Author Archives: admin

Webcurios 13/09/24

Reading Time: 33 minutes

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

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

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

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

By Amie Dicke

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

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

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

By Pale Flare

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

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

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

By Ludwig Favre

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

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

By Pon Arsher

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 06/09/24

Reading Time: 36 minutes

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

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

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

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

By Melody Tuttle (all images this week via TIH)

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

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

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

By Laura Krifka

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

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

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

By Daisuke Ichiba

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

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

By Guy Vording

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 30/08/24

Reading Time: 34 minutes

HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE!

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

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

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

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

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

By Slawomir Elsner (images via TIH, as per)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Robin F Williams

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

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

By Diane Dal-pra

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 23/08/24

Reading Time: 37 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Elspeth Vince

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

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

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

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

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

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

By Andrew Hem

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 16/08/24

Reading Time: 37 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By  Joseph Töreki

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

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

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

By Tyedied

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

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

By Mayumi Tsuzuki

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 09/08/24

Reading Time: 37 minutes

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:

  • NoFilterGPT: You are all good people. You are all familiar with the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as enshrined both in wider human society and the specific way in which they are applied in your own geography and community. You are curious, but in a benign way. You sleep reasonably soundly at night, you do not grind your teeth, you are kind to your family members and supportive to your colleagues, you floss and you exercise regularly, you have a balanced diet and a healthy relationship with legally-sanctioned muscle-relaxants. You do not abuse animals, or pornography, or blameless foreign nationals who find themselves on your soil, or people who don’t look and sound exactly like you. When confronted with machine that can in theory provide an answer to any question you could possibly ask it you DEFINITELY don’t ask it to plan, down to the last detail, a successful spearphishing programme to enable you to part hundreds of strangers from their savings, or to tell you how to manufacture 2cb in your bathtub, or to explain the best method of quickly and quietly disposing of a human corpse within a standard domestic environment. You are all good people. Which is why I feel entirely comfortable sharing this link with you, to a an LLM which, as far as I can tell, really WILL tell you anything you ask it. Not only did it give me what looked like a VERY convincing recipe for meth with nary a pause, it also answered my questions about how to commit online fraud with cheery specificity, and then provided follow-up information about under-the-radar software I might want to seek out to help me in my nefarious plans. Ever wondered why OpenAI et al have been very keen to ensure that their offerings are at least a BIT hard to mess with? Play with this for a bit and learn why. I’ll be honest, I was a bit weirded out by this – I was reluctant to push it too far because, well, I am actually a disappointingly law-abiding person and my actual imagination when it comes to ‘illegal things I want to explore, even theoretically, with a chatbot’ is pretty stunted, turns out, but also because it’s a bit troubling quite how well it works – obviously all the information you could get from this is theoretically just a Google search away, but (and I say this as someone who has very much tracked the evolution of what you can and can’t find on Google, to the point where I buy drugs online from exactly the same person who I found when I Googled ‘buy weed online’ at work in 2003) the benefit here is that you don’t have to spelunk, and, because it PROMISES that none of the queries are stored anywhere, you can ask away to your heart’s content without having to worry about your local law enforcement agents knocking at your door and asking awkward questions about your sudden interest in the chemical properties of fertiliser. Really, have a play – BUT PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS TO COMMIT ANY MURDERS OR CREATE ANY BOMBS OR DISPOSE OF ANY CORPSES OR MAKE ANY ILLEGAL DRUGS. Does that cover me, legally? I think it probably does.
  • Porter Robinson: This is a really rather nice website for the US DJ Porter Robinson, which I think is to accompany their latest album called ‘Smile’ – it doesn’t explain itself particularly well, but it’s basically a series of little 3d vignettes, all featuring the same character who seems to be the record’s ‘mascot’ or something, all of which invite you to do some PLAYFUL INTERACTION – on the homescreen, clicking around will move the avatar across the small city map, growing into a Godzilla-type kaiju before your eyes – click the hamburger menu in the top-right and you can choose between 20 different little game things, some of which link into the others…this is really nicely done, and I am hoping the slightly-bizarre lack of any soundtrack whatsoever to the whole thing is a weird browser/html failure on my laptop’s part rather than a massive and slightly astonishing oversight on the part of the developers here, because, well, IT’S PROMOTING A FCUKING ALBUM FFS.
  • The End of Aging: This is, fine, a digital representation of a physical exhibition (just wrapped up in, I think, Basel), but COME BACK because this is actually done in a pretty novel way (‘actually’? Jesus, Matt, you insufferable pr1ck, why the ‘actually’? Stop it). Rather than just being a standard ‘move through the gallery maze that basically feels like a slightly-staid artworld DOOM clone’ you can instead ‘move through the gallery that has been captured from life using LIDAR’ (LIDAR, you will all doubtless remember, being that technique to do volumetric capture of a physical space which results in the whole thing having that vaguely pointillist vibe), which lends the whole experience a slightly weird and dreamlike quality as you wander through the various rooms and look at the artworks. And the artworks? Well, the whole piece is based on the following premise: “Longevity is a desire as old as humankind. In the near future, we may have numerous ways to slow or even reverse aging, with some in proof-of-concept experiments and others already in human trials. The first anti-aging drugs could arrive within the decade, followed by a procession of therapies. Yet, the exhibition grapples with the social, economic, and cultural implications of longevity. Do we truly wish to live forever? How would society cope with people aged 150 or over? Is there a need to enact the right to die?” Which, yes, fine, is so much internationalartw4nk, and I can’t say any of the pieces I saw in here particularly spoke to me, but equally there’s a creepy vibe about the whole thing that I quite enjoyed – see what you think.
  • Lasting Petals: Some of the news coming out of Gaza this week has been absolutely horrific, and so appallingly-underreported that I can’t find anything to link to which isn’t doesn’t feature some footage too upsetting to feature. Lasting Petals is another website created to help memorialise some of the many, many thousands of people to have lost their lives in the 10 months since the October 7th atrocities, each memorialised as a poppy in a seemingly-infinite field. Every single flower represents a dead human being – the names of everyone remembered on the site can be seen by clicking the middle button in the top-right, which takes you to a slow-scrolling wall of names and ages and Jesus fcuking Christ it is dizzying and horrifying.
  • The Icelandic Penis Museum: LOL C0CKS! Web Curios is a grown-up newsletter, practically old enough to nervously sidle up to the counter in the newsagents and attempt to order three bottles of strawberry/kiwi Mad Dog and a packet of 10 B&H (children of today, what glorious folkloric rituals you are missing out on!), and as such I would like to reassure you that this link is being included less because there is something inherently ‘funny’ about a museum dedicated to penises (one might argue, given the undue degree of relevance and import granted to the male member over the course of human history, that frankly we could do with focusing on it a bit less) and more because it is just a REALLY nice example of webdesign. From the homepage splash, which simply reads ‘HUNDREDS OF PHALLIC SPECIMENS’ in very big letters (their caps, by the way), to the scroll, to the page layout, to the fact that the copy, in a very dry way, knows exactly what it is doing throughout. I’ll be honest, I don’t think the *actual* museum is that interesting – as a man, I feel I spent quite enough time as an adolescent exploring ‘the mysteries of the penis’ tbh – but I would like to congratulate the people who designed this because it’s great (and also doesn’t do the simple, easy traffic-baiting thing of having a page of funny pictures of animalc0cks).
  • Medals Per Capita: I confess to having watched literally 0 minutes of this year’s global celebration of human sporting endeavour, but, broadly-speaking, it seems like it’s been…good! Even for someone as broadly-disinterested as I am, though, it’s been impossible to ignore the once-again steady stream of medals that the Great Britain team is racking up, which led me to wonder about this country’s performance vs other nations of comparable size and that sort of jazz…anyway, thanks to this wonderful website you can now come to your pub chat about THE BEST NATIONS IN THE WORLD armed with a worldbeating array of ‘well, actually…’ stats to make all your companions vaguely hate you – see medal tables by capita, gold medals by capita, weighted in…ways I don’t totally understand…basically the main takeaway is that Granada is currently leading the ‘we have fcuk all people and yet still some medals’ list, while GB is in a very respectable 22nd place in terms of medals per capita (beaten by France, interestingly, which made me briefly wonder whether the French have poured a comparable amount of money into their national athletic success story – in fact what I really want to see is a ‘per pound invested’ medal league table, as I think that would be far more telling, so if someone could sort that out for me then that would be great thanks).
  • A Collection of Collections: Ooh, a PORTAL! Well, ok, fine, it’s still technically just ‘a website’ (you joyless fcuks), but it’s a website that presents a HOST of links to other interesting online places, characterised by all being ‘collections of things’. ‘“Gathering Softly” is a collection of collections in the digital space and serves to explore collections on the web and their impact on web-based design. It emerged through intuitive web exploration and “link hopping” and was curated according to three selection criteria. First: The website hosts a collection curated from external content, not self-created. Second: It is not primarily for commercial purposes. Third: Not only the content but also the design and architecture of the website are interesting. The curated collection then becomes the subject of various archiving experiments aimed at countering the ephemeral nature of the internet and preserving the websites over time. The interplay of experiments offers a perspective on web archiving that foregrounds design and interaction. Multiple combined methods make websites accessible in different ways, emphasizing various aspects in fragments and even providing new possibilities.” So, yes, fine, it’s a *bit* artw4nky, but there are SO many interesting links in here, to design collections and archives and odd personal passion projects, some of which I have featured in here over the years and others which were entirely new to me. Basically like a lovely library of interesting online  collections, to which everyone is invited to contribute – if you think of a site you believe fits with the ethos you can submit it for inclusion into the collection.
  • Aerial Ashes: What do YOU want to happen to your mortal remains when you shuffle from this mortal coil? Obviously that assumes that you’re going to meet your end in a manner which is going to leave some mortal remains to dispose of – this question applies less should you be the victim of an industrial woodchipping accident, say, or should your final moments be spent in the company of a particularly hungry shark – but, given the choice, what would you put in your will? Personally I was always taken with the idea of being cremated and then getting someone to very quickly knock the ashes up into a three-tiered chocolate sponge cake to then be served to everyone at the wake without their knowledge, but I have to say that this service, which lets you have your ashes scattered by a drone from a great height over a location of your choosing, is pretty tempting. I presume that there are some tedious ‘laws’ governing where you can and can’t deposit a boxful of corpse dust, but I am now partly determined to have myself scattered over Glastonbury festival one year so I can be ingested by a quarter of a million unsuspecting festivalgoers (why…why do I want to be eaten after my death? Bit weird, this, possibly messiah complex-ish, best not to think too hard).
  • 100 Gigs: Drake is an incredibly successful musician, whose music has been listened to by hundreds of millions of people – not sure I’ve ever met a Drake *fan*, though (the same applies, on a lesser scale, to Rita Ora – I refuse to believe that there are ANY Rita Ora fans, apart perhaps from the woman herself and her annoying husband). Still, should any of you be interested, he this week did something moderately interesting, dropping this website which contains links to 100g worth of material from his digital archives – videos, demos, new songs, behind the scenes stuff, all the sort of stuff you’d imagine. Which is quite a cool idea if you ask me, a nice bit of fanservice and a whole load of LORE (sorry) for the committed. The fact that one of the videos on there is called ‘Barbados Studio Mandem’ made me do a full-body cringe, though – mate you are not from round here, stop that.
  • ZZap Radio: Are you a videogame enthusiast of a certain age? Do you have a sepia-tinged fondness for entertainment systems of your youth? Do the bloopy 8-bit synth sounds of the half-remembered games of your childhood send you off into Proustian reverie? CALLOO CALLAY, then, for today really is all your Christmases come at once. ZZap Radio is explained thusly by its creator: “Welcome to a new C64 Radio Station! I’m Dave Clarke aka RetroBeachMan and I love listening to classic game/chiptune music so I decided I would make a station I and others could listen to. Zzap Radio plays SID tunes 24/7 for you to enjoy! All this is done for free and is a hobby that I enjoy. I enjoy listening to classic game music and quite enjoy SID music so have created an internet radio station that I and others could enjoy!” This is the soundtrack, for me at least, of being about 6 years old and round at Alex Reilly’s house and being really annoyed at the fact that he wouldn’t let me have a go on Barbarian while simultaneously feeling a bit weird about having watched a ripped VHS of ‘Robocop’ that morning – see which peculiar childhood experience this flashes YOU back to!
  • Fluid Frenzy: I am, it turns out, a massive sucker for in-browser fluid dynamics simulators (who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc! Actually, while I’m here, someone wrote to me this week who is doing the genuinely mad thing of seemingly going back through ALL of the Curios archives – no, no idea – and who wrote some nice things but who also made a passing reference to ‘authorial tics’ which, fine I know it’s true but OW MAN that sort-of hurts), and this is a really fancy version of exactly that sort of thing. Will make your computer wheeze somewhat emphysemically, but if you like the idea of “a wide range of tools to create realistic, immersive, and dynamic fluid simulations” then you will enjoy this (click ‘Live Demo’ on the linked page to start playing).
  • Pictures of Japan: A lovely website by one Christian Mackie, which I think is just a presentation of photos he’s taken in Japan but whose interface makes it a really playful and interesting experience – when the page loads you’ll see a single image in the centre of the screen, which you can drag to any position you like, revealing another photo beneath it, letting you explore the collections by sorting and arranging them into ‘piles’, which in turn makes you think about the thematic and compositional elements of each image, and how they relate to the others, and, honestly, this is SUCH a nice way of exploring a collection of images, others take note.
  • Penguin Series Design: A website dedicated to the cover art of Penguin novels, curated by one Greg Neville in Australia (HELLO GREG NEVILLE, should you ever happen to find this!) – “Penguin Books has had numerous categories in its long history: fiction, crime, sci-fi, poetry, theatre, classics, non-fiction, education etc. Alongside these broad categories more specific printings have been made with particular themes. For example, an edition of a particular author’s works, a specially priced series, a focus on regional authors, or series based on food, travel or romance. These editions of related books, where the art direction and design is co-ordinated in a single aesthetic with variations on a theme, is the subject of this site.” As you’d expect there is some gorgeous cover design on display here.
  • TableFlipper: Load the page and become slightly entranced as you’re presented with what feels like an infinite selection of people flipping over tables in real or simulated rage (mostly simulated, this is largely from film and tv). I have no idea what you might conceivably do with this link, but there’s something undeniably-cathartic about watching people lose their sh1t at a largely-blameless inanimate object. Clicking the page loads a new gif – GO.
  • Cyclemarks:This is an interesting idea. Based on the premise that in an algorithmically-led feed you will regularly be served stuff that is by people who you might find interesting but who you don’t necessarily end up following, Cyclemarks lets you basically set a reminder to check back on them in a set period of time, and sends you occasional email alerts to nudge you – the idea being that you can use it to set cyclical reminders to go back to things that you thought were interesting, which, honestly, feels like a generally good principle which might be applied to other aspects of online life (this is, I think, only for social profiles). This is in very early beta but you can apply for access to the early release should you so desire.
  • The Wigtown Book Festival: I don’t usually include physical events in here because, well, I have no idea who the fcuk any of you are or where you are – but I will make an exception for the Wigtown Book Festival because a) its programme is being curated by Friend of Curios Lee Randall; b) because it sounds GORGEOUS, a lovely, mid-sized literary festival in a beautiful part of Scotland in early-Autumn with some really interesting speakers; and c) because Lee kindly asked me to do a talk there which I’m unable to do (they honestly have no idea how lucky they are and how lightly they have gotten off), and I feel the least I can do by way of apology is to give it a plug.

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!

  • Teletext Art: HOW HAVE I NOT FEATURED THIS IN NEARLY 15 YEARS?!? Anyway, this is a collection of glorious, highly-pixellated ART from the wonderful, incomparable, much-missed (by me, at least) Teletext. SO MUCH MISTY-EYED NOSTALGIA!
  • Videogame Bread: Some really nicely-illustrated an animated digital sliced white. I have no idea why.

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!

  • This Time It’s Worse: Sadly, inevitably, we kick off the longreads this week with another selection of pieces about the what and the why of the UK’s current enthusiasm for ‘doing a bit of a racism’. This is Daniel Trilling in the LRB, offering a broad overview, from the perspective of someone who’s been covering this stuff for a while, of why this feels different and worse to previous comparable instances of racialised violence. It was written a few days ago when everything felt slightly more raw and awful than it does at the time of writing, after a few days of relative quiet, but it’s a good and sober(ing) overview of what has happened and some of the reasons as to why.
  • Bristol: Much like last week, the past seven days have been an excellent reminder of the importance and value of local journalism and how much we stand to lose if we continue to let the gap where they used to be get filled with ‘citizen journalists on Facebook Groups and TikTok’. This is on-the-ground reporting from the antifash in Bristol last Sunday, and, again, is excellent – not that the writing is particularly stellar, more that it displays an obvious sense of feeling for people and place that you don’t get from having a national reporter parachuted in to do the colour piece.
  • Rotherham: More local reporting, this time by Dan Hayes who found himself last Sunday at the Holiday Inn full of asylum seekers which was threatened, and almost set alight, by a charming collection of people who were, lest we forget, simply demonstrating ‘legitimate concerns’ (a small point on that specific phrase – you hear it used a lot, but at no point does anyone stop to say ‘hang on, ok, you keep using that phrase – can you explain EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN BY IT?’ which I think is a mistake because, from what I can see, it’s often being used as a way of saying ‘people feel uncomfortable about the fact that not everyone who lives near them has the same colour skin’ without in fact saying those words out loud).  I found this quite hard to read in places, because it’s fcuking HORRIBLE and because a lot of the language quoted is stuff that I genuinely didn’t think you heard any more in big old 2024 (recall that I grew up in an era in which it was LITERALLY TOTALLY NORMAL to refer to the shop at the end of the road as ‘the p-word shop’, a charming turn of phrase which my immigrant mother helpfully beat out of me at a young age when she caught me parroting it), but I think it’s an important piece in particular because of how it neatly dismantles the ‘legitimate concerns’ lines.
  • GakRiots: We return to the increasingly-prolific Clive Martin next, who writes in the New Statesman about how the UK’s gakky Summer is extending into a season of gakky riots, and how cocaine really is the driving force between so much of mass culture in this country right now. Look, I am a middle-aged man who lives in London and who has worked in advermarketingpr for 20+ years – of course I have done cocaine, I am in no position to moralise. What I would say, though, is that of all the drugs in the world, cocaine is the only one which in EVERY SINGLE CASE I can think of makes people actively worse versions of themselves whenever they take it, no exceptions. NOONE is a better, kinder or nicer person after their third brief trip to the cubicle, and I do think that that’s a slightly-underexplored side effect of the current boom in coke across the country.
  • Labour and the Lobbyists: Another LRB piece now – this is long, and quite involved in the money and connections within UK business and politics, but I thought it a really interesting overview of an environment which I continue to be astonished isn’t scrutinised nearly as much as it ought to be. The piece is basically a look at how lobbyists increasingly form part of the political intake – it was ever thus, but it’s seemingly become even more of a conveyor belt – and the necessary…complications that arise when someone who’s spent their entire career cultivating political relationships for money suddenly becomes exactly the sort of person who the people with said money now want to reach. As someone who worked as a lobbyist (very badly) 20 years ago, I continue to remain slightly aghast at how much the industry just sort of gets away with, and the fact that its a set of systems and structures which legitimise ‘cash for access’ in pretty egregious fashion.
  • The World Assumes War Posture: Just in case you haven’t found the initial selection of longreads too depressing, have this one, all about how a seemingly-significant proportion of the world’s governments appear to be quietly-but-efficiently battening down the hatches in preparation for some sort of flavour of big-scale bellicosity in the not-too-distant. All of this might be old news to those of you who are close readers of The Economist and other such Serious Tomes, but I found it a really decent overview of ‘where we are’ in terms of the big stuff like China/Taiwan and the broader network of interests across the Middle East. Honestly, though, if you’re feeling a bit fragile this week then maybe skip this one – after all, there’s literally NOTHING that you as an individual can do about it!
  • The Tech Industry Vs Journalism: Or ‘why big tech people are increasingly only talking to other big tech people’ – to which the answer, obviously, is because ‘actual journalists have finally started asking them hard questions about stuff’, alongside ‘whereas talking to one of their mates on a podcast lets me say all the stuff necessary to juice my portfolio on the way to my dreamed-of 10x’. This is interesting from a tech culture point of view, but, equally, it doesn’t do much to reassure readers who might have arrived at the general position that much of modern tech exists in a weird Cali bubble that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lived experience of 99% of people on Earth: “But both the progenitors of these projects and their fans share an overarching ethos that building and turgidly celebrating tech is itself an identity. They also tend to share other aspects of their identities: 70% of Pirate Wires’ paid subscribers are men ages 25 to 40 who work in tech and finance. In his own words, Solana is writing for and perpetuating a “new class of people building new things” who are “increasingly isolated from mainstream culture.””
  • Stop Fawning Over His New Hair: Ok, not technically the title of the piece, but it should be. This is about Mark Zuckerberg and his GLOW-UP and the fawning coverage that has been lavished on the Meta CEO as a result of his finally, after 15 years in the public eye, managed to develop a public persona that doesn’t cause spontaneous revulsion in his audience, and the fact that THIS IS TERRIBLE JOURNALISM AND SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. This is a good overview of all the different ways in which Meta and its subsidiary platforms are in hot water, and an explanation of some of the reasons why it might have been convenient, timely and useful for Zuckerberg to get some nice image-focused headlines as a ‘look over there’ PR tactic, but, honestly, WHY THE FCUK DO JOURNALISTS DO THIS? Rhetorical, obvs – it’s the clicks!
  • Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From: 404 Media continues to do God’s work, now answering the question ‘so, what exactly is the deal with all of those Pages pushing obviously AI-generated crap into the TL? What do they stand to gain?’ – the answer being (of course!) small-scale payouts from Facebook’s Creator Bonus Programme! I confess to having been ignorant of this monetisation option, but apparently it’s invite-only – per the article, though, you only need a few bits of VIRAL CONTENT to get on their radar and get invited into the tent, at which point you get access to the MAGICAL MONEY TREE that is, er, getting paid $40 for 300,000 likes or somesuch appalling ratio. Which, obviously, is probably not going to float your boat if you’re attempting to pay rent in London or NYC, but if you’re in a village in Chetinad, say, then is probably significantly more appealing. So there’s an inevitable cottage industry sprung up selling guides on how to produce the BEST AND MOST ENGAGING content, and more and more people are jumping on the bandwagon, and all the while Facebook’s vast machine is paying out trivial sums in order to convince its users to produce rubbish they don’t really understand for an audience of morons and bots half a world away, all to feed the largest interconnected communications network our species has ever known with enough CONTENT FUEL to keep the wheels churning as it prints money for an investor class who probably don’t even use it anymore. WHAT A FUTURE!
  • Punching and Culture Wars: I thought this was a decent writeup of the boxing controversy – also, I am very much on one side of this specific debate, so please don’t email me attempting to have an argument about it because I really, really don’t want to. What I enjoyed about this is that its focus on Imane Khelif takes in Algeria and Algerians, voices I haven’t seen involved much in all the screaming and shouting.
  • The Aphantasia Spectrum: This is a really interesting piece – you are all obviously aware of the concept of ‘aphantasia’ and that there are people who, when asked to ‘imagine’ a thing do not conjure up a visual representation of said ‘thing’ in their mind’s eye, and in fact don’t report having what others might commonly refer to as such, but this explores some of the ranges of experience which are being discovered as scientists explore the concept (also, this is one of those sorts of things that feel like a wonderful post-web learning, one of those ideas that only makes sense when you’ve been linked to a significant chunk of the world’s population and get to hear about how they experience the world in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible pre-www). What I enjoy about this is that it demonstrates the sheer, insane variety of internal human experience, the proper SUBJECTIVITY OF LIFE stuff which is what makes being alive sort-of amazing (the rich tapestry of human experience is vast and infinite!) and also sort-of terrifying (noone can ever possibly experience life in exactly the same way as you due to the innate subjectivity of the human condition and such we will all in some very real way die entirely alone!), and it’s particularly interesting for me as I am definitely not ‘aphantasic’ but, equally, I am DEFINITELY further towards that end of the scale as here described. A nice reminder that WE ARE ALL  REALLY REALLY REALLY DIFFERENT, which, personally, I think usefully links to the previous article in certain important thematic ways.
  • The Virtual Preachers of Kenya: The preachers, to be clear, are analogue – its the ministry that’s being delivered digitally. Rest of World explores the world of Kenyan preachers who are spreading the word of God – and, in some case, soliciting some nice donations – via livestreamed prayer sessions. I do love this stuff, the conjunction of tech with old-school worship (and, if you’ll allow me to be momentarily a *bit* cynical, not a little grifting), and overall this is a really nice piece (which features several people who don’t, in fairness, appear to be attempting to make a quick buck out of their congregations). I did very much enjoy this description of the setup of one particular guy, though, who started small and then grew: “Now his follower count is around 25,000. His ministry’s name has evolved to Spirit Light Ministries Online Church. It’s governed by a team of leaders and headed by two chairpersons charged with keeping in touch with members. There’s also an administrator who manages donation pledges, a secretary who keeps record of meetings, and a treasurer who manages projects such as equipment purchases and Wekesa’s occasional visits to orphanages. Then there are 10 pastors who, when needed, can take up Wekesa’s role as preacher for a night. All these officials work as unpaid volunteers.” Unpaid volunteers, eh? WHAT WOULD JESUS DO???
  • Roblox Dress To Impress: I am not cool. I have never been cool. I am not ‘down with the kids’, nor indeed do I want to be. I accept, and indeed to certain extents embrace, that I am no longer for whom the zeitgeist tolls (A BRIEF AUTHORIAL ASIDE: I met a very old friend of mine last night for the first time in 12 years (she lives in LA) and discovered that she and her husband WRITE FILMS FOR HALLMARK – she told me that it was so, so liberating to do something that could not be less concerned with ideas of ‘cool’, which I think is something we should all take on board a little more. Mind you, I suspect that she and her husband are also earning some pretty violent wedge, which possibly also helps one be zen about one’s personal position relative to the cutting edge). Still, I confess to never having felt as old as I did when reading this, a guide to a ‘craze’ apparently sweeping Roblox – my only small consolation was that it was introduced to me by a younger millennial who was equally baffled by it. I do wonder whether in about three generations’ time anyone under 16 will basically be incomprehensible to anyone over-25 (lol, people have obviously been saying this FOREVER). If you can read this and parse it in any meaningful sense then, well, I have some questions: “Themes are central to the Dress To Impress gameplay. These range from mainstream aesthetics like royalcore, coquette and Y2K to colours, activities and moods like heartbreak and sadness. Alternatively, players can purchase custom themes with in-game currency called Robux. In the past, this feature has led to some impressive themes like Genshin Impact. But on the other end, there have been some questionable and bizarre entries like the now-removed ‘Period Clot’ and ‘Apology Video’. The latter has seen players problematically recreating the outfits worn by YouTuber Colleen Ballinger, known online as Miranda Sings, in her controversial ukulele apology song as a response to grooming, harassment and doxxing allegations.” WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???
  • Quitting Spotify: One of my best friends actually works at Spotify and is quite senior, but I’m reasonably-certain that he’s probably too busy to ever read this, or certainly not this far down, so hopefully he won’t see me posting this piece by Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker which explains why he’s decided to quit the platform – I care less about Chayka’s personal decisions than I do about the general point he makes, to whit that Spotify is the latest software company to place revenue-driving UX/UI tricks ahead of user need. I mean, look, from their point of view it’s working – they’re seemingly actually making money now, though I have questions about the degree of expensively-creative accounting that’s happening around the numbers – but it feels…a bit sad that they seem to have alighted on the solution being ‘just basically railroad everyone into algogenerated playlist streaming’.
  • Inside OzempicTown: A really interesting piece in Bloomberg looking at a particular town in the US where, seemingly, everyone is on fatloss jabs, whether one of the big, official ones or some sort of generic or homebrew knockoff in an attempt to address the clinical obesity which afflicts a massive proportion of residents. What’s this going to do long-term? NO IDEA! There’s something CLASSICALLY darkly-American about the picture painted here of people getting the real stuff on health insurance as part of their diabetes treatment, then losing weight to an extent whereby they fall below the threshold at which the insurer will continue to pay, by which point they don’t want to stop the jabs and get fat again and so they slide into the black or grey market for knockoff alternatives. Definitely going to be fine, that.
  • A Really Annoying Article About British Slang: This came to me via the ever-excellent Links – a piece in the Wall Street Journal clutching its pearls about the fact that certain pieces of ‘traditional’ British slang were falling out of usage, and it properly got on my tits (SEE? SLANG IS ALIVE AND WELL!). Firstly, the piece uses terms like ‘ninny’, ‘blighter’ or ‘toe-rag’ which haven’t been in common usage for over half a century; secondly, as I pointed out to Caitlin via email (she did solicit this, honest, I wasn’t just ranting): “This is just language shifting – also, the fact that there’s no mention of the fact that most kids in the UK speak a version of what’s often termed MLE – Multicultural London English – which takes influence from slang and patois from all sorts of different culture and means that wherever you go there will be teenagers referring to each other as ‘blud’ or ‘cuz’ or ‘fam’. And that’s not even to take into account the flattening effect of international internet English on the written word. It’s all w4nk, basically.” So there.
  • A History of Keyboard Cat: I know, I know, meme nostalgia is LAME – but I promise you that this is a surprisingly-charming story, and you will be pleased to learn (or at least I was) that the person behind the cat is actually someone who’s just a generally fun, creative, silly performer-type, and who has been making ridiculous and weird things all their life, of which Keyboard Cat was simply the most visible example. Sometimes things on the internet are just NICE, and this is very much one of them.
  • VR Soccer: Or, ‘What The MLS Imagines The Future Of Watching Football Will Be’ – I am personally unconvinced at the idea of watching sports on massive, bulky headsets, but I can see some of the stuff here being viable when the hardware becomes less intrusive. Still, the old man luddite part of me can’t help but look at this and grumble about sport being yet one more thing that’s been fcuking RUINED by data and our fcuking obsession with it. Do you ever think we live in a quantitative world when maybe it would be better to live in a qualitative one? I do, but then again I am simplistic thinker who never really got beyond ‘stoned philosophy student’ in his conception of the world.
  • The Fentanyl Supplychain: ALSO sent to me by Tim Magee, to whom once again HUGE THANKS, this is a really interesting look at how easy it is to acquire the chemicals required to buy fentanyl via merchants based in China. A confession – when my mum was dying I spent a LOT of time injecting her with fentanyl, and once, when cracking an ampoule and shooting her up, I found a miniscule drop of the liquid on my finger – reader, I licked it. OH MY GOD. If ever I wanted a sensation to validate my ‘in the unlikely event I make it to 55 I am totally getting into skag’ lifeplan then MY WORD was that it – turns out that this stuff really does make you feel quite remarkable. DON’T DO IT, KIDS. Also, do not get any ‘bright ideas’ about what you might do with the NoFilterGPT, please.
  • The Chipotle Trial: Ok, this is a story about a case in the US when a woman got sentenced to community service after throwing her bowl of food at the Chipotle staff member who served it to them – I appreciate, ostensibly not that interesting, I get it. BUT as I read it it become a wonderful sort of representation of so much of modern, Western urban life in 2024 – people are tired, people are stressed, people are selfish and angry and have forgotten, quite simply, that the other strangely-shaped meatsacks they keep seeing around them are in fact OTHER PEOPLE and might be worthy of consideration, and there are so many points in this piece that felt weirdly representative of actions and reactions you observe – or, let’s be honest, perpetrate – every day in London. A very modern argument born of a very modern set of tiny frustrations with some very modern conclusions, basically, which makes the article significantly more interesting than you might originally think.
  • Pigeons in Arndale Centres: Vittles with an article on the weird majesty of Britain’s slightly-crap inner city markets – I didn’t realise that ‘Arndale Centres’ were a pan-British thing rather than just being a Manc institution, for example, but it turns out that they were built up and down the country by the Arndale Corporation. Vittles has a degree of reverence for ‘incredibly culturally-specific foods served in strip-lite environs’ which, look, I don’t personally share, but there’s so much affection in this piece, and the writing and history are excellent as ever, and it also features quite a lengthy bit about Wood Green Food City which, til recently, was a regular haunt of mine, and so I feel very warmly towards the whole thing.
  • At The Florida Bigfoot Conference: I refuse to believe that that title isn’t enough on its own to induce a click, but, fine, have an extract too: “At the happy hour, I sat down next to Thomas and Todd, who’d driven down from Mississippi. In his free time, Todd designs Bigfoot-themed coasters. He doesn’t have an Etsy shop and wasn’t a vendor for the conference. “I just make ‘em for myself and for friends,” he told me. “Take one.” He handed me a coaster which read “Florida Skunk Ape: The Original Florida Man.” The coaster, disintegrating beneath the ring where his beer had been, was red, green, yellow, and black—the same colors you might find on a head shop ashtray. Thomas told me he was an HVAC repairman and heavy metal guitarist with a long ponytail who filled his time driving between jobs listening to Bigfoot podcasts. His dad got him into it. “It’s intergenerational for me,” he said.” TELL ME YOU DON’T WANT MORE OF THIS.
  • I Got Snipped: Finally this week, another Paris Review piece, this one by Joseph Earl Thomas all about getting a vasectomy as a middle-aged black man who’s already got several kids – this is VERY funny indeed, as well as being an interesting portrayal of black (US) masculinity, and the writing’s generally a joy, particularly given there’s not as much as there should be about the experience: “But who am I anyway, strolling through Target at eight this morning in a BABY DADDY T-shirt Jess got me two Father’s Days back, buying a thirty-six-pack of SKYN Elite condoms—could be large or regular, mind your business—and sexting back one of your friends about what she likes and where. Four kids too late, I’d like to say that getting a vasectomy was the best sexual decision I’ve ever made, and that you can love someone, many people, in fact, and not want any more of them at all.”

By Konstantin Koborov

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 02/08/24

Reading Time: 32 minutes

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:

  • Eyechat: Did you ever spend any time with Chatroulette? As it happens I just logged onto it now (704am UK time, fyi) and was thrilled to find that a) it still exists and is live and is, largely, unchanged in its interface; and b) that I was confronted by someone aggressively masturbating at me within three clicks (in the unlikely event that said masturbator ever happens to find this and feels bad about me noping out of their solo love show approximately 0.1s into it – I AM SORRY, MYSTERY MASTURBATOR, BUT IT IS TOO EARLY FOR THIS). Anyway, the indefatigable and seemingly-infinitely-creative Neal Agarwal (see multiple Curios passim) has created a new and, to my mind at least, infinitely better version of Chatroulette – Eyechat is, at least ostensibly, the same gimmick, whereby you access the site and are paired with a random stranger somewhere in the world, but whereas with Chatroulette the idea is that you have a full video view, with potential voicechat should you wish to communicate verbally with your new friend (if only to tell them to PUT IT AWAY), with this ALL YOU SEE IS THE EYES. I have no idea whether this is ACTUALLY realtime peer-to-peer connection or whether it’s being spoofed in some way, but I am going to hope that it’s doing what it seems to be doing – there’s something genuinely slightly wonderful (and intensely human) about seeing someone’s eyes react to your own, the inferred emotion you receive from the small muscle movements, and (and I say this as a pretty spectacular misanthrope) there is a genuine feeling of human connection when you see a strangers’ eyes creasing into (what you assume/hope is) a smile as they clock your presence. This is beautiful, honestly – there’s something about the reduced field of vision at play and the whole ‘windows to the soul’ cliche that makes this particularly wonderful, to my mind.
  • Dump Site: The second site of 2024 to use the ‘recycle bin’ function of your desktop to interesting artistic effect (do you have any idea, by the way, of how humiliating it is to realise that your brain is so web-warped that you can literally look back over the past 7 months of your life and say with cast-iron certainty ‘oh, yes, this is the *second* project about digital ‘rubbish’ I’ve come across this year – a TREND, I tell you!’? Let me tell you – it is very humiliating), this is another riff on the basic premise that ‘rifling through other people’s bins is fundamentally fascinating, even though we don’t necessarily always want to admit the fact’. It’s not super-intuitive, but if you look at the page UI you can see there’s a set of controls in the top-right – press play, turn up the volume, and get a slowly-scrolling exhibit of the various bits of digital detritus that have been shared so far, accompanied by what I can only describe as a weird digital cacophony of soundfiles that have also been added to the project. You can click on the images as the scroll past to see the upload date and any associated metadata, but otherwise it’s just a slow-moving procession of images and clips and sound that have accreted from a selection of strangers’ lives, and I LOVE THIS SO MUCH SO MUCH, it is mad and cacophonous (visually and aurally) and messy and incomprehensible and dense and pointless and it’s one of the most succinctly-impressive ways of communicating THE MADNESS OF THE DIGITAL NOW that I’ve seen in years. Per their description, “By virtue of pulling files out of the trash folder and resignifying them as artifacts of history, we reinstate their thingness. Pooling our own digital trash together enables us to reminisce across desktops. Dump Site transforms deleted files into tangible substrate for cultural memory. When reconvening with trash files, we realize the materiality of deletion. Byte by byte, the ephemeral becomes tangible. This digital trash heap metabolizes deleted files into archaeological artifacts. Dump Site has three goals: make mess and sow fiction in archival practice, bridge dichotomies within materiality, privacy, usefulness, and time, and provide a field of cyber residues for gleaning cultural memory.” Well, quite.
  • One Million Screenshots: There’s something slightly-dizzying, per the last link, about anything which gives you even the vaguest sense of the SCALE of the web and its contents, which is what makes this so interesting – One Million Screenshots is a promo project by a company called Urlbox, which, simply, collects screenshots of the million most popular websites in the world and presents them on a single page, arranged by dint of popularity, for anyone to scroll around and explore. SO MUCH WEB! Obviously this isn’t *quite* as simple as it sounds – there’s obviously some curation at play here given the conspicuous absence of anything even vaguely 18+ – but it’s quite a remarkable collection of information and images, and from a simple webdesign point of view there’s something really interesting about seeing homepage convention laid bare at such scale. A significant proportion of these websites are for INCREDIBLY BORING companies you have never, ever heard of, but think of this less as ‘a portal for discovering fun and interesting things’ (THAT’S WHAT CURIOS IS FOR HANDS OFF) and more of a high-level overview of design tropes.There’s a degree of AI at play here with a ‘similar sites’ functionality, letting you see homepages that have a similar palette or page design, meaning this is potentially also a superb tool for anyone wanting to pull together some design examples for ‘inspiration’ – if anything, though, what this proves is that the vast majority of websites a) look the same; and b) are incredibly boring, so perhaps use this as your clarion call to ensure that all your future digital builds are delivered in magenta using Wingdings.
  • Deceptio: One of the nice things about the advent of the web has been the way it’s led to the debunking (amongst people with a base-level reading comprehension level, at least) of a bunch of myths and assumptions – for example, that polygraphs work, or that any sort of ‘physical tracking of mental or emotional states’ is reliable or meaningful. BUT HERE COMES THE AI VERSION! Annoyingly the website has been SIGNIFICANTLY locked down in the few days since I stumbled across it (and annoyingly they’ve excluded themselves from the Internet Archive, so you can’t Wayback it), but you can still get the vague gist from the few pages remaining – Deceptio (astonishing name by the way, lads, managing to combine the gravitas of a low-grade ‘mentalist’-type performer with frosted tips with that of Transformers, the 80s shapeshifting robot franchise) is a service that promises to allow anyone paying for the tech to determine whether someone is telling the truth or not…BY THE POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! From what I remember of what USED to be on the homepage, the proposed gimmick is that the tech will analyse any video you feed it for SIGNS OF MENDACITY, presumably based on such famously-reliable indicators as ‘visible brow sweat’ or ‘pupil size’. Look, you don’t need me to tell you what a spectacularly-fcuking-bad idea this is – but, well, IT’S A SPECTACULARLY BAD IDEA BECAUSE THIS SORT OF STUFF IS AT BEST QUESTIONABLE SCIENCE AND AT WORST TOTAL BUNKUM, and machine vision simply can’t make these assessments with anything resembling accuracy at all! Except that doesn’t matter, because I am willing to bet actualcashmoney that, regardless, this is being looked at by questionable people in all sorts of iffy places (America, for example) as a neat, cheap and allows you to effortlessly hand over responsibility to The Machine (“No, sorry, the system says you’re not to be trusted – and who am I to argue??”) and thereby screw people over in a variety of exciting and technologically-advanced ways. GOOD TIMES! BONUS DYSTOPIAN AI BULLSH1T TECH! This system is designed to help employers detect when staff aren’t wholly sober by analysing their pupil size…with AI! Again, you don’t need me to tell you what a fcuking terrible idea this is – if you happen to be someone like me, someone whose pupils even when stone cold sober are basically massive black holes (to the extent to which I have genuinely been asked if I’m on pills at work, which admittedly says as much about my personal/professional demeanour as it does my eyes), you can imagine how this sort of thing might lead to the odd false positive here and there.
  • The Maison of All Victories: Preposterous luxe brand website corner! This is LVMH’s turn, with the digital ‘activation’ of their Paris 2024 sponsorship, and WOW was this not worth the hassle! I’ve always been…curious about the actual value of brands spunking all the cash on Olympian association – once you get to the second or third tier of sponsor rights, beyond your headline brands like P&G or Adidas, you do sort of wonder whether it’s in any way worthwhile – how much did (admittedly not exactly cash-poor) the fashion house have to fork over for the right to use the five rings and the Paris logo? And why did they decide that one of the best uses of that sponsorship was to create this staggeringly-shiny but OH SO FCUKING DULL web experience in which you ‘explore’ (click around) a Parisian townhouse which has mysteriously been dubbed ‘the maison of all victories’ (WHY THE MIXED LANGUAGES IT IS DRIVING ME MAD) and in which you can find all sorts of thrilling information about, er, the ways in which LVMH has ‘engaged its staff in the spirit of the games’, and some bits where you can see some of the various athletes they sponsor in various bits of sponsored apparel, and you can, er, FIND MEDALS! Why can you find medals? What possible purpose could there be in spending 15 minutes of your life clicking around a promotional website for one of the world’s very richest companies, in the hope of perhaps, maybe, accruing some nonexistent metallic rewards? I have no fcuking idea, honestly. I would absolutely LOVE to know what the ‘cost per visitor’ of this web build ends up being at the end of the games – 100% it’s more than £10.
  • Friend: This week’s big ‘O NOES DYSTOPIA!’ bit of AI tech comes in the form of Friend, a physical AI device whose launch this week caused something of a conniption on Twitter and beyond, but which you, dear reader, will obviously have greeted with a degree of tired ennui because you’ll have thought ‘hang on, didn’t Matt feature this in Curios on 3 May?’. WELL. There is a story here. But, to get back to the main product, Friend (set to ship in 2025, supposedly) is another AI pendant-type thing, whose gimmick is that it listens to everything that you say, and that others say to you, and which parses that information and which you can ‘talk’ to about your life, your day, etc etc etc (via messaging through an app rather than voice chat) – basically ‘a wearable companion’, or therapist, or whatever the fcuk you want it to be. The website and the promo stuff does, to its credit, lean hard into the FutureWeird nature of this, and part of the reason for Friend’s insane viral ubiquity this week has been the…slightly-unhinged tone of the promo video, which really is worth watching as an example of how to nail ‘unsettling, but weirdly-appealing’ as a vibe, but it’s hard not to immediately leap to conclusions about What This Might All Mean. Anyway, aside from the bare facts of the product – which, to be clear, is literally ‘a bluetooth mic which captures audio and sends it to an LLM’ – the most interesting thing about this is the beef between this product’s founder and the founder of a REMARKABLY SIMILAR project, launched on Kickstarter in May, and also called ‘Friend’, which was raising money to produce an open source version of the same product. You can read a bit of an overview of the two products and the increasingly-pathetic beef between the founders here – in general, though, my main takeaway is ‘neither of these things is going to do what they currently say they will do, and there are going to be a lot of very disappointed purchasers when this finally ships’.
  • Aladdin Skylab: A TikTok account featuring videos of someone doing terrifying skydiving stunts – there are only nine videos on the page, and while the first couple are just static shots, and the next few are short clips of parachute jumps, there’s a proper leap in ‘hang on, what the actual fcuk?’-ness about three videos back when Aladdin posts a video of what one assumes is them doing what looks awfully like a wingsuit drop EXCEPT INSTEAD OF A WINGSUIT THEY ARE USING A RATHER BEAUTIFUL AFGHAN-STYLE RUG. I…I don’t know what to think about this. On the one hand, I genuinely don’t think that this is possible from a physics point of view; on the other, perhaps I’m being very dumb but this doesn’t look like there’s any CG happening. Can someone who understands science, gravity, flight and all that sort of jazz maybe shed some light? Because otherwise I think this might be magic.
  • Kamala Holding Vinyls: Yes, I know, the ability to create your very own image of Kamala Harris holding any album you choose is about a week beyond its memetic resonance highpoint, but, well, it’s not my fault Curios is on a weekly cadence (ok, it is totally my fault). Still, if you’ve ever wanted to make an HILARIOUS MEME featuring the (let’s hope) next US President holding an old LP from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop then MERRY CHRISTMAS!
  • Anagrams: Type in any word you like and find ALL the anagrams possible for it – not just single word anagrams, but multiple-word combinations. This is obviously a huge boon for crossword fans (crossword fans who don’t mind CHEATING, at least), but even for people who don’t necessarily have a daily (or weekly, or frankly even monthly) need for an anagram solver this is worth a look, if only because the interface is really lovely and you’d be amazed how much mileage you can get from typing the full names of everyone you know into the interface to see which of them can be anagrammatised (no, I know, but it should be) into the rudest-sounding phrase (sadly ‘Matt Muir’ is anagrammatically barren, unless you find ‘trait mum’ to be amusing in any way).
  • Druglarking: A beautiful project, this, and SO BRIGHTONIAN – Druglarking is a site, seemingly sadly on hiatus for a few years, which shares photos of discarded drug paraphernalia, specifically glassine baggies, from the wider Brighton area. Much in the same way that you can map certain eras of your life to the designs stamped on ecstasy, I imagine there’s a similar sort of dating process that can be undertaken with the designs stamped on the outside of your bag bag. An aside – does noone make wraps anymore? ANOTHER GREAT INDUSTRY SENT TO THE KNACKERS BY PROGRESS AND TECH.
  • Double Horn Music: This is quite an ugly and unweildy website, but FCUK ME does it contain a genuinely insane quantity of music files – ok, fine, for these to be of interest or appeal you will probably have to be significantly more into ‘world music’ or the Armenian klezmer scene than I am, but if you’ve ever dreamed of uncovering a trove of MP3s of obscure Bulgarian pop-folk then OH MY DAYS is this going to be a treat. There’s stuff here from Serbia, Greece, Russia, Armenia and the aforementioned ‘world music’ category, and while it’s not exactly a ‘modern’ interface, it works well enough. None of this is streamable on the site – it’s literally just a series of downloads – but based on the jaunty slice of aforementioned Bulgarian folk-pop I’m currently enjoying in the background there’s a lot to enjoy here.
  • What Font?: A Chrome extension which gives you information about any font on any webpage you visit. Simple, useful, helpful.
  • Manga Apartment: I imagine that there are some people for whom this is THE DREAM – an apartment is being made available in Tokyo for artists to live and work in, for free, for periods of a year at a time, allowing them to spend that time focused exclusively on drawing manga. They’re taking applications at the moment – the only stipulations are that you can’t currently have any commercial projects in train, but otherwise applications are being invited from anywhere and everywhere. Places will be assigned based on…actually I have no idea, the website fcuks up quite hard when translated into English so the details are a bit hard to parse, but for a particular type of weeb this is basically ALL OF THE DREAMS COME TRUE. Interestingly, the FAQ gently explains that you’re not allowed to take any sort of part-time employment when living in the house – you are there to draw Manga and NOTHING ELSE, which sounds, frankly, like the sort of premise that would make for an interesting, slow-burn psychological horror film. But don’t let that put you off! Apply!

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!

  • Fruits of the Web: I also love the aesthetic here, but the real draw is the large selection of genuinely mental gifs it hosts.

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!

  • Southport: We kick off this week with a piece which should hopefully serve as a reminder of the importance and value of local journalism – Jack Walton of the Liverpool Post reports from Monday night’s riots in Southport, giving a flavour of the scenes on the ground and doing an exceptional job of giving a clear, cogent explanation of what happened and who was doing it. This is just good, responsible local journalism, done well – it’s worth reading in part to remind yourself of what this sort of thing looks like, and in part as a useful series of correctives to anyone attempting to pass this sort of thing off as ‘just working class people expressing some concerns’. If you can read this and come away with the impression that there was nothing massively racist and far right about how this all played out then, well, you’re a fcuking idiot, or alternatively you’re deliberately ignoring some pretty damning evidence – there’s a quote from one of the Telegram channels involved in organising the ‘protests’ that made me genuinely gasp at the language being used. Look, you don’t need to hear my opinion on this, God knows there’s been enough opining, but a brief point: while it’s obvious that a significant load of lies about the identity of the perpetrator of the attacks were started on social media and continued to spread there, the immediate knee-jerk reaction to blame the platforms does seem to me to rather ignore the potentially-outsize role of a media and political class that in large part has spent the past decade or more fearmongering against Muslims and immigrants. If you can’t draw a throughline between five years of right-wing (and, shamefully, not just right-wing) political comment along the lines of ‘stop the boats’ and ‘we want our country back’ and those same slogans being chanted by fat racists while they lob bricks at a mosque then, well, you’re a fcuking moron.
  • The Seagulls Descend: This is particularly about the US elections – I know, sorry! – but also feels relevant and applicable to those that just finished here; specifically, the fact that the vast majority of people in any given country simply don’t pay attention to politics for 99% of the time, and that therefore the 1% of the time they do the way in which politics is packaged and presented to them is necessarily simplified and binarised, and how that tends to privilege the worst actors in any political theatre (specifically, the fash!). This is obviously about the way in which the US media has, until very recently at least, presented the contest between Democrat and Republican as one between basically-comparable actors as opposed to one between ‘a side still practising what might, if you squint, be termed ‘broadly-not-insane politics’’ and ‘a side that is full of actual fcuking lunatics’ – but you could also apply its thinking to the way in which Farage managed to get ‘both sides neutrality-ed’ to a position of borderline-respectability despite having repeatedly demonstrated himself to be a vile rabblerouser of the knuckledragging contingent.
  • Hollow Point: Tom Stevenson writes The London Review of Books about the new UK Government’s approach to defence spending, arguing (to summarise) that, on balance, maybe the UK doesn’t actually need to spend all that money on incredibly-performative ordnance, and that in fact maybe we could do something else with it instead. I enjoyed this piece, largely because it provided me with a bunch of decent arguments for something I have felt very strongly for a long time – specifically, that the UK’s defence budget is fcuking insane.
  • An AI Wall (and What Comes Next): Gary Marcus has long been one of the AI world’s leading sceptics when it comes to the potential of LLMs and their ability to ever surmount issues like consistency, hallucination and the like – whether or not you agree with him, this is an interesting essay which goes over his thinking on why they won’t, and some ideas about alternative approaches to AI tech which might be able to do rather better in the long-term. Technical, but a useful overview of some of the current thinking at the edges of ‘if not LLMs, then what?’.
  • Speaking to AI: Ethan Mollick again, this time writing about his experiences with the early access version of the new version of OpenAI’s voice GPT – this is being rolled out to people VERY SLOWLY so it might be a while before you get to play with it, but it’s worth reading this to get an idea of how it works in practice, and to hear the clips of Mollick interacting with the LLM in realtime conversation. Honestly, I personally don’t ever have any interest in ‘talking to the machine’  whatsoever, but I was FLOORED by the clips in here. Honestly, this really is quite astonishing and one of those ‘fcuk, this is actually magic and might change the world’ moments – there’s a video of him getting it to read poetry in different styles which you can see here which is similarly ‘oh, fcuk’; I am…unsettled by the way the voice does nuance and feeling, and you will be too. I wonder whether this is the thing that’s going to see this stuff become normie-friendly; it’s certainly immediately obvious of the potential of ‘talk to the device’ for certain specific products.
  • Using AI To Write A Pudding Story: This is excellent – the dataviz people at The Pudding decided to see how far they could get at writing a typical Pudding-type story using AI. No spoilers to say that the answer is obviously ‘only some of the way’ – what’s surprising is how far it got. The team here used Claude, and it would be interesting to see a model-by-model comparison of the same workflows – the article not only explains the steps they went through, but also shares full prompts and outputs so you can get a feel for the workflow, which is hugely useful should you wish to experiment with ‘using this stuff to do actual work’.
  • Going Nuclear: This is a TechCrunch article and so reasonably-horribly-written (sorry, but) – however, on the plus side it introduced me to the concept of ‘nuclear’ content – IT’S THE NEW VIRAL! This is basically a framework for thinking about how information spreads (mostly, but not only, online) which likens the process to the various stages of nuclear fission “Firstly, the initial online rumors are compared to neutrons, uranium nuclei are compared to individual rumor receivers, and fission barriers are compared to individual active propagation thresholds; Secondly, the process of nuclear fission is analyzed, and the degree of energy accumulation is used to compare the social impact of online rumors…The rumors are neutrons, shooting off of people (atoms), which like different states of uranium have varying thresholds for activation, but upon reaching a sufficiently excited state, also become active propagators.” Basically if you work in a particular type of place, with particular types of people, I reckon you can turn this into a NEW MODEL and get about six months of professional credit in the bank for it before everyone realises that it doesn’t actually help you achieve anything at all.
  • Looking Back to 2012: One of two Clive Martin pieces this week – here, he looks back at the London 2012 Olympics, a genuinely weird moment which for a certain type of person (one who, if you’ll excuse the slightly-lazy stereotyping, almost certainly had #FBPE in their Twitter bio and who has bought at least one copy of The New European, and probably loves Jolyon Maugham) has become THE HIGH WATERMARK OF MODERN BRITISH CULTURE AND SOCIETY. Martin rightly reminds the reader that this is, frankly, insane revisionism which totally fails to take into account the fractured and fcuked state of the UK after the first four years of brutal austerity, the mad military and surveillance operations, the turfing out of homeless people from Stratford as the area as sanitised for a global audience…”And I think, in some ways, this is the real Olympic legacy. It was the moment where even a place as rough-edged as Stratford became conquerable. Since the Olympic torch passed through those dark streets of old London, there have been skyscrapers hastily-erected in Acton, chain hotels in Canning Town, a “tech city” in Croydon. Almost as if the whole city was put on the market, or under the spotlight of globalisation.” Still, the opening ceremony WAS ace, wasn’t it?
  • The Physical Embodiment of AI Slop: Specifically, the gorilla sofa-shaped physical embodiment of AI slop. Honestly, I LOVE this story – I mean, obviously there’s a certain angle from which it’s just another example of how our incessant desire to consume total fcuking tat like this is paving the way for a very fiery future, but, in general, the whole unexpected side effect of ‘AI image generation is leading to Chinese factories having to somehow now make physical representations of products imagined by The Machine’ pleases me no end. The opening para gives you the idea – “I keep seeing ads for gorilla sofas. It’s something you can order, but the pictures and videos in the ads are AI slop. Clicking on them brings you to more AI slop. If someone spends the $7,000+, what happens? Does the JPG get sent to the workers in the factory who must then do their best? That’s exactly what happens—just as when you buy AI-generated garments.” – but it really is worth clicking the link, if only to see the sad reality of what your ‘gorilla sofa’ will look like when it arrives on a container ship all the way from Shenzhen.
  • Pop Lore: One of the benefits of being an avid reader of Web Curios, as you doubtless are, is that you will of course have been aware for over a year now about how ‘lore’ was an increasingly important part of brand-building, and how a generation raised online is eager for backstory and mythology and NARRATIVE around everything – this, in The Face, applies that argument to the CharliXCX thing, and contrasts that with the relatively-minimal cultural imprint left by, say, Dua Lipa, who, contrary to the brat marketing machine, didn’t do anything to create a mythos around the music. This feels like the sort of thing that, if you’re in the invidious position of having to use words like ‘brand marketing’ in cold blood, might be a useful source.
  • PowerPoint Is Cool (Again): I’ve definitely said this before in here – STOP FCUKING REPEATING YOURSELF YOU SENILE OLD FCUK – but one of the great joys of ageing is the realisation that nothing is really new, ever, and you’re inevitably condemned to seeing the same trends and ideas and themes coming round again and again and again as the carousel of culture does its nauseating circular thing. So it is with this piece, which gave me some whiplash-inducing flashbacks to about 12-15 years ago when I CLEARLY remember ‘PPT as a sort of ironic party game’ cropping up at all sorts of startup-y events. Anyway, this is apparently a ‘thing’ again, so dust off that ‘PowerPoint Karaoke’ event template and prepare to coin it in!
  • How To Generate Sudokus: Ok, this is…quite technical, and, honestly, I didn’t really understand all (oh, ok, any) of the maths, but somehow I still managed to find it interesting – this is all about how Tom Nick wrote some code to automatically generate Sudoku puzzles, which, ok, fine, I appreciate doesn’t SOUND thrilling, but there’s something genuinely fascinating about the way he works through the problem, and even as someone who basically needs to take their shoes and socks off to count to 20 (I am exaggerating, but only slightly) I was slightly captivated by the smarts here.
  • How PEGI Ratings Work: I confess to having worked in videogames PR for about 5-6 years, and during that time having absolutely no fcuking clue how the whole PEGI age rating system worked – thanks to this article, now I know! Also, this contains a clip of the actor who’s responsible for voicing the ‘PEGI 18’ audio sting that autoplayed ahead of the titles of games of a certain era which, honestly, is so INCREDIBLY pleasing to hear.
  • Sexy Saint Sebastians: Or, to give it its full title, “The Martyrdom Of Saint Sebastian, In Ascending Order Of Sexiness And Descending Order Of Actual Martyring”. This is obviously very silly, but equally it made me laugh a LOT. I had no idea that Saint Sebastian was a gay icon, but according to this piece he very much is. What becomes apparent over the course of the article is that, for a saint who famously met his end thanks to a significant quantity of arrows being discharged into his body, a significant proportion of the paintings are very light on ‘arrow-y death’ and instead choose to major on ‘look at this beautiful beefcake’, which perhaps rather explains the gay love for poor old Seb.
  • This Likert Life: On the ubiquity of the Likert scale – the ratings system which asks you to categorise a product or experience along a five-point scale, from most x to least x – and the weird effect it has on one’s appreciation of existence. “If assessment numbers confer worth, lack of numbers implies worthlessness. So now that I’ve retired, and the numbers have stopped coming, I’m appalled to find myself missing them. How do I have value, and know it, without them? How does anything? How can you enjoy an apple without comparing it to other apples? How do you dare to eat a peach without logging your experience?”
  • CryptoArt in Dover: Our second slice of Clive Martin now – here, Clive schleps to Dover to meet ‘tech impresario’ David De Min, who’s behind “TechFort, a project described on its website as “the most advanced technology hub in Europe,” and a “thriving innovation ecosystem””, and who’s also got a sideline in crypto art because WHY NOT? This is, as you might imagine, something of a skewering for Mr De Min, not that you imagine he will particularly care, and Martin’s on typically excellent form reporting on that weird part of British culture where large sums of potentially-imaginary money rub up hard against shabby, crumbling infrastructure and the general sense of hopeless poverty that pervades so many of the country’s seaside towns (and yes, that means Margate too). The artworks in particular are…astonishing and really do deserve a look.
  • Clickolding: This is ostensibly a review of a videogame called ‘Clickolding’, but you don’t really need to be interested in either it or games in general to enjoy the writing – Taylor Hicklen writes about the game, its mechanics, and how it reminded him of moments in his own life and his own sexuality and power dynamics and and and…this really is very good, far better than a simple ‘review’ has any right to be. “I realized that my internal calculus was different at an early age, but that didn’t spare me the pain of mapping out my equation of desire. I struggled through it like an Algebra II worksheet, desperately trying to get the two sides to balance as “man and woman,” just how I was taught.”
  • American Bimbo: A collection of essays – I’ve read three of them, so feel reasonably comfortable recommending the whole thing – all inspired by the (in)famous 00s tabloid pap shot of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears on a night out together, captioned in the New York Post as ‘BIMBO SUMMIT’. The pieces variously address feminine identity in the 00s, the concept of ‘the bimbo’ as means of feminine empowerment, artifice and identity and presentation, and all sorts of other stuff besides, and if you’re interested in gender studies or feminist theory or THE SEMIOTICS OF POP then you will lap this right up.
  • The Day You Ate Our Deliveroo Delivery: I think this is superb. Farah Ahamed presents a series of vignettes, imagined reactions to customers waiting for their food order at home, only to find that when the driver finally shows up they have in fact eaten the meal in question. A brilliant stylistic exercise whose inherent formal repetition properly hammers the messages (he said, pretentiously – sorry about that) – really, really impressive.
  • The CostCo Holiday: Given it rather feels as though the cruise ship essay has rather been done to death, perhaps we can anoint ‘the package holiday article’ as the next big breakout format? This is a very, very funny piece by Simon Wu, who takes his parents on a holiday provided by US bulk shopping chain CostCo – a company which majors on price, and very much focused on the value. “This is the Costco psychology: quality over brand; value over status. To be ripped off is to be taken for a sucker. It is to have your resources wasted, your hard-earned cash sucked into a delusion of taste, timeliness, or class. It is to be left with nothing; or worse, to be haunted by an alternate timeline in which you saved more money. Costco is a fortress against this loss, and the only vacation that my parents would allow is one that safeguarded against that mentality.”
  • Trivial Pursuits: Finally this week, a republished piece from 2019 by Marlowe Granados – I missed it first time around, but this is so so so good. On the feminine pursuit of love, lust, experience,adventure, whatever, and the way in which the world responds to it. “The term “adventuress” fell out of vogue during the last half of the twentieth century. In its traditional definition, it is “a woman who seeks position or livelihood by questionable means.” I am not interested in what is questionable. Like I tell people in England, morals have never been in. I wish more women sought.”

By Martha Rich

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 26/07/24

Reading Time: 36 minutes

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:  

  • The AI Song Contest: No, hang on, come back, this is the *GOOD* AI! Or, at least, not the entirely bad AI, insofar is this version appears to be based on the idea of a future that does at least in part allow for some small human involvement. The AI Song Contest is amazingly (to me at least) now in its FOURTH year, having started in 2017 and then taken a somewhat-irregular approach to ‘happening annually’, and is based in Switzerland, and it is, for the next few days, at least, ACCEPTING ENTRIES! This, to be clear is a contest designed for ‘people who are making music WITH the machine’ rather than ‘people who have just typed “SOMETHING IN THE STYLE OF COTTON-EYE JOE” into Udio’ (in fact, they strongly discourage entrants from using either that platform or Sudo due to copyright concerns, bless them), and so the idea is that entrants will be actual musicians who are playing around with AI tools and toys and, well, COMPLICATED MATHS to make pleasing sounds, and I wondered whether one or two of you might fit the bill (as ever, WHO THE FCUK ARE YOU????). Entries close next week, so you’ll have to get a move on, but if you’ve got a few spare hours this weekend and, er, a bunch of musical equipment, and a decent chunk of at-home compute, and a penchant for algorithms then, well, HAVE FUN!
  • Crawlspace: Conceptually-adjacent to the HTML Review (see Curios passim), Crawlspace is another ‘publication’ (we need better words, don’t we? It feels slightly preposterous to refer to a digital magazine as a ‘publication’ – can we coin some sort of neologism? How about…a WEBAZINE??? What? It’s pleasingly-retro ffs, and I thought we were all in on 90s/00s fetishism in the year of our Lord 2024?) which operates somewhere at the intersection between words and code, and here presents a selection of…hm ,I suppose you might call them ‘interactive digital/textual experiences’, but only if you wanted to bore someone into submission (WAKE UP, COME BACK!). Instead, let’s call them ‘digital poems’ and be done with them. Some are vaguely-interactive-fiction-ish, some, inexplicably, involve oddly-horny verse written by anthropomorphised cartoon golf balls, some meld words and animations in oddly-beautiful ways…I think these are glorious and spent a genuinely lovely hour or so with them earlier this week, you might enjoy doing the same.
  • Vintage Yourself With Cadbury’s: AN ADVERMARKETINGPR ACTIVATION! A lot about this promo by Cadbury’s made me slightly sad, I have to say – not because of the work, which is…fine, but because of the vaguely-joyless experience it puts the user through and the way you can just tell that the whole thing has been through approximately 37 layers of client approvals and amends and legals, and that everyone involved in its genesis had all the enthusiasm for the project sanded off them about 30% of the way through. Basically the simple gimmick here is ‘put yourself in a vintage Cadbury’s advert, drawn from actual examples pulled from the chocolatey brand archives from decades past!’ which, you know, is fine as things go (use of archive material! Historical brand connection! Personalisable and shareable content! AI! Email capture!) but which also made me sigh quite a lot inside at the banality of it all (‘Your Face Here!’ is what digitaladvermarketingprmongs have been doing for literally 15 years ffs, can we not do ANYTHING new?) and the fact that it takes about 10m, start to finish, to go through the workflow, and you have to get the end result emailed to you for what I assam are inevitable data protection reasons, and tbh what I am most annoyed about is that the resulting image of ‘Matt as a cheery 1930s sweet shop owner’ that I requested looked significantly more like Paul Whitehouse doing his ‘Suits You!’ schtick (contemporary AND in-no-way parochial reference there!) than it did my admittedly-etiolated countenance. Anyway, look, this is the sort of thing that some of your older relatives might like, who am I to sneer? Noone, it is 719am and I am in my pants again, writing this, I have no high ground whatsoever to claim.
  • Kling: NEW FANCY TEXT-TO-VIDEO MODEL JUST DROPPED! Ok, not ‘just’ – users with a Chinese email address have had access for a couple of months now (you may have seen a selection of weird and creepy ‘celebrities meet past versions of themselves’ clips doing the rounds in the past week which if I’m not mistaken uses a version of this that’s baked into a Chinese app) – but it’s been opened up this week to international users so anyone in the world can now make upto 6 5-second video clips for free every 24h. You know how this works by now – type some stuff, submit it, wait an indeterminate amount of time for The Machine to render your request and then feel a sense of mild disappointment as you once again realise that getting these tools to output anything consistent or that doesn’t go full ‘OH GOD I AM ON ACID WHY IS EVERYTHING MELTING?’ about 3s in. Still, it’s undeniably very impressive, seemingly on a par with the latest version of Runway and marginally better than that DreamStudio thing from a few months back, and it’s worth playing just to get an idea of what it can do (again, not enough to be actually useful, to my mind at least).
  • The Failure Museum: A memorial to the schwag left behind by the corporate giants of yore – the failed products launched by otherwise-leading brands that never really took off, the companies that failed to see the future coming and so crashed into it head-on in spectacular, fatal fashion, the many, many terrible and preposterous lies bought and sold by a collection of investors and VCs…all are here, lovingly preserved by one man, Sean Jacobsohn, with an all-consuming passion: “My entire career has been as an operator or venture capitalist for enterprise software companies.  I’ve also been an avid collector of sports memorabilia. On November 14th of 2022, I received an FTX sponsored bobblehead of Jordan Poole. This was only a few days after the FTX collapse.  I realized I had a collectors item and found other similar sports related collectors items at home such as a Webvan hockey puck. Combining my passion for entrepreneurship, risk taking, and collectibles, I built a collection of artifacts from failed companies, products, toys, and sports.  I blog about how we can learn from each of these failures.” Some of these you will be familiar with – Colgate Lasagne! New Coke! The entire concept of Theranos and Juicero! – but others were entirely new to me and as such I have just learned about ‘Febreze Scent Stories (“Launched in 2004, Febreze Scent Stories was a clamshell device which added new scents every five minutes within a 30-minute disc. They proclaimed: “You can play scents… like you play music!” By making Shania Twain its spokesperson who helped with fragrance selection, consumers incorrectly assumed the device would also play her music.”) and Barbie’s defecating dog, Tanner, which inexplicably didn’t seem to feature in last Summer’s obsessive brand deification. This is a WONDERFUL project.
  • Benny: To once again return to the earlier theme of ‘I DON’T KNOW WHO ANY OF YOU ARE’, this is another link which I like to think will be transformative for at least one of you but which, honestly, I have no clue at all. Are any of you ACTUAL MUSICIANS? Like, you know, people who have mixers and who can actually work in Ableton? Do you know what a ‘sequencer’ is (and, er, if so can you explain it to me)? Basically, look, do the following words mean anything to you? “benny is a modular software playground for making live music. it seamlessly integrates hardware and software, midi and audio, lets you connect anything to anything and extends flexibly into polyphony. benny is a good place to host your own max/msp patches, but you don’t need to know max to get started.” It SOUNDS like it’s something really quite cool and useful and potentially-powerful, but, equally, I literally don’t understand what any of those letters mean when put together in that order. Anyway, this is free and open source and if any of you happen to find it useful can you please send me a short, reassuring email? Thanks.
  • Coppelganger: Via Andy, this is an excellent and not a little sinister) project which takes the public database of photographs of New York’s policemen and invites you to upload an image of yourself so that it can use ‘facial matching’ software to see which three NYC cops you most resemble and tell you their names. Beautifully, the site also informed me that approximately 3% of all NYC police staff are called ‘Michael’, so there’s a reasonable percentage that you will match with a Mikey – part of me really likes the idea of doing this and then carrying the photos of my three matches with me when I next visit New York, asking helpful policemen I find if they can help me trace my lookalikes, and a significantly larger part of me realises that these policepeople are likely to find this less ‘whimsically amusing’ than I currently do. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to have the opportunity to potentially pass yourself off as an actual US officer of the law, this might help (the lookalikes it gave me were…er…loose, shall we say, so I wouldn’t place too much hope in it finding your long lost coptwin).
  • Nobody Reads Ads: One for those of you who Work With Copy, and PARTICULARLY those of you who enjoy posting pictures of old creative/advertising on LinkedIn and using it as engagementbait or as part of an…irritatingly…paragraph-spaced…screed about how an overreliance on data has killed good old-fashioned creativity, man (I SEE YOU I KNOW YOU ARE OUT THERE WITH YOUR DESIGNER GLASSES AND VAGUELY-SCANDI LEISUREWEAR) – Nobody Reads Ads is a pretty wonderful collection (maintained by one Miguel Ferreira THANKYOU MIGUEL!) of, er, old advertising, specifically of the copy-heavy variety which was very much en vogue in the 70s and 80s. This is all English language and so necessarily tends towards the North American, but there are some Anglo and (I think) Antipodean examples in there as well, including a truly BRUTAL bit of work by the RSPCA which you can find if you scroll all the way to the bottom. Basically this has you covered for ‘grumpy old man in advertising shouts at clouds and complains the past was better’ content for MONTHS (and is also a great resource should you want to point people towards ‘ad copy that for once doesn’t make you want to gouge your own eyes out with teaspoons).
  • Hako Yamaho: The YouTube channel of (I think) one Hako Yamako, whose ‘thing’ is simple: to quote the ‘About’ page, they “assemble a box from a development diagram. In the description of each video, the PDF of the development diagram is attached. Thank you for watching. If you like it, I would be happy if you subscribe to the channel and give it a “like”. On this channel, you can enjoy DIY paper crafts by watching videos, challenge yourself to assemble the box like a quiz, or relax by observing the process of completing the paper box. We offer content for beginners to advanced, so please check out the other videos as well.” Do YOU want to watch a selection of videos in which you see a pair of (pleasant, well-manicured) hands gently bending and folding a flat cardboard model into a 3d cuboid? Do you want 30 of them, with new ones being added every few days? Would you like them to be soundtracked with a sort of gently-encouraging melody that you might find vaguely-reminiscent of kids’ TV? Look, I’m not judging, if this is what you’re into then FILL YOUR METAPHORICAL BOOTS.
  • Icons: Not really sure what’s going on here, but this is one of the more dizzyingly-esoteric collections of old Geocities/MySpace-ish gifs and jpegs and images – this goes on for PAGES, so use the arrows at the bottom to scroll through an aesthetic time tunnel, back to an era in which, just imagine, you could have decorated your own personal corner of the web with one, or more, or ALL of these wonderful pieces of digital flair. Honestly, look through these and try telling me that the web wasn’t a marginally better place when sh1t like this was festooned over every available spare pixel like some sort of angry, violent response to the very concept of ‘minimal web design’ – YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU??? Aside from anything else, some of these little animations are GREAT – so much tiny creativity here from so many unknown people.
  • The Transformers Wiki: It is a source of no little shame to me that the parts of my brain which I think by now should be full of knowledge like ‘what a futures market actually is’ and ‘plumbing’ and ‘how pensions work’ is instead still more full than I might like of detailed information about the plotlines of the Transformers comic books in the UK c.1987 (to be clear, I haven’t read any of those comics since 1987 – it’s just that the other topics are so skullfcukingly tedious that the ‘robots in disguise’ are seemingly unwilling to make room for them). The Transformers Wiki is seemingly THE repository for all Transformers-related knowledge on the web, and as is inevitable with this sort of thing contains a volume, depth and breadth of information that makes you wonder what the people behind its upkeep might have achieved had they had slightly-different obsessions. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to confirm EXACTLY how many shoulder cannons Galvatron had (I AM MAKING THIS UP I SWEAR I AM) then this is for YOU.
  • One Sound, Two Frames: This and the next few links come from Chris Cubitt’s excellent newsletter all about digital arts and culture stuff, which I highly recommend – this is a new Google Arts & Culture toy which presents the user with two famous paintings at a time, and plays an AI-generated tune as you look at them; your task is to guess which painting was the prompt for the tune. Simple, fun, quick and replayable, this is a really nice little toy (and, honestly, something that it feels like pretty much any museum could rip off with minimal effort).
  • What The Art?: Once again from Google, once again via Chris, this reminds me of Matt Round’s ‘Draw A Crappy Mona Lisa In 60s’ game from a couple of years back (and works as an excellent reminder that Matt has good ideas and you should commission him to make stuff) – this is a REALLY nicely-done game which you can play solo or with friends (I say ‘friends’ – you don’t have to actually like them), and requires you (in multiplayer) to either try and draw an artwork or to guess which of a selection of potential works your opponent is trying to draw. Again, this is simple and fun and the fact that upto (I think) four people can play simultaneously (this is a bit like JackBox, for those of you who got into that stuff during lockdown) makes it the perfect way for you to avoid your professional obligations for the next few hours.
  • Daily Gallery: The final of our Google toys this week, this is…this one I don’t really get, to be honest, but some of you might enjoy the doll’s house-ishness of it. Basically you can log on each day and get a selection of ‘accessories’ ‘delivered’ to your ‘gallery’ – a virtual white cube that you can over time customise and make your own, with artworks and decorations and flooring and wallpaper, like some sort of trust fund gallerina Sims. I don’t know, perhaps I still have some sort of latent PTSD from all those years I spent doing a p1ss-poor job of looking like I fitted in at art openings (reader, I *never* looked like I fitted in), but there’s something about the WHITE CUBE-ness of this that gives me the mild fantods.
  • A Community of People Who Like Electrocuting Themselves: Or, to use the url, r/TDCS, or ‘trans-cranial direct current stimulation’, or, more prosaically, ‘wiring yourself to a battery to see what happens when you apply current to various bits of you’. This is, honestly, one of the more…esoteric online communities I’ve stumbled upon of late, and I feel honour-bound to put some sort of ‘AND OBVIOUSLY I DO NOT SUGGEST THAT ANY OF YOU ATTACH SOME ELECTRODES TO YOUR TEMPLES AND START MESSING WITH THE THREE-POINTS’ caveat in here, but, well, none of you are like that, are you? ARE YOU? This isn’t really a ‘point-and-laugh’ link – there are people in here who are obviously self-medicating for a wide selection of…issues – but it’s FASCINATING to read.
  • A Poem: More digital poetry – this is gorgeous, and there’s no AI at all involved. Each poem is created from a ‘seed’, which then over time mutates and evolves based on…some under-the-hood maths which I don’t understand. You can browse other previously created poems, and there’s a lovely feature which lets you scrub back and forward over each poem’s evolution so you can see the way it grew and changed over time. GORGEOUS.
  • The Best Of Viz: Ok, fine, this is an engagement-bait tweet, but the results are SO JOYOUS that they have to be shared. For the non-Brits amongst you, Viz is a long-running comic for adults – it’s very puerile, very profane and occasionally very, very funny (it’s also where I got my prized ‘Life Of Christ In Cats’ teatowel). The original tweet here asked “Is there a @vizcomic Letter or Top Tip that lives rent-free in your head? EVERY time I’m driving, I think of the person who wrote in to say “Why should I use my indicators? It’s none of your business where I’m going”” and OH MY GOD THE GOLD IN THE QUOTES. Look, just click, scroll and enjoy – if at least one of these doesn’t reduce you to actual tears then I think there might in fact be something wrong with you. I have just lost my sh1t entirely at “Olay says it combats the seven signs of ageing. Does that include ‘becoming more right-wing?’ Because that’s the really problematic one”.

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 Library of the Printed Web: The companion Tumblr to a piece in the MOMA collection: “The mission of Library of the Printed Web is to provide an in-depth view of network culture, artistic practice, and the printed page. The collection is an important resource for the study of print-based experimental publishing in the early 21st century” – this collects various projects seeking to combine the physical world of print and the world of the url for artistic purposes, and as you can imagine pretty much everything on here is right up my street.
  • Grumpy: I don’t know if this is actually a Tumblr, but it FEELS like one. Examples of infuriatingly-bad UX and UI, compiled by a wide range of grumpy contributors from the world of design. EXCELLENT, particularly if you too are grumpy.

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!

  • Why Conservatism Failed: This is a really interesting article of the sort I wouldn’t ordinarily have bothered reading – no idea where I came across it, but it’s basically a look at what has happened to ‘conservatism’ as a concept (this is very much focused on the idea of ‘small-c conservatism’, the traditional definition which focuses on a politics motivated by an appeal to tradition, etc, as embodied by the British Conservative Party (or at least as once-embodied by it)) and why it appears to have rather been left by the wayside in favour of various flavours of liberalism, neoliberalism, libertarianism and the rest. To be clear – on a personal level I do not bemoan the relative demise of conservatism as a movement, but I found the discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of the movement and the way in which the author argues that it’s simply not compatible with a post-tech society, hugely interesting, and you might too – see how you feel about this: “The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends.”
  • The Republican Convention: On the one hand, sending a talented English writer to point and laugh at the mad excesses of the Republican party is pretty much ‘fish in a barrel’ as far as commissioning goes – on the other, Andrew O’Hagen in the LRB really does a wonderful job presenting the various freaks and liars and, honestly, fcuking dreadful, cnutish, ghoulish excuses for people that populate the halls of the RNC. This is written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting, and captures the fear, greed and naked opportunism swirling around the atmosphere as a collection of mostly very rich people work out exactly how they can plot and collude to make sure that they stay rich, and ideally get richer, over the coming five years. Made me almost miss the days in which I used to get to go to party conferences and get paid to be spectacularly rude to Tories (I mean, that’s not what I got paid for, fine, but it’s definitely a significant proportion of what I actually did).
  • Cool URLs Mean Something: I enjoyed this immensely, all about how hyperlinks and urls are GREAT, actually, and how their existence and function is the very backbone of a functioning web, and how they are goods that should be preserved. I have been toying recently with the idea of futureproofing Curios to an extent – I quite like the idea of buying 50 years of hosting to ensure that even long after I am dead someone will in theory be able to read this crap, fcuk alone knows why – but then I realised that that’s sort of meaningless if all the links within are dead, and it made me wonder whether there’s some sort of concerted, organised way of dealing with this, some sort of…I don’t know, guaranteed, state-backed, guaranteed volume of storage that could be guaranteed for every citizen, a certain number of Terabytes guaranteed for 100 years for you to dispose of as you will, and how that might be an interesting way of securing a certain type of small, personal web…anway, that’s all almost certainly b0llocks, but read the piece and see if it takes you anywhere similar.
  • The Pop Craveification of Breaking News: Or ‘the news happens everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and it’s basically weird being alive in a time when it’s as likely you will hear about, I don’t know, an asteroid being about to hit the earth on the news as it is you will hear about it third-hand via an incredibly complicated meme you have to reverse engineer to understand’. Taylor Lorenz writes about the fractured way the US experienced the news of the Trump shooting – which is brought into sharper relief by this list of all the different ways people found out about it. I have been saying this for a few years now, but it really is true that the idea of any sort of ‘universal informational layer’ that we can all agree we all have access to and agree on is gone, perhaps forever. Which is quite strange, and I think will have equally-strange consequences.
  • Confronting Impossible Futures: The wisest man in AI discourse, Ethan Mollick, returns with a typically-superb essay on the current state of AI and how it might be helpful to try and think about its future development, specifically from the point of view of organisational implementation.
  • AI and the Games Industry: A sobering dispatch from the frontlines of game development, in which WIRED talks to a selection of people involved in the industry about how they’re seeing generative AI impacting their jobs and the wider market. The answer, as you might expect, is ‘not in ways that are particularly good news for lower-level staff’ – this is very much worth reading, imho, not so much because of its focus on the games industry in particular but because of the fact that much of what it describes chimes with my own experiences this year of being paid to consult on this stuff – cf, IT IS NEVER THE SHINY, FRONT-FACING STUFF THAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH OUT FOR IT IS THE BORING BEHIND-THE-SCENES STUFF WHERE THE SWINGEING CUTS ARE COMING.
  • Hell Is Haggling With Chatbots: A piece on 404 Media presaging the inevitable future in which AI gets baked into every single fcuking interface on earth – a reality which came a small step closer this week with the release of the new version of Llama – and we have to deal with fun things like ‘having your purchase journey interrupted by a conversational assistant that invites you to ‘barter’ with it for a discount, except you’re not actually haggling, it’s a pre-agreed discount that’s already been baked into the model and the financials and so all you are doing is playing out a dispiriting pantomime with a machine to achieve exactly the same result as you could have gotten with a simple voucher except now you have lost 3% of your soul and you will never get it back’. Sounds GREAT, doesn’t it?
  • Ethiopia’s EV Problem: This is an EXCEPTIONAL story, and exactly the sort of cautionary tale that a certain type of person will almost certainly internalise and use as their go-to example of why PLANNING IS IMPORTANT. So Ethiopia has recently taken steps to address the fact that, until recently, the country was spending $7.6bn on fuel imports per year – by, er, banning the import of non-electric vehicles. Which is a great and progressive idea, at least in theory, but which floundered slightly on the harsh reality of the country’s existing EV infrastructure, which is…patchy at best. Ethiopia, according to the article in the always-excellent Rest of World, has around 50 charging stations in total, and they don’t really have a stockpile of replacement parts for EVs, and the power supply’s not quite up to scratch…an incredible example of how enthusiasm occasionally needs to be tempered JUST A BIT with practical realism.
  • Looking For A Man In Finance: What happens if you ACTUALLY go looking for a man in finance in New York’s financial district? Will you find a blue-eyed plute to pose for rooftop cocktails with? Joanna Rothkopf investigates for The Cut, in a piece which is very funny but which also did nothing to disabuse me of my belief that a good 75% of people who live in Manhattan are actually sociopaths. Also, and I know that this has been discussed at length elsewhere but, I find the ‘Bateman aesthetic’ fetishising so incredibly depressing. “I think American Psycho has always been in” – no mate, it hasn’t, you’re just awful.
  • The Kink Behind Brat Summer: After the past week I can barely bring myself to type the word again – PLEASE CAN WE NEVER, EVER DO THIS ‘X SUMMER’ THING EVER AGAIN, PLEASE? Also (and while I hope this doesn’t happen for obvious reasons) I wonder whether this album will get utterly memoryholed by the culture should Harris not win? Anyway, this is the only piece I am linking to about That Meme because, well, I have already featured too much about it in previous Curios – I am making an exception for this, because it’s very funny and actually very smart about the link between the term, its ubiquity and the kink/fet dynamic that it springs from, and I haven’t seen anyone else writing about this. By Emma Garland, whose newsletter is very much worth subbing to.
  • What Happens When You Let An AI Try And Plan Your Trip: Nothing good, basically – you probably won’t be hugely surprised to learn that ‘let The Machine plan your itinerary!’ services aren’t quite up to snuff yet, what with the fact that The Machine HAS NO UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE OR TIME and therefore can’t do things like ‘work out a suitable cadence of pubs for the Circle Line Pub Crawl’, but despite being largely unsurprising this is still an amusing read, not least the London correspondent’s dogged commitment to following the AI’s mad instructions to the letter.
  • Cleo, The Mysterious Maths Expert: OH I love this! Of a similar vibe to the recent story about the SomethingAwful user who came back after 11 years to carry on an online argument where it left off, this is an adorable and slightly-mysterious tale of Cleo, a user on the Mathematics Stack Exchange website (a place where people who are VERY GOOD AT NUMBERS gather to talk about, er, numbers) who found fame through occasionally popping up on the forum’s pages to offer answers to INCREDIBLY HARD PROBLEMS, with no explanation and, most traumatically of all for this community, NO WORKINGS. This is a lovely piece – transcribed from a podcast – looking at why the ‘no workings’ thing sends the numbermongs into a frenzy, and who Cleo is, and why they post the way they do, and, honestly, I adore this sort of stuff, the random anonymous online heroes, your Let Me Solo Hers and the like, more power to them and LONG LIVE CLEO, whoever they may be. Also, solving complex factorials and the like and just dropping the answer is the coolest geeky thing in the world, to my mind.
  • The Love Letter Generator: A beautiful, sad, poignant bit of history, this – “In 1952, decades before ChatGPT started to write students’ essays, before OpenAI’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing. Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.” There’s no evidence that Turing and Strachey ever had a romantic relationship in real life, but it’s impossible not to read a certain yearning subtext in the project and the letters that were exchanged over its duration. It reminded me that epistolary correspondence is, to my mind, the most romantic expression of feeling there is, the slow unfurling of love over thousands of exchanged words across weeks or months.
  • Books The NYT Missed: Following on from the New York Times’ list of ‘the best books of the 21stC’ which I featured last week, this week I can bring you TWO alternatives – the first, published by LitHub, consists of novels that might reasonably have made it in, but which didn’t, and which you can say fall basically within the same sort of ballpark, books which you have almost certainly heard of if you’re a certain type of person. Personally I prefer this one to the original – it contains a few more spiky texts, a few less ‘MODERN CLASSICS’, and it’s a bit more varied in tone in its picks. The second selection is FAR more interesting and varied – this one’s compiled by a bookshop in New Delhi, and contains a selection of titles that SHOCK HORROR had the temerity to not necessarily be written in English, and of which I had heard of maybe 20-odd, and which I am going to use as the basis for much of my reading for the second half of the year I think.
  • READ: I didn’t know this til this week, but another of America’s big national public ad campaigns (alongside ‘Got Milk?’) has traditionally been one designed to encourage kids to read, via the medium of celebrities, photographed with a book, alongside the single-word instruction ‘READ’. This piece takes you through the 100 ‘best’ – honestly, some of these are WONDERFUL. Who chooses the famouses? Who art directs these? The one of Lucy Lawless in particular, in full Xena garb, holding a scroll, is fcuking PRICELESS.
  • The Worst Album Covers Ever: A list by Rolling Stone, which is comprised mainly of ‘bands you might actually have heard of and who, honestly, all ought to have known a lot better’. Some of these are legendary, some of these were new to me, but it was nice to be reminded of some all-time classics like the infamous Twin Towers cover by rappers The Coup. Still don’t think the Chumbawamba cover’s all that bad, mind.
  • Secrets of a Ransomware Negotiator: A piece from the Economist’s superb 1843 Magazine now, this is a brilliantly-done portrayal of what it’s like to negotiate with a ransomware gang that says it has it hands on a bunch of your customer data – this is GREAT, nicely paced and not-a-little tense at times, which left me with two main takeaways: 1) being a ransomware scammer sounds like a pretty sweet gig tbh; 2) but not as sweet a gig as the ransomware expert negotiator, who, from what I can tell, gets paid enough to live in the fcuking Maldives while basically doing a job that equates to sending one or two calm-sounding emails a day.
  • Indexing Plath: Carly Rollyson writes about exploring the life of Sylvia Plath through his biographies of her, and specifically the insights and understanding of a life and a person through an indexing of their experiences. Rollyson talks about how through indexing his work and her diaries he came to a deeper understanding of the role sex played in Plath’s life and relationships and marriage to Ted Hughes, and for someone like me who’s inherently sceptical of the idea of ‘finding beauty and interesting stuff via the medium of statistics’ it was interesting to listen to him expand on what the accumulation of detail and recording of incident and accumulation of volume can tell about the texture of a person.
  • The Bootleg Beatles: Kieran Morris writes in the FT about the Bootleg Beatles, the world’s premiere purveyors of ersatz Beatles experience. This is SUPERB – honestly, I had no idea that the ‘tribute band’ thing went THIS far, that the Bootleg Ringo has AN ACTUAL PROSTHETIC NOSE, that they try and mimic everything down to the amps and the lightbulbs they use on stage, that they have quietly played some incredible gigs…seriously, everything about the piece and its subjects is charming and lovely and you will not fail to be charmed by it, I promise.
  • The Later Years of Douglas Adams: Very much one for the fans, this – I concede that if you’re not personally interested in the life and works of Douglas Adams, this isn’t likely to convert you. That said, if you’re a fan of the man and his work, this is a great look at what he did AFTER he’d done with the Hitchhiker’s books – all the terrible uses to which he put his money, and the various ways in which he attempted to get out of writing, and the botched mess that was Starship Titanic, and the oddity of H2G2, and Christ he was an astonishing and visionary person in many ways, what a shame he died so young (but, maybe, for the best – at least we didn’t have to watch him Going Full Cleese).
  • The Sounds of a Calculator: Sublime is an interesting-looking new website / tool for collecting and sharing interesting stuff online, sort of like Are.na but different (I will write it up properly when it’s out of beta) – this is a genuinely lovely post from one of the team there, about how they came to find one of the sounds that they use on the site, and I promise you it really is a beautiful reflection on old and new, digital and analogue, and how inspiration can and does come from anywhere and everywhere and you can never tell where.
  • Demon Slayers: I have always been fascinated by Big Evangelical America – the pomp, the theatre, the barely-concealed sense that someone, somewhere is making quite frankly insane bank out of all this proselytizing…I remember being in North Carolina about 30-odd years ago and seeing a church-sponsored sign along the freeway which exhorted parents to keep their kids safe from ‘Drink, Drugs and Heavy Metal Rock Music’, which is pretty much illustrative. ANYWAY, this is a wonderful article by Sam Kestenbaum in Hazlitt, all about the very specific business of mass exorcisms, filmed and packaged and broadcast as Christian films (or TV specials) – Kestenbaum attends a big exorcism, sees the speaking in tongues and the fainting, witnesses the…rather more practical and prosaic considerations of the people running the show, and SOMEHOW manages to pen several thousand words on the whole thing (good words too) without calling anyone a massive, grifting charlatan which to my mind is worthy of some sort of prize.
  • Tyson: GQ interviews Mike Tyson – this piece was presumably intended to coincide with the Tyson/Paul bout which has now been pushed back to November, and it’s…look, we all know how the celebrity interview junket works at this level, and you don’t get access to someone like Tyson around an event like this without agreeing in advance as to what the parameters are, but, well, the softballing here, the lack of any sort of serious interrogation of Bad Mike Doing All The Bad Things, is kind of astonishing. It’s worth reading this and also keeping Tyson’s Wiki open alongside it to remind you of all the stuff it’s NOT mentioning, basically. The section with the pigeons is nice, though (if inevitable and predictable).
  • Pneuma: One of the more astonishing pieces of writing I’ve read in a while, this – Mary Gaitskill writes of her experiences with Pneuma, a form of…what, energy healing? Something like that, I get my woo-medicine confused…which she gets involved with over a period of several years and which sort-of takes over, and maybe halfway ruins, her life. This really is extraordinary – Gaitskill’s a great writer and she’s very good at pre-empting a lot of the reader’s skepticism whilst making it perfectly clear that, for her, this was very much A Real Thing – and the cast of characters she meets is…well, it’s going to be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever come even halfway-adjacent to this sort of stuff. I really was left floored by this – a properly bravura piece, and a very odd one indeed.
  • Bitter North: Our final longread this week is another piece in Granta – Alexandra Tanner writes about Danna and Hal, a couple going on a trip together, and I loved this so so so much, the mundanity and the detail and the fact that you can almost feel the cheap fibres of the motel carpet under your fingers, and the highest compliment I can give this is that I was devastated when I finished it to discover that Tanner’s novel isn’t published in the UK til 2025. Really, really good.

By Daido Moriyama

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 19/07/24

Reading Time: 36 minutes

Propriety be damned, we’re allowed to feel a faint twinge of regret, right? Please take it upon yourselves to determine exactly which of last Sunday’s major news events I am referring to.

Anyway, given the fact that the world’s digital infrastructure appears to have decided to fall over this morning and that therefore a lot of you might find yourself in a position where…everything…takes…forever…thanks…modernity…fcuk’s…sake, I’ll keep this short and instead proudly present to you this week’s selection of freshly-slain links, harvested at no small personal cost by me, for you, just you, always you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can already taste that first pint, can’t you, I can tell.

By Reuben Negron (all pics this week lifted from TIH)

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH AN ALBUM I BOUGHT FOR A QUID ENTIRELY AT RANDOM ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO IN SPITALFIELDS AND WHICH HAS SINCE BECOME ONE OF MY FAVOURITE SUMMER LISTENS AND WHICH FEELS PERFECT FOR AN AFTERNOON LIKE THIS ONE (THE ONE IN LONDON RIGHT NOW, TO BE CLEAR, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOUR PERSONAL AFTERNOON MAY OR MAY NOT BE LIKE)! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS ASKED BY A STRANGER IN CENTRAL LONDON LAST SUNDAY IF I HAD ‘ANY BUGLE’ TO SPARE, WHICH STRUCK ME AS BOTH DELICIOUSLY RETRO AND WILDLY OPTIMISTIC ON THEIR PART, PT.1:

  • What Beats Rock: We are officially in THE TROUGH OF DESPOND when it comes to AI (no, really, Gartner have said it and everything), but if you’d like something to remind you of how it can be FUN and SILLY it can be (leaving aside any momentary worries about how exactly we’re planning on cooling all these datacentres) then you could do worse than spending a few enjoyable minutes playing ‘What Beats Rock?’, a game which asks you the fundamental question ‘which of these two objects, or even abstract concepts, is more POWERFUL than the other?’. You start with paper – your only task as a player is to think of something that the system agrees will ‘beat’ the substance in question, with the LLM that sits behind all this being in charge of deciding whether or not it agrees with you. The obvious – boring, normie! – pick is of course ‘scissors’ – but get creative! Why not try ‘fire’? Or ‘paper-eating termites’? Or ‘a holepunch deployed with repeated aggression’? SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES! If you submit a response that The Machine deems acceptable, you’re onto the next round and charged with trumping your previous suggestion – so you can’t go big too early or you’ll be left thinking ‘hm, ok, what beats ‘the concept of time’?’ and coming up with empty hands. The game ends when you’re unable to come up with a workable suggestion, with the aim being to get as high a score as possible by keeping the chain of ridiculousness going, and, honestly, this is FUN and absurd and while we may not have yet come up with compelling reasons as to why it’s been worth investing all this money in spicy autocomplete (trust me, though, the ‘compelling reason’ is ‘reduced operating costs when it comes to staffing’ and it always has been!), this feels like as good a rationale as any.
  • Jars: One of the great hopes of generative AI to date, of course, has been the prospect of INFINITE CONTENT – fcuk the quality, feel the width! While we are, per Curios passim, a LONG way from these systems being able to produce anything much more than curious nonsense or total dreck, it hasn’t stopped people from ploughing what I assume is a reasonable chunk of idiot VC money into stuff like Jars – an ‘infinite’ series of AI-scripted and fronted ‘tv shows’ which you can view through the website here linked. There are DOZENS of these, with talking head avatars burbling on about topics as varied as, er, ‘would you have a penguin as your vice president’ and Jeffrey Epstein (OF COURSE!)…why? There’s a degree of interactivity available with this stuff – per other ‘AI TV’ setups, you can theoretically direct and influence the chat through comments…but noone’s watching, so this is just The Machine burbling to itself, into the void, forever. I am genuinely baffled by this – firstly, which purse-string holder was duped into thinking that there is ever going to be an audience for ‘computer generated characters have stilted conversations in which they pretend they are in Love Island’ (because of course that is a channel), and secondly ‘how much is this costing?!?!’, given there are several dozen channels, all running seemingly 24/7. Anway, if you fancy checking out what is almost certainly NOT the future of entertainment, Jars is here! I have just found one channel that apparently has 7 concurrent viewers at the time of writing, and all I can think is ‘who are you, and how do you not have anything better to do with your time?’ (swiftly followed by ‘I am in no position to mock or deride, what is become of me?’).
  • Eggnog Infinite: Seeing as we’re doing ‘supposedly infinite content that noone in their right mind is ever going to consume more than once’, here’s another attempted variant on the whole ‘user-directed, AI-generated storytelling’ thing! This is ‘Eggnog’, which is a platform trying to do the whole ‘give us a skeleton of an idea and we will turn it into a storyboard for you’ thing, and which is marketing a feature it’s calling ‘Eggnog Infinite’ where you can watch entire ‘series’ of AI-generated pseudovideo. I have no idea AT ALL who has made all these things – I presume they have been prompted into existence by ‘the community’, the only explanation I can imagine for the VERY COPYRIGHT-INFRINGING material here collected. Would you like to ‘watch’ an incredibly-stilted reimagining of ‘Bridgerton’ (called, for avoidance of doubt, ‘Bridgerton’) delivered via the medium of 20s AI-generated clips? No, of course not! The same almost certainly applies to ‘Breaking Bad: Maldives (no, really) although, honestly, I do rather recommend delving into the mad Epstein or the jaw-droppingly poor ‘Sex Education at Oxford’ clips. Each ‘series’ has a vague ‘choose your own adventure’ vibe, so you each episode ends with a binary branching choice – this is like ‘interactive televisual entertainment’ as reimagined by someone who’s either totally unfamiliar with the concept of ‘entertainment’ or who has recently enjoyed some sort of blunt-force cranial trauma.
  • YouSim: Another rather fun AI sandbox toy, this, in similar vein to ‘SIMULATE THE WORLD’ tools I’ve featured previously – with YouSim, the gimmick is that you can ‘summon’ and interact with anyone you like (to be clear, this happens via the medium of ‘typing with your fingers’ rather than through any kind of occult process – sorry to disappoint), just to see what happens. There are various commands you can experiment with – so you can summon Frida Kahlo, say, and then get the simulation to imagine that she’s just taken ayahuasca and is seeing totally new colours, and then perhaps summon Aleister Crowley to tell Frida about his murderous mountaineering exploits, and then tell the simulation to make Frida angry and see whether you can get her to clock Aleister around the head for his satanic ways…basically it’s like a text-only doll’s house/dress-up box, and with a bit of imagination and effort there’s something rather wonderful about the ways in which you can end up in some very odd, and pleasingly ‘imaginative’, places.
  • Follow The Crypto: Thanks to the increasingly-likely prospect of a Trumpian second term (a sentence which 2015 Matt finds risible in the extreme – 2015 Matt was a fcuking d1ck with no idea at all what was going on or what was going to continue going on, turns out!), crypto is once again a bull(ish) market – WE’RE SO BACK, BABY! With all the usual suspects weighing in behind the Republican campaign in the past week – Thiel, obvs, but Andreessen and others – there’s a real sense that a certain portion of the world sees Donald 2.0 as a Big Business Opportunity. Should the fact that this portion is also the portion which is all-in on incredibly grifty sh1t like crypto give us pause for thought? You’d have to be a fool or a communist to suggest so! Anyway, as the bubble reinflates, even if temporarily, we have a new project by Molly White (of Web3 Is Going Great fame), this time attempting to the amount of crypto-adjacent money that is being funneled into the US Presidential race via PACs and SuperPACs and the various other complex financial instruments that makes American Democracy such a joy to behold. Of interest mainly to keen observers of US politics and who exactly is trying to influence it and how, and anyone who wants to get a tiny, tiny glimpse into the mindfcuking amounts of money involved.
  • The BBC Computer Literacy Project: Oh God, there is a certain type of middle-aged (and older, tbf) UK-based nerd for whom this is going to be Proustian in its ability to take you back to a specific time – return, if you will, to an era in which computer software came on tape or floppy discs (they really used to bend!), in which screen resolutions were such that digital bongo was the very definition of ‘a challenging w4nk’, and in which you were seemingly only allowed access to one if you had a cardigan and elbow patches – HERITAGE! “In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program. The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders. This site contains all 146 of the original Computer Literacy Project programmes plus 121 related programmes, broken down into 2,509 categorised, searchable clips.” This is HISTORY (and will be useful should you have unaccountably put ‘learn BBC BASIC’ on your ‘ways to fill the days between birth and death in 2024’ list).
  • MorseLaptop: Code which lets you communicate in Morse via the simple medium of opening and shutting your laptop (click the link and watch the demo vid, it makes sense, honest). I am less enticed by the laptop hack here than I am with the possibility to setting something like this up on a door in an office or public space somewhere, and translating the ‘long open/short open’ movements into Morse which then get communicated somewhere, like some sort of ongoing, randomised, Dada-ish ‘poetry of movement’. Which is almost certainly the w4nkiest thing I am going to write ALL DAY, and it’s only 751am so well DONE Matt!
  • Snort & Paste: One of several links lifted from B3ta this week, this is a very silly gimmick which lets you erase text from a webpage by hoovering it up with a big digital nose JUST LIKE DRUGS, DO YOU SEE??? Extra special bonus points for the ‘clear your nostril to expel the cloggage’ functionality which is an admirable commitment to the gag.
  • Does It Glider?: Are you still playing Wordle (or similar daily word puzzle, ideally one which, like Wordle, presents you with a daily grid-based scorecard at the end of each game)? Would you like something new to do with your completed Wordle grid once you’ve solved it and are basking in the glory of your fantastic verbal prowess? Well why not copy the scoreblocks and paste them into to this webpage to see whether or not your day’s performance would cut it in the digital petri dish that is Conway’s ‘Life’ – this takes the Wordle scoregrid and asks ‘yes, fine, BUT HOW LONG WILL IT LAST AS A SELF-REPLICATING SIMULATED ORGANISM?’, which, frankly, is the question we should ALL have been asking for the past few years.
  • Font Interceptor: MSCHF released a bunch of new things in the past week or so – this is the first of them, a website where you can plug in the url of ANY OTHER website to let you steal ALL of the fonts used on said site. Caveat – I haven’t actually tried this out, given I have no particular need to grab a bunch of fonts, but, presuming it works, then I feel I ought to also say ‘stealing is bad’. That said, I have a vague recollection that the whole font industry is something of a cartel/racket and, honestly, who can afford to pay for serifs in THIS economy? NO FCUKER, etc. There’s a little Q&A on the homepage talking you through the morality of when one should and shouldn’t steal a font – basically if you’re a povvo you’re fine, and given you’re reading Web Curios I’m going to assume a degree of spiritual/emotional poverty and therefore I officially say it is OK for you to use this with impunity.
  • Project Gucciberg: MSCHF drop of the week #2 is this fun little exploration of copyright law – is it legal to create a selection of audiobooks which take public domain books available via Project Gutenberg and then has them read out by an AI voice model trained on the unique vocal stylings of Gucci Mane? Is it legal if the voice model is unauthorised but created from publicly available recordings? What about if it’s a non-commercial project? WHO KNOWS??? As MSCHF write on the homepage, “We didn’t write the books, and we deepfaked the voice. Is this copyright infringement? Is it identity theft? All of the training data (recordings) used to make Project Gucciberg were publicly available on the web. Gucciberg lives in that lovely grey area where everything’s new and anything goes.” I do think there’s some quite fun and interesting stuff to be done in spaces like this – there’s nothing funny about STEALING PEOPLE’S ART, obvs (he says, despite the fontstealing link he literally just posted, the fcuking hypocrite), but I think there’s space in the charitable/awareness-raising space to take some risks with public domain and what you can and can’t get away with. Leaving aside all that po-faced stuff, though, you can now download an AI-generated recording of a famous rapper reading you Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, which I think we can all agree justifies the effort, expense and environmental impact.
  • Kaleidoscope: This is very simple, fine, but it is also WONDERFUL for making really quite distressing images. Plug in any photo you want and this makes a sort of looping, zooming kaleidoscope-type animation out of it – obviously you’re free to use this however you want, but can I just point out how astonishingly vile the results are if you feed it images of glistening meats? Honestly, SO UNPLEASANTLY SQUELCHY AND VISCERAL.
  • Lower Silesia: A Google Arts & Culture project which looks at the Polish region of Lower Silesia and offers an overview of its architecture, regional mythologies, history, wildlife and all sorts of other things. There’s a virtual art gallery featuring works depicting the area which you can explore! There’s richly-evocative music which feels very much as though it was lifted from the ‘exploring Hogwarts at night’ bits of the early Potter films! Honestly, you may not ever have previously thought ‘Christ I *wish* there was an easily-accessible and attractively-presented guide to this otherwise-little-known area of Poland’ but you will be THRILLED to discover the existence of this one. Seriously, a really interesting introduction to a region I knew nothing about, and which I am now almost tempted to visit (but I simply don’t like pierogi enough).
  • Live Near Friends: Via Elan Ullendorff’s newsletter, this is SUCH an interesting idea which I am slightly amazed I hadn’t come across before. Live Near Friends is a website based on a super-simple premise – that, given the opportunity, people would increasingly choose to live in vague clusters with their friends, and that as such they should be able to arrange things to let them do that. The site asks you to choose what sort of arrangement you’re after – multiple units within an apartment block, say, or houses in a neighbourhood, or on a street – and then helps you find areas where house prices and availability match your and your friends’ criteria…on the one hand, this makes all sorts of theoretical sense; on the other, I can’t help but get a feeling (and this might just be my innate ‘I AM NOT A JOINER’-ness at play here) that there could be some…interesting negative externalities here. What about the people in the neighbourhood/apartment block that perhaps wouldn’t be thrilled at having your entire uni mates groupchat moving in en masse? What if you and your group of friends are, not to put too fine a point on it, *d1cks*? Anyway, this struck me as both a really curious idea and the GREAT starting point for some superb domestic/community drama.
  • Live, HD Stream from the ISS: I have obviously featured this sort of thing at some point before, but this is NEW and SUPER-HD, and if you have ever wanted to watch a stream of, at the time of writing, clouds over the ocean then WOW do I have a treat for you. This gives me vertigo, in a way that is very hard to describe.
  • Epistolorean Club: This is an interesting idea, though details on how exactly it will work is unclear at the time of writing – from the blurb, “Epistolary books are written as letters or journals. They tell a story through the eyes the characters, capturing their thoughts, feelings, and events as and when they are recorded. The Epistolorean brings epistolary books to life. Subscribe to a book and you’ll receive emails from the characters as the story takes place. Our first book, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is currently in testing.” Except, well, Dracula is already in large part an epistolary novel, no? Anyway, no idea if this is going to be any good, but it’s INTERESTING so give it a try and stop being so suspicious.
  • Years In Seconds: ‘A Year In My Life In a Minute’ as a style of video feels VERY 2012-coded, to me at least – stuff like ‘The Sartorialist’ and ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ that’s OLD INTERNET, more innocent and less corrupted…ordinarily I wouldn’t pay much mind to this sort of thing, but I stumbled across this channel this week and became slightly transfixed. This is someone called Shaun Tollerton who since 2015 has posted a ‘my year in 365 seconds’ videos – a second of video a day each day throughout the year, edited into single vids – and none of them have more than 200 views, and it’s just…perfect. Not attention-seeky, not trying to do or say anything, no big running bits or stories or revelations, just mundane, wonderful, boring, LIFE (admittedly the life of someone who I think has quite a decent job in tech and travels a bit, fine, but still). Shaun spends at least part of his life in London, so there’s a pleasing familiarity to some of the shots, but in general I am just slightly in love with the…the ordinariness of it all. No idea why this has grabbed me so, but I really, really enjoyed these and maybe you will too.

By Stephen A Scheer

BACK TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL FOR THIS NEXT MIX, WHICH IS PSYTRANCE AND ACID TECHNO AND THEREFORE ALMOST UTTERLY UNCOOL BUT I LOVE IT UNCONDITIONALLY REGARDLESS BECAUSE DEAR GOD DO I MISS DOING SPEED AND DANCING TO THIS STUFF! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS ASKED BY A STRANGER IN CENTRAL LONDON LAST SUNDAY IF I HAD ‘ANY BUGLE’ TO SPARE, WHICH WAS BOTH DELICIOUSLY RETRO AND STRUCK ME AS WILDLY OPTIMISTIC ON THEIR PART, PT.2:  

  • Gaza Memorial: A site which lists the names and ages of people killed in Gaza over the past 9 months – if you have your volume up, you will hear the names being read aloud as they cycle. The voices reading the names of the deceased are other people from around the world who have contributed their voices to their project – if you’re moved to do so, you can leave a recording here.
  • The Ultimate PaywallHopper: Before you all get excited, be aware that this is TECHNICAL and you will need to be comfortable fiddling with a few things on your computer to get it to work – BUT it’s not actually hard at all, and the instructions on the page are comprehensive, and, look, as previously discussed, I believe in paying for journalism as much as the next man but, equally, I am paying four figures annually for subscriptions at the moment and it’s not like my employment prospects are getting any better with the passage of time. This will get you into ALL SORTS of places, including The Athletic and Bloomberg, and is a fcuking GODSEND.
  • The Picasso Study Centre: Picasso, seen from the vantage point of 2024 – a leathery old pervert who had an indisputable way with the oils but who you probably wouldn’t necessarily trust with your wife/daughter/mum. Still, if you’d prefer your analysis of one of the 20thC’s most celebrated artists to be informed by rather more than my throwaway dismissal, you might enjoy checking out this newly-digitised set of works collected by the Picasso Study Centre – this contains 5,000 works from sketches and studies to monographs and photos and 3d models, and you could honestly lose hours to this if you’re so minded.
  • Code Galaxies: OK, I can’t claim to wholly understand what it is that is being visualised here – yes, fine, ‘code’, and according to the description code which ‘visualizes dependencies among most popular package managers. Every star in this visualization represents a package’, whatever that means – but beyond that I’m slightly lost – but it’s undeniably VERY PRETTY and quite mesmerising. This site – via Giuseppe’s ever-excellent data newsletter, btw – lets you explore Rust, Python, Arch Linux and other languages in zoomy, space commander fashion, flying through the various nodes as though they were, well, galaxies. Hence the name. Jesus. Anyway, I don’t think there’s any purpose to this AT ALL from a practical point of view, but I am very keen on the aesthetic and general VIBE.
  • The ABC Glossary Questionnaire: An interesting nascent project about the web and tech and language, this, in which you (yes, YOU!) are invited to submit your own new words, terms and definitions to characterise how we relate to the internet. “Welcome to the ABC Glossary* Questionnaire, an invitation to revisit your relationship to the internet and to reimagine how we collectively web through language. Below are a set of exercises to help you locate yourself within a (local area) network in order to refuse harmful computing practices and to repair our connections with/between technology, community, and nature. What words do we use to describe our electronic experiences? What terms do you associate with the internet, computing, and cyber culture? What words do we ignore? What words do we need to use in new ways? Submit a term with a newly redefined condition.* Draw an imagined map of the internet.” I mean, that sounds right up my street and maybe it will be up yours too – this is only a few weeks old and only has three entries so far, but I am hoping it will spread and grow as people engage with the idea, not least because I am increasingly of the opinion that we need new vocabulary for all of *this* as ‘being online’ and ‘surfing the web’ (LOL!) doesn’t really cut it any more.
  • Make The Olympic Flag: You know what the Olympic flag looks like, right? RIGHT? OF COURSE YOU DO! In fact, I bet you remember it so well that you can replicate it digitally RIGHT NOW, completely accurately, on your first try. Click the link and PROVE IT. This is one of those things that makes you realise how appalling human memory is at detail (oh, ok, fine, MY memory) – while I had the vague shape of the rings in my head, turns out I have literally no effective retention AL ALL of which colours are involved, what order the colours go in, or indeed the correct proportions of the final design. Erm, can you all try this and reassure me that you’re sh1t at it too? THANKS!
  • The Locavore: This is an NYC thing, but feels very much like it can (and should) transfer as a concept to basically anywhere else. Designed to be a directory of small, local shops in the city, this is a BRILLIANT idea – shops can self-submit, with the only criteria being: “1. Open to All – It’s important to us to highlight IRL shops with regular walk-in hours. Everyone’s welcome!; 2. Independent – To qualify, shops must have 5 or less locations and be independently owned; 3. Accessible – Shops must be easily accessible by bus, train, biking or walking within each neighborhood; 4. Old and New – We prioritize longtime community staples as well as new much needed neighborhood additions.” There’s no search function – you can browse by store type or neighbourhood, but the idea is that this is designed as much to help you learn about the shops that are out there as it is to get you a quick answer to your ‘where can I find a cobbler in Greenpoint’ query – and this feels like a SUPER initiative overall. The directory apparently now spans over 13,000 independent shops, which is quite remarkable – does this exist for London? If so, can one of you point me at it, please?
  • Tinder For Recipes: Yes, I know, but it’s the app-makers’ description so I am letting that one go – it’s actually called ‘Dinners’, but wevs. This is an app for…for who? Big families with wildly-divergent taste in meals? People who want to introduce a potentially-extremely-limiting element to their domestic approach to food? The idea is that you and your fellow housemates all download the app, then get presented with various recipes – swipe left to say ‘MMM YES PLEASE’, right to say ‘I WOULD RATHER EAT MY OWN FACE’. All the recipes that you ALL swipe left on get added to your APPROVED recipebook, ensuring that you only ever cook things that you all like – simple, right? Well, yes, in theory, until you get that one housemate who only wants to eat plain rice and poached chicken breast and who therefore royally fcuks the whole system for everyone else. THERE IS ALWAYS ONE.
  • Jordan Stone: I am really not a TikTok user, mainly because video is very much Not My Medium, and I am sort of grateful for that because I’m very conscious of how easy it would be to find something that scratches a very particular, personal itch and just falling into some catatonic rabbithole with it for approximately six hours or so. So it is with the work of Jordan Stone – I have never, ever seen anything on TikTok which speaks to me quite like this does. Seriously, it has some sort of very odd ASMR-type effect on my brain, like someone is stroking it VERY DIRECTLY, and it’s very hard for me to stop watching – WHY???? This is…I don’t know what it is. Memetic nonsense? TikTok slop? NO IT IS ART, ART I TELL YOU! There are only 23 videos on this channel but they are all worthy of being in the Tate, and I am not sh1tting you – watch and marvel. BONUS TIKTOK: I have no idea what the fcuk is happening here, but the chickens are magnificent and I want more.
  • Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024: Our annual look at ‘photos of mad stuff in the cosmos’, now – leaving aside the fact that I am 100% convinced that one of these images is not a photograph but is in fact just a screenshot from a very heavily-modded version of Skyrim (you will know exactly the one I mean, promise), can I just draw your attention to the caption on the image entitled ‘Run to Carina’? The bit that reads “Deep in northwest Namibia, in a scorched desert where you can drive hundreds of kilometres without coming across another human, an artist is hard at work. Dotted all over the desert are numerous sculptures made of stone which blend seamlessly into the surroundings. Known as the ‘Lone Men of Kaokoland’ [as the region was formerly known], it is not clear who has put them there and where exactly they are located.” EXCUSE ME WHAT?! Why did noone ever tell me about the mysterious stone giants of the Namibian desert?! Anyway, the space pictures are ace, as always, but that detail in particular has spun me out rather.
  • Beautiful AI Animations: Gerde Gotit is…a studio, I think, based in Canada, that does a bunch of work using generative AI to create animations – the main link goes to some work they’ve done creating dancing leaf sprites and the like, but you might recognise them from those videos of the dancing spaghetti which did the rounds last week, which you can see more of here. This is really impressive, particularly in terms of the way they’ve used mocapped dancers to create the movement set, and I’d be amazed if this specific technique doesn’t crop up in a TV spot sooner rather than later.
  • The AI Murder Mystery: Via my friend Tom at the BBC (HI TOM!) comes this slightly-shonky work-in-progress/proof-of-concept experiment in AI-led ludic interactive experiences (catchy, eh?) – you play…A DETECTIVE! And you have to SOLVE A CASE! By TALKING TO SUSPECTS and INTERROGATING THEM! Using NATURAL LANGUAGE! Specifically, “You are Detective Sheerluck, investigating the murder of Victim Vince. The storyline, clues, and suspect alibis are all fixed, with every suspect hiding something about the case from the police. Each suspect knows important information about the other suspects, allowing you to piece together the truth through chatting. Your partner Officer Cleo can investigate locations at your request and present you with observational evidence. You can ask her to give you an overview of the case or to search certain locations for clues. Take notes from your conversations and piece together who killed Victim Vince, why he was killed, and how. When you are ready, click the End Game button to make your deduction.” This…almost works, sort-of, but what’s more interesting is the shape of the *next* thing you can vaguely see beneath its skin; we’re not yet at a point where this stuff can be considered anything other than a passing curiosity, but we can definitely also see exactly how it will work when the tech gets good enough. If you’re of a particular sort of mind, it’s also moderately-amusing to work out how you can jailbreak the characters into telling you everything straight off the bat – one for all you ‘prompt engineers’ (LOL HELLO 2022!) out there.
  • Newsletters-To-Podcasts: To be clear, this is a terrible idea which won’t work at all – but that has never stopped me from including a link in Curios, and it won’t stop me now. This is a service called Jellypod, whose gimmick is that it will take all the many newsletters you subscribe to and which you don’t have time to read, and will, VIA THE MAGIC OF AI, turn them into a fully-voiced podcast, summarising all the main issues so you don’t have to do any tedious, time-consuming reading. Look, I appreciate that I am very much the last person in the world who can or should be making this argument, but can we maybe not just accept that there are real, practical limits on the quantity of information that we are capable of usefully ingesting, even if we listen to it all at 3x speed? Also, can you imagine the hideous mangling of content and meaning you’ll get from an AI summary of multiple newsletter sources? Please, can someone spend a week getting their news and information ONLY via the medium of this service and tell me how you get on?
  • Underground Comix: OH YES. “The Adler Archive of Underground Comix is a collection of underground comix, books, and archival newspaper and magazine clippings on cartoonists and ephemera. The underground comix portion of the collection presented here includes ~250 items published between the 1960s and 2000s by artists such as Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Dori Seda, Art Speigelman and many others, as well as anthology titles such as Arcade Comics Revue, RAW, Weirdo, Young Lust and Zap.” I sort of feel that every kid aged about 16 ought to get access to this, it feels like a sort of countercultural rite of passage – if nothing else, I IMPLORE you to dip in here and read some Harvey Pekar if you’ve never done so before; the man really was a genius, and, on a personal note, his book ‘The Quitter’ is the most painfully-relatable piece of media I have ever encountered in my life.
  • Bookmarks: Ooh, this is a good idea I think – basically IMDB for novels, this is potentially hugely useful for anyone looking to get book recommendations from somewhere less genre-obsessed and generally mental than BookTok. “Every day, the Book Marks staff scours the most important and active outlets of literary journalism in the US and beyond—from established national broadsheets to regional weeklies and alternative litblogs—and logs their book reviews. When a book is reviewed by at least three outlets, each of those reviews is assigned an individual rating (Rave, Positive, Mixed or Pan). These ratings are then averaged into a result and the book becomes part of our Book Marks database. Each book’s cumulative rating functions as both a general critical assessment, and, more significantly, as an introduction to the range of voices and opinions that make up the world of American literary criticism. These opinions are accompanied by pull quotes representative of the overall stance of each individual review, and readers can click through to the full review at its source. Readers can express their own opinions alongside those of the critics in each book page’s What Did You Think Of… comments section.” Smart and helpful, and, coincidentally, a really good place to remind yourself of how TERRIBLE US book cover design is when compared to the variety and ingenuity you see from European and UK publishers (sorry, but it’s really true).
  • Frasier Sleepers: This week I learned that there is an active community of Redditors who have come together around the shared experience of being seemingly unable to fall asleep without the comforting Seattle-based sounds of Frasier to accompany them to unconsciousness. Join them here, as they discuss hot topics such as “I find watching the first 5 seasons far more relaxing and as the series progresses so does the cameras and the sound quality become crisper. Thats not to take anything away from watching and enjoying the series over and over again in its entirety. On the dvd box set version, the microphones and cameras they use on set seem more velvety and the picture quality is creamier and less harsh and bright as in the later series.” PREACH!
  • The Tokyo Toilet Map: At some point in the late-1990s, a resident of Tokyo decided to use the early internet to document the states of various public conveniences across the city. Photos of Japanese toilets from 1996-1997! Occasional images of graffiti of, inexplicably, dogs in congress! I am astonished at the fact that this is still live, 30 years after the fact – there’s an email address attached to the page, should any Japanese speakers wish to get in touch with the Yuuji Hayashi who is apparently responsible for this small slice of odd obsessiveness.
  • Disk Defrag Simulator: Completely, totally and utterly pointless – EXCEPT I reckon that if you work in an office with young enough colleagues, you can reasonably open this webpage, fullscreen it, turn the sound on and then apologetically explain ‘sorry, really important IT updates, can’t do anything about it’ and just sort of go to the pub. Try it NOW while it’s momentarily sunny!
  • Alien Melon Games: Dozens of weird little…games? Art projects? Code experiments? Wevs, these are ace and there are LOADS of them – you will need to download most of them to try them out, but it’s all free or ‘pay what you want’, and there’s SO much creativity and odd packed into each that it’s 100% worth bookmarking for your next bored, rainy afternoon (so in all likelihood ‘August’).
  • Pippin Barr Does Greek Punishments As ‘Snake’ Variants: Pippin Barr, 8-bit game artist and fan of the classics, returns with another in his occasional series of ‘tiny games riffing comedically on Greek mythology’ with a small series of variants on the classic Nokia ‘Snake’ gameplay model, each tweaked to represent one of a selection of Greek punishment myths. Play ‘Snake’ as Sisyphus allegory! Play it to be reminded of Prometheus! Or Tantalus! Ok, so these are single note gags which you will probably get very quickly, but, equally, they are FUNNY and I am always a sucker for medium/message stuff like this.
  • The Coin Toss World Cup: Finally this week, this is literally a piece of branching interactive fiction about tossing coins – BUT it is VERY FUNNY and I promise you that you are going to want to keep playing to because the writing here is far, far better than it needs to be. Although, be warned, I believe that the probabilities here are accurate and so you might want to clear the remainder of the century if you’re going to beat this without brute-forcing the whole thing in some way.

By Mark Forbes

WE CLOSE THIS WEEK WITH A MIX WHICH, HONESTLY, SOUNDS TO ME LIKE WHAT I IMAGINE IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN LIKE TO WALK AROUND THE MALL IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS FROM AN EARLY BRET EASTON ELLIS NOVEL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • PicVoid: This Tumblr is very much ‘a vibe’; not necessarily a good vibe, but very much a vibe nonetheless.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Morgan Leigh Meisenheimer: How full of cows is your Insta feed? NOWHERE NEAR FULL ENOUGH! Rectify that immediately with this Insta account, run by animal photographer Morgan Leigh Meisenheimer, whose photos of LOVELY BOVINE LADS are really very good indeed, and made all the better by the number of said BOVINE LADS who have clearly just received a really comprehensive shampoo, condition and possibly blow-dry and are, by the standards of dairy cattle at least, remarkably glam as a result.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Flattening of Everything: Or ‘what the attempted assassination of Trump tells us about how the media/social media nexus works, or doesn’t, in 2024’. The main link here is to Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic, and it’s a decent precis of how news doesn’t really work anymore, or at least not in the way we were all sort of used to it working for about 8 years or so in the post-social media 2010s, and how we have ended up at a point where the shouting and the uncertainty and the dreadful grifters are just as much the product as a side-effect of the product. “Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired”. If you want more on this, then Slate has a similarly decent overview of how the memetic layer which used to be the dessert with which we’d reward ourselves for engaging with THE ROUGHAGE OF NEWS is in fact the main meal nowadays, our informational gut health be damned (sorry, that analogy really fell apart halfway through, didn’t it?); as is often the case, though, the most accurate-feeling assessment of All Of This comes from Ryan, who writes “The 2010s populism wave which Trump rode to victory in 2016, which guys like Andreesen, Musk, and Thiel are clearly trying to emulate, was dependent on a still-exciting digital public square, made up of millions of disparate groups using it to communicate. And what we were all posting only became Real News thanks to a still-relevant mainstream media that was able to curate it to something that felt it mattered. But normal people don’t use social media to communicate anymore. They use it to watch videos. And those videos don’t mean anything because the apps that want us to watch them want us to watch them constantly. But those videos did replace television. Which is a problem because now there’s no way to elevate the insane chatter that some users are still putting online. So now we’re left with an internet that is constantly screeching at us, but none of it can actually break through into culture.”
  • Austerity, Vulnerability and Populism: This is a link to a full academic paper, so I appreciate your appetite to click and read may be…limited, but I promise you that this is both interesting and, I think, a useful thing to know about. Basically, what this shows is that there is a strong correlation between ‘countries which embraced policies of austerity in the 2010s’ and ‘countries which are now seeing a marked rise in appreciation for populist figures’ – the causative conclusion drawn is that “the success of populist parties hinges on the government’s failure to protect the losers of structural economic change,” and that “the economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies.”
  • Ads In The UK Election: This is a post by Who Targets Me?, literally the only organisation which has anything resembling a handle on how much is being spent on social platforms when it comes to electoral advertising, looking back at what conclusions can be drawn from spending on Meta/Google ads in the UK general election just gone – an election in which over £11m was spent with a pair of companies who aren’t *great* at paying tax in the UK, as a rule. This is smart and sensible and worth a read if you’re interested in how campaigning works – and should, ideally, work better.
  • Minority Report Policing: Apologies for yet another academic paper, but I hope you’ll forgive me when you read the precis: “Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may “bake in” bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits.” Is…is that the sound of a massive ethical can of worms being ripped open? I THINK IT IS!! It’s not possible to read this, I don’t think, and not feel a tiny bit trepidatious about this stuff being rolled out in real life.
  • Devilish: Bruce Sterling writes about the unique cadence of AI-generated copy, a phenomenon he has chosen to term ‘Delvish’ after the propensity of the systems to inject the word ‘delve’ into copy. This is a nice overview of the way it *feels* to read machine-created prose, that odd uncanny valley of prose that it almost always inhabits, and comes with a nice glossary of the most overused turns of phrase employed by The Machine (at least as of July 2024).
  • A Big Chat About The Metaverse: No, wait, come back! It *IS* still a thing, honest it is! Or at least so hopes Matthew Ball, who very much became The Metaverse Guy c.2020, and who now has a book coming out about the whole thing which his publishers, I imagine, are starting to wish they had never paid the big advance for. Anyway, this is Ball in conversation with Epic Games Founder/CEO Tim Sweeney and Author/Entrepreneur Neal Stephenson, and this is, honestly, a really interesting read – particularly for all those of us who spent a significant proportion of 2020-1 saying things like ‘the metaverse sort-of exists already, it’s videogames ffs’. This covers Fortnite, Roblox, hardware, software, user behaviour and barriers to entry, as well as touching on AI towards the end – on the one hand, at least two of the parties in volved in this chat have a vested interest in making The Metaverse happen in some way or another; on the other, I am still long-term bullish about the idea of fluid, interoperable digital identities and experiences, etc, even if the idea we’re all going to be wearing a fcuking Oculus to do it was always bunkum.
  • The Hamster Kombat Explainer: In case you have heard the term but lack context, here you are – basically all you need to know is: a) clicker game; b) on Telegram; c) linked to crypto; d) requires players to shill for the game to boost their chances of getting rewards. So, VERY BASICALLY, this is Farmville reworked for 2024 (it’s not, obvs, but, equally, I am not totally wrong either). If you have kids it might be worth reading this, though, as it feels like exactly the sort of thing that a 13 year old boy might get unreasonably invested in.
  • Roxane Gay on TikTok: This is SUCH a good piece of writing – or at least it is in the parts where it doesn’t reiterate, for the nth time, ‘TikTok has an algorithm!’ and ‘once upon a time there was an app called Vine!’. The bits where it shines – and it really does shine – are those sections where Gay just talks you through The Feed, the dizzying carousel of videos and people and experiences that you can just flow through, zenlike, dipping into and out of the river of human experience (yes, it’s a river, I have decided, what of it?), partly at will and partly guided by the algocurrent. I would honestly happily read an entire piece riffing in that style, or a prose poem, should someone fancy spending an awful lot of time and effort writing something specifically for my enjoyment.
  • Imagination vs Creativity: As a general rule I’m not particularly interested in ‘I think like this therefore…’ or brainhack/method type pieces, but I thought this essay, by Venkatesh Rao, was an interesting look at the conceptual distinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’, what each is ‘for’ and how to go about encouraging both different forms of thought. This feels very much like the sort of thing that those of you with collarless shirts, black, thick-rimmed glasses and those annoying fcuking fishermen’s knit beanies paired with wide-legged artists’ trousers will enjoy – and I mean that EXACTLY as disparagingly as it sounds. More seriously, though, as someone who is occasionally moderately creative but who has no imagination AT ALL, this was both depressing and oddly-helpful, so maybe some of you might find it speaks to you as well.
  • The Greater London Project: This is interesting – a new project by Sam Bowman and Joe Hill, seeking to solicit and explore ideas on how to Make London Good Again (my term, not theirs). I don’t know either of these people, but Sam Bowman on Twitter is a slightly-weird combination of vaguely-economically-libertarian policy chat and light trolling – this, though, seems sincere, and while there’s a lot of stuff in the initial introductory post which strikes me as…well, silly tbh, there’s also enough that makes me curious to see what sort of other ideas might get explored. Obviously this is all utopian, with no mention of how any of it might be paid for, but if you’re curious about how one might think about creating better urban spaces – specifically, better urban spaces that will likely benefit me, the author of this newsletter, then you might want to have a read of this.
  • Bitcoin Mining Is Bad For Your Health: A cautionary tale from Texas, where it turns out that the noise of a million computer fans whirring 24/7 as they do the hard compute on Bitcoin mining does Bad Things to people over time – this gets more and more unsettling as it goes on, and left me with two lasting impressions: 1) fcuk me does Bitcoin have an astonishing number of negative externalities; 2) turns out that having regulation around what people can and can’t in pursuit of money do IS occasionally a good idea, whodathunkit?
  • Vegetarians Only: Sara Ather writes for Vittles about the ways in which vegetarianism is being weaponised against India’s Muslim community as part of the Modi regime’s ongoing demonisation of them as a group; specifically, landlords are using diet to restrict the supply of homes to Muslim families who, in contrast to mostly-vegetarian Hindus, are more likely to eat meat. “The concept of ‘purity’ that is embedded in the Hindu caste structure – espousing vegetarianism and demonising meat, especially beef – is consistently used to enforce hierarchies and to control the movement of Indian Muslims, preventing them from finding comfortable homes. In 2021, Mohsin Alam Bhat reported that a Hindu broker in a suburb of Mumbai found that ‘the right way to refuse people’ was to ‘simply [tell them] that he only has houses for “veg families”’, while a recent study found that being a meat-eater or ‘non-vegetarian’ made house-hunting a significant challenge for people moving to a new city. Over the last few decades, the policing of tenants has also extended into the online realm: Facebook groups frequently include dietary requirements in their listings, subtly discouraging Muslim applicants from searching for a home in neighbourhoods of mixed faith.”
  • The Mayor of Amsterdam: A fascinating interview in the FT with the Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, in which she talks with refreshing openness about how she is attempting to manage the city’s drugs policy, where she wants to take it, her work to modernise and relocate the red light district, and the particular, peculiar challenges of running a place which, for better and worse, has been a byword for ‘liberalism’ for the past 70-odd years but can’t really keep going as it is for that much longer.
  • The Mayor of Mexico City: Not an interview this time; instead, this is a short piece looking at the ‘UTOPIAS’ created by incoming Mexico City mayor Clara Brugada developed in her previous mayorship in the less-storied territory of Iztapalapa – UTOPIAS are basically mixed-use public spaces which she established across the province, reclaiming old buildings and spaces to create areas which can be used for community projects, education and the like. There’s something so refreshing about reading about an elected official with an appreciation of the importance of ‘third spaces’ and community hubs, something which I have really started to notice the absence of in London in recent weeks – this is the sort of thing you read and think to yourself ‘well OBVIOUSLY everyone should do stuff like this, makes total sense’ and then get slightly depressed when you realise that without committed, dedicated work from people significantly better than me, stuff like this simply doesn’t happen.
  • Offline Is The New Online: Look, I don’t know who the author of this is or why anyone should listen to them -BUT I wanted to include this just in case it turns out to be the most incredibly prescient essay of the year. YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: “Who is going to be online in 2027? Less than 15% of the population. Remember the early days of the internet, when it served as a secret corner for all sorts of freaks and outsiders with niche interests to unite? People from small towns could connect with like-minded individuals across the globe, overcoming geographical barriers and finding solace in a sense of community. People in big cities could start companies from their basements and get venture funding if they understood how the internet worked. You didn’t need a degree, and you didn’t need a sponsor. You just needed to be interesting. Wake up. The world that once welcomed outsiders and eccentrics is gone. We’ll spend the next few years reminiscing about it with nostalgia, never quite capturing the same feeling. Offline is the new online, and we’re currently at the beginning of a drastic shift in how we socialize. By 2027, less than 15% of the population will actively participate in the digital world unless it’s for work.” I don’t think this is true, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a sickos.jpeg part of me that really wants it to be.
  • The Origins of the Broccoli Perm: I AM CALLING BULLSH1T ON THIS ESSAY! This is in GQ – US GQ, I think – and it focuses on the ubiquity of the ‘short on sides, permed on top’ cut so popular amongst so many young men (see also: tiny little gak satchel), and it traces its surge in popularity back to one Dylan Lathem on a TikTok from 2020…NO! THIS IS NOT TRUE! I posit that the genesis of this cut’s popularity can in fact be traced back to Little T and the Blackpool Grime massive, as rendered famous in the mid-00s (see 7:50 in this video), and that in fact it was originally referred to as the ‘meet me at mcdonalds’ for reasons that I can’t for the life of me recall. NO MORE LITTLE T ERASURE! Whatever happened to Little T, anyway? I hope he’s ok.
  • Auramaxxing: This week’s completely-made-up online trend comes in the form of Auramaxxing, or, per this piece, “I feel like it’s a new term for being cool,” …Auramaxxing is just taking care of yourself and also knowing who you are as a person first before you try to show other people.” Which is obviously very silly, but, equally, I do see this as part of the broader post-austerity / post-2013/4 trend for witchcraft and woo and astrology and witches, which is less about a resurgence in beliefs in the occult and, to my mind at least, far more a reaction to everything being sh1t and hopeless and largely out of our control, and therefore this sort of rubbish being seen as more legitimate given the lack of actual, sensical things that anyone can practically do to ameliorate things (that’s just my theory, though, you are welcome to develop your own should you so desire).
  • Wealth Creation Machines: Ooh, I like this – an odd little essay looking at mythology around machines to make infinite wealth arising in different cultures, the names given to those machines, and the businesses that have adopted those names in an attempt to, I don’t know, hopefully apply a degree of nominative determinism. Contains a ‘Fruit of the Loom’ observation that BLEW MY MIND, and well do the same to you.
  • Making A Generative Documentary: I was vaguely aware of there being a forthcoming documentary on Brian Eno, but hadn’t realised that, in typically Eno fashion, it’s all GROUNDBREAKING and sh1t. The gimmick is that the doc is generated anew each time from a central corpus of footage, effectively Frankensteined into being anew at each screening from a sort of central skeleton, with the flesh being different each time. This is a really good explanation of How It Works – certainly better than my typically cack-handed attempt – and the sort of thing that ought to give anyone still believing in the idea of ‘ads as a craft medium’ significant pause for thought, because if you can do this for a doc and make it good you can certainly do it via The Machine for an infinite set of adverts for protein powders.
  • The Best Books of the 21st C: …according to the NYT, at least. I think…I think this is a pretty good list! There’s nothing too obviously ridiculous on there, it’s not TOO uniquely Americentric (though it is a bit), it’s not TOTALLY blind to authors who don’t write in English (though it is a bit), and it gave me a prod to add a couple of overlooked biggies from the early part of the century a try (although I confess to finding the love for the ‘Oscar Wao’ novel utterly fcuking baffling). BONUS POTENTIALLY-ENERVATING BOOK RANKINGS! This is Esquire’s ‘Best 75 SciFi Books EVER’ list which I am sure will render a certain type of person apoplectic.
  • The Unexpected Poetry of PhD Acknowledgements: A paean to the beauty found in the acknowledgements section of people’s PhD theses, and all of the worlds of struggle and sacrifice and solitude and skull-crushing tedium that a doctorate entails (honestly, so much respect for people with the dedication to pursue one). There are some lovely examples in here, sort of the equivalent of discovering humorous marginalie in a library book – GENTLE HUMOUR AND WARMTH of the best sort, and that’s not always something you get in Curios so, you know, BE GRATEFUL.
  • Blood In The Water: Weirdly this is the second consecutive week I’ve featured something about dead whales – this piece is a fascinating (but, be warned, a touch bloody) article about the tradition of the grindadráp, the Faroese whale hunt, and the international protestors trying to put pressure to bear on the islanders to make the practice history. Largely dispassionate, it features some great writing, an excellent sense of the oddity of the Faroes and just how insanely remote and far away they are, and a few pictures of dead whales which I had to scroll past quite quickly – although the photos of the sea turned blood-red from, well, actual blood are astonishing.
  • On Delivery: Snapshots from the frontline of the opioid crisis in the US, written from the perspective of an aid worker whose job it is to keep addicts on the streets from dying. “MY 10-YEAR-OLD SELF, learning the language of recovery during his father’s brief stint in AA, would think I’ve become the second-worst kind of person: an enabler. I have no defense except to say, like a parent to a child, that stuff gets more complicated. On deliveries, we don’t try to get people sober. Sobriety is beside the point. We offer resources if they ask, but we never push it. We never even mention the idea of getting sober unless they bring it up, because otherwise they wouldn’t trust us. We are, for many people, the only service they receive that doesn’t try to make them do something, that doesn’t demand shame as the price of care. So we are uncompromising enablers. We deliver to people at homeless shelters, knowing that if they are caught they’ll be kicked out. We deliver to people on parole, knowing that drug use could send them back to prison. We deliver to people in the dark corner of the parking lot outside the rehab facility, where they once hoped to get sober.”
  • Letters to My Ex-Metamour: As a rule, I am largely of the opinion that there is literally nothing less interesting than hearing to someone talk about their polyamory (apart from hearing people talk about their dreams, obvs) – POLYAMORY IS JUST LOGISTICS WITH ADDED MUCUS FFS, IT IS NOT INTERESTING. I will, though, make an exception for this essay by Allison Darcy, which takes the form of fragments of notes written to her ‘metamour’, which I this week learned is the term given to the other person with whom you share a partner – this is, per everything to do with poly stuff, at times infuriatingly self-absorbed and self-indulgent, but I forgive it because some of the writing really is excellent.
  • Daisy Chain: Finally this week, a lightly-interactive scifi story – you ‘play’ it, but it’s a linear (ish) narrative; think of it a bit like a short story delivered in a vague-graphic-novel-y way. I really, really enjoyed this – the form makes a genuine difference to the heft of the narrative – and I think you might too.

By Maureen Dougherty

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 12/07/24

Reading Time: 34 minutes

Welcome, one and all, to the very first Web Curios EVER not to be written under a Conservative government!

What do you mean ‘it all looks dispiritingly familiar, you’ve not even given the place a lick of paint ffs’?!

Ok, so the election wasn’t all good news – loads of people simply couldn’t be bothered to vote, and a troubling proportion of those that did chose to put their ‘X’ in a box marked ‘racist, frog-faced haunted ashtray’ – but, equally, at least I can now forget that Michael Fabricant was ever anything other than a middlingly-successful mobile DJ who once worked under the nom d’arte of ‘Mickey Fab’ (this is 100% true, by the way).

Anway, enough of all that, there are a fortnight of links for you to get through while you wait for the nice man in the blacked-out beemer to show with the seventeen grammes of cheap cocaine you’ve ordered to ‘get you through’ on Sunday. To be clear, if England win then I hope all your gak is cut with strychnine.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and after Sunday we are never, ever going to talk about football again.

By Jason Levesque

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS BRILLIANT SELECTION OF GAUZY, JAPAN-INFLECTED, VIDEOGAMESOUNDTRACK-Y D’N’B, WHICH I PROMISE IS SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN THIS DESCRIPTION ALMOST CERTAINLY MAKES IT SOUND! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY THRILLED TO IMAGINE ALL THE FRENZIED GROUPCHATS HAPPENING AROUND THE UK RIGHT NOW AS THE UK’S MEN COMPETE TO SEE WHO CAN BECOME THIS YEAR’S ‘AR$E-FLARE MAN’, PT.1:  

  • All The MPs: Apologies to those of you who really couldn’t give less of a fcuk about the conclusion of the DEMOCRATIC JAMBOREE over here in the UK, but we’re going to kick off with some political content this week because I figure at least one or two of you might find it interesting or useful. First up, this link – a directory of every single MP now in the Commons, with links to information (mostly empty at present given, well, a large proportion of them have barely got their name badges yet) about their voting records, their debate interventions, their expenses (again, when published)…this is hacked together from various different datasources, you can set up alerts to track the activity of Parliamentarians you’re particularly interested in tracking, and, generally, this feels like a really useful thing (in particular, if any of you have a friend or relative who is FAR TOO INTERESTED in politics, this is basically going to be like crack for them).
  • Parse The Bill: POLITICS X AI! It’s like all my Christmases have come at once (in that I hate Christmas)! This is actually a pretty smart-looking bit of lightweight LLM use, taking select pieces of legislation passing through Parliament (right now it’s ‘select pieces of legislation which *have* passed though Parliament, but one assumes more will be added in due course as the machine once again starts to grind) and using…some AI or another to summarise and explain each, offer you an overview of objections, present summaries of the changes that the Bill underwent at each stage of its passage through Parliament…beautifully this is all rather undermined by the (entirely necessary) disclaimer which says in big letters (I paraphrase, but) “there is a significant possibility that everything you’re about to read here bears no actual relation to the legislation in question, LLMs lol amirite?!?’, which does slightly undermine its utility, but it’s a neat way of getting an overview of new Bills as they come through (maybe).
  • All Of The Labour Ministers On Twitter: A Twitter List! Just like it’s 2012! How retro! Still, if you want what seems to be a pretty comprehensive list of the current Cabinet in one place, here it is.
  • A Bunch of Campaign Trail Photos: I know, I know, after 6 weeks of campaigning there’s a large part of you that never, ever wants to see Starmer’s Easter Island head or Sunak’s sad, diminutive frame ever again (in the case of Starmer, good luck with that) – for the rest of you, though, this collection of campaign photography by one Stefan Rousseau is a nice overview of the sort of weird images that end up being produced of electioneering politicians; there are some lovely (mad) shots in here, including a particularly brutal one of Mr & Mrs Sunak outside Downing Street after his concession speech where she really does look like his mum come to pick him up after school, bless. Oh, and here are some behind-the-scenes shots of the press pack on tour, which reinforces my long-standing belief that being a political journalist is a really miserable job on pretty much every level and one which you have to be a peculiar kind of weirdo to enjoy (to any such ‘weirdos’ reading this, that was obviously meant with immense affection).
  • The Internet Phonebook:. I might have mentioned before (of course I have; this has been going for 13 years now, I simply am not interesting enough  not to repeat myself over that sort of timeframe) that the first time I ever used the internet it was with the assistance of an actual, physical book which purported to contain ALL OF THE WEBSITES IN THE WORLD (in fairness, in 1995, that would actually have been possible). Well now someone is doing it again! Friend of Curios Kris, of Naive and TinyAwards fame, and Elliot Cost, write: “We are creating a physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web. It features the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators. We are seeking personal, poetic, and human websites. If you would like your site to be considered for the first edition, click the link below to submit your website and we will get back to you.” This is as much an artwork as anything else – the site lets you submit your site for consideration should you so desire (or, presumably, anyone else’s), so get involved if you want your slightly-ephemeral HTML stylings to be rendered in slightly-less-ephemeral paper and ink.
  • OpenVibe: This is *really* interesting – 100% not for me, but really interesting. OpenVibe is basically a prototypical service which *should*, if you can be bothered to wrestle with the fundamental unfriendliness of decentralised social media (I am sorry but life is TOO SHORT for Mastodon instances), create a single, unified feed across from all your various different networks into one timeline – so you can pull your feed from Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and even Threads into a single, solitary source, and post to each from one place. Which, to be clear, is very much The Dream for the decentralised social model and which is The Way It Was Meant To Work – I just can’t shake the feeling that, at present, it’s all a bit too ‘tofu and homemade granola’ for your average web user and that until you can make all this stuff happen without really thinking about it then we’re going to be stuck with the big, centralised platforms (or, perhaps more accurately, til Meta makes this all work for the middle of the bell curve). Still, please do let me know how you get on with this should you try it, am genuinely curious.
  • Some AI Video Examples (Again): I feel I need to put a quick caveat here – ‘fcuk’s sake Matt’, I almost hear you mutter, ‘NOONE CARES’ – and explain that I link to all this AI stuff not out of implicit endorsement but because I think it is interesting; to be very clear, though, I would personally prefer it if we weren’t all rendered entirely professionally obsolete by The Machine, and that we didn’t render our planet entirely-uninhabitable while that happened. BUT, also, I think that if you can’t be curious about the sudden, semi-magical ability to conjure words and images out of nothing then, well, that’s a bit sad too. ANYWAY. Sorry. This is a thread on Twitter by one of those AI booster accounts (sorry) which collects a dozen or so examples of best-in-class recent RunwayML/DreamStudio outputs – as I keep saying with this stuff, it is nowhere near good enough to do anything serious with yet…except this time there are at least two of these where I watched and I thought ‘you know, you could probably actually use this for 2-3s in a TV spot’, from which it is only a very small leap to ‘well, if we made sure that the whole of the spot is just a series of short scenes, no more than 1-3s each…’, and, well, you can see where this is going, right?
  • All The Cannes Lions Stuff: Seeing as I just did the Bad Thing and mentioned advertising, may as well chuck this here – this is a link to a Google Drive folder featuring a quite spectacular trove of case studies from this year’s Cannes Lions – every single category, every single entry (seemingly at least), every single metal winner – each with its own one-page case study explaining the ‘INSIGHT’, the creative and the outcome, each with its own unique-yet-strangely-familiar hyperbolic style (“Only 27% of teenage boys are proud of their testicles; that means 73% of teenagers, nearly three quarters of our young men, are suffering TESTICLE SHAME – we knew that Dr Pepper had to act swiftly to change this and make an impact. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”). I have to confess that I have only glanced at a couple of these as, well, I simply don’t care about this stuff anymore, at all, still, if you’re the sort of person who feels your chances of still having a job in 12 months time depends on bringing home one of these fcukers in 2025, then you could do worse than getting one of your AEs to spend a day uploading all of these to an LLM and crafting a custom prompt to develop Lion-winning ideas for whatever brief you fancy (this is a legitimately not-terrible idea which I can’t believe I’m giving you for free – look, you can even use Google Notebook to do it you fcuking ingrates, don’t say I never do anything for you).
  • NoPlace: The latest in the seemingly-neverending wave of web1.0 fetishism, the HOT NEW APP FOR TEENS (so I am told, anyway) is NoPlace, which is the latest iteration of ‘MySpace, but for a new generation!’. It literally *is* MySpace – there are friend lists, you can pin songs to your profile, there’s a degree of customisability and a vaguely-retro aesthetic to the whole thing, Very much not one for me – or, in all likelihood, you either – but you may have kids or siblings or nephews or whatever who might be into it (although I imagine that ‘recommending a new social platform to a child’ in 2024 is likely to elicit the same sort of response from the concerned adults in their lives as ‘sitting down and reassuring them that there *are* safe ways to consume fentanyl’). I did enjoy this particular faq, though: “what if i encounter bad vibes? we are doing our best to build a solid community with noplace, but the haters will still get in. we have community rules in place to make noplace a place for everyone. there are features that allow u to block, mute, and report users who have problematic behavior.” Honestly, “WHAT IF I ENCOUNTER BAD VIBES?” should be in every single employee induction handbook from now on.
  • Adimverse: On the one hand, this looks like quite a cool idea and I can see the potential; on the other, I am slightly annoyed that it’s backed by Rob McElhenny, who I’m sure is a perfectly nice man but who I don’t personally want to enrich any further by promoting his portfolio projects. Still, this could be of interest to some of you – the idea here is it’s a creative collaboration platform, where people post their ideas for projects, recruit people to work on said projects alongside them, find other talent…there’s also a degree of rights management apparently built into the platform to help smooth the often rocky path towards rights sharing. OBVIOUSLY it’s on the blockchain – OBVIOUSLY – but, in a pleasingly non-obnoxious move, there’s no mention anywhere of wallets or coins, and there’s seemingly no attempt to turn this into a MLM. This is, basically, a DAO-ish enterprise but without the web3cryptoguff around it, and it seems like it *might* be worth a look if you have an idea in search of a creative team to bring it to live. Still, though, it would be nice if it wasn’t all in the service of making an already-violently-rich man even richer.
  • Moshi: This is slightly incredible, even if at present it’s not much more than a really fancy demo-toy-thing. Moshi is…I think it’s a French initiative, and I think the LLM it’s using is its own open source variant, but to be honest I’m not sure and you almost certainly don’t care anyway. What makes this interesting is the voice interface, and the speed at which it works – try it in your browser and it really is quite amazing the first time you give it a go, with The Machine occasionally even interrupting you it’s so quick to understand and respond. The magic is slightly undermined when you realise that what it’s saying bears, in most cases at least, absolutely no relation whatsoever to real life or fact, but its a very cool party trick and the low-latency really is transformative from a UX point of view.
  • Jen Music: Another text-to-music tool! Except THIS ONE IS ETHICAL! Yes, that’s right, Jen’s unique gimmick is that “With over 40 fully-licensed catalogs in its initial training set, Jen adheres to a strict training doctrine that emphasizes its commitment to transparency, compensation and copyright identification. Jen’s rigorous compliance process sets it apart from the pack. Every track is automatically vetted for audio recognition and copyright identification utilizing a database of 150M tracks. This includes both the compositions in the training set and every newly generated track on the platform. Further, Jen generates a cryptographic hash for each track that is then recorded on The Root Network blockchain. This process provides an advanced form of verification, ensuring the integrity and timestamp of each track’s creation.” So, basically, it’s trained on licensed stuff and it’s also designed to it won’t spit out anything that violates copyright – which is great! Except, er, when you try it, and it’s about 10% as good as Udio, Suno and the rest, suggesting that actually training these things on massive amounts of copyrighted material actually might be necessary to make them work. Which, if nothing else, will keep the lawyers in clover for a few years yet.
  • Mosquepedia: Photographs of gorgeous mosques from around the world, information about their design, and occasionally accompanying architectural drawings and plans too, for anyone serious about getting into the ‘designing beautiful religious buildings’ game (seriously, some of the architecture here is astonishing).
  • The D-Day Map: This is a LOVELY educational resource – the National Museum of the Royal Navy has put together this interactive map-cum-guide to the D-Day landings, from preparations to the aftermath, all presented on a massive map with small models offering a lo-fi animated depiction of troop and unit movement at each phase of the operation. Honestly, this is really nicely-done and it’s worth a look if you’re interested in the history – note that the clickable area on the landing page ‘start’ button is a bit iffy, but if you hover just over the text you should be able to get in).
  • Natural Language Colour Picker: ANOTHER great use of an LLM! No, seriously! This is a colour finder which lets you basically describe the hue you want in whatever florid, descriptive terms you fancy and will provide you with the colour AS IF BY MAGIC! I have no idea how consistent this stuff is – I suspect NOT AT ALL – but I really like the idea of being able to go into a client meeting and say with confidence ‘yeah, we’ve gone with this particular hue because we’ve used AI to determine that it is actually the colour of migraine’, or ‘we think it’s important that the male lead’s jumper be in #FF3300 because that’s actually ‘the colour of a man’s face who believes that his marital infidelity has been discovered’ and we think that that sort of subtle easter egg will really engage the online audience’.
  • A Taxonomy of Swears: “Swear words and profanities from around the world!” proclaims the website, all of the arranged on a vertical, scrolling scale, from least offensive at the top to the very worst words EVER at the bottom. Various languages are covered, and there’s a colour-key to help you distinguish between profanities of a sexual, familial or scatological insults. This is obviously GREAT, and, even better, there’s an option to submit your own terms for consideration – I really want this to become some sort of profanity thermometer, an objective ranking of THE WORST THINGS YOU CAN EVER SAY, although I will forever argue against ‘cnut’ being deemed the ne plus ultra of profanity (on a purely personal level, I have always found being called a ‘pr1ck’ far more offensive) (but please don’t).
  • Realise: A website to promote the single ‘Realise’ by the band Hearse Pileup – it’s a relatively-simple Outrun-style driving game, in stylised black and white, running at pace through a selection of cityscapes as you attempt to avoid obstacles and collect cash. There are CHOICES TO MAKE! There is a MESSAGE! I really enjoyed this – there’s a touch of the Ace Of Spades about the track, which is no bad thing, and the whole thing is short enough to be a nice bit of engaging fun. MORE STANDALONE WEBSITES AS MUSIC VIDEOS PLEASE!
  • New Food at the Minnesota State Fair: Long-term readers may know that I have something of an obsession with the preposterously-calorific menu items dreamed up each year for the various state fairs of the US; this is basically now a virality contest, with the various venders trying to come up with something that will go viral like ‘deep fried butter’ did a few years ago (I am not sh1tting you, that was literally a thing – cubes of butter, deep-frozen, breaded and then deep-fried; can you *imagine* what that would do to your insides?!) – this year’s selection of ‘no, fcuk off, that is not fit for human consumption’ comestibles come from Minnesota, and highlights include deep-fried ranch dressing (a concept so vile I am honestly doing those small swallows people do right before yakking, not one word of a lie) and (and I have to quote this one in full) “kettle chip-flavored ice cream created by Minnesota Dairy Lab, sandwiched between focaccia bread from Wrecktangle Pizza. Topped with a blend of honey butter, kettle chips and herbs.” THIS STUFF IS WHY REDDIT IS FULL OF COMMENTS FROM PEOPLE WITH TERRIBLE BOWEL ISSUES, AMERICA.

By Mobolaji Ogunrosoye

WE CONTINUE NOW WITH ANOTHER SELECTION OF STRANGE AND OCCASIONALLY SINISTER BUT ALWAYS VERY CRISP BEATS AND BREAKS AND BLOOPS FROM FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY THRILLED TO IMAGINE ALL THE FRENZIED GROUPCHATS HAPPENING AROUND THE UK RIGHT NOW AS THE UK’S MEN COMPETE TO SEE WHO CAN BECOME THIS YEAR’S ‘AR$E-FLARE MAN’, PT.2:  

  • The Swype 30k: How often do you see or hear things that make you think ‘yeah, I mean, we’re fcuked, aren’t we?’ I hope, honestly, that it’s rare, that you’re not constantly muttering under your breath about how WE’RE ALL DOOMED – I mean, I’m definitely not doing that, oh no siree – but it’s reasonable to assume that the constant whirling assault of modernity will occasionally throw up some in-feed content that makes you…somewhat concerned as to the likely trajectory of our future. So it was this week when I encountered an ad for the Swype 30k, a newly-announced brand of disposable vape (remember, DISPOSABLE) which not only lets you inhale variously-flavoured particulate matter to your heart’s content but which also comes equipped with, er, Bluetooth, and an OLED screen, and the ability to link to your social media accounts, and Spotify, so it’s basically an entirely-disposable smartwatch. AMAZING. On the one hand, let’s make sure we’re doing our recycling – on the other, let’s also churn out 100,000k units of these fcukers! Still, maybe this is made out of a revolutionary new class of entirely-biodegradable electronics and plastics, right? Right? Er, hello?
  • The Doolittle Prize: Ok, yes, fine, it’s not TECHNICALLY called the Doolittle prize, but it ought to be. Existing pretty much at the opposite end of the intellectual/’hope for the species’ spectrum as the previous link, this is ‘the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication. A Grand Prize of USD$10mln will be awarded for “cracking the code” with annual prizes of USD$100,000 to support successful applicants with their research to develop scientifically rigorous models and algorithms for coherent communication with non-human organisms until interspecies communication is achieved.’ So, basically, ‘can you use AI to help us talk to dogs? Great, we’ll give you ten million quid’ (I simplify, but only slightly). On the one hand this is obviously BRILLIANT and I am 100% here for this sort of funding; on the other, where do we go when we finally get the opportunity to TALK TO THE ANIMALS and we finally learn that they think we’re d1cks. WHAT THEN????
  • Volv: I’ve long tired of the slightly-smug epithet ‘a stupid person’s idea of a clever person’, but, if I can paraphrase that, this really is a stupid person’s idea of a clever idea. Volv promises to give you ALL THE NEWS YOU NEED, but in, er, nine-second snippets. Why nine seconds? Because, apparently, ‘that’s all our TikTok addled brains can take’ (SCIENCE!) – so instead of, I don’t know, working to get your attention span back, why not lean into that degradation by downloading an app that promises you summarise EVERYTHING YOU COULD POSSIBLY NEED TO KNOW in small infobites that can be consumed in less than 10 seconds each. Take a moment to think about the top 5 significant news stories happening today wherever you may be. Now think about how you might communicate those stories in a manner which preserves their nuance and complexity, that communicates a necessary quantity of information and context, in nine seconds. Hard, isn’t it? I remain unconvinced that the GENIUS MINDS behind Volv have quite nailed this, but if you find the idea of the ‘…For Dummies’ series of books too intellectually daunting for you to cope with then perhaps this is for you.
  • A Song Map of Canada: This is a LOVELY idea. One man, on a bike, cycling across Canada, following a route mapped by song lyrics. “Canada has no shortage of lyrics that pay tribute to the places people call home, with songs like Alberta Bound, Runnin’ Back to Saskatoon, Sudbury Saturday Night, Farewell to Nova Scotia, and Bobcaygeon to name an obvious few. Whether it’s rock, pop, folk, or blues there are countless artists of all genres, traditions, and communities with songs that tell the stories about the places we live. The Great Canadian Song Cycle is an unsupported (no van following along) bicycle trip across Canada with a focus on collecting songs about places. The end goal is to provide a song map of Canada populated by artists and their fans, and random interviews en route.” This has apparently just started, and there are minimal updates so far, but there’s a map and a list of songs, and I think this is just a lovely idea for a trip (for someone with significantly stronger calves than I possess).
  • A Computer Vision Gallery: A curated collection of AI-created artworks pulled together by the Seattle Convention Centre – these are fascinating, a really interesting selection of different styles and techniques and models being employed by the various artists in question. I do think that anyone who out-of-hand dismisses any art made with AI as ‘not art’ should probably take a look at stuff like this and think again – there’s a categorical difference between ‘artist making work with models’ and ‘person typing prompt into Midjourney’, and this stuff is definitely the former.
  • Paint’N’Play: This is quite fun – a tool from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC which lets you paint in the style of various different artists; effectively this just cycles the paintbrush through four or five different shapes, but they’re done well enough to mimic the styles of Van Gogh, Constable or others and the way in which you can mix and match the different stroke styles allows for some surprisingly-interesting effects (or it would if you were more artistically-inclined than I am; all my stuff looks like dogsick). Try drawing a Van Gogh-style portrait, it is FCUKING HARD – so fair play Vince, you were actually pretty good.
  • Large Horse: This is a single-serving joke, but I am very much into the commitment to the bit and the use of subdomains as a comedy vehicle, something which, personally speaking, I don’t think you see enough of. COMEDY SUBDOMAINS FTW!
  • Find The UK’s Hellmouths: Matt Round has somehow found a document listing the official location of every single one of the UK’s 700+ hellmouths, and has mapped them for you here – see where YOUR nearest one is. Then spend a good 10 minutes getting annoyed with yourself as you try and work out which actual, real-world datasat Matt has used to populate this, and then wonder whether or not their PR team will get in touch to complain should they ever find out about this.
  • BossManChickFillA: The TikTok account of a fried chicken shop in Preston, Northern England, which consists mostly of them posting videos of their customers coming in after having had a few drinks of an evening. This is actually really lovely – it’s good-natured and feels nice, not sneery, and is a gently-comic look at life in a standard English town when you’re young and p1ssed and REALLY need a chicken shish with everything on NO LETTUCE! Although I have to say that the footage of all the kids celebrating after the football on Tuesday makes me so, so scared for Sunday night that I might have to stop writing here and just take 70 Xanax.
  • Noiys: This is a very simple anonymous messaging site – anyone can log on and post a message anonymously and it will disappear in 24, and it’s obviously been hacked together by a kid somewhere, and it’s…weirdly, I found myself quite invested in this this week. You won’t read anything particularly profound or hilarious and most of it’s just nonsense posted by people who I reckon are probably on average about 12 years old…but also there’s something sort of fascinating about it, like looking at an antfarm or something, and it made me think of how this is what so much of the young adult experience is in 2024, these streams of strangers sharing text messages across Discord channels or Slack channels or Telegrams or weird little websites like this, so ephemeral and yet so persistent…no idea where I am going with this, but I found this a curious-if-pointless ‘slice of modernity’ and maybe you will too.
  • All Of The Playlists: Oh, ok, fine, not ALL of them, but a VERY SIGNIFICANT NUMBER. “OK Mondays was a near weekly playlist spanning genres and moods, published from January 2nd, 2017 through January 1st, 2024. This page serves as a searchable index and archive of all playlists in the project.” So that’s somewhere in the region of 350+ playlists, all hand-curated, which, based on a quick scan of some of the tracklistings, span a truly remarkable selection of genres…this should be an instant bookmark imho.
  • Some Interesting VTubers: While I’m not personally ever likely to get into the whole VTubing thing – I’m reasonably-relaxed about ‘the trappings of adulthood’, but at the same time draw the line at being the sort of 44 year old man who watches an anime e-boy with dragon ears and considers that to be legitimate entertainment – I am fascinated about the creativity evident in what some of these people are doing and how they do it. This Twitter thread presents a few examples of people pushing the envelope in terms of what it’s possible to do with Twitch and a mocap rig – there are a couple in here combining it with a hand-drawn animation style which I am in awe of.
  • 4Chan’s Top 100 Books Ever: This is interesting – even if only from a sort of cultural analysis viewpoint. You all know what 4Chan is – each year the site does a member poll on THE BEST BOOKS EVER – one enterprising Channer has gone through all of the lists to date to compile THE UBERLIST, based on rankings over time, and you can see them all here. This is pretty much what you’d expect in many respects, but I was pleasingly surprised to see that it wasn’t ALL male (just, er, massively, overwhelmingly so) – it’s obviously super-American and super-Western and super-white in its bias (also, there is no universe in which ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ should be anywhere near any top books list – what is it with American men and their obsession with that novel?), but it’s an interesting look into ‘what forms the mindset of an average super-online Western teenage boy in 2024’. Slightly embarrassed by how many of these I’ve read tbh, but in my defence I have read a LOT (and I have read 80% of the collected works of Jilly Cooper and I bet none of the Chan fcukers can say THAT).
  • Lettre: I feel slightly like I am ageing into a different part of the web. Partly this is my insistence on experiencing it primarily via desktop, which automatically siphons me towards A Certain Demographic, but it’s genuinely arresting to me when I get served stuff like this, which is, objectively, for Older People – I mean, look, it’s an fcuking iPad-first app! I am not old enough for iPad first apps! Except, er, it also looks quite interesting, I must say – it’s basically a penpalling app, where anyone can write letters (handwritten, obvs – again, AIMED AT OLD PEOPLE FFS) and if you like the look of a letter then you can reply to it in-app…basically like a sort of a reskinning of the basic concept of ‘forums’ for people who would be very scared of the concept of ‘forums’ but who are still very big fans indeed of ‘handwritten epistolary correspondence’. Ngl, if I had an iPad (WHICH I DON’T BECAUSE I AM NOT THAT OLD) I would totally give this a go.
  • Not Quite Past: A LEGITIMATELY GOOD USE OF AI! MACHINE-IIMAGINED TILEWARE! “Not Quite Past trains AI to make beautiful things. Our first project explores classic Dutch Delftware tiles and lets you make your own. Make your own tile in our Workshop or pick one that’s already been made in our Marketplace. We then get it made in a kiln in the Staffordshire Potteries and sent to your door.” This is really fun, and quite a cool way of making yourself something bespoke and unique and secretly-geeky which will also look rather nice in your newly-refurbed kitchen.
  • Buy A Stegosaurus: Yes, ok, there are other lots available at this forthcoming auction at Sotheby’s, but there is only one star attraction and that star attraction is Apex, a mounted stegosaurus skeleton which is estimated to go for a mere $4-6m dollars, making it the perfect adornment for your front garden. You can also get a T-Rex tooth for a mere $50k or so, though, which frankly feels like the sort of thing your kids can probably sacrifice their university fund for (tell them to become plumbers, seriously, it’s a better bet in the long run anyway).
  • Dawn Chorus: Via blort, ALL OF THE BIRD SOUNDS! This is lovely – recordings of the dawn chorus from all over the world, mapped, which you can listen to to your heart’s content. It’s weird how evocative the different sounds of different birds’ songs can be – there’s a qualitative difference to what it sounds like to wake up in Rome to what it sounds like to wake up in London (and yet the taste of the tears in the morning is tediously-uniform, how queer!). This has been going for a few years now, and there’s an app which you can download should you want to record your own sounds and contribute them to the project – 100% lovely, this, no notes.
  • Insect Photos: Got to be honest, I’m a *bit* of an entomaphobe and so these images make me itch like billy-o, but they’re also amazing in the way that only massively-close up photos of, say, beetles can be. THEY ARE LIKE TERRIFYING ORGANIC TRANSFORMERS! THEY ARE LIKE JEWELLED DEATH MACHINES! PRAY THEY NEVER GROW TO 100x THEIR SIZE! Anyway, this is the page featuring the nominations for the Royal Entomological Society’s annual photo contest, and these are GORGEOUS, especially the one of the termites which isn’t something I thought I would ever type.
  • Chrono Piano: Ooh, this is both mathematically-pleasing and melodically-pretty and I very much enjoy it. “Chrono Piano is a live music player generates piano music based on the current date and time. Each digit from the date and time corresponds to a musical note. The date digits create the bass and the time digits form the melody.” Can we please have a clock in a public place that uses something like this to produce sounds, please?
  • One Checkbox: You remember that ‘One Million Checkboxes’ site from the other week? Well this is that, but…smaller. It made me do a small lol, and may do the same for you.
  • Where’s Wally?: Ok, so for excellent reasons of copyright this isn’t in fact called Where’s Wally? – but, well, that’s exactly what it is. I think it’s a promo for some New Zealand-based agency or something, given that all the various places in which you’re charged with finding a character in the throng are NZ locations, but, honestly, who cares? FIND THE MAN IN THE RUBBER RING! FIND THE LAUGHING OLD LADY! BEAT THE CLOCK! I am so, so bad at this it made me quite angry and I had to stop playing after a few fruitless minutes, but you may get significantly more out of it (you fcukers).
  • The King Is Watching: Finally in this week’s miscellanea, A GREAT GAME! And one which will tide you over nicely til 8pm on Sunday night (PLEASE GOD SPAIN PLEASE GOD) – it’s quite hard to explain but easy to pick up, and all you really need to know is that a) you need to protect your kingdom fro hordes of ravening goblins; and b) noone does anything unless THE KING IS WATCHING. Seriously, this is great fun and is distracting enough that it kept my mind off the horrendous prospect of a potential England victory for a good 10 minutes.

By Roope Rainisto

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK BRINGS WHAT I MIGHT DESCRIBE, WERE I A VERY DIFFERENT SORT OF PERSON, AS ‘IMPECCABLE NYC BLOCK PARTY VIBES’ AND IS COMPILED BY ARSENII!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Anime Computers: Depictions of computing devices in anime – partly just cool, and partly a really interesting look at how culture has seen, reflected and conceived of computers over the past 50-odd years.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Sonder Solutions: Sonder Solutions are a German art collective that do odd little performances that riff on stereotypes of national identity and ORDER and probably all sorts of other stuff that I don’t understand because, well, everything they do is in German. Still, their Insta feed is full of pleasingly-nonsensical (to me at least) videos of them doing things like ‘pointless roadworks, very slowly, in a TINY SILVER DIGGER’ and, honestly, who doesn’t need a bit of in-feed Tuetonic surrealism? NO FCUKER, etc!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • What Is A Majority For?: In what I PROMISE will be the last bit of UK politics-focused writing in here for at least a few weeks, this is James Butler in the LRB writing about the election and what the incoming Labour Government has on its plate, and how we might expect it to approach the myriad issues facing us. This is…look, it’s a pretty sombre reflection, as befits the whole ‘worst economic status since WWII’ thing (although, er, does that mean we can expect the same sort of achievements as those enacted by the Atlee government, then? GREAT!), and the other ‘hm, you really like the Private Sector Partnerships idea, don’t you, and we’ve been here before’ thing – but, equally, however cynical and embittered and pessimistic you are (and, reader, I am VERY), it’s been impossible this week not to feel like there’s been a slight lightening of the mood, a sense that, at the very least, the people currently in government aren’t total fcuking shits (they might still end up being, mind, so don’t get complacent). The bar was limbo-low, fine, but good to see them managing to clear it comfortably nonetheless. Although, and apologies if this applies to any of you reading this, if I hear one more person use the appallingly-twee formulation ‘the grown-ups are back in charge’ or any variants thereof I can’t promise I won’t do some sort of appalling dirty protest on the spot.
  • How To Raise Your AI: This is a few weeks old now, but it’s a really interesting chat between Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell on the subject of AI, machine ‘intelligence’ and learning, and how to think about All Of This Stuff. Sensible, level-headed and pleasingly factual throughout – no woo-woo predictions, no fearmongering, no boosterism, just a reasonably-level-headed discussion about the current state of AI and LLMs, the extent to which the speakers believe that this is or isn’t a path to ‘better’ AI, the problem of embodiment and all that good stuff. This is a really good overview of where the smart thinking is at the moment on the topic, imho, and worth reading as a ‘we are here’-type primer.
  • That Goldman Report on AI: Many of you will have read Ed Zitron’s latest ‘AI IS ALL A SCAM!’ screed – or at least seen it floating around the web – but this link is to the Goldman Sachs report that is his piece’s subject. The report is GS’ most recent research document in which they go deep on a particular issue, in this case ‘are we spending too much on AI based on the potential benefits it may accrue?’ , and the answer is…mixed. The big headlines that Zitron took were from Jim Covello of Goldman and his bold statements that AI won’t be able to do the stuff that it needs to do to make serious money because it can’t solve complex problems – which, it’s true, is a pretty damning assessment. It’s also accompanied by a statement that basically says ‘but that doesn’t matter even if I’m right, because there’s so much money sloshing around that it makes sense to keep investing in it anyway because, either way, we will still win!’. Which rather changes the conclusions here if you ask me – the point is less ‘AI is a bust!’ and more ‘AI is going to fcuk us whether or not it’s a bust or otherwise because so many people have a vested interest in selling and implementing it, and even if all it achieves is efficiencies rather than transformative change that is going to be more than enough to make lots of people very very rich and lots of other people very, very unemployed’. WE SHALL SEE.
  • Antiquity to Alt-Right: Oh this is good – I have been waiting for someone to write a neat ‘look, this is how the whole ‘classical civilisations were great!’ to ‘I am now an actual fascist’ pipeline works’ piece and here it is! Tallulah Trevezant writes: “The association between the ancient world and contemporary extremist political ideologies is well known among career classicists and amateur historians alike. For example, the etymology of ‘fascism’ is derived from fasces – bundled rods with protruding axe blades carried by lictors during the Roman Republic, signifying imperium, the power of the state. Not only is the association widely-known, it has a long history: in 1922, Benito Mussolini’s government – considered by some to be the first government to be known as fascist – envisioned itself as an extension of the Roman Empire, while in 2015, outspoken white supremacist Richard Spencer encouraged white people to embrace their “forgotten” Roman identities. My aim is not to explain that there is a connection between Classical Antiquity and the Alt-Right, rather, I aim to understand how algorithms on social media sites such as Twitter[1] lead users who engage with content related to ancient history– particularly ancient Greco-Roman history– down an alt-right pipeline.” This is REALLY interesting and useful to know imho.
  • Exorcising the Primer: Ok, so this is only really worth reading if you’ve a) a degree of familiarity with Neal Stephenson’s ‘The Diamond Age’ and/or b) if you’ve a particular interest in educational/pedagogical techniques and how technology can help improve them. How many of you left? Eh? Oh. Anyway, for the three of you still reading this, this is a HUGELY-interesting essay on the question of ‘if we were to attempt to design an interactive, exploratory educational/instructional system from scratch, what might that look like?’, using as its base premise the concept of ‘The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’, a fictional device invented by Stephenson which is, very basically, a ‘magical book’ which acts as a dynamic tutor to one of his characters as she grows, and which is basically the most incredible-sounding teacher ever to have been dreamed up in fiction. In this essay, Andy Matuschak talks about what we want from learning, how to create experiences and scenarios that encourage learning and thinking, how technology might be used to prompt curiosity…honestly, this is so so so interesting, and if you like this one then you will also enjoy this essay in response to it by Adrian Hon.
  • Why Is Chile So Long?: I know very little about Chile, other than the existence of the Atacama desert and the fact that they have PENGUINS! Now, thanks to this brilliant and properly-interesting article, I also know why it is so very, very long. As you read this, take a moment to consider the country’s geography and what, exactly, it must have been like establishing a civilisation there using nothing but some very hardy and unfortunate donkeys for support. Not sure if I’ve said it before in here, but if you’re ever offered the opportunity to reincarnate, NEVER take the donkey option.
  • Fridge Peepers: Economic divination via the medium of fridge readings, basically – this piece profiles a London-based investment manager called Tassos Stassopoulos who, so it’s claimed here, scries the future trends and movements of markets worldwide by perusing the contents of fridges in cities across the world. A rise in demand for fudge flavoured yoghurt in Mumbai means pork bellies are about to take a hit in Montevideo is the very-basic explainer here, a sort of culinary-chaos-theory of taste – actually it’s less witchcraft and more about using certain class-indicating signifiers (aspirational snack consumption, ready-prepared fruit and vegetables, etc) as early-warning signals for larger economic shifts (he says, as though that’s simple), but this is REALLY interesting, and if you’re a certain type of agency person (I KNOW YOU) might be a useful one to send to senior people when you’re next trying to make the ‘WE NEED TO GET OUT INTO THE WORLD AND SEE ACTUAL PEOPLE RATHER THAN JUST SITTING AT HOME WATCHING TIKTOKS OF REAL PEOPLE’ point which I know you make without fail every 24m or so.
  • A Roblox Primer: Do YOU want a decent guide to Roblox, what it us, how it works and the sorts of things that brands are doing on it right now? GREAT! This is by the people at Ex Research and might be quite useful to some of you.
  • Notes App As Wardrobe Planner: You may well all be aware of this behaviour already, but as someone whose wardrobe consists of ‘the clothes lying on the bed in the spare room’ I confess that ‘outfit planning trends’ rather tend to pass me by. Anyway, apparently it is now A Thing for young people (in the main women) to take snaps of themselves in particular outfits, then take that image as a sticker and drop it into their Notes app, arranged under various headings so they can easily categorise their favourite fits under various categories – work outfits, say, or ‘hot day’ outfits, that sort of thing. Which is partly just a really interesting example of ‘users find use cases for software that devs can never imagine’, and also something that it feels like a smart brand could do something with (the idea of creating personalised irl sticker books for people to populate with their fits feels like a nice touch tbh).
  • We All Speak Phone Now: This is written from an annoyingly US-centric perspective – GYAC it’s an English language thing not an American thing! – but feels SO TRUE; effectively this piece talks about the linguistic flattening that’s happened thanks to the smartphone era, the way that, because slang now often arrives and evolves primarily via textual, online media, mediated via a screen, it’s impossible to know who’s using it, and who ‘owns’ it, which means that you lose some of the in-/out-group function that it used to fulfil, which, to crib from the piece’s conclusion, “is a problem because it deprives people of a previously reliable way to know whom they’re talking with and how to treat them. If I hear someone make a remark about the first Velvet Underground album with which I strongly disagree, I am more likely to respond kindly if I know they come from a background different from my own. If a stranger on Twitter says that Nico had pitch problems, I am much more likely to tear into them if they speak the way I do, because I assume they have the cultural experiences, education, and resources that brought me to my own extremely correct opinions. When everyone talks like me, I make the mistake of believing that everyone is like me—and therefore falls into the category of people whom I cut the least slack.”
  • The Aesteticisation of Food: Yes, I know, not a word. BUT! It sort of ought to be, at least for this article which looks at the way in which food is being presented in advertising – as in, non-food advertising – in 2024, the semiotics of it, if you will (you don’t have to, honest), and how that might relate to the fact that we are, per the author, living through the skinniest era in years (I am going to have to gently demur here based on my experiences in South London of late – babes, just because everyone in LA and certain parts of Notting Hill is on Ozempic…). I think this topic merits deeper thought than this piece gives it, if I’m honest, but I think it’s a decent start: “Our growing obsession is almost like a modern-day lipstick index, which posits that during economic downturns, sales of smaller indulgences tend to increase. And what could be a smaller indulgence than a fancy little treat? Even when it’s too expensive to travel or buy new clothes, we all have to eat. Food is a universal indulgence. No matter your income, any food can feel like a guilty pleasure “
  • Food Miniatures: OH GOD TINY MODELS OF FOOD! I can’t help myself, I go giddy over this stuff – no idea why, I don’t think I ever wanted and failed to get a doll’s house as a kid – and this piece from Vittles, in which Emily Kenway visits an expo at which various vendors of TINY MODELS OF FOOD (honestly I love them!) are flogging their wares, to explore what the appeal is and who collects them and why, and this is not only beautifully-written but also really heartwarming in a slightly-odd way. Thanks to this article I now know that there is a magazine dedicated to this stuff, called Shrunk (obvs), and LOOK HOW CUTE IT IS (must not subscribe, must not subscribe).
  • Winter of the Mind: You may recall a few months ago I featured a longread which veered halfway through into becoming a very odd piece about an even odder secret society dedicated to paying attention to things (this one, in fact) – remarkably, this is the second piece this year about the same broad topic, but this time describing a DIFFERENT society dedicated to getting people to really, really pay attention to stuff (although it’s orthogonally-related to the other one, turns out). I really enjoyed this article, in part because it goes a little longer and deeper into the genesis of ‘radical attention’ as a concept, and in part because I think this is something that you could potentially turn into something quite personally/professionally useful (in a very w4nky way). Comes from a similar place to the obliquiscope – the idea of paying deep, persistent attention to an object, system or process is something it feels like we might have fallen out of the habit of doing, maybe bring it back?
  • Thoughts on Glastonbury: Not by me, you understand, but by someone who was there this year and who’s done dozens of the things over their lifetime, and who has Some Ideas about what the festival needs to do to keep going. I was interested by this – not least because it’s not just someone going ‘it was better when I was young’, which is about 88% of all festival criticism, but because it takes a fairly dispassionate look at what the crowd is like these days, what punters seemingly want to see and do, and how space is allocated on that basis. The TL;DR here is ‘take some of the space away from the hippies, literally noone cares anymore’ which feels, honestly, pretty much the antithesis of THE GLASTO VIBE (™ – Bottles of authentic ‘Glasto Vibe’ are available from the mail order shop, shipping international, £19.99), but from the point of view of cold, hard commercialism it feels like they are probably right tbh. Then again, though, fcuk commercialism, cap the numbers and keep the hippies imho.
  • Water In Sicily: A lovely blogpost from the Scope of Work newsletter, about water supply in Sicily – which, I know, really doesn’t sound like it should be interesting but I am right and you are wrong and you should read it forthwith.
  • What’s In A Sex Scene?: This is wonderful. “A lot of ink has been spilled parsing the difference between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. Some might call it arbitrary; others, imaginary. It could be said that one distinction between the two is that in contemporary literary fiction, characters seem rarely allowed to get off.  Sex scenes in literature have always been contentious. Since the inception of the novel, detractors and moralists have often accused the form of promoting degenerate behavior and corrupting the morals and impressionable minds of young women. The Literary Review started a “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” in 1993 and laureates include Jonathan Littell, Tom Wolfe, and Morrissey (yes, that one). On the one hand, contemporary literature, like movies, is often accused of being bereft of real eroticism. On the other hand, smutty fiction and erotica is thriving online and increasingly in print as well, albeit subject to the scolding of many more highbrow readers. Everyone’s a critic, so few are having fun. So we asked some of our readers to tell us about their favorite sex scene in a book.” SUPERB – runs the gamut from forced-inlaw-incest-erotica through Twilight by way of Sheila Heti, and it’s interesting and erudite and funny and even, yes, a bit sexy.
  • Lewd Vocabulary in Erotic Fiction: A seamless segue there – this is actually a presentation rather than an essay, but, well, it fits better here. Want to know the most and least popular terms used for specific anatomical parts and saucy activities across the gamut of smutty novels? YES YOU DO! Some of this is just astonishing – you mean to tell me that there is smut currently circulating on the market which uses the term ‘milkers’ for breasts?! And that that smut is of a significant enough volume for ‘milkers’ to rank as one of the more popular mammarial euphemisms?! I particularly enjoyed the wordclouds at the end of this which showed readers’ most-loved and most-hated words in erotica – a special shout out to whichever author is peppering their steamy sagas with liberal sprinklings of the oh-so-erotic word ‘clinical’. Seriously, this really is one to be opened up in company so you and your friends and colleagues can go deep (ahem) on this, it is VERY funny indeed.
  • Working On Meth: About having a very boring, very menial job, and doing it while getting very, very high on methamphetamine while you’re at work. I really, really like the flatness of this, the matter-of-factness, the way it matches the matter-of-fact demeanour you probably need to keep about you when you’re spending 20 minutes in the toilets huffing rock.
  • Whale Fall: This is from 2015, but oddly enough it floated across my field of vision last week and has been rendered current by events in Orkney this week. Rebecca White, in Granta, on a beached whale: “A few years ago I helped push a beached humpback whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the sand. For the three days that it died the whale was a public attraction. People brought their children down to see it. They would stand in the surf and wave babies in pastel rompers over the whale, as if to catch the drift of an evaporating myth. The whale was black like piano wood and because it was still young, it was pink in the joints under its fins. Every few minutes it exhaled loudly and slammed its fluke against the sand – a tantrum or leverage. Its soft chest turned slack, concertinaed, when it rolled.”
  • The Year When My Husband…: The full title of this is “The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention”  – this is…not a pleasant read, in some respects (it deals with issues of abuse and paedophilia, even if not explicitly described), but it is, I think, very well-written indeed.
  • A Pandemic Breakup: Finally in this week’s longreads, a piece I really didn’t want to like when I started reading it but which I had to concede by the end is really, really good – an excerpt from Emily Witt’s forthcoming novel, this segment deals with going out clubbing with her husband just before the pandemic through the breakdown of their marriage and his mind – even if you hate the opening three paragraphs, persist because I promise it’s worth it.

By Nick Prideaux

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: