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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY LISTENING TO BBC RADIO4 AND THEY HAVE JUST STARTED TALKING ABOUT FURRIES AND HONESTLY I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FCUK IS HAPPENING ANYMORE, PT.1:  

By Stuart Pearson Wright

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

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY LISTENING TO BBC RADIO4 AND THEY HAVE JUST STARTED TALKING ABOUT FURRIES AND HONESTLY I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FCUK IS HAPPENING ANYMORE, PT.2:  

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

By Francesco D’Isa

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Kasia Mrożewska

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

By Alejandro Peters

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

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

By Randy Ortiz

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

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

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

By Yoon A Mi

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jess Allen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

By Amie Dicke

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

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

By Pale Flare

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

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

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

By Ludwig Favre

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Pon Arsher

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

By Melody Tuttle (all images this week via TIH)

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

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

By Laura Krifka

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

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

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

By Daisuke Ichiba

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Guy Vording

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE!

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

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

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

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

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

By Slawomir Elsner (images via TIH, as per)

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Robin F Williams

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Diane Dal-pra

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Elspeth Vince

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

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

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

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

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Andrew Hem

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

By  Joseph Töreki

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

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

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

By Tyedied

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Mayumi Tsuzuki

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Welcome to England, a country now reaching the ‘results’ stage of a decades-long experiment designed to answer the question ‘so what do you think happens to the social fabric of a nation when its inhabitants spend 20 years watching their quality of life diminish by almost every conceivable available metric while a significant proportion of the people responsible for said diminishing continually tell them, with a straight face, that it is all in fact a direct result of the arrival of people who do not look, sound or behave EXACTLY like their grandparents did’!

Oh, and to anyone suggesting that what’s been seen in the past week isn’t a demonstration of racism and specifically Islamophobia – how else would you characterise a group of people being demonised, protested against and attacked for a crime THAT LITERALLY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM? I don’t know, man, feels weird.

Anway, you’re not here for this – why are you here? Don’t think, just click.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can all join me in shouting Allahu Akbar in Robert Jenrick’s stupid fat Tory face.

By Joe Webb (images this week again via TIH btw, to whom thanks)

WE START WITH AN OLD MIXTAPE WHICH I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO A LOT THIS WEEK AND WHICH I THINK IS A PARTICULARLY GOOD SOUNDTRACK TO SLIGHTLY-MUGGY CITY AFTERNOONS AND NOT SETTING FIRE TO THINGS! 

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN WANTS TO TAP THE ‘YOU DO KNOW WHICH OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRE ELON IS GETTING A LOT OF THIS END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION’-TYPE SCHTICK FROM, DON’T YOU?’ SIGN AGAIN BUT WHICH REALISES IT’S LIKE A BROKEN RECORD ON THAT TOPIC AND SO WILL FOR ONCE RESTRAIN ITSELF, PT.1:

By Gil Rigoulet

NEXT UP, WE’RE BACK TO THE MINIMAL BEATS AND BLEEPS WITH ANOTHER OF FORMER EDITOR PAUL’S ‘I SECRETLY WISH I WAS GERMAN’ MIXES!

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN WANTS TO TAP THE ‘YOU DO KNOW WHICH OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRE ELON IS GETTING A LOT OF THIS END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION’-TYPE SCHTICK FROM, DON’T YOU?’ SIGN AGAIN BUT WHICH REALISES IT’S LIKE A BROKEN RECORD ON THAT TOPIC AND SO WILL FOR ONCE RESTRAIN ITSELF, PT.2:  

• Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle: A special link for all you lovely North Americans! I confess to finding certain aspects of the Walzian love-in this week ever so slightly…icky? Childish? I don’t know quite how to explain it, but it’s the same sort of slight disgust I’ve mentioned before at the whole ‘phew, the grownups are back in charge!’ thing, a slight feeling of disappointment that all it takes for people to express ‘LOVE’ for a politician is the very smallest suggestion of their humanity or being even vaguely in the same ballpark as ‘someone you might once have met and not actually hated on sight’. Then, of course, you look back at the procession of ghouls that the American electorate has been presented with over the course of the past decade and you realise that, yes, fine, perhaps the relief is at least *slightly* comprehensible. Anyway, back in the OMG EPIC BACON LOL era of the Obama years, everyone was so enthused and excited by Barack and his promises of hope (let’s not scrutinise those too hard) that someone set up a Tumblr called ‘Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle’ which would spin up a new ‘Barack is AWESOME’-type message each time you refreshed (very much in the vibe of Chuck Norris memes from The Old Web) – this is the same, except it’s HOMELY UNCLE Tim Walz who’s being lionised here as (for example) being ‘happy to check over that job application for you’. Honestly, I don’t personally get this parasocial aspect of politics AT ALL (I have worked in politics, they are all basically weird lizards, even the good ones), but if you’re a US Democrat looking to keep the feelgood buzz this week going then you might enjoy this (don’t want to talk about the US elections too much because a) they are still going to be happening at the time of the heat death of the universe, or so it feels; and b) I don’t want to jinx anything, but, well…it feels vaguely positive? SHUTUPMATTDONOTBRINGTHEBADLUCK).
• The Banned Book Club: A neat segue into one of the (many, many) reasons why it is probably quite an important thing for the US that the Republican party don’t in fact win on November 5th – this is an initiative by The Palace Project, which aims to “support public libraries in their mission to provide equitable access to digital content, while restoring the direct relationship between library and patron.” The Banned Book Club is a brilliant initiative – apps available on Android and iOS which will enable students at schools in states that have banned specific texts from the curriculum on grounds of conservative complaints to access them securely in digital form via inter-state lending protocols. This is very much only for people in the US who I think are registered students – but it’s a brilliant idea and a great act of resistance against intellectual myopia and mad fundamentalism.
• Did You Make It?: I have on occasion featured websites that have a physically-reactive component to their function – sites that only function when the sun’s out, say, or which follow a diurnal rhythm in terms of content or design – but I think this might in some small way be my favourite, conceptually at least. “”Did you make it?” Is a poem writen by Sam Mason de Caires. It is contained within this website which is synchronised to the tides of the coast line where Sam lives. As the tide rises it covers the beaches and also the lines of this poem, as the tide recedes it reveals more, until at low tide it will reveal the entire poem. The accompanying music is meant to be listened to while visiting the site and reading the poem and is made from local recordings and samples made by Sam and also gifted by friends.” SUCH A BEAUTIFUL IDEA – and, let me repeat this for the nth time, SURELY something which you can use as ‘inspiration’ for something big and shiny?
• Millennium Skills: One of the lovely things about YouTube is that it’s demonstrated the universal human appeal of ‘watching people do stuff they are really good at, however ostensibly-dull that practice might initially seem’ – this channel is FULL of footage of people in (I think) India just making things. Gold-dipped statue of Ganesh? CHECK! Cricket balls? CHECK Hammers? CHECK CHECK CHECK! All the videos are just ambient audio with some light plinky piano behind it, so there’s a vague ASMR vibe to these things, and all the titles have that peculiar tone which you find in so much stuff from south Asia (lots of ‘Amazing!’ and ‘Most Incredible!’) which I personally rather like, and, look, if you really enjoy watching people doing ONE THING very very well indeed, and if you don’t mind if that ‘thing’ is something seemingly-mundane like ‘making melanin crockery’ then you will very much enjoy this.
• 100 Vending Machines: ANOTHER photo website with an unusual interface – this is, er, what I presume is 100 photographs of vending machines, taken across several months in 2024 by…some nameless person – as you move your cursor across the white screen, so the photos are dropped following the path you trace, making a sort of trail of vending machines which, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, I find very pleasing indeed. It’s not, fine, perhaps the best way of displaying them for anyone who has a really deep interest in the vending machines of Japan and who wants to really go deep into the details, but let’s presume you just want 30s worth of pleasing UX/UI before you move onto the next link and just leave it there.
• What Vegetable Are You?: Ok, fine, this is a very silly quiz, but there’s something honestly really charming about the vague sense of whimsy and how (really, very) silly it is. In case you’re curious, I am broccoli (I am fine with this).
• The SmallWeb Subway: Oh I like this a LOT – it’s a really simple idea, presenting a bunch of thematically-linked websites as though arranged on an imagined city’s underground map, each ‘stop’ a new site and each ‘line’ a collection of web projects linked by a particular quality or subject, with intersections from line to line taking place at sites where two conceptual ‘lines’ converge. From the creator’s explanation: “The Smallweb Subway is an experimental project that seeks to connect communities online using webrings. A webring is a list of websites linked together in a circular structure. The usage of webrings dates back to the early days of the internet before search engines were widely adopted and when there were no big social media platforms with discovery algorithms. Webrings were ways for people to discover new sites by clicking through conveniently organized links, eventually bringing you back to where you started…The subway system theme is my attempt at making the internet feel more like a place where you can have neighbors. If a webring looks like a subway line, then it’s easier to imagine a friend only a few stops away!” Beautifully, they’ve provided code so that anyone who owns a site they think would fit can add themselves to a particular line, making this a theoretically organic, growing series of connections – which is lovely, but, equally, I really like the idea of giving people the tools to make their own versions of this. I can’t imagine – lol, I KNOW FCUK ALL ABOUT HOW TO BUILD STUFF, WHAT DO I KNOW? – that it’s beyond the wit of man to create a simple interface to let anyone create their own version based on their own taxonomies and selections, and I would genuinely be thrilled were someone to create such a thing (do, er, any of you want to thrill me? Please?).
• Quick Share For Windows: Sincere apologies for what is, objectively, an incredibly-fcuking-tedious link – BUT IT IS USEFUL. Would YOU like an app (and an official one too!) which lets you simply and easily send files from your phone to your laptop without having to do that fcuking annoying thing of emailing it to yourself (literally half my life is me emailing links or files to myself; I promise the other half is less sh1t, though)? Yes, of course you would! Simple, quick and actually useful, in a way which, if I’m honest, pretty much none of the links I usually give you are. BE GRATEFUL.
• Auto Highlighter: This was sent to me by the aforementioned reader who’s doing the Curios Back Catalogue Marathon, one Tim Magee from Cambridge, who is using it to help them filter out stuff they’re not interested in from their online reading. It’s a really clever little idea for a browser extension – you basically give it a bunch of keywords which will, from point on, be highlighted in whichever colour you want, or hidden, basically helping you either easily identify topics of interest, or avoid trigger topics or spoilers…the only annoying thing about this is that it’s seemingly Firefox-only, although I’d be amazed if there wasn’t a variant on this on Chrome somewhere.
• Rick Steve’s Travel Forum: There are a few rules of thumb that I have found it useful to live by over the years – never drink in a flat-roofed pub, or one built directly into a housing estate; never, ever assume that the pills are duds until AT LEAST an hour has passed, etc etc – but in recommending this site I am having to abandon one of those I hold to be most true, to whit ‘never, ever trust a man who has two first names’ (I once worked with someone called ‘Robert John’ who is comfortably the worst human being I have ever encountered, personally or professionally – he is a former Conservative councillor now living in Dubai, which, I think, probably tells you all you need to know). Rick Steve’s Travel Forum is, I have now seen said in various places I trust, THE single best source of European travel advice anywhere on the web, a community of people who just really, really like sharing tips and tricks and recommendations about places to go. I am told that if you have a question about traveling ANYWHERE, your first port of call should be ‘check the Rick Steve forums’. The fact you need to register an account upfront is a good sign that Rick Steve’s Travel Forums (sorry, there’s just something inexplicably pleasing about typing the full name out – I’m doing that very odd thing of reading the words as I type them because they are just VERY SATISFYING) is a Serious Place for Seriously Helpful Travel Experts, and, generally, this gives me Good Vibes – although, equally, there’s every possibility that once you’re in it’s just 300 different flavours of Minnesotan asking about why there aren’t any Starbucks in Naples.
• Mumbdle: Congratulations to the creators of this (very good) little daily puzzle game on coming up with a name that is really quite particularly unpleasant to say out loud (try it, go on – HORRID) – although perhaps I’m just bitter as this is one of those things that I am simply Not Built To Be Good At. The premise here is simple – each day there’s a different song for you to guess based on the hummed interpretation of the site owner; you get five guesses; with each guess, a new layer of humming harmony is added, fleshing out the track and making it (allegedly) easier to guess what it is. You might be able to do this with nary a thought, but I am basically tone-deaf (not quite, but almost) and as such this is, for the most part, a bit like staring at a Magic Eye picture and consistently failing to see any sailboats whatsoever.
• ASCII Frogger: This is only a demo, really, so don’t expect to spend more than 30s with it, but I can’t tell you how wonderful the squished frog effect is and so it definitely deserves you to die at least once so you can experience it.
• The Point Clicker: A clicker game which is also a really annoying maths problem. I didn’t realise at first and was clicking like a slack-jawed yokel until I cottoned onto what was happening and realised that, actually, no, my brain doesn’t actually work in the right sort of way for me to be able to do anything other than attempt to brute force this and, honestly, life is too short. I like to think that one of you will look at this and just sort of GET IT (and then explain to me what the optimal strategy is here and how you arrived at that, in a manner which a particularly-docile ruminant might understand).
• Sets: Ooh, I like this – it requires you to look at and think about patterns in a way that is *just* unusual enough to mean that you (or at least I) feel it tugging at the edge of your brain slightly as you solve them (does…does anyone else get this? Like a near-physical feeling in your head when you’re doing thinking that is outside your usual wheelhouse? I feel it most either when I’m being forced to ACTUALLY THINK by something like philosophy, or when I am trying to use one of the bits of my brain that mostly languish unbothered, like ‘spatial awareness’ or ‘pattern matching’ or ‘anything but the most cursory aesthetic judgement’). Created by Shelby Wilson, the premise is simple: “Set is a card game in which each card has four properties: color,  shape, shading and number of elements. A ‘set’ is created by finding three cards that are either all the same or all different for each property. In a deck of 81 cards, this means there are 1080 unique sets.” It’s match by similarity or exclusion, basically, and it’s surprisingly addictive when you get your head round what it’s asking of you.
• Eidercake: A cute little interactive fiction game set in a mediaeval cloister. You play as a young woman working in the kitchen – per the short description, “It’s the feast day of your patron saint, and a recipe has gone missing. A short tale of birds, books, and the cloistered life” – and it’s a gentle 10 minutes of exploring the different rooms and looking for the recipe book and talking to the various other inhabitants of the cloister who, inexplicably, are all birds of various sorts. The sounds and the visuals are really lovely here too.
• Asciicker: This week’s final ludic distraction is quite incredible. This is a project which has, as far as I can tell, been going for YEARS, cycling through phases of development as the person or people behind it get better at coding and what they can do with the limited palette of ASCII characters…it’s basically a sort of limited proof-of-concept for a browser MMO which is, remarkably, all built from the ASCII characterset – but wait, honestly, click the link and click ‘new game’ (and then click one of the options below it – the interface is…sub-optimal) and then marvel at what they have been able to create. I promise you, this really is quite incredible from a technical point of view – functionality’s a bit limited, and you might have to google around a bit if you want to work out what the fcuk is meant to be going on, but you can explore the landscape and collect items and meet other players and while this is very far away from being a ‘game’ in any meaningful complete sense it’s certainly a pretty amazing exploration of what you can do with some pretty simple tools (honestly, when it loads up try right clicking and moving the mouse to make the camera circle, it’s a proper ‘oh wow, this *is* smart’ moment).

By Takashi Nakamura

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS 70s-INFLECTED SELECTION BY MY FRIEND DARIO (I DO NOT KNOW THE MAN, HE IS NOT MY FRIEND)! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Andy Altman Studio:  Andy Altman is a graphic designer, whos Insta feed is just a collection of really good-looking bits of design. Oh, and he’s currently posting old detergent boxes, which is an aesthetic that is RIGHT up my street (BONUS 70s DETERGENT PACKAGING FACT! According to Jonathan Meades’ excellent-if-genuinely-horrible novel ‘Pompey’, OMO-brand washing up powder was used by British housewives in the mid-20th Century as an indicator of their availability for sexual favours, OMO being a handy TLA for ‘Old Man Out’. No idea if this is true, but I like to imagine so.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Konstantin Koborov

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE! Are you enjoying the Olympics? Or are you instead choosing to use it as an opportunity to pursue your single-minded fixation on incredibly complex questions of human biology?

However you’ve chosen to spend your week, I hope you’ve had a fabulous time – unless, of course, you chose to spend any portion of it chanting ‘we want our country back’, in which case can I ask that you fcuk off? Thanks!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably want to click all the links this week, they really are ACE.

***OH, AND PS, THANKS TO EVERYONE VOTING IN THE TINY AWARDS AND TO EVERYONE WHO’S SHARED THE LINK PLEASE CONTINUE TO DO SO THANKYOU!***

By Pale Flare (and via TIH)

CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING ALIVE TO SEE AUGUST 2024! CELEBRATE WITH THIS GORGEOUS SELECTION OF JAZZY CUTS MIXED BY TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ALL THE BLOKES PICTURED LOBBING BRICKS AT MOSQUES THIS WEEK ALL LOOK LIKE TOTAL FCUKING SH1T, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT BEING A VIOLENT RACIST IS TERRIBLY AGEING AS WELL AS BEING STUPID, PT.1:

By Ollie Jones

NEXT UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF HIGH-QUALITY REMIXES CURATED AND COMPILED BY THE LOVELY FRED DEAKIN OF LEMON JELLY FAME!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ALL THE BLOKES PICTURED LOBBING BRICKS AT MOSQUES THIS WEEK ALL LOOK LIKE TOTAL FCUKING SH1T, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT BEING A VIOLENT RACIST IS TERRIBLY AGEING AS WELL AS BEING STUPID, PT.2:

• Twanalysis: Plug in your Twitter handle (don’t worry, it doesn’t do anything nefarious) and get an AI-generated summary of what The Machine thinks you’re like based on its analysis of your feed. I have to say I was impressed with its assessment of me, not least the age thing given that I don’t think I’ve really mentioned it on Twitter before – although on reflection all that means is that my prose is middle-aged-coded, which is admittedly *slightly* crushing. Anyway, you  can plug in any username you like, so feel free to spend the next 10 minutes getting it to assess all your hatefollows after it’s done you.
• T Minus: Ooh, I quite like this – feels like this might be EMINENTLY THIEVABLE for a bit of easy brandwork (if nothing else it feels like you might be able to use this to game ‘website dwelltime’ stats, in the unlikely event any of should have that as a metric on your ‘do I get a payrise or bonus?’ bingo card). “T-minus is a collaborative online game, contributed to by hundreds of people from across the internet! The objective is to get the counter down to t-0! The player who makes the last click gets a special reward….” I can’t imagine that this will ever get to the end – but, equally, I can TOTALLY imagine this becoming a weird internet craze if, say, Nike were to do something similar with the promise of an EXCLUSIVE DROP for the final clicker. This is basically Peter Molyneux’s ‘Curiosity’ game stripped down to the very bare bones, but that doesn’t mean you can’t totally lift this for PR gain.
• Date Like Goblins: How long has everyone been writing the ‘hmm, online dating and the apps really suck, huh?’ thinkpieces? FCUKING YEARS, it feels like, and yet still the western world persists in tapping and swiping and ghosting and breadcrumbing and all of the other miserable neologisms that reflect the increasingly-miserable process of ‘trying to find someone to see out the apocalypse with’. Date Like Goblins is a new spin on the old horror, with the gimmick that it’s designed for people for whom even the prospect of ‘chatting to someone on a dating app’ is A BIT MUCH – instead, the service offers to match you with a potential date via the medium of games. This is a beta project seeking to raise funding – there’s a link to the Kickstarter on the homepage – but the gist, per their blurb, is: “We let singles meet and then seamlessly schedule dates in their favourite video games while voice chatting. We’re for the introverts, neurodivergent, and the perpetual third wheels who know their person is out there, they’re just having a hard time finding them.” Look, I can’t imagine for a second that this is the sort of thing that will a) get funding; or b) ever get beyond the basic problem that all the users will be desperately horny teenage boys, but part of me approves of the hopeful intent behind it.
• Traini: Do you have a dog? Do you want to train it to do EXCITING CANINE TRICKS? Would you like to do that THANKS TO THE MAGICAL POWER OF AI????? Oh good! Traini is an iOS app which purports to let you learn all sorts of exciting training commands to get your dog to, I don’t know, roll over, or play dead, or rip out the postman’s jugular (there’s a big splash at the top of the homepage which seems to suggest you should use it to teach your dog to skateboard, which, well, ok!) – I have a sneaking suspicion that this has existed for a while now and the whole ‘AI!’ thing has been added to the copy by a zeitgeist-chasing marketing drone, but there’s an alleged ‘video analysis of your dog’s posture and behaviour’ gimmick which is meant to give you detailed insight into ‘your pet’s bone structure’, which feels worryingly close to some sort of weird canine eugenics-type thinking, but I’m sure it’s all entirely benign. Terrifyingy, the homepage also promises to help you “make dogs into KOL” – presumably ‘key opinion leaders’? – which is both horrible and also utterly ridiculous, so well done whoever penned that line.
• On Track: No idea whether any of you are the sorts of people who would like the opportunity to download a ‘game’ which provides you with a procedurally-generated view out of a virtual railway carriage, with bucolic scenery sliding by, which is basically designed to give you a soothing vista to gaze at while you, I don’t know, get on with tedious, menial bits of digital administration from your small-windowed urban hovel, but, well, this is what this is! You’ll obviously need a second screen to play this on if you want to use it for its intended purposes as ‘productivity tool’, but should you be one of the fabled ‘two monitor’ tribe then this could be quite a nice, soothing addition to your screen setup.
• Look So Unique: Leaving aside the slight horror or ‘so unique’ as a phrase, this is a terrible ‘generate a tshirt design using AI and then get it printed and shipped’ service which has literally nothing to recommend it, other than the fact that you can opt to have your original prompt included in the eventual design, which lends the resulting creations a weird sort of poignancy – without the caption it’s just another sh1tty Stable Diffusion image of a kitten wearing a suit; with the caption it’s a strangely-poignant vision of a feline businessman, captioned “the most professional cat in the world gets ready for the most significant meeting of his life”, which I think we can all agree elevates the resulting creation to ART status.
• Gaping Maws: A website dedicated to photos of animals with VERY WIDE-OPEN MOUTHS. Literally just that – this hasn’t been updated since 2007, sadly, but I hope whoever’s responsible for its creation is happy to know that a whole 17 years later his collection of mouthy critter pics is still bringing joy to the world (or at the very least the three of you who click this link).
• The Best of The Far Side: Anyone old enough to remember the late-80s/early-90s will have a soft spot for The Far Side, Gary Larson’s single-panel comic strip which was for several years an IMMENSE cultural juggernaut, literally everywhere, and which then just sort of…stopped being everywhere, and which hasn’t, to my mind at least, really achieved the same sort of post-web fame and love that other strips like Calvin and Hobbes have. The link takes you to a selection of QTs of people sharing their favourite panels, and fcuk me you forget how GOOD so much of this is. Seriously, if you’re a YOUNG PERSON and you’re not au fait with the strip, this really is worth digging into – there’s an internal logic and coherent worldview across the strips which really makes them stand out, a sort of inherent ‘Larson-ness’ that permeates the canon, which imho is the hallmark of the very best comics work, in the same way that Calvin and Hobbes is clearly imbued with a significant amount of Bill Watterson’s personal philosophy. Pick your favourite – personally speaking, I think the ‘thagomizer’ cartoon might be mine.
• Italian Air Pollution: Via Giuseppe, this is a very simple but LOVELY bit of visualisation work, presenting shifting air quality in four Italian cities over a monthlong period in a genuinely-inventive, clear and effective way. Really, really smart – this feels like an approach that can be repurposed for other data, potentially.
• Off TikTok: I have a vague feeling that a few of you reading this are in India – if so, this is for YOU (and for Americans, should the TikTok ban actually go ahead, about which I continue to be…sceptical, frankly). This is a simple website that lets you watch TikTok’s off TikTok, meaning that it should let you view them even in countries in which the platform is technically banned.
• Zack D Films: Via Former Editor Paul, this is the Facebook page of Zack D Films, which seemingly pumps out two genuinely-batsh1t CG video ‘explainers’ per day, covering subjects as diverse as ‘getting struck by lightning’, and ‘the importance of not eating undercooked bear meat’. Do you remember about ten years ago there was a brief online craze for sharing the CG news summaries created by some South East Asian TV channel, in which big news events would be recreated in dreadful, clunky 3d models? Of course you do! Well this is pretty much in the same stylistic ballpark, and I can’t stress enough how marvellous it is to (for example) watch a computer-generated mountaineer curl out a perfectly-rendered CG brown as part of the clip for ‘why is Mount Everest covered in poo?’ video (you really do need to see that one).
• Public Work: SUCH a good resource, this one. “Public Work is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.” Not only can you keyword search for anything you fancy, but there’s a lovely bit of ‘similarity matching’-type code doing on which means that you can explore stuff that has the same visual energy too – this is just a really pleasing site to scroll around and explore, leaving aside its obviously utility in terms of finding images that are free to use.
• The LAAX Highline World Championships: Slacklining is one of those things that gets me properly sweaty-palmed when I watch people do it, but I’d totally forgotten about its existence as a sport until I stumbled across this site this week – JESUS GOD DOES THIS LOOK TERRIFYING. Last month, the 2024 highlighning (slacklining, but, well, VERY HIGH UP) world championships were held in Switzerland – this site features videos of them doing their thing. If you can watch these without your stomach doing strange cartwheels as you watch them bounce and caper and, on certain particularly-terrifying occasions, DO CARTWHEELS AND STUFF, on a loosely-tied rope hanging over a massive alpine ravine then you’re a braver person than I (lol, of course you are, I am a total physical coward).
• Corals:3d models of a whole bunch of different types of coral, collected by the Smithsonian museum. Why? I have no idea, but corals are cool. Actually I do sort-of know – the page features five separate guided education modules to help people learn about corals, what types there are, their shapes, etc, so you can either use this to learn about them or, if you’re perhaps less invested in IMPROVING YOUR MIND, just to look at some really impressive renderings of some cool undersea organisms.
• Tim Andraka: You might have seen these doing the rounds this week – Tim Andraka is an illustrator who creates wonderfully-inventive and surreal drawings of animals. I can’t really explain these beyond ‘no, I meant it when I said ‘surreal’, honestly’ – and yes, I know that I always say that, but click the link and then try and work out how YOU would explain these. See?
• Blue Screen of Death Maker: Working in an office with minimal IT support? Want to take the rest of the day off? Chuck this up on your screen, throw your hands in the air and head to the pub! NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any implications resulting from your paymasters seeing through this incredibly obvious ruse.
• Online Dice: Did you ever read the 70s classic ‘The Diceman’ and briefly think ‘hm, that does sound like quite an interesting way of approaching life and decisions, even if one which would eventually lead to some absolutely-fcuking-catastrophic places’? This site lets you roll any number of any-sided dice you choose at the push of a button – ostensibly I presume it’s designed for online tabletop/roleplaying games, but I prefer to think of it as your very own decisionmaking device. Why not spend the rest of the afternoon leaving all of your personal and professional decisions UP TO THE DICE? Go on, what’s the worst that can happen? NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for your life being entirely fcuked beyond all recognition as a result of you handing over its reins to the capricious whims of The Dice.
• Glitch Game: This is a really interesting riff on the nascent ‘text adventure game using LLMs to allow for natural language in game’ – in Glitch Game, your job is to exploit your knowledge of prompting to subvert the mechanic and escape the weird simulation. It doesn’t QUITE work, but I really liked the way it uses LLMs’ own inherent weaknesses to exploitation as part of the narrative/ludic hook. If you’re confused or struggling you can read the developer’s writeup here, but I’d advise you to have a play around blind first as it’s quite nice to discover the premise by yourself the first time round.
• Arsonate: Occupying the coveted ‘last slot in the miscellaneous links section’ position this week is this excellent little game – a demo for the forthcoming full release – in which you play a card game against a sinister, gas masked antagonist. There’s a fire coming – the way you play your cards determines which of you gets consumed in the flames. Really nicely done, this – pleasingly sinister, the game is simple but surprisingly chewy in terms of strategy when you get your head round it, and the PS1-era graphics make the whole thing feel grubbily retro in a vaguely-Manhunt-esque way. An excellent way to spend an hour or so trying to see all three endings.

By Maisie Cowell

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS BEAUTIFULLY-ETHEREAL SELECTION OF WISPY, BLEEPY AMBIENT (WISPY AND BLEEPY REALLY ARE THE APPROPRIATE ADJECTIVES, I PROMISE) MIXED BY NORUS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• OO KK AA: I *think* this is someone whose work I featured in a video a while back – stop-motion animation featuring matches, ring a bell? – but this is an Insta feed full of some of the most incredible, short pieces of stop-motion work I’ve ever seen, ever. Beautiful, precise, verging on the sublime (no, really, it is that good).
• Life Imitates AI Art: Ooh, a WHOLE NEW AESTHETIC! No, seriously, you may not even have thought that was possible here in the used-up, dried-out husk of the 21st Century, but this really is a properly novel thing – welcome to the brand-new category of ‘actual photographs which look like AI-generated images but are in fact actual images of the real world’! These really, really mess with my brain and I think this feels like a potentially-interesting visual direction for a very particular type of campaign, should you be in the market for such a thing. Even if not, there’s definitely a bunch of w4nky thinkpieces all you creative directors can get out of this for LinkedIn – you dreadful, soulless fcukers, you!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Martha Rich

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hi everyone! Hi! Can…can we all please stop talking about the US election for a bit, please? There’s ages left and you’re not going to be able to keep this level of discourse up for another three months, unless he really DOES fcuk his couch.

Tell you what, let me distract you with something different, something which exists BEYOND POLITICS! Something which transcends petty boundaries of left and right, right and wrong, ‘Republicans’ and ‘people who aren’t total cnuts’ – THAT’S RIGHT I AM TALKING ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS!

Yes, gentle reader, we have a shortlist! 12 websites in the main category, 6 in the ‘multiplayer’ category, all vying for your votes and attention and the chance to win a VERY SMALL PRIZE!

Thanks to everyone who shared the website – we had over 300 entries after clearing up spam and the leavings of all of those people who simply can’t comprehend written instructions – and especially to our esteemed judges who sorted through them all to pick their favourites.

Please do go and check out the nominations, and vote, and TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE – if nothing else it’s a lovely selection of interesting and odd and fun and silly and BRILLIANT websites, made by actual people for the simple love of Making Stuff Online, and for that reason alone it deserves a bit of love and attention.

The winners will be revealed on 18 August – I’ll remind you ahead of time, don’t worry – but PLEASE SHARE THE LINK AND SPREAD THE WORD! Should any journalists be reading this thinking ‘you know, maybe this would make a good hook for that piece I’ve been longing to write about the small, creative web as an antidote to Big Tech Hegemony?’, let me reassure you that you are right and that it would.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are as sick as I am of the ‘b’ word, don’t pretend you’re not.

By Natalia Gonzales Martin

WE KICK OFF THE SONGS THIS WEEK WITH WHAT IS FRANKLY THE ONLY MIX YOU NEED, PERHAPS EVER, IN THE SHAPE OF OVER 24 HOURS OF (FROM WHAT I HAVE HEARD, AT LEAST) SUPERB TRACKS SPANNING A MASSIVE RANGE OF GENRES AND ARTISTS AND ERAS AND WHICH, HONESTLY, IS JUST A GIFT FOR WHICH IMMENSE THANKS TO THE PEOPLE AT DEEK RECORDINGS FOR COMPILING IT!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS HOW EXACTLY YOU IMAGINED THEY GOT THE HORSES TO DANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, PT.1:  

By Janet Maya

NEXT UP, AN ACTUAL ALBUM BY A NORTH-EAST PUNK BAND CALLED SUNNY BLUNTS WHICH I DISCOVERED THIS WEEK AND FELL SLIGHTLY IN LOVE WITH, NOT LEAST BECAUSE THE SINGER HAS A RECOGNISABLE ACCENT WHICH IS IMMENSELY PLEASING AND THE SONGS ALSO SLAP! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS HOW EXACTLY YOU IMAGINED THEY GOT THE HORSES TO DANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, PT.2:  

• Ready Player One: Ok, it is very important that you watch at least some of this clip twice –  the first time KEEP THE SOUND OFF. The link is to a Tweet promoting a bunch of ‘sports cars’ existing in ‘metaverse platform’ (so 2021!) Somnium Space (remember them? They were selling ‘real estate’ for real cashmoney back in the day, bet that’s appreciated nicely!), and, honestly, this is slightly amazing – these are all modded in by users, and they are all ‘ownable’ (something something web3 blockchain) and drivable in the game, and as you watch this you start to get a creeping feeling that, yes, ok, fine, this may be something that is currently only really being used by about 1000 people worldwide, in all likelihood, and it’s a *bit* janky, but, actually, if you squint, you can JUST ABOUT make out the shape of every fcuking tedious manchild’s fictional wet dream Ready Player One lurking in the not-too-distant future…look, seriously, I have no personal appetite for any of this stuff, but even I can concede that there’s something slightly mind-blowing about the possibility being hinted at here. Ok, you done that? You watched at least a bit of this with the sound off? Ok, great, now go back to the beginning of the video and put the sound on. Listen to the voice-over. THAT IS WHY THE METAVERSE IS NEVER GOING TO BE A THING. PEOPLE LIKE THIS. WHY ARE YOU ATTEMPTING TO MAKE SEXY CHAT ABOUT VIRTUAL CARS? Honestly, you can practically *smell* the mountain dew and see the very, very grubby gamer chair. Still, the tech is undeniably impressive so well done, sort-of.
• The Salesforce Child Art Sale: I have featured the strange and, honestly, rather horrible, art of Salesforce Child in here before via their Twitter account, but I noticed this week that some of their work is now on sale in physical form and, well, GET INVOLVED. Spending some of the corporate art budget on one of these would be an incredible statement of intent, is all I’m saying.
• Overlap: What do you want more of in your life? Time? Money? Sex? Cake? Tearful solitude (lol!)? NO WHAT YOU WANT MORE OF IS PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS CONNECT ME UP TO THE NETWORK LINK MY NODE. Ahem. Overlap is a new professional matchmaking setup, which, presumably, is designed to do similar stuff to LinkedIn except without causing you to lose some of your immortal soul every time you post (I presume that’s what’s happening on LinkedIn, anyway) – basically it’s a dating app but for professional connections (sort of), insofar as it seeks to pair you with potentially-interesting people based on your profile, but the idea here, presumably, is that you will swap business cards and contacts and wisdom rather than mucal extrusions. The problem with an approach like this, I worry, is…well, it’s men, isn’t it? Given that men can’t seem to spend any time on any platform without attempting to use it as a platform for chirpsing, it seems to me vanishingly-unlikely that one which quite obviously apes the UX and UI of dating apps (minus the sexy photos, fine) isn’t going to be swamped with guys attempting to use it to get into more than someone’s contacts book. Still, MORE PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS, like some sort of miserable besuited Pokemon of sh1t.
• Button Stealer: Fun AND pointless! Button Stealer is a Chrome extension which, when installed, lets you ‘steal’ a button from any webpage you happen to visit – ‘stolen’ buttons are not, of course, stolen in any meaningful sense, but the extension saves them in your personal ‘stash’, so over time you can build up a small, personal collection of digital design elements that are uniquely yours. It’s that that makes it charming, I think – the fact that everyone’s haul will be unique (and obviously totally pointless, but, well still unique!).
• Raymond Biesinger: Ok, this is an online shop, fine, but the design here, by one Raymond Biesinger, is SO GOOD – this is his store, where he sells his own prints and restorations of vintage design work from 20th Century Canada, and, honestly, I promise you that you will find something here that you adore, and the prices are relatively low for this sort of thing. Take a look, this is great.
• So, You Want To Build A Museum: WHAT a resource this is! Offered by by Florence Schechter, who is the person behind the long-running and eventually-successful campaign to establish London’s Vagina Museum and who’s now created this insanely-generous document which neatly and simply takes you through the questions you need to think about and the steps you need to take if you want to establish your own small museum on whatever topic you fancy. You need to fill in some details and hand over your email to get access, but, honestly, that’s a small price to pay – there’s SO much good thinking in here, and, honestly, it’s probably worth a look for anyone who’s involved in planning-y, thinking-y, organising-y work.
• Asqme: Interesting idea, this, aimed at YouTube creators – the idea here is that you train The Machine on your archive material, which is then used as the basis for a Question & Answerbot version of YOU, spun up by AI, which can be available 24/7 for anyone to ask questions of, the idea being that answers will be valuable because drawn from your actual bank of knowledge and not in fact just spun up as a result of probability. You can even go so far as to monetise the system, charging for responses (and even charging a premium for FAST responses), which seems…punchy, frankly. I see what they are trying to do here, but I would have to be SIGNIFICANTLY more confident in the ability of these people to fix the whole ‘hallucination’ issue than I in fact am before I let The Machine confidently answer questions on, say, the safe way to install an induction heater. Feels like there might be some interesting legal liability stuff in the future here, is all I’m saying.
• Rebind: Featured in the longreads section a few weeks back, Rebind is an AI-augmented reading platform which offers you the ability to, er, read but with ADDED FEATURES – video content to go alongside the reading experience, and discuss the book with an AI model which has been specially trained on the thoughts and interpretations and reactions of another reader, an expert or someone with particular perspective on the text in question. It was this AI component that got all the attention in the press leading up to launch, and it’s an interesting idea, although I suppose I question exactly how many people are actually going want to spend significant amounts of time ‘talking’ to an AI interlocutor about, I don’t know, Middlemarch enough to spend the cash on these SPECIAL BOOKS. There’s a slow publication cadence, with a new title coming out every month or so, and there’s a bunch of additional functionality including the ability to take notes on the text as you go, and then use those notes to create your very OWN interlocutor, so you can…what, discuss your feelings and thoughts on the text with an AI version of yourself? As you can tell, this holds VERY limited appeal for me, but perhaps you’ll be persuaded – personally it feels quite a lot like CD-Rom encyclopaedias c.1995, but see what you think.
• A Very Big Auction of Sports Memorabilia: How much would you pay for the shorts that Michael Jordan wore on his final ever NBA game, playing for the Washington Wizards in the 2002-3 season (it is unclear from the listing whether said shorts have been laundered, lest that change the amount you might be prepared to bid)? How about Diego Maradona’s ACTUAL SIGNED ARGENTINA SHIRT from the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup? Well TOUGH, unless the answer to both those questions was ‘a genuinely insane amount of money’ then I’m afraid you’re unlikely to get near any of the lots at this forthcoming Sotheby’s sale taking place in the US next week. Still, nice to window shop.
• Free Faces: After last week’s ‘steal the fonts’ MSCHF drop, here’s the lawful-good antonym – Free Faces offers “a curated collection of typefaces that are available under a variety of free licences somewhere on the interwebs”, collected by one Simon Foster. THANKYOU SIMON FOSTER!
• Free Textures: More free digital things! Textures this time! “Texturelabs is an online resource for free, original textures and tutorials for art and design. These elements are created by Texturelabs and are free to use, even in your commercial work (with just a few exceptions). Alongside these resources are a selection of original Tools – project files, templates, actions, and more, which play a vital role in sustaining the project.” All of this was created by one person, Brady Erickson, which is such an insanely generous thing to do it makes me very slightly emotional.
• British Teeth: Matt Round gets his second mention of the week (he doesn’t even PAY me, ffs) for this lovely new project on Vole where the English amongst you can find out exactly HOW English your English teeth are, compared to the degradation of the teeth of the average English person of your age. As someone who went to the hygienist this week and therefore is feeling moderately-virtuous about their oral hygiene (whilst simultaneously currently imbibing his seventh mug of ruinously-strong brew of the day here at 917am, of a hue that might best be described as ‘terracotta umbre’, thereby undoing all of the good work accomplished in the chair a few short days ago ffs) this made me feel rather smug – anyway, this is ANOTHER great example of a simple idea that can and should be coopted into a marketing promo for a dentist’s, or a public health campaign or something. SOMEONE PAY MATT THE MONEY FFS, HE HAS LITERALLY DONE ALL THE WORK.
• Learn Go: I appreciate that telling people to ‘learn Go’ in 2024 is a bit like telling them to, I don’t know, master times tables – you could do it, fine, but, equally, we passed the Rubicon of machine superiority a while back. Still, if you don’t mind the fact that you’re learning a game that machines have literally completed (to an extent, at least) this is a really good resource which patiently takes players through the rudiments of the game before slowly scaling up the complexity across a five-step tutorial program. To be clear, I tried a few steps of this and realised quite quickly that this is FAR too maths-y for me, but those of you with more, er, rigorous brains might enjoy the learning experience here.
• Infinite Homepage: Another attempt to recreate the Million Dollar Homepage! Honestly, has anyone tallied the various riffs on Alex Tew’s now-legendary early-internet stunt? Would love to see something chronicling all the copycats it spawned (and to know whether any of them had anywhere near the same degree of success). Anyway, Infinite Homepage is another ‘hey, why don’t you buy a stake on this infinite webcanvas?’ project, with the gimmick that there’s an infinite series of editable text boxes which users can ‘lock’ in exchange for a payment – if you want an idea of why this is never going to work, try making ANY fcuking sense of the ‘about’ page here. Doomed to eventual irrelevance, but in the meantime there’s something oddly-fascinating about seeing all the various bits of graffiti people are choosing to populate the canvas with (and slightly dispiriting to note that the moronic crypto ‘gm!’ thing is still a, well, thing).
• Smokescanner: I am slightly annoyed by this – I think it’s a fun, silly little idea (and as a smoker – still, just – I obviously approve of the theory behind it), but it REALLY doesn’t explain itself particularly well. Let me see if I can do a better job – tell the site where you are flying from, and to, and it will tell you how many packets of fags you have to buy at your destination to cover the cost of the flight in the savings you make. Er, does that make sense? Hang on, maybe it’s harder than I thought. Basically the idea is ‘if you buy loads of fags in (eg) Italy you will save about £9 per pack – by that token, if I buy 20 packs of fags I have basically got a £180 flight for free’ – SEE, IMPECCABLE LOGIC!!! I know that you almost certainly can’t use ‘tabs are cheap abroad!’ as an advermarketing mechanic in 2024, more’s the pity, but this is a great little gimmick.
• The Supreme Court Art Competition: Do YOU know someone between the ages of 15-18? Are they artistically talented? Are they at a loose end this weekend? Are they the sort of 15-18 year old who would like to spend their free time creating an artwork inspired by the UK’s Supreme Court to celebrate its 15th anniversary? WELL ISN’T THIS YOUR LUCKY DAY! You only have until Sunday 28th to get your entries in, and they have to meet the following criteria: “This is a free, open submission exhibition for students aged 15-18 studying in the UK. Families of Supreme Court staff and Justices cannot take part. We welcome works on paper, small canvases and small, light sculpture. Paper and canvas artworks should be a maximum of A3. Sculpture should weigh a maximum of 1850g and be a maximum of 30cm high and 20cm wide.” Disappointingly, if perhaps predictably, the contest also stipulates that “Artwork should focus on the UK Supreme Court building or the judicial system. Artwork should not parody or satirise the law,” but, well, TRY ANYWAY.
• A Good GoFundMe: I don’t think this is serious, and even if it was it would never meet its target, but I am 100% here for the concept behind the campaign which I think is the best use of the Vegas sphere I have yet heard of.
• IRL HTML: A FUN USE OF AI! Specifically multimodal AI, which is being used under the hood here to ‘see’ the images uploaded, ‘read’ them, and then render them as code. “IRL HTML is a web app that hosts HTML web pages created from photographs of HTML code. You can upload a photograph of some HTML to create a new HTML page!” Hear that? Sketch some html on a piece of A4, photograph it, upload it here and VWALLAH IT IS A WEBPAGE! Which is, honestly, quite magic – there’s a really interesting extension to this which is effectively creating a sort of scrapbook Visual Basic tool for people to literally draw out webdesign and have it automatically spun up into a prototypical page design, which now I come to think of it is obviously totally possible right now and which I imagine someone has already made. Still, if not, GET ON IT IT IS A GREAT IDEA.
• Sarah of the Antartic: Sarah is someone who has recently arrived in Antartica to do research into polar ice cores. This is their TikTok account, which only has three videos but two of them are ‘doing polar research in the style of Wes Anderson’ and are so beautifully, perfectly realised that I feel reasonably-confident recommending the channel to you, because, really, who doesn’t find beautifully-presented Artic landscapes delivered via the medium of perfectly-composed cinematography compelling? NO FCUKER, etc!
• The Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library: Have you harboured a long-standing fascination with teledildonics and felt that the only thing holding you back from creating your very own remote-controlled sex aid? OF COURSE YOU HAVE, YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Welcome, then, to the Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library, a repository of all the code you could possibly need to set a variety of latex-covered objects moving intimately within you! I present this information without judgement or prejudice, and ask only that none of you ever try and tell me what you do with it.
• Mojie: The final miscellaneous link this week is to this fun little Wordle clone (I know, but I promise it’s fun) which asks you to guess three films each day based on emoji-based clues. My general lack of anything resembling cinematic knowledge makes this a particularly challenging one for me, but if your appreciation of cinema extends beyond ‘Bad Boy Bubby’ and ‘Meet The Feebles’ (no they ARE classics!) then you might find this an enjoyable addition to the daily puzzle round.

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK DESCRIBES ITSELF AS ‘BALEARIC BOOGIE NIGHTS’ BUT PERSONALLY SPEAKING I THINK ‘MASSIVE 80s GAY DISCO’ IS A BETTER FIT – EITHER WAY IT IS ACE AND IF I HAD A POOL IT IS THE SORT OF THING I WOULD PROBABLY PLAY WHILE ‘LOUNGING’ NEXT TO IT AT THE WEEKENDS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Cruising Archaeology: An Insta feed sharing photographs of some of the detritus abandoned at various cruising sites across the UK – from the mundane, to the poignant, to the odd and inexplicable, all of gay life is here. SO much fascinating stuff here – my personal favourite is the discarded poppers bottle emblazoned with the Union Jack and bearing the legend ‘ENGLISH ROOM ODORISER’ which immediately opens the window onto an imagined psyche absolutely RIDDLED with self-doubt and contradictions, but you will find your own amongst the collection. There’s an art book out now accompanying this, should it be your sort of thing.
• Historic Embroidery: I mean, you probably don’t need this explaining, do you? IT’S OLD NEEDLEWORK FFS.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Daido Moriyama

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: