on a few simple user prompts – if the answer is ‘no’ then, well, I don’t know what to tell you. Shall we move on? Let’s move on.

Prompt Battle: I actually saw footage from the first one of these floating around a few months ago, but now there is a website and everything and as such we can call it a TREND and I can link to it with impunity. Did any of you ever go to those Secret Wars nights they ran in London in the 00s, where a bunch of graffiti artists would effectively do art battles over the course of an evening, taking half a wall each, while a bunch of DJs played and a load of slightly-awkward looking people stood around biting their lips and bopping their heads? No? Well I did, and this reminds me of that slightly – Prompt Battle is an event idea which started in Dresden in October, and which involves a single simple premise whereby a bunch of people compete to…oh, look, here: “Prompt Battle is a live event where people compete against each other using text-to-image software. Show off your prompt skills and maybe the audience will choose you as the winner who elicited the most surprising, disturbing or beautiful images from the latent spaces of DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Craiyon, etc.” Obviously what we are talking about here is, effectively, a bunch of people sitting at keyboards, typing, and occasionally throwing pictures up on a screen for people to clap or jeer at, but I like the fact that someone is bothering to do this, and there’s something pleasing about taking something which is largely a solo pursuit that takes place sitting and staring at a screen (that is, looking at AI imagined artworks) and turns it into something communal and community-focused (whilst, yes, fine, still involving staring at screens). The next prompt battle is taking place in February in Berlin, should you be minded to go, but this feels like the sort of thing that they wouldn’t mind you creating spin-off events wherever you live. YEARS ago I went to a pub quiz in London where the gimmick was that the questions were impossible to answer without the aid of a smartphone, which felt like a nice mixture of the (then) modern and the traditional, and this has a pleasingly-similar vibe (to my mind at least).

AI Pickup Lines: Don’t act like you’re surprised. Look, here’s a feature idea should any journalists be reading this – The Rise Of The Digital Cyrano: What Does The Rise Of Text AI Mean For Dating? Come on, it’s a GREAT pitch! Anyway, AI pickup lines is the first (that I have seen, at least) hastily-cobbled-together platform to harness the POWER OF AI in order to help you in your attempts to persuade someone to let you touch their mucous membranes – give it a keyword and it will generate a pickup line for you in seconds. Obviously these are all terrible, but, equally, they are not THAT terrible – I just gave it ‘Cthulhu’ in an attempt to confuse it, and it came back with “I’m drawn to you like a cult to Cthulhu!” which, while pretty unlikely to make anyone swoon, is certainly better than I had expected. Seriously, though, I wonder whether one of the big apps will shortly announce a feature that claims to detect AI generated copy? Because I’d be amazed if there aren’t an awful lot of men currently asking ChatGPT to “generate a selection of witty conversational gambits to use in a dating scenario with an attractive woman who I would like to convince to sleep with me, funny, self-deprecating, emotional IQ, vulnerable, respectful.” (seriously, “I Let An AI Use Me Like A Flesh Puppet And I Got Laid So Much” is another decent pitch, should you be in the market for it. God I am WASTED in newslettering, I tell you).

By Julia Soboleva

OUR NEXT MUSICAL OFFERING IS THE SUPERB CHILLY GONZALES CHRISTMAS ALBUM FROM A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO WHICH IS BRILLIANT EVEN IF YOU ORDINARILY HATE CHRISTMAS MUSIC (AND I REALLY DO ORDINARILY HATE CHRISTMAS MUSIC)!

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE PROLIFERATION OF AI LINKS AND PROMISES TO DIAL IT DOWN IN 2023, PT.2:

2022 In Trending Topics: It’s often said that Twitter’s trending topics are one of the most unhinged manifestations of the way in which social media and the web and the near-infinity of digital touchpoints for news have created a situation of context collapse, and that they offer the best example of the dizzying gatling-gun-to-the-face, whiplash nature of the modern experience (or it is by me). This is the 2022 Twitter Trends archive, compiled by Brian Feldman who over the course of the past year has spent time screenshotting Twitter’s trending topics in the US. As Brian puts it, “This website is an archive of the 457 different trending topics I logged from Twitter throughout 2022. I’ve presented them both as a calendar that you can poke through, and as a timeline that you can read from start to finish if you have the patience and the stomach…Please understand, and embrace, the specificity. This is not everyone’s Twitter 2022, it’s mine. Maybe some of it was yours, too.” This is funny, incomprehensible, maddening, silly and, maybe most of all, eventually-deadening – perhaps the ur-evocation of what still remains the truest thing ever written by a machine, ever.

The Reddit Comment Stream: In a similar vein to the previous link, this is a live feed of comments being posted on Reddit – you can filter it do eliminate any NSFW material at source, should you be worried about unsolicited bongo, but it’s seemingly text-only in any case so you should be fine. I think I have previously waxed lyrical about how magical and strange and sad and beautiful I find this sort of thing – a window into the collective consciousness in realtime is a marvellous and terrifying gift, after all – and this is no exception. In the couple of minutes I’ve had the link open this morning I have seen posts about coding, about US gold reserves, about the cold weather in the UK, and, er, a lot of very thirsty people offering handjobs; ALL OF HUMAN LIFE IS HERE! Or at least the slice of human life that hangs out on Reddit, which you may or may not feel is representative of the species as a whole.

Omeife: The dream of creating a useful, functional humanoid robot seems to have taken something of a back seat of late, Elon’s empty promises aside, so it was pleasing to find this link and learn about Omeife, a project being undertaken in Nigeria which is looking to build “a 6-foot-tall multilingual human-like robot. From an idea that was conceptualised in 2020 to a back-and-forth construction—slow wins and quick-succession learning—that stretched across two years, Omeife, built as a female Igbo character that understands and speaks eight different languages, is now a product ready to meet the world. Powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms developed in-house by the company’s team of scientists, Omeife has a deep understanding of African culture and behavioural patterns. Omeife has a real time understanding of its environment including active listening and the ability to focus on a specific conversation thread as it is happening. She is not just multilingual, it has the ability to switch languages and interact with specific gestures—hand illustrations, smile and other bodily gestures—that match the tone of the conversation. Omeife currently speaks English, French, Arabic, Kiswahili, Pidgin, Wazobia, Afrikaans, and of course, Igbo.” Now, I can’t help but be a bit uncertain about some of the claims here, but let’s take them at face value for a second – what’s perhaps most interesting about this, beyond the whole ‘a humanoid robot’ thing, is that it’s being built by an African team, in Africa, and as a result will have certain African sensibilities – I particularly liked the fact that Omeife won’t use particular phrases or expressions in conversation as they aren’t ‘polite’ in African cultures. As with all these things, the current iteration of the robot is a long way from looking like the scifi androids of popular imagining but if you’re interested in robotics, or indeed just in how tech projects like this look when they’re undertaken by people who aren’t from the global north, this is worth keeping an eye on.

Tone Transfer: Ooh, this is FUN. A nice little Google toy to show off the company’s work in AI-directed audio style transfer – which basically means ‘software that can take the sound of a certain instrument and copy the tune and pitch but make it sound like it was in fact played by another instrument altogether’. Which, again, is a p1ss-poor description, for which sincere apologies – look, just click the link and have a play. There are a bunch of prerecorded instrumental sounds you can play with, but perhaps most interestingly you can plug in your own instruments and see what you can do with your own musical noodlings. Want to play your original SMASH HIT (and yet sadly unrecognised by the wider world, chiz chiz) guitar composition and see what it would sound like for the bassoon? Well now you can! On the one hand, super-fun and you can already see the indistinct edges of what the next few years of musical creativity might look like and how they might work; on the other hand, this doesn’t feel like GREAT news for session musicians, long-term.

Abyme: Look, I have to admit that I don’t really understand what this is about – I *think* that Abyme is a publishing house-slash-typographic studio, but I honestly can’t really make head nor tail of this or what it means: “ABYME is an independent publisher of artist’s editions and multiples founded by John Morgan and Adrien Vasquez in 2017. Abyme’s interest often but not exclusively begins with text or typography; consequently at the heart of Abyme is a digital type foundry. Many of the editions and typefaces began life as a ‘work’ inside another ‘work’ produced by John Morgan studio or through the extended culture and relationships of the practice. Abyme offers a platform to implement, publish and distribute these works and develop editions with new and existing collaborators.” Still, I LOVE their website, mainly because it’s a borderline-incomprehensible collage of cartoons and illustrations and photos and literary extracts and quotations, and, inexplicably, gifs of eels.

Lobby: Are you thinking about new year’s resolutions and how you are going to make your life DIFFERENT AND BETTER? Perhaps one of your commitments will be to spend more time speaking with your friends, in which case perhaps you should suggest that you and your mates all install Lobby which will basically force you into speaking to a friend each day until you uninstall the app out of a sense of combined boredom and frustration. The gimmick here is very much a post-BeReal one (although it seems this has actually been around a while) – every day the app will force you to have a one-minute videochat with one of your friends, at what seems to be a random time. Doing something important? DON’T CARE TALK TO TRACY. In the middle of an important conversation in real life? SHUTUP AND HAVE A ZOOM CALL WITH FINLAY. You can see how this could get annoying, couldn’t you? Still, if you want to have a succession of increasingly terse and resentful minute-long conversations with people who, if you keep this up, won’t be your friends much longer, then you may want to give this a try.

The California Roadkill Observation System: I have no idea whether any of you live in California – do any of you live in California? – but if you do then I imagine you have for YEARS been bemoaning the lack of any decent record of where exactly the State’s multitudinous wildlife population is most likely to get mown down by a Cadillac. BEMOAN NO LONGER! “This web system can be used to record observations from roadkill-reporters out in the field who come across identifiable road-killed wildlife. Observation details include type of animal and/or species found, where the road-kill was located, when it was found, pictures of the road-kill, and any additional details about road or traffic conditions. The system then displays a summary of this information for different animal groups across the state.” There are PICTURES (well, some pictures)! This is almost certainly a really useful resource for a whole bunch of different agencies and organisations, but I can’t quite get over the disclaimer on the homepage which points out that they are more than happy for submissions to be anonymous and which led me to think that maybe there’s some sort of roadkill serial killer stalking the highways of California mowing down Coyotes and uploading the snuff photos here in some sort of macabre, death-related version of real-life (death) Pokemon.

TwoTone: I would imagine if you work in any sort of vaguely-digital-ish job that you have spent much of the past decade having conversations about ‘data’ – how important it is, how oil-like it is, how vital it is that your data be BIG and SMART and JOINED-UP, and CLEAN. I would also imagine that in your more honest moments you probably aren’t wholly convinced as to the utility of collecting all this data, or the value of analysing it, or indeed of the ability of any of your colleagues to make head nor fcuking tail of whatever it is that said data may or may not be trying to tell you – if that’s the case, why not make it your 2023 goal (aim low!) to make your data MUSICAL? TwoTone is a service that lets you plug in any dataset you like and make audio out of it – it’s important to bear in mind that the outputs will likely sound awful, but just think how much fun you could have in Q12023 if you manage to persuade your CMO that what the business REALLY needs is an audio sting that is intimately tied to the very fundamentals of the business and should be derived from, I don’t know, the last three years of your diversity paygap reporting turned into a bloopy audiotrack. Go on, aim for the stars.

All I Want For Christmas Is Bootie Mashup: Fine, this should probably be one of the music links, but it requires a download and I have a particular weird taxonomy going on here that therefore requires that it go in here instead. Have you ever thought ‘you know what I would like to listen to more than anything else in the whole world in the month of December? A 40+track compilation of some of the best (oh, ok, least-bad) mashups featuring Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas!”’ No, of course you haven’t, and yet here we are. This is, personally speaking, my very own Guantanamo soundtrack, but I appreciate that there are others of you out there for whom this may be less of an aural torture.

Associated Press Photographs of the Year 2022: You know the drill by now. I did find the opening line of the copy accompanying the photos here rather arresting – “Taken together, they can convey the feeling of a world convulsing” – and it’s certainly true that there is a LOT in these pics, and a sense that (even if you’re someone who, like me, spends more time than is conceivably healthy with your face plugged into the world online events firehose) there is simply too much happening everywhere all the time to ever get anything resembling a coherent picture or sense of the whole. Which is, of course, true, and maybe it’s healthy to remember that every now and again and concede that so much is necessarily unknowable to us, and incomprehensible. Hm, does that make sense? Not sure, it’s too cold for me to think properly. Anyway, as ever with the AP’s annual best-of there are some astonishing images in here, and many that are as heartbreaking as they are beautiful (there’s a not-inconsiderable amount of death and destruction, as per). My personal favourite is the one of the protestor in Buenos Aires, but please pick your own (YOU CAN’T HAVE MINE FFS!).

The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year: Experience the majesty of the aurora borealis from the warmth and comf- oh, no, hang on, it is not warm and comfortable, it is COLD and we may as well be in the frozen wastes of the North. Still, if you want to see 25 photographs of pretty lights in the sky over snowy vistas then this will sort you right out.

The Natural Landscape Photography Awards 2022: These are WONDERFUL – so many glorious subjects and beautifully-composed shots, with the best ones (to my mind) achieving that trick of making landscape look both recognisable and entirely abstract at the same time.

Wyldcard: This is such a clever idea, and the potential applications are vast – Wyldcard is basically a prototype e-ink playing card system in search of a game mechanic. Its designer, a certain Jonah, writes: “Wyldcards are small plastic cards with e-ink screens (like a Kindle). When placed onto a plinth, the image on the card can be changed by a hidden computer. The cards also contain a memory chip, so they can store stats, moves, and keep changes and status effects from one game to the next. Plug your plinth into your friend’s and play against them.” Jonah is actively seeking collaborators to help him turn the prototypical idea into a playable game, so if you’re a game maker with ideas, or if you know anyone who fits the bill, do take a look at this – it feels very much like there’s *something* here.

More AI-generated Imaginary Film Stills: You want a bunch of more images from imaginary films that don’t exist? GREAT! Another couple of a megadumps (here’s the second) of some of the recent new SD and Midjourney projects where people have basically plugged in ‘The Jungle Book, but directed by Akira Kurosawa’ (not exactly this, but you get the idea) into the machines to generate some truly wonderful stuff. Fine, ok, this is still a bit creativity-as-madlibs, but, well, that’s not that far away from how creativity works (sort of), and a lot of these are quite remarkable. Once again thanks to Rene Walter for compiling these.

Rotaboxes: You may not think a game in which you’re asked each day to compose a photography by rotating individual square elements of it one-by-one until it’s perfect again would be fun, but I have played this every morning this week and I feel it has basically ushered me over the threshold into PROPER middle-aged, and I’ll shortly be investing in a year-long subscription to one of those puzzle magazines so beloved of Nanas on long coach journeys.

Murdle: Speaking of Nanas and their puzzle books, do you like logic puzzles? You know, the ones with premises along the lines of “James likes Joanna; Joanna thinks Steven smells; Tony will sleep with John, but not Jane, on Wednesdays; Alan is the house gimp; using this information, please determine the exact configuration of the polycule on Thursdays”? You do, don’t you? In which case, GREAT! Murdle (I know that I had promised to feature no more Wordle-y puzzles in here, but this is only Wordle-y in the sense that its daily, promise) is a daily logic puzzle where you have to SOLVE THE MURDER – look, I warn you, this is HARD (or at least I found it so – I have only done one of them, but it took me a…frankly embarrassingly long time), but if you’re a particular type of person with a particular type of brain (specifically: one that is better and more efficient than mine), you may find this a pleasing addition to your morning procrastination routine.

Costerly: Is a packet of fags in Liberia more or less expensive than a tracheotomy in Ecuador? Is it cheaper to buy a knockoff driving licence in Rome or to drink yourself to death in Bucharest? These are the sorts of TOUGH QUESTIONS that Costerly presents you with each day, in a game that doesn’t sound like it should be in any way fun or compelling but which somehow manages to be both.

The Old Operating Theatre: Fancy playing a small piece of interactive fiction all about amputating someone’s leg? OF COURSE YOU DO! “Step into the role of a surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital in the early 19th century, before the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptic practices. Warning: This story is inspired by a real historical case and contains graphic descriptions of injury and surgery.” This was surprisingly fun and lightly educational, and I felt inordinately proud of the fact that I managed to get to the end without seemingly condemning my patient to a horrible, gangrenous demise.

The Confounding Calendar: A new game a day until Christmas! Ludic gifts for all! “It’s that time of the year again. The days are shorter, the nights are longer, and the puzzles are puzzlier. We would like to once again present…The CONFOUNDING Calendar! A collection of tiny puzzles that functions like a free online advent calendar of games, with a little surprise for you to play each day in December. (Deducember, if you will.) Check back here each day of the month for new puzzle games!” I have played half-a-dozen of the nine available so far this year and they are a lot of fun – also, you can go back and play previous years’ entries too. Excellent end-of-year work avoidance, should you be firmly into the ‘shall we circle back on that in the New Year?’ phase of professionalism.

Advent Incremental: The final miscellaneous link of 2022 is, appropriately enough, a Christmas-themed clicker game which will hopefully give you something to stare at, slack-jawed, until you can start the serious business of drinking and remembering why you only see your relatives a handful of times a year. Click! Wait! Watch the numbers go up and enjoy the inexplicably-satisfying itch-scratch of slow, incremental numerical progress! IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR!

By RubyEtc

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Tumblr’s Year in Review: In general I tend not to find year-in-review posts by the social platforms hugely useful, but I’ll make an exception for Tumblr’s as it feels significantly more culturally-interesting than the others, perhaps because it tends to have less of an impact on the mainstream media and so tends to feel fresher and newer to me than the ones from Insta telling us all stuff we already basically know. If you want to know which fictional couples the ceaselessly-horny fandoms of Tumblr have spent most time ‘shipping this year, which fandoms have been most active, which KPop stars are biggest with users, what social issues most resonate with them, and a host of other information besides, this will be super-useful; honestly, if you’re doing anything with any sort of youth-focused bent then you really have no excuse not to at the very least skim this.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

A Rural Pen: I love this project, where ink and pigments are made from old firearms; “I take handguns and other firearms out of circulation, dissolve them in sulfuric acid and derive pigments from them, commonly known as Mars colors, including Mars Black, Mars Red and Mars Yellow. As these are hand crafted, the colors may vary. Join me in the transmutation of firearms into pigments.” SUCH a good idea.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Conversation Fear: Apologies, again, for the rather AI-ish bent to the first few articles here – again, though, this feels genuinely frothy and intellectually interesting and cusp-of-something-incredible-y (yes, fine, but you know what I mean), and it feels appropriate to share some writings that explore what the past year’s rise in accessible AI products across images and words might mean. First up we have this excellent and, if you’re feeling a bit scared of all this stuff, moderately-reassuring article by Rob Horning exploring what he sees as the inherent limitations of the current iteration of textual AIs and how these limitations both render them perfect for social media but, equally, perhaps less-threatening than we might initially have thought. I don’t necessarily agree with the slightly dismissive conclusion, but it’s hard to argue with Horning’s assertion here that: “Generative models produce images and fragments of text that are superficially novel and surprising but comprise a readily recognizable and predictable genre of intrinsically meaningless content. This material is not only perfectly suited to filling out templates with placeholder images and text; it is also well-suited to the master template of our time, the social media feed. It is calibrated to the amount of curiosity we bring to scrolling, to the desire to be distracted while procrastinating or waiting for something else to happen. Tech reporter Kashmir Hill tweeted that “About half of my feed now is text and art generated by AI. At what point do we just go 100% prompt?” The obvious answer — one that ChatGPT might even offer — is that feeds have always already been filled with algorithmically produced content, and generative models’ content just reflects a slightly different hybrid of human and machine than the one made up of humans and recommendation algorithms. The feed has always been a kind of chatbot responding to the prompts of our past interaction data. That is to say, feeds can be understood as AI-generated works, and vice versa: The output of models is always implicitly a kind of endless feed.”

The Empty Brain: Another very useful corrective to some of the more hyperbolic commentary you might have seen about AI and the brain and parallels between the two over the course of the past twelve months, this piece is subtitled ‘the brain is not a computer’ and is a really helpful explanation of our current understanding of neurological function and the way in which we (again, currently) perceive memory and thought to work. I checked this with an actual (almost) qualified doctor of neuropsychology (thanks Shardcore) and he said it was ‘quite good’, which is endorsement enough for me; this article is specifically concerned with refuting the conception of the brain (and therefore us as ‘intelligent’ beings) as an ‘information processor’, because, as Robert Epstein writes, “The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors. Setting aside the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and mechanical metaphors to be silly.” So, so interesting.

The Future of Work in the AI Age: How do you feel about your future employment prospects right now? I as ever assume that most people reading this fall under the broad rubric of ‘generic media w4nkers’, white collar workers employed in some aspect of the advermarketingpr industries, or design, or CONTENT, and that as such this year has been the first in which the long-heralded promise of ‘the robots are coming and they are hungry for our jobs’ has seemed to have any real-world weight. This is another optimistic-ish piece which will hopefully serve to make you feel slightly better about at least the short-to-medium term future; it describes a centaur-ish way of working that may well become standard in the next few years, which the article’s author describes as ‘sandwich’ working – a human decides what is needed, how to describe it, and what it needs to be; the task is then given to an AI or combination of AIs to undertake; and the human then picks up the work again to finish, refine, tweak and revise, perhaps with ulterior AI assistance, until a satisfactory conclusion is reached. Which, I agree, sounds plausible and not too scary – unless of course you’re one of the people who currently makes a living by doing the step in the middle, in which case, sorry, you’re still screwed. The other thing that I find slightly troubling about this is that it’s a future predicated on one’s being able to effectively use a bunch of third party digital interfaces and tools and OH GOD DON’T MAKE ME HAVE TO LEARN NEW FCUKING UIs AND DASHBOARDS IN MY MID-40s IDONWANNA.

How To Use AI To Generate Ideas: Still, did the ideas people think they were safe? THEY WERE WRONG! This is an excellent post by Ethan Mollick (who really is a must-follow/read on this stuff, if you’re keep to keep up-to-date) on how one might go about using ChatGPT as a way of coming up with ideas – I know that you might think that one thing that machines can’t do is come up with truly creative solutions, but I refer you back to my earlier point about creativity being very much something you can brute force. Honestly, read this piece and then think back to every single stultifying, pointless, soul-destroying 20-person ‘brainstorm’ that you had in 2022, and how much useful material was generated and how much BILLABLE TIME was spunked into the ether, and how much easier and, frankly, better it would have been had you just been able to ask the machine to come up with ‘50 creative ideas to promote fingering to the over-60s’ (other briefs are available) rather than having to deal with your stupid, bovine colleagues. Ok, this isn’t going to replace your Creative Director – but it might save you 100-odd hours in 2023 that you would otherwise spend listening to double-figure-IQ morons say things like “What about…a TikTok? Or could we do something with an installation?” Oh, and seeing as we’re on Ethan’s blog, this post looking into whether AI could usefully help him in his dayjob as a professor is also quietly astonishing (small spoiler: it can, in ways you might not expect).

Building a Virtual Machine in Chat-GPT: This is *quite* techy, so feel free to skip it if you’re not comfortable with code and computing gubbins (or, of course, for any other reason you like – I AM NOT YOUR BOSS), but it’s another ‘fcuk me this stuff really does feel like witchcraft at points’ moment for text AI – this is complicated but by the end MINDBLOWING, not least because of the seemingly-infinitely-recursive way that you can create a virtual machine inside Chat-GPT WHICH CAN THEN ITSELF RUN CHATGPT. I confess to feeling a little bit like my brain had been turned into a Moebius strip around about the halfway point of this, but it’s once again a spectacular proof-of-concept demonstration of what this stuff can do (and, remember, this is literally a week old).

AI Can Invent Language Too By The Way: At this point I’m sort of just reduced to waving my hands in the general direction of this stuff and gaping in wonder; this article looks into how Chat-GPT can be used to create an entire fictional language, with grammatical rules that the AI can then consistently apply to enable to to undertake translations from English into said imaginary language. Which, on the one hand isn’t immediately useful, but on the other is, again, just kind-of mindblowing and which at the very least will save all the people labouring over their twelve-volume fantasy epic about “Tharg, Daughter of Thargandia” the trouble of inventing their own alphabet and coming up with its own syntax.

New Avenues: This post by author Robin Sloan articulated rather perfectly something that I think I’ve said repeatedly over the past year or so of Curios – that it feels like there is something of an independent creative renaissance happening online, outside of the major social platforms, which is seeing individuals and collectives returning to the practice of making small, personal, curious projects on the web just because they can – and that we will benefit from exploring these projects and making our own, outside of the attention industrial complex that characterises the web as seen through a phonescreen. Basically Robin has managed to effectively explain Why Web Curios Exists and Why I Think This Stuff Is Important far better than I could ever have done, and without knowing that either I or Web Curios exist. Damn you Robin, this is why you’re a successfully-published author and I am a very cold webmong.

Reading As Counter Practice: I have been reading the Count of Monte Cristo recently, and it’s struck me the extent to which the nature of the text (it is VERY long, and despite being plot-heavy and eminently readable, and oddly modern in many ways, it is also dense with description and aside in the manner of novels of the time) necessarily changes the manner in which one reads it and in turn how one relates to it and the ideas it contains. Which is, basically and less-articulately, the point of this article – inspired in part by the recent, viral comments by discraced cryptocriminal SBF about how ‘most books should probably have been blogposts’, the piece explores how and why the medium informs the manner in which the message is received, and how reading longform work, offline, can be useful as much as a means of changing the way in which one thinks as of imbibing information: in conclusion, the author recommends “that we think of reading as a valuable counter-practice. Or, rather, that we at least sometimes think of reading as a valuable counter-practice. By counter-practice, I mean a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu”, and, honestly, I like this a lot as a way of thinking.

Writing With A Quest: The second proper review of Meta’s new kit I’ve seen, this feels more positive than the one I featured here a few weeks back, without at any point offering any sort of compelling rationale as to why anyone might actually NEED such a thing. Ryan Broderick, writing for Information, explains his experience of working and writing in VR, using the Quest’s multiscreen and mixed reality features, and given Meta’s apparent immediate focus on selling VR and the metaverse to enterprise customers rather than consumers it’s an interesting look at how a near-future of work might look if big business buys into what Zuckerberg is selling. Although, honestly, I had sort of hoped that the exciting VR future first trailed to me in the mid-90s would involve slightly more exciting things than what is basically ‘a load of different virtual monitors on which you can look at multiple spreadsheets simultaneously’.

The Therapy Chatbots of Singapore: This is in-part a fascinating look at how high-tech societies seek to streamline public health provision, and some of the pitfalls of so doing, and the limitations of current AI as a solution to emotional problems – but it’s also a glimpse into what we are going to be seeing a LOT more of in the coming 12-18 months. GIven the fact that the chatbot future we were promised by a buch of consultants 7-8 years ago is finally seemingly here, and that there’s now API access to a generally very good English language human conversation interface, we are going to see a LOT of startups that apply a Chat-GPT layer to various issues; we’re going to see specially-trained advice bots for dating and relationships and mortgages and investments and health and motoring and cooking, and 99% of them will be spun up on the cheap by grifters who want to make a quick buck and don’t know or don’t care about the potential negative side effects of allowing an unknowable machine ‘intelligence’ to dole out advice, and we are going to see some INTERESTING CASE STUDIES here about how wrong this stuff can go imho.

A Year With Merkel: I have always found Angela Merkel fascinating as a political figure, and I adored this long profile of her in Spiegel – the writer, Alexander Osang, obviously knows his subject well, and was granted decent access, and it’s by turns a moving and clear-eyed portrayal of a politician who, after dominating European politics for decades, has seen her legacy recontextualised in ways she probably didn’t quite foresee in less than 12 months. All politicians are great and terrible and their own way, even the inconsequential ones (it’s something about the necessary degree of hubris, I think), but there is something oddly…sad, almost, about the slow slide into irrelevance of the post-power Premier (which perhaps explains Mr Tony Blair’s seemingly-incessant ‘rare interventions’ into UK politics). This is quite chewy, but it’s a really well-written (and translated) piece about a woman who has been one of the most significant actors in German, European and international politics of the past 80 years.

The Corner Kicks of the World Cup: I know it’s the done thing to look slightly askance at Americans when they talk about football, and to laugh at their insistence on US-ifying the language and terminology to fit their domestic expectations of what sport should be and how it should work, but I have really enjoyed some of the reporting of the football from US outlets over the past couple of weeks, not least because of the fact that they don’t assume knowledge of their readers to the same extent and so therefore can end up doing a better job of outlining certain tactical elements of the game. This piece – on the different ways in which teams take and defend corners – is a case in point; it features really clear diagrams, and an explanation between zonal and man-to-man marking that, honestly, I would really appreciate them employing on Match of the Day from time to time.

More World Cup: More World Cup writing, this in the New Yorker, on the oddity of Qatar and the whole World Cup experience, and, yes, you have probably read a version of this piece already but this is a particularly good example of the genre.

So You Want To Be A TikTok Star?: Another superb New Yorker article, this one looking at the steps by which one becomes a music star of TikTok. Taking as its central example the rise to actual musical fame of one Katherine Li, this does a superb job of taking her ‘journey’ (sorry) and using it as a skeleton on which to build the wider ecosystem of talentspotters and A&Rs and marketing people and and and and, all of whom depend on the TikTok ecosystem and who in turn make the flywheel of hype spin ever harder.

The Avatar Conundrum: Or, WHY did it seemingly have no cultural impact? I remember going to see the original in the cinema way back when, and emerging blinking into the night feeling very strongly that it was by far and away the best utterly-terrible film I had ever seen, which is why I think I will probably go to the cinema to check out the new one despite not having set foot in a multiplex for, I think, about six years – this article takes the Avatar theme park experience as its starting point to try and dissect why there feels like there is no narrative ‘there’ there, and while it doesn’t quite come to any concrete conclusions it does seem to scratch at what I believe is the central truth; that is, that the film is basically a massive, fcuk-off tech demo, a wildly impressive tech demo, sure, but you are no more likely to feel a deep emotional attachment to it than you might to those raytraced animations they used to show off high-end PCs in the late-90s. Oh, while we’re on Avatar, this is a good thread by Matthew Ball explaining how we shouldn’t forget how mind-fcukingly successful the first one was, particularly in non-Western markets.

Dwarf Fortress: Honestly, I can’t imagine that there are that many of you who are reading this and thinking “you know, what I really want to do over the coming holiday period is hunker down with a famously-impenetrable videogame in which I attempt to help a colony of dwarves survive as long as possible whilst knowing that they will at some point or another all die horribly.” AND YET! I have spoken about Dwarf Fortress in here before, but I am linking to another piece about it because there is a new version out which has ACTUAL GRAPHICS and is apparently marginally-less confusing and daunting whilst at the same time containing exactly the same sort of insanely-detailed simulation of hundreds of individual dwarves, and cats, and animals and monsters and history and memory and and and and. I promise you, read this piece and there will be at least a part of you that fancies getting well into this. If nothing else, it’s worth reminding yourself of the now-infamous ‘drunk cats’ bug to give yourself a flavour of how weird the whole thing can and does get.

The Comeuppance Button: Roald Dahl is the very definition of an author who, by modern standards, would be defined as, er, ‘problematic’, and this article in the LRB, reviewing a new autobiography of the man, does a wonderful job of dissecting not only his personal history and less-than-sparkling character, but also the peculiarities of his writing, both for adults and children. Dahl was a famously unpleasant character in many respects, but this is a really good read about a difficult man who wrote some of the 20th century’s most-beloved children’s stories (I also very much enjoy the fact that the author of this review shares my opinion that Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is absolute tripe).

What Is Mckinzie For?: Another piece from the LRB, this one a review of a book about the history and practice of Mckinzie, purveyors of 100-slide powerpoints that seemingly always boil down to loads of triangles, loads of arrows, and, in the end, loads of redundancies. “A damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation,” this could frankly be applied to any other consultancy operating in the same space.

I Don’t Want To Be An Internet Person: An appropriate final longread of the year, now – I can’t say I enjoyed reading this piece, well-written and well-observed though it is, as it felt perhaps a tiny touch too close to home, but it felt true and articulated a bunch of things I have been feeling for a while but hadn’t been able to crystallise. I mean, look, I am not the subject of this piece, but I read this and felt a really quite powerful and not-particularly-nice-feeling jolt of recognition, and I wonder whether maybe…maybe this isn’t in fact doing me any good? HM. “With the same blank, unmoving expression as his associates, Charlie told me that he made a logical decision to dedicate his life to the mastery of digital culture. Of course being chronically online is destructive. He admitted that he and his affiliates are weird. He described one former posting partner “Sunny” as having “part of his brain missing.” But to ignore the internet, he said, is to give up on making an impact in your own time. Cultural cycles move so fast online that being unplugged for a few years will render anyone culturally defunct, functionally a separate species from the digitally engaged. The internet is a superhighway. Step off and you might be safer, but you will also be quickly left behind.” One to ponder while I unplug my face from the machine for a few weeks.

By Tom Philips, author of A Humument, one of my favourite ever books, who died recently

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

We kick off with a BRAND NEW old-style Disney animation, resurrecting the company’s original, pre-Mickey character called Oswald Rabbit. This is a lovely piece of oldschool animation in the classic rubber hose style, and it contains some genuinely great slapstick sight gags, and it’s so nice to see something that’s not CG for a change, honestly.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to love this 100 Gecs x Skrillex track, but there’s something about the juxtaposition of the helium vocals and the less-than-sunny things that they are saying that I rather liked. Fcuk knows what Skrillex contributed to this, but I rather like it. It’s called ‘Torture Me’.

The coveted Web Curios TRACK OF THE YEAR award now – and I’m slightly surprised that it was a novelty track I found in late-January, and even more surprised that this doesn’t have more than 3k views nearly a year later. What can I say? I have niche tastes. This is obviously slightly tongue-in-cheek, but, equally, it fcuking slaps, and it’s weirdly sad and poignant and funny, and the video is great, and I don’t quite know why but it speaks to me somewhere deep in my ‘soul’ (lol), and it reminds me of Alex Cameron, and it’s basically just great. This is Bungalow Jonathan with ‘Love Online’.

And so, we come to the final video of the year. What to close out with? Well, I can think of no better piece of PRIME CONTENT than this…idiosyncratic Christmas banger by Spanish artiste (the extra ‘e’ is appropriate here, I feel) Leticia Sabater. This is called ‘Papa Nöel lléname el tanke’ – which, I think, means ‘fill up my tank, Father Christmas; and, honestly, I don’t think you will find a more festive track all Christmas (although, fully disclosure, the vibe is more ‘C0ck Destroyers’ than it is ‘chestnuts round the open fire’), and I hope you like it and I AM OFF I AM TURNING OFF THE INTERNET BUT I WILL BE BACK AND I HOPE YOU WILL TOO THANKYOU FOR EVERYTHING I LOVE YOU WELL DONE FOR SURVIVING ANOTHER FCUKING YEAR THANKYOU I LOVE YOU GOODBYE AND MERRY CHRISTMAS IF YOU CELEBRATE AND EVEN IF YOU DON’T!

Webcurios 02/12/22

December 2, 2022

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Reading Time: 40 minutes

This week I thought I would ask GPT-3’s new chatbot to pen the opening – this is what it came up with, based on my request that it ‘write me a humorous, cynical opening paragraph to a newsletter about interesting things on the internet’:

“Welcome to our weekly newsletter, where we share the most interesting things we’ve found on the internet (or at least the things we found interesting enough to click on). No guarantee of accuracy, truthfulness, or even goodness, but hopefully at least a little entertaining. This week: a bizarre conspiracy theory, a hilarious video, and an unexpected use for a chicken. Enjoy!”

You know what? FCUK YOU AI I AM BETTER THAN YOU LIKE FCUK CAN YOU MANAGE MY UNIQUE AND IRREPRESSIBLE STYLISTIC FLOURISHES AND BOLD USE OF CAPITALISATION I AM A SPECIAL AND UNIQUE HUMAN SNOWFLAKE AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT.

(next week I will train it on the entirety of the Curios corpus and then kill myself as I am rendered otiose by machine).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I am increasingly feeling like I would rather like to be replaced with AI if I’m honest with you.

By Miki Kim

WE START THIS WEEK’S MIXES OFF WITH A RATHER WONDERFUL THREE-HOUR SET OF PLEASINGLY-LISTENABLE HOUSE FROM LEE BURRIDGE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY SPECULATING AS TO WHICH OF THE CURRENT CROP OF HORRIBLE PLUTOCRATS IT WOULD LEAST LIKE TO ALLOW TO STICK A BUNCH OF ELECTRODES INTO ITS GREY MATTER, PT.1:

GPT3 Chat: It’s that time of year in which agencies around the world desperately flail to get their ‘TREND PREDICTIONS FOR NEXT YEAR’ presentations out of the way, which means that many of you will either be reading or writing a bunch of pointless crap that says things like ‘We predict that AI will be big in 2023!’ I doubt, though, that any agencies will be quite honest enough to admit that, based on this link, what will actually happen in 2023 is that anyone with an ounce of sense will start outsourcing 90% of the shovelware content creation work that forms so much of agencies’ bread and butter these days to the machines – because, honestly, based on this, no fcuker will be able to tell. OK, fine, perhaps I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but if you’ve yet to check out OpenAI’s new GPT3-based chatbot then please click the link and have a play and come back here and continue reading once your mind has been properly blown. This is, quite frankly, fcuking ASTONISHING – it’s based on the tweaked new GPT-3 model called DaVinci03 which OpenAI released earlier this week and which you can read more about here, but the main takeaway is that there’s now a convenient, in browser toy with a conversational interface which you can command to write whatever you want for you, and it is SO GOOD. Honestly, just try it on something like ‘can you write me a 600 word article on the history of Facebook?’ or ‘what are the basic tenets of confucianism?’ or even moderately-esoteric stuff, like ‘can you write me a romantic sonnet expressing my love to a person called Calliope, which specifically references her peculiar love of millinery and which contains a marriage proposal?’ – it NAILS it. Honestly, I was a bit sniffy earlier this week when messing around with the base-level new model, but the addition of the interface is game-changingly good. The potential implications for this are insane, but, at the very least, this feels like it’s ushering in the end of ‘kids, go home and write me an essay’-type homework – honestly, a busy teacher would be hard-pressed to tell the output of this machine from a standard C+/B- student’s work – as well as being the first technological innovation that made me think that the era of most written content online being machine-penned is almost upon us. I can’t stress enough how astonishingly near-magical this feels, and also how deeply unsettling, like we’re standing on the edge of something that may well be a terrifying precipice full of as-yet-unknown monsters. This unrolled Twitter thread gives a decent overview of some of the things which you can do with this, and the things which it still struggles with – you may find the software’s inability to do anything which even halfway looks like ‘reasoning’ somewhat comforting.

Chat With Your Inner Child: Of course, human nature being what it is, this new tech almost immediately saw someone somewhere online doing something…ever so slightly odd with it. Step forward Michelle Huang, who went moderately-viral earlier in the week as a result of her having used this new tech to, er, have a ‘conversation’ with a specially-trained version of the new GPT-3 software which she had ‘fed’ a bunch of text from her childhood diaries – said training meant she was then able to ‘converse’ with a software model which responded to her in a style reminiscent of her as a child. Which, I think, is such an insanely-future idea that we should take a moment to really chew over how mad it sounds – someone trained a computer on their childhood diaries so that they could subsequently have a conversation with said computer as though they were talking to a past version of themselves. Honestly, this is a MIND-FLAYINGLY ODD concept and I am simultaneously deeply-fascinated and slightly troubled by it – there’s another thread here covering some of the reasons why this might not be a wholly psychologically healthy thing to do, but, well, who am I to tell you not to create a digital ghost of your childhood self? NO FCUKER, etc etc.

Fabled: Do you think David Walliams’ recent spate of negative publicity means that maybe, perhaps, some other people (maybe non-famous ones?) might be allowed a shot at selling some kids books? Who knows, but let’s hope so as time may well be running out for authors of reading material for small folk – whilst I don’t expect AI-generated novels to be troubling actual novelists anytime soon (although on reflection, given the quality of some of the stuff self-published on the Kindle store, this may in fact happen sooner than I expect), it does rather feel like the slightly more formulaic childrens’ book market could well see AI make serious inroads. Welcome, then, to Fabled, which uses a combination of AI tools to spin out stories for children based on simple prompts (or at least it will – it’s currently in beta, but you can apply for waitlist access) – “Instantly create custom books about any topic or theme! Make personalized kids stories, baby books, adult novels or fan-fiction. Simply give us a sentence and our AI writer will do the rest.” It will churn out accompanying illustrations too, letting you specify an art style to direct the aesthetic however you choose – honestly, I look at this and I think ‘hm, those companies that churn out those generic ‘your kid’s name in a storybook!’ books are going to have a field day with this stuff’, and also ‘if you’re a small-scale kids author this is going to feel like someone hammering the coffin down over your face’. Fabled isn’t alone – even Amazon is getting in on the act, with its new Alexa-based system that uses AI to create animated stories on-demand for its screen-enabled domestic surveillance devices – and whilst we’re evidently going to see some alarming headlines about ‘AI creates snuff story and terrifies children’ in the not-too-distant future, it also seems reasonably clear that the number of people able to make anything approaching a living from writing books for kids is going to take an absolutely massive fcuking hit in the next 24 months.

Instoried:. CONTENT! MORE CONTENT! The ceaseless demands of the content-hungry maw of the web are becoming ever more insistent, while the rewards for actually bothering to make anything become ever slimmer – which is why any sane advermarketingprdrone will be looking for ways in which they can eliminate themselves from as much of the pointless slog of CONTENT CREATION as possible. InStoried is one of a growing number of subscription services which promise to help you churn out the pointless words that make up 99% of the modern web – it will write straplines and blogposts and social media copy and, basically, all the crap, largely-pointless words that exist only to fill up the infinite spaces of the internet and to be read by the Google Spiders, and it’s keenly-priced at 250 quid a year for 20 licenses, and, honestly, how much did you spend on copywriters last year and was it REALLY worth it? I say this as someone who occasionally gets paid to write – I know, it’s RISIBLE, isn’t it? – and, honestly, most of the time I simply wouldn’t bother paying for a human these days because most corporate content is read by approximately 17 people and, frankly, who the fcuk cares if it’s machine-written or not? Which I appreciate is exactly the sort of attitude that will see us sinking in a swamp of machine-dreck within a few short years but, look, it’s been a long year and I am tired and part of me just wants to sink into it and just sort of suffocate.

NotContent: On a similar note, NotContent is an interesting idea – an agency which is quite open about the fact that it uses a combination of the AI stack to do its work faster and smarter and cheaper than the competition. I have no idea who these people are or whether there work is in fact any good, but am including the link because, seriously, there are going to be a LOT of these shops spinning up in the next 12 months and attempting to undercut larger agency structures and, honestly, having worked within large agency structures here and there over the risible mess that I like to call my ‘career’, it’s about time too. If you’re not using this stuff as a streamlining element of your creative process then you are probably soon going to be losing work to agencies who are, basically, simply because they will be able to be cheaper than you (and, almost certainly, because your work’s not special or exciting enough to warrant the ‘artisanal human premium’ that you’re charging).

GPTweet3: Not, to be clear, the actual name of this service, but allow me the terrible ‘gag’ – this is a little webtoy that will spin out tweets for you on any topic you tell it to, with any tone you specify, even mimicking the general feel of a specific other Twitter account should you wish. If your job involves having to fill out endless content calendars and having to draft an infinite number of pointless Twitter bromides that will one day be punted out to a largely-uncaring audience then a) I am so, so sorry that this is what your life has become; and b) this may well stave off the suicidal feelings for at least a week or two.

Natural Language Playlists: Ok, this doesn’t totally work but I like the idea and there’s something fun in the ‘fuzziness’ of the interface and what it delivers. The premise is simple – you write in a description of the rough sort of playlist you would like to create, click a button, and in a few short seconds this site will have created something for you from Spotify based on your specifications. I just gave it ‘happy jazz for a summer evening’ (literally antonymical to my current mood and situation, as I sit in a dark and freezing cold kitchen with a hot water bottle stuffed under my jumper) and a quick glance at the tracklisting it’s given me suggests that it vaguely-understood the brief – I can’t guarantee that it will be similarly effective with more esoteric or complex requests (“A soundtrack that perfectly evokes the feeling of anxiety that precedes a major international football fixture which you expect to win but fear you will lose”, for example), but it’s definitely worth a play – I would be fascinated to know how this works under the hood.

Jodorowsky’s Tron: People have been playing around with the new version of Midjourney this week, and the consensus seems that it’s currently the leader of the AI art pack in terms of the quality and style of its outputs – you may have seen this selection of images, effectively imagining ‘what if Tron, but directed by infamously-batsh1t Mexican auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky?’ (the first batch of which are at the main link, the second which you can find here), but they’re worth examining up close because…well, because the machines are getting so much better so much faster than I would have expected. Contrast this with the stuff people were getting excited about six months ago and it’s astonishing to see the degree, and speed, of progress – there’s a nice selection of images in this post by Renee Walter which showcases some of the other ‘what if film x, directed by person y?’ mashups people have been playing with, and whilst, yes, fine, this stuff does tend to produce better results when doing what is basically style transfer work than when ‘imagining’ something entirely new, it’s hard not to see this as our first, tentative steps across a massive fcuking creative Rubicon.

AI Synths; This is just a Twitter thread, fine, but it struck me as a lovely little example of what it’s possible to do with all this stuff – AI art meddler Fabian Stelzer has created a series of odd, imaginary synths, dreamed up by machines to his specifications, and has animated them and then gotten another AI to imagine what music each of them might make, and I honestly get giddy at the thought of what people are going to be able to make with this stuff by this time next year.

Old London Photos: And then, of course, there’s the very real fact that if we think we’ve had a dodgy few years in terms of our inability to determine truth from falsehood online then we should probably brace ourselves because, honestly, we have seen NOTHING. These images are a case in point – created using Midjourney, they are a TERRIFYINGLY convincing selection of images which mimic with eerie accuracy the very particular visual style you see in old photographs that have been retouched and sharpened by digital imaging techniques.Except, of course, they are not – these are not real photos, the people in them never existed, and if you look closely then you will see that there are occasional anomalies in the photos such as the fact that at least one horse appears to be floating above the ground unaided by limbs. But, honestly, a cursory glance would see you convinced that these are proper old images which have just been digitally retouched a bit – as evidenced by the fact that they were happily accepted as real by the subReddit in which they were originally posted. We’re on the cusp of another popular panic about THE PERILS OF DEEPFAKES, except this time there will actually be something to worry about.

Woolitize: This is a version of StableDiffusion that has been trained on wool, and which therefore will create BEAUTIFUL images of whatever you like, as long as you don’t mind the fact that all the outputs will look…well, distinctly wooly. If you’ve ever wanted to see what your favourite pop star might look like if they were knitted by your nan then this is the model for YOU!

Cleo: WARNING: THIS LINK WILL MAKE YOUR LAPTOP SOUND LIKE IT HAS EMPHYSEMA. Or at least it will if it’s as sh1t as mine is – you may well have some sort of insanely-powerful beast which will render this with nary a complaint – but it’s sort-of worth it, if only to see what a digital recreation of a piece of interpretative dance all about the life of Cleopatra is like. I don’t really understand this – it’s contemporary dance, which to me is about as comprehensible as Urdu – but it’s a nice (if heavy) piece of digital work and I am glad it exists.

Wyth: I am including this website solely because it contains some of the most astonishingly-meaningless examples of copywank I have read in YEARS. If any of you can explain to me what the fcuk it is that this company does I will be hugely grateful – seriously, what in the name of Christ does this mean? “Wyth is designed to facilitate a virtuous cycle of experiences converging on a single platform. We call it the Circular Experience. The Circular Experience is Wyth’s human-centered approach to technology aiming to connect social, interactive and collaborative frameworks to enable deeper relationships in every aspect of our lives.” I mean, obviously it means nothing, but what is it MEANT to mean? Can we please start asking questions like this when we read copy this bad? Can we stop letting these cnuts get away with these crimes against language?

Powder World: “Powder World”, reads the onsite blurb, “is a lightweight simulation environment for understanding AI generalization.” Honestly, though, that MASSIVELY undersells it – what Powder World in fact is is a little browser-based sandbox that lets you experiment with all sorts of interlinked physics models in a tiny little pixel world. Drop vegetation everywhere! Set fire to it! Douse the flames with water! Cackle maniacally at the feeling of godline power that ensues! I mean, yes, ok, there is doubtless loads of really impressive maths happening here which I am totally glossing over in favour of cooing over the physics toy aspects of the whole thing but, well, I reckon you’re probably not reading this for my trenchant analyses of emergent phenomena simulation engines (or at least I hope you’re not, and that if you are that the disappointment isn’t too crushing).

Not Pink: Click the link. Remind you of anything? Yes, that’s right, someone has FINALLY ripped off MSCHF wholesale – this is a quite astonishing aesthetic lift (seriously, click this and check out their homepage and do a mental comparison and marvel at the chutzpah), and as far as I can tell the basic premise (mysterious brand punts out odd little creative game/experiment things on a semi-regular schedule) is the same. No Pink only have one project under their belt at the moment – a game in which they invited people to attempt to come up with the closest match possible to an AI created image, which is a fun-if-lightweight idea (lol like I have ever had a ‘heavyweight’ idea in my life) – and their next drops in 10 days and I think is going to be something involving AI and a popular Twitch streamer; worth watching, if only to see whether it’s possible to rip off the MSCHF concept wholesale or whether it only works if you’re a bunch of trust fund kids in Brooklyn.

Mocopi: This is super-impressive, at least in theory – this is new kit from Sony which comes in the form of a series of small sensors which you affix to your wrists, ankles and head and which, at least according to the launch blurb, will let you do full-body mocap using only said sensors and a smartphone. Which, obviously, is huge – it takes VTubing out of the bedroom and into the wild, for a start, but it also opens up the general mocap industry to anyone which, when allied with the boom in AI image generation and modelling, means that any kid with an imagination and a phone can theoretically create fluid mocapped animation with minimal spend and resources – I very much get the impression that we’re all going to be looking back at Avatar 2 in a decade’s time and laughing at the fact that Jim Cameron spent billions on creating space jungle smurfs when we were only about a year or so away from every single 12 year old being able to make the original Avatar using some of this kit and some Snapchat skins.

Mindmelt: This is GREAT – pick a music genre, streamed from some popular online radio station or another, and enjoy this frankly brilliant visualiser to accompany the sounds. I promise you, this is superb – hallucinatory and glitchy and straddling the gulf between abstract weirdness and odd metacultural commentary, and I promise it’s all I can do not to abandon Curios here at 825am and just stare at this, entranced, for the rest of the morning.

By Laura June Kirsch

WE CONTINUE THE HOUSE-Y THEME NOW WITH THIS EXCELLENT MIX BY JOHN TALABOT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY SPECULATING AS TO WHICH OF THE CURRENT CROP OF HORRIBLE PLUTOCRATS IT WOULD LEAST LIKE TO ALLOW TO STICK A BUNCH OF ELECTRODES INTO ITS GREY MATTER, PT.2:

Taking Shape: Whilst obviously there are some downsides to the current and coming boom in AI image generation and the associated tools – huge swathes of the artistic community potentially having their earning potential decimated by machines, the as-yet-unknowable impact it will have on visual styles and aesthetics, the as-yet-underexplored questions of bias and prejudice inherent in the models we’re building, etc etc etc ad infinitum – there are also some positives, for example the hope that this might see everyone’s least-favourite software behemoth Adobe lose at least some of their stranglehold on the digital art and design marketplace. It does feel rather like Adobe doesn’t quite get how potentially fcuked it is – this website, designed to showcase a bunch of modern design styles and how YOU TOO can recreate them by – SUPRISE! – investing heavily in the Adobe Creative Suite – doesn’t really acknowledge the extent to which there are, and certainly will be, a bunch of other, free, non-Adobe means of getting these sorts of looks and feels and outputs that don’t require you to sell your soul in perpetuity for an After Effects license. This isn’t a bad site per se, it’s just…pointless, and also doesn’t do what it says it will – the homepage suggests that it’s to ‘explore questions of modern art and design’, something which it singularly fails to engage with on any meaningful level. Still, at least it scrolls nicely.

In My Nature: Subtitled ‘A Multimedia Hike With Cyborgs’, this is a GORGEOUS project where three actual, real-life cyborgs (in the real sense, not just in the weak ‘I have a smartphone, you have a smartphone, we are ALL CYBORGS NOW’ sense) go on a hike and you can see how their augmented senses alter their experience of the world around them. “What is it like to choose your own senses? Join three cyborgs from Barcelona on a multimedia hike inspired by our interviews with them. They will show you how their electronic enhancements change what it means to be human.” You’ll probably recognise at least one of the three participants – Neil Harbisson is instantly-recognisable from his numerous TV appearances over the years, and the fact that he has an actual antenna poking out of his skull – but each has augmented their body in interesting ways, and each tells an interesting story through illustrations and prose and photography about why they have chosen to build on their existing senses in the way they have, and how their experience of ‘cyborg-ness’ alters their relationship to the natural world around them. After reading this, it is entirely possible that you too will want to install some weather fins in your head, and I say GO FOR IT.

Noggin Boss: There are many, many reasons I will never be rich, but one of the principal ones is that I literally have the opposite of business instincts – I am largely incapable of predicting what will be a popular success and what will not, and am as a result never going to end up being an early investor in surprise breakout consumer hits. Which is a longwinded way of saying that I think these hats (for that is what Noggin Boss is selling) are, by a long way, some of the most stupid-looking articles of clothing I have ever seen in my life, and I cannot for the life of me understand how the fcuk it is that they appear to be selling so many of them. How best to describe a Noggin Boss hat? Hm. Ok, imagine a baseball cap. Now imagine that said cap is enlarged to somewhere in the region of five times its original size. Now imagine said enlarged cap perched on the head of a normal-sized person. It looks ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yes, yes it does, and yet here we are. I think we’re probably too late for this to ship to the UK in time for Christmas, thank God, but if YOU want to be the first person in your postcode to wear a comically-outsize cap then this may be the link for you.

Count Things: I am THRILLED that this exists – this is an app that exists solely to help you count large numbers of uniform objects, at scale. Imagine, if you will, that you are a…I don’t know, a scaffolding magnate. You have a massive pile of scaffolding poles in a yard somewhere, which you want to accurately enumerate (this is a HIGH OCTANE thought experiment, isn’t it? Never let it be said that Web Curios doesn’t truly engage the mind!) but you don’t actually want to have to stand in front of said pile counting each pole one by one. Enter Count Things! This app contains all sorts of pre-built models to count common supplies and materials (bricks, tiles, all sorts of joists), and the people behind it will even work with you to create your own model if there’s something you want to count at scale that they don’t currently support (badgers, skulls, teeth, etc). The only thing about this that could possibly be improved would be a brand tie-in with Sesame Street – I want the number of girders delivered to me by a cuddly vampiric number obsessive.

Tidbyt: Look, I appreciate that times are hard and we are all feeling poor and parlous, and therefore the idea of pointing you at frivolous ways to spend what little disposable income you have left after you’ve dealt with the basic ‘not dying’ expenses is perhaps not exactly ‘on trend’ for the fag-end of 2022, but, well, I have no idea who any of you are and for all I know you might all be plutocratically rich thanks to judicious crypto investments (lol) and can happily drop the £180 (oh, ok, dollars, but still) to purchase your very own customisable artisanal pixel display screen thingy, which you can use to display everything from email alerts to the time to the weather to data about where your family members are on their commutes…basically if you’re a particular type of geek, the sort who likes messing around with a Raspberry Pi and who once owned one of Berg’s TinyPrinters, then you might well like this too.

Instafest: Yes, yes, I know that you have all done this thing already – that thing where you connect this website to your Spotify account and it spits out a festival lineup based on your listening habits, and you share it online to show what a fascinating and unique person you are based on your music tastes – but completeness compels me to include it here as well. I’ve been interested to see this doing the rounds far more than Spotify’s own ‘Wrapped’ content so far this year (although in fairness that’s possibly because Wrapped only came out late this week), which perhaps speaks to the fact that this shows you MORE STUFF and also perhaps because the Wrapped stuff this year is (imho at least) pretty horribly copywritten (you don’t need to fcuk with this stuff! We’re all narcissists who think that the world should care about our listening habits and would share this data even if you just gave us the artist names and nothing else, you don’t need to call us fcuking ‘astronauts’ for having listened to 17 hours of Diamanda Galas in 2022 ffs!). Anyway, I don’t fcuking care what music you have listened to this year so don’t fcuking tell me.

Pattern Collider: “Pattern Collider is a tool for generating and exploring quasiperiodic tiling patterns. Every pattern that you create has a custom URL that you can bookmark & share.” This is slightly-hypnotic and geometrically-dazzling, and it made me want to sit and basically create my own intricate bathroom tile design (before I spent too long staring at the shapes and patterns and my visions started to go a bit funny).

TLDR: FULL DISCLOSURE: I have only given this a cursory play, and so I can’t either vouch for its brilliance or that using it won’t cause you some sort of significant professional or personal embarrassment. Still, the brief play I had with it made me think that there’s possibly utility here (and this is definitely only the tip of the iceberg for stuff like this – the obvious next extension is AI crawlers that do the same thing but without you even having to ask) – TLDR is a Chrome extension that effectively lets you batch-create AI generated summaries of any urls you point it at, whether they house text or audio or video, meaning that (in theory, at least) you could find a bunch of sources for research and then point the machine at them and get digestible notes on their contents rather than having to wade through X,000 words and hours of audio and YouTube videos. I wouldn’t, obviously rely on this for anything serious, but I can envisage scenarios in which it’s genuinely useful to get a top-level overview summary from a wide range of sources, if only to get a vague steer on an idea or concept. I probably wouldn’t trust this right at this moment, but it feels very much like a coming future.

Lungy: Look, full disclosure, I am including this link solely because I find the name of this app to be almost-impossibly awful. “Lungy”? LUNGY????? It sounds like the World Health Organisation’s ill-fated attempt to create a mascot to raise awareness of bronchial illnesses! It sounds like what you call the kid at school who once suffered such an extreme coughing fit that they dislodged a small piece of meat from inside themselves which landed on Melanie King and meant she was never quite the same again! WHO NAMED THIS? But, er, more seriously, it’s actually an app to help with breathing exercises, which, honestly, is probably quite useful and I shouldn’t mock. But, really, ‘Lungy’?!

Trendwatch 2016: A PERFECT Curio, this – Trendwatch 2016 is a YouTube channel which features 50-odd videos which are…just fcuking weird, honestly. I don’t want to tell you too much more, just click the link and dive in and immerse yourself in the strange. It feels…hm, how to describe it? It’s very much in the same aesthetic/vibe(sorry) space as the ‘infinite corridors of liminal space’ stuff, but with less of the self-conscious wackiness of a lot of that stuff, and I have no idea whatsoever who makes it or why it exists, or indeed why they posted two videos six years ago and then nothing else until February of this year, or where it is going. If you enjoy Scarfolk then you will enjoy this – they are not similar, but they also are (more high-quality critical cultural analysis coming up shortly!).

The Covid-19 Dream Journal: I can’t be bothered to dig it out, but in the early days of the pandemic I featured a link in here which invited people to share the dreams they were experiencing during the pandemic to see whether any clues could be drawn as to the impact of lockdown and isolation and the general sense of directionless fear that everyone was experiencing on the collective unconscious. I am not sure if this page, collecting people’s submitted Covid dreams, is the result of that particular project or something else, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a browse through all the things that people’s psyches threw up during The Great Plague of 2020-? then this will please you immoderately. Whether or not you believe that these are faithful recollections of people’s real dreams or a chance for people to indulge in a bit of creative writing is up to you – I haven’t gone through enough to see whether there are common themes that emerge, but I have read exactly enough to know that I am personally not that interested in hearing about other people’s dreams.

Oimo: A collection of beautifully-coded little browser-based physics toys, all by a person known as Saharan who I think is from Japan. Click on the ‘works’ tab and enjoy a couple of dozen beautiful little physics-y webtoys – I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing with the fabric model, but you will all find something to amuse you here if you look closely enough.

The Sheffield Tape Archive: Via the excellent ‘Things’ magazine comes this superb archive of music from Sheffield – “A series of archive recordings from around 1980 onwards: sheffield bands, demos, concerts and rarities..” Want to listen to a bootleg of a Butthole Surfers gig from 1987? YES YOU DO! Want to explore the work of the (to me at least) largely-unknown 80s beat combo called, magically, The Fcuk City Sh1tters? FILL YOUR BOOTS! There’s a wonderful mixture of the classic and the very obscure here, along with some proper historical curiosities like a campaign recording of Monster Raving Loony Party founder ‘Screaming’ Lord Sutch – a properly good archive collection, this.

Appropedia: If one of the things on your tentative list of ‘plans for 2023’ is ‘attempt to make my life more sustainable and perhaps less reliant on things like the crumbling British national infrastructure which it increasingly looks like failing entirely in the near future’, you may find Appropedia useful; it’s a Wiki which features all sorts of useful information on things like installing appropriate solar power, or living roofs, or proper composting, or bike-powered generators – in the main, I am including this link for my friend Ben who lives on a boat and I imagine will find all this stuff hugely useful (on reflection I could possibly have just texted him this link, but then what the fcuk would I put in the newsletter?).

The International Society of Antique Scale Collectors: Do YOU have a deep and abiding passion for antique weighing devices? Do YOU want to learn more about them, perhaps with a view to amassing a collection of these magical, wonderful devices? I mean, the answer to this is almost certainly ‘no, of course not, I have a full and rich life and I do not need to sully it with mechanical devices from The Old Times’, but just in case one of you is after a really obscure and ostensibly-incredibly-tedious hobby to pursue in the new year then, well, WELCOME TO YOUR SCALE-Y FUTURE!

Door: This is a website which hosts a load of music, with the following loose curatorial guide: “At the end of the 90s, we ripped albums that we found in physical stores and took them to the internet. It was during this era that we built a content channel with a noble purpose, that of listening. Soulseek’s directories were cities and “emigrate to a new land” was a common feeling. Back then, connecting to the Internet required a desktop computer, a good local provider, modem, and time. Life was concretely and cybernetically constituted,a division that no longer exists and -without automatic playlists or advertising- finding material was the product of research so the user was, at the very least, selective. With free internet on the streets and the advent of the smartphone, the latest generations are now easy recipients of unrequested information. All this, before touching a wire or having a thoughtful moment. Curated by romi, door is a music selection for listening and dancing in closed spaces.” I have listened to half a dozen of these over the course of the week, and each has been excellent in its own way – I highly recommend bookmarking this page and dipping in when you fancy some guided listening featuring some genuinely obscure (to me, at least) and eclectic stuff.

Internet Archaeology: Twitter’s wobbles over the past month or so have elicited some interesting conversations about the preservation of online ephemera, making this link a timely one. Internet Archaology is a project seeking to preserve not so much individual websites but the broader cultural artefacts that are created by our shared online experience – “The Internet is a network for contemporary cultural expressions. We act within the web and reproduce and produce cultures in the process — making it a virtual cultural space. The network also provides access to the artifacts and cultural assets of the past. Many museums, archives, or libraries have digitized large parts of their collections and made them available online. This very confluence of past and present represents our new digital heritage: We must protect and transmit it for future generations.” So, for example, exhibits so far include Kony2012, Harambe, a bottle of p1ss from an Amazon delivery driver…this isn’t perfect, but I think that there’s something genuinely interesting in how we seek to preserve movements and memes and general vibes of particular online moments and eras, and more experimentation and discussion of the best means of so doing is A Good Thing.

Planet Pizza: If you were to attempt to explain the concept of ‘pizza’ to aliens, how would you go about it? If you’re the creator of this website, you would do so via the medium of a wordless website that seeks to communicate the nature of humanity, maths and tomato sauce to a theoretical offworld presence. Why? WHY NOT??? “Pizza is simple, versatile, delicious, and most importantly, worldwide. Every country in the world enjoys pizza to some degree; and, pizza is just “pizza” in most languages of the world, with only mild variations in the pronunciation. As a species that strives for that sweet release of dopamine, pizza is a worldwide peacemaker and a perfect representation for one of the little joys which makes a human, human. Earth very well may be the only planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, or maybe even the only planet in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies that enjoys pizza. If extraterrestrials visit as friends, explorers, or researchers, it would be very beneficial to use this site to simultaneously describe broad sections of our math and science system as well as to teach the makeup of one of our planet’s most agreed upon pleasures.” This is pleasingly pointless and perfectly overthought.

Hindsight 2030: This looks like a rather fun idea, whether as a game to play for fun or as some sort of icebreaking/teambuilding exercise (god, that’s a depressing juxtaposition, isn’t it? Let’s just stick with the ‘fun’ usecase, shall we?) – “Hindsight 2030 is a quick and lighthearted game for exploring possible futures. Each player or team will pick one target headline for the year 2030 and then create a timeline, also made up of headlines, that shows how the world gets from today to that headline in 2030. Then, they will create one final headline, set after 2030, that serves as an epilogue.” The only potential downside here is the potential for it all to get very apocalyptic and a little depressing rather quickly, so perhaps start each game with a clear set of directional guidelines and some baseline rules (“Matt, why must your future headlines always revolve around crying robots on a dying planet?”).

Music Historian: Ooh, this is really fun. Pick any musical artist you can think of and this will tell you what their most-played song is (fine, based on Last.fm so limited data, but still), along with artists that the platform believes are similar to them – as a result, I can now happily inform you that Cannibal Corpse’s most-played song is their cheery little ditty ‘Hammer Smashed Face’, and that part of the universe of related music that Last.fm thinks exists around the band includes the incredibly-named bands Cattle Decapitation, Waking the Cadaver and, inexplicably, a country singer called Alan Jackson. This is a lot of fun, and feels like the basis of quite a fun online quiz game if you could be bothered to build one.

The Jerry Lawson Doodle: Time was I wouldn’t bother featuring a Google Doodle on here, but I figure that a relatively small number of us bother actually visiting the Google homepage these days and therefore won’t have seen this – this is a gorgeous bit of work, which “celebrates the 82nd birthday of Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, one of the fathers of modern gaming who led the team that developed the first home video gaming system with interchangeable game cartridges. The Doodle features games designed by three American guest artists and game designers: Davionne Gooden, Lauren Brown, and Momo Pixel.” Not only this, but it’s also a really robust little game creation engine which lets anyone who fancies it make their own simple browser games and share them with the world – honestly, this is a GREAT one to bookmark and point your pre-adolescent children at when you want 10 minutes of peace over the coming holidays.

Gourdlets: The last miscellaneous link of the week is a BEAUTY – Gourdlets is basically a tiny, pixel-y, browser-based Sim City clone, except there are no budgets and no goals and all you have to do is build whatever you fancy building. It’s a demo for a full game, but, honestly, there’s enough functionality in here to keep you happily citybuilding for hours, and there’s something super-charming about the art style and the way that the cute little inhabitants of your semi-urban paradise interact with your city and each other. This is GORGEOUS, and you should all play it.

By Jason Shulman

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, AND ESPECIALLY FOR ALEXANDER WHO ASKED FOR MORE JAZZ, HERE IS A LOVELY HOUR OF JAZZ AND LOUNGE MIXED BY THE APPROPRIATELY-NAMED JAZZ N PALMS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Blombluss: I don’t really understand why this has been built as a Tumblr but, well, it has, so here it is! This is actually a quiz all about bad ports of classic videogames, so if you’ve been desperately craving a ten question quiz about old games and the obscure systems they may or may not have been ported to then this will please you no end (it will also please you if you were ever a devotee of the teletext videogames magazine ‘Digitiser’, to whom this owes a very obvious and welcome debt of stylistic gratitude).

MurdochHere: Last updated nine years ago, this Tumblr collects images of Rupert Murdoch spotted in the wild. I REALLY want to know why this was started and also why it stopped when it did – it seems to have been maintained by someone who worked closely with him, and I wonder whether he found out it existed and had poor Nathalie Ravitz killed (NB – Web Curios is in no way suggesting that Rupert Murdoch is the sort of man who would have someone murdered, honest).

Enchanted Book Art: Rare book illustrations, because who doesn’t love a rare book illustration? NO FCUKER, etc.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Howard Lee: If you’ve ever found yourself in an ASMR video rabbithole you may have come across videos of people painting things with an otherworldly degree of photorealistic precision – Howard Lee does that exact thing, taking photos of real life stuff, cutting a square out of the photo, and then painting in the blank til you can’t tell that there’s a point where the photo stops and the painting begins. Which, yes, I know, is a horrible description, but you’ll get it when you see it – this is mind-boggling, or at least it is to me.
Kevin Is In New York: Home Alone 2, presented on Insta in clips. I personally don’t really ‘get’ Home Alone (yes, I am a joyless husk, why do you ask?), nor indeed why anyone celebrates the markedly-inferior sequel which features Donald Trump, but should you be differently-minded then perhaps you will enjoy this.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

How Do We Create Digital Life?: Now, fine, your initial reaction to that question might well be “Jesus, Matt, why the fcuk would we want to do that? It’s bad enough being made of meat without inflicting the horror of existence on a blameless digital entity!”, but work with me here for a minute. This article is…interesting. I don’t necessarily believe that this stuff is as possible as the author seems to think, nor indeed that what he describes is necessarily tied in with crypto and web3, but the general thinking about what digital ‘life’ might look like, and how it might end up working, is fascinating (and, honestly, if you follow this thinking even a little beyond where this article takes you, not a little unsettling). Digital ‘life’, by the way, is defined by the author here as a digital entity characterised by the following: “It needs to be able to survive past its creator’s death; It needs to be able to reproduce; Its descendants need to be able to evolve; It needs to locally reduce entropy”, and the discussion of how such entities might be created and what they might be used for is genuinely interesting (but, again, also possibly a *touch* more unsettling than the rather pollyannaish tone adopted by the writer, and certainly not the sort of thing that we ought to pursue ‘just because we can’, which appears to be the general conclusion of the piece).

Where Is The Innovation?: Or, more accurately, where is the useful innovation? This was sent to me by Katie (thanks Katie!) and is a really interesting read about the degree to which so much new tech stuff from the past decade or so has left so little in terms of a meaningful mark on culture and society – technologies have made money, and financial bubbles, but there’s an increasing degree to which questions are being asked about what meaningful impact we’ll be left with once the froth dissipates. The piece looks at this question from the perspective of research and what can be done to improve its utility, but the basic premise is neatly summarised here: “Our question is whether newly hyped technologies, like the Metaverse, Web3, and blockchain, have any chance of changing this basic picture. There are many reasons to be skeptical that they can. In many ways, the Metaverse and Web3 are merely a pivot by Silicon Valley, an attempt to gain control of the technological narrative that is now spiraling downward, due to the huge start-up losses and the financial failure of the sharing economy and many new technologies. Huge start-up losses along with the small markets for new technologies have brought forth novel criticisms of Silicon Valley. If we are correct that the newest wave of hot technologies will do almost nothing to improve human welfare and productivity growth, then elected officials, policymakers, leaders in business and higher education, and ordinary citizens must begin to search for more fundamental solutions to our current economic and social ills.”

Minecraft Bots: The one area in which it seems fair to say that we can point at real technological process with tangible effects on culture and society is the emergent field of machine learning – it’s clear to anyone who’s paid any attention to this stuff over the past 24 months that we are building tools now that are going to completely reshape the way in which business and culture work in the not-too-distant future (although, amusingly, none of us have the faintest idea as to how!), and this essay, about OpenAI training machines on videos of people playing Minecraft to teach said machines how to do it, is an excellent example of how quickly this stuff is moving and what we might do with it. This is less about Minecraft than it is about the technique being used here as a step-change in how we go about this sort of training – YouTube provides us with an INCREDIBLE training set for any number of things, and the ability to effectively (yes, I know that I am massively oversimplifying this) point a bot at a YouTube channel and tell it to, basically, ‘learn’ is fcuking INCREDIBLE.

Galloway on AI: My standard Galloway link apology (“you’ve probably already seen this, but in case not…”) aside, this is a really good overview of why this stuff is so exciting and where we are at now and why it’s not just a fad (probably). If you know a lot about the field then you can skip this, but if you’re after a decent ‘state of the market’ overview for beginners then this is a clear and cogent bit of thinking/writing.

How Dall-E Works: This is SO GOOD. I have a…moderately-fuzzy understanding of how LLMs and image-generation AIs sort-of work, but this article (the first in a short series), explaining how OpenAI’s Dall-E manages to magick pictures out of thin air in simple terms and without resorting to HARD MATHS, was genuinely eye-opening. I promise you, if someone like me (who is so bad at maths that he understands literally nothing taught beyond GCSE level, and who once was reduced to near-tears by the mere concept of ‘logorithms’) can understand this then ANYONE can.

The GPT-3 Cookbook: This is SUCH a good resource, and is a hugely-useful overview of all the different things that you can use GPT-3 (or another LLM of your choice) for – it offers a short explanation of what an LLM is and how it works, but then is straight into explaining and describing a bunch of potential usecases, from getting it to write code to getting it to do translations, cleaning up copy to writing things from scratch. Read this and then work out all the ways in which you are going to be rendered obsolete in the next five years or so!

The Generative AI Revolution in Games: It upsets me how many times this year I have linked to the A16Z blog – but, in their defence, they do occasionally post stuff that is far more interesting and useful than the standard ‘thought leadership’ pabulum spat out by VCs, and does occasionally seem to contain actual examples of actual thinking. This, for example, is a good overview of some of the ways in which generative AI might usefully be employed by the games industry – whether or not you’re interested in videogames, it’s a useful read as an illustration of all the different ways in which the current AI tech stack might disrupt (sorry) an industry, which might prompt you to have a think about what you do for a living and how it might be utterly upended by AIs (and, more positively, how you might exploit that for your personal gain).

Automation Drives Income Inequality: Which, fine, I expect we already knew, but it’s interesting to see this articulated so starkly in a new study from MIT, which shows “most of the growth in the wage gap since 1980 comes from automation displacing less-educated workers.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s useful to bear in mind after half a dozen pieces focusing on the coming wonder of the AI revolution: “A central conceptual point, Acemoglu says, is that automation should be regarded differently from other forms of innovation, with its own distinct effects in workplaces, and not just lumped in as part of a broader trend toward the implementation of technology in everyday life generally. Consider again those self-checkout kiosks. Acemoglu calls these types of tools “so-so technology,” or “so-so automation,” because of the tradeoffs they contain: Such innovations are good for the corporate bottom line, bad for service-industry employees, and not hugely important in terms of overall productivity gains, the real marker of an innovation that may improve our overall quality of life. “Technological change that creates or increases industry productivity, or productivity of one type of labor, creates [those] large productivity gains but does not have huge distributional effects,” Acemoglu says. “In contrast, automation creates very large distributional effects and may not have big productivity effects.””

The Weird Right: This piece is about US politics and the US right specifically, but, as ever with this stuff, I think we ignore the extent to which we’re downstream of America to our peril. What’s interesting is the extent to which this weirdness is a post-Trump thing – “This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.The ascendant weird right will likely struggle to sell its deeply anti-patriotic vision to many voters. In these segments of the mostly young, online-influenced American right, the optimistic vision espoused by Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” has been discarded. The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s “American carnage”—now disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms. Today, the right has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”” Obviously the UK is different, and we have our own peculiarities and nutters, but keep an eye on the fringes over the next 6 months or so because I have a feeling we’re going to see some of this stuff replicated over here as well.

Why Fascism’s Coming Back: Feels appropriate to post this 12 hours after one of the world’s most famous people happily and openly stated that he thought Hitler had some good points – I think this piece by Umair Haq is a bit ‘fearmongering 101’, and I don’t for a second buy his ‘America as a last redoubt’ lines, but in general it’s hard not to look at the baseline analysis (to whit: fascism thrives in circumstances where significant numbers of people suffer a vertiginous fall in living standards simultaneously over a relatively short period of time) and think ‘hm, seems legit’.

Yolo Personal Finance: OR, “Young People Spend The Pain Away”, OR “Klarna Is Going To Be Looked Back On Just Like Wonga Currently Is” – here’s one for your 2023 trend decks (THEY ARE FCUKING SLIDES FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE CAN WE PUT THIS ‘DECK’ THING TO BED?)! In the face of worsening economic conditions and increasingly-precarious employment, and a world in which everything does rather seem to be falling apart at the edges and seams, are young people being frugal and tightening their purse strings? Are they fcuk! Instead, the author of this piece in Dazed asserts, it’s all about the frivolous yolo spending, whether motivated by a lack of planning ability or the very real belief that civilisation will collapse long before the time comes to pay back the debts. You can literally base

an entire strategy for any number of consumer brands on this article – it won’t be very good, fine, but it probably doesn’t matter!

The Amazon Adpocalypse: Or ‘no, it’s not your imagination, shopping on Amazon fcuking sucks now unless you know exactly what you want to buy’ – this is a look at how the transformation of Amazon from ‘business that sells everything’ to ‘a business that is based on cloud software and advertising which also happens to have an awful lot of warehouse space’ has meant a worse customer experience for pretty much everyone, sellers and buyers alike, and how it doesn’t matter because of the company’s size and near-indelible place in the popular consciousness as ‘the everything store’.

This Is England: The World Cup continues to underwhelm, but I enjoyed this piece in The Face about the weird feeling around the England national team and the strange evolution of the country’s relationship with the current incarnation of the Three Lions. These paragraphs in particular resonated with me: “It’s taking place when living in England itself feels like a laughing stock: three prime ministers in seven weeks, a public being relentlessly ripped off, a conveyor belt of cartoon villains who fall in and out of power, occasionally appearing on our feeds to say something like “heating is woke”, launch an assault on tofu, or to whip up excitement about sending people to Rwanda. Everyone’s knackered, everything’s divided. The Queen’s death revealed England’s identity issue. An island of myth and mantra, a teddy bear from Peru hoisted up as a grief totem. A monarchy that’s fading into insignificance, a nation mourning the future as much as it is the past. Screwfix posting its condolences. A king barking at his subjects over leaking fountain pens.”

TikTok and Bad Food: Or “How algorithms are unexpectedly messing with society in ways we are yet to fully understand, part x of an almost-infinite series” – this piece is about the rise of inexplicable/horrifying-looking food content on TikTok (did you see the onion water girl? You have to see the onion water girl), and how, yet again, human behaviour is being manipulated by algorithms we don’t comprehend in ways we can’t predict. This piece is, honestly, a fairly standard ‘hey, look, weird internet trend everyone’ bit of copy, but I think what’s more interesting is to think about where this leads us and what happens when an entire generation of humans grows up being exposed to food preparation only in the context of this sort of horrific ‘made for virality’ content – basically what I am asking is ‘what if there is a direct throughline from Onion Water Girl to everyone in 2062 being incapable of cooking anything other than the 30 canonical ChefClub recipes that have resulted in ⅓ of the world’s population now having type-2 diabetes?’

Greece Is Capitalism’s Petri Dish: This is SO interesting, and feels like a bigger story – this piece in VICE looks at the partnership between Volkswagen and the small Greek island of Astypalea, which has become a testing ground for VW’s electric cars, buses and scooters, and a whole app-based ecosystem to manage said vehicles, and how this works and whether or not it feels like a good thing to give a massive international conglomerate this sort of access to and control over public infrastructure. The article mentions other areas in Greece where similar things are being tried – and why not, right? The country’s still reeling from being fcuked 17 ways by the 2008 crash and why wouldn’t they sell off access to themselves as a market and a testbed for new tech to some deep-pocketed corporate partners? Except, of course, there are QUESTIONS over transparency and influence – but, perhaps most interestingly, the bigger questions should be around how common this stuff is likely to get. Think, for a second, about the UK right now, a country in which nothing seems to work and where the money to fix it no longer seems to exist. Do you seriously think that a UK government wouldn’t seriously consider an offer from a massive international tech business to help fix some of its infrastructural problems with experimental innovation, in exchange for, I don’t know, lots of lovely data and maybe some preferential treatment on future national contract bids? I have a sneaking suspicion that we will look back on PPI and PFI as being just the tip of the iceberg for ‘interesting’ corporate involvement in the national architecture.

The Problem with EVs: Look, obviously electric vehicles are better than petrol or diesel vehicles – but, er, they are also problematic in their own way, turns out. This is a typically-excellent piece in Rest of World which looks at the specific issues faced by Indonesia, one of the countries whose natural resources are being mined to meet demand for batteries and associated technologies used in electric vehicles, where the human and environmental costs associated with the rocketing demand for nickel and other elements and minerals in the EV trade are slowly coming to light. This is, I warn you, one of those articles that might make you feel less-than-positive about the direction of the world.

The New Jennicam: You all remember Jennicam, right? The first EVER lifestreamer (or at least the first one that anyone had ever heard of), Jennifer Ringley broadcast herself in realtime, all the time, from a series of webcams around her apartment, showing her sleeping, showering, occasionally-fcuking…it was, at the time, an incredible phenomenon, a true species first in a way, and the precursor to the society of the streamed spectacle we now ‘enjoy’, and now others are following in her footsteps on Twitch. One such streamer is Emily, who for over a year now has been on Twitch 24/7, playing games and sleeping and eating and chatting – this piece profiles her and her stream, and inadvertently pinpoints the way in which our relationship with people online has changed in the 25-odd years since Jennicam started this whole thing (the professionalism, the money, the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any joy in the experience for Emily whatsoever) and the ways in which it hasn’t (creepiness and entitlement and the fact that this doesn’t seem in any way a healthy way to live, for anyone involved).

Brand Restaurants: I had NO IDEA that Gucci has a restaurant, let alone that said restaurant (in Tokyo, in case you were minded to visit) has this year been awarded a Michelin star, but I rather enjoyed this piece about the surprising number of high-end brands that have experimented with opening eateries as part of the infinite, multidirectional expansion of their brand identity. As the piece notes, these restaurants will all lose violent quantities of money, so the benefits are far more intangible – but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of thing becoming more commonplace as brands (and the awful people like me who occasionally advise them) continue to seek offline means of connecting with audiences in an increasingly-online-only world.

CoreCore: In some respects this piece (via Shardcore – thanks, Shardcore!) is total bullsh1t (honestly, read it and try and make it make sense beyond ‘here is an aesthetic that seems almost deliberately non-aesthetic but does in fact have some rough unifying principles that we’re not really capable of articulating’), but on the other it feels like there’s a certain truth it’s pointing at but not quite articulating. The overall gist is that we’re seeing a move towards more obviously, deliberately ugly, scruffy, tonally…wrong, or baffling, content on TikTok, and that this is part of a movement of sorts – where I think this is interesting and half-right is that I think this is a factor of platform maturity; you saw this on Insta too, as it reached saturation, with the growth of collage-y cut-up aesthetics and rough, zine-ish graphics and a general sense of wanting to kick against a prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy, and it feels like a lot of the stuff described (and embedded) in the piece is the same sort of thing but for TikTok. Which, if we follow this to its logical conclusion, suggests TikTok will be a cultural deadzone in about two years time, just like Insta has become.

Japanese Web Design: This has been everywhere in the past week or so, but with good reason – this is SO INTERESTING, and such a clever use of data analysis, to explain how Japanese website design is peculiar to that nation, and why that might be. Again, even if the subject matter doesn’t immediately grab you, this is just a really good example of storytelling and argument-building using data.

Cruising The Village: OK, this is a bit of a peculiar one, but bear with me here. This is the Phd thesis of Michael Atkins from 2013, which I stumbled across online this week and which is all about the practice of cruising amongst gay men in the city. Which may or may not interest you as a topic, but which is rendered SUPERB by the fact that all of Atkins’ interviews with various men on the subject are represented here in comic form, to help protect the identities of the people he spoke to. Honestly, I wasn’t expected to find this so interesting, and so moving, and I ended up reading far more of this than I expected to. Skim it to find the comics, but it’s worth dipping into the writing too as it’s a fascinating portrait of a culture, and of a less-online time.

Hello, World!: Sheila Heti is one of my favourite novelists, and I would read her shopping lists given the chance; this is a really interesting formal experiment, in which she conducts a series of conversations with various AI chatbots and transcribes them. This links to part one of five – this is LONG, but if you’ve any interest whatsoever in either AI and the idea of ‘sentience’ in machines, or in the manner in which these sorts of tools can form part of the authorial process, or indeed in the extent to which they can be useful interlocutors from the point of view of self-discovery, then it’s pretty much required reading. I don’t think it totally ‘works’ as an exercise – though of course it depends on what you perceive the aim of the exercise to have been – but I found it fascinating to read.

Insensible Loss: Surgery and sickness – a doctor writes about the relationship between their work and their sense of their won body, and the extent to which one impacts and affects the other, and, honestly, this is so so so so so good. Look: “I spend my days and nights invading strangers’ bodies. I put my finger in their mouths and gag them, feeling for firmness suggesting tumors; I snake a thin camera through their nostrils and into their throats to see the organ that gives these strangers their voices. I assess bodies impassively, looking for infection, inflammation, hidden cancer. I cut bodies open, dissecting them layer by layer; I suture them back together again using needles curved like hawks’ talons. Strangers’ bodies are where I work and where I learn. I know things about my patients’ bodies that they don’t know and can’t see. I know things about them that they have no reason to know. Some people want to see inside themselves, and they ask if their operations can be filmed, or if they can take their tumors home. “Where do my tonsils go after the operation?” one patient asked me during my training. “Do you keep them in a jar, and once the jar is full, you get to graduate?””

52 Things: We close this week’s longreads with the 2022 edition of Tom Whitwell’s ‘52 Things I Learned This Year’, which once again is fascinating, baffling, funny, sad and sort-of terrifying, all at once, You will learn more from reading these, and thinking about them a bit, than you will from reading three million agency trends presentations, I promise you. My personal favourite this year is number 44: “In March 1967, the CIA tested Acoustic Kitty, a live cat with a microphone, battery and antenna surgically implanted. Sadly, on its first public trial, the unfortunate animal was run over by a taxi.”

By Mark Macevoy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

We kick off this week with a track that’s actually a few months old, but which comes in response to a reader who emailed me to ask why I wasn’t including Knifeplay in the videos section. The answer was “Because I have never heard of them”, but then I went and had a listen and it turns out I rather like this song, which is called ‘Ryan Song’. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, DAVID?

This is by the fantastically-named Skinny Pelembe, and it sounds a bit like a genuinely brilliant song being played by an enthusiastically-stompy band in a room across the corridor from you (in case you can’t tell, that’s an emphatic endorsement). This song’s called ‘Like A Heart Won’t Beat’.

Paul Roux up next now, with a song called ‘Bapteme’ – I like the relatively-spare structure of this, but I like the video, with its strange CG astronaut trapped inside a…machine? Ai’s imagination? Whatever, I like the video even more.

Now, though, for something completely different and borderline-unlistenable (but, at the same time, actually pretty great in a horrid sort of way); I don’t know what you’d describe this as other than ‘a massive, horrible, shouty bit of industrial noise wrapped up in a creepy nursery rhyme’, so, er, that will have to do. This is by Catnapped and it’s called ‘Stay Unsaved’ and OH NO THAT’S IT I HAVE RUN OUT OF LINKS AND ALMOST OUT OF WORDS TOO AND IT IS TIME FOR ME TO ATTEMPT TO COAX SOME WARMTH INTO MY FROZEN CARCASS VIA THE MEDIUM OF A SHOWER SO HOT I MAY WELL GET SECOND-DEGREE BURNS AND SO ONCE AGAIN IT IS TIME FOR ME TO SAY GOODBYE AND GOODLUCK AND COME BACK AND DON’T LEAVE ME WE HAVE ALMOST MADE IT TO THE END BUT PLEASE PROMISE YOU WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK PLEASE PLEASE COME BACK I LOVE YOU I NEED YOU DON’T LEAVE ME BYE!

Webcurios 25/11/22

November 25, 2022

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Are you running a slight temperature? Do you feel a bit clammy? Are your glands a bit ‘up’? Test yourself, because you may well have come down with WORLD CUP FEVER!!!11111eleventy

Except of course you probably haven’t, as noone seems particularly able to get excited about this one, perhaps a result of the jarring cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously buy into FIFA’s inclusive ‘one sport’ messaging whilst at the same time holding the tournament in a regime best known for its less-than-inclusive attitude to anyone who isn’t straight (and leaving aside the equally-jarring cognitive dissonance of it taking place in a desert, just after we’ve all spent a week or so talking about how important it is that we start taking all this climate stuff PROPERLY SERIOUSLY this time).

Still, I imagine a significant proportion of you will be getting tanked tonight in anticipation of England tearing the Americans a football-shaped new one, so I hope you enjoy that (but, at the same time, know that there is almost nothing that would make me happier than an embarrassing English defeat).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and it is not a proper football tournament without Italy in it and so doesn’t to my mind technically count as a real World Cup anyway.

By Chelsea Gustafsson

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A MIX OF PLEASINGLY-WIBBLY (TECHNICAL TERM) ELECTRONICA BY CARLTON DOOM!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS TO RUSH AS IT’S OFF TO LUNCH AND WHICH APOLOGISES FOR ANY DROP IN QUALITY (LOL) YOU MAY NOTICE IN TODAY’S CURIOS AS A RESULT OF THIS SLIGHTLY-TIGHTER DEADLINE, PT.1:

Save Your Threads: Whilst, obviously, I like Twitter and would be sad and not a little annoyed if it died, I confess to finding last Friday’s ‘THIS IS THE END, THE END OF IT ALL!’ flailing quite funny. Turns out, though, that Elon firing half the company and then forcing a significant proportion of the remaining people to quit hasn’t gutted the platform to the point of total dysfunctionality just yet (brief Musk-related aside here – it’s astonishing how the millions of people caping for him online seem oblivious to the fact that, even if you believe that his hard-line approach to cost-cutting and staff bloat is necessary, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to go about it in a way that makes everyone involved in the process so uncertain and unhappy. Turns out the man’s a pr1ck! Having to read the fcuker’s Tweets is also a painful education in hierarchical sycophancy – it’s honestly slightly heartbreaking to see the literally thousands of mooks in his replies who seem to think that telling a billionaire how great they are is going to induce said billionaire to chuck them a few quid or FINALLY recognise their generational talent and reward them with a position at his right hand. We really do love the taste of bootleather, turns out). Maybe, who knows, it will all be ok? Still, just in case it’s not, you might find this service useful – plug in a Tweet url and it will generate a datestamped PDF of the entire thread, useful for preserving the GREAT PATRIMONY OF HUMAN THOUGHT that is Twitter. This requires you to request access – it’s designed primarily for journalists, researchers and archivists – but it’s nice to know that someone out there is thinking of how to preserve all this stuff in a useful fashion. Oh, and if Twitter does start to get a bit flaky as a result of everyone who knows how it works being P45d, you might find this site useful too.

Nitter: If you’re so upset and outraged by the fact that That Fcuking Man has bought the bird site and don’t want to fluff his ego by adding your data to the traffic stats that he keeps trumpeting as a measure of his vast success (GYAC Elon, people logging onto Twitter to check whatever mad sh1t you’ve said this week, or which collection of right-wing ghouls you’re currently cosying up to is not going to be the long-term financial panacea you seem to think it is) then why not use Nitter to check up on whatever you want to check up on. Basically this lets you look at individuals’ profiles, or search for specific terms, and look up the content without visiting Twitter dot com, and thereby sticking it to the plute by denying him a DAU. TAKE THAT, SQUARIAL-FACE!

Some More Alternatives: I’m increasingly of the opinion that, should Twitter die, that’s probably it for me and social media, but should you still be desperate to find an appropriately-shaped digital liferaft to cling to then you might be interested in the latest pretenders. There’s Hive, which has seen a boom in signups this week and which I am told is functionally pretty good and Twitter-ish, but which only exists as an app and therefore is of no personal use for me whatsoever; there’s Koo, which is ‘big in India’ and is, according at least to some of their press materials, the second-biggest microblogging platform in the world after Twitter itself, but which (based on my cursory exploration) doesn’t really have a great English language community on it at present; and then there’s Post, which is significantly newer than either of the other two and which is literally being built from the ground up, and which is in limited early access at present. I have been playing with it a bit this week and it’s nice – it feels Twitter-ish, and the people seem nice, but Christ alone knows if it will take off, and if it does whether the small dev team will be able to manage. The various community teething problems happening on Mastodon instances around the world right now are fascinating real-world examples of just how fcuking hard community management and moderation is at scale.

For Every Goal Scored: I’ve found it literally impossible to get excited by this World Cup, in common with millions of people around the world, for all the obvious reasons (and, er, the fact that Italy made a humiliating pig’s ear of qualification), but I thought this was a nice initiative – this site lets you commit to making a donation to the LGBT+ charity MindOut, pledging a set amount per goal scored at the tournament. Choose how much you can afford to pledge, from 10p to £1 a goal, enter your email address, and at the tournament’s end you’ll get sent a link to donate the amount you’re liable for. Which, obviously, you could then totally fail to click on, but that would make you a cnut and I’m sure you’re better than that.

Digital Tuvalu: So, that was COP – do we feel like a significant number of the world’s most pressing environmental issues were meaningfully discussed, and that we have reached sensible resolutions as to how best to address them? GOOD! Cynicism aside, the loss-and-damage fund for nations most affected by the side effects of the world’s richest countries living it up on fossil fuels for the past 150 years does seem like A Good Thing, although as ever with this stuff I have a slight fear that the reality of what eventually gets committed will be significantly watered-down by the time it gets to the point of coughing up. The fund is designed specifically to assist countries like Tuvalu, which has created this little website to highlight the threat it’s facing – per the blurb, “Teafualiku Islet, our smallest island, is the first part of our country we’ll lose – so it’s the first we’ve recreated digitally. Without immediate, global climate action, all of Tuvalu will only exist here.” Which is a nice idea, and I don’t want to be too much of a miserable, critical w4nker about it, but, well…I feel justified because the website reads ‘in partnership with accenture’ and I don’t like them very much. This is SUCH a missed opportunity – you could have gone deep with a ‘metaverse’ gag here, creating a sh1t digital island that users could navigate around, the joke/point being that you can’t make digital replicas of some of the world’s remotest places because IT IS NOT THE SAME, and that is why it’s important we act to save the real islands asap; you could have got the community to built Tuvalu in Minecraft; you could have done LOADS, and instead what they did is build a one-page website, with a pretend ‘we’re uploading the palm trees now’-type graphic, and chucked a video on there along with a bit of ‘email your local representative’ campaign functionality. It’s a missed opportunity, basically, although frankly if we think that a website campaign is going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of a bunch of remote Pacific islands then, well, we might be deluding ourselves a bit lads.

Swoosh: This is potentially interesting, at least as a canary in the coalmine for NFT/Web3/community type stuff in the mainstream world. Nike has launched Swoosh, which is basically a community hub based on the idea that the brand’s fans want to be involved in the process of creating its new collections. Which, you know, feels broadly right, although whether or not they will be interested enough to jump through the various NFT-related hoops that this sort of thing always seems to entail is another matter. You need a Nike ID and an access code to get in, but the general gist is as follows: “Nike Members will be able to learn about and collect virtual creations, which are typically interactive digital objects, such as virtual shoes or jerseys, that community members will soon be able to wear in digital games and immersive experiences. In some instances, community members will be able to unlock access to physical product or events like intimate conversations with athletes or designers.” Which, of course, is exactly the sort of bland corporate speak that sucks the life and excitement out of even the most thrilling of prospects, but at least gives you an idea of where they are going with this – according to the roadmap, the first Nike collection co-created by the Swoosh community will drop in 2023 sometime, so let’s see whether that does in fact happen or whether this gets quietly sunsetted when it becomes apparent that noone wants to get a fcuking Metamask wallet to participate.

Coca Cola Dreamworld: It’s slightly amazing to me that we’ve had Augmented Reality for over a decade now and I am still yet to see anything approaching a compelling use-case for it – ok, fine, Google’s ‘big arrow on your phone pointing in the direction you need to go’ stuff is useful, but I haven’t seen anything fun which uses AR in a meaningful way (I am discounting Pokemon because the AR stuff was totally unnecessary to the actual gameplay, and all the serious weirdos who got properly into it turned it off after about a day). This doesn’t really do anything to change that – it’s a mobile game which is meant to promote carbonated sugarwater (no idea what the fcuk it has to do with tooth decay and type-2 diabetes) by letting you play a Guitar Hero-esque rhythm game by tapping your phone’s screen in time to the notes as they fall, and which exists in AR because…I don’t know, because one of the marketing team at Coke has a cousin or partner or crush who worked at the development studio, maybe? Still, if you want a reason to hold your phone up in the air while you desperately tap at its screen in a series of irregular, arrythmic spasms (or maybe that was just how I played it), this will be PERFECT for you.

Stable Diffusion 2: This is more of an ‘FYI’ than a ‘click the link and gawp at the marvels of AI image generation’ – Stable Diffusion this week released v2 of its open source text-to-image model (here’s a link to the Github page if you’re techy and interested in running it), which from what I can tell is more of an incremental improvement than a real generational shift. This piece explains some of the changes – not least the fact that the model’s been tweaked to make it harder to create images of specific celebrities, certain artists, and bongo. There’s something slightly future-shocky in the fact that in the space of year we’ve gone from ‘this stuff doesn’t exist yet’ to ‘I am salty that the magical machine will no longer let me create an infinite gallery of naked, large-breasted hentai girls’ (but, inevitably, the guys who want to make the galleries of naked, large-breasted hentai girls will win out, because it sadly seems they always do).

Edge Dance: You can’t play with this yet, but it’s FASCINATING – Edge Dance is basically code which can generate dance moves based on music that you feed it, or, per the website, a “powerful method for editable dance generation that is capable of creating realistic, physically-plausible dances while remaining faithful to arbitrary input music. EDGE uses a transformer-based diffusion model paired with Jukebox, a strong music feature extractor, and confers powerful editing capabilities well-suited to dance, including joint-wise conditioning, motion in-betweening, and dance continuation”. This is INCREDIBLE, honestly – scroll down the page and have a look at some of the video examples of the dances the machine has created. Now I’m not a choreographer, and I dance in exactly the manner that you image a middle-aged white man who likes techno dances, and as such am perhaps not best-placed to judge the quality of the steps generated but, well, they look to my untrained eye like ACTUAL DANCES. Who had ‘choreographers’ on their bingo card of ‘jobs that will be rendered obsolete by machines’? Also, if you think that this isn’t going to be used by every single record label to generate new TikTok dances for the hooky parts of every single song ever then, well, you’re wrong. I can’t wait for the first moral panic caused by an AI-generated dance move which has the unfortunate side effect of snapping the ankles of one in every ten humans who tries it.

Oio: This is a nice idea. Oio is a design studio with a singular gimmick – the products that they design and make and sell will be man/machine co-creations, with AIs being guided to create specific articles and artefacts, with the final production designs being chosen and modeled by humans. Each thing they make will be produced as a one-off limited edition series, never to be repeated, creating a neat bit of scarcity and FOMO which, as any fule kno, is essential for the development of a high-end brand. The first collection is SPOONS – there are three slightly different designs on sale for the frankly staggering sum of 190 quid each, which strikes me as a LOT of money (yes, fine, they are silver, but still) but which obviously might turn out to be a wise investment when Oio turns out to be the Bauhaus de nos jours.

Nation States: This is a rare example of a link being featured in Curios more than once, but I have a particular attachment to Nation States. This site launched in 2002, as part of the promo for a novel called ‘Jennifer Government’, a lightly-dystopian bit of futurefiction about a world in which corporations were basically state entities – at the time I was working as a lobbyist and hating it and using my 9 hours a day of high-speed internet access to become acquainted with all the ways in which the web could help me fill in the dead hours between arriving at work and drinking the pain away. I stumbled across Nation States somewhere and was HOOKED – you could create your very own micronation, name it, pick its politics, and each day check back to see how it was doing, each day being confronted with small decisions about governance that would affect your country’s progress. I did this for YEARS and then left the job and kind-of forgot about it, but this week I saw that its creator had posted about the site’s two-decade anniversary and, honestly, it is SO HEARTWARMING! There is a community! There are thousands (well, ok, maybe hundreds, but still) of people still tending their micronations, and maintaining the code, and moderating discussions, and this is what is wonderful and amazing about the web and about people and why I sometimes think that maybe everything isn’t totally terrible after all.

222: Do you feel that, perhaps, you are stuck in something of a rut? Do you want to open yourself up to NEW AND EXCITING EXPERIENCES? Would you also like to perhaps use said experiences as a way of meeting new people, potentially even romantically? I appreciate that everything I have written to this point almost certainly makes you think I am about to start extolling the virtues of swinging or polyamory but, I promise, I am really not – instead, this is the premise of mysterious website 222, which offers the following blurb: “We are on a mission to revitalize our social fabric through accelerating chance encounters. We’re not a dating app. We’re not a friend-making service. We’re a platform for unique social experiences. No profiles, no DMs, no scrolling, no swiping. Just say “yes” & explore the chance encounters you’d have never experienced.” Sign up, give them your phone number, answer a bunch of questions about your likes and dislikes and then…see what happens.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: It’s hard not to occasionally look around the planet and Wot We Have Wrought and think that perhaps, on some level, humanity hasn’t been the unalloyed boon to the rest of creation that we might like to think we are. If you find yourself quietly agreeing with the general vibe of that sentence, and if you every now and again find yourself humming that seminal Bloodhound Gang classic ‘Lift Your Head Up High (And Blow Your Brains Out)’ (sample lyric: ‘Life’s short and hard, like a bodybuilding elf; so save the planet and kill yourself’), then you might want to get involved with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a loosely-affiliated organisation whose basic (and surprisingly cheery) message is ‘look, don’t have kids, it’s probably not worth it and maybe we should just die out, eh?’. “Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense” is the official shortform rationale, but you can read more about the movement and its founder in this profile. I particularly like the cheery signoff ‘Thankyou for not breeding!’ at the bottom of the homepage.

Digital Benin: Oh this is GREAT – a superb bit of digital curation and archivism and cultural preservation, focused on the culture and language and history of Benin. “Digital Benin brings together all objects, historical photographs and rich documentation material from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artefacts from Benin Kingdom looted in the late nineteenth century. The historic Benin objects are an expression of Benin arts, culture and history, and were originally used as royal representational arts, to depict historical events, to communicate, to worship and perform rituals. The digital platform introduces new scholarship which connects digital documentation about the translocated objects to oral histories, object research, historical context, a foundational Edo language catalogue, provenance names, a map of the Benin Kingdom and museum collections worldwide. Digital Benin connects data from 5,246 objects across 131 institutions in 20 countries. Digital Benin’s scope focuses on objects looted by British forces from the Kingdom of Benin (now Edo State, Nigeria) in February 1897 and distributed in its immediate aftermath. Together, these events and processes led to the worldwide translocation of the objects shown on this platform. A small set of objects is included in the catalogue to represent the broader context in which the artistic production of Benin guilds is situated: Bini-Portuguese Ivories, produced and circulated outside West Africa in the 16th centuries, objects produced in neighbouring regions of the kingdom and a selection of works produced by named artists after 1930, which are held in museum collections.”

By Bisma Hussein

NEXT, SOME PROPER TECHNO FROM PROPER TECHNO LEGEND LUKE SLATER!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS TO RUSH AS IT’S OFF TO LUNCH AND WHICH APOLOGISES FOR ANY DROP IN QUALITY (LOL) YOU MAY NOTICE IN TODAY’S CURIOS AS A RESULT OF THIS SLIGHTLY-TIGHTER DEADLINE, PT.2:

Puffy Bear: Occasionally you’ll come across something online which you click on and look at and which you can’t help but wonder “is…is this a fetish thing?” – so it is with this, the frankly-terrifying ursine nightmare that is Puffy Bear. You know teddy bears, right? You know that you can get the REALLY BIG ONES, the sort of thing that is bought by well-meaning but almost-certainly-childless uncles or godparents and which inevitably ends up terrifying its recipient with its massive girth and dead eyes? Well, imagine a REALLY BIG teddy bear, right, but one which has had its arms and legs scaled up to actual human proportions so it looks like some sort of horrific plush Slenderman figure… THAT is Puffy Bear. I honestly don’t have the descriptive skills to adequately convey just how unsettling Puffy is – there’s something about the expression on his face that screams ‘I will at some point attain murderous sentience’, and there’s imagery on the site that seems to quite strongly suggest that there is a market for his services that veers from ‘friendly cuddling companion’ to ‘potential romantic partner’, and, honestly, no. WHY IS PUFFY ONLY EVER PICTURED CUDDLING WOMEN? WHY ARE THEY LYING ON HIM WITH A CONTENTEDLY-POST-COITAL SMILE? Puffy costs 160USD, and whilst there’s no explicit mention of this on the webpage I would not be at all surprised if you couldn’t ask for ‘extra attachments’ if you know what I mean.

Lyre’s Dictionary: This is such a nice little toy – “Lyre’s Dictionary is a computer program that generates novel English words based on existing roots and patterns.” Refresh the page to get a new totally made-up but strangely-plausible sounding word, along with its definition; recent examples it’s thrown me include “gymnasis · (noun) the act or state of training” and the frankly brilliant “morsive (adjective) given to biting”, which latter one I am frankly going to start using at every chance I get.

Asterisk Magazine: A new online magazine, should you want such a thing! Here’s the blurb: “Asterisk is a quarterly journal of writing and clear thinking about things that matter. We’re for Bayes’ theorem, acknowledging our uncertainty, wild imaginations, and well-constructed sentences. We’re against easy answers, lazy metaphors, and the end of life as we know it.” – I think, based on the above and some of the people who’ve contributed to the initial issue, this is a vaguely-rationalist-associated publication and as such your appetite for its content and opinions will largely map against your tolerance for Slate Star Codex and the like. There’s also an interesting bit of site functionality which I rather like – you can highlight passages from articles and create a personal scrapbook of bits you found interesting or useful which get stored locally on the site, which struck me as a smart idea that might be worth replicating elsewhere.

The Ooh Directory: A great project, this, by Phil Gyford – it’s a DIRECTORY OF BLOGS! Like what you used to get in the olden days! This is new, and growing, and you can submit suggestions for additional blogs to include – they’re roughly categorised by theme, or you can browse by recently added or updated, and if you ever find yourself thinking ‘God I really miss the idiosyncratic joy of reading the inside of a stranger’s head every now and again’ then this will basically be catnip to you. In a few random clicks I have found, variously, the blog writeup of a long-running D&D campaign, a cooking blog maintained by a homesick Texan who longs for proper barbecue, one man’s obsessional love affair with vintage comics…this is, honestly, wonderful, and yet another pleasing example of the way in which some of the old spirit of the web (individual, idiosyncratic, self-published, odd) has seen something of a resurgence this year.

The Old Vic Hub: I appreciate that this is not exactly a good time to be contemplating a career in the arts in the UK – here’s to all the poor buggers who were recently shafted by the Arts Council – but, should you or anyone you know be contemplating a career in the theatre then this set of resources compiled by the Old Vic might be useful. Here you can learn chapter and verse about what different jobs entail, how they work, and how to find them, with career advice and training materials and all sorts of useful content for anyone seeking to make their way in the industry – if you have a child in your life who’s contemplating a career in something soul-destroying-but-lucrative like accountancy, now’s your chance to fcuk up their future by convincing them to pursue a life of penury and stress instead!

A Lot Of 80s Music: KCRW (I find the US convention of four-letter radio station names so upsetting – WHY CAN’T YOU CALL YOUR STATIONS STUFF LIKE ‘MAGIC’ FFS?) is an LA radio station which in the 80s hosted a quite incredible array of talent in its studios. This page collects the session recordings of people as diverse as REM, The Meat Puppets, the Cowboy Junkies and more – if you’re a fan of any rock, indie or new wave artists of the period there’s a decent chance that they’ll have featured here at some time.

Junni: “We want to make the world more exciting and happy with new ideas and technology!”, parps this website, which is a laudable ambition which we can all get behind. Junni is a Japanese company and I confess to not really understanding what they do, but that doesn’t matter because this website made me laugh out loud and has just done so again even though I knew what was coming. Just click the link, let the site load, and when it asks you ‘would you like to know about our philosophy’ then, well, just enjoy. I don’t want to spoil anything here for you, but if you don’t want a cuddly tapir by the end of this then there’s something wrong with you.

The Appreciation Effect: I am, as regular readers may have gathered by now, a miserable cynic with dust where my soul should be and a dwindling ability to feel. HOWEVER! I understand that others are not necessarily like this, and as such I present to you The Appreciation Effect, a service which is *just* the acceptable side of twee for me – it’s a simple premise whereby you can collaborate with a bunch of other people to arrange to have a series of short, positive daily messages sent to a mutual friend or loved one, each being an opportunity for the sender to tell the recipient how much they appreciate them and how great they are. Which, honestly, is really cute! Although I do hope that someone somewhere is monitoring the copy, as this could equally-easily become a targeted harassment campaign (NO MATT WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS THINK OF THE BAD THINGS???). This feels like something that could very easily be coopted by the right sort of brand for Mother’s Day or similar, so file this away until the next time you need some sort of saccharine content campaign to help you sell bunion cream.

Kiwix: I’m slightly embarrassed that I didn’t know that this existed, but it is SO useful – Kiwix lets you download local copies of whole websites to your phone or computer, meaning that you could (for example) get a local copy of Wikipedia saved to your mobile so that you can access it even when offline (you can also download stuff about surviving disasters, for those of you of a more paranoid or survivalist bent, and a bunch of other similar information repositories besides) – there’s even a text-only version for people who don’t fancy the full-fat, increadibly heavy, picture-laden version of Wikipedia you get on the web. If you’re the sort of person who likes to get into arguments with strangers on planes and wants to be able to back up said arguments with COLD HARD FACTS (insofar as you can claim anything on Wikipedia to be ‘facts’) then a) this will appeal to you; and b) never, ever sit next to me on a plane, please.

Quivr: I have to confess, I can’t think of ANY way in which Quivr, the latest in the seemingly-infinite procession of dating apps to stumble into my field of vision, can be a good idea, but maybe I am being stupid here. The gimmick in this instance is that you don’t make matches yourself – someone else does! Yes, that’s right, if you’re so exhausted by the concept of modern dating and The Apps that you can’t bring yourself to even swipe anymore then why not outsource all that emotionally-draining selecting to someone else? There is VERY limited information about exactly how this works, and I get the impression that this is very much a ‘proof of concept idea’ rather than ‘actual proper business proposition’, but I am genuinely intrigued at how messy and awful the premise could end up being. “Get matches handpicked for you! Allow the best matchmakers in your area to pick matches for you, or designate your family and friends. Compete with other matchmakers and set up the best couples for the happiest relationships!” Actually, I take it all back – this sounds GREAT and should it ever take off in the UK I am absolutely going to sign up to play actual Cupid with actual real people. What’s that, Immanuel? The means/ends distinction? Away with you! (I know you all secretly come here just for the occasional undergraduate-level philosophy jokes).

Natural Habitat Shorts: Natural Habitat is an animation series which lives largely on TikTok but which is also compiled here for ease of use and for everyone who would prefer not to engage with CrackTV. This is the very definition of ‘gentle, occasionally slightly sardonic liberal humour featuring animals’, but if that doesn’t turn you off immediately then you might enjoy these (the art style is cute too, if that’s a selling point).

Madsounds: A friend of mine works at Spotify – I must ask him what the company thinks about all the hacks and plugins that people build for it, and whether they have ever considered creating a sort-of ‘build your own Spotify hacks’ modular toolkit for making it easier for people to build on the API. This week’s ‘people doing interesting things with Spotify’ link comes in the shape of Madsounds, which basically gives you a new ‘Discover’ playlist, based on your tastes, daily rather than weekly. This is a really nice idea and an excellent way of making your daily listening a bit more varied than it might otherwise be.

Managing The Wilds: My notes for this one read, simply, ‘Wolves?????’, and, frankly, I am not sure what I can add to that. I have literally no idea whatsoever what is going on here, or why this exists, or what I am supposed to take from it other than that it’s a wordless imageblog, that it seems to be about reintroducing wolves to the wild, and that it features a surprising amount of imagery pertaining to animal faeces. If anyone can explain this to me then I would be incredibly grateful.

All Light Expanded:Oh wow, this is quite wonderful. ‘All Light, Everywhere’ was a (seemingly pretty high-concept) film released last year all, whose Wikipedia entry describes it thusly: “[All Light Expanded] follows the biases inherent to the way humans physically see the world, focusing primarily on the usage of police body cameras and other forms of police surveillance, but also tracing studies of solar eclipses as well as the parallel development of automatic weapons with the motion picture camera.” This website is a companion project to it, “an interactive companion of articles, quotes, links, and archival materials that inspired the 2021 documentary”, and whilst I can’t pretend to ‘get’ the themes and references here, I think it’s SUCH an interesting exercise in presenting themes and concepts as they relate to a work. The UI in itself is fascinating – you can select elements on the left of the page which relate to themes that crop up in the film, and these are expanded on the right with references and links, and, honestly, I think there is a lot to be taken from this from a webdesign and IA point of view.

Sunday Paintings: Bryon Kim is a US artist, who for many years now has been making a painting on most Sundays. This website collects those Sunday paintings, single images which often come with short notes, acting as a low-key, minimalist, episodic diary of sorts. I love this – I lost an hour this week going back through time and charting the changing seasons and skies, and Kim’s changing moods, through the paintings – and I really hope, given that the site’s not been updated since mid-September, that they are ok and just on holiday or something.

Blueprints for Intelligence: How we visually represent AI is an interesting question – how can we, or should we, attempt to visually communicate what is happening when machine learning is doing its thing? This is a wonderful collection of historical illustrations of ‘machine thinking’ compiled by Philipp Schmitt, who writes: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often illustrated with sci-fi characters. That’s misleading. ‘Blueprints for Intelligence’ is a visual history of AI told through a collection of diagrams from machine learning research publications published between 1943 and 2020.Looking at the history of AI through its diagrams lets us trace key tendencies in the technology’s evolution. Unconcerned with what these figures might tell a researcher, this project explores what they say about the researcher. It draws connections between the visual representations of neural networks and the researchers’ conception of cognition.” Super-interesting, both in terms of design and philosophy.

WOW Geoguesser: I never got into World of Warcraft, even when I was briefly doing the PR for Blizzard and sort of had to try for professional reasons, but I am aware that there may be some of you who lost hours (and friends, and lovers, and jobs) to the MMO – if you’re one of those people (and, really, if you’re not then you probably don’t need to click this one) then you may be one of the exclusive club of people who might stand a chance at playing this. Presented with a screenshot of a location in WoW, you simply have to guess where it is – obviously normies need not apply, and if you can get ANY of these right then it’s probably important to accept that you have (or, I hope, had) something of a problem.

DugBunnyPuzzle: Get the dogs and the bunnies to the right locations on the board – there’s a new game each day if you want to add something to your Wordlerotation, and it’s a gently-amusing way to wake your brain up (although I confess to taking an embarrassingly long time to work out what the fcuk was meant to be going on – I recommend clicking the question mark icon because the rules are actually pretty simple (and the way they are presented is cute too)).

Barnacle Goose: I hadn’t seen a good Clicker game for a while, so it was lovely to come across this new(?) work by Web Curios favourite Everest Pipkin, which is pretty much entirely baffling at first but which slowly reveals itself to be an odd, interesting, moderately-unsettling project to create…well, life itself. Pipkin describes this as “an abiogenesis body horror idle clicker”, but there’s a slightly-less oblique explanation on the project given by the Leicester indie cinema and arts centre that commissioned it (also, can we just take a moment to applaud that commission – MORE ODD BITS OF WEBART, PLEASE, INDEPENDENT CINEMAS OF THE WORLD!): “The Barnacle Goose Experiment is an idle clicker game set in a world where spontaneous generation is commonplace. As a player, you are a researcher studying the creation of new and living things out of raw and non-living matter. In order to undertake this work without experimental contamination, you are locked inside of a hermetically sealed dome — entirely empty. As such, the only raw material for experimentation is that of your own body. Through the accretions of self, the slow learning of mechanical systems, and the simple duration of time, you must uncover the combinatory logic of spontaneous generation and make again a living world from a dead one.” This is GREAT. Creepy, weird, but great.

The Winners of the 2022 Interactive Fiction Competition: The votes have been counted, and this year’s winner is…The Grown-Up Detective Agency! Here’s the synopsis: “The only thing Bell Park likes more than a mystery is solving it on her own. But when a time-traveling 12-year-old version of herself lands face-down on her rented co-working desk, she’ll have no choice but to take the displaced kid detective along on her latest case. FOLLOW THE TRAIL of a missing heterosexual on the strange streets of Toronto! Investigate a QUIRKY CAST of drag kings, chicken wing enthusiasts, and women in elaborate cat make-up! Thrill in the PERVASIVE ENNUI of your early twenties! Struggle to remember where your preteen self was at with the whole BEING GAY THING!” – I played it this week and it’s excellent, but if that doesn’t quite appeal then you should check out one of the other commended entries as there’s sure to be something you fall for.

The LEA Project: Finally this week, an interactive musical webgame storyhorrortypething – I don’t want to spoil this, but it’s REALLY nicely done. All I will tell you is that you need to log in to the site, and the instructions as to how are RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU. From then, you’re on your own – I love the craft that has gone into this almost as much as the mechanics, and I can even deal with the musical-ness of the whole thing. Wonderful stuff.

By Sophie Holden

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES WE HAVE THIS ONE BY ORDINARY MORNINGS WHICH FOR SOME REASON REALLY REMINDED ME OF THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Groove Is In The Art: Fine, not ACTUALLY a Tumblr but it very much feels like one. “Pop art and psychedelica meet the mainstream on vintage classical, instrumental and children’s album covers with an explosion of line art and color in Groove is in the Art.” – this is such a good inspiration resource for a very particular 60s/70s aesthetic

A Game Of Clothes: This, though IS ACTUALLY A TUMBLR! You can probably guess what it is from the title, but in case you’ve forgotten all about the world’s inexplicable six-year obsession with that show about dragons and sex, it’s a look at the fashions that the characters from the GoT books would wear if they were real people who could buy couture. Weird, but whatever makes you happy.

Restauranting Through History: Also not a Tumblr, but also feels like one! This is ACE – a regular look back at old restaurants in the US, their menus and the food they served and the place they held in local society of the time… if you’ve any interest in food history, particularly North American, you will love this.

Chuck Tingle: DR TINGLE IS NOW ON TUMBLR! You all know Chuck Tingle, right? Author of a seemingly-infinite number of (actually surprisingly wholesome) erotic novels with titles like ‘Pounded in the Butt by the Sentient Manifestation of My Own Latent Homophobia’ (this is not a real Tingler, but it may as well be), he has decided to create this Tumblr in case the whole ‘Twitter is dying’ thing turns out to be real and, honestly, I can’t tell you how much I love Chuck Tingle and his very idiosyncratic posting style, and the genuinely caring community that exists around his very, very odd stories about gender representation and fluidity and love and self-acceptance. This may be one of the nicest places on the internet right now.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Dan Catt: The account of one Dan Catt, a printmaker whose work I stumbled across this week and really enjoy – you might too.
Moon Over Marine: OH GOD THIS IS AMAZING. This person does needlework in the style of 80s videogames, which may not sound good but I promise you that once you click this you will be transported back to a world of brown carpets and flickering CRTs and Spectrums and CGA and Findus Crispy Pancakes (or at least you will if you’re an English person in their mid-40s, I can’t speak for any of the rest of you fcukers).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Dan Hon On Elon: We begin this week with a few pieces on That Fcuking Man and that bloody website – which, honestly, I totally understand if you skip because, well, it’s been EVERYWHERE. Still, if you have additional appetite for Big Thinking about What This Means then you could do worse than reading Dan’s typically interesting and readable take on the whole thing, which covers Silicon Valley’s longstanding obsession with Great And Visionary Men, the fact that the world can usefully be divided in terms of ‘those who have at some point suffered from abuses of power in their lives’ and ‘those who have not’, and all the various reasons why That Fcuking Man’s actions over the past week have been suboptimal on both a human and managerial level. Excellent.

The Unbearable Mundanity of the Very Rich Man’s Mind: This is another cracker, from the guy who ordinarily writes the ‘Hola Papi’ queer advice blog but who this week pivoted into writing about how incredibly fcuking dull and exhausting it is to have your experience of life and the world conditioned and sculpted by very rich men. “These past few years, especially, have felt like being locked in a theater where the only actor on stage is holding a gun and telling us to clap. Attention is being demanded, and the person demanding it doesn’t really think of any one of us as being on the same level of personhood as they. We have little choice but to suffer them, to some degree.” – I believe the phrase is ‘preach’.

What Do You Want From The Internet: The last link about Twitter, promise – this is by Brian Feldman and is about how maybe, actually, Twitter dying might be good for us because we have become fat and lazy from gorging on its infinite content stream and this is a chance for us to rediscover the exploratory hunger of The Old Web. This rather resonated with me, though I accept that it could also be read as being, well, a little snobbish: “You are mad about friction. The broad answer is that it was easy to stay put and the costs of preparing for the worst is high. Kinda like climate change, I guess? But I also think modern internet users are generally complacent. I love pulling at weird threads on the internet and seeing where they lead — stepping outside, so to speak. I think many others are more interested in training a personalized algorithm to bring the silly JPEGs to them — ordering Seamless, if you will. For a lot of users, Twitter was 9GAG.” Well quite.

Facebook Is A Freakshow Ghost Town: I’m including this essay – in which the writer talks about how Facebook’s slow decline into cultural irrelevance has made it a weirdly-compelling and interestingly-odd corner of the web to hang out in again – partly because I think there’s a bit of truth in it and partly to help punt my niche belief that we’re all going to be getting back on Facebook in the next year because, honestly, it’s there and it works and everyone has an account so why not? NB – please do not remind me of this when you all realise how spectacularly, stupidly wrong I am.

A Feminist Future of Digital Care: An excellent essay by Rachel Coldicutt which explores how we might usefully change the way in which we consider and conceive of tech and how we use it, and which effectively lays out a multipoint plan for how we might want to do things in future. There’s some great thinking in here – I particularly liked the part about decoupling tech skills from STEM, which is so true but which I’ve never seen articulated this well before – I suppose if I had a criticism it’s that I don’t think the essay does a good enough job of explaining to the reader (ie me) what makes this framework specifically ‘feminist’, but I appreciate that that might just be me not knowing nearly enough about feminist theory. Anyway, this is a good read and a useful one for anyone interested in the design and creation of digital services and how we think about them.

The Memeification Of Pop: Or ‘why every song needs not just a dance now but some sort of memeable moment so that people can copy it on TikTok and thereby increase the song’s reach’. I can’t wait until they apply that Echo Dance machine learning thing from the first section to this and let the machines come up with the ‘kooky moments’ too. If any of you reading this are in the business of delivering speech or presentational training to executives, can you PLEASE start lying to them and saying that it’s important to include these sort of things in their keynotes and annual results presentations, please? I want to see the FTSE100 CEOs making with the camp eye-rolls as they take analyst questions.

Worldbuilding Pt.2: The second in Dirt’s series on the growth of ‘worldbuilding’ as a broad concept (I linked to the first one a couple of weeks ago, as you doubtless recall). This covers the NFT community stuff and the few crypto-gaming projects that seem to have some actual meat to them, as well as touching on the baffling success of ‘Loot’ – I find the thesis that worldbuilding is an increasingly vital part of brand development a bit silly, but also exactly the sort of ‘silly’ that you can probably do reasonably well flogging some smart consultancy around.

TikTok Customer Service: Fcuk’s sake – have we been delivered from the horror of self-aware brand Twitter only to be plunged into a new one, the ‘sassy customer service clapback’ on TikTok? It would appear so, or at least it would if you believed that the few examples included in this Wired piece constitute a trend (I am…skeptical, personally). I’m including this not because I think it’s particularly true or important but because a) it might let you write a community management strategy based around ‘being a total pr1ck’, which sounds more fun than the usual bland positivity; and b) I am genuinely fascinated to see exactly what sort of small-but-significant cultural changes are engendered by us becoming a society that is almost entirely visual.

FutureShopping: This is a surprisingly-interesting piece of (sorry) ‘thought leadership’ (really, I am so sorry), ostensibly written by MD of Selfridges Ann Pitcher (maybe I’m being unfair on Ms Pitcher here, but these things are never, ever actually written by the person whose name appears at the bottom) and covering what she perceives to be the main changes and challenges facing the retail sector (specifically department stores) in the coming years. If you work in retail, or retail-adjacent consultancy, this is worth a read – in particular the section about ‘control’ was interesting (the final paragraph, fine, is a bunch of bland pabulum about ‘making the world a better place through selling more crap’, but I figure you’re contractually obligated to include that stuff in any corporate nonsense you write these days and so I’ll give it a pass).

Tradwives vs Birth Control: Quick update from the stealth front of the culture wars, where the tradwife movement is promoting ‘fertility awareness methods’ as alternatives to birth control, based on scare stories about the medical dangers of the pill, etc. I liked this piece because it made the connections explicit: “far-right venture capitalist and noted surveillance titan Peter Thiel invested millions into the conservative online women’s magazine Evie, which recently created an app to help people track their periods (with very flimsy promises around privacy) and dissuade them from using birth control. And in a popular Twitter thread shared this week, a female writer at the conservative National Review called birth control “actively harmful” and erroneously identified it as “a carcinogenic.”” I know I bang on about this a lot, but I think it’s important to follow the money here.

The Real Creator Economy: Oh, ok, fine, that’s my own snarky title not the actual title of the piece – this is an article about the artists and digital makers who exist making things for people in online communities and worlds, and who have been for years, and who make up what I think of as the ‘real’ creator economy, to whit ‘people who make digital goods and transact with others to sell them’ rather than ‘people who make 3% commission selling tat to their followers’. This is an interesting look at an ecosystem that’s been around for 15 years and which is, slowly and quietly, creating some foundational aspects of what might one day form a small part of a shared, pervasive digital experience (I WILL NOT USE THE ‘M’ WORD).

Dog Names: This is an actual academic paper, and I appreciate not all of you will be itching to read this based on the synopsis: “The Names of All Manner of Hounds is a unique list of 1065 names for hunting dogs (running hounds, terriers and greyhounds) found in a fifteenth-century manuscript that has recently been sold into a closed private collection. The present article offers a critical edition of this unusual text, which has never been published before, preceded by an introduction that contextualizes its contents in terms of the hunting culture and the milieu to which they belong. For these purposes I examine a number of medieval and early modern hunting treatises that are revealing about attitudes to hunting dogs and that mention a smattering of names given to them. I discuss the enthusiasm felt by hunters towards their hounds, an enthusiasm often expressed in terms of the pleasure that is derived from the sound of a pack in chase, and consider the importance of knowing hounds individually by name.” BUT! I promise that once you get to the list of dog names you will be CHARMED – there are some true greats in here and you may find by the end of this that you have an almost-irrepressible desire to rename your pet to something more florid like ‘Mownferaunt’ or the slightly-baffling ‘Go-byhynde’. Wonderful.

Goncharov: Speaking of worldbuilding…this is wonderful, and one of those occasional flashes of collective inspiration which make the internet feel like a wonderful hive mind rather than some sort of Sartrean hellhole. You probably know the story by now, but if you’re less terminally-online than I am you might have missed the fact that this week the web discovered a great, lost Scorsese masterpiece called ‘Goncharov’ which obviously doesn’t exist but now has a quite astonishing body of content around it to try and convince you that it in fact does. Honestly, human creativity (and our propensity to use it for wonderfully-silly things) is a source of endless fascination to me.

Recalling The Leviathan Axe: I am currently playing the new God of War game (it’s excellent, honestly), and as such really enjoyed this post from one of the designers of the last game in the series in which they discuss how they designed one small, specific gameplay feature – the way in which the main character’s axe returns to his hand once thrown. You may not think that this is going to be interesting – and, fine, if you’ve never played the game and have no interest in game mechanics design then perhaps you won’t, but you SHOULD – but it becomes a really interesting look at the way in which small tweaks can have outsize impacts on user experience.

The Great Toaster Hoax: I mentioned Wikipedia earlier – it’s kind of amazing that a free website created by unpaid contributors has ended up being a genuinely-useful and not-entirely-inaccurate source of information on almost anything you can think of. It is, though, not TOTALLY accurate, and occasionally you do get some actual lies creeping into otherwise accurate entries. So it has been for years with the Wikipedia entry for the toaster, which stated with confidence that the first working model was invented by a Scotsman called Alan Macmasters – a man who never in fact existed. This is a lovely little writeup of both the hoax and how it was discovered by a 15 year old kid, and a useful reminder that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on a wiki.

Insomnia: I have, to date, been fortunate enough to be a relatively easy sleeper, but have lived with my share of insomniacs and it looks MISERABLE. This is a great essay in which Rachel Handler talks to a variety of sleep experts to work out exactly which of her pre-bed habits is fcuking her up – it’s funny and readable and will, perhaps, make you feel marginally better if you’re one of those people who falls asleep phone-in-hand and then wakes up at 3am for a pleasant few hours of staring at the ceiling while your thoughts whir like horrible termites. There’s a lovely Nabokov quote about insomnia that I can’t help but recall when reading about it – “All nights are giants, but this one was especially terrible” (which I just checked and I last quoted on here in 2016, fcuking hell).

The TikTokification of London: On the one hand, this is VERY much ‘old man shouts at clouds’ stuff – on the other, I am an old man and I found myself nodding along to this to an upsetting degree. See what you think: “A disease is crippling London. You see it in the nightclub closures, each vibrant, interesting, or queer space on the fringes of the city that’s forced to shut down. You see it in the Zone 2 pubs that rip out their carpets and banquettes and install spartan, wooden canteen tables and faddy resident kitchens. You see it with the central London vanity projects: the mounds, roof terraces, and other quasi-public spaces built with a grubby combination of taxpayer’s money and murky foreign investment. Welcome to the modern city: London as an experience; London as a thing to be consumed.” This articulates quite a lot of the things that I have found a bit weird and sad about the city since I came back – but, again, maybe I’m just old.

James Cameron: It seems a bit odd to link to a profile of a ‘genius auteur’ after having kicked off this section with several essays explaining why that sort of mythologising is bad and dangerous and rarely-warranted or helpful; still, this GQ piece on James Cameron is fascinating (although, honestly, I am disappointed that the reporter didn’t see fit to ask Cameron ‘So Jim, how come your admittedly record-grossing film has left all the cultural imprint of an issue of the Beano, and what does that say about what you’re making here?’). He in no way comes across as a person I want to spend time with (in fairness I imagine he’d feel much the same way about me), but I’m always fascinated by people with this sort of energy and drive. Imagine being him – it must be EXHAUSTING.

Letter To My Younger Self: “Sara Eckel writes to the 25-year-old she once was, just starting out as a writer in New York City in the 90s.” – this is so much better than that slightly-beige tagline makes it sound, I promise. This is beautifully-done, and I am always a sucker for anything written in the second person.

Beachcombers in Doggerland: Finally this week, I know that describing essays as ‘haunting’ is lazy hackwriting of the worst sort but, well, it is and I am. This is a short story about death and memory and the ocean and letting go, and it is beautiful.

By Jude Sutton

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I don’t feature enough jazz in here – this is GREAT, and the video really captures the energy of the track imho. This is Leland Whitty with ‘Glass Moon’ – I really love the drumwork here.

This is interesting – sort of modern-classical, but with a slight edge to it and a vocal that takes it in quite a different direction to that you might expect at the outset. This is by a collective calling itself isomonstrosity, comprised of these three sickening overachievers: “Ellen Reid won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Johan Lenox studied composition at the Yale School of Music then built a career as a go-to producer for iconic pop artists (ie 070 Shake, Travis Scott, Lil Nas X). Yuga Cohler is a Juilliard-trained conductor and an established software engineer.” I mean, really. Still, I really liked this and am going to go and check out the whole album as soon as I have a spare hour’s listening time.

Hyd has, I think, been around for a while under different guises – this track is BEAUTIFUL and mysterious and ethereal, and the person’s back in the video is…weirdly sexy, and judging by the comments under the video it’s quite possible that some of you might find it incredibly affecting so, well, enjoy and BYE THAT IS IT I NEED TO RUN AND SO WILL HAVE TO RELUCTANTLY LEAVE YOU BUT KNOW THAT I MISS YOU ALREADY AND AM COUNTING THE HOURS UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN AND I LOVE YOU AND NEED YOU AND MISS YOU TAKE CARE GOODBYE COME BACK!

Webcurios 18/11/22

November 18, 2022

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Opening
Misc 1
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Long Reads
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Reading Time: 35 minutes

No turkeys! No money! WELCOME TO CHRISTMAS 2022 EVERYONE!

Still, on the plus side, at least it’s looking increasingly unlikely that you’ll be able to worsen your mood by spending the ‘festive’ (lol!) period doomscrolling through Twitter, what with That Fcuking Man apparently beating even the most optimistic predictions about how quickly he could gut the business. Silver linings!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we are all set to be Tiny Tim this year.

By Alessandra Leta

WE START THIS WEEK OFF WITH A MIX THAT I CAN’T REALLY EXPLAIN OR DESCRIBE BUT WHICH I WOULD LIKE YOU TO TRUST ME ON, AS IT REALLY IS A SLIGHTLY-WOOZY DELIGHT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GRATEFUL IT’S NOT BUDWEISER’S HEAD OF SPONSORSHIPS RIGHT NOW, PT.1:

Another Lettuce: We’re just going to get the M*sk mentions out of the way quickly up-top and then get on with things as though he doesn’t exist, ok? OK! In what has now apparently become the international signifier for professional hubris, we now have a LETTUCE VS TWITTER camfeed! So far Twitter is still standing and the lettuce is starting to look a touch on the brown and withered side, but given there only appear to be somewhere in the region of 20% of the staff that worked there a month ago left, I wouldn’t bank huge sums on the birdsite. You’ve all read and heard far too much about this over the past fortnight or so, so I’ll keep this short – but in general this episode does rather feel like an excellent opportunity for us to hammer another sturdy nail into the general concept of ‘individual exceptionalism and the genius-polymath-saviour’, or even the strangely-persistent ‘rich and famous people are somehow better and smarter than everyone else’ myth. Should Twitter eventually self-immolate and vanish into the digital ether, we can at the very least look back fondly on its status as the human invention which did more than anything else in history to demonstrate to us that there is not one single person alive in the world, not one individual that has ever existed in history, who isn’t also a bit of a d1ck at the very least – it’s A WINDOW INTO OUR HORRID TARNISHED SOULS FFS! It’s been a great leveller in that regard, although personally I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to this specific lesson.

Twitter Is Going Great: As someone who has to pay attention to all this Twitter stuff for Dull Professional Reasons, it’s been interesting watching the pace of the news flywheel change over the past fortnight – from desperate hacks mainlining speed to keep up with the announcement and the leaks and the changes and the Tweets, to this week in which everyone’s sort-of worked out what the direction of travel is and has decided to just slow down a bit and enjoy the car-crash. If you want a nice, easy one-stop-shop to keep updated on exactly how the company’s new owner is currently working to eviscerate his new toy, this site provides a neat compendium of the latest headlines in reverse-chronological order. Unrelated, but whilst this is obviously childish it’s also quite funny – well done whichever ex-employee set this up.

Futurepedia: Ooh, this is super-useful. Futurepedia is a searchable, filterable compendium of all sorts of AI tools for creating images, copy, code and anything else you can conceive of – you can filter the sites by the type of work you want to create, search by keyword, and there are already nearly 230 different sites linked to from here covering everything you could possible want. A CHALLENGE – I reckon that it’s probably almost-possible to create an entire business using AI tools alone, from the product, purpose and vision to the logo, website, copy and associated imagery. Can someone try this and see what happens? Because obviously all of you are going into winter with LOADS of spare cash just lying around that you can frivolously spend on stupid, pointless internet projects dictated to you by some random webmong.

The Bureau of Multerversal Arbitration: I got really excited by this when I found it, and then realised that it’s all run on Midjourney and through Discord, and part of me died inside. STILL! The Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration is, I think, the first ACTUAL game that’s been built around AI-generated images (I featured something in here a few months back that claimed to be such a thing, but it was literally just a crap jigsaw game using Dall-E images and so doesn’t really count) and this feels, interestingly, like the tip of some sort of iceberg when it comes to ways of encouraging players to create as part of gameplay. The premise here is based around the idea of a theoretical agency which exists to assist people in the multiverse, with players effectively using Midjourney (via the collaborative fiction of a Discord server) to create images based on specific prompts and tasks, which the wider community vote on and which are then integrated into the game’s wider story…look, fine, this is very much a game in the ‘D&D’-type sense, in terms of requiring a degree of involved commitment and imaginative legwork from the players (and, to reiterate, you have to use fcuking Discord), but if you can get on board with that sort of thing, and the idea of collaboratively pretending to be multiversal bureaucrats with a bunch of other strangers on a shared community server on your phone appeals to you (I realise that reads as slightly sniffy – it’s not meant to, honest), and you like the idea of creating images and artworks to illustrate the imagined scenarios dreamed up by the gamemakers, then this might be up your street.

Paris World; On the one hand, ragging on THE METAVERSE does rather go against my stated aim of ‘not featuring stuff in Web Curios for the sole purpose of slagging it off’; on the other, there are occasions when the only right course of action is to click and point and laugh. So it is with PARIS WORLD, Paris Hilton’s inevitable entrance into the giant grift that is THE METAVERSE (weirdly it feels less wrong typing it in all-caps, perhaps because it neatly encapsulates the ridiculousness of the whole thing). Why does Paris Hilton need to create her own metaversal experience? Why, to flog you clothes of course! There’s quite a large part of me that wants to tell you that this is a terrible, poorly-made waste of time and that you should avoid it like the plague – because that is exactly what it is – but I have an even stronger desire for you to click the link and experience the sheer, miserable, soulless cashgrab that the whole thing embodies. ENTER THE PARISVERSE! You get to design your avatar, choosing from a selection of sub-Roblox designs to create a stunted minifig which then gets unceremoniously plonked into a poorly-rendered CG environment (all pink and pastels and rainbows and unicorns, natch, as of course befits the personal brand of a now-middle-aged millionaire) and…and that’s basically it! You can move around, you could chat to other users if there was anyone there (there won’t be)…oh, and you can BUY PARIS MERCH! The ‘shop’ is literally the only thing that a user can visit or interact with in the ‘metaverse’ (lol), and, beautifully, even that is terrible and phoned-in, with a bunch of stuff for sale but no indication whether the items are digital or physical, and, if digital, where you might use them outside of the cold, joyless and deserted environs of THE PARISVERSE (also, beautifully, the ‘shop’ section is rendered in 2d because NOONE WANTS TRAIPSE ROUND THE SHOPS IN A SH1TTY 3D WORLD). Honestly, this is quite an astonishingly-cynical piece of low-quality work which I think sets the current bar for ‘worst example of metaversebullsh1t I have ever seen’ – WELL DONE PARIS!

The Tresverse: Or at least it was, until approximately 10 minutes later I found this and once again had my mind blown about exactly what it is that consultants are able to sell to stupid clients. If you were well-known high-street haircare brand Tresemme (sorry, I can’t be bothered to find the appropriate keyboard shortcut to apply the right accent to the final ‘e’, you can just imagine that it’s there), what would YOU think was a good use of a wedge of your marketing budget? Influencer work? Product sampling opportunities? Assorted follicular content? Any and all of these might be acceptable answers, but what I imagine literally NONE of you immediately landed on as a response was ‘the creation of a virtual hair salon in digital space’. AND YET! This is quite special – from the grandiose characterisation of the thing as ‘The Tresverse’ (LOOK I KNOW THAT IT’S NOT REAL AND THAT THEREFORE I SHOULDN’T GET UPSET ABOUT THIS BUT THE USE OF THE TERM METAVERSE TO DENOTE A SINGLE, ISOLATED AND TINY DIGITAL EXPERIENCE REALLY GETS ON MY FCUKING NERVES) to the way in which it constitutes literally three interactive elements (choose your hair! Choose your face! Select some colours for your outfit!) and then just shows you a few adverts and boots you out, to the fact that (shockingly in 2022) all the character models are very white, to the point at the end at which I genuinely lost my sh1t and started laughing at my laptop because of the terrible rendering of some of the crowd models (you get to choose a new look for your avatar and it does a small, hair-related catwalk, is the entirety of the experience here). Perhaps my favourite thing, though, is that this is SO phoned-in, so poorly-made, that if you load it on desktop the site asks you to TURN YOUR SCREEN (don’t try and swivel your monitor – the site will eventually load anyway). Honestly, this is so terrible that it’s almost cheering – I promise you that however much you may hate what you do for a living, however hard you are phoning it in right now, however much you might thing ‘I really am a charlatan who doesn’t know what they are doing’, know that you are still better than the people who commissioned this (although, credit where it’s due, the hair physics is nice). Still, at least you don’t have to justify the spend to anyone (NB – should anyone involved with this project happen to stumble across this, I would LOVE to know about its genesis).

Xtadium: Is VR going to transform the way in which we experience entertainment? Eventually perhaps, but it feels like there’s still a significant way to go before any of the VR gubbins add anything meaningful to the TV experience. Xtadium launched this week as part of Meta’s VR offering, and it’s billing itself as THE FUTURE OF SPORTS; initially there are a very limited number of sports available, and none of them are what you mght call top-tier, but the service offers you the ability to set up VR viewing rooms to watch things with your friends on big virtual screens and, perhaps more interestingly, to run your own multi-camera setup so that you can effectively direct your own and your friends’ viewing experience. Which, I’ll be honest, sounds of very limited appeal right now, but I suppose if you’re a more committed fan of sport than I am you might relish the opportunity to be able to flick to BoundaryCam™ or TiouchLineCam™ or AttractiveMemberOfTheCrowdCam™ whenever you like. Presumably as this stuff develops there will be more interesting widgets you can drop in and add – so, for example live Fantasy Football score updates, say, or your favourite Twitch streamers watchalong – but at present this feels, as with 99.9% of all VR stuff, like technology desperately searching for a use-case.

Africa Climate Mobility: How are we feeling about COP? Positive? Like change is just around the corner? Good, don’t let me ruin that momentary feeling of optimism. Launched in conjunction with the climate change conference, this website is a superb resource (and a sobering one), presenting a wealth of data and information about the scale of the climate crisis as it affects the African continent – here you can find details on the projected scale of climate-induced migration projected across the continent in the coming years, flood risk data, water availability (actual and projected) and much more, along with a significant amount of writing about What This Data Means and What Needs To Be Done. I think we’re probably all past the point of thinking that a reason argument based on data is enough to change anyone’s mind about anything anymore, especially on an issue as polarised and, frankly, post-fact as the climate ‘debate’, but I find it literally staggering that people can look at stuff like this and not think ‘hm, we possibly have a global duty of care here’.

The Midnight Pub: This is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, and is effectively like a slice of 1998 right in your browser. This year online has, for me at least, been characterised by the pleasing sense that the odd, small internet is growing back again, and that the sorts of strange, small projects that characterised much of the very early public internet are starting to sprout once more after a decade or so of being stifled by big platform hegemony – the Midnight Pub is perhaps the ur-example of this, as it’s basically a webforumchatserverthing which could as easily have existed in the late-90s as the early-20s. “It’s late. You are seconds away from the main street in a small alley. It’s quieter here, but you can still hear the sound of chatter, footsteps, and cars from busy downtown. The city is buzzing, the streets are like arteries. You see an intriguing place in the alley, with a moon on its door. It reads “The Midnight Pub”.The Midnight is a virtual pub that lets you write posts and create pages.” Every post is a new place for people to talk and chat and discuss (JUST LIKE A FORUM!), and this is a live and active community with new posts each day, and the posts are WEIRD – there is some time travel roleplay happening (or at least, er, I presume it’s roleplay; we should also allow for the possibility that there are currently visitors from the future in our midst and that they are choosing to hang out on a very obscure corner of the web whilst working out how to get home), posts about coding, posts about academia and research…this is lovely not so much for what it contains, which may or may not interest you, but for what it embodies about slow community online.

Spotilicious: A truly-hideous name for this otherwise-useful service, which lets you filter your own Spotify account to allow you to do things like filter your Spotify Liked and followed music by your Mood, Genres, Running pace and more.

Childishism: This is baffling, but in a good way – it’s actually the online component of an exhibition around artists and childhood at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and, according to the exhibition blurb, Childishism “is a visual essay commissioned for the catalogue accompanying To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood. Childishism takes the form of an imagined search engine that algorithmically maps an associative history between artistic representations of the childish. For Anna Craycroft, “when artists personify the childish or childhood in their work, a deeper social imaginary is revealed.”” Type in whatever you fancy and see what crops up – I am a big fan of these sorts of search engines which exist not so much to give you what you ask for as to show you things you might not have considered, and the way in which this encourages a different sort of exploration of artworks and themes through tangential association is pleasing in the extreme.

The Female Gaze: This made me a tiny bit sad. A collaboration between the Kunsthalle Charlottenburg in Denmark and Meta, The Female Gaze seeks to make the user question the way in which depictions of women in art are a product of the conventions and perceptions of the male-dominated society in which they existed and their interpretation by the mostly-male artists who captured them – which is a totally legitimate question, and something which it is good and right that galleries are interested in exploring! Such a shame, then, that what this boils down to is the ability to take a 3d render of a painting by artist Peter Illsted, depicting a young woman cleaning mushrooms, and change elements of it – from the walls, to the lighting, to the arrangement of elements in the scene, to the pose of the central figure herself – and then take a digital photo of your creation to share. Er, why? How does me changing the way in which the subject is posed radically alter what the painting is communicating? How is this doing anything other than substituting the painterly male gaze of the title with my own digital-but-equally-other gaze? I would argue that it does neither of those things. Still, you can make some nice images with it if you’re in the market for that sort of thing.

Floor 796: Another one of those occasional ‘a massive canvas made up of interlocking tiles, each of which is its own bit of pixelart but which when added together form a huge composite image of quite staggering density and complexity’ things, this time in which the overall composition is of the imagined ‘Floor 796’ in a future space station. This is DIZZYING – zoom out, pan around and have an explore and see what you can find; I get the impression that if you are a particular sort of pop-culture consumer (specifically, if you like scifi and popular big-ticket TV shows, and anime and videogames) then you will get a lot more of the in-jokes and references here, but even if you don’t there is an awful lot of really quite good animation and artwork on display here, along with some genuinely weird little vignettes (why is there an old-style headmaster administering a caning to someone? WHAT SORT OF SPACE STATION IS THIS?).

Galactica: This launched this week with surprisingly little fanfare – Galactica is Meta’s newest text-generating AI, a large language model that, rather than the general, all-purpose corpus GPT-3 was fed to train it, has been “trained on over 48 million papers, textbooks, reference material, compounds, proteins and other sources of scientific knowledge. You can use it to explore the literature, ask scientific questions, write scientific code, and much more.” This stuff is, potentially, so exciting, and I think that there’s something more interesting about this sort of focused LLM than the broader stuff. The demo was live earlier this week but has annoyingly now shut, so you can’t currently play with it yourself, but it’s worth having a look at some of the examples cited on the site as you get a very real sense of the possibilities at play with this stuff.

Beatmatch: It seems astonishing to me that noone’s done ‘a dating app, but using your musical tastes to match you’ before (maybe they have and I just missed it), but that is exactly what Beatmatch purports to be. It’s iOS-only at present, and I think only in the US, but you can sign up to the wait list and in the meantime start thinking about exactly what sort of listening profile your ideal partner will have. Actually on closer inspection it’s less of a ‘pure’ dating proposition than it is a social app with music at its heart – but, look, it’s going to be literally wall-to-wall BTS stans and Barbies seeking mutual gratification, isn’t it? Still, if YOU will only deign to fcuk people who can name all of Sepultura’s albums then perhaps here’s where you might go to find them (or, perhaps, more likely, the classifieds in Kerrang!).

Play Your Power: It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to feature a mobile game created by a cosmetics brand to flog you some makeup – so ENJOY this shiny-looking if deeply-simplistic racing game from lipstick-peddlers NARS, in which you pick one of three ‘characters’ (lipsticks) and participate in an infinite-runner(rider)-type game, collecting nonspecific blobs and avoiding obstacles and racking up points which you can then exchange for PRIZES (if you are terrifyingly competent). Interestingly, according to my terrible performance and subsequent place on the global leaderboard, over 11,000 people have played this since launch – I would LOVE to know what the conversion rates are for this sort of thing, and what the CPU is. I mean, ok, ‘love’ is a bit strong, but I have a vague interest should anyone happen to know.

By Mary Frey

NEXT, ENJOY SOME ABSOLUTE JUNGLE BANGERS COURTESY OF 4AM KRU!

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GRATEFUL IT’S NOT BUDWEISER’S HEAD OF SPONSORSHIPS RIGHT NOW, PT.2:

NFT Map Layers: The ongoing quest to try and work out why NFTs exist continues apace, with a predictable lack of success. The latest? Er, some sort of weird Foursquare-crossed-with-Ingress map layer! This is an initiative by Superlocal, a borderline-incomprehensible platform which as far as I can tell promises you the ability to be able to earn ACTUAL REAL MONEY by ‘checking in’ to places with their app (I can almost guarantee that noone will ever earn any actual cashmoney as a result of this), and which is offering NFT owners the ability to link their tokens to the service to create a gamified layer in which people who own the same types of NFTs can collaborate to ‘own’ areas of the map and…oh, God, this is so tiring. NOONE WANTS TO DO THIS! NOONE WANTS TO BUY SOME UGLY NON-ART TO PLAY A CRAP VERSION OF GOWALLA THAT LITERALLY A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE WORLDWIDE ARE EVER GOING TO ENGAGE WITH! STOP TRYING TO MAKE FETCH (ok, fine, NFTs) HAPPEN! There’s also a light social discovery layer to it – “People who hold the same NFTs as you likely have similar interests to you. Use your NFTs to discover new places, meet up at events more easily, and more!” – but seeing as everyone who owns an NFT already knows everyone else who owns the same type because they all spend 20h a day in the same discord talking to each other about their fcuking NFTs this seems a touch otiose.

Ask My Book: Not my book, to be clear – I have on occasion been asked if I ever want to write a book, and once I have stopped laughing at the suggestion I am forced to admit that the answer is ‘no, because I have literally nothing to say that I think is worth reading’, which always leaves me feeling a bit sad if I’m honest – but the book of one Sahil Lavingia, who as part of the promo for his book called ‘The Minimalist Entrepreneur’ has trained a small AI to answer questions about the title. A cute idea, and as the costs and barriers to training drop ever lower there’s something quite nice about thinking of how this sort of thing can be integrated into publishing promo. At the very least, a chatbot trained to act as one of your major protagonists could be fun – although be aware that everyone will at some point try and fcuk your character.

The Gist: This is genuinely brilliant and super-impressive. A plugin for Slack, the Gist does one single thing – anyone entering the channel it’s plugged into can type ‘!gist’ and get a summary of everything that has happened in the Slack over the past 24h, and the amazing thing is that the summaries are…really good! They make sense, they are accurate, they are concise, and they genuinely do help you catch up with recent events and discussions. This is, as far as I can tell, genuinely good, and I almost never say stuff like that. A rare, official Web Curios endorsement, not that the people who made this will ever know or care.

The Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards: I’ve not featured these for a few years now, mainly because they went a bit mainstream (I FOUND THE CONCH!) and I figured you were all getting your fix of derpy tortoises or whatever from the pages of the Guardian. BUT everything is so cold and damp and bleak and foreboding right now that I figured we could all do with some dumb animal pick-me-ups – here, then, for your enjoyment, are the finalists in this year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. If the ‘talk to the hand’ penguin doesn’t become a meme in its own right then there is no justice in the world.

Listening: I don’t think this is the first service of this ilk that I’ve featured here, but I had a play with this this week and it’s…pretty good! A Chrome plugin which lets you take any article you find online and automatically have it text-to-voiced by AI and sent to the podcast player of your choice for later listening – if you’re a listener rather than a reader by preference then you will find this invaluable.

All The Web Shortcuts: This is VERY worky and quite dull (SORRY) but also very fcuking useful indeed (NOT SORRY) – a directory, compiled by Google, of all the web shortcuts you can use in Chrome and what they do – from the ‘oh everyone knows that Matt, fcuk off and stop patronising me’ ubiquity of slides.new (which you all OBVIOUSLY know will open a brand new Google Slides doc) to the ‘wow, this is practically witchcraft’ hacks that let you open, say, a brand new Canva doc or Miro session just by typing a couple of words into the browser bar. Honestly, you may think this stuff is immaterial but it’s the sort of thing that will lead colleagues to gaze at you as though you’re some sort of keeper of all of the tech-work secrets, and who doesn’t want that sort of low-level adulation? NO FCUKER, etc.

All The Meme Templates: Nathan Allebach is a hero of modern times – it is he who has spent the past…Christ knows how long compiling every single text, emoji and ASCII meme format into this open GDoc for anyone to cut and paste from whenever they like. Want a nice, easy way to make an emoji sheriff like it’s 2019 all over again? Want every single tired old joke format you’ve ever seen on Twitter for you to riff through with your own personal tweaks? Honestly, this is every single stressed-out community manager’s dream – this is basically 107 pages worth of content calendar material in one. Obviously this stuff is mainly for Twitter, meaning that the potential shelf-life of its utility is at present hovering around 96h based on current lifespan predictions, but just think of what an amazing weekend of posting you can now have!

Free Anime!: Another free anime site! I know I feature these things with semi-regularity, but I always figure that things like this are likely to get shut down by the copyright police pretty much immediately and that I should therefore share new ones as and when I find them. Anime’s not my thing, but should you be one of the seemingly-infinite numbers of people who find the whole ‘three frames of animation in a minute’ style compelling (joke, honest) then you will potentially find a lot to love here – I have checked a couple of titles at random and they definitely worked, so click away and fill your boots before the rights holders cotton on and demand that you cough up.

Rose Island: A website which I think was created to accompany a Netflix series about the island in question, which was a mid-20th century attempt at creating a micronation: “Rose Island was built in 1967 by Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa, just outside of Italy’s territorial waters. Rosa proclaimed himself President and declared the independence of ‘Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj’ on 24th june, 1968.” You may be unsurprised to learn that the Republic lasted less than a year – still, this is a nicely-made little site which tells you enough about the mad project’s genesis and history to tempt you into perhaps watching the documentary in question. Has ANYONE ever succeeded with one of these dreams of aquatic independence and sovereignty, out of interest? And what is it with rich people and the almost-universal desire to create water-bound communities with rules made up by them? Money is brainworms, I am increasingly convinced.

Cine Casero: Ok, so this is all in Spanish but you can translate it in Chrome if necessary, and it’s worth making sure you can understand the copy because this is a LOVELY project. Perhaps the first Uruguayan website I’ve featured in over a decade of doing this, which I now feel unaccountably guilty about (SORRY URUGUAY!), this is a the home of Cine Casero, “which is a collective dedicated to the preservation of collective memory that was born in 2014 with the aim of celebrating for the first time in Uruguay “The day of family movies” (Home Movie Day). We are interested in involving, enthusing and training the communities themselves so that they can address the problem of audiovisual preservation of their collective memory.” This is so so so lovely – a wonderful amalgam of found history and narrative, and national identity as defined by home cinema over the decades, and there are some wonderful examples of old home films scattered around the site – again, obviously all in Spanish, but even if you don’t speak the language there’s a certain atmosphere to everything here which is worth experiencing. Also – and I NEVER say this – the autoplaying music on the page is rather lovely.

Signlearner: This is SUCH a good idea – is there an equivalent for English sign language, does anyone know? Signlearner is a Chrome plugin which helps to teach you American Sign Language by highlighting random words on pages as you browse – hovering over the highlighted word or phrase will bring up a short, hovering video of someone demonstrating how to sign said word in ALS. So so so clever, and it works really nicely – this feels like an excellent mechanic that could be replicated quite simply for a host of other things.

Teenage Engineering: I appreciate everything probably feels quite…tight right now, and that there probably aren’t many of you – any of you? – who are currently desperate to drop the fat end of £300 on what is basically a nicely-polished hand-carved Weeble, but, on the offchance that any of you are feeling both rich and at a loss as to what to buy your audiophile aesthete friend for Christmas then you might be interested in the products sold by Teenage Engineering, particularly the wooden choir, which consists of “eight wooden dolls, made to serenade you with

a repertoire of choral classics as well as perform your own original compositions through midi over ble. Each member has their own characteristic vocal range. individually one can sing a dynamic solo, together they perform an immersive a cappella concert.” The ‘choir’ members are available to purchase individually – but seven of the eight types are sold out, so you’ll need to be quick if you want a ridiculously-expensive (but very pretty) musical wooden toy gift.

Flags of Afghanistan: A project by a certain Omar Mohammed, exploring the history and heritage of the many flags of Afghanistan’s history: “Since the beginning of Afghanistan as a nation state, the design of its flag has existed in a constant state of flux. With each new leader, faction, or party gaining power, the flag and its emblem were altered to represent the new order in the country. Flags Of Afghanistan بيرق هاى افغانستان places these flags in political, cultural, and design contexts; building visual and historical relationships that aim to archive the past while informing the future.”

Partiful: One of the very real and painful things about ageing is the extent to which so much of what is ‘new’ is just stuff that you remember perfectly well from the past but repackaged slightly and given a new name, and the associated extent to which literally NOONE cares when you point out that ‘exciting new service x’ is exactly the same as ‘boring old service y’ which has been around for ages. So it is with Partiful, a website which replicates exactly ONE bit of Facebook’s functionality – the ‘events’ widget, which older readers will recall were basically the only way in which anyone organised anything for approximately 3 years in the late-00s/early-10s. You can create an event! Invite people from a predetermined friends list or an imported one! RSVP with varying degrees of commitment! Exactly like the Meta-owned legacy product, but with none of the stinky brand association! Actually, while we’re talking about it, my outsider prediction for 2023 is that Facebook makes a comeback as a platform as people remember that, whilst it’s a hateful company owned by a terrifying techfuturezealot, it actually has a lot of pretty robust and useful functionality that people might remember about when Twitter finally dies. I am not suggesting that it will become ‘cool’ – just that people might remember that it can in fact be quite useful. But, er, don’t quote me on that please, unless I turn out to have been right.

Earbirding: A site designed to help YOU, the casual, non-expert avian enthusiast, get better at identifying a variety of bird friends via their calls and cries and strangulated croaks. This has been dormant for three years, sadly, but it contains an absolute wealth of information on how to tell a corncrake from, I don’t know, a chicken, should you be in the market for such a guide.

Gem: Multisearch for secondhand stuff – that’s literally it, but I figure it might be useful to those of you who enjoy sorting through eBay for bargains. This searches across “eBay, Etsy, Grailed, The RealReal, Poshmark, Vestiaire Collective, Rubylane, Farfetch, Fashionphile, Garmentory, ASOS Marketplace, LiveAuctioneers, Reversible and hundreds of independent online stores”, so it’s fair to assume that if you can’t find it via Gem then it probably doesn’t exist or is illegal.

The Best Inventions of 2022: Time Magazine’s annual rundown of the inventions that they consider to be the most impressive of the year is once again a BRILLIANT overview of human creativity and ingenuity, and is honestly a list that makes me feel marginally better about the state of the world (the bar is low, fine, but still). Divided across a range of categories spanning everything from accessibility tech to VR to sport to parenting to ‘wellness’ (LOL!), this is a compendium of amazing ideas and problem solving, and (as I think I have said every year I’ve featured this) is as good a source of creative inspiration as a million and one links from fcuking Contagious. A warning, though – the Time website has (for me at least) been rendered horrible to use through aggressive advertising, so apologies in advance for the fact that the reading experience is a little like scrolling through a letterbox.

The Talking Swear Clock: One of Rob Manuel’s multifarious bot projects on Twitter has been SwearClock, which each hour (on the half hour) Tweets a particularly foul-mouthed version of the time. Now that’s been turned into a talking swearclock thanks to the magic of free text-to-voice software and a bit of light automation – honestly, it’s worth opening this up on a laptop, turning up the volume, and then locking it and changing the password and watching as people around you get increasingly upset at the steady stream of things like “vicar’s jizzrag, it’s 9:49am”. Beautifully, whatever plugin they are using to do the voice lets you choose from a range of different accents, so I am currently amusing myself as I type by having what I imagine to be Italian Elon Musk shouting the sweary time at me incessantly.

OnlyBans: Nabbingt the coveted final slot in this week’s cornucopia of miscellaneous links is this game, which is designed to highlight all the ways in which it’s hard to make a living as a sex worker online whilst navigating the ever-changing world of what is and isn’t allowed on the major platforms. Your task is to earn enough money from your camming and subscriptionbongo services to pay your bills this month – navigate your way through content creation and sponsor deals and platform rules as you try and turn a profit. This is…not fun exactly, but interesting, and it’s a smart way of demonstrating the hoops adult content creators are forced to jump through by the platforms that make millions from them. Whilst this isn’t explicitly NSFW, it is very much a game about fisting yourself on camera for cash, so, well, probably not one to send to your nine year old unless you’re a significantly more liberal parent than I would be.

By Francisco Rodriguez

LAST IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, A MIX BY TIGERBALM WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘FUNKY’ DESPITE BEING WELL AWARE THAT THERE ARE FEW WORDS LESS ACCEPTABLE WHEN SAID BY MIDDLE-AGED WHITE MEN THAN ‘FUNKY’!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Caroline Ellison’s Tumblr Archive: Look, you may well be in the privileged position of not knowing who on God’s earth Caroline Ellison is, in which case feel free to skip this entirely as, honestly, you don’t need to know. If, on the other hand, you’ve been keeping track of all ‘this’ then you might be interested to read the personal Tumblrs of a woman at the heart of the first instance of economics/polyamory crossover since John Maynard Keynes.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

James Perrou: I don’t know who James is, but their Insta feed is mainly polaroids of people who are in bands and I am very much in favour of this sort of tightly-focused photo project. Some of the people are famous, some of them less so, but I very much like all the pictures.
Yamaha Black Boxes: Are YOU a music equipment nerd? How nerdy? THIS nerdy? Yamaha Black Boxes is an “Archive of 1980s electronic musical instruments and music computers made by Yamaha’, and to be honest I can’t imagine for a second that any of you will give two hoots about this but, well, you never know and I live in hope.
Tobias Gremmler: Are YOU in the market for the sort of unsettling digital art that depicts people’s nervous systems extending from their skeleton like a milky filigree web of pain? GREAT!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

A New Climate Reality: We kick off the longreads this week with a timely piece in the NYT about Where We Are Now with regards to the coming climate apocalypse – and, I promise, this is a moderately-hopeful article! Ok, fine, it’s ‘hopeful’ in the sense of ‘well, things are looking terrible but they are at least not looking as terrible as we thought they might look a decade or so ago’, and the main takeaway here is still ‘we need to work really fcuking hard to attempt to ensure that stuff doesn’t get any worse than we think it’s currently going to get based on the direction and pace of travel right now’, but it made me, for the first time in a while, feel moderately more positive about the future of the planet. This is, of course, relative, and perhaps this positivity is simply the result of a recalibration of expectations – don’t for a second think that the future is going to be anything other than, for the vast majority of people, significantly more unpredictable and parlous than the past and the present – but the fact it feels possible to talk in even halfway-positive terms about the future of the planet is a small positive in an otherwise somewhat-dark end-of-year period.

The Crypto Winter: I confess to not having really been following the FTX story, not least because, well, it’s crypto and crypto is boring, because money is boring. Still, it’s been hard not to snigger a bit at all the shock and amazement at exactly what an insane fcukup the whole thing has been – this Atlantic article offers a reasonable precis of what it means for the wider crypto ecosystem and its adoption by the mainstream (tl;dr: nothing good). If you’re in the market for more SBF content (what is it about awful men and the three-letter name? Cuddly journalist-decapitator (ok, fine, AUTHORISOR OF JOURNALIST DECAPITATION) MBS, professional philosopher and professional Frenchman BHL, now this cryptow4nker…this is a THING!) then you might enjoy this recap of five reasons why people might perhaps have done well to have been a bit more suspicious about the wunderkind’s promises, or for the real kicker why not try reading this interview with the man himself in which, astonishingly, he on-the-record tells a journalist that he lied through his teeth every time he talked up the ideas of philanthropy and altruism that saw FTX attain its momentary successes. There are a lot of interesting strands to this story, but one of the most significant to me strikes me as the extent to which large portions of the media devoted to covering this stuff are simply incapable of subjecting it, or the people involved in it, to anything resembling actual scrutiny.

The Rise of Influencer Capital: An excellent-if-unrelated piece in New York Magazine which segues rather nicely from the FTX stuff, all about the rise of the individual and the individual’s brand in the business of raising and making money – which, it doesn’t take a genius to work out, is entirely what SBF was doing and what Musk has been doing for years, and what GaryVee does (the article spends a not-inconsiderable amount of time to GaryVee and in particular the terrifying amounts of money he has apparently made from his value-free collection of poorly-drawn NFTs), and frankly what it feels like everyone is trying to do. Ask kids these days what they want to be when they grow up and I would bet money that whilst loads of them will still say ‘creator’ there will be a significant number who will say ‘brand’ (these are the children we ought to be most frightened of, and the ones I strongly suggest keeping a close eye on).

Everything Is Silicon Valley Now: Or, perhaps more accurately, why money and the drive for ‘growth’ ruins everything. Read the whole article – it’s good, and it will hopefully elicit meaningful nods throughout, and what the author writes about baseball might meaningfully be applied to ‘football’ or ‘exercise’ or ‘veganism’ or anything else you care to mention, frankly – but, equally, the whole piece can neatly be summarised in this single paragraph: “It’s a cycle. People create something, together, that reflects their energy and weird work; that thing becomes compelling as a result, and that makes it valuable, and at some point someone puts a price on it and someone else pays that price. It is at that moment that the thing begins to change. The new owner will almost always decide that what is most interesting about this thing is not the human essence that gave it value, but The Owner Himself, and will act accordingly. People will come back for the valuable stuff until the owner succeeds in crowding it out; when that crowding is done, the owned thing dies. Until then, what’s left is just what’s valuable—the humanity and brilliance and unpredictability and fun that all that cynical and idiotic and self-serving wealth is always and everywhere busy replacing with itself. There’s nothing to do but look for the good stuff until the looking becomes too challenging, or until it’s gone.”

Immortality Through Breeding: I’m not 100% convinced that this piece isn’t the result of some sort of elaborate trolling sting to fool the reporter into thinking that the faintly-ridiculous central premise – to whit, that a certain subsection of the very rich have decided that they want to attempt to get their bloodline to own the future by basically just procreating like mad, to the point where their eventual pool of descendants is large enough to have some sort of controlling stake in human affairs and as a result form a kind of Dune-like Atreides-level superfamilynexusthing – is in fact real. AND YET! If you’ve read enough about effective altruism and longtermism and some of the other more recherche’ bits of niche philosophy that the very rich tend to end up espousing (weirdly, these bits of niche philosophy also tend to be the ones that paint said super-plutes as exceptional individuals whose unique brilliance is what has granted them their wealth and who probably deserve to be ruling and running everything!) then this sounds sort of weirdly-plausible; I for one am very glad that I will be long dead before the 9th-generation of post-Elon Musks takes control of the irradiated wastelands that remain.

How Facebook Designed The ‘Like’: This is properly fascinating – it’s not wholly hyperbolic to say that the ‘Like’ button has been one of the most culturally-significant bits of code ever written, at least in terms of the way that it shaped the internet in its formative mass-adoption years, and, through so doing, the way that it subsequently shaped society. What I find most interesting about this is the degree to which the issues we know know resulted from the ‘like’ – the way it favoured light-touch, no friction interaction, in particular – were predicted to a degree but considered to be trivial when compared to the potential benefits; I am not suggesting for a second that anyone can have been expected to predict exactly how its evolution, rollout and adoption by the wider web will have played out, but it’s fascinating to see that people literally did have the ‘yeah, but won’t this just make people default to incredibly light-touch social interactions and reduce meaningful engagement between individuals, as well as not doing anything positive for the idea of nuanced and in-depth debate online?’ conversation and decided ‘well, maybe, but wevs’.

Hancock: I can’t imagine you want to read about Matt Hancock, but don’t worry, this isn’t really about him – instead, Sam Leith in the Spectator writes about the very modern obsession that people in the public eye have with showing their ‘real’ selves, and the fact that the rest of us really, honestly, genuinely don’t care what our elected officials are like as people and would simply prefer that they were competent and honest (qualities which Hancock has not previously demonstrated in abundance). Again, this feels tied in some way to the ‘influencer capital’ piece up there – must EVERYONE be a brand?

Football and Money: You really wouldn’t know that a major international football tournament starts on Sunday – fine, yes, there’s a new version of that fcuking Three Lions song out today, but in terms of people actually getting excited about the sport in question it’s yet to really capture the public imagination (maybe it’s different if you’re an 11 year old, of course, I shouldn’t assume that everyone looks at life with the jaded, cataracted eyes of the senescent). Why? OH YES THAT’S RIGHT IT’S MONEY FCUKING EVERYTHING UP ONCE AGAIN. If you’re a keen follower of football and the wider discussion around it then this is unlikely to tell you anything you don’t know, but for the rest of you this is a useful and instructive whistlestop tour of how the game has changed since it become a toy of the billionaire classes in the post-Premier League era.

Reviewing The New Meta Quest Pro VR Thingy: I don’t normally feature product reviews here, but I’ll make an exception for this as I think it’s the best explanation yet of why Meta might be a bit fcuked. Read this review – by a tech reporter, for a tech publication, so exactly the sort of target audience that Meta have in mind for this bit of kit – and have a wonder as to exactly how many people, based on the reporter’s experiences, might ever be minded to fork out £1500 for an ugly, heavy helmet that you can use for a couple of hours at a time to do spreadsheets in VR with.

The Other Side of the Twitter Exodus: I really enjoyed this essay, by Hugh Rundle, on what it feels like as a long-term user of Mastodon to see the hordes of Twitter users approaching over the horizon, and the feeling of having your home suddenly invaded by a bunch of people who don’t know you, don’t know the rules, and seemingly want to do nothing more than p1ss on your rug and have noisy sex in your shed when all you want to do in there is paint Airfix models. This is, to be clear, in no way a ‘we don’t want you here, leave’ rant – it’s more of a thoughtful piece on the nature of small communities and the care it takes to build and curate them, and the necessarily different desires and use cases that communities have when they change from being small to massive. Here’s a taster – but I encourage you to read the whole thing, as it’s a really interesting perspective: “It’s not entirely the Twitter people’s fault. They’ve been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there’s been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves “refugees”, but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don’t know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we’re losing.”

Local Ubers: One of the things that I have decided over the past 5 or so years that I really believe – and one I which, I know, I have wanged on about too much here, for which apologies – is that we are going to look back on the past three decades as a period of time when we let Venture Capital do untold harm to society in pursuit of ceaseless hockeystick growth and margin. This article in the always-excellent Rest of World is a nice example of what can happen outside of that relentless flywheel – it profiles a number of different ridehailing companies that have been established in markets that aren’t currently served by Uber due to their being perceived as too small and unprofitable, and which are able to offer a small, limited service to people who need it without the desperate drive from investors to increase user numbers and margins and returns. Turns out it’s perfectly possible to run a small-scale business that serves a user need and a community and make it work, enough to pay yourself and your drivers and to earn a living, and you don’t need to expand ruthlessly or put anyone at risk or be some sort of *ahem* ubercnut to do so. Whodathunkit, eh?

The MSCHF Art Show: Another profile of MSCHF to coincide with the…agency(?)’s inaugural real-world art show currently taking place in NYC. Your interest in this will largely depend on your interest in both MSCHF as brand/art pranksters and the intersection between brand, marketing and high-end artworld stuff, but I personally find the whole project here fascinating, not least the seeming pivot away from advermarketingpr-type stunts towards the sort of stuff that feels more adjacent to brands like Balenciaga or Supreme (who I suppose they have always been a natural evolution of). Still, though, no piece has offered me an adequate explanation as to a) where the initial cash for this came from; b) what the VCs who’ve paid in think they are investing in.

All The PR: A journalist at Slate spends a day saying ‘yes’ to all the PR emails they receive – this is what their day was like. This is interesting even if you have never worked in PR (you lucky, lucky fcuker) or journalism, but if you have done either then you will very much enjoy this (albeit probably for different reasons). I have MANY THOUGHTS on this, but the main one is ‘man, there are some fcuking terrible PRs in the US that are literally stealing money from idiots!’ I particularly enjoyed the quote from one business owner who says something like “Our PR is always telling us to keep an eye on the news to see if there are any breaking stories we might want to offer a comment on” and, my dude, that is literally what you are paying the PR for, perhaps stop paying them.

Can Food Be Art?: I have a feeling this might be paywalled – if so, sorry, but it’s an excellent opportunity to subscribe to Vittles which really is worth every penny if you have any interest in food and writing about food. Still, if you’re able to read it then you will be treated to a beautiful pair of essays on the links between food and art, the extent to which food can and / or should ever be thought of as art, and the role of the aesthetic in defining our relationship with what we eat. Also, the descriptions of radicchio in the second essay are just LOVELY.

London’s Forgotten River: A GREAT essay, which taught me all about the river Roding and which is genuinely heartwarming about the community and care that exist around it. It is also, unfortunately, likely to also render you inconceivably p1ssed-off when you read things like this: “I traced the source of this to an outflow, which was clearly spewing raw sewage (visible poo, toilet paper, condoms and all) into the brook and from there directly into the Roding. From estimating the rate of flow, it would appear to be spilling potentially hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage into the Roding every day and appears to have been doing so for some time. This is the worst pollution event that I have ever seen.” The Trust reported the spill. And though Thames Water came to investigate they have so far not resolved the issue.” There are notes of hope, though, not least in the ideas towards the end of the piece around the concept of the rediscovery of value in the commons, and the potential for giving natural areas defined state ‘incomes’ which are guaranteed and which are used for their upkeep. Baby steps.

What It’s Like To Dissect A Cadaver: This is an odd piece – I don’t think the author would mind my describing them as a touch idiosyncratic, as evidenced by the fact that, per this article, they have so far paid multiple times to attend dissections as a curious observer. Which, it’s fair to say, isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time,but has resulted in this fragmentary series of observations about what it’s really like to apply a scalpel to dead flesh and cut. This is written conversationally and dispassionately, but it’s probably not one for the squeamish – your likely enjoyment will depend largely on your ability to stomach lines like: “Cutting into the skin and tissue is interesting. The skin goes way deeper than I thought, and you can stand a scissor point in it,” which in and of itself is a perfectly banal sentence until you take a moment to actually imagine it at which point it becomes powerfully evocative.

Menu Design: SUCH a great book review in the LRB – this is Rosemary Hill, writing about a book on European menu design through history and taking the reader on a whistlestop tour through culinary history and trends in both food and society over the past couple of hundred years. This is JOYOUS – my girlfriend and I collect restaurant menus, in part so we can remember what the fcuk we ate which occasionally gets tricky after the third bottle – and so I am admittedly the perfect target audience for this, but I challenge anyone not to be charmed by stuff like this: “Who knows what a Coventry Puff is, or a Fedora Pudding? Congress Tart sounds unappealing and it is unclear what the Haversnack café in London had in mind in 1966 in its offer of ‘Fruit Disc’ for 1/6d.” I WANT CONGRESS TART NOW.

On Lithuanians and Russians: Ok, a warning, this is VERY LONG, but it is also a superb piece of writing – honestly, I can’t stress how much I enjoyed the prose here (translated from the Lithiuanian by Elizabeth Novickas – I don’t obviously speak Lithuanian so can’t comment on the accuracy, but this reads EXCEPTIONALLY well) – which touches on national identity and selfhood and history and politics and philosophy, and, honestly, if you can spare the time and a bit of light thinking work, this is one of the best things you will read all week, I promise you.

Lockwood On Saunders: Finally this week, Patricia Lockwood writes about the work of George Saunders. It’s a testament to how good Lockwood is as a writer that I enjoyed every word of this, despite not being familiar with all of the works discussed – if you are a devotee of Saunders work then this will obviously be of help, but anyone with an interest in The Novel and The Short Story (sorry, but) and narrative and Why Writers Write (sorry again) will adore this. Honestly, it makes me almost upset how good Lockwood is and how well she writes – it’s just not fair that someone can be this good (specifically, someone who isn’t me).

By Keita Morimoto

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

The general consensus is that we’re still a way away from AI generated music being anything that anyone in their right mind might actually want to listen to – but I discovered this this week, and was…impressed. Fine, it sounds quite a lot like someone turning the analogue dial between a bunch of world music stations while you listen from a couple of rooms away, but, equally, it also sounds almost like a real song in places, and as someone who spent more money than they care to remember in the late-90s for CDs by ‘experimental’ beats-type outfits it sounds oddly reminiscent of my youth. Oh, and the video’s done by AI too, because why not?

I’m not sure whether Brockhampton ever managed to become the biggest boyband in the world, but they have certainly been famous – as of this week, though, the group is DONE. No idea what happens next for them, though I’ll watch everything Kevin Abstract does with interest – til they resurface, though, this is one of the tracks from their final album, called ‘New Shoes’.

This is by Sega Bodega, it’s called ‘Kepko’, and my notes for this in the Curios GDoc read, simply, ‘skittering’, which frankly does as good a job of describing the track as anything else I could write here.

I can’t exactly say I like this, but it’s certainly compelling – there’s a certain quality to the delivery of the spoken verses that reminds me a lot of the cadence used in ‘Sharks Patrol These Waters’ by Morphine, not that any of you care about that. This is called ‘Leech’ and it’s by Dream Wife and it’s…hypnotic.

This, though, is beautiful. It’s called ‘Barking Dog’ and it’s by Dizzy

Last up this week, it’s another banger from my favourite UK MC Manga St Hilare – introspective little track, this, but with exceptional flow as ever. “This Isn’t About Me” – AND THAT’S YOUR LOT IT’S OVER I AM SPENT AND DONE AND AS EVER I HAVE EMPTIED MYSELF ALL OVER THE FLOOR OF THIS NEWSLETTER JUST FOR YOU AND I HOPE YOU LIKED IT DID YOU LIKE IT DID YOU LIKE IT DID YOU DID YOU I HOPE SO BECAUSE REGARDLESS IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN NEXT WEEK SO PLEASE COME BACK PLEASE COME BACK I LOVE YOU DON’T LEAVE ME I NEED YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!.

Webcurios 11/11/22

November 11, 2022

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Reading Time: 32 minutes

Many years ago – I think it was 2012 – I was unexpectedly approached on LinkedIn about a job at Twitter (they were looking for someone to run their comms in the UK and Europe, suggesting someone somewhere was very much having a laugh when they suggested me). I had several interviews in London, and was even flown out to San Francisco (economy class, though) for a final interview with a bunch of important people including their then head of legal and even Biz Stone. I didn’t get the job, mainly because of the fact that I was woefully unqualified and definitely not a safe pair of hands (there may also have been an embarrassing moment when the head of legal pulled up a Tweet I had sent to Sir Martin Sorrell asking about the whereabouts of my ‘fcuking bonus’ that they seemed to think indicated ‘poor professional judgement’, the dullards), and it’s a good thing that I didn’t because I would have been fcuking terrible at it, not least because back then I was even less worried about such piddling niceties as ‘not going out for a three hour lunch’ and ‘being sober on the job’ than I am now (and trust me, I still don’t really care that much).

I still, though, don’t think I would have made as much of a pig’s ear of that gig as Elon seems to be making of the whole company.

Anyway, I’ve spent too long this week being forced to pay attention to, and think about, that fcuking man, so let’s stop there and get on with this week’s links which I promise will continue to work even if Twitter suddenly dies at some point in the mid-afternoon.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are inexplicably still reading this self-evidently phoned-in introduction for reasons that, frankly, escape me.

By Charles Burns

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A BRAND NEW MIX FROM SADEAGLE’S VOLUMINOUS COLLECTION OF VINYL ODDITIES, WHICH THIS TIME IS BROADLY LATIN-ISH AND IS TYPICALLY EXCELLENT!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT’S A GENUINE SHAME THAT ELON MUSK IS UNLIKELY TO EVER PARTICIPATE IN IACGMOH AS RIGHT NOW IT WOULD REALLY LIKE TO FEED HIM A FRANKLY-UNCONSCIONABLE QUANTITY OF RAW ANIMAL VISCERA AS PUNISHMENT FOR ALL THIS, PT.1:

The Tweet Museum: It does rather have the feel of the last days over at Twitter right now – the only good thing about this (unless of course you’re of the general opinion that Twitter is a cancer and should be excised from society) is that one hopes it may prove to be a nail, however small, in the coffin of the idea of ‘Musk as intellectual ubermensch’. Should you be in the process of dealing with the tough realities of your (ok, fine, my) favourite timesink potentially going to the great server in the sky, you may be comforted slightly by this website where a person known only as ‘Ian’ is collecting screencaps of THE BEST TWEETS EVER to preserve for posterity (or, more likely, as long as he can be bothered to pay for the domain). This is…look, it’s an uncomfortable admission but I think I can probably admit here to the fact that I spend more time online than is probably strictly healthy (I went to a thing last night that was basically about ‘weird sh1t on the internet’ and I already knew everything, which felt quite wrong) and that as a result a significant proportion of the tweets here captured feel like ACTUAL CULTURAL ARTEFACTS. The King’s Hand! A cat in a yurt! God, I’m getting preemptive nostalgia just typing this stuff. Click this link, scroll the ‘exhibits’, and weep internally for all that we are almost certainly about to lose thanks to one pr1ck’s hubris/desire to usher in a new politico-financial world order (delete as applicable).

Twittoons: I’ve mentioned this here before, but don’t think I ever linked to the site – Twittoons is where former Twitter employee (as of a week or so ago) Manu Cornet hosts their satirical cartoons about the company, which they produced throughout their year working there as a reflection on the weirdness of the place and its role in the global politicomediaclusterfcuk. As you can imagine, Cornet has…opinions on the Musk situation. This is half-funny and half just sort of…sad, to be honest.

Who Blue?: You know what it’s like when you launch something, right? SO MUCH WORK and stress and horror and fear and everything being glued together with string and sellotape, and when you launch it and it works NOONE EVER KNOWS just how rickety and close-to-collapse everything was behind the scenes. Except this week, with the launch (or, more accurately, attempted launch) of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription project, which has demonstrated exactly how every website and business is just one billionaire’s brainfart away from total collapse at any given moment. At the time of writing, the whole subscription product has apparently vanished from the app – whether that means it’s been canned or whether something has just fallen over in the back end is unknown, and I’m pretty sure that Elon doesn’t quite know either – but, should it ever return, this Chrome plugin will apparently help you distinguish between people whose blue ticks were ‘earned’ (LOL) through professional competence or general notoriety vs the FILTHY ARRIVISTES who bought them. Except according to Elon, all legacy blue ticks will be sunsetted anyway, so who knows whether this will work in 48h. Or indeed if the website it’s meant to work with will make it through the next six months. INTERESTING TIMES! Oh, and here’s another extension which will apparently level the Twitter playing field by unverifying everyone, just in case you fancy such a thing.

Visualising Stable Diffusion: There’s something interesting in the fact that every single thing you can imagine seeing as an image can in theory be mapped in latent space, the idea that the sum of visual imagination is also, basically, maths (or it’s intensely creepy and makes the world feel unpleasantly-deterministic; take your pick) – this is a visualisation of the Stable Diffusion-generated images that have been included in the search set for prompt database Krea, and it’s sort-of wonderful; the standard view is a constellation of datapoints with each being an image, their relative position being determined by the elements they share. So basically this is a GALAXY of AI-created pictures which you can zoom around and explore a bit, and it’s in part a wonderful window into all the things that people have asked the machines to imagine as well as being an interesting taxonomical exercise in how the machine ‘thinks’ of the images. I think everything in here is SFW, but please don’t come blaming me if you end up in one of the seamier arms of the AI hentai galaxy.

Amazing AI Camera Thingy: I appreciate that even by my standards that is a…shonky descriptor, but I honestly have no idea how one might describe this in a single sentence. Er…ok, so imagine that you have taken a video of something? Are you imagining that? GOOD. Now imagine that the camera movements that you undertook whilst filming that something can be transposed to a video of ANY OTHER digital thing – so, for example, you could take a particularly well-executed tracking shot and apply it to a digital object in digital space. And yes, I know that that’s a fcuking horrific description that barely makes any sense, but YOU try putting the future into words and see how you get on. Honestly, this is so interesting – I don’t have the first idea of how this works, but the potential executions are fascinating. I really like the idea (for example) of taking a single 30s camera movement and challenging people to create scenes that use that shot in interesting ways, or the (admittedly slightly-fanciful) idea of being able to take iconic directorial styles and transpose them onto other works. It’s a real shame we’re all in the process of killing ourselves at a species level, because some of this future stuff really is fascinating.

Draw Things: OK, so this is iOS-only and so I confess to not actually having tried it out, but various people online have spoken glowingly about this and so I feel reasonably-safe recommending it – it’s basically AN Other AI image-generation toy (I presume based on Stable Diffusion) but it’s an app and non-browser-based and therefore might be slightly less clunky than the mobile web interfaces for Dall-E and the rest. Web Curios obviously takes no responsibility whatsoever for any appalling things that may happen (but which probably won’t, honest!) to your mobile device as a result of installing this.

Hublot Loves Football: I have never gotten the impression that Zuckerberg and Musk are friends, but I can only imagine the degree of gratitude that the Meta CEO feels towards the squarial-faced emerald scion this week; it speaks to journalism’s Twitter sickness that the loss of 11,000 jobs at one of the most significant companies in modern human history has been largely ignored, comparatively-speaking, in favour of endless column inches about WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE BIRD SITE. Still, let’s take a moment to pour one out for the many thousands of people who have just been sacrificed to the Great Metaversal Revolution – and, while we’re here, shall we check in on how that’s going? GREAT! Hublot make watches – look, my arms are thin and my wrists are very breakable, and I could barely lift a luxury timepiece, don’t ask me any more about Hublot – and are sponsors of the World Cup, and have decided to ACTIVATE THAT SPONSORSHIP by, er, entering the metaverse! Do you know what that means? THAT’S RIGHT THEY HAVE BUILT A MISERABLE, SH1TTY LITTLE 3D EXPERIENCE!! What does the World Cup mean to you? Schumacher/Battiston? Fabio Grosso? Or the ability to ‘explore’ a poorly-rendered CG football stadium in painfully-slow detail, and possibly the chance to stand next to a heavily-pixelated image of a FIFA ambassador? If you answered ‘give me the CG, daddy!’ then WOW will you enjoy this – honestly, even by the standards of p1ss-poor ‘metaverse’ rubbish this is particularly poor, from the low-quality graphics to the fact that it’s just so…big and empty (I like to imagine that this was a deliberate design choice by the team to artificially juice the dwelltime statistics) and there is simply nothing to do and nowhere to go and no sense that anyone involved in the project had ever experienced football (or sport, or joy, or the touch of another human being). Perhaps worst of all – certainly from the point of view of the idiot brand moron who signed off on the spend and the partnership with ‘metaverse destination’ Spatial for the delivery – is that, beyond the name, I have no fcuking clue whatsoever what this has to do with selling overpriced timepieces to beefy-wristed time enthusiasts.Spectacularly sad and pointless – not unlike the World Cup itself (yes I am bitter that Italy didn’t qualify, what of it?).

The Metaverse Festival: Did you spend Sunday morning desperately refreshing the Glastonbury page and hoping against hope that you were one of the lucky ones? Or did you instead consider waking up and then think ‘no, fcuk it, I do not ever need to go camping again and there is no way in hell I am ever forking out for a luxury yurt and so I will leave it to the children’? If the former, well done you and I hope you got lucky; if the latter, then perhaps you would rather check out the Metaverse Festival (lol!), taking place THIS WEEKEND and featuring actual proper people that you may have heard of, like Metallica and Bjork. It’s taking place in Decentraland, which basically means that the experience will be like listening to a poorly-encoded MP3 through someone else’s iPod headphones from two rooms away while a bunch of poorly-dressed sub-Roblox avatars teabag each other with energetic abandon, but, well, BJORK!

The Universal Poem: This has been going for a few years now but I only stumbled across it this week – Universal Poem is, er, literally that, an ongoing work of collaborative poetry that has been written by hundreds (thousands?) of strangers from across the world over the past couple of years. This is, fine, a bit of a mess, unsurprisingly, but there’s also something lovely about the slightly infinite corpse-ish nature of the exercise. For reasons I don’t quite understand, submissions in Spanish vastly outweigh those in other languages (there’s a map of where contributions have come from and the UK is only on about 60-odd lines, which is frankly embarrassing) and as such your ability to appreciate the content of the poem will in part depend on your ability to parse lines such as “¡Érase el hombre malo de la Pradera!”, but there’s something genuinely wonderful about the fact that this is slowly growing day-by-day a strangers around the globe drop in to add lines to it.

A Gift From Ukraine: ARE YOU FEELING FESTIVE YET YOU CNUTS? No, me neither – it turns out that one’s desire to revel in the idea of cosy, festive warmth is somewhat muted when the reality of existence for many is less ‘chestnuts on an open fire’ and more ‘soft, vulnerable flesh pressed against a burning brazier’ – but I appreciate that it might not be possible for you to totally ignore this year’s festival of conspicuous consumption and that, as such, you may be in the market for presents and things like that. A Gift From Ukraine is a service set up by a family of Ukrainians currently living in the UK, offering Ukrainian products and pro-Ukrainian merchandise for sale, with proceeds going to charity – this looks and feels legit and like A Good Thing, but obviously I apologise in advance if in fact this is just a scam run by a man called Tony from an industrial estate in Harlow.

The Wordcraft Writers’ Workshop: This is interesting – Google recently published the results of an experiment it ran with its LAMDA text AI (you know, the one that the engineer thought was Jesus – Christ, was that only this year?) and a collection of authors which the company invited to explore co-creation with the machine; this website collects the essays that they wrote. There’s a full description on the site, but this is a helpful summary: “Wordcraft is a tool built by researchers at Google PAIR for writing stories with AI. The application is powered by LaMDA, one of the latest generation of large language models. At its core, LaMDA is a simple machine — it’s trained to predict the most likely next word given a textual prompt. But because the model is so large and has been trained on a massive amount of text, it’s able to learn higher-level concepts. It also demonstrates a fascinating emergent capability often referred to as in-context learning. By carefully designing input prompts, the model can be instructed to perform an incredibly wide range of tasks. However this process (often referred to as prompt engineering) is finicky and difficult even for experienced practitioners. We built Wordcraft with the goal of exploring how far we could push this technique through a carefully crafted user interface, and to empower writers by giving them access to these state-of-the-art tools.” Honestly, this made me feel a bit…funny – these are real writers, several of whom I have actually heard of, and reading a few of these stories I had literally no idea at all whether I was reading words penned by person or by machine or by a collaborating pair…and that’s the point, I suppose. I would have been interested to read accompanying short essays by each author about their experience of the creative process, being demanding, but this is SUCH a fascinating experiment with some hugely-impressive outputs.

Are You Pressworthy?: Many years ago in the UK there was a particularly bleak summer for child abductions, which saw a young woman called Millie Dowler go missing and then, a relatively short while later, a pair of twins called Holly and Jessica. As is, inevitably, the way of these things, the latter disappearance totally overshadowed the former (after all, there were two of them!), and I remember stumbling across a website (this must have been, without checking…2003?) which riffed on this fact (in admittedly hugely tasteless fashion) by selling tshirts which read, in small letters across the front, “where the fcuk is Millie?”. Anyway, I was reminded of that by this website, which uses real data about the amount of press coverage devoted to various missing person cases to make the point that who you are, and what you look like, makes a significant difference to the amount of media attention you’re likely to get around your disappearance. Are you a non-white male? Don’t get expect a tabloid campaign to find you, basically. This is a nicely-made little site which communicates its central message powerfully.

Passive Cooking: I don’t normally feature PR stunts that are…good, but I very much enjoyed this bit of work by Italian pasta wonks Barilla (fun fact: the theme tune to the Barilla ads in Italy is so hard-wired into the psyche of every Italian that merely humming the first 10 notes can reduce even hardened expats to tears) which plays on the fact that domestic gas prices are horrific and that as a result even doing simple things like boiling a pan of water might feel a bit of the extravagant side – the site basically gives you instructions on how to cook pasta using the ‘soak in just-boiled water much like you would with rice’ method, rather than the ‘keep on a rolling boil for 10m’ method. Which, I confess, made me instinctively recoil, because no Italian has EVER cooked pasta like this, but which actually seems like a pretty smart idea and probably won’t end with an inedible plate of floury collagen. I particularly like the way the idea expands – yes, fine, at its most basic it’s just a list of different cooking times for different types of pasta, but there’s also an ACTUAL PASTA-SOAKING BASKET DEVICE that you can 3d print should you have the means, which feels like a nice extension. Oh, ok, if I’m being cynical it’s perhaps a touch awards-baity, but in general this feels…good! How odd to be positive for a change!

The Spaceshipper: A Twitter account sharing stuff relating to spaceships – fictional ones, in the main – from drawings to videos to film stills. Another of those occasional Curios links that feel like they should be catnip to a certain type of middle-aged man.

Locals: On the one hand, this is ANOTHER FCUKING APP, and it’s ANOTHER FCUKING THING where the ‘insight’ behind it is that ‘people are lonely in the modern world!’ which is, honestly, a statement of such crushingly obvious banality that I want anyone using it in the future to be cast into some sort of eternal oubliette so they can realise the true meaning of solitude and suffering; on the other, maybe you will find it useful. Locals – currently live in London and LA, “Locals.org creates a safe environment for people who want to meet new people, have fun, learn new things, feed their souls with emotions and build meaningful connections”, which, as far as I can tell, seems to mean that you can browse events that have been created by other people to find things that you want to do and people you want to do them with, and create your own for other people to find. Which does sort of beg the question as to why you can’t just use one of the myriad other social platforms for the same purpose, and exactly what it is that Locals brings to the table besides a nice design and some VC money – although, as far as I can tell, there’s a degree of vetting to the community and so you’re perhaps less likely to get a sweaty-palmed wrongman turning up at your whist drive than you might be if you used Facebook for the same purpose.

The Magical Pantry:I am not entirely sure how it happened, but if you go to the US then you will discover that Kerrygold butter is some sort of hipster product, trading on its IRISH GRASSINESS rather than being, as it is in London, what you buy in the cornershop in desperation when you realise the Lurpak’s gone rancid. Which perhaps explains why they’ve gone to the trouble of creating this rather swish site which presents a series of gently-interactive stories which double up as simple recipes – choose the story you want to ‘read’ and you’ll be guided through an (admittedly nicely-illustrated) tale with a light ‘BE KIND YOU FCUK’ moral which also doubles as a guide to cooking various buttery treats. This is aimed at kids, obviously – although show me a child who would be interested in cooking or eating a broccoli and potato gratin and I will show you a fcuking changeling – but there’s a general ‘read along as a family’ vibe, with the ability to print out the stories and keep them should you desire. This is…quite good, in a small sort of way, and I was particularly impressed by the fact that it lives at the very top of the homepage of the Kerrygold US site – if you’re going to make this sort of stuff, after all, you might as well tell people about it.

Pizza Flicks: Do you want a YouTube channel collecting a vast quantity of old films and TV episodes from the 1930s, 40s and 50s? YES YOU DO! There is basically a motherlode of kitsch here, and if you’re undecided as to whether to click then let me just tell you that this contains several films by the great Ed Wood, widely acknowledged as one of the least-competent directors ever to grace Hollywood and whose Plan 9 From Outer Space is still to this day one of the most incredible (and I mean that literally) examples of the cinematic art you will ever see.

Apple Rankings: A site which exists solely to rank the world’s apple varieties by quality, and to give you an honest-if-subjective opinion as to the strengths and weaknesses of various different cultivars. Which, ok, may not sound like loads of fun, but it’s elevated by the quality of the writing which has the air of being written by someone to whom apples have done a great but unspecified harm and who bears grudges. Witness this description of the Fuji, an apple which I don’t think quite deservces the following scathing review: “it has the taste of used sponge water and the consistency of the dirty leftovers it cleaned. This mushy, rough-skinned, Japanese experiment gone awry is perfect for anyone who enjoys the taste of an apple that feels like it’s already been eaten by someone else.” If you’ve ever wanted to read several thousand words of someone just basically beating the everliving textual sh1t out of some otherwise-blameless fruit then you will LOVE this.

Social Justice Kittens 2023: IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN! The Social Justice Kittens calendar returns again, juxtaposing lovely photos of kittens (and puppies!) with some of the more batsh1t examples of Tumblr-speak from the corners of the web, juxtaposed with some very cute animals. This is, as ever, a delight – my personal favourite from the 2023 selection is I think the little guy captioned with “Calling yourself a free thinker means you want to be free to think bad thoughts”, but, well, choose your fighter!

By Caleb Hahne Quintana

NEXT UP, AN HOUR’S D’N’B WITH MCING BY HARRY SHOTTA AND OTHER EXCELLENT PEOPLE!

Bubbles: A tiny webtoy that lets you blow bubbles. Move the fan! Move the spike! Watch the bubbles! I don’t know what it says about my current state of mind that I am hugely tempted to do nothing more for the rest of the day than stare at this and cry slowly, but probably nothing good.

IA Presenter: I tend to try not to feature too much stuff in Curios that’s directly-related to the tedious realities of the dayjob – you’re here for a good time, not a timesheet! – but occasionally stuff lurches across my radar that looks genuinely quite useful. So it is with AI Presenter, a tool for helping you make slideshows but which does so by seeking to change the way in which you think about said slideshows – so starting with the content and copy rather than slides, and encouraging the user to think about what they are trying to say before getting to the ‘putting it on slides’ bit. This is in closed beta, but you can apply for access, and if you’re the sort of person who starts work on something by just writing into a document to get ideas of structure and themes then you’re already doing what this is trying to teach you – but, on the other hand, if you’re stuck in a working environment in which you’re surrounded by morons who can’t do anything other than put things in fcuking PPT then you may find this a helpful way of retraining their slide-addled minds.

DMV Bot: One of the ‘fun’ things about California is the fact that anyone can theoretically have anything they want as a license plate (space permitting) – except, of course, you can’t have anything as it’s America and people might get offended to the point of firearm-assisted homicide if you were to emblazon something as controversial as, I don’t know, ‘free healthcare at the point of delivery’ on your vehicle. This is a Twitter account which shares real-life examples of applications received by the California DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles? Probably) in 2015-16, and whether they were approved for use or not along with the reason for the judgement – so, for example, I now know that someone tried and failed to get ‘HUF4RTD’ as their license plate and it was rejected because, and I quote, “It clearly reads ‘Who Farted’”. This is glorious.

Landscape Photographer of the Year 2022: These are, as you would expect, superb – I have a personal preference for this rather gorgeous shot of the neons of Margate’s Dreamland reflected in street puddles, but there are LOADS of superb images here to peruse and enjoy.

Metaphor Search: Via Shardcore, this is an interesting idea seeking to apply some of the same sort of techniques used in generative AI to deliver results. “It’s a new type of search engine, built from scratch, and we’d love for you to try it. Search today looks largely like search 20 years ago. Search engines do a reasonable job at returning results that match the literal content of your query but often fail to understand your real goal. The effect is that even for simple questions, it’s often quite easy to get lost in a sea of irrelevant results. Metaphor is a search engine that understands language – in the form of prompts – so you can type what you’re looking for in all the expressive and creative ways you can think of. The model that powers Metaphor is trained using a form of self-supervised learning, the same paradigm behind models like Stable Diffusion and GPT-3. Stable Diffusion tries to generate images based on their captions, GPT-3 tries to predict the next word based on the previous ones, and the model behind Metaphor tries to predict the next link on a webpage based on all the words that come before it.” I;ve yet to have a proper play, but a cursory examination suggests that you can find some rather cool stuff with this – a search for “a website featuring great links”, for example, magically pulled up a few of my favourite link repositories which strikes me as a good sign. One to keep an eye on and maybe bookmark.

Crowd: Ooh, this is *such* a smart idea and one which definitely has some interesting applications that I haven’t quite managed to think of yet but which someone as clever as YOU will definitely be able to work out. The blurb is as follows: “This website is a small experiment, where each visit to the page deteriorates the main image. Every 400 visitors a reset button appears on the bottom, which can be used to restore the image back to its original quality. You could see this website as a metaphor for the effects of tourism, how humanity affects nature, or how meme quality degrades over time as they are shared.” What might you use a degrading website for? An image that only reveals itself to the nth visitor to a page, containing a secret message or instructions (START THE KILLING) or some sort of clue? THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS! At the very least I quite like the idea of a site that has an inbuilt shelf-life, degrading to the point of unreadability after a certain number of visitors and lost forever.

The HappyToast Tarot Deck: You may know HappyToast from other parts of the internet – he’s been making drawings online for years, and I first discovered his stuff through B3ta back in the day. He’s launched a Kickstarter to crowdfund a tarot deck he’s designed, with cards featuring descriptions of the meanings of all the arcana, and if you’re in the market for something that’s simultaneously a bit occult and a nice example of a singular artistic style then you could do worse than check this out (also, it’s already funded so there’s no risk of disappointment. Apart from from your eventual apocalyptic reading itself).

Die In The Game: Ok, so this isn’t technically a thing so much as a proof-of-concept idea for a thing – still, it’s upsetting and a bit horrifying and so probably fits in well here. “If you die in the game, you die in real life” is a protoypical VR headset designed to deliver that exact experience – the device is inspired by manga/anime Sword Art Online, which features as part of its plot a scenario in which a bunch of gamers are trapped in a VR title which, if they die in-game, will kill them in meatspace too. Hence this model, which imagines what such a device might look like and how it might function, which in this case involves having a bunch of explosive devices attached to the headband of the headset, primed to go off should the user die in-game. “I used three of the explosive charge modules I usually use for a different project, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency, making game-over integration on the part of the developer very easy. When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user.” I am genuinely fascinated to see which game is the first to offer a real permadeath mode using this kit – obviously this is sort-of a joke, but, well, I can also totally imagine a streamer eventually upping the ante to the point where this seems like the natural logical progression from emotes and subscriber drives.

TinyTV: I don’t generally feature links to things that are just ‘stuff you can buy’, but given Christmas is approaching I feel I can make a small exception for cool stuff like this. Admittedly it’s not cheap – £75 is a fair old whack – but the TinyTV is SO CUTE, and basically acts as a VERY SMOL monitor for whatever you want to play on it. “The TinyTV® DIY Kit assembles easily in less than 5 minutes with no soldering or special tools required. Load your own videos, movies, and TV shows easily using our TSVconverter – a free tool to convert any MP4 file. Then load the files onto the included MicroSD card, sit back, relax, and enjoy hours of entertainment! The TinyTV DIY Kit is 3D printed, has a rechargeable battery, 4 push-buttons, and an ON/OFF switch and it also comes with the Tiny Remote, so you can easily change channels, power on or off, and adjust the volume.” Look, if you’re not charmed by the idea of a tiny telly with its own, working, tiny remote control, you’re probably beyond help. I am now half-tempted to get one of these and a pair of hamsters in order to create a series of cosy, rodent-based domestic dioramas, and you might well be too after clicking the link.

Mad Heidi: I also don’t tend to feature links to forthcoming films, but this looks so…idiosyncratic that I thought I would make an exception (also, it will be available to stream for free on this website on release, so it basically counts as a Curio). This has been a 5-year labour of love, from a spoof movie poster created in 2017 through to the crowdfunded final film set to launch in a few short weeks. What’s it about? I am glad you asked: “In a dystopian Switzerland that has fallen under the fascist rule of an evil cheese tyrant, Heidi lives the pure and simple life in the Swiss Alps. Grandfather Alpöhi does his best to protect Heidi, but her yearning for freedom soon gets her into trouble with the dictator’s henchmen. The innocent girl transforms herself into a kick-ass female fighting force who sets out to liberate the country from the insane cheese fascists.” I mean, look, I think it’s unlikely that this is going to be anything other than a…knockabout romp, and I do wonder how long you can reasonably sustain a gag which at its heart is basically ‘Heidi, but with GUNS!’, and (whilst I’m maybe being unfair to the makers here) this does have rather a strong whiff of ‘could descend into late-nigh-Channel-5-softcore-at-any-moment’ about it, but at the same time it’s nice that the gag has reached its final evolution. Unlikely to trouble the Academy in the 2023 awards season, but perhaps worth a watch in the festive perineum.

Physics Interactives: A bunch of little physics toys and explainers designed to teach you the basic principles of a few of the building blocks of the universe, or alternatively to let you press a few buttons and pull a few levers and scratch your head in blinking incomprehension at the ensuing movements. These look shonky, fine, but I promise you are surprisingly fun – I just lost three minutes attempting to save a dog from a rampaging alien being via the medium of simple physics puzzles, if you want an idea of the degree of concentration I’m bringing to Curios this week.

Dril Tracy: A little Twitter project which uses AI to identify dialogue in panels of the Dick Tracy comic and replace said dialogue with Dril tweets. Which is, obviously, sort-of pointless, which, obviously, makes it sort-of perfect.

Fashion Adviser AI: I have no idea whatsoever what this is built on – I presume GPT-3 or a variant thereof – but I am very taken with the idea of letting this (frankly a bit shonky) website determine my fashion choices for the foreseeable future. Why not let it determine your wardrobe choices for the next week? Ask the website any fashion-related question you like and it will attempt to advise you – recent questions asked of it include “what matches with blue trousers?” and “what colours can I wear with fuschia?”, although it was sadly incapable of answering my desperate cry for help around “how to look halfway fashionable when you haven’t bought any new clothes for approximately a decade”.

Feed Anus To Matt Hancock: Just in case you don’t think he’s being asked to eat enough animal protein of dubious origin during his jungle experience, here’s a simple mobile game in which you try and stuff as many kangaroo testes and dingo ovaries into his mouth as possible within a time limit. Briefly, on the Hancock thing – one of the things that people seem to underestimate about politicians is how fcuking weird they are. You know how weird they come across in general in TV appearances? That’s NOTHING compared to how weird they are in day-to-day life. Watching politicians being ‘normal’ is honestly one of the most unsettling experiences its possible to have outside of the occult, and it’s this that I think will make Hancock’s experience in the jungle so unpleasant for him – it’s not just the fact that he presided over the pandemic sh1tshow, it’s not the hypocrisy and whiff of corruption and the incompetence and the unrepentance and the hubris, it’s the fact that none of the other people in there will like him because, as a politician, he’s basically only on nodding terms with the basic tenets of ‘being a human being’.

Cactus Sim: Be a cactus! It’s not wildly exciting, fine, but it very much feels like an accurate representation of the spiny flora existence.

Teenyshire: Ooh, this is fun – a daily game (NOTHING TO DO WITH WORDLE I PROMISE) in which you are challenged each day to come up with the optimal placement of certain tiles; each can be placed with certain restrictions, and wins points based on certain criteria, and your challenge each day it to place them so as to get the highest score you can. This is a lovely, gentle little puzzle which you may find a nice addition to your daily ‘just one more frivolous website before I return to the grinding horror of my dayjob’ routine.

The CSS Puzzle Box: Last up in this week’s selection of random frivolities is this excellent little game – you know when you were a teenager and one of your mates had this incredible stash box that was from India or Tibet or somewhere and which looked like it was impregnable but which could, when manipulated in a very specific series of ways, be opened to reveal your very own personal stash of plastic-laden soapbar? Well it’s one of those, except a) digital; and b) to the best of my knowledge without the bonus of a poorly-weighed lump of petrol-y resin to reward you at the end. This is really very fun but also quite hard (which is why I was grateful for the fact that there were hints). I would like more of this stuff baked into websites – wouldn’t it be ace if clicking on seven very specific pixels on an ostensibly-boring corporate website took you to a secret easter egg-filled backend, for example? Yes it would. MAKE IT HAPPEN, CODEMONGS!

By Murray Fredericks

FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS ANOTHER 90S THROWBACK AS I GIVE YOU DANNY TENAGLIA PLAYING AT SXM FESTIVAL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Falgaia: I know pixel art feels a little like ‘stuff from the internet of a decade ago’, but I still rather like it and this is some high-quality work with impressive technical chops.

Tapefan: OK, fine, not actually a Tumblr, but it feels like it fits here. The website of a person who really, really likes cassette tapes, so much so that they maintain this page on which they document the various designs of the cassettes themselves and of the blank-ish sleeves they come packaged in. Or at least I presume what this is about – it’s all in Japanese, though, so apologise to the curator if I in fact minsterpreting their life’s passion.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Peter Fredricksen: Fredricksen makes embroidered artworks, often of details of individual frames from cartoons, and whilst that description makes it sound frankly terrible, I promise you that in fact it is good. No really, it is.
SW Gouge: The Insta account of a woman who photographs horses. If you like horses, you will like this (and even if you don’t, frankly, the photos are lovely).
Julia Lillard: The bio to Julia Lillard’s Insta page reads ‘surreal digital collage’ and, honestly, that’s pretty much exactly right. This is some GREAT work.
Filter Drops: An new-ish Insta feed posting examples of Insta filters and general AR/XR work; worth a look and a follow if you’re interested in seeing what people are making with this tech at present.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Jack & Elon: I’m sorry to once again lead this section with stuff about That Fcuking Man (as an aside, it’s genuinely distressing to me that this is the second time in the relatively short lifespan of Web Curios that I have had cause to apply that nickname to someone – noone should ever have to deal with more than one ‘That Fcuking Man’ in one lifetime, surely?), but, well, I do think that his purchase of Twitter is quite a big deal, whether because of the increasingly-likely fact that he is singlehandedly going to tank a business in a matter of what feels like weeks, or, if you take the central tenet of this slightly-conspiracy-ish blogpost seriously, because he’s using it as a means of bringing about a new world order. Look, to be clear, I am not saying that I buy into everything outlined in this post – which effectively suggests that the Musk/Twitter deal was effectively a step in the creation of a ‘multipolar power’ world and the global adoption of web3 ancd crypto – but, equally, I’m not saying I don’t believe any of it. If you happened to listen to Musk’s chat with advertisers the other day – which I did, and fcuk me do I wish I hadn’t – then you might have caught a fleeting mention of the possibility of using crypto to turn Twitter into some sort of universal FS product which, yes, fine, may well be just the latest example of Elon SPEEKING HIZ BRANES but which may equally be a sign that not all of the stuff set out here is entirely batsh1t.

How To Build A Winning Paid Membership Model: I feel I need to apologise again here for introducing a link to the corporate blog of VC nightmares Andreesen Horowitz, but in my defence this is a really smart piece of writing which neaty articulates all the ways in which one might go about establishing a functional, successful, mechanically-viable paid membership model, and why (parenthetically) none of what Twitter has done so far fits within that framework. I mean, yes, ok, a lot of this is also slightly bleak, in particular the relentless drive to incorporate game mechanics to incentivise member engagement and drive value to subscribers (which reads not-dissimarly from Adrian Hon’s excellent satirical Twitter thread on this from last week), but it’s also not stupid, and I still believe that if there’s a future for NFTs that it might come as part of this sort of paid membership structure for digital services.

Bring Back Forums: I can only concur. I spent a significant proportion of 2002-4 lurking on a range of forums and they were fucking GREAT – a combination of interesting chat, deep knowledge, terrible sh1tposting and a real sense of community, all happening at a manageable pace, with the best examples featuring decent moderation and a shared understanding of where the lines and boundaries were. Honestly, it’s a genuine shame to me that forum architecture has died off so much – I wonder to what extent that was facilitated by Google killing off the specific ‘search forums’ functionality way back in the day (and whether it’s recent decision to at least partially reinstate it will reverse that trend in any meaningful sense). This gave me a very real pang of nostalgia for Something Awful, and Popbitch (although, fine, that wasn’t technically a forum), and the days when B3ta was a bit more lively, and as soon as I’m done writing this I’m off to see whether Liphook’s still live (if you know, you know).

Theses on the Techlash: I very much enjoyed this piece, which examines what we mean when we talk about the ‘techlash’ and the extent to which said techlash is only ever partial because we understand that we are sort-of trapped within the machine and, perhaps, have developed a relationship with it so symbiotic that we couldn’t free ourselves if we wanted to and if we tried. I was thinking about this in the context of ‘how generally fcuked everything feels and how everyone seems to be slightly on the edge all the time, like they might start laughing hysterically and then never, ever stop’ the other day, and I wonder whether there’s a part of that that’s due to the creeping knowledge that we exist within systems that we have built to serve us which no longer serve us at all, and which instead seem to be doing us harm, and whether in fact it’s that disconnect and incongruity that causes the disaffection and wider sense of ‘this is all going wrong’ – the gap between what we have promised ourselves and the reality of the outcomes, and the poisoned space it leaves.

How The Tories Broke Neoliberalism: I think the title here’s potentially a bit optimistic to be honest (come back to me and say that when we’ve gone a decade without any fcuker citing Hayek as an inspiration or economic role model), but I otherwise enjoyed this piece setting out some of the reasons why the neoliberal project (and particularly the Trussian apotheosis thereof) floundered so badly. There’s lots of interesting analysis in here, but this paragraph in particular struck me as both fascinating and true, and made me wonder at the ‘why’ of the disconnect here outlined: “And yet, 40 years of neoliberalism have not bred a selfish “me” generation: we are surrounded by major illustrations of voluntary action, including large formal and informal protest movements; young people care seriously about climate change and biodiversity; it has become a cliché that the Covid lockdowns showed the depths of resources of neighbourly care possessed by societies around the world. But there is a general disconnect between this rich civil society and political communication. For a brief moment, it seemed that the pandemic would turn the direction of public political discourse in a collective direction, but the moment passed without significant change.”

AI Selfies: A post by Matt Haughey explaining how he played around with AI-generated self portraits, from training a model to generating the pictures. This is both a decent how-to guide on generating these things yourself rather than through a dedicated ‘AI portraits’ portal (which leads to more flexibility in outputs), but also a nice look at how incredibly good this stuff is. If I had a kid I imagine it would be really rather lovely to use this stuff to create a series of images of them embodying different scenarios and archetypes, and it would be a fun creative exercise to enjoy with them (as long as you don’t think too hard about where the images of said kid are going, and what they are going to be used for, and whether or not it’s ethical to effectively be handing their face to the infinite vision machines in exchange for a few pretty pictures).

Technique as Self-Service: This is quite system-y, but in an interesting way – a short post (oddly on the blog of Stripe Partners) about how it might be useful to think about tools such as Stable Diffusion in terms of their relation to the user, and the difference between ‘craftspeople’, ‘users’ and ‘technicians’ when it comes to making use of tools. This is quite wonk-y, fine, but it’s also a smart framework within which to think about any products and services you might be developing or selling, or indeed the people you might be attempting to sell them to.

The WeChat Apology Letters: On the one hand, this reads quite a lot like a joke; on the other, there’s not really anything that funny about it. Users of WeChat in China who get locked out of their accounts for perceived infractions are, apparently, occasionally required to demonstrate their contrition to the business in writing: “WeChat accounts are so essential to people’s social and professional lives that users, after getting banned, are willing to go to great lengths to retrieve them. In some cases, the app asks users for handwritten apologies before unlocking their accounts, and the users have complied.” So people pen self-flagellatory missives apologising to Big App for having dared to contravene its Ts&Cs in the hope that their access will be returned and they can do things like, I don’t know, leave the house and pay for groceries. You may laugh, but if you read this and don’t think ‘Yep, Elon would totally get off on people having to write him begging letters to get their ticks back’ then I, once again, have a bridge to sell you.

Qatar: Are you excited about the World Cup? No, me neither, and it’s not just because I appear to have lost the ability to feel joy about anything. It’s hard to get enthused about a tournament which better than even the mooted SuperLeague embodies the Mammonic insanity of modern football, and that’s without getting into the unique relationship that the Qatari regime has with human rights. With all that said – and with the knowledge that this is in part PR for Qatar in the classic sportswashing sense – I did find this series of essays and photographs, by Qataris and Qatari residents, about their lives and the national relationship with football and their hopes for the tournament, interesting and vaguely-hopeful (although, equally, I felt a bit uncomfortable about the number of times these pieces say things like ‘and you’d never believe how friendly and amazing Qatar is, nothing like what you read about!’).

The Scent of Flavour: A great essay about smell, taste and flavour, the difference and connection between the three, how they all work, how we can use chemicals and science to modify and augment them, and how language slightly fails us when it comes to talking about these things: “we lack a verb to describe the perception of flavor. Consider how we describe the sensations evoked by taste, smell, and flavor. I can say, “I taste sugar” and “I smell cinnamon,” but not “I flavor cinnamon.” Using “flavor” as a verb means to add flavor to something rather than to perceive the sensation of flavor. When we want to describe how we perceive the flavor of cinnamon we borrow “taste” and say, “I taste cinnamon.” This only adds to the problem.”

Vanguard Estates: I rather enjoyed this – a ‘choose your own adventure’-style short story about a future in which robotic care for the elderly is the norm, and the extent to which you might feel comfortable handing over a loved one into the care of the machines. I have only tried a couple of the branches, and whilst I haven’t found anything weird or traumatic in there I suppose I ought to at least acknowledge the outside possibility that one of the branches in the narrative ends up with some sort of horrible scene of snuff-gerontophilia, so, er, caveat lector.

How I Lost $1m In The Pandemic: Or “Stonks: Line Also Go Down”, to give it a plausible alternative title. This is from the Guardian, fine, but I don’t know how much traction it got this week and I think it’s a really interesting piece – the author writes about their experience briefly making it big in the pandemic stock market madness around Gamestop before (and I think the headline already gave this away and so I don’t feel bad for spoiling the surprise) losing it all again, and the emotional strain of having your mental and financial wellbeing yoked to the vagaries of a market being prodded by idiots with sticks. A useful reminder that the value of your investments really can go down as well as up, particularly at a time when we once again seem to be being bombarded with ads suggesting it’s a really good idea to get in on the ground floor of the trading and speculation marketplace (still, probably a better bet than crypto right now lol).

Buying a Goblin: This is a near-perfect piece of writing in which the author explores the possibility of buying a goblin (yes, a real one – OBVIOUSLY) from a Zimbabwean bloke on Facebook; the only downside is that the price quoted was too rich for the buyer, and so the goblin sadly went unpurchased, but otherwise everything about this is golden. I particularly enjoy the tediously-practical bits of advice for the spirant goblin keeper as peddled by the sellers – ‘don’t eat okra’, feed it milk, don’t have sex with any virgins while you’re in possession of said goblin, etc – and genuinely wish they had gone through with the purchase, if only to see what poor, benighted member of the animal kingdom eventually showed up half-dead in a fedexed parcel from Harare.

Modlins: A lovely story, this, in part historical detective work and in part a profile of a genuinely odd-sounding family, the Modlins, who fled the US for Franco’s Spain in pursuit of the artistic and cultural success they believe their genius warranted. This is a lovely piece of writing by Aaron Shulman, in particular for the portrayal of the titular family who are rendered with a sense of tragic sympathy throughout.

Mozarting The Mind: Finally this week, I adored this – I suppose I would call it a prose poem if pressed, but it’s just a gorgeous piece of writing from start to finish. Revel in the language, it really is superb

By Jang Koal

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

We begin this week’s selection of music and videos with a nice bit of slightly-jangly and occasionally-atonally-abrasive guitarpop – this is Special Interest, and the song’s called ‘Cherry Blue Intention’

Here is the cheerily-named Yves Tumor, with the hypnotic and rather excellent ‘God Is A Circle’ (and the video’s excellent too)

This is a LOVELY bit of indipop, by a band I had never heard of before called Desperate Journalist – the song’s called Cedars, and while it’s not groundbreaking it’s just really…nice (and I know that sounds like faint praise, but it’s not meant as such; sometimes ‘nice’ is just what you want)

Finally in videos section this week (yes, I know, but I promise you I have been VERY BUSY), this is an absolute cracker. Leibach covering Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Future’ to genuinely terrifying effect. This feels very much like a late contender for ‘most apposite song of the year’, and, honestly, you could use this to soundtrack a supercut of this year’s news and it would be PERFECT (if desperately miserable) and OH LOOK THAT’S IT I HAVE COME TO THE END OF MY BIG BAG OF LINKS AND AM BEREFT AND EMPTY AND A SHELL OF A MAN SO PLEASE WHATEVER YOU DO PROMISE TO COME BACK NEXT WEEK BECAUSE OTHERWISE I WILL BE LOST AND ALONE AND SCARED I LOVE YOU PLEASE COME BACK I LOVE YOU PLEASE COME BACK I LOVE YOU DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE!

Webcurios 04/11/22

November 4, 2022

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Reading Time: 38 minutes

OH GOD I AM SO BORED OF IT ALREADY PLEASE GOD CAN EVERYONE SHUT UP OR JUST SUPERGLUE HIS FINGERS TOGETHER OR SOMETHING SO THE ENDLESS MUSKIAN HYPECYCLE CAN STOP FOR A SECOND AND WE CAN GO BACK TO BURNING ASYLUM SEEKERS TO KEEP WARM OR WHATEVER IT IS THAT WE ARE DOING NOW IN RISHI’S BROKEN BRITAIN?

Ahem.

I have spent a reasonable chunk of the past few years successfully ignoring Elon Musk, and now here I am being forced to hang on every word he fcuking says for Tedious Professional Reasons and, let me tell you, I do not like it one bit. I know that phrases like ‘spare a thought for the poor journalists’ are unlikely to elicit widespread approval but, really, just imagine what it would be like to have to actually spend time thinking about that fcuking man and his horrible flying monkey sycophants (it is not fun, let me tell you).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should be grateful that this isn’t hosted on Substack and that I am not trying to push you into ‘Web Curios Chat’ because, honestly, can you IMAGINE?

By Jenna Barton

WE KICK OFF THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH A NAME SO EVOCATIVE OF THE MID-90s THAT I CAN PRACTICALLY TASTE THE HOOCH – JOHN DIGWEED (AND JAMES ZABIELA)!

THE SECTION WHICH. TRAGICALLY, PROBABLY WOULD PAY A FIVER A MONTH FOR TWITTER BUT WHICH WOULD NEVER, EVER, GIVE THAT MAN A FCUKING PENNY, PT.1:

Mastodon: So, look, let’s get all this stuff out of the way quickly so we can go back to focusing on ephemera and not the seemingly-significant damage being wreaked on my favourite social media platform by a man who will, I strongly believe, soon come to realise that being responsible for what literally millions of people say on the platform you own is NO FUN AT ALL. I obviously featured Mastodon way back in the day when it first launched, and I equally obviously created an account and signed up to an instance, and perhaps even more obviously have not gone back to it since because, honestly, it was empty and fiddly and no fun. BUT! If you are feeling like you simply can’t any more with Twitter, or at the very least want to explore somewhere to migrate to should That Man continue to dismantle it, you may want to explore Mastodon. It’s basically like Twitter, except it lacks the fundamental thing that makes Twitter good, namely ‘all the people’, and it’s…well, it’s a bit fiddly to get your head around how it all works. Effectively Mastodon operates on ‘instances’, each of which are basically a different version of the platform with their own rules on what is and isn’t acceptable, and all these different instances have varying degrees of contact and connection with other instances, and…oh, ffs, it’s just NO FUN. I have rather enjoyed seeing Mastodon advocates on Twitter this week attempting to educate normies on how easy it is to port your life over – “if you’ve ever run your own email server, this is basically a piece of p1ss”, ran one particularly optimistic comment, to which most reasonable people’s answer is “GYAC mate I have no desire to ever ‘run my own email server’, I just want stuff to work and to be able to get 16 RTs for a mild joke about Matt Hancock chowing down on wallaby sphincters” – but, honestly, it’s a bit of a faff. Still, should you be interested then there’s a helpful guide to the platform which does a reasonable job of explaining How It All Works and What It All Means, and here’s a tool to find people you follow on Twitter on Mastodon, and here’s a bit of code that lets you crosspost to both simultaneously if you feel like straddling the divide for a while (in my head this is a bit like JKVD in that now-iconic Volvo ad from about 10 years ago). Oh, and this is a typically-smart bit of writing by Dan Hon about Twitter and Mastodon and migration and communities and utility and fragmentation which neatly sums up a lot of how I feel about moving my digital life elsewhere (DONWANNA).

Nicheless: So one of the problems with ‘migrating to a Twitter alternative’ is that, fundamentally, Twitter does its ‘thing’ almost perfectly – or, at least, I can’t conceive of a better means to enable near-instantaneous textual communication from any individual to a potentially-infinite audience (let’s leave aside all the things that Twitter does very imperfectly, like context and nuance and user safety). Still, if you’d like something that is ‘Twitter, but slightly different’ and want to be one of what I imagine are literally HUNDREDS of people currently using a nascent social platform, perhaps Nicheless will be up your street. The gimmick here is that each post can be up to 300 words long, which the developers say will allow for NUANCE and DEEPER THINKING and LESS KNEE-JERK REACTION (lol these are human problems not software problems, kids), and which doesn’t have like counts or follower counts or anything like that. It also, from what I can tell, doesn’t have anyone really using it, but perhaps that will change after free Twitter becomes an unusable hellscape.

The DALL-E2 API: This is a very boring link and one which should only click if you are REALLY interested in API access to Dall-E2 – but for the two of you for whom that is the case, fill your boots! This is quite exciting, in a geeky sort of way – any developer can integrate OpenAI’s image generation magic into their site or app with a few lines of code – which, fine, you could do with SD too, but I think this is simpler and also ‘safer’ given the slightly more restricted nature of what you’re allowed to generate with Dall-E2. Basically expect to see every fcuking website under the sun chuck in some AI image generation magic over the next few months, because why not? Honestly, if you happen to work on any STAGGERINGLY DULL brands – think, I don’t know, a maker of cavity wall insulation – why not consider leavening your otherwise-skullfcukingly-tedious online presence with the ability for your customers to generate a sad-eyed puppy on a specially-dedicated webpage, driven by the ‘insight’ that people like puppies more than they like cavity wall insulation? You can’t think of a good reason, can you? See? That’s strategy, that is.

SD Libraries: Another week, another selection of Stable Diffusion models trained by other people and made available online. So here you can download and play with SD variants that have been specifically trained on the work of various different artists so as to mimic their specific style with particular efficacy. It’s not just artists, of course – for example, one of the 100+ models on here appears to have been trained exclusively to generate images of N64 consoles, which is a genuinely-odd thing to focus on – but there are a lot of what look like people’s names here, suggesting that a significant proportion are literally just designed to replicate the work of human artists. Which, obviously, is basically stealing, and is an excellent working example of how we really haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking ‘hm, how ought this stuff work to ensure that it is fair to the people whose output feeds the machines and to prevent them from being effectively marginalised by said machines to the point of obsolescence’ (ie we have spent no time at all thinking about this). If you’re interested in the questions around the rights and wrongs of this, there’s a good bit in the longreads section which touches on it – if, on the other hand, you couldn’t care less and just want to play with a stable diffusion model which has been taught to produce nothing other than images of a stranger’s border collie (no, seriously) then that’s ok too.

The Stable Diffusion Bias Explorer: The other thing that we’ve not really quite come to terms with is the fact of bias in models created by massive image sets – which is why this little toy on HuggingFace is a useful reminder of How This Stuff Works and The Assumptions That It Has Baked In As A Result. The tool lets you compare SD outputs for various professions, as well as letting you add adjectives to said outputs – so, for example, you can compare results for ‘engineer’ and ‘competent engineer’ and see how certain types of faces seem to be related to specific qualities in the ‘mind’ of the machines, and how said relationships can quite obviously be seen to be born of the very 20thC biases and assumptions of the images that the models were trained on in the first place.

Rewind: On the one hand, there is no way that this will work as well as advertised and as such it’s probably significantly less scary and scifi as it sounds on first investigation; on the other, FCUK ME THIS IS SO SCARY AND SCIFI (if I hadn’t decided a few years back that I wouldn’t use this comparison any more because it’s lazy and frankly boring, I’d invoke the spirit of that TV show about how technology can ACTUALLY sometimes have creepy and unintended social consequences!). Rewind purports to be “The Search Engine For Your Life”, which in many respects, fine, is effectively what things like Evernote have promised for years, except this takes things a step or two further by allowing you to search through ‘anything you’ve seen, said or heard’. It’s in early access, and it will be Mac-only, at least initially, but, honestly, this looks sort of like witchcraft – it’s worth watching the demo video, because whilst I’m usually sceptical about this sort of thing it really is rather impressive and made me momentarily think ‘hang on, this could be useful’ rather than my usual ‘I want to forget, not to remember, why must you make me remember?’. Basically if you’re the sort of person who believes in the vital importance of ‘keeping the receipts’ for everything, then a) you may like this idea a LOT; b) you’re kind of a nightmare and everyone finds you annoying, rein it in a bit please.

Breathhh: I think I’ve said before that I have…limited time for digital mindfulness tech, but this particular variant on the theme at least had the benefit of making me laugh out loud at how ridiculous it is. Breathhh (the name is, remarkably, not the most ridiculous thing about it) is a free browser plugin which purports to offer you AI-driven realtime advice on when you might want to do a small bit of mindfulness and meditation. I have dug through the site and they are…not exactly forthcoming about how this works and, specifically, what they mean by ‘AI’, but I am DEFINITELY SURE that this isn’t because it’s all made up lies. I am SO tickled by this – the idea that the app’s constantly watching your browsing habits and thinking ‘hang on, they’ve just sat staring at the Samaritans contact details for 20 minutes – IT’S TIME FOR SOME BREATHING EXERCISES AND MAYBE SOME POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS!” I also particularly liked that, whilst the basic service is free, there is also a paid option, which strikes me as…optimistic. Still, who knows, maybe this really IS a magical solution that will enable you to browse the web in a more MINDFUL way! Please do let me know (and also, I have a bridge to sell you).

Horse Kicks: Via Lauren Epstein comes this EXCELLENT bit of odd – “Lexington, Kentucky is home to the world’s greatest equine athletes. For far too long, these multi-millionaires have been fitted with traditional, run-of-the-mill horseshoes. Horse Kicks is here to change that. Based out of Lexington, Kentucky, the Horse Capital of the World, Horse Kicks was founded to offer horses of all breeds and disciples the drip they deserve.” Yes, that’s right, this is TRAINERS FOR HORSES. Neigh-ki, if you will (COME ON THAT WAS A FCUKING GREAT GAG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?). These are, as far as I can tell, an entirely-real thing, made to order by one Marcus Floyd, and I am SO HAPPY that this exists and I would like all the horses at the next Olympics to be wearing these for dressage please thankyou.

Introspectabilia: You know, whilst obviously it’s a terrible shame that quite a few people will have taken something of a haircut on the whole NFT thing, it’s also gratifying to know that the whole scene really was as empty and fraudulent as it looked from this angle. Still, it’s not totally dead yet, as evidenced by this website which is basically a showcase of a bunch of NFT art accompanying a real-life pop-up exhibition which is looking to tour in the coming year. “Introspectabilia is a pop-up exhibition of digital loops & physical artworks by design studio illo. It explores our relationship with technology by depicting 10 emotions we often feel online, despite being unnamed yet.” The website presents artworks from the exhibition, which are (sorry!) all available to buy as NFTs – but that’s got nothing to do with it really, and I can forgive the artists for having a go at monetising their digital art, and the work here is significantly more interesting than the glut of poor-quality vapourwave-aesthetic giffery that characterised the NFT boom of 2021. I…I like this, and I don’t think I’ve said that about anything NFT-related for over a year so WELL DONE EVERYONE!

The Miniverse: Another week, another entry for Matt’s Big Book Of Brands Who Have Been Absolutely Taken To The Cleaners By Some Silver-Tongued Metaverse-Peddling Snake Oil Salesman And Who Will Have Some Difficult Conversations About Value For Money And ROI Coming In The Next Financial Year If There’s Any Justice. This week it’s Mini who take the mantle of ‘idiots who should have known better’ – even worse, they have called their poorly-coded, pointless and unsatisfying digital sandbox ‘The Miniverse’, which is unforgivable and should alone be enough to condemn whoever’s responsible to an eternity of poorly-rendered VR experiences. The Miniverse (sorry) is – and this may shock you, so hold on to your seat – a series of 3d environments in which the user moves around…for no discernible purpose whatsoever! Exactly what the user is supposed to get out of this – a website in which you can ‘drive’ a Mini around a series of slightly-fantastical ‘zones’ – is unclear, but it’s certainly not ‘fun’; the environments are, fine, at least, pleasingly-odd and full of ramps and curves and loop-the-loops, but the experience of driving is genuinely horrible and glitchy and weightless and crap (contrast this with the Slow Roads driving toy featured last week which was pleasing and weighty and beautiful), and there’s simply no point to any of it – you don’t learn anything about the cars, and there’s not even the most basic ‘click to book a test drive near you’ functionality, and I just don’t know why it exists. Except I do – it’s because one of YOU fcuks, you advermarketingprdrones, sold them it. You should be ashamed.

All The Starlinks: This is a live(ish) map of all the Starlink satellites currently in orbit and FCUK ME are there a lot of them. Is…is there a plan for what happens when our orbit gets full? Because that’s sort-of possible, right? Is surrounding the planet with space junk going to be the sort of thing that comes back and bites us in a century or so when we’re finally in a position to try and escape the horrible burning mess of a planet we’ve created so as to go and do it all again a few hundred light years away?Things I am simultaneously happy and sad that I will never know due to being long-dead.

Play Chess Against Grandmasters: I rather like this idea – this site has taken a bunch of matches played by ACTUAL CHESS GRANDMASTERS and used their moves to create a series of ‘bots’ against which you can play, which bots will attempt to play the moves that the GMs did in actual matches when confronted with the same board. Which in theory works fine, but which obviously only works if the board is configured in a way that matches one of the database entries for the GM you’re playing against – which means that if you’re, like me, a terrible chess player whose personal style can best be described as ‘suicidally idiosyncratic’ you will regularly find yourself arranging the board in configurations that would never happen during a match between two players who actually know what they are doing. Still, if you play a bit this could be quite a fun training toy.

The TIME Magazine Faces Project: Ooh I like this – “This is an examination of an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on images of faces. We extracted 327,322 faces from the archive, categorized all of them by gender, and obtained detailed characteristics of a subset of 8,789 of those faces. We use computer vision analysis, combined with contextual research and methods from the humanities, to elucidate trends and patterns in the visual culture reflected by the publication. In particular, we are examining how representations of the human face have changed over time, and seeking relationships between the visual features we discover and their corresponding socio-political contexts.” This is really nicely done – you can see the faces extracted and arranged by similarity, see how the average face featured in the magazine has changed over the years, see the proportion of faces of different ethnicities, etc etc. Aside from anything else this is a great resource for anyone looking to research the changing nature of How Media Represented The World in the 20th and early-21st Century.

Infinite Conversation: This is SUPERB – well done Giacomo Miceli, whose work it is. Infinite Conversation is another ‘look what you can hack together with all these exciting new AI tools!’ project, which in this case has created an imagined conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek – Giacomo doesn’t explicitly name the tools used, but I would imagine it’s a combination of GPT-3 and one of the voice synth toys (I seem to recall at least one of them has an off-the-shelf Žižek model) and the resulting output is, whilst obviously gibberish if you spend a minute listening to what they are actually saying, quite remarkable. There’s a fluidity to the dialogue that is oddly, almost unpleasantly, human, in part aided by the fact that both interlocutors aren’t native English speakers and as such the slightly-halting nature of text-to-speech software doesn’t jar too much, and it made me think that it’s actually going to be incredibly easy to create convincing audio fakes of people speaking in their non-native tongue. Honestly, this really is quite astonishing and made me feel a bit ‘funny’ in that now-familiar ‘I both like and fear this and don’t quite understand how to feel as a result’ way.

3d Pollen: 3d models of pollen particles which, if you like, you can print out using the 3d printer that you OBVIOUSLY all have knocking around at home. If I had such a thing – which I don’t – I would use it to print out models of pollen and then hand them out to all my hayfever-suffering colleagues as a nice ‘here’s to the start of spring’ gift as soon as their noses started running, but I’m particularly nice like that.

Inside The Great Pyramid: I’m probably not going to ever visit the Great Pyramid of Giza – tangentially, there’s something quite oddly-liberating about admitting these things to yourself as you age; “nope, never going to swim with dolphins; turns out, don’t care!” is a freeing thought, for example – but I now feel like I sort-of have anyway, thanks to this really rather good 3d tour which has been created by (I think) the Giza project which is part of Harvard University. You can properly explore the inside, although I have to warn you that I wasn’t able to find any evidence of either mummies or some sort of murderous Anubis-worshiping cult anywhere in the interior, and it’s pretty fcuking incredible to be honest. One of those ‘oh, look, the internet is in fact actually really good after all’ moments which, honestly, are a bit rarer than I would like them to be.

National Parks: A map of all the national parks around the world, which is a GREAT resource if you’re the sort of person for whom a holiday has by law to involve thick socks, hiking boots and those sorts of weird skipole things that middle-aged German walkers seem to carry with them everywhere but which they never actually seem to do anything with other than gesticulating angrily at me to get out of their way as they pass me, wheezing emphasymatically (this may not be a word but I don’t care), on a mountain trail. Why does France have so few national parks, by the way?

Freetone: Adobe and Pantone have done a fcukery, which basically means that unless you pay a monthly subscription fee you will no longer be able to get exact Pantone colours in your Adobe products. Which, obviously, is something of a p1sser given the fact that Adobe have one of the world’s most hateful near-monopolies. You can read more about the issue here if you like, but the main link here takes you to artist Stuart Semple’s free plugin which will effectively let you get around this. “FREETONE by Stuart Semple contains 1280 colours including digital versions of his Pinkest Pink, Incredibly Kelinish Blue, Black 3.0 and TIFF. That unlocks a whole books worth of very Pantone-ish colours. 1280 Liberated colours are extremely Pantoneish and reminiscent of those found in the most iconic colour book of all time. In fact it’s been argued that they are indistinguishable from those behind the Adobe paywall.” Designers, fill your boots.

Moonwalkers: These look like a joke, but, apparently, is a REAL THING which has raise nearly £250k on Kickstarter with three weeks still to run. Do YOU want the magical ability to ‘walk at the speed of a run’? If the answer to that is abreathless, sweaty ‘YES MATT YES I DO’ then you might want to get involved with these – attachments which you clip onto your shoes and (as far as I can tell) turn them into what basically look like rollerskates BUT WHICH ARE ELECTRIC! So you’re basically strapping small cars to your feet which will help you walk more efficiently and faster and HOW IS THIS SAFE? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT YOUR LEGS WON’T START MOVING AT WILDLY DIFFERENT SPEEDS? I can’t think about this without having very vivid visions of eating a LOT of curb, basically, and it’s freaking me out rather. Also – and this may or may not concern you, but it’s worth mentioning – these look REALLY silly, a bit like orthopaedic footwear of the sort that you’d normally associate with this guy (TOPICAL REFERENCE). Obviously these will become hugely popular because, as I have often and amply demonstrated, I am basically the anti-Nostradamus, so YOU SAW THEM HERE FIRST.

By Liz Sexton

NEXT UP, EVEN THOUGH IT’S A FEW DAYS LATE, HAVE THIS SLIGHTLY-HORROR-THEMED AMBIENT/FOLK-Y MIX BY THE EPHEMERAL MAN!

THE SECTION WHICH. TRAGICALLY, PROBABLY WOULD PAY A FIVER A MONTH FOR TWITTER BUT WHICH WOULD NEVER, EVER, GIVE THAT MAN A FCUKING PENNY, PT.2:

Super Yu-Gi-Oh: There are a few aspects of the millennial experience that I simply do not understand, and card-battling games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh are some of them (see also: Dragonball Z, Harry Potter, Ariana Grande, Starbucks, giving a sh1t about stuff) – still, I understand that they are very popular and for some of you will be charmingly redolent of YOUTH and THE PAST and TIMES WHEN THINGS WERE SIMPLER AND BETTER. Even if you don’t have the first inkling about how Yu-Gi-Oh works, though, or even really what it is, you will be impressed by this link which takes you to a Twitter thread detailing how a French streamer has made a quite-incredible AR layer to allow themselves to do some next-level streaming of their card-based hobby. You have to watch the clip to get the full effect – and there’s a link to a YouTube video in subsequent tweets which will show the full extent of the build – but, basically, imagine that when you played a card you got to see the monster associated with said card doing all of its monster-y stuff on screen via the magic of AR and you get the idea. This is, to be clear, not technically revolutionary – this sort of thing has been on shelves for a while in various forms – but what’s amazing is that it’s all DIY. Again, one of the genuinely-exciting things about the past 12 months has been seeing the proliferation of insanely-powerful tech and software that can be frankensteined together like this to make some quite remarkable things – it makes one almost hopeful.

The Solo AI Awards: One of the occasionally-annoying things about not having the first idea as to who reads this and what they click on (a deliberate choice of mine, by the way, before anyone offers to build analytics into the Curios experience – honestly, I really don’t want to know how few people care) is that I have no idea whatsoever whether any of you will find this link interesting or useful. Still, fcuk it, I don’t do this for you, I do it for ME. Ahem. Anyway, the Solo AI Awards is a new prize for AI artworks which was announced recently and which is currently accepting entries – “SOLO AI ‘23 Awards is an open call that aims to foster, acknowledge and support the use of AI as an artistic tool within the paradigm of the digital world. AI’s new aesthetics and languages are shaping the contemporary art field at an accelerating rate, raising a full range of questions about the present and future of artistic creation regarding issues such as originality, creativity or authorship. For this reason, SoloJSN, hosted by Colección SOLO, creates SOLO AI ‘23 Awards to encourage artists to expand and enrich the possibilities around innovative digital art. SoloJSN will grant one artist 10.000 euros from among 10 finalists eligible for the possibility of taking part in a collective exhibition held at Espacio SOLO” I will be fascinated to see entries and winners from this – I hope that one of you knows someone who should enter.

NaNoGenMo: It’s November, which means NaNoWriMo (you don’t need me to explain this to you, do you? Good) but also its lazy cousin NaNoGenMo, in which coders work to create a generative novel through the month of November. It’s been going since 2013(!), and, honestly, this week I lost more time than I care to admit going back through the years and seeing how generative text has changed and evolved over the years. This is perhaps the first time that it’s feasible that someone could create something…actually quite readable, so this is probably worth keeping an eye on even if you’re not thinking of participating yourself. As previously noted, by the way, I think it would be quite a lot of fun to see if you could palm off a NaNoGenMo text as a NaNoWriMo text – although, fine, it would be Bad News for novelists.

This House Does Not Exist: You know the drill by now – imagined images of houses along with descriptions of said houses. These are really rather good – quite architect-y in style – and tbh I quite want to live in at least three of the ones I’ve spun up on the site.

Haircuts by AI: Using Stable Diffusion, this lets you upload three photos of yourself and then, if you pay the site a fiver, generate a bunch of different haircuts for you to see what you look like. What’s interesting about this is less the idea – so far, so standard – and more the monetisation model; whilst $5 seems a bit steep to me, I could totally imagine something like this being quite an attractive ‘fcuk around and find out’ toy for a $1 fee. Which, given how quick and relatively-easy it is to train and set this stuff up, means that an enterprising developer can set up a bunch of things like this with low-level price points and probably keep a reasonable peppercorn income coming in with a bit of light promotion across socials. This is, guaranteed, absolutely an area in which one or two people are going to make quite a lot of fast cash in the next 12 months or so.

Simpsons Albums: Album covers that look like single frames from The Simpsons, because it is law that there is no facet of human existence or experience that cannot be filtered through Matt Groening’s yellowfaced prism.

SuperTunnel: This is a lovely little student project by Vinicius Suerio as part of their MSc in interaction design, which lets you model a tunnel through the earth from any location. “For thousands of years, physical objects have been used to represent data – like using pebbles to account for votes in ancient Greece. Such representations, especially newly computer-supported ones, became the focus of an emerging field called data physicalization. As part of my master’s in interaction design, I explored how data physicalization and tangible interaction could be combined. More specifically, I studied how an object might convey data not through its shape, but only through our interaction with it. I proposed a tangible and embodied

artifact (a shovel equipped with orientation sensors) that could be used by visitors of Earth sciences museums. By pointing the shovel to the ground at different angles, visitors could learn where in the world they would end up, if they were to dig a hole towards that direction.” This is simple but SO nicely-made and satisfying to play with, testament to the power of good interaction design.

Yarn Picker: I presume that, given winter’s closing in and we have all been told that our mortgages will cost eleventymillion quid a month and we can’t afford to turn the heating on, that you will all be planning on spending the winter months knitting an increasingly-voluminous series of scarves and hats and jumpers in an attempt to stave off both boredom and frostbite. In which case, you might find this site useful – you can pick any shade you like from a colourwheel, and the site will provide you with a bunch of yarn brands that you can buy that match the colours you’ve selected. The site’s American, and I know literally nothing about knitting and whether or not the brands it recommends will be available internationally, but, well, here’s hoping. If anyone wants to knit me a scarf, by the way, that would be lovely.

Lost Cat: Oh God I love this – WONDERFULLY pointless but very charming indeed, and I am slightly sad that it’s taken me this long to learn about it. Steve Chapman is one a mission to get as many copies of his ‘LOST CAT’ poster pasted up around the world as possible; currently it’s in over 50 countries, including Antarctica, but I think we can help spread it more widely. Steve explains: “One day whilst walking I saw a lost cat poster. Whilst it was sad that somebody had lost their cat I couldn’t help but notice how majestic the picture was of the animal. Tall, proud, slightly cross-eyed. The picture made me wonder whether the cat was actually lost or whether the owners were just showing off what a great cat they had. When I got home I painted the cat and then decided to turn the piece into a poster to show off my painting of the magnificent beast. A couple of days later I took a bunch of posters and put them in random places around London. Surprisingly they elicited a remarkable response with pictures of my (Not a) Lost Cat posters popping up everywhere on social media and people asking if they could get involved. On the back of the London experiment I decided to expand the project and see how many locations around the world I could get the (Not a) Lost Cat posters put up in. Since then the project has taken on a life of its own with posters now in 52 countries across all seven continents.” If you happen to live outside the UK, could you maybe consider printing and putting up one of these? GO ON I NEVER ASK ANYTHING OF YOU GO ON FFS.

The Entertainment Memorabilia Auction: This is happening RIGHT NOW! And it is INSANE – there is SO MUCH in here, from silk suits worn by the Beatles to some cans of fizzy pop produced as props for the film ‘Joe Vs The Volcano’, to a bunch of Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop stuff from Labyrinth, to, er, a pair of headphones allegedly owned by Ed Sheeran. Honestly, there is absolute GOLD here, but bear in mind that the prices reflect that and there doesn’t seem to be much below the grand mark. Today is music stuff, tomorrow and Sunday film & TV – yesterday was, it seems, the day they flogged all the Star Wars stuff so if you were hoping to own a maquette model of a landspeeder then a) you can’t, sorry; and b) GROW UP FFS THERE ARE OTHER FILMS AVAILABLE.

The Spirit: This is an entirely-pointless but very pleasing bit of particle simulation in (I think) webGL – move your cursor around and enjoy the lovely, soothing particulate sweep as it wafts across your screen. This is going to sound silly, I appreciate, but there’s an odd sense of personality to the particles here which makes me like this a lot (see? Told you it would sound silly).

Reddit2Video: This feels a bit cheeky, but, well, all’s fair in love and content. See a video on Reddit that you think would make the basis for good content on another platform? Well use this service to rip the source and repurpose it for whatever other social network you choose – this will reconfigure vids from Reddit to work as material for TikTok, Insta and all your other favourites, which is particularly useful for the ‘I position myself as a talking head to opine over a heavily-annotated video’ content style so beloved of the kids. As an aside, I wonder what it’s going to be like in a few years’ time when literally everyone has spent their formative years training themselves to deliver monologues like a fcuking news anchor or late-night TV host (‘insufferable’ is the answer, in case you were wondering)?

Freja Christiana: The website of the collected projects of digital artist Freja Christiana, which are presented without much – if any – explanation and which are slices of small, beautiful digital play and experimentation. I strongly encourage you to take 10 minutes and just click around the various works and see which of them speak to you (I know, I know, but I promise that they will speak to you in some small way). This comes via Kristoffer’s ‘Naive Weekly’ newsletter, which I know I have recommended here before but which I would like to recommend again as it is a source of such WONDERFUL, odd little links and projects that never fail to interest and please.

European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022: You know the drill by now. Another photography prize with superb entries slightly let down by a website that simply isn’t very good at displaying photos – still, my tedious kvetching about webwork aside, this is another wonderful selection of images. My particular favourites are the one of the spider on the ceiling which is just all sorts of threatening and could basically be a movie poster for a particular type of arachnophobes’ nightmare, and the one of the kid in the bearskin looking like a real-life Max from ‘Where The Wild Things Are’, but, as ever, I encourage you to pick your own.

AdjectiveFinder: I confess to being a bit sniffy about writing, at least in terms of my willingness to solicit help from digital assistants and the like (of course, this sniffiness totally fails to take into account the very genuine feelings of horror and revulsion I occasionally get when I read back my work and I realise how often I reuse certain expressions or phrases – do you reckon Jay Rayner gets the same when he realises he’s once again described a dish as ‘spun through’ with something, or Grace Dent when she suggests for the nth-fcuking-time that a particular plate of food has been ‘titivated’? And do you think there’s anything more hubristic than some no-mark sitting in his pants writing a newsletter that’s read by, at best, a dozen or so webmongs comparing his output to two national newspaper restaurant critics?), but this one seems…quite good. Simply give it a simple adjective and it will suggest a superlative for said adjective – so, for example, ‘very open’ could be ‘exposed’, or ‘very stupid’ could be ‘feebleminded’. This seems to work quite well, and feels like exactly the sort of thing that would be superuseful if incorporated into GDocs.

Bauhaus Pedagogy: Now THERE’s an enticing title for you. Still, if you’re in any way interested in the Bauhaus movement, or indeed the general history of design, this is a very good site indeed. “With the project ‘Schools of Departure’, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is working on a digital atlas of Bauhaus pedagogy after 1933. This atlas combines research into the global interrelationships of Bauhaus with other twentieth century plans to reform design education. Instead of starting from the notion of “influence” of the Bauhaus based on the premise of the Bauhaus as a “centre” with movement to the non-European “periphery”, the atlas renders visible the diverse interconnections. In doing so, it proposes an interpretation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a constantly changing combination of approaches to education, thus challenging the idea of a self-contained Bauhaus teaching concept which was applied as a model in various schools. Travelling concepts in the context of this project are understood as figures of discourse, each with changing connotations of meaning, that keep the explorations of the different schools and learning collectives in constant exchange through their oscillation between disciplines and cultures.” This is actually a pretty-engaging way of learning about Bauhaus and what it meant and its influence.

DallE Album Covers: Specifically, a Twitter account that shares Dall-E generatyed images that would make banging album covers. If you are in a band you should probably consider nicking some of these as they all absolutely slap.

Flight Guesser: This is technically a game, but, honestly, unless you’re someone with a VERY detailed knowledge of flight paths then you’re unlikely to get much joy out of it. Still, for those of you who are AVID PLANESPOTTERS (who knows? Maybe one of my twelve readers spends all their spare time when they’re not reading Curios hanging out at the far runway at Gatwick South?) then you might enjoy this game – you get shown a ‘live’ map of planes, and clicking on any of them will let you guess where it’s going from, where it’s going, and even its altitude and the airline in question. Honestly, to my mind this is literally impossible, but, well, fill your boots.

You Have Not Died of Dysentery: Finally this week, a browser game which is basically the hoary old classic Oregon Trail but with less dying of dysentery. Your mileage here will largely depend on the extent to which you are familiar with the original, but there are some moderate lols here if you are – and, if not, this is still a better way of passing 15 minutes this afternoon than fiddling around with slides.

By David Alvarez

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS COLLECTION OF DISCO-ISH HOUSE-TYPE STUFF (THAT’S THE TECHNICAL TERM) COMPILED BY NIGHT DANGER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Awkward Spyro Photos: Spyro the Dragon, looking awkward. I have a special place in my heart for Spyro from back in the day when I did PR for one of the (not very good) games in the franchise and my colleague Andrea had to do a media tour dressed up in a literal ‘Spyro’ costume like some sort of really sh1t mascot (we got a picture of her in at least one terrible consumer magazine so it was totally worth it), and this made me weirdly nostalgic.

Phoebe Bridgers Art History: Phoebe Bridgers is very much one of those artists that means nothing to me whatsoever but whose work I am pretty sure I would have adored had I first encountered it in my teens or 20s. Anyway, this is a Tumblr collating her song lyrics overlaid on artworks for PROFOUND EFFECT.

The Blorbo Project: There’s a lot of excited chat over on Tumblr ar the moment about how the recent reversal of the nipple ban combined with Twitter’s well-documented Muskian travails could potentially mean the site seeing an influx of FRESH MEAT and returning to its position as a hugely-culturally-significant platform; stuff like this seems to me to be why Tumblr is forever condemned to be ‘a bit niche’. Does this mean anything to you? If so, you possibly want to reevaluate your life in some small way: “Do you have a favorite blorbo? A poor little meow-meow? A cinnamon roll who never did anything wrong in their life? If so, then we’d love to hear from you! Tumblr and Twitter users who are familiar with these terms – or have at least seen them being used! – are invited to take this survey on what they mean, where we use them, and who they apply to.” All websites cause brainworms, but it’s fascinating to see how the specific nature of the brainworms varies from platform to platform.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Things We Won’t Keep: From the most recent Naive Weekly newsletter (mentioned and linked above) comes Kristoffer’s Insta account which he is using to sell off bits and pieces of stuff that he and his family no longer want or need. Which is both an interesting use of Insta, and a pleasing insight into the minutiae of someone else’s life as seen through material possessions.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Twitter Thinkpiece The First: One of the most annoying things about the Musk/Twitter thing, from my selfish point of view at least, is that, as someone who writes about social media (not here, you understand; elsewhere, for a Real Publication that Actual People read), I now have to listen to what that fcuking man says and, even worse, because of who he is and the sort of people who seemingly enjoy nothing more than tonguing his slack and gamey bunghole, read a whole lot of commentary about WHAT IT ALL MEANS and WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN from some of the worst people on the web. Which is how I found myself reading Matt Yglesias’ Substack – not something I ordinarily do, and on this showing not something I will do again. I am including this link because it’s a neat example of how crap much of the ‘analysis’ about the Musk/Twitter thing is, and how much of said ‘analysis’ comes from the point of view of people who use the site in ONE VERY SPECIFIC WAY and don’t seem to be able to understand or empathise with other users who are not them, So Yglesias, a man who could famously beef with an empty TL, talks a bit about some fairly banal feature tweaks he’d like to see and then comes out with this STAGGERINGLY dumb line which I would like to reproduce in full so you can laugh at it too: “More broadly, I think left-of-center people working in media or creative fields or academia or political advocacy need to get used to the honestly quite banal idea that many successful and capable businesspeople have right-wing political views. The whole point of right-wing politics is that successful businesspeople should pay less taxes, so there’s a natural affinity there.” Take a moment to really ENJOY that final sentence – and that, friends, is why you don’t ever need to listen to anything Mr Yglesias says ever again.

Twitter Thinkpiece The Second: Look, you probably don’t need to read anything else about Twitter and Musk, but if you’re a glutton for it then this was one of the less-bad pieces I read in the past week, characterising the whole deal from the point of view of Musk as a poster, and the fact that a large part of the enjoyment of Twitter for a certain part of the userbase is watching people you perceive as enemies swill down huge quantities of what’s commonly known as copium, and how in a weird way there’s a significant part of all of this that is just about that. I know it’s a thesis of mine that’s a couple of years old, but I still reckon it’s true – you can file this under the wider heading of ‘everything everywhere is kayfabe’. .

Welcome To Geriatric Social Media: I thought this was a very good piece, though, capturing much of what I feel about the current State Of The Platforms and Where We Go From Here – specifically, the way in which the rise of video as a the de facto medium for social communication (or at least the medium that works for/is preferred by the largest number of people) is fundamentally altering the manner in which we use platforms and how they work, and how this is presaging a fairly fundamental difference in the way in which we present ourselves and communicate. It’s summed up in this paragraph, but I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing and see if it resonates: “This shift still feels like social media—but in the way that YouTube is considered social media. It’s about feeds and broadcasting in a way that, even with individuals, feels very conscious of people as internet brands. What feels much less ascendant is the more personal and informal status-update form of social media, which we’re seeing get funneled into siloed messaging apps, text threads, and chat communities like Discord. The broadcast-focused version of social media, as Munger suggested, is one with people who argue about politics in green-screened “videos that look more like a John Oliver or Tucker Carlson cable-news clip than anything else.” You could say that social media isn’t exactly dying, but bifurcating. Apps like Twitter—which don’t really offer the ability to split status updates and broadcast capacities or switch to short-form video posting—and Facebook—which are essentially so rotted out by network decay—are not fertile ground for this kind of consumption shift.”

Meta Myths: I don’t ordinarily link to Ben Thompson because I sort-of assume that all of you probably read him already, but this recent essay about why he is a bit more bullish on Meta’s prospects than perhaps some others is interesting. I broadly agree with much of what he says here – the decline of FB in the West is only part of the picture, it’s still on the upswing in the developing world, it’s still ‘the internet’ for a significant swathe of the world’s population who literally see its products as the only ways to use the web and the framework through which all their digital lives work, and it still has a really good ad product which is largely unmatched in letting anyone reach potential customers for pretty much fcuk-all money – but personally don’t think he’s critical enough of the metaverse stuff and the insane sums of money being invested in a vision that there is currently no evidence of anyone at all wanting outside of the people who want to monetise it. I actually thought that this article on VICE was a slightly-better ‘state of the Meta-verse’ (lol sorry) piece than Thompson’s, but they work quite well as a pair and if you’re in the business of Having Opinions About Big Tech then you might find them useful.

A Dose of Rational Optimism: This is a review of, and discussion around, “Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century” by J. Bradford DeLong, and it is GREAT – the piece analyses the book and its central question, to whit: ““Why, with such godlike powers to command nature and organize ourselves, have we done so little to build a truly human world, to approach within sight of any of our utopias?”, and offers a whistlestop overview of the economic trends which characterised the 20th century along with some interesting analysis of how they ended up failing us. SPOILER: the author argues, persuasively, that neoliberalism might not have been the massive success story its proponents like to claim, as summarised here: “The great puzzle of neoliberalism, DeLong astutely maintains, is how it preserved and even consolidated its intellectual grip even as it straightforwardly failed to achieve the social outcomes it promised. Milton Friedman, DeLong notes, insisted that repealing the elaborate economic management apparatus of the New Deal would produce price stability, something close to full employment, and a socially tolerable distribution of income. But none of that actually happened under Reagan and Thatcher. Inequality skyrocketed, as did unemployment. There are true believers who insist that their program wasn’t sufficiently libertarian—Social Security, the NHS, and defense spending all survived. But the retreat on fiscal and regulatory policy was real, and the results were higher unemployment and deeper inequality. That should have been enough to discredit the program. Instead, DeLong notes, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, and Barack Obama called for deficit reduction with unemployment over 9 percent.” This is a good read and made me actually want to read the book it’s about, which NEVER happens.

Get Blogging: One of the BIG THEMES of this year, at least from my vantage point, has been the sense of a reemergence of a sense of the independent web and individual projects, whether as part of the boom in available free tools for people to make words and pictures and videos with or as part of the creeping realisation that mass-reach social platforms are perhaps not the be all and end all of the online experience, and that in fact eschewing them can occasionally have positive effects. So it is that we now have websites like this, designed to encourage YOU (yes, that’s right, YOU! Or your friends or family or children!) to take up the exciting, Olde World mantle of blogger! I felt SO OLD when I realised that the author (quite rightly, I suppose) felt the need to explain the etymology of the term ‘blog’, but otherwise this is a really good, practical overview on how to get started if you want to make like it’s 2007 again and start SPEEKING YOUR BRANES on your own personal corner of the web. I honestly thing that it’s SUCH a good exercise for anyone who writes even a little, and that you could do worse than taking it up simply as a way of forcing yourself to practice, but as someone who’s almost certainly committed literally millions of words to HTML by now I probably would say that.

Becoming The AI Model: Friend of Web Curios Andy Baio (HI ANDY!) speaks to artists who’ve found their work used to train AI models, and discovers that – unsurprisingly! – they have one or two reservations about the way in which their work has been commoditised. But! There’s nothing they can do about it! This article neatly-illustrates one of the central problems that we’re increasingly seeing with questions of training data and the like – that the technologists tend to simply not quite get the extent to which an artist’s style is an extension of them, and that simply ‘taking’ it and making it available to all can feel like a violation in ways that are significantly more complex than simple questions of ‘rights’. Andy quotes one of the model creators he spoke to as saying “artists won’t really have a say in how these models get written or not,” and it’s hard not to sadly agree.

Worldbuilding: File this alongside that longread about the emergence of ‘lore’ as a core part of brand identity from earlier this year – this is an essay (from the occasionally very good Dirt newsletter) which touches on the extent to which the creation of ‘worlds’ (wider narratives, multiple touchpoints through which to tell a brand’s story) is an increasingly important part of business. Much of this is the sort of thing which will have older veterans of advermarketingpr nodding sagely, smiling wryly (yes, I know, noone has ever ‘smiled wryly’ outside of really badly-written novels, but it’s a cliche’ that I can’t help but enjoy) and murmuring ‘ahhh transmedia!’ to themselves (although nothing quite as bad as that risible ‘is Taylor Swift building the real metaverse’ piece which I am linking to here solely to point and laugh), but I found the general concept to be persuasive: basically, “Consumer brands, from the iconic (Nike, LEGO, The Coca-Cola Company) to the newly emergent (Duolingo, Ruby Hibiscus Water, Poolsuite), are equally invested in developing product-oriented worlds. It’s the latest evolution in the ubiquitous pursuit of branding. “Brands” — agglomerations of logos, slogans, and signature aesthetics — are limiting, while “worlds” are immersive and interactive. Branding, then, is just the flimsy precursor to worldbuilding. To contend with our ever-slimming attention spans, even advertisements are concocting persistent storylines with fictional characters and backstories to compel consumers into caring. Jake from State Farm has a mini-series on TikTok, where he performs “good neighbor deeds.” If a story becomes exhausted, a franchise can simply explore more of its setting. A character with a singular narrative has limited branding potential. A world, by contrast, offers infinite possibilities.” Is this cheering? No, not particularly but hey ho – just think, even if you don’t ever get that novel written perhaps you can scratch that creative itch by contributing to the development of the Swarfega Extended Brand Multiverse.

History Repeating On You: I link once again to perennially-furious media commentator Mic Wright’s ‘Conquest of the Useless’ newsletter, which this week provided this excellent little bit of analysis of How Columns Work in the UK media – specifically, he dissects a recent bit of writing in the Times about how the 00s were a decade in which nothing happened and neatly demonstrates all the ways in which it is demonstrably either factually incorrect, poorly-argued or internally-contradictory. This is a very good piece of explanatory analysis which does the twin jobs of both exposing the flaws in the column and its writing whilst also demonstrating exactly how these things are constructed from the ground up; it provides yet another compelling argument for the increasingly-vital thesis that all UK newspaper columnists should, without exception, be forbidden from doing the job for more than a maximum of six months (or, perhaps preferably, at all).

The Moneyball Effect: Or, ‘why using data to make decisions about everything has perhaps not in fact made everything miles better’. This piece starts with sport and then expands to briefly touch on films and music, but I feel SO STRONGLY that this is effectively the case in almost every facet of human endeavour. Analytics leads to statistical bunching around the most effective strategies, which creates homogeneity, lessening edge-cases and generally making everything more boring. If all you do is listen to the data and the data says X is the most likely action to yield the greatest reward, then everyone who listens to that data will take action X – which means everyone will do the same thing. Which, yes, fine, is an appallingly-reductive and simplistic way of looking at things but, equally, it’s also true. I know that ‘data has ruined creativity’ is the sad, dying cry of the old adland warrior, bleeding to death from a thousand (budget) cuts, but, well, it sort-of feels true.

The Rise of the Millionaire LinkedIn Influencer: In a weird way this piece feels like an offshoot of the last – because what is the rise of the LinkedInfluencer other than LISTEN TO THE DATA writ large? People discovered that line-break business broetry delivered numbers, and LO IT CAME TO PASS THAT LINKEDIN IS NOW NOTHING OTHER THAN LINE-BREAK BUSINESS BROETRY! What I find most remarkable about this is the very real sense that…there is no value here. The LinkedIn posts are empty of meaning; the people selling the skill of how to write the LinkedIn posts are selling the ability to sell…nothing. The engagements resulting from the posts offer no tangible value whatsoever. There is no THERE there, no HERE here, it’s just some sort of ponzi scheme of bland business bromides as far as the eye can see. I know I’ve said it before, but I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if LinkedIn was revealed to be a two-decade-long performance art piece in a few years’ time.

Social Media As Evidence: We return once again to El Salvador! You might be asking yourself “well, we know that the whole Bitcoin thing has gone a bit sideways, fine, but let’s not judge poor Nayib Bukele solely on his absolutely-definitely-in-no-way-gak-addled crypto dreams! How’s he doing on the other key metrics of governance like, say, law and order?” Well I’m sorry to say that the answer appears to be ‘not so well’, as this report in Rest of World outlines, with ‘evidence’ collected from social media increasingly being used as grounds for prosecution. “The rise of social media-driven arrests in El Salvador came about as a result of Bukele’s push to get citizens involved in his crackdown by reporting suspected crime. In May, the Salvadoran police (PNC) opened an official, dedicated phone line to receive tips from citizens who suspected others of being so-called terrorists, as the government refers to gang members.”. Honestly, El Salvador right now is very much in the ‘fictitious setting for the new Far Cry game’ territory, which is all sorts of miserable. Poor Salvadorians.

A Throuple’s Geometry: I confess to having in the past been a bit sniffy about the idea of polyamory, not least because of the propensity of people who are into polyamory to go on about it all the fcuking time as though I am supposed to care about the extremely-tedious admin that goes into maintaining your fcuk rota. This article didn’t change my mind, but I did very much enjoy reading this account of the author, their husband, and the Summer they spent inviting a third man into their marriage.

Your Mental Illness Beliefs Are Incoherent: I’m increasingly of the opinion that much of the past decade’s focus on mental health – or at least the pastel-coloured ‘saddy waddy’ version of it that’s presented in the media and advertising – has been actively bad for our understanding of, and empathy with, people with serious conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Freddie de Boer agrees with me, as he argues in this excellent essay which I really strongly recommend you read all of but which can broadly be summarised in this paragraph: “So it’s a great time to be an upwardly-mobile Swarthmore graduate with a professional-managerial class job who never shuts the fcuk up about having adult ADHD and whose penalty for failing to take their medication is that they send only 80 emails in a day instead of 100. Those for whom mental illness is a hashtag. It’s a less cool time to be someone with severe paranoid schizophrenia whose medication comes with punishing physical and mental side effects and whose penalty for failing to take that medication is that they start muttering bizarre conspiracy theories about the Jews. For the former, online culture has limitless patience and support. For the latter, who violate identity norms when sick, online culture has only censure and blame. For years now, the severely ill have been pushed further and further into the backseat of the public discourse about mental illness. With the new insistence that mentally ill people never do anything really bad, that process is complete; those who suffer the least from mental illness now blot out the sun.” Seriously, I know I have made this point a few times of late but this is possibly the best articulation I have yet read about how I feel about the whole thing.

The Original Star Trek Pitch: OH GOD THIS IS SO GOOD! This is Gene Rodenberry’s original pitch document for the Star Trek TV show, which outlines the themes, characters and general vibe of the show, before Captain James T Kirk had even been thought of and when noone could possibly imagine how many ignorant space ladies William Shatner would end up having to explain the concept of ‘Earth Love’ to. Regardless of whether you care about Star Trek (and I really don’t), this is SO interesting, partly from the point of view of an early look at something that became a global cultural property but also from the perspective of how to package and sell an idea – this tells you EVERYTHING to give you an idea of what Star Trek could be with admirable clarity and economy of style, and frankly you wish your pitches communicated this well.

Common Misconceptions: Yes, ok, fine, this is ‘just’ a Wikipedia entry, but it is SUCH a good one and you will learn LOADS and, look, here’s a small taster: “The word “fcuk” did not originate in the Middle Ages as an acronym for either “fornicating under consent of king” or “for unlawful carnal knowledge”, either as a sign posted above adulterers in the stocks, or as a sign on houses visible from the road during the Black Plague. Nor did it originate as a corruption of “pluck yew” (an idiom falsely attributed to the English for drawing a longbow).[92] It is most likely derived from Middle Dutch or other Germanic languages, where it either meant “to thrust” or “to copulate with” (fokken in Middle Dutch), “to copulate” (fukka in Norwegian), or “to strike, push, copulate” or “penis” (focka and fock respectively in Swedish).[92][93] Either way, these variations would have been derived from the Indo-European root word -peuk, meaning “to prick”.[92] See? MAGIC.

Fin De Siecle: A lovely essay about San Francisco and decay and maintenance (recurring theme of the latter half of 2022) and money and inheritance and and and. I loved this.

Rabbit Test: Finally this week, an absolutely virtuoso piece of short story writing that imho is going to win awards. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, other than to say that you shouldn’t let the fact that it is technically scifi put you off – this is one of the best things I have read all year, genre fiction or no. Honestly, it is SO good, please do take the time to read this one.

By JC Gotting

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Are The Go! Team making a comeback of sorts? This is the third time I’ve mentioned them here in the past 6 months, so let’s call that a tentative ‘yes’. This song is called ‘Look Away, Look Away’, and it is BAGS of fun, to the point that it’s actually impossible not to move (if you’re me, in slightly-malcoordinated fashion) to it.

This is by Ab Soul, and it’s called ‘Do Better’, and it’s a great bit of oldschool-feeling conscious hiphop and, whilst this may not be your sort of thing, the YouTube comments under this video are honestly sort-of inspiring and touching and a little bit amazing.

This is called ‘Ketamine Jass’ by Molly Millions, and when I first heard it I initially had it pegged alongside ‘Bathtime in Clerkenwell’ by The Real Tuesday Weld and then it…goes elsewhere. Honestly, this is a very weird piece of music that starts as a halfway-grating novelty piece and by the end has mutated into quite an intense hiNRG techno track and, well, it’s…different.

Finally this week, I am a little late to this but Loyle Carner’s latest album is FANTASTIC and I particularly enjoy this track, ‘Nobody Knows’, and it is SO pleasing to see him doing so well after featuring Cantona on here 8 fcuking years ago. This is called ‘Nobody Knows’ and it is fcuking fantastic, and if you get the chance do go and see him live as he is AWESOME and THAT’S IT THAT’S IT IT’S OVER FOR ANOTHER WEEK AND I AM SPENT BUT HAPPY AND I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT AND I HOPE YOU COME BACK BECAUSE WITHOUT YOU I AM NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING JUST THE EMPTY VOID AND YOU GIVE ME MEANING AND PURPOSE SO PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE I LOVE YOU I NEED YOU BYE!

Webcurios 28/10/22

October 28, 2022

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I AM RISEN! I appear to have survived covid (so far, at least – I am generally of the impression that that which does not kill you is merely operating in concert with that which eventually does, though, so am not getting ahead of myself), and have emerged, blinking, into a strange and terrifying new world in which the UK has a diminutive new leader (austerity, but this time funsized!) and Twitter has an egocentric new owner. WHAT MAGICAL TIMES!

Look, I can’t bring myself to opine on Musk and Twitter – you’ll get enough breathless analysis of WHAT THIS ALL MEANS from the world’s Twitter-sick journalists – other than to say how miserable it is that so much of our present and future is being determined by men who appear to be immensely rich 14 year olds. Zuckerberg – got rich off an app which let him get his own back on people better looking than him, currently involved in trying to replicate his favourite scifi novels which he didn’t realise are actually dystopian parables; Musk – literally a rich boy trying to buy friends, hates the fact that the really cool kids think he’s a d1ck; Bezos – a geek who got buff and is now enjoying dating a cheerleader…No wonder the future’s looking so bright!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I promise you are unlikely to be infected by any of what follows.

By Herbert List

WE KICK THINGS OFF THIS WEEK WITH A WONDERFUL AND VAGUELY-CINEMATIC MIX OF TECH-ELECTRONICA BY PLEIZEL!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THIS MIGHT BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MASS THING AND WHICH, HONESTLY, REALLY DOES HOPE SO BECAUSE FFS IT’S BEEN 15 YEARS AND WE’RE ALL VERY UNHAPPY, PT.1:

AI Comes For Your Job: Yes, that’s right, YOUR JOB (this is, of course, based on the assumption that you, the reader, earn your coin doing advermarketingpr rather than anything more meaningful or fulfilling). Whether or not you see this as the beginning of the end of your professional relevance or instead as a merciful release from the obligation to pretend to care about the creation of ADVERTISING-RELATED CONTENT will depend on you, but I encourage you to see this as an opportunity rather than a threat. The link above takes you to a Reddit post, which in turn shows a video of the workflow for recently-launched AI ad creation platform Clickable (currently a limited-access beta), and is basically a vision of the future in which rather than you slaving for literally minutes to come up with the best possible creative and copy for some Insta or banner promos you instead leave it all to a machine and go and do something better with your time, like trepanning yourself. Obviously the outputs here are…a bit rudimentary, fine, and noone’s going to win a Golden Pencil for the copy or the artwork, but, well, WHO FCUKING CARES? 99% of all social content is pointless busywork that doesn’t need to exist and certainly doesn’t need anyone to spend more than 10s thinking about what goes into it (this is true and if you deny it then you are lying to yourself), and if any of you think that there’s craft and skill involved in the production of 500 different marginally-different variations of an ad that couldn’t be replicated, or indeed improved upon, by some brute-force machinework then I would like a dose of whatever magical hubris potion you’re currently imbibing. Oh, and this isn’t the only version of this sort of tech currently floating around, it’s just the most impressive – see also this, for another glimpse into a future in which machines are just better at your job than you are.

Stable Diffusion Hub: One of the interesting things about the open source nature of Stable Diffusion is the fact that anyone can effectively create their own version, trained on whatever they like. So obviously there’s now a place online where you can browse and download a selection of SD models trained by other people, and obviously a bunch of them have been trained on smut because, well, HUMANITY. There are half a dozen or so models available here at present, and, depressingly, they are all focused on generating ‘sexy’ pictures of imaginary women – you can’t see anything smutty at the link, but clicking the thumbnails depixellates them and so you should probably be warned that at least one of the available downloadable models is…very gynaecological.

Train Your Own SD Model: There are a few of these doing the rounds at the moment – the main link here goes to a webtoy called Astria, but there’s another one you can play with here called DrawAnyone – and they all work on the same premise, letting you train an SD model on a small number of photos (the sites tend to require a minimum of 20) and then use the resulting model to spit out any number of variations on your chosen theme. Obviously the big draw here is the ability for the machines to create portraits, fake photos and stylised artworks of anyone whose face you feed the AI – on the one hand, lovely and cute and fun, but, on the other, exactly the sort of thing that is going to be used to make all sorts of…questionable imagery. In a week in which BBC3 aired a documentary about the threat of Deepfake bongo, it feels rather like this stuff is about to surpass it entirely. Obviously there are loads of potential applications for this that don’t involve the creation of nonconsensual grot – for a start, if you’ve got a clearly-defined art style for a particular brand or business, training a model on your corpus of images seems like a quick and easy way to help conceptualise new shots, for example – but, look, we’ve had an internet long enough for us all to have a reasonable idea what this is going to be used for.

Stable Diffusion x Live Video: Speculative AI imagework of the week, part 1! This is a proof-of-concept video posted by one Stijn Spanhove (fantastic name), who has hacked together a toy that lets you basically inpaint into live video with Stable Diffusion – I appreciate that that description is, at best, a bit clunky, but I promise that if you click the link it will make sense. Imagine being able to shoot a video on your phone and as you’re doing so also being able to draw in AI-imagined flourishes which then appear in the life feed – yes, exactly, THAT. See? Piece of cake to understand. Oh, you might also like this, which is experimenting with (as far as I can tell) applying an SD-generated aesthetic layer over a live video feed.

Making Videos With SD: This is a bit of speculative work by Dmitrii Tochilkin and it is DIZZYING – the speed at which people are managing to bend this stuff to their own ends is quite remarkable, as is the increasingly high-quality output they’re generating. The video here is a short, vaguely-surreal 40 second animated zoom through a bunch of rural scenes – the evident range of artists whose styles are being lifted here is mesmerising, as is the extent to which this looks…quite good? I mean, you can tell that it’s been machine-created, fine, but already the transitions and zooms and pans look less…wrong than they did in previous AI video iterations I remember seeing a month or so ago. For those of you significantly more technical than I am, there’s a host of explanatory notes in the Twitter thread that follows the video, but if you’re anything like me you’ll just sit and gawp at it whilst having no idea whatsoever how it really works.

Cobbling Together An AI Assistant: I think what I find most interesting about the current state of AI-wrangling is the sense that there’s a growing toolbox of toys that noone quite understands the potential of yet – watching people gingerly gaffertape various slightly-disparate bits of AI tech together feels a bit like those scenes in 1980s kids movies in which a bunch of near-teens manage to make a functional spacecraft out of colanders and an old Henry hoover. This is another short Twitter video demonstrating what you can currently do with a bunch of open access AI tech – here you see a developer who’s hacked together GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and Whisper (OpenAI’s audio recognition and transcription tool) to effectively make a VERY RUDIMENTARY digital assistant, who you can talk to and who will respond to your questions and commands and, honestly, this is FCUKING INCREDIBLE. Again, it’s important to remember how incredibly new this stuff is – six months ago, to create anything like what you see in this vid would have taken not only loads of time but also a LOT of coding chops, whereas now this is basically as simple as plugging a few things together and seeing what happens (ok, fine, not that simple, but almost). Just IMAGINE what will be possible in another year.

This Wallpaper Does Not Exist: AI-generated mobile phone wallpapers, just in case what you REALLY want as a reward for making it to the end of another week here at the exhausted fag-end of human civilisation is a vaguely-abstract background for your portable misery portal.

PromptIst: This is a cute idea – you know those ‘infinite canvas’ websites which let a theoretically-infinite number of webmonkeys create a theoretically-infinite painting on a theoretically-infinite bit of digital real estate? Yes, well this is that, but with Stable Diffusion – the idea here is that anyone can drop into the canvas, select an area, and create whatever they want within that area based on SD prompts; the canvas allows for inpainting and outpainting and in theory could be used to create a vast, neverending, sort-of-coherent whole. In practice, this currently seems to be a bunch of people adding their own stuff without any sense of collaboration, but it’s still interesting to see the different things that people are choosing to create, along with the dizzying array of styles and techniques that the software is able to produce. Special shout out to whoever it is that has decided that they want the AI to do nothing other than create stylised portraits of Tilda Swinton – although tbh that’s exactly what I imagine the AI itself might do should it ever attain sentience.

Clip Interrogator: This has done the rounds a bit over the past week, but that doesn’t make it any less useful – this tool lets you submit any image you like, and in return receive a textual description of what the AI thinks the image is of, which can then be used in conjunction with SD, Dall-E or whichever image generation model you have access to to create more images of a similar vibe. Which, obviously, is HILARIOUS when used to dissect images of you and your friends – I just fed it a photo of me out of curiosity, and may never recover from the textual bodying I just received (a ‘character portrait’? Why not just call me a funny-looking wrongman and be done with it?) – but is also more practically useful from the point of view of ripping off any particular visual style you care to mention. Got an artist whose vibe you can’t quite seem to adequately rinse? Feed some of their work to this and use the outputs to start generating replicas!

Hueman Instrumentality: Look, they choose to spell ‘Hueman’ like that, don’t look at me. Hueman Instrumentality (a spelling so upsetting it makes me feel physically unwell to even type it out) is another YouTube channel ploughing the ‘we make AI music videos’ furrow, but the craft here is better than most and the channel has been around for a while meaning there’s an interesting sense of evolution in terms of the quality and style of the outputs over the past six months as the tech develops. Has anyone used SD or similar to make a realtime AI-enabled music visualiser, by any chance? I reckon there’s something in that, so if any of you fancy taking this half-considered idea and making it reality then that would be ace, thanks.

The Feels Matrix: I have no idea AT ALL what this is, but my speculative guess is that this is a near-infinite canvas of AI-generated Wojack variants (which, fcuk, joins the growing pantheon of sentences that I really, really wish I didn’t understand and had never written). There’s no obvious purpose to it, but there’s something sort-of amazing about the variants and the dizzying army of memetic weirdness on display here – if anyone can explain or shed any light as to what the actual fcuk it is for or why it exists, please do let me know.

OutreachUK: Speaking of stuff I don’t really understand, here! OutreachUK is a very, very odd project which I am 99% certain has some sort of interesting and involved explanation or backstory that I am totally missing. Still, my complete lack of comprehension around what this is and what it is for hasn’t prevented me from really enjoying clicking around and being confused. I think that this is some sort of transmedia thingy – if you spelunk around long enough there are references to Swamp Motel, who are apparently “Multi-award-winning creators of immersive entertainment that blurs the boundaries between theatre, film & gaming – but, honestly,who knows? The ‘Info’ page is just a live webcam of (I think) somewhere near Bond Street, there’s a small, slightly-creepy and very odd Pico-8 game hidden on the site somewhere, a bit of interactive fiction, and, in general, a pervasive sense of weirdness which never quite resolves itself. Basically I have no clue whatsoever what this is or why it exists, and that’s probably for the best.

Astronaut: One of my very favourite things about the web is the feeling you get when finding something small, personal and utterly human, projects or photos or bits of writing which you know exist not because their creator needed or wanted an audience but just for the sheer pleasure or creating or recording or making or just existing. Astronaut is effectively a pure distillation of that, offering you the chance to see never-before-seen videos on YouTube. “Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).” This isn’t the first platform like this I’ve seen over the years, but the focus on new uploads means there’s a freshness to this that makes it all the more compelling – honestly, this, forever, on a big screen in a gallery, please.

Chptr: This may be a result of the fact that 2022 has been, for me at least, characterised by proximity to death, but it does rather feel like ‘online services dealing with the messy business of memorialisation’ are having something of a moment right now. Chptr is one such service, offering users the opportunity ‘to gather, share, and hold memories for a lost loved one’s life for generations to come’, which, as far as I can tell, effectively involves the creation of a shared in-app community where contributors can post images, memories and the like. Why exactly you couldn’t just use, say, a Facebook Page instead is somewhat beyond me – in the main, stuff like this just makes me imagine some incredibly petty post-mortem familial laundry airing taking place via passive-aggressive status updates and backchannel conversations (“I can’t believe she’s made the background sage green; Matt hated sage green, and anyone who truly loved him would know that”) and shifting app permissions. In fact there’s a half-decent short story in this space, if you ask me (which, I appreciate, not one of you fcukers ever has).

Campus FM: I tend to listen to Radio4 during the day, much to my girlfriend’s dismay (I enjoy Woman’s Hour much more than she does, turns out), but the past few weeks of news have stretched my tolerance for talking heads and IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS of exactly how fcuked everything is to breaking point. Which meant I was particularly pleased to stumble across this little portal, which lets you switch between a selection of US college campus radio stations at will; right now I am listening to some soft-voiced bloke on the graveyard shift at Virginia Tech University and it’s really quite pleasant (although now I focus a bit harder, turns out this guy is, going by his voice and the fact that he’s burbling on about dragons and moon moss, quite monumentally stoned). Anyway, if you’re curious to know what American college students consider to be Good Radio, this is worth a listen.

Big Pumpkins: I am slightly annoyed about the fact that Hallowe’en has become A Thing in the UK – or, more to the point, that it’s become A Big Thing In The American Style – but I appreciate that many of you may feel more warmly towards it. By way of grudging acknowledgement of this year’s spooky jamboree, have this website devoted to the cultivation and display of absolutely MASSIVE pumpkins. Whilst it’s probably a touch on the late side for you to grow your own for this year, should you wish to embark upon some sort of huge squash project in 2023 then this probably contains all you need to know.

By Danielle Mckinney

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF EXCELLENT BREAKS PULLED TOGETHER BY ADAM HOYLE!

The Good Country Index: This is a fascinating concept – The Good Country Index “ measures what countries contribute to the world outside their own borders, and what they take away: it’s their balance-sheet towards humanity and the planet…Because the biggest challenges facing humanity today are global and borderless: climate change, economic crisis, terrorism, drug trafficking, slavery, pandemics, poverty and inequality, population growth, food and water shortages, energy, species loss, human rights, migration … the list goes on. All of these problems stretch across national borders, so the only way they can be properly tackled is through international efforts. The trouble is, most countries carry on behaving as if they were islands, focusing on developing domestic solutions to domestic problems. We’ll never get anywhere unless we start to change this habit. The Good Country Index isn’t interested in how well countries are doing, it’s interested in how much they are doing.” All the data used to compile this is from reputable sources, and, whilst there’s of course a degree of subjectivity in the weighting of the various factors and elements, this presents a really interesting and unusual way of considering the world and the role of nation states within it (Sweden, apparently, is the ‘best’ country per its contribution to the collective global good; the UK is 14th).

Routora: Boring-but-potentially-useful, this – Routora is a Chrome plugin that is designed to make it easier for travellers to plan more efficient routes. Go to Google maps, select your start and end destination and the stops you want to make along the way, press the MAGIC BUTTON, and Routera will calculate the optimal route to take, including all the stops, to minimise the time spent in the car. Now, I don’t drive and as such haven’t tried this out and therefore cannot guarantee that it won’t inexplicably decide to reroute you via Tring regardless of your intended destination, but if you’re willing to take a punt then this might be useful (I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any Tring-related detours you may end up taking).

3d Text to Gif: Want to create a gif of animated 3d text saying WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO? Of course you do – you may not realise it, but there is no better way to communicate your utter disdain for someone or something than by communicating in the sort of medium beloved of teenage girls in 2003. You can change the font, you can change the colour, you can change the ‘waviness’ of the resulting animation, and, honestly, if you don’t use this to send a variety of whimsically-profane messages to your friends and colleagues then know that I am deeply disappointed in you.

Bot The Flag: This is an interesting and smart little Twitter bot, which does one thing and one thing only – point it at any Tweet you choose and it will analyse the usernames and bios of everyone who’s ‘liked’ the Tweet in question, pulling out data on which particular flags said users have in their bios. Which might not seem useful until you consider that the ‘flag in bio’ thing is a reasonably-good heuristic for bots – this is a really useful quick-and-dirty way of seeing whether there’s a particular national group that is boosting a particular message (or whether there’s a particular national group that is being made to look like it’s boosting a particular message, for the more conspiratorially-minded amongst you).

Oral Histories of the BBC: Following on from the Corporation’s centenary last week, this is a wonderful, searchable archive of interviews about the history of the BBC, featuring “415 interviews from seven oral history collections. 688 audio files (471 hrs 32 mins), 623 video files (162 hrs 18 mins), and 451 documents. Discover the people and past of the BBC. Read original interview transcripts, hear and see interviewees, search the catalogue or browse the collections. For search help click on the question mark icon.” This will be super-useful to anyone looking to research the organisation, but equally to anyone who has an affection for it as an institution and would like to know a bit more about how it came to be. Special mention for way search works on this site – it is SO GOOD, seriously, and whilst a boring detail it’s worth praising because, frankly, most websites fcuk it up horribly.

Smores: On the one hand, ‘TikTok but for music’ is a pretty obvious elevator pitch that makes vague sense; on the other, er, isn’t TikTok already a pretty developed music discovery platform? Still, Smores (no idea what this has to do with a campfire marshmallow snack) is a smart enough concept – an algorithmically-juiced discovery platform which learns your likes and serves you up more bitesized musical snippets based on what it perceives your tastes to be – even if there’s something slightly-miserable about its approach to doing this. You see, the gimmick here is that Smores only serves you up the GOOD BITS – “S’mores grabs the sweetest part of a song and gifts it to you. As you listen s’more and s’more [sic], the app will begin to learn which part of a song you like the most – ie. what type of melodies, drops, choruses and verses you enjoy. S’mores will adapt to your own style of music, genre, artist, etc. and will introduce you with a variety of songs to help spice up your playlists! By creating a recommender system around snippets, we empower you to easily build playlists around both your liked and skipped songs. Our mission is to make the discovery process of new music incredibly easy, fun, and engaging so you can find and share your next favorite song!” – which does feel a bit like one in the eye for the musicians who composed the whole song and perhaps would like people to pay attention to bits other than the hook and chorus.

The People’s Graphic Design Archive: Oh this is GREAT! If you’re in any way into or involved with design, this is an absolute treasure trove of good stuff. “The People’s Graphic Design Archive is a crowd-sourced virtual archive of inclusive graphic design history. The Archive includes everything from finished projects to process, photos, correspondence, oral histories, anecdotes, articles, essays, and other supporting material. You’ll find all sorts of information and links to other relevant archives, too.” Honestly, if you want inspiration or direction or just to browse a whole load of amazingly-varied graphic design styles, this is absolutely perfect.

Websites By AI: This probably ought to be nearer the top with the rest of the AI stuff, so sorry about the lack of coherent curation here (I AM SORRY FFS). Websites By AI is exactly what it purports to be – look, the outputs aren’t great, and you won’t be winning any design awards for the aesthetic of whatever is created here, but I have to confess that I was MESMERISED by the process at work here. Tell the machine what you want to create a website about – what your business area is, from pottery to electrician to photography to, based on one slightly leftfield suggestion, lactation consultant – and watch as in approximately 30s it generates a business name, a url, copy, testimonials…honestly, this is fcuking witchcraft, basically, and made me think that a) Squarespace will have this sort of thing integrated within a year; and b) how incredibly easy it is to spin up enough digital real estate to give the illusion of a real company / business, and how consequently this all makes low-level fraud even easier to perpetuate. Not that I am advocating any of you commit low-level fraud, for the avoidance of doubt, just saying.

The Daft Punk Cafe: A small fan-made site paying homage to Daft Punk, which includes not only a bunch of their live shows and other tracks which you can stream, but which also (and this may be my favourite thing about it) includes a version of Tetris which you can play whilst listening to the music. This is LOVELY.

The SubContraBassoon: I am not, and never have been, a bassoon enthusiast, meaning I was until this week unaware of the fact that not only does there exist an instrument called the contrabassoon, but that since the 1800s there has been an imagined subcontrabassoon which would, if it existed, be capable of playing a full octave lower than the contrabassoon itself (the word ‘bassoon’ has now lost all meaning to me, fyi). Richard Bobo is a professional contrabassoonist (words that trip off the tongue – just say that out loud to yourself for a moment, go on; satisfying, isn’t it?) and has an ambition to make the subcontrabassoon a reality – he has built a prototype, but is currently seeking funding to turn it into a real, functioning instrument, and whilst I know that times are tough and we need to watch the pennies, can you honestly say that heating and feeding yourself is more important, on a species-level, than the development of an entirely-new and wonderfully-named instrument? I would argue that it is not.

Code Poetry: This is utterly sublime. “This website displays a collection of twelve code poems, each written in the source code of a different programming language. Every poem is also a valid program which produces a visual representation of itself when compiled and run.” Honestly, if you have any interest at all in either coding or poetry then this really is beautiful – a perfect marriage of form and function in each individual case.

Transform Your City: This is interesting – I think I featured the progenitor project to this a few months ago, a Twitter account that used Dall-E or SD to reimagine urban spaces, which has now spun into what looks like being a nascent campaigning and advocacy model for urban redevelopment, offering community groups who want to lobby for improved city spaces the opportunity to conceptualise the changes they’d like to see and use said visualisations to communicate their desires with policymakers. This is a VERY nascent project, currently only set up for NYC, but the idea behind it – and in particular the way it’s using openly-available AI tools for public good – is an interesting one, and I’m intrigued to see the raft of other initiatives along these lines that spring up as communities begin to become more aware of the power of these new tools which are increasingly at everyone’s disposal.

Discmaster: WARNING: this could, conceivably, steal your entire life. Discmaster is a search interface which lets you spelunk through literally MILLIONS of old files, hosted on the Internet Archive, searching by filename – seriously, you could lose yourself forever in here. Just type in anything you fancy and get back a dizzying array of images and gifs and text files, plucked from the CD Rom archives of the late-90s and early-00s; this is literally perfect for falling down half-remembered digital rabbitholes of your youth (or for finding an awful lot of very fuzzily-scanned bongo, depending on your proclivities).

Throttle Tabs: A browser extension that will physically limit the number of new tabs you’re able to open in a single window. I find the very concept of this offensive in the extreme and fundamentally antithetical to the Web Curios ethos, but I know that some of you perverts might find such a thing useful and so I am grudgingly including it despite my misgivings.

Regional US Food: A Twitter account sharing examples of some of the regional delicacies that visitors to the US can hope to experience. Frankly the vast majority of this does nothing to dispel my notion that the vast majority of American cuisine simply involves adding gelatine to tinned soup and topping it with bacon – I mean, honestly, listen to this, is this food? I posit that it is in fact no such thing: “a hotdish with potatoes, cheese, onions, cream of chicken or mushroom soup, sour cream, butter, and a layer of corn flakes or crushed potato chips.” Still, if you want to feel a vague sense of culinary superiority towards your fellow man then this will absolutely do the trick.

How Fateful: A bit more of a longread than a single link, this one, but it’s such a lovely project. Channon Perry wanted to work out how many times she and her partner almost-but-not-quite met in the years prior to their eventual meeting and getting together, so using each of their Google location data she calculated exactly that – all the times they were in the same place in the same city but never knew, and never spoke, and never met. This is quietly lovely, and gives a very real sense of the VAGARIES OF FATE and all that sort of thing – Channon includes instructions so that all of the rest of you who want to do something similar can do, although it’s worth bearing in mind that downloading and analysing all your partner’s previous location data might reveal things about them that you might wish you hadn’t known (“And you were spending all that time outside that school because…?”).

Nokia Ringtones: Does anyone keep their phone’s volume up these days? No, of course not, only a sociopath would do such a thing – anway, we’re all constantly glued to the bast4rd things, in any case, so it’s not like there’s any chance of us missing a call or notification. Still, if you’d like a memoryportal back to the good old days when you could listen to polyphonic symphonies on the top deck of the N32 then this will be exactly what the doctor ordered – there are literally THOUSANDS of the things on this GDrive folder, and I would imagine that if you’re a particular tyoe of music producer then you will find a veritable treasuretrove of sampleable material here for the retro garage banger you know you were born to pen.

Parkulator: Smart bit of code, this, which lets you select any area on a map and which then calculates how much of said area is given over to spaces for car parking – the idea being that it highlights the insanity of much urban land usage in terms of the relative space given to cars and people, and tells you how many houses could theoretically be built on the land instead. Obviously a BIT depressing, but the sort of thing that might be useful for campaigning or planning purposes.

Mar1d: “What if Super Mario Bros, but first person?” is a question that various people online have asked at various points in time (leading to some wonderful proof-of-concept imaginings like this one), but noone’s taken it to quite the extreme that the team behind Mar1d have – this is Mario in 1d, effectively reducing the players field of vision to a single vertical line of pixels. Obviously this is almost-entirely unplayable, but it’s sort-of fun at the same time; you will need to download the files to play it, but it’s worth it as frankly this is better than this sort of single-note gag really needed to be.

Old Games: I’m not 100% sure about the legality of the all the material on this site – pretty sure that there are a few titles on here that aren’t in fact quite as ‘post-copyright’ as they are made to seem – but, frankly, fuckit. If you want a repository of over 10,000 old videogames, searchable and downloadable and playable, then HERE IT IS! Honestly, if you’re in your late-30s to mid-40s then this is a portal right back to your teenage years – you can find EVERYTHING here, including what is still the greatest computer football simulation ever created.

Endoparasitic: I came across this as it has apparently now been turned into a full game – this is the demo version, produced fpr a game jam earlier this year, in which you play as a scientist who has unleashed UNTOLD HORRORS within their lab, and who must try and escape said horrors despite being infected with a ravening parasite and also having lost their legs. You move by dragging yourself around with your remaining arm, and it’s impressively horrible – try not to die too quickly.

Slow Roads: Finally this week, one of the most impressive bits of coding I have seen all year – Slow Roads is an in-browser, procedurally-generated driving ‘game’, where you pick the weather and the season and the type of vehicle you want to pilot, and then just gently guide it around the twisting, turning roads generated by the machine. Or, even better, just chuck on the autopilot and put on some nice music in the background and just enjoy the scenery sliding past as your computer chauffeur ferries you to nowhere. This is insanely impressive from a technical point of view, but it’s also perhaps the most relaxing website I have seen in months – honestly, I promise that however enervated you currently are it will evaporate in seconds as soon as you start moving. Cheaper than therapy, and probably as effective.

By Mercedes Helnwein

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, ENJOY THIS SPARE-BUT-THRILLING SELECTION OF ELECTRONICA BY SSEAGULLS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

This Is A Recording: Oh, ok, fine, not a Tumblr, but it sort of feels like one. This Is A Recording is an old-school blog where an anonymous online person writes about records in their collection, one a day. Small, charming and VERY eclectic.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Joseph Shara: Joseph is a visual artist working at Axis Studios – this is their personal Insta where they post their own work, and there’s something super-impressive about the digital composition in all of these images, not least because there’s a pleasingly un-digital feel to much of it.
Tokyo Build: An account sharing miniature models of buildings, and the process of making them. Which, fine, may not sound compelling, but I fcuking love me some miniaturism and I hope that you do too.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The Crypto Story: We start with something REALLY LONG – Bloomberg this week gave Matt Levine, business reporter extraordinaire, the whole issue to pen what they hope will be the definitive explainer on ‘crypto’ and what it is and what it might mean, and, honestly, this is SUPERB. Engaging – Levine really is a brilliant writer, even when dealing with concepts that are as ostensibly-confusing (and, frankly, tedious) as ‘distributed ledgers’, and the whole piece (which, to be clear, really is 40k words) is just a superb summary of what cryptocurrencies are, what ‘crypto’ is, and how the concept links to a bunch of wider, contiguous ideas around ‘web3’ and ‘the metaverse’ and the rest. Levine is admirably clear-headed and objective in his writing, neither eulogising nor decrying crypto as a whole, and if you want an objective, definitive guide to What The Whole Thing Is About and What It Might Become then this is pretty much the ur-text.

The Future According to Mckinzie: I have never been a management consultant, and I never will be, but I have sat in enough meetings with people in suits from Accenture and Mckinzie and the like to know that I fcuking hate them, as a rule, and think that in the main they are useless parasitic powerpoint monkeys with dust where their souls should be. This is a report by Mckinzie which purports to focus on ‘the next normal’ – stuff which in the 2030s will be commonplace – and I am including it not because it’s good (it really isn’t) but because it’s emblematic of the sort of bullsh1t, lazy, pseudo-futurology that masquerades as ‘insight’ when speaking to so many large agencies/consultancies. FLYING TAXIS! CONNECTED HEALTH! INTERACTIVE MOVIES! Er, lads, the world is on fire, we’re on the brink of a global recession, faith in technology has hit a 21st century low point, and literally EVERYTHING on this list has been on similarly-unimaginative other lists for the past decade or so. I think what really annoys me about this is that its emblematic of the soundbitey, LinkedInification of ‘thinking’ in the world of work right now; limited insight, limited analysis, even more limited reflection, and everything drawing on the same dozen white papers so that the thinking is exactly the same sort of tired beige as everyone else’s. Please, please, please, STOP PAYING PEOPLE LIKE THIS MONEY THEIR WORK IS FCUKING SH1T.

The Negative Appeal of the Metaverse: One of the few bright spots for Meta this week is the fact that the Elon Musk clownshow has distracted the press enough to ensure that they only spent a day focusing on the carcrash that was its latest earnings report. Still, it’s fair to say that the news from the Big Blue Misery Factory is not a sunny one at present – despite the $15bn investment to date (and take a moment, just one, to think of some of the other things that one might have chosen to invest $15bn in), it seems nobody really wants to be part of the Zuckerbergian metaverse vision. Po’ Mark! This piece by Charlie Warzel predates the results, but is a decent look at why the Meta metaverse is so unappealing – the short answer is ‘because the company seems to have no idea whatsoever what normal people want’, but the whole piece is worth reading as a useful precis of the company’s travails.

Dystopia For Realists: Or, “how might we protect the work of humans in the face of automation?” – this is a really interesting article in which the author argues for the necessity of more open and transparent software development, and a greater emphasis on outcome-led thinking when designing the AI and algorithmic systems that will increasingly govern our lives. Lizzie O’Shea frames this as a question of rights, arguing that “If we think there is a role to play for automated technologies…and aspire for a world where productive work is minimized as a precondition of human liberation, then we have to accept that these technological systems must be built and maintained. To that end, it is worth remembering that the point of an algorithm is to discriminate. The point can never be to correct for this, but rather to ensure the discrimination is intentional. If the purpose of a system is what it does, we need to impart intention into our use of automated technologies by building in systems of rights for those who experience these systems in unintended ways.” I find the intellectual space around ethics in machine learning to be some of the most interesting at the moment, and this is good food for thought.

The Landlord’s Algorithm: An almost-perfect companion to the last article, this piece is all about a piece of software developed in the US which helps landlords optimise their rent prices to maximise income based on the current state of the market, effectively letting a machine determine the optimal pricing that they can get away with charging – software which, it seems, might be driving a nationwide increase in rental prices as the software moves the market in ways previously unthought of. What’s really interesting about this is not just the economics, but the psychology – handing over responsibility for pricing to the software obviates the landlord from moral responsibility (“it’s not me raising the rent, it’s just the software”), as neatly encapsulated in this quote: “The beauty of YieldStar is that it pushes you to go places that you wouldn’t have gone if you weren’t using it.” There’s something so horribly human about this, inventing software that turns the invisible hand into a fist.

The Art of Maintenance: Specifically, how the idea of maintaining things rather than replacing them is a declining one, but one which has resonance beyond simple questions of material goods. As ever with arguments of this ilk, I find myself nodding along but fundamentally thinking “yes, but, well, what about capitalism?” – per this paragraph, I am not quite sure what the solution is: “Under capitalism, maintenance is an ambiguous position, almost a kind of limbo. The economics are rarely cooperative. There are plenty of carrots from a technical point of view — make things safer, more reliable, longer-lasting — but often no stick. In the developing world (or budget-strapped transit agencies), sticks are everywhere. Cuba’s beautifully maintained mid-century automobiles owe their longevity to a cruel and arbitrary embargo. India’s long-standing repair culture is the byproduct of the country’s position at the bottom of the global supply chain, and even now is being undermined by rising incomes and consumption.”

IKEA’s Crimes Against Cartography: On the peculiar evil of the IKEA store floorplan and signage. I haven’t spent anywhere near as much time in IKEA as your average 43 year old man (in part because I have an attitude towards furniture that can best be described as ‘ambivalent’, in part because I don’t own a car) and so this was legitimately all news to me – you may already be aware of the labyrinthine nature of the warehouses, but this will give you a new appreciation of the how and the why of their design (and some useful tips for escaping via the hotdogs in the quickest time possible).

Mental Illness and Social Media: This was published ahead of Kanye West’s latest episodes, but feels very relevant in light of that – this article asks whether platforms should have a duty of care when dealing with content being posted by people who are quite evidently having a mental health breakdown and who could perhaps be argued to not be fully cognisant of what they are saying or posting, and to what extent people’s posting history and activity can and should be used to determine their mental state. This stuff is HARD – serious mental illness is messy and often ugly and frightening, but it also generates GREAT numbers (cf Kanye – who, by the way, doesn’t get a pass for being a pr1ck just because he’s bipolar), and surely there’s a principle of personal autonomy at play here vs a paternalistic desire to ‘protect’ the unwell…short answer is ‘I don’t really know how this should work’, but I do think that if you spend any time at all on any social platform you will before very long come across people who you have a feeling are…not really ok, and I think it’s increasingly important that we think about what we do about that and whether, and how, we attempt to help.

Outside The Gates of Europe: A snapshot of life in southern Spain’s refugee camps amongst the Algerian migrants seeking a new life in Europe, many of whom have been sitting, waiting, for years, in the knowledge that they will likely be refused the right to stay and will eventually be deported back again, with their ‘new life’ amounting to a few dozen months in a migrant processing centre. This is, honestly, a bit heartbreaking, but it’s a beautifully-written piece of journalism.

Stockholm’s Electric Bike System: …is, I appreciate, not the most enticing title for an article. BUT! This is genuinely interesting, promise – Stockholm, in common with many other cities, has a rideshare system in place; unlike other cities, though, Stockholm’s is dirt cheap: “a 24-hour plan “just to unlock a bike and enjoy Stockholm eBikes for 24 hours” costs 11 Krona, or 98 cents at current conversion rates. A 7-day plan is 26 Krona ($2.32). A 30-day plan is 35 Krona ($3.12). And a whole year of unlimited 90-minute e-bike rides costs a measly 157 Krona, or just about $14. If you want to ride more than 90 minutes in one trip, you will be charged an extra 11 Krona (about $1) per extra hour.” This piece in VICE looks at how the city has managed to set this up without massive subsidies – yes, fine, some of the usual caveats apply re the fact that it’s Stockholm, and everyone there is Swedish and so therefore obviously incredibly civically-minded, and the city is small, but there’s also a lot of sensible stuff in there about planning and zoning and systems infrastructure and, look, honestly, I fcuking hate working and having a job and I would happily never, ever do agency type stuff ever again, but I would LOVE to spend some time thinking about a problem like this and how to solve it.

Top Surgery: Naomi Gordon-Loebl writes in Esquire about their top surgery – the why, the how, and the why now, and it is a beautiful and gentle piece of writing and I thought this paragraph in particular was lovely, about the idea of transition and the idea of becoming into oneself: “I never hated my chest. It’s a perfectly fine chest; a good one, and I’m fond of it, even. It’s been with me for some 21 years. Everywhere my body has traveled, it has come along. Everything I have done, it has done too. It has been a part of me, and in some ways, it always will be. It needs to go now, not because it is wrong, or something worth despising, but simply because it is standing in the way of a life I can no longer postpone.”

Keep It Clean: This is a great essay by James Vincent in the LRB, reviewing a book about the idea of proxies or stand-ins (so, for example, the ur-kilogram), focusing in particular on the image of ‘Lenna’, the model whose Playboy photograph was used as the subject of the first ever JPEG, and the way in which these proxies act as shorthand for wider social and cultural themes, and how these encoded themes can render the proxy problematic over time.

Gouranga: This is a short essay about videogames and the imagination and the ways in which the idea of possibility is sometimes better than actual possibility itself, and it’s by Edward Smith and I loved it.

Greaser: A short story combining body horror, motorbikes and LOTS of engine noises – it’s ‘interactive’ in the sense that you need to click to advance the story, but otherwise this is just text and images and sound. This is super stylish, and I would very much enjoy reading (or even playing) more stuff set in this milieu.

Tuna: A superb essay in Granta by Katherine Rundell, all about tuna – the fish, the product, the foodstuff, the environment and the economics of it all. Contains LOADS of excellent knowledge as well as top-notch writing; the fact that Mitsubishi controls 40% of the world’s bluefin tuna market and is effectively buying it up as a speculative commodity is…weird, frankly (then again, Mitsubishi is one of those weird companies (see also Hitachi) that does literally everything – it wouldn’t surprise me if they’d even had a hand in the pills around ‘97), whilst the detail about the menu at Nobu is bleakly, hideously perfect.

Last of the Cockney Criminals: I know, I know, ‘profile of ageing gangster, loves his mum, bangs on about ‘claret’ all the fcuking time’ is SUCH a late-90s trope; still, this is better than your average crim-fetishisation, not least because its subject is very much of the non-violent variety and is full of charming stories like this one: “Some aspects of his life were conventional. He and Sylvie married young and had two children. Legitimate work threaded through his career as much as theft: he saw no contradiction between the two. On one short-term job with a logistics firm, he found out on his first day that drivers were instructed to leave loaded lorries outside the depot gates overnight, with the keys hidden under the front wheel for whoever was on the morning shift, so that depot staff didn’t have to get up early to open the facility. He tried to explain to his bosses how risky this was: “I told them that they were bound to get nicked by someone. But they took no notice of me, I was the new bloke.” Having given them what he felt was a sporting chance, he waited until some particularly enticing cargo was parked outside the gates, returned before dawn and stole the lorry. When he arrived for work at his usual time police officers were taking statements. He feigned outrage, shouting: “I fcuking told you this would happen!” Later, a popular crime-reconstruction show on tv wanted to recreate the theft and the film crew needed someone to play the part of the thief. Jackson enthusiastically obliged: viewers watched him grinning at the wheel as the presenter solemnly appealed for witnesses.”

The Doctor Said: This piece absolutely destroyed me when I read it last week. Judith Hannah Weiss writes about what it’s like to watch your mind disintegrate, to struggle for words and meaning, to grapple with aphasia and incomprehension and, worst of all, to know that this is what is happening to you even as it robs you of the ability to articulate it. Having spent much of the past couple of years watching someone’s world be shrunk to a pinprick by illness, I can’t tell you how devastating it is to read this – Weiss’s prose is beautiful and communicates the confusion and loss, but the thing that really finished me off is the past-tense coda of authorial achievements, achievements which belong to a different person. Honestly, this is devastating but so so so good.

By Takaya Katsuragawa

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I don’t normally put ‘a whole playthrough of a videogame’ stuff in here, but will make an exception this week for INCREDIBLY unsettling Geiger-inspired FPS game Scorn, which, honestly, has some of the most wonderful art direction I have seen in years. The full playthough’s 3 hours, which I appreciate is probably longer than you want, but I strongly encourage you just to dip in here and there to appreciate the quite astonishing aesthetic of the whole project.

This is called ‘The Dream’ and it’s by Gold Panda, and whilst the track’s a nice plinky bit of electronica it’s the video I really enjoy – I want more AR in music videos, please.

This next track is slightly-annoying – I am a bit sick of breathy little girl vocals – but, equally, I enjoyed the skittering drum pattern and the lyrics made me laugh, and it’s got a certain vibe to it, and the video’s got skateboarders in it, so, well, it’s in! It’s by Coco & Clair Clair and it’s called ‘Love Me’.

This is very odd, and I am not entirely sure it works, but equally it’s…strangely compelling and I have listened to it more times than I would have expected to for something so fundamentally-mumbly and low-key. This is called WW4 and it’s by Show Me The Body.

By way of contrast, this is basically the polar opposite of that last track – upbeat jangly indiepop in the shape of “I Can’t Fight This Crazy Anymore” by Doki Doki.

Danger Mouse’s recent album with Black Thought was EXCELLENT, and this track from it is no exception – this is called ‘Belize’, and it features the late, lamented MF DOOM and is generally ace.

Last up this week, I did not expect this AT ALL – this has shades of Burial, and is SO melancholically beautiful. It’s called ‘dj’ and it’s by Jim Legxacy, and it is so so lovely and I think you should put some headphones in and listen to this loud and with focus because THAT’S IT I AM DONE I AM EMPTY AND SPENT AND BEREFT OF LINKS AND WORDS AND I HOPE YOU LIKED THEM BECAUSE I PUT THEM TOGETHER FOR YOU BECAUSE I CARE AND I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY AND IF NOT HAPPY THEN AT THE VERY LEAST DISTRACTED AND I HOPE YOU COME BACK NEXT WEEK BECAUSE I WILL BE HERE WAITING FOR YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 14/10/22

October 14, 2022

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Are you aware of the concept of the ‘ratking’? It’s one of those things that’s become popular in the post-web age despite there limited evidence that such a thing has ever existed, but it works so well as a metaphor for so many things that it’s destined to be a part of collective mythology for evermore, regardless of its fictional nature or otherwise.

A ratking, for those of you unaware, is what apparently happens when a large number of rats are left together to breed and live in a small space for long enough, and their tails fuse together to create a writhing mass of claws and teeth and fur and bacteria, leaving the rats unwillingly attached to each other and, presumably, angry and toothy and bitey, and quite liable to turn on each other in an attempt to disentangle themselves from the doomed mass and escape to freedom.

Which is rather what the Government looks like from the outside, a bunch of vermin fused together by prolonged proximity and circumstance and, quite possibly, secreted filth, now turning on itself as the slow realisation dawns on the collective consciousness that the food can’t last forever and the pest control van’s well on its way.

See? I told you this week’s intro would be more cheerful!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and thank fcuk the web is still full of wonderful things otherwise I don’t know what I’d do.

By Emily Mae Smith

WE KICK OFF, AS IS NOW TRADITIONAL, WITH A MIX, AND THIS WEEK’S FIRST MUSICAL SELECTION IS COMPILED BY JED HALLAM AND IS TYPICALLY JOYOUS!

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE NEARLY GOT ARRESTED AT LIBERAL DEMOCRAT PARTY CONFERENCE FOR SMOKING WEED WHICH DIDN’T FEEL VERY LIBERAL AT THE TIME TBQHWY, PT.1:

A Slice Of The Pie: It’s ART WEEK! Or at least it is in London, which means…well, for me it means fcuk all, seeing as the days when I used to be able to semi-legitimately blag my way into art world parties and neck as much free booze as possible before anyone realised are well over, but this time of year always causes me to flash back to An Earlier Time when I was younger and had bigger hair and would occasionally end up at launch events and get photographed by Martin Parr whilst holding a cocktail served in a hollowed-out pineapple. Anyway, this link isn’t about London art week at all – out of interest, is there anything interesting being presented from a digital/web art point of view this year? I haven’t seen/heard much, but that’s perhaps down to my own ignorance and lack of anything approaching contemporary knowledge rather than the Absence Of Work – and is instead a work currently being presented in Austria, at the Kunsthalle in Zurich. A Slice Of The Pie is a simple premise – there’s a work hanging in the gallery which consists of a circle divided up into six segments, each of which can be ‘rented’ by a viewer/participant who can pay a small sum (about £1.50, based on this morning’s exchange rate) in cryptocurrency Tezos (it’s ok, it’s one of the less-environmentally-ruinous variants) to fill one or more segments with whatever image or video they want, creating a dynamic(ish) canvas guided by the web, and visible both in-gallery and online via a livestream of the work in-situ. Based on some gentle tinkering earlier in the week, they don’t seem to care too much about what you put on there – so if anyone wants to stump up the maximum fee (around £20 buys you the whole pie to fill as you see fit) to show an advert for Web Curios to a bunch of confused and unappreciative Austrians then, well, you have my blessing.

The Christie’s NFT Shop: I am nowhere near close enough to any of this to have any sort of idea how the market for NFT art is faring after nearly 24 months of intensely-frothy speculation (and a lot of truly appalling ‘art’), but it doesn’t feel like it’s booming or that anyone who invested hundreds of thousands in a link pointing to a jpeg is feeling like they made a sensible investment. Still, the art world (or at least certain bits of it) spent so much time wanging on about NFTs and investing time and money promoting them as a viable thing (what’s that you say? The art world is a shameless den of grift and naked market manipulation that would make a pyramid salesman blush?) that they have to keep pushing (sunk costs and all that), which is presumably why Christie’s has recently launched its EXCITING NFT ART PORTAL (Christie’s 3.0, apparently, although the website is, perhaps predictably, light on detail as to what the fcuk that number might be meant to mean other than ‘this is where we will attempt to flog you a gif or two’) through which to conduct auctions of not very good clips of mediocre video art (sorry, but). This isn’t super-interesting other than as a snapshot of where the digital/NFT art market has settled in late-2022 after some of the excitement has died down – and where it is is people paying between £6k and £25k for links to some very short video work. Which is…a bit miserable really, if only because (perhaps unsurprisingly) the upshot of all the NFT and Web3 excitement about the art world has essentially boiled down to “it’s another way to sell the same old not-very-interesting work as before, except now we’re just selling a link to it” rather than anything conceptually novel or interesting. Still, if you fancy buying a REALLY EXPENSIVE bit of video to throw onto your smart telly in an attempt to present a veneer of sophistication then you may want to bookmark this.

Dance Diffusion: And lo! It came to pass that The Great AI Disruption did come for music, and the producers did quake! This is more one to file under ‘watch this space’ rather than ‘the magic is real and here and now!’, but if you’re a bit techy and musically-inclined then this might also be worth experimenting with a bit. This is new from the same people who created Stable Diffusion but is for music instead – the whole project is called HarmonAI (I know, sorry), and you can sign up for access to the community (WHY MUST THERE ALWAYS BE A FCUKING COMMUNITY THE WEB USED TO BE FOR MISANTHROPES FFS) should you wish – the original link, though, takes you to a Google Collab instance with instructions on how to fiddle with it yourself and use it to create short clips of entirely-AI-generated music, and whilst this isn’t the first of these toys to crop up (by any means), its pedigree suggests to me that this might end up being quite good quite quickly. You can read a bit more about the project here should you be interested – this is very much early days for AI music generation, but if it moves as quickly as text-to-image has done over the past 12 months then expect the suicide rate amongst composers of stock music to beginning soaring in around 18 months’ time.

NovelAI: I imagine that many of you are currently girding your loins and flexing your typing digits in preparation for the forthcoming ORGY OF WRITING that is National Novel Writing Month – this year, why not apply a twist to your (doomed) attempt to churn out a functional work of fiction in 30 days by getting an AI to do all the hard work? NovelAI is A N Other attempt by some enterprising folk to monetise GPT-3 – it’s a paid-for service (albeit with a free trial tier so you can play around with it) with subscriptions costing as much as $25 a month for the bells-and-whistles version, which effectively presents you with a nice front-end to make story creation with GPT-3 simple, letting you do all sorts of things like pick an authorial style, or a genre. There’s a degree of ‘memory’ in the system, with the software able to recall upto 8,000 characters of text (if you pay for the privilege), meaning it’s less likely to throw out stuff that bears no relation to what it wrote two paragraphs ago, and there’s also integration with some image generation software which allows you to churn out illustrations too. I had a quick play around with the free version earlier this week, and whilst I personally didn’t fall in love with it (I think it skews VERY hard towards your standard, online-weebish ‘fantasy and scifi and fcuking elves’ style and chafes slightly if you try and make it do anything a bit more realist-contemporary; either that or I was feeding it garbage, which, honestly, regular readers may well concur is more likely) I can see how it could be super-useful if you’re struggling for inspiration when penning the fifth in your nine-novel epic fantasy fanfiction Doctor Who-slash-Star Wars series (I physically recoiled when typing that, fyi). PLEASE can one of you use this to do NaNoWriMo, though?

PodcastAI: Welcome to the future, in which we reinvent everything by adding the letters ‘AI’ to the end of it. PodcastAI is (and I imagine you’re there already, but bear with me here) a totally AI-generated podcast! Fcuk knows why you would want such a thing, but it’s here! There’s currently one episode on the website, a simulated chat between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs (if you want a distillation of some of the reasons why I am so, so tired of certain aspects of technology and web culture, by the way, the choice of those two people works pretty well) which…I mean, on the one hand it sort-of sounds like real people talking, which is undoubtedly impressive (although I’m not familiar enough with either Jobs’ or Rogan’s speaking voices to determine how faithfully they are reproduced), and the conversation flows, but on the other, well, the content is fcuking garbage and seems to just consist of each man simply spouting a few pat inanities as they pass the conversational baton back and forth; it’s a ‘conversation’ in the loose sense that there are two people talking, but there’s little sense that the two interlocutors are actually listening to each other or engaging in proper dialogue – SO IT’S JUST LIKE A REAL PODCAST THEN LOL (sorry)! Here’s how it works: “podcast.ai is a weekly podcast that explores a new topic in depth, entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The episodes are rendered using play.ht’s ultra-realistic voices, and transcripts are generated with fine-tuned language models. For example, the Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography and all recordings of him we could find online so the AI could accurately bring him back to life.” So there. Obviously it’s churlish of me to complain about a proof-of-concept exercise that is in many respects sort of magical – I mean, the idea that machines can ‘imagine’ and render even half-convincing human chat is astonishing, and this is only going to become more impressive – but I can’t help but be a touch discomfited at the future this seems to presage, one in which all our entertainments are built from the ground up by AI, based on what it thinks we like. What will it look like when the AIs are making things having been trained solely on AI-generated output? I know it’s hideously-unfashionable to mention Infinite Jest in 2022, but I do wonder whether we’re on our way to the creation of exactly that sort of perfect ‘entertainment’ (don’t worry, though, a long way to go!).

CharacterAI: Honestly, I really do hope this naming trend stops soon. CharacterAI is something that I actually had on the list for last week and then dropped, thinking it looked a bit shonky and not actually that interesting, and then I read this piece describing it and explaining it was built by ex-Google people, and I thought that perhaps I should reconsider. The gimmick with CharacterAI is that anyone can create their own, er, AI character with whom they can then chat – characters can be defined as having specific traits or personalities, so current models include (inevitably) Elon fcuking Musk, and (equally inevitably and significantly-creepier) the AI from the film ‘Her’ which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with. “Character.AI is bringing to life the science-fiction dream of open-ended conversations and collaborations with computers. We are building the next generation of dialog agents—with a long-tail of applications spanning entertainment, education, general question-answering and others. Our dialog agents are powered by our own proprietary technology based on large language models, built and trained from the ground up with conversation in mind. The Character.AI beta is based on neural language models. A supercomputer reads huge amounts of text and learns to hallucinate what words might come next in any given situation…At Character.AI, you collaborate with the computer to write a dialog – you write one character’s lines, and the computer creates the other character’s lines, giving you the illusion that you are talking with the other character.” Amusingly/not amusingly (delete depending on the extent to which you think stuff like this is potentially dangerous rather than a bit of fun) there don’t currently seem to be any limits on the sort of ‘characters’ you can create using the software, so, er, caveat emptor and all that. It’s worth having a browse through the existing character models that have been created – partly to get a feel for the sort of things that are being explored (lots of fandom stuff, unsurprisingly), but also to be surprised at the numbers – there are bots on here that have racked up literally hundreds of thousands of conversations, which considering this is only a few months old is pretty impressive (or, again, depending on the degree to which you think lonely humans talking to machines is somehow miserable, incredibly depressing!).

PixelFika: A potentially-useful website sharing examples of high-quality webdesign and copywriting, for all those of you who want an easy, one-stop solution next time you’re asked to come up with a selection of other people’s sites for ‘creative inspiration’.

MS Designer: Oh look, it’s Dall-E integrated into a Microsoft product! If you don’t think that AI design is going to change the world, then a) you are wrong; b) take a look at this and think again. The idea here is for it to be a simple, easy way of creating images for social media and websites – so banners, avatars, etc – and you can literally see the work pipeline to Fiverr drying up as I type.

Japanese Restaurant Videos: I have to be honest with you, gentle reader – I went out for drinks last night with some friends, and didn’t get to bed til gone midnight, and somehow woke up at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, and am writing this feeling a bit cold and sleepy and it’s all I can honestly do not to throw this video channel to the telly and wrap up in a blanket and just soothe myself to sleep rather than spaffing out all these words that none of you really need or want. BUT I RESIST, FOR YOU! Ahem. Anyway, that’s by way of needless preamble to this GENUINELY WONDERFUL YouTube channel, which as far as I can tell exists solely to profile a bunch of small restaurants in the Osaka area of Japan – each video is presented in lovely 4k, and features people cooking gorgeous-looking dishes (noodle-based, in the main) with occasional cameo appearances by customers and children and cats and, honestly, this is just the most soothing thing in the whole world – no dialogue, just ambient audio and the oh-so-pleasing spectacle of peolpe calmly doing their jobs very, very well indeed. Pleasingly the description for each video not only tells you where each restaurant is, should you ever want to visit, but also tells you what dishes you saw being cooked and, occasionally, how much they cost – if you live in London, you may weep slightly when you see exactly how nice a lunch about £7 buys you in Osaka.

Ride Review: There are many signs that I am inching closer to death – the vague feeling of senescence, the aches and pains, the almost-certainly-benign-so-let’s-not-check-eh?-lumps… – but perhaps most telling of all is the fact that I can’t help but make a slight, small middle-aged sigh of vague disapproval at the idea of electric bikes, WHY? WHY DO I CARE? E-bikes are good! They encourage people to cycle! They are clean! They are good for cities! Also, I don’t even ride a normal bike so why the fcuk do I care if someone else chooses to ‘cheat’ by having assisted pedalling? And why do I think of it as ‘cheating’?! No idea. Getting old is WEIRD. Anyway, should you be less of a purist w4nker than I am about your velocipedes, and should you be in the market for an e-bike (or e-scooter, or skateboard, or moped, or any one of a number of non-car vehicles that this site covers), this may be super-helpful – Ride Review is basically a review and ratings site for all these sorts of vehicles, which you may find useful when you’re considering dropping a few hundred quid on an urban getabout. Or, alternatively, the fat end of £20k on one of these mad-looking deathtraps that would absolutely get you killed after six minutes on the North Circular.

Talk To Books: This is a fun idea, made by Google (and found via the lovely Nag On The Lake) – Talk To Books doesn’t actually let you talk to books, obviously (you don’t need the web to do that ffs, chat with your paperbacks whenever you like!), but instead acts vaguely like a sort-of conversational search engine. Type in whatever question is currently troubling you – “What is the most evocative smell?”, “What does love feel like?”, “How do I stop worrying about the inevitability of my death and overcome my innate fear of the fact that we are all made of meat and gristle and, occasionally, hatred?”, that sort of thing – and the wite will spit out a bunch of quotes from GREAT WORKS to inspire and guide and educate. This is, honestly, really rather nice, and works both as a fun little literary toy and a good way of finding topic-specific quotes that haven’t already been done to death.

Dorsia: To be honest I am including this largely because of the name – a MILLION Web Curios points to any readers who get the reference here (Curios points can be redeemed for more links next week) – but there’s also something interesting about the idea at the heart of this app, which basically exists to let rich people jump the queue for restaurants by guaranteeing that they will drop a minimum amount if they get given a table. Which is, obviously, horrible – let’s add another layer of rich-person-only exclusivity to a scene which is already expensive and exclusionary! – but also feels very, very ‘now’ and like the sort of thing that will eventually cross the Atlantic and land in London. This is currently only in NYC, but it claims that it’s expanding to LA and Miami (obvs) in due course – will be interesting to see whether it gains traction.

The Hummingbird Clock: You’ll want to mute the tab as soon as you open it, FYI, but this is a genuinely-interesting thing that I learned about this week and which I now share with you. The Hummingbird Clock is an art project made six years ago for Liverpool Biennale, but which I have just discovered: “The UK national electrical grid delivers power across the country. This mains power supply makes a constant humming sound, yet there are tiny changes to the frequency of this sound every second. Most recordings made in the UK have a trace of mains hum on them and this can be forensically analysed to determine the time and date they were made, and as a result, whether anyone has edited the recording. For over ten years, the UK government has used this technique as a surveillance tool. This is the Hummingbird Clock, an online time piece that aims at making this technique available to everyone.” So the clock tells the time, but also plays the sound of the National Grid which is…weird, but also sort-of cool. Beautifully, the project also offers you the chance to accurately date/timestamp any audio or video from the UK since 2016 – just submit the file and they will do the rest, which for any of you desperately needing to prove that you were or weren’t in a specific place at a specific time could be hugely useful (Web Curios obviously doesn’t judge, but obviously believes in you and your innocence).

By Konstantin Korobov

NEXT UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES TO DELIGHT AND AMUSE IS THIS TRULY AMAZING COLLECTION OF MUSIC FROM ERITREA WHICH I PROMISE WILL SURPRISE AND DELIGHT IN EQUAL MEASURE!

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE NEARLY GOT ARRESTED AT LIBERAL DEMOCRAT PARTY CONFERENCE FOR SMOKING WEED WHICH DIDN’T FEEL VERY LIBERAL AT THE TIME TBQHWY, PT.2:

The Design Generator: “The Design Generator is a text-to-image AI trained on images of the V&A’s collection. Using prompts that combine key terms from the V&A’s collection categories (periods, styles, materials, techniques, etc.) it can generated new, imagined museum objects.” So there! This is the Twitter feed of said AI, which was spitting out the resulting images up until the end of September and then seemingly…stopped, which seems a bit rubbish frankly given the infinite generative capabilities of AI and the fact that you could literally automate the creative-generation-to-Twitter pipeline with very little work whatsoever. Still, here’s hoping that this gets resurrected as there’s something rather nice about having the day’s doomscrolling interrupted by a totally imaginary piece of decorative 18th century earthenware.

Wildlife Photographer Of The Year: Yes, ok, fine, every single newspaper website in the world will be running a selection of these today, given the winner was announced last night, but here’s the link to ALL OF THE PHOTOS for you to gawp at should you so wish (personally I find looking at them online far more pleasant than the inevitably-oversubscribed physical exhibition at the Natural History Museum). As ever with this award, the photography is amazing and pleasingly-clear-eyed; it’s nice to see a nature photography prize that acknowledges the fact that death is part of life, and also one which doesn’t shy away from documenting all the various multifarious ways in which we as a species have perhaps been less-than-lovely to our lovely animal chums over the millennia. That said, if you’re the sort of person who would prefer not to see any images of animals in distress then perhaps scroll carefully and be prepared to look away. My personal favourite this year is this shot, a Cuban guy feeding a bird with a seed from his mouth, but, honestly, these are uniformly astonishing.

Voicy: Has this been around for ages? It rather feels like I should have seen it before, but, well, I haven’t. Voicy is basically ‘Giphy, but for audio clips’ which on reflection isn’t something I can ever imagine anyone wanting, but still it exists. You can search clips, browse them by category, download them and use them however you wish – which strikes me as s the sort of thing which isn’t entirely ok from a copyright perspective, but if you’re after a free library of audioclips and sound effects and snippets of dialogue then it might be of interest. As far as I can tell a large proportion of this stuff is being created by children and is being used to make stuff in Roblox (fx for user-created games, that sort of thing), which means that the quality of clip on there is…questionable at best, but there’s something quite fun about the sheer oddity of the range of stuff on here (also there’s a whole soundboard of Pingu sound effects, which is never a bad thing).

OpenPeeps: Oh this is a GREAT idea (via Blort) – this is an open source library of line-drawn people, available to download, and all modular, meaning that you can mix and match faces and hairstyles and arms and legs to create exactly the sort of illustrated individuals you want, allowing for a diverse range of characters which all have a recognisable style. It’s SUCH a great resource for anyone who needs/wants to create something using character art, and the fact it’s all available under an ‘anything goes’ Creative Commons license is all the better.

The Syrian Cassette Archives: WOW. This is such an incredible resource and you could basically lose yourself in this until next week’s Curios without coming up for air. You ever wanted an incredible, exhaustive compendium of Syrian music as available on cassette tapes sold from small Damascene stalls in the late-20th/early-21st-Century? GREAT! The Syrian Cassette Archives is “an initiative to preserve, share and research sounds and stories from Syria’s abundant cassette era (1970s-2000s). We invite you to explore and immerse in the many sounds and images of the digitized cassettes as you navigate the site in Arabic or English. In our Features section, you’ll find specially produced audio, visual and written works developed by the SCA collective and its collaborators, including interviews with musicians and producers from the era, curated audio features and written contributions from a variety of writers and researchers.The growing collection features an overview of musical styles from Syriaʼs many communities and neighbors, including Syrian Arabs, Assyrians, Kurds and Armenians, as well as Iraqi cassettes and music from Iraqi’s that had been displaced by sanctions and war. Amongst the tapes are recordings of live concerts, studio albums, soloists, classical, childrenʼs music and more, with special focus on the regional dabke and shaabi folk-pop music, performed at weddings, parties and festivities. At the heart of the site’s initial collection are hundreds of cassette tapes purchased at music shops and kiosks throughout Syria by producer and archivist Mark Gergis during multiple stays in the country between 1997-2010.” The music fcuking slaps, as does all the cover art – honestly, this might on reflection be my favourite link of the week.

The Small World Photography Contest: More photographs! This time of REALLY SMALL THINGS! We return for another year to Nikon’s ‘Small World’ photo competition, which once again showcases some of the most impressive examples of photomicrography (I am happy to type that word, but please don’t ask me to tell you what exactly it means) from around the world. These are quite beautiful, although good luck working out what any of the images are of without clicking and reading the associated descriptors – do make sure to cycle through the different categories using the links at the bottom of the page, as the ‘highly commended’ and other non-prizewinning images are also wonderful (including this lovely one of a rat embryo, which isn’t a phrase I’d expected to type when I woke up 4 hours ago).

The OEC: My work doesn’t tend to involve me having to look at hard data about international trade, which is good as I would neither understand nor care what any of the numbers mean. Still, this site impressed / intimidated the hell out of me, and I imagine if you’re someone who does occasionally have to think about international trade and imports and exports and stuff like that (can you tell that I honestly don’t understand the first thing about business? No fcuking clue, honestly) then you might find this useful (or, perhaps more likely, you already know about it). “The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) is an online data visualization and distribution platform focused on the geography and dynamics of economic activities. The OEC integrates and distributes data from a variety of sources to empower analysts in the private sector, public sector, and academia.” I have no idea how interesting or useful this might be to you, but I was momentarily fascinated to look at all the data on the UK and to find out that in 2020 we were the world’s largest exporter of ‘hard liquor’, which I feel isn’t something we shout about enough tbh.

Parties Started: A Twitter account which, fine, won’t be the most active that you follow but which is very much worth keeping an eye on – this will Tweet every time a new political party is registered in the UK. Which is how I know that we can all look forward to the ability to vote for the “Workers Voice UK” party in the next election, and that the party previously known as ‘The Children and Family Party’ (sounds a bit sinister) has changed its name to “Justice for Men & Boys” (sounds even more sinister and I sort-of wonder what happened to cause the change – I imagine she ‘took the kids, Dave’, but I’m just speculating here). Anyway, if you want to keep up-to-date with exactly when the first bunch of Tories jump ship and set up ‘The Continuity Conservatives’ or somesuch, watch this space.

Musk Messages: I imagine that most of you get your fill of Elon simply by existing – I understand, of course, the public fascination with the world’s richest man, I just wish he seemed…more deserving of said fascination. However, if you are itching to do a deep dive into all the texts that were made public around the “will he/won’t he?” (so bored of it, so want it to be over) Twitter acquisition and see exactly how banal his conversations with a bunch of other rich people desperately attempting to engage in some amateur nasal proctology are then this website will see you right. It’s been said before in discussion of these messages, but it’s a staggering window into quite how unremarkable the people running tech/VC/the world really do reveal themselves to be up-close – there’s nothing in here that you would describe as particularly smart, quite a lot that is self-evidently quite stupid, and everything points to the depressing fact that, no matter how rich and successful you are, there is always someone richer and more successful than you that you want to ingratiate yourself with. We really are just primates with pretensions, honestly.

The Descent of the Serpent: A nice little bit of ludic edutainment from Google, with this small ‘game’ (it’s only a game in the loosest sense of the word, but it’s cute and fun and so it probably gets away with it) which does a nice, light-touch educative job of telling kids (or frankly anyone, but I think the sweet spot here will be for children of about 9-10) all about the history of Mesoamerica. Wander around, talk to various historical figures, gloss over all the stuff about human sacrifice…it’s like a very small, very worthy Zelda, sort-of, but with more unpronounceably-concatenated consonants.

Splitter FM:. This is a really interesting idea which rather needs some more high-profile artists to properly take off. Splitter’s a service where artists can upload song stems for their work, thereby allowing fans (or just the curious) to mess with them to remix and rework existing tracks and make new material from the raw. This is LOADS of fun to play around with, as anyone who’s messed about with this sort of thing in the past will know – it’s also sadly lacking any artists who I’ve actually heard of (aside from long-time internet favourites Pomplamoose), although that may be a result of my being in my mid-40s and my musical tastes having long-since atrophied. Anyway, this is a really fun site to mess around on, but if any of you happen to work with any artists I actually like could you please persuade them to sign up for this so that I can produce my own tin-eared manglings of their back catalogue? Thanks!

Manhattan Population Explorer: As ever with this sort of New York-ish stuff I am including this mainly because I wish there was a version that did the same for London. This map shows you the distribution of people around the island of Manhattan over the course of 24h, with density represented by bar charts to create a rather pretty topography. “The visualization you see here is a model of the dynamic population of Manhattan, block-by-block and hour-by-hour for a typical week in late Spring. The model is currently fixed to your local time. The population estimates are the result of a combination of US Census data and a geographic dispersion of calculated net inflows and outflows from subway stations, normalized to match population daytime and nighttime estimates provided by a study from NYU Wagner.” So, er, can someone build this for my home city now, please?

Hahahahahahaha: A small webtoything, which would be literally PERFECT if only it had sound (but it doesn’t, and so is just ‘pleasing’. AIM HIGHER, ANONYMOUS WEBPERSON WHO CERTAINLY DIDN’T MAKE THIS LOOKING FOR MY APPROVAL!).

If You Lived: OK, I confess to not totally understanding what’s happening here, but I think that the gimmick is that the page is effectively mimicking the processes happening in a living body in realtime, but as back-end code functions. Look, this will be a lot simpler if you just click the link and follow the onscreen instruction – done that? Good. Do you see now? DO YOU SEE? I think this is quite beautiful, in a way I can’t quite put my finger on, and I would like to see it as a big, permanent thing in a public space (my word, I am FULL of never-to-be-fulfilled wants this week, it must be the lack of sleep).

Kevin Costner’s Waterworld: Finally in this week’s coveted ‘it’s the end of the miscellanea section, have a videogame!’ slot, KEVIN COSTNER’S WATERWORLD! Which you obviously are all aware is in fact a very small gag in the Simpson’s, where Milhouse plays approximately 3 seconds of the arcade game in question and dies immediately, and which has now been turned into an ACTUAL, REAL VIDEOGAME! This requires you to download and install it, but it’s small and it’s free and it will give you approximately 15 minutes of genuine (if frustrating and janky) joy, which is more than you can probably say for whatever bullsh1t ‘job’ you are currently pretending to care about. This is actually quite smart – the difficulty comes in that you are not controlling the game, you are controlling Milhouse’s arms controlling the game, making the whole thing an exercise in slightly-awkward metacontrols, but it’s worth persevering because there are quite a few solid gags in here and it’s an enjoyable play in a ‘ridiculous and shonky but good’ sort of way.

By Daisuke Ichiba

FINALLY THIS WEEK, A MIX BY FRENCH DJ DUST YARD WHICH CONSISTS OF SOME EXCELLENT DEEP HOUSE AND TECHNO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

The Modified Body: I was reminded earlier this week of being a lobbyist in the mid-00s and being so bored and hating my job so much that I basically took to browsing the most overtly-NSFW content I could in the office (no bongo, obvs, I’m not an animal), which much of the time was the website of body modification publication BMEzine. Which meant that I saw a LOT of hooks-in-skin and suspensions and people ecstatically bleeding on each other – which is exactly what you’ll get from this site, showcasing both examples of body mods from around the world and throughout history, but also some more modern examples including scarification and suspensions and all that jazz. Obviously if you don’t want to see pictures of people’s skin being pierced by large hooks, don’t click this one.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Daniel Lazo: Daniel is a designer who works on films and as far as I can tell designs scifi-style user interfaces for imagined futurestuff – this Insta feed collects some of his work, and it is GREAT and make me wish that I wasn’t going to be long dead by the time stuff that looks like this is in circulation.
Automotive AI: “Automotive designs from a parallel universe, brought to you by artificial intelligence”, because concept car designers have no place in the AI future either.
Harry F Conway: I was in Harrow last weekend and saw a sticker on a lamppost advertising this Insta handle, and when I checked it out I was SO impressed; Harry F Conway (I feel the ‘F’ is important) takes shots of urban London and they are great – dogs, teeth, tatts, protest, madness, the works.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Ark Head: Venkatesh Rao ishas over the past couple of years become one of my favourite writers about The Now, consistently readable and interesting and novel, and this piece is no exception; Rao looks at how and why people are reacting to the latest evolution of modernity and all the fear and uncertainty that that connotes, and puts forward a thesis about the extent to which said fear and uncertainty leads to what he terms ‘ark head’ – “We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or managing most of the snowballing global problems and crises we’re hurtling towards. Or even meaningfully comprehending the gestalt. We’ve accepted that some large fraction of those problems will go unsolved and unmanaged, and result in a drastic but unevenly distributed reduction in quality of life for most of humanity over the next few decades. We’ve concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality–an ark–and compete for a shrinking set of resources with others doing the same. We’re content to find and inhabit just one zone of positivity, large enough for ourselves and some friends. We cross our fingers and hope our little ark is outside the fallout radius of the next unmanaged crisis, whether it is a nuclear attack, aliens landing, a big hurricane, or (here in California), a big wildfire or earthquake.” Which, I don’t know about you, just sort of feels accurate to me, and is a neat way of contextualising the past year’s drive towards small communities and local practice and small initiatives, because the big picture is too vast to focus on and too terrifying to digest.

The Thatcher LARP: The LRB on the current UK political sh1tshow, part 1! This is John Lanchester, with characteristic clarity, outlining exactly why the current Prime Minister’s evocation of a former one is nothing more than cosmetic, and why that matters. “ The uncosted new policy became, to markets, a signal that the new government is not serious and doesn’t know what it’s doing. Truss can wear as many pussy-bow blouses and sit on as many tanks as she wants, but while her policies continue to be uncosted, it’s Larp Thatcher, not the real thing. Markets don’t want a G7 economy to be led by people playing ‘let’s pretend’.”

Madman Economics: The LRB on the current UK political sh1tshow, part 2! At the time of my writing this, Kwasi Kwarteng is landing from Washington and is still Chancellor, although it’s entirely possible that by the time I’m writing the intro that will no longer be the case (and if rumours are to be believed, the Saj’s tactic of ‘just hang around long enough and keep the power stance and they’ll have to give you No.11 eventually’ may well be about to pay off); still, regardless of which particular moronic unfortunate has the job of carrying the poisoned chalice that is ‘the UK economy’ this week, this piece does a good job of explaining exactly why the past fortnight has been such a meteoric sh1tshow from a markets perspective, as well as offering perhaps the best explanation of why the current pair of morons may have decided to take this baffling course in the first place (I’m not saying it makes sense, by the way, I just mean that it’s explained well).

The Silicon Valley Podcasts: I recently had a conversation with someone about ‘doing content’ for a firm of VCs – it was an incredibly depressing conversation, mainly because when I asked ‘but why do you need content and what do you want people to think of you and the fund as a result of the content you put out?’ they weren’t able to offer a cogent answer and instead just sent me 200 links to every single VC newsletter in the world and just sort of gestured vaguely towards them and shrugged. This piece reminded me of that conversation – in it, the author spends a bit of time consuming ‘by VC, for VC’ content and comes to the conclusion that it’s all empty, meaningless and stupid, that it promotes values that might be described at best as ‘questionable’ and at worst as ‘nakedly sh1tty’, and that none of the ‘thought leadership’ contains any ‘thoughts’ or ‘leadership’ (plus ca fcuking change, eh kids?). I remain convinced that, when The Big Reckoning happens and we as a species do some soul searching about How We Got Here and Who Is To Blame, VCs will be right alongside the advermarketingpr drones when the firing squads start up.

Life In The Metaverse: As part of the press-prep for the unveiling of Meta’s new $1500 VR headset this week, a bunch of reporters from outlets around the world did the whole ‘I spent a week in the metaverse!’ thing (ignoring the fact that THE METAVERSE DOESN’T EXIST YET) – this is the NYT’s take, which is broadly more positive than others and paints a picture of a series of experiences that are on the cusp of maybe being interesting, possibly, in the future, with a lot of polishing and a lot more people using them. If you want to focus on the dystopian, though, the segment in there about heavy VR users sleeping in their headsets so that they can immediately wake up and log on is…pretty bleak! And this is a sh1tty, 1.0 version of the future – if it’s still enough to tempt people away from the mediocrity of meatlife now, just you wait til it’s all in glorious haptic 4k. Hundreds of thousands of people will choose over time to commit what will effectively be ludic suicide and never ever leave the machines (hyperbole, yes, but plausibly so imho). WHAT A TIME!

Zuck On The Metaverse: If you’re at all curious about Meta’s vision about whatever the fcuk the ‘metaverse’ will end up being, this interview with Zuckerberg is worth a read. It’s as personality-free as ever, although you can tell he gets…quite spiky when talking about Apple’s VR plans, but this is a really interesting overview of how the man driving all this sees it progressing and working. In particular I thought that his emphasis on Accenture and Microsoft as partners in developing the idea was interesting – if you’re looking for real-world applications for all of this as-yet handwavey potentialtech, corporate is probably the place to keep an eye on.

Mobile China: Thanks to my friend Alex for sending this to me – it’s a super-interesting piece looking at the ways in which China’s mobile-first online infrastructure has had interesting and unforeseen consequences in terms of human behaviour. There’s a lot of this which I think we’re going to see happening in the West too as a result of GenZ/GenAlpha (sorry, I know, these are made up demographic distinctions and I am SORRY for using them, I should know better) being so utterly mobile first, and the increasing ubiquity of mobile-only sites and products. “In China, the clear trend towards mobile drove start-ups to focus exclusively on mobile development, and content platforms that had legacy desktop versions further crippled their desktop products to increase mobile adoption. In the end, we get a fragmented information system where everything is trapped in an app and nothing can be “rediscovered.”” Well, quite.

The Self-Driving Car Lie: As a non-driver I am personally slightly annoyed that all the mid-10s promises made to me by people like Elon have turned out once again to be utter bunkum – I was personally really looking forward to being able to finally do the London-to-Ulan Bator roadtrip I’ve been dreaming of since my teens, especially when I could do it whilst incredibly stoned and being chauffered by machine. Sadly it seems that that vision may never come to pass, at least based on this Bloomberg piece which strongly suggests that pretty much everyone involve in the self-driving car game, Musk excepted, seems to be on the verge of accepting that this isn’t happening anytime soon. The piece does a decent job of explaining why that is, and details where the tech might end up going – the example they use at the end of quarries and construction sites is a fascinating one, and you’d expect that the design of both will become somewhat standardised over time to better-accomodate self-driving vehicles.

The Porcelain Challenge: Or “why you should rarely if ever believe moraql panic stories about social media”, or “it really should be harder than this to spoof international media”, or “man, fact-checking stuff like this is becoming near-impossible thanks to how TikTok is structured”. This is the story of Sebastian Durfee, who a few weeks ago invented a concept called ‘the porcelain challenge’ – a fake TikTok trend in which he claimed kids were snorting dust from ground-up crockery – and then attempted to spoof the media into thinking it was a thing. Which worked – and then worked again when he started posting spoof coverage of his spoof story, faking people into believing the media had been fooled by his initial prank…this is obviously all quite silly, but equally contains some serious points that reflect some of the stuff in that China link up there about the increased impossibility of doing adequate due diligence around content within TikTok.

The Death of Podcasting: Or, perhaps more accurately, ‘why isn’t podcasting producing any breakout hits and is it basically just radio now?’, to which the answers are, in order, “because most podcasts are self-indulgent crap which noone would read if it were written down but which people will deign to listen to because it requires no effort to let the voices of a bunch of people wash over you while you do the washing up or walk to the gym”, and “yes, basically”. “What does it mean if the primary reason a podcast gets any attention these days comes from its ability to drive newsworthy gossip or extend the brand of various A-listers, public personalities, and influencers-in-waiting? It means, as Snyder feared, that podcasting is or will become indistinguishable from corporate radio. Which would be a shame, given that podcasting’s explosive entrance into the mainstream eight years ago was principally defined by the medium’s possibilities as art.”

Mrs Hinch and the Fan Content Question: I confess that I hadn’t ever really given too much thought as to how the endless stream of SEO-bait articles created by online publishers actually works, but thankfully my friend Nick has and has written this explainer about the Mrs Hinch Content Industrial process – whereby articles are written ‘about’ Mrs Hinch and her cleaning expertise, but where the content is literally lifted wholesale from fan Facebook Groups and the like. “One recent story about Mrs Hinch fans sharing tips for removing condensation from windows appeared in no fewer than 24 (twenty-four) different Reach PLC-owned local and national news sites. Express, Mirror, Manchester Evening News, My London, Liverpool Echo, Essex Live, Belfast Live, Staffordshire Live, Suffolk Live and OK to name a selection. I did a search to find which Facebook page these comments were even from, and I couldn’t find anything: Either the posts have been deleted or they were taken from one of the private fan pages, which you can’t peruse unless you are already a member of the group.” Which is interesting for several reasons, partly because of the ‘ethics’ (LOL!) of the practice from a journalistic point of view, but also from the perspective of, again, checking and sourcing and attributability and oh God it does rather feel like we’re hurtling towards an age in which stuff just EXISTS online and finding out where it came from or how it started or whether it’s real is going to be like trying to decode the Voynich manuscript.

The Comedian Footballer: A lovely story, this, of a Spanish footballer who fell out of love with the game and reinvented himself as a standup comedian; this is particularly good in the parts where it explores why Zuhaitz Gurrutxaga stopped wanting to play football for a living, and the feeling of being an imposter in the sport he had grown up dreaming of playing.

Visiting The Body Farm: I featured a piece about a body farm a few years ago – that was about the largest one in the US, which is coincidentally (and comedically) pretty much next-door to Dolly Parton’s ‘Dollywood’ theme park, whereas this is about a smaller equivalent in North Carolina. In case you’re not familiar, body farms are places where the corpses people who’ve donate their bodies to medical sciences are left so that said scientists can study the effects of decomposition in the natural environment. I have a slight personal fascination with the mechanics of death (having to hang out with the corpses of both one’s mother and grandmother within a six-month period will do that, I found), and so this piece spoke to me (in a weird, creepy voice not unlike The Cryptkeeper), but even those of you who don’t have my morbid fascination with mortality and decay should find something interesting here (also, there are no photos of anything gross and limited descriptions of body horror, in case you’re feeling squeamish).

Diplomatic Dining: I know I spend a lot of time on here making fun of BRANDS and CONTENT and BRANDED CONTENT, but it’s important to give credit where it’s due and I think it’s only fair to acknowledge that WeTransfew does really, really good content. I mean, I have no fcuking idea how it helps them sell more premium file transfer solutions, and I question whether it in fact does, but I bet some cnut not entirely unlike me has put together a 60-slide presentation about why it’s EXACTLY the right thing for the business to do, and the resulting output is really far better than it probably needs to be. See, as an exemplar, this very good essay (allegedly by Bompass and Parr but, from what I know of them, I do not believe that for a second) all about the role played by food in international diplomacy over the years, which includes LOADS of great anecdotes including one about George Bush Senior vomiting on the then-President of Japan at a diplomatic meeting in 1992, which apparently placed a certain froideur on US-Nipponese relations for a few years (so, Liz, console yourself that you’ve not hit rock bottom yet!).

Tory Conference: Laurie Penny is on spectacular form here as she recounts her experience of visiting the recent Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. Honestly, if you have ever worked in or around politics then this will be joyously familiar; if you haven’t, know that this is EXACTLY WHAT IT IS LIKE, even in the years when the Tories aren’t having some sort of existential crisis (just like a fcuking Tory, too, to have an existential crisis that fcuks everyone else up). The little vignette right at the end about the sh1tfaced young Conservative is beautiful, and the whole piece is a perfectly-controlled dissection of the peculiar insanity that is ‘people who like politics far too much for their own, or indeed our, good, letting loose’.

Faking Car Crashes For A Living: This is a BRILLIANT story, which really is as insane as the headline makes it sound. Imagine, if you will, a man who decides to make a career out of recruiting a large body of accomplices with whom he stages car crashes to scam the insurance; a man who takes his job so seriously that he will personally thwack said accomplices about the head with a bottle of Jim Beam to simulate a decent concussion; a man who exerted such a degree of charismatic control over his team that they would do things like rip out their own teeth to create convincing crash sites…THIS IS THAT MAN AND HIS STORY. Honestly, this is so so so so good, and you can practically smell the cocaine sweat of everyone involved.

Stuff: A shortish essay about having things and not having things, about not really wanting things, and about loads of other stuff that is just sort-of alluded to between the lines and in gaps. This is…not unpretentious, but I really enjoyed it and I think that the writer (one Kris Bartkus) is at least a bit self-aware about said pretentiousness. Contains excellent paragraphs such as this one: “The young have a fundamentally different relationship to objects, a more artistic one. She convinced me to lug from Guanajuato all the way to New York (mercifully in an era of inefficient airline luggage pricing) an entire sink, which we found in a trash heap. What can one do with a sink? What can’t one do with a sink? One can leave it in one’s basement until one’s mother throws it away—the regret from its disappearance will power us to live another day.”

The Clinic In The Forest: Marcus John Henry Brown is a performer and artist and occasional trainer of speakers, and he used to work in advertising until he realised it was making him sick and so he stopped. This is him writing about part of that sickness and the need to be honest about the sickness, and about what you do (and what you don’t do) when you notice the sickness, and how other people relate to it (or don’t), and it’s a very brave thing indeed to have written.

The Secret Diary of a Ukrainian Soldier: Finally this week, this is just wonderful. It’s exactly what you think it is – except the soldier also happens to be a great writer. This is the first instalment in what I think will be a series, and covers his period of training after joining up with the army; in common with all great writing about war, it captures the insanity and ridiculousness and fear and boredom, and does so with humour and wit and heart. So so so so so so so good, this.