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Webcurios 29/09/23

Reading Time: 34 minutes

Trains! Misogyny! Hateful rhetoric about immigration! The risible lolfest that is Liberal Democrat Party Conference! Unauthorised tree surgery! WHAT A WEEK!

There, that’s you all caught up with the stuff in the ‘real’ world! Now it’s time to focus on the weird internet ephemera, of which there is a BUMPER CROP – which is fortunate because Web Curios is off next week and so fcuk knows what you’d have done without this jam-packed dose of linky munificence.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably found the concept of Laurence Fox opining on the ‘fcukability’ or otherwise of anyone else as risible as I did.

By Noah Kalina

KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS WITH SOME EXCELLENT TECHNO COURTESY OF JON HUSSEY! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER IT WOULD IN FACT BE MORALLY ACCEPTABLE TO JUST CULL EVERYONE INVOLVED WITH THE CURRENT INCARNATION OF THE TORY PARTY, INCLUDING THE WIDER UK MEDIA SYSTEM THAT PROPS THEM UP, BECAUSE IT’S BECOMING INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT THEY ARE ALL DREADFUL CNUTS WITH LITERALLY NO REDEEMING FEATURES WHATSOEVER AND, Y’KNOW, THERE ARE SOME PRETTY STRONG UTILITARIAN ARGUMENTS WE COULD DEPLOY IF PRESSED, PT.1:

  • Wikipedia Search-by-Vibes: I can’t help but love a wonky, slightly-orthogonal search mechanic (WHO DOESN’T, RIGHT KIDS? Eh? Oh), and this is a near-perfect example by Lee Butterman, who’s built a way of navigating Wikipedia which eschews all the normal, traditionally ‘click a hyperlink’ or ‘search for keywords’ techniques and which instead uses natural language stuff (look, there’s a more technical explanation which you can find here should you so desire, but know that I tried to read and understand it and, well, I failed) to let you search for, I don’t know, ‘those trees with the leaves that are a bit pointy but also rounded’ and return you a bunch of results from the Wikidepths. SUCH a brilliant idea, and a nice example of the eventual endpoint of all this AI stuff, where The Machine will eventually be able to make sense of whatever garbled, half-baked request we feed it and we’re able to sit back and just feed on peeled grapes while reclining like late-period Romans (that’s definitely how it’s all going to work out).
  • Another Text-To-Video Toy: Yes, ok, fine, I know that these are no longer new and shiny, but I’m always interested to compare the pace of change of the various tools in this space – this one’s called ‘Genmo’, and it’s in-browser, and it’s free (or at least you can play around with it a bit without having to fork out initial cash for ‘credits’) and while you won’t be using this to create all your video from hereon in, a) it’s not bad, considering it took ~10s to generate this; b) honestly, most of the video you create for your job and your clients is pointless and doesn’t need to exist, so why not just sack it all off, replace the ‘content’ with AI-generated footage of cats or whatever, and call it all quits? I appreciate that ‘link 2’ is a bit early in the week to start with the whole ‘your job in advermarketingpr is a pointless joke and you should stop doing it’ but, well, I am feeling it VERY STRONGLY this week and thought you might want a Friday afternoon fillip.
  • Historica: This is a genuinely-interesting project which, as far as I can tell, is fruit of collaboration between a bunch of historians and a few technologists across Europe, and which is interested in looking at how generative AI tools and techniques can be applied to the study of history, and specifically the creation of AI-augmented historical maps. This site itself is…a bit dense, fine, and VERY WORDY, but there’s a lot of interesting thinking and writing on there about some of the ways in which they have used generative models to help generate visual representations of THE PASSAGE OF TIME, and if you’re interested in AI, history, teaching or any vague combination of those things then you may find this stimulating.
  • The Snapchat Agency Adventure: Snap is having something of a trying period, with various stories appearing over the past week or so suggesting user numbers are dropping, and the company culling its enterprise AR team a couple of days ago…but that’s ok, because it’s going to persuade agencies to pay it FCUKTONNES OF MONEY via the medium of, er, a game! And not just ANY game, but ‘a game designed to show you how Snapchat can help your clients reach their audience and drive results’, which I think we can all agree is just what the troubled company needs to get people spending big with them again! This is actually a reasonably-diverting 15 minute experience, although it suffers slightly from being built in a top-down, vaguely-16-bit style which means you spend more time than you might necessarily want to having ‘conversations’ with various avatars representing Snap staff who tell you helpful things like ‘we have a large and growing audience of 750 million a month!’ while they loop through three frames of minimalist animation. Still, there are a few pleasing minigames in there which will help use up some of those empty hours between birth and death which you might otherwise have to fill with ‘work’.
  • The Coca Cola Record Store Experience: What do you think of when you think of ‘Coca Cola’? Sticky brown sugarwater? Incredibly-expensive endorsement deals? Vending machines? Those weirdos who seem to exist solely on Diet Coke, to the exclusion of all other liquids (I say this as someone who probably gets through in the region of 20 cups of tea a day, but WHAT IS THAT DOING TO YOUR INSIDES?!)? NO YOU THINK OF NONE OF THOSE THINGS YOU INSTEAD THINK OF CRATE-DIGGING IN AN UNDERGROUND RECORD STORE! Or at least that’s what Coke *wants* you to think of, judging by this ‘interactive digital experience’ in which you’re plonked into a 3d CG representation of a dimly-lit vinyl emporium and invited to wander around it, collecting digital tchotchkes representing various expressions of the Coca Cola Brand Experience (so miserable, so sad!) – but not just that! Oh no! You can also find a selection of records in the ‘store’ by various artists which you can then ‘listen’ to in a dedicated ‘room’, and by so doing you can ‘unlock’ some special artist-related content…on the one hand, this is pretty-slickly-made (as you’d expect from one of the world’s largest and richest brands), but on the other there’s something a bit…thin about the experiences you unlock, and I remain slightly baffled as to exactly what I would get from this were I a fan of (to cite but one of the artists involved) Cat Burns (other than, obviously, a near-irresistible desire to waterboard myself with Coke).
  • Staring Contest: I really like this – a neat little toy by Google, as part of its Arts & Culture Lab, by longstanding Web Curios favourite Pippin Barr – click the link and you’re presented with a different artwork each day (I think), representing an individual who is presented to you in close-up detail; your job as the viewer is to STAY AWAKE, which you can do by clicking your mouse to keep your ‘digital eyelids’ (I promise it will make more sense when you click the link) open. This is obviously a bit of a silly, one-note gag, but it also does a good job of forcing you to engage with the work,  and because it’s Google the works are presented in super-high-res and as such the whole ‘stare into the subject’s eyes while clicking manically’ thing does actually make you engage with each piece in a way you mightn’t have done otherwise. This is fun and silly and a really strong example of how interaction design can have interesting impacts on how information is communicated and absorbed (he said, like the boring pseud he is).
  • The City of Praxis: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a plutocrat in possession of vast fortune must be in want of a vaguely-libertarian citystate built to exactly their specifications in which they can live out the rest of their violently-wealthy days unfettered by the tedious concerns of the lumpenproletariat! Or at least that’s how it fcuking seems, judging by the speed with which all these fcuking cnuts start imagining their own ‘NEW TECH UTOPIA CITIES’ as soon as they get to nine figures in their bank accounts – and so it is with the fantastically-named CITY OF PRAXIS (in my head it is called ‘CITY OF HUBRIS’ fwiw), which self-describes as ‘A greenfield development designed to support those tackling the world’s hardest problems’ (also, I like the implied positioning here that these MEGABRAINS, these violently-rich altruists, DESERVE a special city all of their own because of the vital work they are doing delivering hockey-stick returns and 10x shareholder growth). This is still very much at the blueprints stage, but the site claims that the collective behind the project is in ‘the final stages of site selection’ to determine where exactly in the Mediterranean they are going to establish this utopia for the brightest and best – and if you would like to be one of them you can apply here; they stop short of asking for your net worth, but it does rather feel implied, but there’s a…reasonably-strong implication in the literature that they’re only interested in you if you can bring a few million to the table, as the model for Praxis is built on ‘ten thousand members with an average lifetime value of $2+ million collectively represent $20+ billion in city value.’ Details as to who has signed up so far are limited, but intriguingly the site mentions ‘a former G7 Prime Minister’ and ‘a former EU Prime Minister’ and I would not be surprised if the grinning face of Mr Tony Blair was somehow involved in this. You can read a bit more about the project in this excellent piece in the equally-excellent The Fence Magazine – I doubt that this is ever going to happen, but I hope that its failure is spectacular and visible from space.
  • Spill: As The Great Social Fragmentation engendered by That Fcuking Man’s slow evisceration of Twitter continues, so new spaces to hang out online continue to crop up – the latest to cross my field of vision is Spill (main link here) which is a Twitter-esque product built by ex-Twitter staffers and which is designed for, and aimed at, the Black community specifically. The main link takes you to their ‘about and onboarding’ document, which is done as a Google presentation and is…actually really good, giving you a clear illustration of what the platform is, how it works, some notes on language and general vibe…honestly, it struck me as a really smart and simple way of quickly getting people onboard with what you are trying to do and significantly quicker and easier than spinning up and maintaining a website. I confess to not having tried Spill, mainly because a) I am a misanthrope and don’t actually feel the need to join any more fcuking communities, please leave me alone; and b) I am a white, middle-aged man and didn’t feel that I would necessarily have a lot to contribute to the app, but it looks like a decent new entrant into the ‘granular alternatives to Twitter’ landscape should you be in the market for one.
  • Post Crossing: I am slightly astonished that I have apparently never featured this before, but I suppose I should just be pleased at how that illustrates the wide-ranging and near-infinite majesty of the web rather than letting my failure to be across EVERY SINGLE FCUKING WEBSITE IN THE WORLD irk me (except obviously that is exactly what I am going to do) – anyway, my inadequacies aside, Post Crossing is a LOVELY web project which exists to encourage strangers to send postcards to each other – there’s a simple mechanic which matches people, and all you have to do is request an address from the site, pick a card, write a message and pay the postage and VWALLAH! You are now part of an international network of strangers all sending messages to each other via the magic of the postal service. I love this so so so much and am going to pop out and do my first missive this afternoon (someone is going to be SO EXCITED to get that postcard of a goose being fois-grased!) – honestly, I don’t think there is any pleasure quite like getting a (nice, to be clear) message from a total stranger, and I STRONGLY recommend you get involved with this as it is lovely and pure and you may end up with a nice new friend as a result (although based on a cursory bit of research, it is very likely that that friend will be in Germany – MAN do Germans love postcards, turns out).
  • The Nature TTL Photographer of the Year: ANOTHER EXCELLENT SELECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF CRITTERS! As ever, these are all wonderful – as far as I can tell, they’re also all reasonably-happy pictures (no obvious animal death on display, basically) so you can click safe in the knowledge that it’s all cuteness and light and no PETA-style horrors; my personal favourite of these is the gorgeous shot of the caterpillars chowing their way through a leaf, but please feel free to pick your own.
  • 1FF: I am fascinated by this (and thanks to Rishi for sending it my way) – it’s another example, along with the previously-mentioned King’s League, of how it feels like we’re on the cusp of some sort of new breakout mass sporting format based around football, but equally like noone quite knows what that might look like or how it might in fact work. 1FF is…it’s an entirely-fictitious, entirely-CG-and-AI generated football league, in which a bunch of (again, entirely-fictitious and entirely-virtual) teams compete in computer-generated matches to contest a league title; the gimmick here is that ‘fans’ can invest in individual teams and players by buying stakes, which stakes translate to votes on crucial decisions on which players to sign, or in the case of the players which teams to sign for…There’s an element of this I can imagine really taking off, that taps into the modern phenomenon of people supporting individual players rather than teams, and the idea of kids being able to materially affect the ‘career’ of one of these ‘players’ is something I can conceive of as being appealing, but at present it all feels a bit…thin. I haven’t delved in too deeply – there’s a weirdly crypto-ish vibe which puts me off, although perhaps that’s unfair – but I am honestly fascinated to see how (if) this evolves – if nothing else the fact that they have seemingly got their very own proprietary CG match engine simulating all this is pretty impressive and suggests to some reasonably-deep pockets. The team names are AWFUL, though – South London United FC is SO ‘Pro Evo’ it hurts.
  • Fat Bear Week: It’s FAT BEAR WEEK AGAIN! You should, by now, what to do – at the time of writing, voting in the first bracket is yet to open, but hopefully by the time I hit ‘send’ on this fcuker you’ll be able to click and decide whether you think ‘910 Yearling’ or ‘806 Spring Cub’ is the chonkiest.
  • All Of The PixeL Art: OH GOD THIS IS SUCH AN INCREDIBLE RESOURCE! Japan’s Maeda Design Studio has made this incredible collection of pixel art assets available for anyone to download and make use of – the description is so charming I might cry: “DOTOWN is a site where you can download coarse dots. Rough dots refer to pixel art that uses the lowest possible resolution to create the ultimate abstract expression. Despite being abstracted, the coarse dots are packed with information and have achieved a “reverse evolution (=ultimate abstraction)” in game graphics.They have a slightly empty atmosphere and have a “Maeda design feel”. Rough dots have been a symbol of this, and even today, rough dots appear everywhere, including on the Maeda Design Office’s website and membership page. All of us at Maeda Design Studio would be happy if you could use these coarse dots for a variety of things, including websites, banners, flyers, and even embroidery!” No, seriously, literally crying a bit (I am tired), IT IS SO PURE.
  • Castrooms: This does, I concede, feel VERY 2020, but there’s no reason why some of you might not still find this useful – Castrooms is a bit of software designed for DJs or indeed anyone doing live performances to a virtual audience, and which presents everyone listening to / watching said performance as a massive WALL OF AUDIENCE in front of the performer so as to give them a better sense of presence and feedback when putting on a show. This is a really good idea, which is eerily similar to technology that The Pleasance Theatre were experimenting with during lockdown, which makes me wonder whether it’s in any way connected – anyway, if you do stuff that involves ‘streaming comedy or music or theatre or whatever to a reasonable audience’ and you would like to deepen the connection between perform and said audience then, well, HERE HAVE THIS.
  • Songwritings: I stumbled across this earlier this week on Twitter and I LOVE IT – this is an occasional newsletter by two people who I think work in advermarketingPR (but don’t hold it against them, they seem nice) and who every now and again collaborate to make a song. Nick Asbury writes words, and Kate van den Borgh sets them to music, and they share the resulting songs and thoughts about the creative process each time they make something, and the latest one is genuinely really rather beautiful and made me want to hear more.
  • An Auction of Stuff from Tron: I saw Tron at the Cinema with my mum in Swindon in the early-80s, and it honestly changed my life – not in the sense that it motivated me to pursue a career in, say, programming or graphic design (lol career!), but in the sense that it was the first time that I realised that I would probably be happier inside a machine than outside, and that perhaps this whole ‘meat’ thing was a mistake. You may or may not have any sort of personal connection to the original film, but you will almost certainly be vaguely aware of its incredibly strong sense of style and aesthetic and the neon and the costumes and the light cycles and the mad Jai Alai-variant game that they play…SUCH A GREAT FILM! Anyway, this links you to a bunch of stuff currently for sale online – lots have between 1-3 weeks left to run, as far as I can tell and so you have PLENTY OF TIME to peruse them and work out what you’re going to spend your kids’ nonexistent inheritance on. Concept art, frames from the film…there is SO MUCH wonderful material here, and there’s a lot of stuff where the starting bid is $0, so it’s entirely possible that you might be able to get your hands on something without having to sell a kidney to do so.

By Xiangni Song

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER IT WOULD IN FACT BE MORALLY ACCEPTABLE TO JUST CULL EVERYONE INVOLVED WITH THE CURRENT INCARNATION OF THE TORY PARTY, INCLUDING THE WIDER UK MEDIA SYSTEM THAT ENABLES THEM, BECAUSE IT’S BECOMING INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT THEY ARE ALL DREADFUL CNUTS WITH LITERALLY NO REDEEMING FEATURES WHATSOEVER AND, Y’KNOW, THERE ARE SOME PRETTY STRONG UTILITARIAN ARGUMENTS WE COULD DEPLOY IF PRESSED, PT.2:      

  • Bloom: Audio erotica has been a thing for a few years now – pretty sure I’ve featured at least one company making SEXY PODCASTS for you to enjoy here in the past – but that’s almost certainly set to explode thanks to the INFINITE CONTENT FLYWHEEL allowed by generative AI; which is exactly where Bloom comes in. The platform promises to offer a range of SPICY CONTENT augmented by AI chatbots which reflect the personalities and kinks and desires of the most popular characters from the platforms stories, which will let you talk filth to whichever hunk you prefer (and, eventually, let you ‘talk’ to them with AI voice simulation, although I don’t think that that’s live yet) – I confess to not having spent much time with this, partly because, well, I don’t personally feel the need to listen to audiobongo, but also because the site is pretty heavily paygated (you only get a couple of stories to listen to for free, and any chat beyond the third interaction needs ‘credits’) and it’s also (unsurprisingly) VERY much focused at the heterosexual woman market and I don’t personally really want to listen to some breathless discussion of how ‘she tasted the nectar of his forbidden hardness’. You, though, might be DESPERATE for exactly this sort of content – I neither know nor care about your proclivities! – and so, you know, ENJOY.
  • The StayCay: Another link which is SO 2020 (this one via Rina), The StayCay is a gorgeous example of ‘building an online ‘space’ using freely-available and non-obvious tools’, specifically in this case doing so via Google Sheets – there was a spate of people creating ‘hangout’-type environments during the pandemic using the ‘shared documents’ functionality of the GSuite, but I think this is by far the most involved and well-realised and thought out, although I am personally saddened by the fact that it’s basically all about how cool crypto is which rather lessens its whimsical appeal in my eyes. Still, this really is a proper labour of love and it’s really pleasing to explore and see the care that’s gone into designing, making and maintaining this shared space. I STRONGLY BELIEVE that every single company should create one of these spaces as a sort of unmonitored digital hangout for staff, and if any of you would like to pay me loads of money to do a really half-ar$ed job of setting such a thing up for you then, well, YOU KNOW WHERE I AM.
  • The Tomb of Rameses I: Do you want to explore the inside of the tomb of one of Ancient Egypt’s rulers? Would you like to do so without suffering the horrors of international air travel and the attentions of 10million artefact-peddlers attempting to sell you a pewter model of the Great Pyramid? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is a rather wonderful project which has photographed the interior of the Tomb of Rameses I and made it available to navigate via a Google StreetView-esque interface, complete with all sorts of explanatory annotations – you can either choose the guided tour or to ‘freely explore’ the temple, and while the latter is best for actually learning stuff there’s something genuinely cool and slightly-Indiana-Jones-y about the ability to navigate the tomb’s tunnels and the torchlight effect the software applies to your field of vision. The only thing that could make this better, to my mind, would be some sort of ‘OH GOD THERE’S A MUMMY’-style Easter Egg, but I concede that that’s possibly not the historically-accurate vibe that the creators were going for.
  • Stay In Shrek’s Swamp: I wouldn’t normally link to something which is literally just ‘a PR stunt by Airbnb’, but I’ll make an exception for this specific promo because, well, IT’S SHREK!!! WHO DOESN’T LOVE SHREK?!?! NO FCUKER, etc! As part of its semi-regular ‘let’s mock up a location from a popular entertainment property and make it available as a very short-term let, and by so doing rinse the PR!’ activity, Airbnb has created a version of Shrek’s Swamp somewhere in Scotland, which will be made available to rent for a limited period in this Autumn/Winter – booking opens on 13 October, so I suggest you bookmark this now and set a reminder, because otherwise this will be 100% booked out by the sort of weirdos who want to use this as an opportunity to film disturbingly-well-located Shrek-related bongo (look, it’s a disgusting concept and I am sorry for raising it but, also, that is EXACTLY what will happen).
  • Sent You A Song: I have long thought that there’s a missing…thing (sorry, this is very inarticulate but we have run out of milk and it’s 903am and I am currently torn between needing to keep caffeinated if I am ever going to finish this thing and knowing that if I take 10m to run to the shop my ability to finish this even vaguely on time will be utterly banjaxed, and you don’t actually need this internal monologue digression, do you?) in modernity when it comes to cute and pleasing ways to share music with people – you can send a link, fine, but it lacks a certain poetry. Sent You A Song is a lovely little project which attempts to make sharing music with an individual a bit special again – what I particularly like about this is that by using the site to share a track, you add your selection and accompanying message both to the site’s homepage and the accompanying playlist, which makes the whole thing a lovely accumulation of songs that mean something to people, and which they have wanted to share with others. The trail of messages is a beautiful touch – it looks like this has been most popular in Brasil to date, based on the fact most of the messages are in Portuguese, and the music that people have sent is wonderfully-eclectic. Basically this is GREAT.
  • FontGuessr: I think this might be the hardest game I have ever featured on Curios – NO OF COURSE I CAN’T GUESS WHAT THE FCUKING FONT IS, WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM SOME SORT OF TYPOGRAPHICAL RAINMAN?! Ahem. Anyway, those of you who are actual designers and typographers might find this significantly more fun and less challenging than I do.
  • Has Your Book Been Scraped?: You may have seen a whole bunch of authors online getting understandably upset this week at the discovery that their works have apparently been ingested into OpenAI’s training corpus for its LLMs – The Athletic first ran this story early in the year, but it’s been resurrected by the fact that they have now released a search engine which lets anyone check whether their works have been included in the Books3 dataset (which is what speculation suggests has been used to train GPTx) and as such whether they form part of the training data for the current most popular LLM. The main link takes you to the search engine, but you can read more about it The Atlantic’s project here – the question that remains, though, is to what extent can any of these authors expect to have any sort of legal redress against OpenAI and others, and how might the various lawsuits currently being engaged work in practice? Obviously the answer is ‘lol noone knows this is literally unprecedented’, but if you’re interested in delving into some of the likely legal arguments then you could do worse than read this rundown which does a neat job of explaining why ‘fair use’ is a very slippery idea, and why it might turn out that there’s a perfectly compelling argument that OpenAI might make to suggest that at best authors might be entitled to a couple of quid and a pat on the head (briefly: I can totally see a legally-sound argument to suggest that the best equivalence to what we are talking about here is someone ingesting an author’s entire body of work and then using that body of work to inform their own subsequent thinking and writing and doing – and there is no way in hell that we would suggest that the ‘someone’ here owes anything to the author in question other than the RRP of their body of work).
  • Mused: It’s fair to say that museums in the UK don’t always do the very best digital work, often through no fault of their own – I know what public sector digital procurement is like, and I know what ‘attempting to get funding for anything’ is like, and I know that there is often a…disconnect between the digital abilities and inclinations of staff at the more operational end of the pyramid and those at the top who tend to be a bit more…traditional, let’s say – so I don’t want to be mean about this new effort by the V&A… Mused is aimed at 10-14 year olds (placing me quite firmly outside its target demographic, so feel free to take everything I say from hereon in as the ramblings of an old and out-of-touch moron who doesn’t understand d1ck) – so why make it a website? How many 10-14 year olds visit websites? It’s obviously intended to frame the V&A’s exhibits and work in the context of kid-friendly concepts like gaming, film and music – so why’s it all so static? Ach, I feel bad writing this stuff so I will stop, but it feels like a huge missed opportunity – still, if you have a 10-14 year old person in your life who you think might like a quiz about Minecraft delivered by one of the UK’s national museums then, well, IT’S THEIR CHRISTMAS COME EARLY!
  • Heste Nettet: I think that this is one of my favourite stories of the week, possibly the year, possibly the decade. I stumbled across this while doing a bunch of reading around AI and stuff (such is the misery of my ‘professional’ existence) – while so doing I happened to read this Bloomberg newsletter, which included this astonishing fact about Danish language AI development: because there’s a relatively-msall quantity of Danish on the web, and a relatively small number of sources, a significant part of the training corpus for Danish-language LLMs comes from Heste Nettet, a Danish forum which over the past decades has basically become a sort of universal catch-all platform for conversations about literally every aspect of Danish life (as forums are often wont to do) – except the forum was originally designed to be about horses, and horse ownership, and as a result there’s an awful lot of equine content in the training data, which means that “There is definitely a horse bias…If you want to know something about horses, it’s definitely in there.”  I LOVE THIS SO SO SO MUCH, in particular the idea (completely untested, but I am going to presume that it’s true) that the long arc of conversation with AI in Danish will ALWAYS tend towards horses: “Yes, that’s nice Dave, and I am sure that you do want to know more about the document you’ve just fed me to ingest and summarise – but wouldn’t you like to know more about optimal forelock length?” Anyway, the original link takes you to the Danish forum in question which, I concede, probably isn’t hugely compelling to you, but I love this story so so so much and I hope it has pleased you to the same degree.
  • Hearts and Minds: Also via Giuseppe, this is an excellent piece of datavisualisation (bizarrely a bit of CSR work by the IKEA Foundation) which demonstrates how attitudes towards immigration have changed across Europe over the past few years – and which pleasingly demonstrates how in general people are significantly more pro-immigration than might be thought based on some of the vile media and political rhetoric being spewed at the moment. This covers 10 countries in Europe, including the UK, and the data’s from the ODI and as such pretty unimpeachable.
  • Be A Bee: Non-Anglos amongst you may be aware of Ricola, a Swiss company which for nearly a century has been manufacturing sweets flavoured with Swiss herbs – I don’t think they sell them in the UK, but I have very strong flashback memories of these things being foisted on me as a kid by well-meaning elderly Italian relatives and realising at a young age that it turns out that I really don’t like the taste of Jaegermeister (they really do taste of Jaeger, I promise). Anyway, this is an international promo site which is designed both to promote the sweets and the brand’s partnership with a doubtless-incredibly-famous Korean person (sorry, I don’t recognise the face/name – is it a BTS person?) – it’s a game in which you’re a bee, and you’re tasked with flying around some alpine meadows and collecting herbs or somesuch, but, honestly, it is SO RELAXING that if you’re anything like me you’ll spend 10 minutes just sort of flying around and enjoying the apian splendour of it all. Mobile-only, but this really is very nicely done indeed and I’m not joking about the ‘soothing’ thing.
  • National Populations As Joy Division Album Graphs: A horrible descriptor which almost certainly means nothing to you, so click the link and get enlightened (these are glorious, honestly, and some of them would look rather nice as posters I think).
  • Gorgeous PixelArt Cars: The link actually takes you to the Twitter account of a games studio called ‘Etherfield’, but at the moment they seem to be posting nothing but really beautiful little 8-bit representations of old cars – if you’ve ever wanted a pixel representation of 1978 Toyota Celica (and, honestly, which of us can say they haven’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then this will be your paradise, your Elysian Fields, your happy place.
  • The Tenth Watch: If you’re the sort of person who has been online for A LONG TIME then you will also be the sort of person who knows about the legendary history of the pitch drop when it comes to online video streaming and its use in pioneering the idea of a webcam feed waiting for SOMETHING to happen – now the University of Queensland in Australia is running a livestream of its 10th pitch drop experiment (the last one fell in April 2014), so if you would like to stare blankly at a video feed in the hope that something, anything will happen then, well, ENJOY!
  • Sun Terraces: I really like this – a collaborative Dutch project which seeks to map all the places in the Netherlands where there’s a bit of public space that gets the sun – whether that’s a pub garden or a public park, this is just a superb and really useful resource that feels like it should be trivial to replicate pretty much anywhere (or at least, anywhere where everyone has the same sort of general spirit of commuty as the Dutch, which perhaps isn’t as common as one might wish). Conversely, if you’d rather avoid the sun while travelling, then this is a similar tool which tells you which side of the train you ought to sit on to prevent getting blinded – I don’t know why I love these things so much but I really do.
  • Bihrmann: Kris described this as ‘possibly the perfect personal website’ and I don’t know that I can disagree with his assessment – I have no idea whatsoever who this belongs to what it is for or why it exists, or indeed what most of the content it hosts is about, but I am slightly in love with the aesthetic and the maximalist nature of the endeavour. MORE OF THE CONFUSING AND LARGELY-POINTLESS-SEEMING WEB, PLEASE!
  • Planet Destroyer: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is this SUPERB clicker game which I have had open in a tab all week and which I can confirm is incredibly cathartic – there are few things more satisfying when having A Professional Moment than clicking frantically on a little CG planet and watching it blow up (no, that’s totally normal, I don’t know what you mean).

By Hiroshi Sato

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A GORGEOUS END-OF-SUMMER LOUNGE AND 80s-TYPE SELECTION COMPILED BY BURNOUT SUMMER! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Hallowe’en 2023: Because I appreciate that some of you like doing the whole ‘it’s autumn! Let’s make everything orange and cinnamon-tasting!’ thing.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Unicorn Colour Theory: “Transmutation of thought into touchable color. Colorbending is about encouraging connection thru touch, and the joy that color brings!” Does that description speak to you? No, of course it doesn’t, it’s utter gibberish! Still, if you’ve ever wanted to see someone make art with ‘liquid crayons’ (no, me neither, but apparently they are a thing) then this is very much the Insta feed for you.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  •  Let Them East Oysters: We start the longreads this week with what I have to warn you is a relatively-chewy bit of writing – Lorna Finlayson in the LRB writes about animal rights and applied ethics more generally (while the ostensible focus of the piece is on the animal rights question, the piece is really a LOT broader than that) as she considers two new(ish) books on the subject by Peter Singer (see Curios passim) and Martha Nussbaum, and OH GOD IS THIS INTERESTING. Ok, fine, I perhaps have a slight bias towards this stuff as it maps onto a significant proportion of my MSc, but these are also objectively fascinating questions – how ought we behave? How do we decide? And how much of a theoretical fcuk ought we give about anything else while so doing? – that Finlayson analyses with intelligence and humour (honestly, you forget quite how…funny some of the discussion around ethics can be, silly as that probably sounds). The central questions here revolve around utilitarianism vs deontology, the question of ‘speciesism’, self-actualisation and ‘higher goods’ and all sorts of other thorny stuff – I personally think that Finlayson slightly-traduces some of Singer’s arguments in the piece, or at least doesn’t present them entirely fairly, but overall this is a WONDERFUL bit of writing about some hard fundamental questions about How We Should Be that I promise you really is worth taking the time to think through.
  • The Fateful 90s: For about the first third of this essay I was in awe at its analysis and dissection of a lot of 90s political and economic thinking, and how it shaped Where We Are Now – and then it goes quite weirdly right-wing in ways I don’t agree with towards the end. That said, regardless of the extent to which I don’t agree with some of the intensely-Republican (and frankly quite racist-feeling) assertions made towards the article’s coda, the way it presents economic theory and the rise of the web and the broken promises of much of the early-to-mid-90s political (and social, and technological) rhetoric of the US is really interesting (particularly if you’re old enough to remember it the first time round).
  • What Makes Elon Tick?: So I read the biography and wrote it up for work – SPOILER ALERT: it is a very, very dull book which is written very badly and which seems to take almost everything Musk says at face value without at any point asking any really interesting or challenging questions, and which really doesn’t pay enough attention to the people who for the past couple of decades have been Musk’s influencers and what looking at them might tell us about him. This, though, is not about the biography – in the Guardian, David Runciman writes about his experience of following all the same people as Elon does on Twitter, and what that might tell us about the man and his worldview – obviously this is an…unsifficiant mechanism by which to GET INSIDE ELON’S HEAD, but I promise you that the conclusions drawn in this piece are significantly more interesting and trenchant than those Isaacson gets to after 620-fcuking-pages.
  • The Sam Altman Profile: My appetite for profiles of ‘great men’ (particularly ‘great men of technology’) is VERY small right now, but I reluctantly read this profile of OpenAI’s Sam Altman in case it contained any VITAL INSIGHTS – it doesn’t really, unless you count ‘wow, this person really has incredibly shallow points of view when it comes to the really hard questions’ and ‘this person probably shouldn’t be determining the future path of R&D in this incredibly morally and intellectually complex field, and yet, well, HERE WE ARE!’, but I appreciate that I have spent a LOT more time reading about this man and this fcuking industry than you probably have (this isn’t some sort of brag, to be clear, more a sad cry for help) and as such you my find this a bit more enlightening. Altman comes across as a bit of a d1ck, but only in that nonspecific sort of ‘smooth-faced, monied Thielian protege’ fashion rather than anything more pointy – but, honestly, can we PLEASE have a different type of guy (non gender-specific, for avoidance of doubt)  in charge of stuff in the future, please? I am very, very bored of this flavour of man. BONUS LINK: if you’re not familiar with the TESCREAL acronym detailing the broad belief systems underpinning the current AI movement which mean we should be very fcuking sceptical of the Altman position, this is a very good overview.
  • GPT Goes Multimodal: Or at least it will do soon – this is the OpenAI announcement of its forthcoming GPT update (in the next month or so, apparently), which will let you interact with its models via text-to-voice and, more excitedly, introduce image analysis to the Beta of GPT4 (this stuff will only be for the paying few, at least initially, although it will come to Bing soon enough too) – this is already available on Bard, but given how much better the OpenAI LLM is than the current Google one I’m expecting this to be a significant upgrade. If you’d like an idea of What This Means, you might find this post detailing an early user’s experiences useful in terms of outlining what’s possible – and if you’d like something genuinely mindblowing, this ‘sketch-to-website’ demo is pretty mad. I know that there are quite good reasons for this, but I am moderately-annoyed that OpenAI is nerfing the tech from providing assessments or analyses of images of people – I REALLY like the idea of making a ‘roast me’ mirror, which they won’t let me do the BAST4RDS.
  • Welcome To The AI Infinistream: Or, “How AI is enabling Chinese livestreams to create digital avatars of them which can shill tat 24/7 for that sweet, sweet affiliate revenue’ – welcome to the future in which we all have digital versions of ourselves who we set to slave earning pennies in the affiliate mines! I appreciate that livestream shopping is very much not a Western phenomenon, but I am slightly curious as to whether people will still have an appetite for watching infinite QVC when the presenters are AIs – if they do, I am probably going to downgrade my position on humanity stocks from ‘HOLD’ to ‘SELL’.
  • Zuckerberg on AI: Yes, I know that I said that I didn’t care about FOUNDERS AND THEIR VISIONS, and that I didn’t really want to read anymore profiles of tech people, but this relatively-rare interview with Zuckerberg in The Verge, which focuses on Meta’s AI announcements from this week and What They Mean, is more interesting than most, mainly because it offers a clear picture of how Zuckerberg sees generative AI fitting into the Facestagram ecosystem and the broader metaverse bet (don’t laugh!) – there’s also a bit in there about AI and training data that really made me laugh from a ‘wow, you really have been media trained haven’t you Mark?’ perspective. Basically this won’t tell you anything startling, but I think it’s useful to read it if you want to (or, worse, need to) have a point of view of Meta’s current position in the AI race/bunfight.
  • Confessions of an AI Writer: Vauhini Vara writes for WIRED on their experience of writing with AI – Vara wrote one of the earliest published ‘cowritten with an AI’ pieces in 2021, and this article looks at how her feelings about ‘collaboration’ with AI have changed, and the extent to which as the tech has improved over the past two years its creative outputs have become…less interesting. I’ve touched on this in this newsletter a lot over the past year or so, but I think it’s visible to anyone who’s been paying attention to this space at all over the past few years – as with anything relating to DATA, the more you have the more your results tend to the middle of the bell curve, and the more smoothed and homogenous they become, and I think we’re only about a year or so away from a reasonably-noisy ‘make AI weird again’ movement (feel free to point and laugh at how wrong I was about this in 2024, by the way).
  • Monkey Laundering: LOL AT THE NFTs! You will have seen the article doing the rounds over the past few weeks which claims that NFTs have lost 95% of their value – inspired by that story, Ed Zitron pens a decent summary of ‘where we are now with the racist monkey jpegs’ which feels like it should serve as a neat summary coda to the whole movement. I still believe that there’s something interesting in the concept of a DAO, which Zitron very much doesn’t, but otherwise this is an enjoyable read (although perhaps less so if you’re That One Guy in a group of friends who dropped £10k on a Logan Paul gif in 2020 and is feeling a bit sheepish three years on).
  • The World of TikDoxing: Another ‘wow the future is weird and I am not sure I like it’ link (is there any other sort in Web Curios?) – did you know that there’s a new ‘thing’ on the platform where people are demonstrating their ‘OSINT Chops’ by identifying strangers in the background of online content and using a bunch of available tools such as facial recognition database PimEyes (see Curios passim) to find out their real identities, and document their skill in the search in their very own TikTok vids? No, I didn’t either, but now I do and it feels…somehow not ok that TikTok claims that this is totally fine and legitimate content to post, although on the flipside I suppose there’s technically nothing ‘wrong’ happening here, nothing illegal, and this is just another example of social mores butting up hard against new tech and noone really quite knowing what we’re meant to do about anything. Someone really, really ought to write a Digital Debrett’s for kids to get given when they are 10, to educate them about what, honestly, it really isn’t cool to do to people online – actually that’s not a wholly terrible idea, is it?
  • The Airbnb Detective: This was SO much more interesting than I expected it to be – a profile of Airbnb’s Naba Banerjee, who’s the person responsible for helping Airbnb develop the tech that lets it identify people who are planning to host a party in their hosts’’ apartment, and how exactly they went about developing the tech. I appreciate that some of you might read this and think ‘SHE IS A COP HOW DARE YOU CELEBRATE HER’ which, you know, fine, but this is more of a ‘wow that’s a really interesting account of the technical and practical challenges involved in solving a specific problem’ than it is a ‘GO AIRBNB PROTECT THE LANDLORDS’ piece fwiw.
  • Masterclass Is Fcuked: I’d totally forgotten about the existence of Masterclass until I read this piece – in case you have too, let me refresh your memory. Masterclass is the training platform that was ubiquitous during lockdown and which offers the opportunity to learn specific skills from VERY FAMOUS EXPERTS – so, I don’t know, direction with Martin Scorsese, say, or fisting with the C0ck Destroyers (tbh I don’t think either of these were ever offered, but you get the gist) – for a fee. You may have wondered how the economics of this work – turns out, according to this article, they really don’t! This contains some astonishing details of insane profligacy, not least the detail about how they literally built a whole apartment set for Natalie Portman to deliver her ‘acting’ Masterclass on – I don’t think I will ever cease to be amazed at the way in which our current business model for so many things appears to be ‘throw an awful lot of money at people who at no point have demonstrated that they know what to do with it, and watch as they come up with interesting and innovative ways to p1ss it all away’.
  • LARPing and Violent Extremism: Ok, this is neither a longread nor particularly fresh, but I came across it this week and it made me laugh SO MUCH – did you know that the FBI produced a small guide a few months back to help its agents distinguish between ACTUAL TERRORISTS and, er, people enjoying a nice live action roleplay session? Would you like to read it? YOU’RE WELCOME! Honestly, this is proper beyond parody stuff.
  • Domain Names: A lovely Rest of World article looking at the tiny nations whose internet domains earn them big money – you’ll already know about the Christmas Islands and Tuvalu, but I hadn’t previously considered where .ai domains are registered – turns out it’s Anguilla, which now receives ⅓ of its entire monthly budget from revenues from domain names. This is lovely, and includes a rundown of all the tiny places making reasonable bank from urls.
  • Why Does Everyone Swear So Much In The Witcher 3?: Ok, you’ll need to be either really into videogame development or a big fan of the Witcher 3 to really get the most out of this, but if you tick either of those boxes then you will adore this piece in Eurogamer which takes a surprisingly deep dive into the process that led to the game’s wonderful collection of profane incidental dialogue.
  • Moving Beaches: Did you know that there is a massive international market in sand, and that loads of the beaches we think are natural aren’t in fact natural at all? This is a super-interesting read about something to which I have given literally NO thought (to whit, if you need sand, where do you get it from? And is all sand the same?) but which is a genuinely fascinating topic (and particularly-relevant for a variety of depressing environmental reasons).
  • Murdoch: There will be a lot written about Rupert Murdoch and his empire in the wake of his stepping back from NewsCorp, but I found this article by Conrad Black in Unherd (sorry, but) particularly interesting – not because it’s revealing, because it’s not, or because it’s well-written, because it’s not, but because of the insight it gives into the banality of thought of the very, very rich. Black’s observations on his old media rival are bland to the point of risibility, but contain the odd standout line – such as the frankly mad statement that “I’ve never had the impression that he is much interested in politics, other than in how they affect him, or culture, or hobbies”, which does rather make one wonder exactly what Conrad Black thinks ‘politics’ is all about.
  • Painting With AI: I thought this was a lovely piece in the New York Times, which acts as an interesting counterpoint to the earlier article about co-creating prose with The Machine – in this, contemporary US painter David Salle ‘collaborates’ with a specially-trained AI to generate a new work in his style, with the process documented throughout with images and commentary, explaining how the artist worked alongside the software to define and refine its outputs; I find this sort of Centaur-process-type-investigation-stuff (god I’m such a writer!) absolutely fascinating, regardless of the eventual quality of the outputs achieved, and this is no exception.
  • The Accidental Art of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater: I have, it’s fair to say, a reasonably high tolerance for stuff that might reasonably be considered ‘a load of pretentious spaff’ – that said, this article tested even my patience. That said, I also absolutely loved it, so see what you think. Jeremy Klemin writes about the obscure subculture that exists within the fandom of classic skateboarding videogame series Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, specifically around the concept of ‘improvisational’ play in which a player tries to achieve super-long combos while eschewing the ‘optimal’ routes set out by the level designers and by so doing achieves a weird, balletic state of ‘flow’ within the gamespace…look, there’s no way around it, this really is HYPERW4NKY but it’s also so so interesting if you’re curious about ideas of space and place and movement in virtual worlds, and how Borges relates to a Playstation2-era classic (so so so w4nky, honestly).
  • Watches: A little while ago my friend Paul arranged for us to go on a tour around Hatton Garden, specifically some of the locations rendered infamous by the gold heist that took place a few years back – it’s still a genuinely odd part of London, one of those weird ‘cities within a city’ (see also: the inns of court, every single London university, all the big markets) where you can see some genuinely weird stuff (and an awful lot of men looking INCREDIBLY furtive – selling – and an awful lot of other men looking very deliberately conspicuous – guarding). This is a BRILLIANT profile of the watch trade in Hatton Garden – the people, the patter, the prices – and frankly I now want someone to do a (good, though) film set in this exact milieu (but noone tell Guy Ritchie, please).
  • The Last Nazis: Ordinarily ‘GQ Magazine writes about Nazi hunters’ isn’t the sort of thing I’d bother to read or link to, but this is a wonderful, sensitive and far-more-restrained-than-expected piece of writing by Tom Lamont, who profiles the German officials engaged in seeking to track down the last remaining people who can be proven to have had practical, personal involvement in the Holocaust and bring them to some sort of justice. This is, honestly, such a brilliant article which raises all the right questions about responsibility and where it can reasonably be said to end, the likely limits of personal knowledge, and what we are doing when we pursue justice. So much of this deals with the mechanics and logistics of horror, the very practical ‘banality of evil’ – it reminded me a lot of Amis’s novel ‘The Zone of Interest’, whose characters are in the main Nazis engaged in the administration of a concentration camp, and which features a line which kept coming back to me as I read this; I paraphrase slightly, but there’s a certain scene in which two Nazi officers are walking to some evening function at the Governor’s mansion overlooking the camp, seeing the billowing smoke from the chimneys, and one says to the other “You know, Hans, without the proper context I can see how this might look entirely reprehensible”.
  • Ballard: I have always loved Ballard’s writing, ever since I was a teen, and personally-speaking I’ve always thought of him as rather a great prose stylist; turns out my opinion isn’t necessarily universally-held, but it’s defended nicely here by Tom McCarthy who writes persuasively about all the idiosyncratic qualities that made his works and the way he wrote them great. There’s a certain thematic callback here to the ‘writing with AI’ piece and the data-led bellcurve, should you wish to perceive it.
  • Homesick Chernobyl: I thought this essay – about Chernobyl and home and place and memory and addiction and coming home – was absolutely beautiful, and I think you will too.
  • I Remember Arthur: This is all about suicide, basically, which may or may not determine whether you want to read it – for those that do, though, it’s by Kevin Sampsell and it’s about his friend Arthur who killed himself, and reflections on why that was and how that feels, and this took me quite a long time to read because I had to stop at various points to basically void myself with tears but, that small caveat aside, I think it is wonderful.
  • Man Called Fran: Finally this week, a short story about plumbing. I promise you that this is PERFECT and frankly it ought to win awards. PLEASE READ THIS..

By Molly Bounds

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 22/09/23

Reading Time: 34 minutes

I was going to try and write the intro in the style of Russell Brand this week as a sort of ‘topical’ riff, but then I realised that a) that wouldn’t actually be funny in the slightest given the horrible stuff he’s alleged to have done; and b) that the rest of Curios is already written in a style that might best be described as ‘somewhat overdone’ and that you probably didn’t need me doing a tuppeny-gorblimey act on top of all the garbage that is to come. You should be grateful, really – think how much WORSE this could have been!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you shouldn’t EVER trust ANYONE who wears trousers that tight.

By Julie Tuyet Curtiss

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC WITH TYCHO’S SUNRISE SET FROM THIS YEAR’S BURNING MAN, WHICH AS IT DOES EACH YEAR MAKES ME BRIEFLY THINK THAT IT MIGHT BE QUITE NICE TO GO BEFORE I THINK A BIT MORE AND REALISE IT WOULD IN FACT BE DREADFUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOUR FIRST RESPONSE TO THE BRAND STUFF IS ‘YES, BUT HOW CAN I USE THIS TO FCUK THE BBC?’ THEN YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, PT.1:  

  • The Artificial Client: Those of you who work in advermarketingpr (or associated, adjacent, similarly-made-up ‘jobs’) will be aware of the unique and particular pain that comes from having ideas that you have SLAVED over (or, more likely, come up with in one of the endless, airless ‘brainstorms’ that constitute the risible pantomime that is ‘agency life’) considered, assessed and then finally dismissed out of hand by some double-figure-IQ-moron who’s spent the whole presentation staring at their phone and wouldn’t know decent creative if it bit them on the ar$e – it’s GREAT, isn’t it? Still, I appreciate that not all of you are lucky enough to have experienced this particular joy – but worry not! Now everyone can have their creative babies eviscerated before their very eyes thanks to this fun little AI-based toy/game thing, created by Dentsu in Amsterdam – click the link, choose the client persona you’d like to have analysing your work, upload the document you’d like critiqued and GO! There are three different critical viewpoints you can access – the ‘ruthless critic’, the ‘confused creative’ and the ‘idealistic dreamer’ – and they will happily analyse your UI design, your identity design or your TVC script in SECONDS to tell you exactly what is wrong with it, and even if you don’t happen to have a suitable bit of work to hand you can get the site to generate something for you which will then be eviscerated by the digital peanut gallery. This is obviously a silly toy, but it’s fun and nicely-made, and has a pleasing degree of polish to it, and whilst you OBVIOUSLY shouldn’t take any notice of anything that these AI personas tell you (no, you ARE a talented creative! Don’t listen to them!) it’s a decent reminder of the way in which you can use LLMs to critique and analyse written work and elicit feedback.
  • AI De Bono: Speaking of creativity – SEAMLESS! – you will all OBVIOUSLY be aware of Edward de Bono and his collection of multicoloured hats as a series of tools to develop creative ideas (in the unlikely event that you’re not – WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIVES?! – you can learn about the theory here); if it’s a technique that you use as part of the creative process, you might find this digital prototype thing useful. Matt Webb has been playing around with generative AI and has created this website which features a selection of rooms, each corresponding to one of de Bono’s different hats (you know what? I am sure it’s a decent theory and I am sure it makes all sorts of sense and can be genuinely helpful, but, equally, I really can’t get past the fcuking hats) and as such to a different technique for developing and interrogating ideas. Each room gives you the chance to talk through your thinking with a different AI interlocutor, each embodying a different way of thinking about ideas, which you can navigate between using the arrows in the bottom-right – so the Yellow room will give you positive feedback, the Blue room will interrogate the presentation of the idea, the White room is all about gathering facts…you get the idea. This is, at heart, just a selection of different conversations with a pre-prompted LLM, but, again, I think there’s something interesting about using the conversational interface as a means of interrogating one’s thinking.
  • Prices: Ok, this is…quite niche, and is only likely to be of practical use to you if you’re currently living in Austria – are any of you currently living in Austria? – but I really really like the thinking behind the project and figure that it might be something that could inspire similar projects elsewhere. You can read a full rundown of what this is and why it exists here but, in summary, inflation in Austria is, muchlike in the rest of Europe, going somewhat mental, and as such food prices are a real concern for many people. In response to this, the Austrian government committed to maintaining a database tracking food prices at different supermarkets across various product categories, to help citizens keep track of changing costs and to guard against price gouging by retailers…but they kept saying it was too hard, and would take too long, to do in any meaningful way. So one Mario Zechner decided to take matters into his own hands, and used all the various supermarket website APIs to set up his own price tracking website for literally every single grocery item sold by all the shops, and in so doing discovered that multiple retailers were colluding when it came to price rises, that they were taking advantage of ‘shrinkflation’ to screw consumers while raising prices, and a whole load of other stuff besides – which was picked up by the press, and let to an apparent shift in pricing behaviour by the supermarkets when the story was taken up by the Austrian competition authority. Which is, fine not HUGELY exciting as a story, but it is A VERY GOOD THING, and a lovely example of how nothing is ever as expensive, slow and complex as government (and specifically government digital departments) like to make out it is. Can someone do this in the UK, please? I know I ask this every week, but this one really is a good cause.
  • Collage Diffusion: Ok, ok, this is admittedly a *bit* crap, but I really like the potential inherent in the tech – it’s basically a layered AI image generator, which lets you create…er…layers within an image, making for a slightly more reactive and easy-to-control creative process – giving you a far greater degree of granular control over the individual elements within a composition (you don’t actually need me to explain this to you, do you? Er, sorry). Except this is running off a model that’s a couple of generations old, it feels like, and so everything you produce with it looks a *bit* like a potato, but this feels like it’s a feature that will end up coming to the other platforms sooner rather than later. Oh, and seeing as we’re on AI image generation, here’s the announcement about DallE-3 that’s launching in a few weeks’ time – the main takeaways here are the fact that it looks a whole load shinier, it can seemingly generate readable text, it has been guardrail hard to stop you creating images of famous people (BOO) or images ‘in the style of’ living artists (A Good Thing), and it’s apparently going to be easier to tweak individual elements within a generated image thanks to the interface being integrated with GPT. So that’s nice.
  • The History of Ukraine: It’s astonishing to think the war in Ukraine has been going on for 18 months now, and that it might well continue for at least as long again. This site is a celebration of the country’s history, presenting the events that have shaped Ukraine over the course of human history in a rather lovely timeline, focusing in particular on ‘previously unknown and unpublished findings about Ukraine that are not found in textbooks or Wikipedia.  All materials on the website are the result of years of research in European archives, letters, and newspapers that were long ignored by “old school” historians.The value of these materials is that they prove that Ukraine has always been a full-fledged subject of European political relations. They also highlight Ukraine’s image as a victorious country with a rich history, culture, and achievements, which disproves the propagandistic narratives of our neighbor and the imposed image of a suffering country.” This is a gorgeous piece of webdesign.
  • We’re Safety Now Haven’t We: It’s rare that I find cause to celebrate the communications efforts of a national health and safety executive, but I think we should ALL applaud the work being done by the US’s Consumer Product Safety Commission in guardian the safety of North Americans via the medium of song. Yes, that’s right, while your BORING and DULL and STAID government communicates to you via tedious leaflets and yawnsome public information films, over in the US the CPSC has instead decided to communicate its ‘keep safe, don’t die!’ messaging via the medium of an entire album’s worth of safety-focused bangers – honestly, I am not joking, these songs are…quite good! From the oldschool hip-hop of ‘Protect Yo Noggin’, a paean to the importance of wearing a helmet when on a bike or scooter, to the remarkably-polished pop of ‘Going Off Like Fireworks’ (unsurprisingly all about the importance of not shooting yourself in the face with a Roman Candle), there’s a full record’s worth of safety-related bangers to enjoy, and which you can download if you like so that you can listen to them ALL THE TIME. This is just brilliant, from the upsetting name to the copy on the Page (“Death by firework is bad”) and I applaud everyone involved in its creation.
  • Punta: What do we think about ‘digital nomads’ these days? Are we pro? It does rather feel like it’s slightly less socially acceptable in 2023 to sit in a hammock on a Caribbean beach, getting paid 10x the national average wage to phone in a content calendar while you’re waited on hand and foot by the local service economy, but, equally, it seems like there’s still a significant number of people for whom the lifestyle continues to be aspirational and appealing. If you happen to be one of them, you might find this app useful – Punta sells itself as a ‘digital nomad hub’, which basically lets anyone self-styling themselves as such set up a profile on which they can share details of the sort of work they do, their travel plans, connect with and message other likeminded folk, and generally BUILD COMMUNITY (or, inevitably, attempt to use the app as some sort of unofficial Tinder analogue). Which I’m sure sounds lovely, but all I can think of as I type this is of how perfect this seemingly is for anyone who wants to stalk, rob and potentially murder digital nomads – so, er, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE GUYS.
  • The Ig-Nobel Awards 2023: I missed this last week, meaning I am LATE with this link and I am SORRY. Still, if you’ve not already had your fill of the annual ‘the most stupid academic research conducted in the past 12 months’ rundown, click the link and revel in the beautiful, pointless wonder of the pursuit of esoteric knowledge as embodied by these 10 projects – my personal favourite, and which I really don’t think received enough attention, is the work which ‘used cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.’ WHY?!?!?! WHAT POSSIBLE BENEFIT COULD THERE BE TO KNOWING THAT?! Infuriatingly, the actual research paper in question here is behind a paywall, meaning that I am currently unable to find out what the answer is to the question which I can tell is going to cause me no end of low-grade psychic pain for the remainder of the day.
  • Tamashell: A website which catalogues the multifarious different Tamagotchi designs that have appeared over the decades since the battery-operated ‘pets’ first appeared on the market – obviously this will mainly appeal to any of you with an obsessive fixation on 90s electronic toy design and will, perhaps, not *quite* grab the rest of you as much, but I find the endeavour generally heartwarming and particularly enjoyed this, from the ‘About’ page: “I decided to create this website after finding that while the internet was chock full of images of Tamagotchis, there really wasn’t a single source where I could find all of the different designs in once place. Understanding that there are hundreds of different shell designs released in different regions all over the world, I knew this would be a significant undertaking, but I also knew that it was a worthwhile endeavor in order to share information not easily attained elsewhere.” YES IT IS A WORTHWHILE ENDEAVOUR! THIS IS WHAT THE WEB IS FOR!
  • Twilly: Inexplicable-but-shiny-luxe-videogame-corner! We’re back in the world of luxury goods websites, this time with Hermes and this rather pleasing little (mobile-only) webgame, in which you inexplicably play as…a piece of ribbon, which is equally-inexplicably blowing around the streets of New York – guide the ribbon as it travels through the nicely-rendered 3d cityscape, collect some stuff, get a score, don’t win a prize! This is totally pointless and I have no idea exactly who it’s aimed at or how the doubtless-brilliant minds behind it think it’s going to help them flog more perfume – as ever with these things, tbh, can someone who works in the industry maybe explain the ROI of this stuff to me please? – but it is VERY pretty (the moving subway trains are a nice touch) and a pleasing 3 minute distraction from whatever horrible things are happening in your day-to-day life.
  • Ramen Haus: Do you remember Rotating Sandwiches? OF COURSE YOU DO IT WON THE TINY AWARD IT IS NOW WORLD-FAMOUS FFS! Anyway, this is like that, except instead of rotating sandwiches you are instead presented with photographs of bowls of ramen, also spinning gently in the digital non-breeze.
  • SwipeWipe: This is a nice idea, and a potentially-useful tool to encourage you to declutter your phone’s camera roll. SwipeWipe is an app that introduces a Tinder-like interface to your photos – you get presented with them one at a time, and made to choose whether to swipe right to keep them or swipe left to delete them forever, forcing you to determine whether or not they SPARK JOY or not. Which seems like a nice little gimmick, but immediately made me think of a dark extension to this where every day your phone presents you with a pair of contacts, or apps, or files, and you are forced to choose which to keep and which to delete FOREVER, which I think would introduce a neat element of fear and jeopardy into the otherwise-mundane daily interaction with your device.
  • MSCHF x Reebok: On the one hand., I am slightly surprised that this is (afaict) the first big-name brand to collaborate with MSCHF on something; on the other, I am slightly surprised that they have done this as, to my mind at least, it rather cheapens their brand (but then again, what do I know? They are lauded as some of the most creative digital stunt people around at the moment, and I write an overlong newsletter to an audience of what I am fairly certain is tens of people, so perhaps I should just wind my neck in tbh). Anyway, MSCHF have partnered with Reebok to release a special edition of the company’s legendary ‘Pump’ trainer which instead of the traditional single pump (which as anyone who has ever actually seen a pair of the shoes in the wild can attest, makes literally NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER to the shoe’s fit) instead has NINE OF THE FCUKERS, meaning you can literally inflate any part of the shoe’s interior to your exact specifications and (probably) jump ten foot in the air or something. These look VERY silly, but in a knowing enough way that they will inevitably become fashion must-haves amongst a particular coterie of dreadful fashion cnuts.
  • Sh1trentals: OH YES. This is a great idea – although obviously it would be a nightmare to run and administer, for which reason I can’t imagine it’ll be a going concern for that long. Sh1tRentals is a website for renters to share information and details about bad rental properties and bad landlords, to help guard against exploitation and price gouging and generally, well, sh1tty behaviour on the part of the rentier class. To quote the site’s fouonder, “This website is about giving power back to renters. As a renter, landlords and real estate agents have access to so much information about you, but you don’t get that same level of transparency from them. Real estate agents often provide photos of properties that are years out of date, and don’t tell you what it’s like to actually live there. You don’t get to enter into a new rental knowing how difficult it might be for you to request basic repairs to be completed. This website is here to help. It will always be free, and there will be no ability for landlords or real estate agents to pay for reviews to be removed. Do your part to help your fellow renters by writing an anonymous review of your rental property or real estate agency. At this stage, I’ll be reviewing each submission each night and uploading the submissions to the page, so if you don’t see your review immediately, don’t stress!” As far as I can tell this is an Australian thing, and I am unsure whether they are accepting international submissions, but, well, if you have a landlord you need to warn the world about why not slag them off with impunity on this site?

By Virginia Villacisna

OUR NEXT MUSICAL DELIGHT IS THE POSTHUMOUS ALBUM BY ONE OF MY FAVOURITE EVER BANDS, SPARKLEHORSE, WHICH IS SAD AND BEAUTIFUL AND VERY VERY GOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOUR FIRST RESPONSE TO THE BRAND STUFF IS ‘YES, BUT HOW CAN I USE THIS TO FCUK THE BBC?’ THEN YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, PT.2:  

  • Stained Glass: I’ve always thought that I’d quite like to spend a few days making stained glass – getting high off the lead fumes, maybe illuminating some manuscripts in my spare time…sadly I am yet to receive the call from the Abbot (that’s how it works, right?), and so I’m having to make do with this digital version, which is very pleasing indeed and which lets you click to create your own variegated glass masterpieces, and which I highly recommend you use with the volume up as the sound of breaking/snapping glass that accompanies your every click here is just *delicious*. This is very, very therapeutic, so maybe save this for Monday morning when you might need it a bit more.
  • The Vulgar Wave: This is a couple of months old now, but it did the rounds again this week in the wake of the Brand stuff and the reevaluation it seemed to spark amongst the British media of the 00s and the very particular way in which popular culture manifested itself across media for a good five years or so – specifically, the way it was characterised by prurient sexuality and a sort of general grubbiness. The link takes you to a Twitter thread which pulls together various examples of The Way Things Were Then and WOW do some of these hit differently at a distance of 15 years or so – any of you who aren’t from the UK really should take a moment to enjoy this selection of clips from TV shows, old adverts and the odd music video, which really give you a feel for the prevailing mood of the era. This is a hell of a selection which runs the gamut from accepted classics of the genre (Rebecca Loos masturbates a pig to happy completion on English TV!) to deep cuts (an advert featuring an unpleasantly-sexualised talking boiler!) and gives a pleasingly-lumpy picture of the odd cultural topography of The Past (and, possibly, a clue as to why the generations that grew up during and immediately after this period are perhaps a touch more censorious than their forebears).
  • All The Poe: This is a great resource – all Edgar Allen Poe, all in once place, pulled together by one Joshua Maldin, who writes: “This is a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, some 130 pieces, presented with optimized legibility and no ads or trackers.” What more could you possibly want? If nothing else this site looks sufficiently sober that you could probably get away with spending a significant chunk of the day just reading Poe short stories in the office without anyone realising.
  • Couture To The Max: What were YOU doing at 7? I expect you can’t remember, what with it being a fcuking AGE ago (so OLD, so decrepit, so close to death!), but I’d hazard a rough guess that it probably involved a bit of school, a bit of playing, and an obsessional interest in something like dinosaurs or Polly Pocket – which, frankly, demonstrates exactly the sort of crippling lack of ambition and long-term goal setting which has seen you end up where you are. Contrast yourself with Max Alexander, who at the tender age of not-even-8 has already, er, established himself as an actual fashion designer and had a runway show in LA. This is Max’s website, which I am sharing with you because…well, in all honesty, because there’s something sort of wildly-sinister about the whole thing. I mean, just read this: “Max Alexander was born in 2016 in Los Angeles, California to a Canadian father and American mother. He graduated from Little Dolphins by the Sea, an arts-based preschool, in 2021. During his time there, he was heavily influenced by the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Yayoi Kusama, Frida Kahlo and Alexander Calder. Max announced to his family in 2020 that he was a dress maker. Encouraged by his mother, also an artist, Max began designing, draping and sewing, and launched his Couture to the Max label in 2021.” I mean, fine, it is of course entirely possible that Max is an intensely-precocious genius and that he really WAS influenced by the luminaries there named; it’s, er, at least *equally* possible, though, that his parent(s) have seen an opportunity here and have grabbed it hard with both hands while their eyes do that creepy Scrooge McDuck dollar signs thing. The quote from People Magazine – “Boy, 7, Who Says He Was Gucci in a Past Life” – doesn’t *scream* ‘normal child’, and if you scroll down to the bottom and see Max’s designs you may be…confused as to the adulation being apparently bestowed upon him. Still, whatever is going on here I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that poor Max is the driving force behind it, and as such let us wish him well in his pursuit of couture glory (and in the inevitable, messy process of divorcing his family which I predict will kick off around 2029).
  • Antique Book Patterns: Via Kottke, these are lovely – a Flickr album, compiled by the University of Bergen in Norway, which compiles the patterned endpages of a selection of books published between 1890-1930. Which, fine, you might not immediately think of as being a gorgeous aesthetic treasure trove, but you would be WRONG because that is exactly what it is. SO much excellent design inspiration in here for any of you who are interested in that sort of thing.
  • Simulation: This is interesting – you remember that ‘AI Showrunner’ from a few months ago, that software which purported to let anyone spin up an entire AI-generated episode of a TV show based on a few simple parameters? OF COURSE YOU DO! Well the company behind the tech has been doing some press this week, which is how I stumbled across its website, and WOW is this simultaneously very scifi and also very creepy and pretty unbelievable! The pitch the company’s making is effectively that it can create AI ‘agents’ which can operate with a degree of autonomy within a defined virtual environment – so you can effectively set up your sandbox, invent your principal players, wind them up and watch them go. “At Simulation Inc, we’re redefining the contours of existence, conjuring a universe where the line between the physical and the virtual blurs into oblivion. Our mission, as audacious as it is intriguing, is to birth a new kind of life: the world’s first genuinely intelligent AI virtual beings. Each one, a mirror of the human psyche, navigating the tumultuous seas of emotions and experiences in a digital cosmos of our creation.” Exactly how The Simulation think that that is going to magically going to result in compelling narratives that people actually want to watch is, at present, unclear, but it’s worth watching the videos on the website landing page to get a feel for the madly-overblown way they talk about the simulated agents and their ‘freedom’ to act independent of direction – scroll down to the bottom of the Page to discover the three formats that the company is apparently working on right now, which run the gamut from, er, space scifi to space cowboy scifi to ‘planet of the apes, basically’ scifi, and sigh quietly as you realise that we are apparently condemned to consume the same media forever (just AI-generated and, probably, worse).
  • Nuclear War Simulator: Have you ever wanted to run an incredibly-detailed simulation of what exactly would happen if the people with access to the nuclear buttons all simultaneously decided to say ‘oh, fcuk it, we’re all screwed anyway, we may as well use these fcuking warheads’ and set them racing across the skies? GREAT! Nuclear War Simulator lets you do exactly that – it’s a PROPER piece of software and as such requires a download, but once you’ve installed it you have SO MUCH POWER at your fingertips! “Nuclear war simulator is a detailed realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the questions: what will happen if Russia and the United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals? What will happen to the population of a country in a nuclear war? What will happen to me and my family? You can design warheads, missiles, and carriers, place them on the map and execute attack plans to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what the consequences are. Using a high-resolution population density map and realistic weapons effects like blast, heat, and radiation you can make an estimate of how many people will die in a conflict. Individual humans can be placed on the map, travel, and take shelter to analyze the effects and estimate injuries and survival probability.” You might argue that this is all a bit macabre – and you’d probably be right, but, be honest, who hasn’t wanted to make the massed ranks of the world’s populations run for cover, like ants from the glare of a magnifying glass, as terrifying thermonuclear death rains from the skies? NO FCUKER, etc!
  • Are You A Voicecel?: No, you are not, because it is a made-up concept that doesn’t exist! Still, if you are a man and want another reason to feel slightly-inadequate then why not upload a clip of yourself speaking to this website which will apparently then analyse your voice and tell you whether or not it is ‘squeaky and unaesthetic’. This has obviously been made by some very confused young men and as such one probably shouldn’t point and laugh but, well, LOL! LADS HAVE YOU EVER ACTUALLY HEARD FAMED INTERNATIONAL SEX SYMBOL DAVID BECKHAM SPEAK? Anyway, try it out for yourself and see if you too can attain the exalted status of ‘certified chad’ based on, er, having a deep voice. Dear God I am SO GLAD I am not a teenager in 2023.
  • The Metamorphosis: Or, specifically, ‘a not particularly good attempt at creating a short film based on Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ using text-to-video AI tools’ – this is obviously a complete mess because, well, the tech is nowhere near good enough to produce anything other than a hideous, inchoate mass of indeterminate shapes, but at the same time there’s the odd frame here and there among the five minute runtime that hints at some sort of potentially-interesting aesthetic and stylistic possibilities beginning to be thrown up by these systems – quite a few of the shots have a very distinct ‘cut scene from a late-90s PC game’ feel to them which I find oddly appealing.
  • RailCams: Do you like trains? Do you like trains A LOT? Frankly if the answer is ‘yes’ then it’s entirely possible that you’ll already be aware of this site which is an INSANELY comprehensive directory of train-related webcams from around the world, over 450 of them to be precise. Want to watch freight trains slowly moving backwards and forwards just outside Zurich? OF COURSE YOU DO! Want to spend a bit of time checking out what’s happening on the platforms at Riomaggiore in Italy? I MEAN, YES! My word, then, is there a set of train-based treats in store for you.
  • Unusual Internet: I really like this – Unusual Internet is a site that collects examples of less-than-typical user interfaces, displaying them in a manner that itself is somewhat unusual: “The interfaces of most websites follow the same design principles over and over again. In short, websites tend to look the same. The interfaces are simplified, the design is standardised. We rarely come across provocative or unusual interfaces. Designers should experiment more and try something new. Out of the comfort zone and into the unusual. To achieve this, the »Unusual Internet« course took a close look at UI elements (buttons, typography, scrolling, etc.). Students experimented with these elements on a weekly basis. A selection of the experiments can be seen here.” There are some lovely examples buried in here – you have to click around a bit, but there are a few wonderful examples of interesting and unusual webdesign to explore (including this one, which is my personal favourite I think).
  • Interpreted: Ooh, I really like this – an art project which combines the analogue and the digital to rather beautiful effect, with artist Jonny Scholes creating woven tapestries depicting an entire day’s news as interpreted by an AI: “Drawing on a decade of experience as a software developer, Scholes has created an automated program which continually reviews all news articles as they are published around the world. An AI tool is employed to create a single image that represents each day. Using generative art techniques, the days are collected into months, and incorporated into a unique tapestry design. The result is autonomously sent off to be woven and eventually delivered by post to Jonny Scholes’ studio.” The resulting tapestries, which you can see on the site, have a wonderfully deep-fried quality which links them back to the digital materials that were the starting point for their creation, and there’s something rather beautiful about the oddly-70s-ish aesthetic contrasted with the modernity of the tech at play here. Some of the work’s available for sale, should anyone fancy saying thanks for a decade of words and links by buying me a lovely tapestry gift.
  • Timelineify: Listen to an artist’s catalogue in chronological order thanks to this Spotify tool – NO, YOU’RE WELCOME!
  • Learn To Code With LinkedIn: We are, thankfully, now at a distance of a decade from the boom in ‘LEARN TO CODE!’ exhortations, and people are now a little more realistic about the employment prospects available to you as a result of your being able to code some basic HTML and Java – what with the imminent AI-ifinication of a significant proportion of the bottom end of the dev market it’s perhaps not QUITE the career silver bullet you might have been sold back in the day, but, equally, having a basic working knowledge of How Some Of This Stuff Works is genuinely useful (I say that as someone who can’t write a fcuking line, by the way, but who can just about understand the principles behind it). Should you have decided that NOW IS THE TIME for you to finally master the Dark Arts (not THOSE ones ffs) then you could do worse than check out this selection of free learning resources available of the world’s worst social network – this is available til mid-December, so there’s plenty of time for you to give it a go.
  • A Trillion Tiny Little Poems: This is rather lovely. The developer describes it as such: “a trillion / quite tiny / little poems generates untold billions of quite tiny little poems in a miniature haiku format of 4 then 3 then 4 syllables…or at least it tries too but sometimes the source poems get their meter completely wrong for reasons i am simply unable to explain (reason/explanation: i am quite poor at poems)…rather than a trillion tiny poems there’s only 5,268,024, but maybe 5,268,024 is the secret definition of a quite tiny little trillion or somethging, maybe, perhaps, possibly. anyway occassionally it blurts out something surprisingly beautiful though more often as not it just churns out rubbish” Many of these are gibberish, but that makes the occasional glimpse of meaning that crops up even more special – I just got this, and may now get it tattooed somewhere intimate: “some poems were / bleak roses / quite the relief”
  • The British Seaside Simulator: Published just too late to make last week’s Curios, this is the latest bit of silliness from Matt Round who has coded a web EXPERIENCE that lets you enjoy the peculiar purgatory that is the British seaside – specifically, the British seaside as experienced from the inside of a slightly-too-warm estate car in which you are having a desultory ‘picnic’ (limp, sweaty cheese sandwiches on wholemeal bread) as the horizontal rain beats across your windscreen and the sound of a provincial radio DJ whimpers tinnily into your ears. This is really beautifully-observed (the radio stations in particular are a lovely touch), although it’s so intensely well-realised that you might find it…a bit depressing tbh.
  • Fridge Floppers: Move the fridge. That’s it. No more, no less. MOVE THE FRIDGE! This is a very enjoyable little puzzle game which has a pleasingly-kinetic feel to the controls and movement.
  • Pacman The Roguelike: What might Pacman look like were it designed now, and had all the needless bells and whistles of the modern triple-A game experience grafted onto its basic gameplay? It might look a little like this tbh – a really smart play on the traditional Pacman which adds pointless joke mechanics like ‘companions’ and ‘crafting’ and ‘levelling’ which initially feels like a simple gag but which you realise as you play actually creates a pretty interesting new play experience whilst also working on some level as SATIRE. This is far better than it needs to be, and a really fun way of killing 30 minutes before you can get to the pub/back on the pipe (delete per your personal preferences).
  • Connections: You know the Only Connect ‘wall’ game which the NYT ripped off earlier this year? YES YOU DO STOP LYING TO ME! This website lets you make your own, bespoke versions of the game to share with friends – select your categories, select your words, and then share the link with anyone you fancy to see whether they’re smart enough to crack your doubtless-fiendish conundra. If any of you fancy making one of these and sharing it with me, I can chuck it in next week’s Curios for THE COMMUNITY to test themselves against.
  • A Little Game Called Mario: This is an interesting idea – a collaborative project to create a fan-made Mario-a-like game, with the twist that the code repo is open which means anyone can go in and tweak the gameplay, level design, etc, making the whole thing a massively-collaborative endeavour. The resulting title is a messy combination of trad Mario mechanics and a lot of VERY HARD platforming bits (and, bizarrely, a level that appears to have been inspired by Dance Dance Revolution) including quite a lot of bullet-hell-style bits; basically this is an exercise in level design sadism and experimental, barely-functional mechanics, but it’s fascinating to see how the different people across the community approach level creation. There are LOADS of different examples of creative design in here, so it’s worth having a bit of an explore and a play with a range of different levels to get a feel for it.
  • Ad Nauseam: Finally this week, via Rosie & Faris, comes this rather fun little platformer themed around working in an ad agency. SHOOT THE CLIENT! DODGE THE FEEDBACK! SEE IF YOU CAN LEAVE THE OFFICE BEFORE MIDNIGHT DURING A PITCH WEEK! This is rather good, and you should 100% dedicate 20m or so to trying to complete it.

By Jonas Örtemark

WE CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS FRANKLY-UNSEASONAL BUT STILL VERY GOOD SELECTION OF DISCO-Y-FUNKY-HOUSE-TYPE NUMBERS MIXED BY FLAMINGO PIER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Falling Down The Internet Hole: A *delicious* Tumblr compiling links to sites with a particular, vaguely-old-school, often Geocities-ish aesthetic – this really is a portal to some top-notch web vibes and some EXCELLENT odd internet, I highly recommend giving this one a click.
  • Obscure Videogames: Sharing screenshots and gifs and marketing materials from old games you might not have heard of – there is some GOLD in here, but if nothing else I urge you all to click and scroll down just far enough so you can enjoy the truly majestic 16-bit graphical representation of a wrestler ripping their leotard off which, honestly, is practically erotic.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Supinatra: Impressive-if-creepy-and-a-bit-body-horror-y makeup and accessory design by Russian artist Maria Luneva (via Blort).
  • Surface of Wikipedia: Created to act as a sort of a negative impression of the storied ‘Depths of Wikipedia’, this Insta account instead celebrates the incredibly mundane on Wikipedia – you will be genuinely amazed at some of the things documented here that apparently have Wikipedia pages (the concept of ‘something’, for example – WHY DOES THAT NEED A WIKIPEDIA PAGE?), and this is another in the long, long list of reasons why Wikipedians are, honestly, some of the most magically-peculiar people on the planet.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Leftwing Britain: Lol, ok, not quite, but this is genuinely interesting information which was published this week as part of the annual publication of the British Social Attitudes survey, now in its 40th year, which tracks public opinion on a range of issues, and which this year threw up some interesting data on how exactly the British think of poverty, opportunity, social mobility and the role of the state and the individual. This is a really good piece of analysis by Sam Freedman, who looks at the numbers and the surprising conclusions that it’s possible to draw from them – to whit, that people in the UK are increasingly likely to believe that state intervention to reduce income inequalities is A Good Thing, and that there is a parallel rise in the numbers of people who believe that greater public spending and state intervention would be of benefit to the country – there’s SO much interesting stuff here digging into where people sit on a left-right spectrum, and how that varies by age, and how the numbers perhaps don’t look quite as one might expect, and why that might be, and why (fingers crossed, eh?) the Tory party lurching further to the right after its hopefully-inevitable electoral defeat next year will see it fcuk itself even further into the sun from an electability perspective. This is interesting AND useful, and to to be honest if you find this interesting you could do worse than check out the whole report here.
  • The Noughties: I know a couple of people who have slept with Russell Brand – I am aware that they are not in an exclusive club – and while there was never any indication from them that they had anything other than a splendid time in the man’s company, I can’t say that this weekend’s revelations came as a huge shock to me. What has been interesting is the speed with which the media has rushed to condemn the prevailing culture of the rough 2004-12 era (see the link to ‘Vulgar Britain’ earlier on), and the number of pieces that have sprung up all doing the same hand-wringing bit, often from people who I remember full well being very much ‘of the establishment’ at the time and who I don’t recall being anywhere near so censorious when they were enjoying the gak back in 2006. Anyway, the main link here is to Zoe Williams in the Guardian, who is very good on the broad era but who, oddly, fails to mention the Guardian’s own role in elevating that sort of culture by giving Brand a column for years when he was at the height of his ‘jellied eels and fingering and Proust, oh my!’; schtick; if you’re in the market for more, then Sarah Ditum (yes, I know, but) in Unherd (yes, I know, but) is also good on the prevailing culture of the time; and this thread by Caspar Salmon does a good job of deconstructing the relationship between Brand and laddism and how both evolved as a reaction to the perceived ‘threat’ to traditional masculinity posed by the rise of (at least the appearance of) feminism in the popular culture of the 90s. I had a genuinely odd (and not wholly pleasant) moment this weekend, when I saw this story about Noel Fielding and Pixie Geldof from 2007 doing the rounds and I realised that it was entirely plausible that the story was placed by the PR agency where I was working at the time – it didn’t feel…great, I must say. This tweet by Rob Palk resonated with me quite a lot.
  • GPT and Jobs: Another week, another link to Ethan Mollick’s newsletter (it really is excellent, I offer no apologies) – in this post, Mollick looks at new research from Harvard University and Boston Consulting Group (which this week inked a deal with Anthropic to integrate Claude into its service offerings, and which, it’s fair to say, has something of a vested interest in making this stuff look like THE BEST POSSIBLE FUTURE) which seems to show that workers using LLMs as part of their workflows are faster, more efficient and (in the main) produce ‘higher quality’ work (as assessed by human peers) than those working without LLMs (as ever with this stuff, this is just ONE study; also, the effects, as seems to regularly be the case, are most pronounced when it comes to less-competent workers). Which may or may not interest you, fine, but I’ve been having to do a bit of work around the whole ‘how can we use this stuff to make more money?’ question and there really is some baseline practical stuff that you can implement which I reckon can shave 10% off general admin time for most bullsh1t white collar jobs like yours and mine. Anyway, this is worth bookmarking for next time you need to have an argument with IT about unblocking GPT from your machine.
  • Simulating HIstory With GPT: I enjoyed this a lot – another piece examining some of the ways in which LLMs can be integrated into teaching practice in interesting and creative ways, here Benjamin Breen describes some of the ways in which he’s used GPT in his classes to get students to engage critically with the study of history, and to help get them used to research and fact-checking in ways that are possibly more creatively-engaging than your traditional classroom methods. To quote Breen: “I’m envisioning an assignment in which my students will simulate the experience of being sold flawed copper by Ea-nāṣir, a real-life shady copper merchant in Mesopotamia circa 1750 BCE (one who, in recent years, has unexpectedly become a meme online). Crucially, this is not just about role-playing as an angry customer of Ea-nāṣir — or as the man himself, which is also an option. As illuminating as the simulations can be, the real benefit of the assignment is in what follows. First, students will print out and annotate the transcript of their simulation (which runs for twenty “turns,” or conversational beats) and carefully read through it with red pens to spot potential factual errors. They will then conduct their own research to correct those errors. They’ll then write their findings up as bullet points and feed this back into ChatGPT in a new, individualized and hopefully improved version of the prompt that they develop themselves. This doesn’t just teach them historical research and fact-checking — it also helps them develop skills for working directly with generative AI that I suspect will be valuable in future job markets.” I think this is such a clever way of using an LLM, and the sort of thing that might useful be adapted for all sorts of similar purposes in other industries or areas of study.
  • How To Make Those Spiral Image Things Using AI: Yes, I know that you’re BORED of the visual trick already, but be aware that normies probably haven’t seen it yet and as such there’s probably some decent mileage to be made in being the first to adapt this for a billboard or print campaign (for a brand with the right logo, this could look rather cool I think). Anyway, this article contains an explanation as to how it works and how you can do it yourself, along with a link to an external site that can help you knock an image together – and here’s another one, should you want one.
  • Your Car Talks To You: This is a piece looking at how integrating natural language tech into self-driving cars lets the vehicles communicate what they are doing any why in simple, easy-to-parse language, helping us better understand what the machine is ‘thinking’ at any given time, and offering an easily-comprehensible rationale for each driving decision it takes – which is interesting from the point of view of cars, fine, but also struck me as a neat illustration of the most exciting power of LLMs, specifically their ability to act as near-universal translation tools. There’s something genuinely exciting about the imminent arrival of multimodal AI which will let us start to attempt to get The Machine to explain the world to, and the things that we will be able to build on top of that tech – the ability to analyse video and audio using conversational interfaces is going to be transformational, I think.
  • Bard Updates: Bard is by a long way the least-good of the big name LLMs, but it does have one or two things going for it (multilanguage support and the ability to analyse/read images, specifically) – and now it’s been given a host of updates, including the ability to plug into your personal Google Suite and ‘analyse’ your information and data, so that you can ask it questions about your email inbox, say, or get it to find, collate and summarise specific types of file from your GDrive. Except, per this New York Times review which is an exquisitely-embarrassing read from start to finish, it doesn’t actually seem to work properly, or indeed at all. Still, early days and it’s worth looking at the updated feature list as it gives a decent indication of the broad direction of travel of this stuff and the sorts of things that will be coming to the next versions of GPT et al soon.
  • China, AI and Student Labour: I know I’ve featured multiple pieces in recent months which look at the human labour that sits behind China’s AI efforts, but I make no apologies for including another one – this is Rest of World’s take, which focuses in particular on the way in which AI companies are effectively co-opting the country’s students to do the tedious, repetitive data-labelling tasks required to train LLMs, GANs and other generative AI systems, and is a convenient reminder of the fact that each and every one of these systems is on some level built on the labour of people who it’s likely were being paid somewhere in the region of the square root of fcuk-all for their time.
  • The Female Reciters of Clubhouse: This is SO interesting, and one of those fascinating stories about technology finding a specific, niche use that its creators almost certainly never envisaged. Lockdown-era darling Clubhouse (you remember Clubhouse, don’t you? “We’ve reinvented phonecalls and broadcast radio; yes, that’s right, we’re now worth $10bn”) limps along, having recently announced its latest pivot to audio messaging a few short weeks ago, but has unexpectedly found itself being used by a nascent community of young Muslim women who are using the platform as a place to recite the verse of the Qur’an in a safe space and with a woman-only audience.
  • Being 13 (and a Girl): I have recent found myself wondering whether my generation (I am ‘young GenX’, whatever that means) is the first which hasn’t found itself hitting middle-age and wishing it was young again – I currently look at How Things Are and How Things Seem To Be Going and, honestly, I would rather eat my own face than be 17 right now, but I imagine that had I been 43 in 1997 I might have felt rather differently and have bitten your hand off were you to offer me the chance to go back to my youth. This superb New York Times piece looks at the experience of being a teenage girl in New York in 2023 – the author, Jessica Bennett, spent a year recording the lives and feelings and emotions of a coterie of 13 year old girls, who shared their thoughts with her via diaries and voicenotes each week, and whose lives are here presented as a patchwork view of ‘what it is like to be young right now’. OBVIOUSLY this is not in any way representative of The Whole World, and New York is not America, let alone the rest of the world, but at the same time it’s hard to imagine that the experiences of any other 13 year old girls in the West being significantly different, and as such this feels like a decent snapshot of a certain facet of youth experience here at the fag end of modernity. I can’t speak for you, but, honestly, I can’t pretend that the vast majority of this sounds anything other than intensely miserable. Poor the kids.
  • 2Girls1Bottle: This has been widely shared this week, with a degree of reverence that, personally, I think feels a *touch* out of place – still, see what YOU think. This is a profile of TikTok ‘creators’ Mixie and Munchie in The Face, two London women who’ve built a following on the app by posting videos of themselves making cocktails, silently, in fast food joints. Which, you know, is fine! It’s a bit! First rule of social media – find a thing, stick to it, double down, know your niche! Content 101! Except, well, this piece goes on to treat the schtick with the wide-eyed reverence of someone frotting themselves senseless over the Abramovich show (about which I am similarly unimpressed fwiw), featuring analysis like: “In a video posted on 11th July 2023, Mixie rolls fake ice cubes like dice on the table. She holds one up, beauty guru-style, using the inside of her palm to pull focus like Jeffree Star or NikkieTutorials might. There are no numbers on the ice cubes, but the gesture is clear: these are the winning ​“dice”. It’s a bizarrely soothing experience, like watching someone divining the future from chicken bones in an internet age. For another video, they go pastoral. Munchie grinds an Oreo in a pestle and mortar then sprinkles the dust into a medium-sized pot of what appears to be dirt. Daintily, she digs into the biscuit-dust and pseudo-soil, then eats it. It has the same appeal as being a child and creating a potion, or actually eating earth in your garden.” Do you…do you maybe think that we’re possibly analysing stuff on the web TOO MUCH? When I was at college, some friends of mine and I became briefly obsessed with the idea of cucumbers as a symbol of…something or other (I forget what, exactly) and for a month or so took to placing them EVERYWHERE as a sort of running gag (that didn’t work because no fcuker noticed them, but webs) – I don’t think that would have warranted a deep-dive critical analysis, and I personally don’t think this stuff does either. Maybe, just maybe, we should stop attempting to deconstruct everything kids do on the web? Maybe they’re just fcuking around? MAYBE IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MEAN ANYTHING AT ALL AND THE JOKE IS IN FACT ON YOU, THE FACE!
  • Fictional Brands: Such an interesting article looking at the practice of creating fictional brands for film and TV shows – so, for example, ‘Duff’ on the Simpson’s, or the 50s-inspired faux-products in Wes Anderson’s latest film.
  • Weather Influencers: Another piece from Rest of World, this one looking at the growing number of hyperlocal weather ‘influencers’ in India, who are bringing a centuries-old practice of predicting rainfall for their village and its immediate environs into the 21st century thanks to smartphones and readily-available weather data. I think I want a name for this sort of thing – the very ‘first novel in the Sprawl Trilogy’ low-rent Gibsonian vibe of centuries-old customs married to modern tech means, like someone doing the I-Ching using an app on their smartwatch.
  • Ernie Barnes: A profile of an artist whose work you’ll recognise even if you don’t know their name – Ernie Barnes painted The Sugar Shack, one of the most iconic (sorry) and widely-reproduced pieces of North American Black art of the 20th Century, and this profile looks at his life and work and the way in which his approach to both the practice and sale of art enabled the distribution of his works through affordable backchannels to African American households the length and breadth of the States. Also, he was a pro basketball player! Some people are just too talented, it’s most unfair.
  • The Fake IPL: This is a CRAZY story – did you know that there’s a lucrative Russian gambling market that works by effectively running fake cricket games, 24/7, and running rigged books on them? This is honestly jaw-dropping – the scale of the operations described is insane, as is the general principal of ‘setting up an entirely-faked cricket league purely for the purposes of being able to run a book on it’, and even if you broadly disapprove of, you know, the crime and the people trafficking and the gambling, you sort-of have to admire the chutzpah and the sheer ambition on display here.
  • Who Deserves To Eat At Noma?: Yes, I know, you read all the ‘what it’s like to eat at the world’s best restaurant’ pieces 15 years ago when they were first published – BUT, Noma is going to close soon and it will never exist again, and it’s always nice to read someone’s account of eating – and not totally enjoying – a meal that I am never going to be able to experience. I liked this essay a lot, despite the general sense of (self-?)loathing exhibited by the author throughout.
  • The Berkeley Hotel Hostage: A piece from 20 years ago, all about Douglas Adams and his writers’ block, and how he was once cured of it by basically being kidnapped and kept in a hotel by his publishers’ until he’d finally delivered what he owed them, but also about the weird horror of being captured (kidnapped, again, to an extent) by one’s own success.
  • Soft Spotted Animal: A beautiful essay about the body and obsession and pathologies and control and loss and picking at yourself until there are holes all over you. Horrible and wonderful and sad, this, by Ellie Eberlee.
  • Index of Porosity: ANOTHER beautiful essay (really, though, this is A Good Week for high-quality prose) about music and death and love and AIDS and funerals and memory; I want to describe this as ‘crisp and elegant’, though I have no fcuking idea as to why.
  • All My Fathers: Heredity, generations, ancestry and family, wrapped up in recollections of three generations of men that preceded her by Lee Reilly.
  • La Dolce Vita: Tanya Bush spends a summer in Italy, working in an agriturismo where each week a group of North American tourists descent to learn to cook, or to play at learning to cook, and to eat – Bush is employed both as kitchen help and as bulwark between the Italian host/organisers and the tourists, and the piece recounts her increasingly-bleak experience as the Summer passes and the atmosphere becomes more oppressive…I didn’t think I’d hugely enjoyed this when I finished it, but it’s stuck with me all week – personally I think it works a lot better if you read it as a slightly-oblique horror story, but see what you think.
  • On Silence: Finally this week, it seems apposite to finish with this essay by Ella Bassist which looks back at her life and the way men have repeatedly treated her and the Me Too moment and what happened, and didn’t happen, next. It is brilliant, but bleak: “In learning how to write about sh1tty (and litigious) men, now I know to say, “I remember this happened, and that, in my opinion, it happened like this.” I know to acknowledge the possibility that what happened, happened only to me. I also know that only two of us were there, that one of us gets to be believed, and that no matter what I say, someone else can say I’m lying and sue me for libel.”

By Seth Armstrong

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 15/09/23

Reading Time: 38 minutes

HI EVERYONE HI HAPPY FRIDAY! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I am trying to stay positive before I have to spend a portion of the weekend reading Elon Fcuking Musk’s fcuking biography (there are strong professional reasons why this is necessary; I am not *that* sort of masochist) – how are YOU? What is going on in YOUR world?

Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to tell me – we don’t have that sort of relationship, after all – but this is the sort of ‘caring interaction’ I am increasingly informed is required if you want to ‘grow your newslettering community’. Am I doing it right?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if any of you have any JUICY INFORMATION as to exactly how many people the BP guy was boning then I am ALL EARS.

By Hagar Vardimon

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL OFFERINGS WITH THIS WONDERFUL SELECTION OF MID-90s D’N’B WHICH I PROMISE YOU IS LEGITIMATELY EXCELLENT AND NOT JUST AN EXERCISE IN NOSTALGIA, HONEST GUV!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED ABOUT HOW DOGS BECAME THIS WEEK’S BURNING CULTURE WARS ISSUE HERE IN THE UK, PT.1:  

  • Chat2024: I was previously pretty relaxed about next year’s US elections – and tbh I’m still relaxed, it’s not my fcuking problem and we’re all going to die anyway so, well, wevs! – but over the course of the past month or so I have become…somewhat more concerned that several tens of millions of people are going to do something incredibly stupid (again). Still, we’re still at the ‘let’s pretend it’s going to be anything other than a miserable contest between two nonagenarians’ stage of things, which means that there are multiple candidates vying for attention and airtime and with THOUGHTS AND VIEWPOINTS that you might want to consider (if you’re a North American, at least) – and now, thanks to the MAGIC OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY, there’s a simple and easy way of doing so…VIA THE MEDIUM OF AI! Chat2024 is a PR/marketing project by a company called Delphi, which it may not surprise you to learn wants to sell you DIGITAL CLONES of yourself, and it basically lets you ‘interrogate’ all of the potential candidates for the 2024 sh1tshow in one fell swoop. Type in your questions, and you’ll get a selection of different answers from the ‘candidates’ (or more accurately the chatbots based on their policies) which, so the press release almost-inevitably says, will help voters make up their own minds without having to do anything so difficult as, I don’t know, read a manifesto, or pay attention to what it is that these people say. This is fascinating, in part on a technical level and in part in terms of What It All Means – there’s limited detail on the site about exactly how the makers have built the models, other than some vague ‘trained on material such as speeches’, but I presume it’s a standard ‘we ripped everything we can find that these people have ever said and trained a model on each of them’ thing, and the Q&A feature…works reasonably well, as far as I can tell (and there are certainly reasonable guardrails in place that mean it’s so far prevented me from getting any of them to say anything reprehensible), and as a quick way of getting a rough overview of differences of opinion and perspective on various issues this is…maybe good? – there are even ‘citations’ to where it’s pulling certain positions from, to give you a vague sense of confidence that it’s not lying to you. Then again, I obviously don’t know the first thing about the granular detail of the DeSantis campaign’s fiscal policy objectives and so I would have no fcuking idea if ths DeSantisBot (for example) was wildly misrepresenting the man’s ideas – and while there are bits of the bots’ output that are referenced, there’s also quite a lot of stuff that isn’t…I don’t quite know how I feel about this, to be honest. On the one hand, maybe this is a really useful new way of letting people engage with policy and quickly and simply find out what their potential representatives think about stuff; on the other, I can’t help but feel that the propensity of the current generation of LLMs to just, well, *make sh1t up* possibly presents one or two not-insignificant problems for this tech and perhaps is maybe a reason why people relying on this stuff for information is, generally, still A Very Bad Idea. I suppose the main thing that sprung to mind when I found this was ‘fcuk, it’s actually going to be reasonably trivial for ANYONE to spin up something like this come about May 2024, which means there is going to be SO MUCH MAD STUFF being created around the eventual candidates campaigns’, which feels…a bit troubling. Anyway, that’s all by very long-winded way of saying that anyone who fancied making something like this for the inevitable 2024 UK General Election would fcuking CLEAN UP, coverage-wise, so get on it.
  • Stable Audio: After Google and Meta’s efforts in the ‘text to audio’ space (see Curios passim), this week Open Source AI people Stable Diffusion have got in on the act, releasing their Stable Audio product to the world – and it’s good! Really good! It’s been slightly hugged-to-death by the internet in its first 72h of life, so you might need to wait a bit to make it work properly, but once you get access it’s as magical as previous iterations of this tech, with the added advantage that it lets you specify the duration of output of your generations, meaning you can make upto 2mins (I think) of completely royalties-free instrumental music for whatever purposes you can conceive of – AND this model can apparently do drum’n’bass and slightly-trickier forms of composition, which the Google and Meta models I previously tried haven’t quite managed to achieve. Nothing you generate here is going to be bothering the charts, I don’t think, but, as previously repeated ad nauseum, you really never need to pay a stock music library for painfully-generic backing tracks ever again. I really think there’s something fun that could be built with these things at this point – I would quite like the chance to have a sort of four-track AI studio that let me play around with layering different AI-generated elements to…well, to almost-certainly cacophonous and horrible effect, but it would be a nice toy to mess around with. CAN ONE OF YOU FOR ONCE MAKE THE THINGS THAT I REQUEST, PLEASE? It feels like the least you could do. Oh, BONUS STABLE AUDIO CONTENT: here’s a little guide to audio prompting, should you desire one.
  • River: I LOVE THIS IT IS WONDERFUL. Also, I can’t *really* explain or describe it very well, so you’re just going to have to trust me a bit here. ‘River’ is a project by Max Bittker (whose work it turns out I’ve featured a few times on here in the past) which effectively acts as a sort of…visual connections scrapbook thingy? Oh, ok, fine, even by my standards that’s a risibly-lazy attempt at communication – let’s try again. River presents you with a series of images upon loading – click on any image that appeals to you and the images will reload, with the new pictures being morelike the one you just clicked…and so you go, clicking and following whatever aesthetic thread you choose, creating a personal, never-to-be-repeated journey through a visual landscape being generated just for you. I can’t stress what a glorious way of navigating images this is, and how lovely the way you tweak and refine the images you’re presented with – there’s a section in Michael Ende’s ‘The Neverending Story’ (which, by the way, you owe it to your inner child to read; if you have only ever seen the film, know that you only know half the story and that the book starts to get good once the film ends) in which Bastian, the ‘hero’, wonders through a palace of rooms of seemingly infinite doors, each door chosen taking him to yet more doors which are in small ways thematically linked to, and inspired by, the doors that came before…well basically it feels like that HYPERSPECIFIC thing, but in online form. It is BEAUTIFUL and, honestly, were it not for a strange and frankly misplaced sense of duty towards YOU, mysterious and unknown reader, I would stop typing right now and just click this for a few hours. It really is that wonderful.
  • All AI, All The Time: This is the video channel of one Darragh Walsh, a ‘content creator’ who has been doing the YouTube thing for a while now (instructional videos – nothing particularly interesting or novel, but equally nothing nefarious or grifty, just another kid attempting to mAkE a LiViNg In ThE cOnTeNt MiNeS) but who at some point in the past few months has pivoted to making ALL of their content using AI – the scripts, the videos and the voice overs on every single video on this channel are the product of a suite of largely-free tools combined to MAKE CONTENT with approximately 10% of the effort. You can read a Twitter thread here in which Darragh explains their thinking and methodology – these vids aren’t doing great numbers on release (a few k views, in general), but I assume that the play here is long-tail utility and building up a bulk catalogue of content which will produce a regular stream of residual revenue, and, well, I suppose…fair play, Darragh? I mean, the content is terrible, but then again so much of the rest of YouTube is too…Actually, no, sorry, I don’t mean to be mean to Darragh who I am sure is a nice person, but THIS IS HORRIBLE. This is what people were talking about a few months ago when they started to get a bit worried about ‘a flood of useless, junky, AI-generated dreck flooding the web’, and it’s coming to YouTube (see also: this channel creating entirely AI-generated ‘animations’ about history – they are TERRIBLE, but I did find the thumbnails with their single-word captions (“BRUTALITY”! “URINE”! Inexplicably, “CONSOLE”!) strangely amusing) and I am reasonably confident that there are going to be literally tens of thousands of kids in bedrooms across the world spending a not-insignificant portion of their afternoons and evenings churning this sort of stuff out in the hope of winning some sort of minor algorithmically-mandated payout lottery. Which is nice.
  • OpinionGPT: One of the (many, tedious) WE ARE DOOMED prophecies that I have been wanging on about for a while now around AI is the whole ‘everyone will have their own virtual assistant in their pocket which they can consult on whatever they fancy, and the whole ‘open source’ thing means that it is actually going to be a pretty trivial matter to have an assistant which espouses whatever weird, fringe, mad set of beliefs you like best and which presents a very specific and doctored version of ‘truth’ in response to any questions’ thing – neatly illustrated here by this project, which lets you ask questions of a bunch of different LLMs which have been tweaked and trained so as to make them espouse quite clearly-distinct political viewpoints. From the homepage: “ What happens if you tune a model only on texts written by politically left-leaning persons? Or only on texts written by right-leaning persons? Only on texts by men, or only on texts by women? Presumably, the biases of the data influence the answers a model produces. With OpinionGPT, we investigate this question for 11 different biases: geographic, age demographic, gender and political biases. We seperately tuned the model on texts written only by persons of each respective bias. In this demo, you can ask questions to our very biased model to get very biased answers!” This is SUCH an interesting project (by the Humboldt University in Berlin, in case you care) and a perfect example of how odd things are quite possibly going to get in the next few years.
  • Coca Cola’s Y-3000 Cam: Coke was the first big brand to publicly jump on the AI bandwagon thanks to horrible, dead-inside management consultancy Bain, and I am going to go out on a limb and assume that this activation is the fruit of that agreement and the OpenAI collab. Coca Cola is releasing a BRAND NEW FLAVOUR OF SUGARWATER, DESIGNED BY AI!!!! Which is obviously HUGELY exciting (although, er, haven’t we done this before?)  – in case you’re curious, it tasted like all the red soda flavors got together and threw a party. Cherry, strawberry, raspberry, generic “fruit punch” – those were the tastes I sensed most”, so,  er, now you know! – and is accompanied by an AI digital experience! Click the link (mobile-only) and take a photo of anything you fancy; hit a button and watch in AWE as whatever you snapped gets magically transformed into a FUTURISTIC and MAGICAL scene thanks to the POWER OF AI! What that actually means in practice is that your photo will have some of the surfaces swapped out with vaguely-shiny and reflective materials (THE FUTURE) and there will be a slight sheen to it, and, basically, it will look almost exactly like every other AI-doctored or generated image you’ll have seen over the past few months. This is VERY underwhelming considering the violent amount of money that’s been spent on it, and I am honestly slightly disappointed that ‘light visual style transfer’ is the most interesting thing that the combined intellectual might of a bunch of management consultants and a bunch of advermarketingprdrones has managed to envision. Also – and perhaps this is the root of my dismay – HOW DID THEY MISS THE OPPORTUNITY TO BOOK BUSTED FOR THE PRODUCT LAUNCH!?!?! Amateurs, these people, I tell you.
  • AI-Augmented Blogging: This is quite tricky to explain (I say that far more often than is probably reasonable, don’t I?; shall I…shall I just *try harder* and *write better*? Let’s give it a go!) but basically it’s an experimental bit of webwork that asks ‘what would it be like if stuff written online also included generative AI elements which enabled the reader to engage with and interrogate the text using textual AI interfaces?’ – so for example, as you read the linked blogpost, you will find areas in which you can ask questions of an LLM, to engage with the themes raised in the piece; there’s something hugely interesting in the questions this raises around reader and author and intent, and when I found this this week I got a very real frisson (get me with my fancy words) of excitement because it feels very much like there is *something* interesting here (although, fine, I am not smart enough to work out exactly what that is or what shape it might be; you think about it for a while, it’s 8am and I am already getting a bit fatigued of brain and finger).
  • The Open Audiobook Collection: Or, to give it its full name, The Project Gutenburg Open Audiobook Collection – this is a wonderful initiative and a superb resource which I literally can’t find anything bad to say about at all. I mean, look, you can’t really criticise this, can you? “Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.” So click the ‘browse collection’ button (or just click here) and browse the INSANE archive of old titles – finding something you ACTUALLY want to listen to might be tricky, fine, but why not take a punt on something curious-sounding, like “The Glory of the Trenches” by one Coningsby Dawson (oh, ok, maybe not that one), or some improving Plato, or maybe some Jack London short stories…I am very glad this exists.
  • Roma Testimonies: The persecution of the Roma during the Second World War is something that often gets forgotten amidst all the other horrors – this is an archive maintained by the Czech Academy of Sciences and which collects testimonies of people from the Roma and Sinti communities who suffered at the hands of the Nazis in WWII. From the site: “The experience of the Roma and Sinti during World War II is still a neglected topic, although the consequences of the wartime genocide and persecution are still felt by Roma communities today. Moreover, even in the few publications about the Roma and Sinti Holocaust, the perspective taken from documents written during the war by the state administration and police forces often prevails. On the contrary, the key idea of our project is to convey to the widest possible readership the testimony of the Roma and Sinti themselves and thus their personal and irreplaceable experience of the Second World War. We hope that the Testimonies of Roma and Sinti project will contribute to greater awareness of their genocide and will be an irreplaceable source of information for researchers, relatives of the victims, or anyone else interested in this important topic.” You can search the archive by birthdate, place of birth or name, should you be interested in looking for specific individuals or locations, or you can just browse the testimonies – this is obviously…affecting, but it’s an incredible piece of historical archiving and an important collection.
  • Fish Letters: Who wouldn’t like to receive a heartfelt digital message from a friend or loved-one in the shape of a fish? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Mikimoto is a Japanese company which was, according to the cursory Google I did when I found this site, the originator of cultured pearls and the first company in the world to produce them commercially – I have literally NO IDEA why they created this bit of digital marketing, but you can use it to send anyone you like a message (via email, or a shareable link) which will be presented in the shape of a fish made of words. If you have some really, really bad news to deliver to someone today, or a tough conversation to get through, why not soften the blow by communicating it via the medium of an inexplicably-piscine piece of digital communication? It will DEFINITELY make it all better. “Yes, fine, I understand you’re upset Philip, but at least I took the time to deliver the “I don’t love you any more” message via whimsical digital billet doux!”
  • Poised: One of the many terrible things about The Era Of Digital Work is the degree to which so much of what we are all forced to do professionally these days exists in a feedback vacuum – there are few things more soul-destroying than doing an already-pointless presentation to an audience of dead-eyed morons, other than doing so via Teams or Zoom and as such having no fcuking idea exactly how badly your schtick is going down. So THANK FCUK FOR POISE, then, an AI-powered (obvs) product which basically (as far as I can tell from an admittedly pretty casual glance at the site) monitors your performance on calls and offers you DIRECT AND REALTIME encouragement and feedback on how you’re doing with little popups that tell you that you need to be more assertive, or that remind you that you really should try not to say “er…” so much when you present. This sounds, to be clear, HORRIFIC – if you’re the sort of nervous person who struggles with presenting or confidence in the workplace, I am not totally convinced that being constantly monitored and assessed by a nameless, faceless AI judge is going to make you perform better but perhaps you feel differently. Personally this feels like the sort of thing that might tip someone over the edge, professionally-speaking, but then again my ‘career’ is a joke so what do I know? That was rhetorical fwiw.
  • Slingshot: This is entirely-frivolous and none of you need it in your lives, but at the same time there is something genuinely pleasing about both the idea and the execution here. Slingshot is a new app which exists solely to give you an easy and fast way of sharing photos with your friends – you open the app, you select a friend from your contacts list, you ‘pull back’ on the screen to take a picture and then let go to ‘fire’ it to your friend. Yes, a totally pointless gestural interface but SUCH a fun one, and frankly we need more of this sort of design ethos in our lives.
  • Iskarioto: A Twitter account sharing short AI-generated animations, via Rene’s ever-excellent links roundup – your appetite for this stuff will track closely with your tolerance for/interest in the AI art aesthetic and the current state of this tech, but in general there’s an interesting mix of styles and techniques here which make it worth a follow.
  • Shot Glasses: The Wikipedia entry about shot glasses this week taught me that there is in fact no global standard to what constitutes ‘a shot’, and that as such the capaciousness of shot glasses varies wildly from country-to-country, and that this is why you should never, ever get into a situation where you’re being challenged to down nonspecific spirits in Bulgaria – SERIOUSLY GUYS WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?!
  • The Url Poetry Club: A new project by Kris, The URL Poetry Club sits neatly at the intersection of three of my loves – prose, verse and LINKS – and is a glorious little website creating short poems from links and words; the resulting works function both as bits of verse to be read, but also as verse-in-digital-space, if that makes any sort of sense at all…I love the way that this makes one think of the connections built through linking sites to each other, and how the act of this selection and curation and arrangement itself builds new networks of meaning – attempting to communicate this stuff inevitably makes me feel like I might turn myself inside-out with embarrassment and pretension, but, well, it’s nice to try and be sincere every now and again. I love this, and I would quite like to encourage more people to think about the web and links and ideas in this sort of way. If that makes sense. Which it might, I concede, not.

By Laurie Simmons

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY A SELECTION OF TECHNO AND VAGUELY-AMBIENTY BITS AND ALSO SOME DOWNTEMPO BEATS IN A COMBINATION THAT DOESN’T SOUND LIKE IT OUGHT TO WORK BUT WHICH ACTUALLY IN FACT DOES, MIXED BY FORMER-EDITOR-PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED ABOUT HOW DOGS BECAME THIS WEEK’S BURNING CULTURE WARS ISSUE HERE IN THE UK, PT.2:      

  • The Terrible Ads of LinkedIn: I really, really hate LinkedIn – I also (this is a bit of a tangential rant, but if you’ll indulge me for just a moment) REALLY hate the current spate of articles suggesting the fact that young people are now using it makes it in some way ‘cool’. GYAC YOU FCUKING IDIOTS WHY DO YOU THINK YOUNGER PEOPLE ARE USING LINKEDIN NOW IS IT DO YOU THINK BECAUSE THEY ARE COMING TO AN AGE WHERE HAVING A PROFESSIONAL PROFILE ON THE WORLD’S ONLY BUSINESS-FOCUSED SOCIAL NETWORK IS NECESSARY? WOULD YOU HAVE WRITTEN PIECES 30 YEARS AGO SUGGESTING THAT CVs ARE SOMEHOW COOL BECAUSE 21 YEAR OLDS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY ARE WRITING THEM? YOU WOULD NOT, WOULD YOU? FCUK’S SAKE. Ah, that feels better. Anyway, this is by way of poor-quality introduction to the fact that you can now peruse the LinkedIn ad library and MY GOD is it a soul-destroying cavalcade of poor-quality grift and low-rent copy, and, in a weird way, it’s sort of uplifting – whatever terrible, pointless drudgery you’re engaged in today as part of your quotidian attempt not to die of exposure or starvation, console yourself with the fact that at least you’re not brokering LinkedIn Brand Partnership deals between a manufacturer of industrial endoscopy machines and a Daily Good News inspirational updates Page (no, really, that is a thing). There but for the grace of God go we all.
  • That Guy: Ordinarily I don’t tend to do ‘this week’s viral trend’ content on Curios – mainly because, er, I tend not to be aware of it, what with not being on Instagram and largely eschewing TikTok – but this, which came via Anne-Helen Petersen, amused me enough to make an exception. TikTok recently released a new filter which gives people facial hair, which has led to loads of women trying on themselves and realising that, with said face-fuzz, they end up looking like ‘A Certain Type of Guy’ – this link takes you to an Insta reel which compiles a bunch of TiKToks of women embodying Types of Guy and, honestly, some of these are perfectly observed – “I look like I have a podcast” is, well, perfect.
  • Meltdown Flags: It’s not exactly a controversial position to suggest that perhaps the planet’s large bodies of ice are melting perhaps a touch faster than we might in an ideal world wish them to – or at least it shouldn’t be, yet, well, here we all are! As part of the increasingly-futile-seeming attempts by individuals and organisations worldwide to make people take notice of What Is Going On, Melting Flags is a project designed to raise awareness of the fact that so many countries are going to be in not-insignificant trouble as a result of rising sea levels – specifically, it’s “a climate data initiative that visualizes the effects of global glacier retreat by reducing the amount of white in the flags of countries with glaciers.” This is a really neat bit of design and visualisation which does an excellent job of conveying the differential impacts of glacial retreat, and which will almost certainly have no effect whatsoever on anything (sorry, but, well, it’s true, isn’t it?).
  • Mind Window: The name here strikes me as oddly-sinister (I don’t know why, but it puts me in mind of the sort of terrible invention that would be spoken of by deep-voiced scientists in a pulpy 50s scifi movie – “We must activate the Mind Window, or Planet Terra is lost!”, that sort of thing) but I am really curious about the project. This has been going since 2020, apparently, and is a research project designed and undertaken by the University of Arizona – from their description: “Do you ever wonder if there is some rhyme or reason to how you think? How often are your thoughts focused on troubling topics, the past, the future, or memories and imaginative thinking? Mind Window helps you to track the way that you uniquely think and discover how these patterns of thought may affect your well-being. Mind Window is part of a scientific research project to develop a large international database of thoughts in daily life. The purpose of this app is to identify patterns of thinking by asking questions about user’s thoughts at random moments throughout their day-to-day life.” There is limited information on the site about what, if anything, the collected data to date has told the researchers, but I am very much into the idea of a worldwide project that seeks to find out whether, for example, everyone actually feels the same specific sense of dread and ennui at around 17:37 on a Sunday.
  • The News Clock: The Pudding’s ‘Clocks Team’ (this is now canon – there is a Pudding Clocks Team) continues to ship at an impressive rate; this latest project is a clock which uses news headlines featuring the time to, well, tell the time; so right now it’s ‘Apple Watch Series 09 is official’ and ‘Who Will Succeed Mitt Romney? 04 Candidates’ o’clock. This is less fun than the previous two iterations (personally the YouTube clock is my favourite so far), but I applaud the commitment to the project  now do the Stock Market clock, please (actually that isn’t a wholly-terrible idea, you know).
  • Neptune In Space: My note for this in the GDoc where I store my links each week (one day I will share that magic with you – ONE DAY) reads, simply, ‘bafflingspacedesignthing’ and, well, I’m not sure I can improve on that to be honest. A project by designer Callie Mc (whose personal website is very pleasing too), this self-describes as “an explorative design lab translated across time and space orbiting curiosity and discovery”, which, honestly, tells you pretty much nothing – it’s an interesting exploration of design ideas and themes and how combining them creates rules and forms that create aesthetic sense (or at least that’s what I think it is – you might think something completely different, which is fine but also WRONG), and it’s also just sort-of baffling, which I like.
  • The Iconographic Encyclopaedia: I had before this week never heard of The Iconographic Encyclopaedia, but now I know that “In 1844, German publisher Johann Georg Heck started compiling his illustrated encyclopedia, covering wide range of subjects from astronomy to zoology”, and that “Published between 1849 and 1851, the 10-part collection comprised 500 steel engraved plates containing more than 13,000 illustrations and more than 1.6 million words of detailed descriptions” (and now you do too). This website lets you explore all the illustrations and diagrams as well as the copy, arranged by theme, and it’s genuinely fascinating to browse through and see exactly how wrong we were about everything just 180 short years ago.
  • Video Translation: You may have seen videos of this tech doing the rounds this week, but I can’t stress enough quite how incredible this is and how much it will make you go ‘no, hang on, that might in fact be actual magic’ when you see it in action. This is a new product by Heygen Labs which basically takes any video you give it and creates a version in any language you care to mention – but it does so in YOUR voice, and it adds decent lipyncing, meaning that to the casual viewer it looks as though you’re speaking, say, German, in your natural voice, like it was the most normal thing in the world. Honestly, I don’t think I can overstate quite how insane this  is – the speed and the quality is quite remarkable, not least because this would have been entirely impossible about a year or so ago.
  • Planta: I like plants, I really do, but I am so bad at keeping them alive that it feels rather like they don’t like me very much to the extent that they would rather suicide themselves than spend another minute in my company (I refuse to countenance the idea that it’s my incompetence or neglect that’s killing them, no siree) – if you, like me, are more brown-than-green-fingered (I am sure I have used that phrase before, and it hasn’t gotten any less unpleasantly-faecal sounding since last time, has it? Sorry!) then you might find this app, which offers help and guidance on all aspects of plant husbandry, from indoor houseplants to allotment-type vegetables – it identifies plants, helps you monitor light levels, gives you reminders to water the fcuking things, and, basically, if you can’t keep a peony alive with this then there’s no hope for you and you might as well just patio over the whole fcuking garden.
  • Bike Index: It’s entirely plausible that this site will be common knowledge to all of you who own bikes, but in case not…Bike Index purports to be the world’s largest bike registration site/portal, on which you can sign up and record the details of your velocipede in the hope that when it inevitably gets nicked in three months’ time you can alert the users here and get people to look out for it; the idea being that if you see a bike for sale you can quickly check the reg against the database here collected and see if it has in fact been unlawfully-liberated from its owner. It’s not entirely clear to me what happens then – is the idea that you politely inform the vendor that they are in fact dealing in stolen goods, and that they thank you fulsomely for the intel and alert the local constabulary post-haste, and then arrange swift repatriation of the bike in question to its rightful owner? Because, honestly, that seems a *touch* fanciful, but I guess I admire the optimism here. Anyway, this is an international endeavour and is the very acme of A Good And Nice Idea, so I encourage you all to sign up your bikes and never buy one from the nice bloke down the market without first running the serial number through this site.
  • Modern Serial: It feels very much like I have featured this before, but a cursory flick through the archive suggests it’s new to me, and so perhaps it will be new to you too. Modern Serial is a smart way of making classic texts episodic via email (in much the same way as the ‘Dracula Via Email’ project from a few years back – was it a lockdown thing? It feels like a lockdown thing – which gave readers the Bram Stoker novel as a series of email updates) – sign up, pick a book, pick a delivery cadence and ENJOY as a new section of classic fiction ends up in your inbox in regular, bitesize chunks. This is SUCH a good idea, and I wonder whether it could be extended to, well, anything – I quite like the idea of being able to learn like this, being sent small bits of learning around a subject area on a regular basis, accumulating over time; the selection of books here is limited to out-of-copyright works, but that encompasses some wonderful material and in general this is a really rather wonderful idea, executed superbly.
  • Organic Maps: Ooh, this is potentially super-useful for all of you middle-aged dads who dream of getting on a bike and just fcuking off for a few weeks with nothing but a rucksack, some suitably fit friends and a route featuring a lot of remote pubs for company; Organic Maps is a “a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data. It is a privacy-focused, open-source fork of Maps.me app (previously known as MapsWithMe), maintained by the same people who created MapsWithMe in 2011. Organic Maps is one of a few applications nowadays that supports 100% of features without an active Internet connection. Install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card (by the way, your operator constantly tracks you), and go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.” Hugely useful for all your off-network travel needs
  • Trickle: Ooh, this is potentially really useful – Trickle harnesses THE POWER OF AI to help you make sense of, and organise, your screenshots. You upload your screenshots to the site, it analyses them using…some AI (not sure what it’s using here, does Bard have an API that would let them use that?) and annotates them based on what it ‘sees’ in the image, creating a bunch of metadata and tags associated to each screenshot, making them searchable and, well, useful. Genuinely potentially helpful to anyone who spends a lot of time working (specifically, designing) on their phone, this is also a really interesting glimpse into all the fun things that are coming down the line with truly multimodal AI in the next few months.
  • Pika: Another text-to-video app, offering an alternative to RunwayML – this is, like Runway, incredibly shonky at present, but you can very much see glimpses of how crazy this is going to get in ~1 year’s time. Annoyingly it uses the Midjourney ‘Discord-as-a-command-interface’ model, which personally makes me never want to touch it again, but it’s definitely worth a play if you’re interested in seeing how it stacks up against the best-in-class (or just if you want to make some really unsettling, melty-faced short films).
  • EmojiGen: Yes, I know, emoji generators are OLD HAT and SO 2020, but this is a NEW VARIANT, powered by AI, and it is ACE. Type in whatever you want it to generate an emoji of, and it will deliver, creating a small, C&Pable graphic for you to drop into whatever conversation you’re currently having on whatever platform you prefer (I presume that this is built on the DallE API or an open source GAN, with a pre-prompt of ‘an emoji of’ or something similar). There’s a selection of examples that people have generated on the homepage – I particularly enjoyed the very wholesome result for ‘threesome’ – but I encourage you to play around and make your own, as this is FUN.
  • FAU’s Roman Boats: OK, so this isn’t the MOST compelling site I’ve linked to this week, but it made me laugh SO MUCH and as such I must share it with you, so that you can inevitably click the link and not understand what the fcuk it was that I found so amusing about what is, on the face of it, a pretty dry website detailing the efforts of one Professor Dreyer of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Nurenburg to build a working replica of a roman boat (he is now apparently ‘investigating how ancient bread ovens worked or how accurately Roman catapults could shoot’ – I have to say, Professor Dreyer sounds like a lot of fun). I’ll give you a clue – scroll down and observe the AMAZING offer to buy your very own small replica Roman boat. Honestly, I don’t know why I find this so funny but there are literal tears streaming down my face as I write this. Perhaps I am overtired.
  • The Small Web: I am increasingly convinced that there is a COMING TREND towards people rediscovering the joy of sharing odd and obscure links to weird little webprojects, presaged by that fcuking Guardian piece the other week and supported by things like this, which I am seeing start to crop up more and more and which feels like it’s coalescing into…something of a movement, maybe? Not quite sure where I’m going with this tbh, but when Kris and I did the Tiny Awards earlier this year we both got a sense that there was a real appetite for things that broke the quotidian drudgery of the functional web of 2023 and helped people find the unexpected online; so it is with this project, by alternative search engine people Kagi, which is basically ‘stumbleupon, but for posts on personal websites’, and which lets you effectively hop from blog to blog like it’s 2002 and you have just discovered the concept of the webring. This is gorgeous, and another place you could legitimately lose hours to as you hopped from essay to diary to project page to photodump, all the while exploring the tiny, home-carved corners of the vast infinity of cyberspace that people have decided to call home. I promise, by the way, that when everyone and their fcuking dog is doing ‘updates of interesting stuff they found on the web’ I will not get all miserable and salty and “I FOUND THE CONCH YOU CNUTS” (I will totally do that, apologies in advance).
  • Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers: Finally this week, a very fun little demo of a larger game in which you play a version of blackjack against a cast of antagonists as part of a vaguely-fantasy-themed ‘quest’ – this is a lot of fun, and tweaks the basic gameplay of ‘21’ in a series of interesting ways, with power-ups and special moves and all sorts of other clever additions. A genuinely enjoyable hour or so’s play, this, with a full game that you can eventually purchase if you feel so minded (and, if you like this sort of thing, there’s a much-shinier version of the same sort of thing – but this time based on poker rather than blackjack – available on Steam which I can heartily recommend).

By Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY AURA SAFARI AND SELF-DESCRIBES AS “A JOURNEY INTO ITALIAN UPTEMPO AND PEAK TIME HOUSE RECORDS FROM THE 90S” WHICH FRANKLY SHOULD BE MORE THAN ENOUGH TO RECOMMEND IT TO YOU!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Strange Flowers: Not in fact a Tumblr! Noone cares! Via the wonderful Nag comes this superb blogtypething, whose raison d’etre is to…hang on, it’s worth reproducing the ‘about’ page in full because it is unusually joyful and explains perfectly what this is all about. Strange Flowers is “a cabinet of human curiosities, a celebration of some of the most eccentric, extravagant and extraordinary personalities of the last 200-odd years. It is a product of the blogger’s obsession with history’s footnotes, paragons of vivid individuality who elevated the craft of selfhood to an art. Because often it wasn’t what they left behind, but how they lived that was their real masterpiece. They might be difficult, ridiculous, contrary – even tragic – but never, ever dull. Strange Flowers constitutes an alternative universe Who’s Who, a pantheon of ill-deserved obscurity which roams the worlds of literature, art, science, aristocracy and bohemia, low life and high society. Unique and fearless, some of these rare blooms emerge from the shadows of history as unsung influences on our lives, others served as inspiration for fictional characters that became better known than their models. Some may have travelled under the banner of Dandyism, Dadaism or Decadence, but this is an account of individuals, not movements, and most of our subjects were avant-garde without a garde to be avant. More interesting are the elective affinities, private connections, the bequest of tastes and sensibilities from one esoteric nature to another. Some squandered early promise and slid into squalor and ignominy. Others lived and worked in eremitic isolation, finding scant recognition only after death. Whatever their fate, Strange Flowers aims to celebrate the individual by remembering those who, having inherited the basic materials of existence bequeathed to us all, fashioned them into something heroically, wilfully odd, and often sublime.” This really feels like it should be a book, or a documentary series, or a podcast, as well as this superb blog – there is SO MUCH amazing and interesting stuff in here about so many incredible people.
  • Tenement Town: Also via the Nag (THANKYOU) comes this website (I have checked the source code and this isn’t a Tumblr either, chiz chiz – standards here really are slipping, and I am SORRY) which collects and presents old and forgotten stories of the people who lived in Edinburgh in years past, when the social and economic profile of the city was…different, and this is a lovely urban history passion project. To quote its creator, “I’m Diarmid Mogg. I’m interested in the stories of ordinary people who lived their lives in the places where we live today, and I spend a lot of time writing about them, mostly using stories I find in old newspapers. The newspaper archives contain a lot of interesting scraps of information about the people who were here before us, and about the places they lived, and I often search the old papers for mention of the addresses of tenements that have caught my eye to see what stories I can find. Tenement Town takes a look behind the doors I pass every day, and offers glimpses of the lives that were lived over the centuries in the places Edinburgh’s citizens still call home.” Super-interesting, particularly for those of you who live in, or haved lived in, Edinburgh.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  •  The London Night Cafe: This is a great idea – recently opened in Whitechapel, the London Night Cafe is a place that offers a nocturnal space for people who want somewhere to work or just hang out late at night without having to be in a bar, club or other booze-related establishment; it’s open overnight and you pay just over £8 for the privilege of being able to sit somewhere and work, or read, or think – tickets are on sale in advance, they do events on some evenings, Thursdays are phone-free spaces…generally this seems like A Good Thing, and if you’re a London insomniac or the sort of person who a) can only work at night and b) can only work in a place that isn’t their actual house, then this could prove very useful indeed.
  • Monster Fish Taxidermy: SO MANY TERRIFYING, MANY-TOOTHED B4STARDS OF THE DEEP HERE.
  • Sofy Guerrero: Guerrero does watercolour illustrations, near-photorealistic, of translucent plastic objects (and other things too, fine, but it’s the translucent plastic objects that I particularly enjoy here), and they are excellent.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Get A Rabbit: We begin this week’s longreads with John Lanchester on typically-excellent form in the LRB, ostensibly reviewing three books about data and statistics but in fact taking the reader on a fascinating journey through some of the ways in which the modern world’s (understandable, and mostly-helpful) obsession with quantification and data and analysis have had interesting, unexpected and often unintended and unwanted consequences, and all the reasons why unlimited data and statistics and the analysis thereof are not necessarily enough to protect from Bad Outcomes. I think Lanchester’s a better essayist than novelist, personally (that said, this is one of my favourite ever novels and I have read it two-dozen times and I cannot recommend it highly enough to each of you, especially if you enjoy food and cooking), and this is a wonderful example of what makes him so good – this sweeping essay takes you from Maoist statism through the racism of 19th-and-early-20th Century North America, to modern football, to a clear-eyed takedown of the current UK taxation system and throughout manages to be entertaining, educational and occasionally even funny. This really is superb.
  • Thinking DNA: There was a point about halfway through this essay – which starts out as a summary of the life and work of Barbara McClintock, a woman who spend her career studying the genetic makeup of corn in Iowa and who is the most interesting scientist I had never, ever heard of, and which ends up as a series of questions and provocations about what cellular biology can teach us about how LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD FUNCTIONS – when I started getting that weird fizzing feeling in the back of my head that pops up every now and again when I am reading something properly stimulating and curious and exciting; honestly, this is truly fascinating and thought-provoking (at least for me, a man for whom biology is a terrifying and mostly-closed book). Here, this should give you a feeling for it – I promise you that this is SO thought-provoking, you really won’t regret reading it even if you (like me) tend to find Hard Science a bit much: “Take our brains, for example, with their neurons. For Levin, the use of electricity to carry information is not exclusive to brains. That’s not a philosophical stance, so much as an empirical one. Bioelectricity, as McClintock noted, is a pervasive phenomenon across kingdoms of life. “The unique computational capabilities of bioelectric circuits likely enabled the evolution of nervous systems, as specialized adaptations of the ancient ability of all cell networks to process electrical information as pre-neural networks,” Levin writes. The brain’s special feature is not the ability to store or spread information, but its speed. Let’s recall the old saw: “Plants are just very slow animals.” And then consider that it might be actually true.”
  • Artist Datasets: This is really interesting, and touches on stuff that I had never thought about before reading this. It’s easiest just to quote the opening paras here, as they do an excellent job of framing the premise of the piece: “In 2018, artist Anna Ridler spent three months taking 10,000 photographs of tulips. From purchasing each tulip to manually writing every image label, Ridler made physical the laborious, painstaking process of deliberate dataset creation. She eventually used these photographs to produce downstream generative artwork—but the Myriad (Tulips) dataset is a work of art in its own right. Ridler describes the process of dataset creation as craftwork: “repetitive, time-consuming…but necessary in order to produce something beautiful.” When I look at Myriad (Tulips) today, I’m struck by the prescience of Ridler’s work. Debates on AI and art have intensified over the past year. An increasing subset of artists are rightfully angry that their work is being used to train AI systems that will compete against them. A growing mountain of lawsuits, strikes, and congressional hearings speak to the anxiety rippling through creative industries. Previously in Reboot, Amanda Wong discussed the complicated visual aesthetics of AI art, concluding that we must “actively shape [the] meaningful production, creation, and consumption” of AI art. I want to pick up where Wong left off by focusing on the meaningful production of datasets.” This covers all sorts of fascinating questions about taxonomy and selection and bias and representation, and fractional representation of the whole, and feels like the sort of thing that could usefully be read by anyone with an interest in how we use large swathes of information or data, and how we decide what data or information we use in the first place.
  • Roblox: Ordinarily I wouldn’t put ‘a bunch of feature updates by a videogame’ into the longreads here, but I will make an exception for this because I think it’s worth taking a moment to think about how massive this is potentially going to be. There’s a bunch of stuff included in the link, but the big takeaway from Roblox’s latest set of announcements is the introduction of AI-enhanced creative tools, which will let anyone who wants to build something on the platform create assets out of thin air based on conversational prompts – so, for example, create an empty world and then ask The Machine to generate character sprites and scenery and objects based on your prompts, and then use prompts to establish relationships between objects, and and and and…I think what’s most interesting about this is the feeling of crossing a (small, but still) Rubicon in terms of adoption and acceptance; if you consider how many kids worldwide use Roblox, and how comfortable they are going to become (and how quickly) with generative AI as part of their creative apparatus, you get a small idea of what things might end up looking like in 15-20 years when the same kids are adults building the world for real.
  • Your Waiter Is Not Your Extra: Or, “another charming example of all the ways in which the creation of a culture in which Everything Is Content has led to a bunch of weird situations in which people find themselves becoming Content against their will, and of how we are still at the stage of attempting to work out what exactly the social mores around all this stuff are because right now it’s all a bit of a mess” – this article in the WSJ looks at the very modern phenomenon of kids in the US (but this is obviously a worldwide thing) filming their HILARIOUS SKITS for TikTok at restaurants and fast food outlets, and by so doing rendering unwitting extras of the people working there who perhaps are less keen on being background material or, worse, reactive mooks for whatever viral CHALLENGE is keeping the children occupied this hour. We can’t be too far from there being a movement to start teaching kids ‘camera etiquette’ from the age of about 7 (I might start it tbh).
  • Trench Foot Burning Man: For a variety of annoying reasons – mainly associated with the fact that, for reasons known only to them, my girlfriend’s internet provider, 3, classifies The Internet Archive as ‘adult material’ and won’t let me access it; this despite the fact that it didn’t have a problem with the ACTUAL BONGO link in last week’s Curios ffs – I am unable to give you an unpaywalled version of this, but I encourage you to attempt to find it on the Wayback Machine because, honestly, this is one of the purest hatereads you will experience all year. This is an ‘oral history’ of some of the world’s most annoying people – West Coast US tech industry people! Wellness nonces! THE ‘SPIRITUALLY AWARE’! – talking to you about how INTENSE it was at THE PLAYA this year, and, honestly, reading this confirmed to me my long-standing belief that I can never visit Burning Man because I would commit A Bad Crime, perhaps two, within moments of arrival.
  • Selling Tennis: This is a GREAT read, particularly for those of you who work in advermarketingpr and have strong opinions about things like BRANDS and BRAND EQUITY and THE HISTORY OF ADVERTISING (please, if you don’t mind, keep those opinions to yourselves), telling the story of how tennis became US advertisers’ sport of choice in the 70s and 80s, and how Virginia Slims made tabs and racquets strangely-comfortable bedfellows through its sponsorship of its very own women’s tennis tournament. This is FASCINATING, honestly, and for all those aforementioned BRAND-HEADS there is all sorts of useful stuff you can take from it – for the less business-sick amongst you, though, this is just a fascinating throwback to a very different era (also, as an aside you do forget what a weirdly…sleazy time that was).
  • Tiny TVs: A small but objectively-hilarious piece of writing in which an American who is strangely-obsessed with the property-based UK TV show ‘Escape to the Country’ and, specifically, how many of the houses in it have, to American eyes at least, incredibly small and sh1t TVs. That’s literally all this is about, fine, but I personally found her increasing indignation at the refusal of the British middle-classes to have a 90-inch digital funscreen on every single vertical flat surface in their home an enjoyable read.
  • Ignore The Fans: Or, to give you the full title of the piece, “I am begging TV shows to ignore fans” – specifically, this relates to the character of Che Diaz on the SATC revival show “And Just Like That”, and all the reasons why said character is sort of the apogee of bad fan-reactive creative output. I have never watched AJLT (fortunately I was at university during the heyday of SATC, meaning I’ve not really seen much of that either) but there’s been enough DISCOURSE about it across its two seasons to date that I am aware of the character, the criticisms of it and the way in which said criticisms have bled through in terms of the responses of the actors and writers making the show – that said, even if you’re coming at this entirely cold, the piece does a good job of explaining its premise and then detailing exactly why a project which takes its fans’ opinions too seriously will almost always lead to Bad Art. A really good piece of meta-media-criticism, this, by a newsletter with the best name I have seen all year (“All The Heterosexual Nonsense I Was Forced To Endure”)
  • The Influencercation: Or, “How To Take Your Grift On Holiday!” You can’t move right now for people with newsletters (OTHER newsletters, less good ones) talking about ‘community’ and how ‘energised’ they feel by their readers – rest assured that I NEVER think of you fcuks as a ‘community’, and I am largely oblivious to your presence, as it should be – which, honestly, strikes me as just another twist on the parasocial grift that is ‘getting people to pay you money for your mostly-banal observations about life’ (GYAC, literally EVERYONE doing this stuff pivots to ‘life coaching’ at some point or another – ALL of them). This piece is about the NEXT LEVEL version of this – specifically, charging your ‘community’ to go on holiday with you! There is, it turns out, a company that will, for a cut of the total income from the grifter’s audience, arrange an entire ‘community getaway’ for you and your fandom; you pick whether you want, say, a cruise, or some sort of ayurvedic self-harm retreat (probably) and they arrange the whole thing for you; you, meanwhile, cobble together some sort of events programme and prepare to think of the money every time one of your readers attempts to become your actual, IRL friend. I honestly find this sort of thing…quite uncomfortable, but I concede that it might just be because I am a miserable misanthropist who is the very opposite of a ‘joiner’.
  • The Alien Mummies: The recently-launched tech title 404 Media continues to deliver decent stories in its first few weeks; this is a good overview of the slightly-less-exciting reality behind this week’s ‘MEXICAN ALIEN MUMMIES’ story, which, you may be surprised to learn, is possibly not quite as clear-cut as the enthusiastic man talking wildly about ALIEN DNA might initially have suggested.
  • The Pen1s Enlargement SubReddit: On the one hand, there is obviously nothing funny about men who are riddled with insecurity about the dimensions of their junk; on the other, there is something very, very funny indeed about the communities of interest that spring up around this insecurity. This piece takes you inside the /r/gettingbigger community and WHAT a place it is – even if you don’t want to read an article which is mainly about men attaching weights to themselves in an attempt to scare up another 3cm, I cannot encourage you enough to click the link and scroll down enough to see the images of the devices that these people are using. Male readers of Curios – HOW DESPERATE AND MAD WOULD YOU HAVE TO BE TO PUT THAT NEAR YOUR COCK?! (please do not write to me and tell me, this was another rhetorical one).
  • Bernie Taupin: I really didn’t expect to enjoy this anywhere near as much as I did, but this profile of long-time Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin is a joy from start to finish – it’s funny, candid, contains some great stories, and presents Taupin as a man who has had a genuinely great life, for which you don’t begrudge him one iota. Honestly, this really is a tremendous, fun read.
  • Dolls: A really interesting look at the community of enthusiasts that make up the world of the ball-jointed doll fandom; you will have seen these things online at some point, and I have definitely linked to at least one of the creators named in here before, but there’s something fascinating about this profile of the people who make, and buy, these ultra-poseable, highly-stylised and entirely-bespoke creations, which is made more compelling by a genuinely unusual tone and style to the piece (which is by one Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, who absolutely wins ‘best name of the whole week’).
  • Old Smells: There’s a *bit* of ‘old man mourns the passing of time’ about this piece, fine, but given I am an increasingly old man I think I can probably let this slide. A lovely piece of writing about how some smells from the past are simply gone forever, and the often very good reasons why; this both a good essay and a useful reminder to pay attention to things before they stop existing, or change without warning.
  • Teeth: I have, I am ashamed to admit, horrific teeth; wonky, stained from years of incredibly-strong tea (I honestly shudder to think of what colour my insides are; some sort of deep tannic mahogany, no doubt) and fags and spliffs, exacerbated by unusually-porous enamel; if you didn’t already know, or hadn’t heard me speak, a cursory glance at the dental graveyard in my gob would confirm my English-ness in a heartbeat. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed this piece so much – a long look at the veneers industry, and how perhaps getting your teeth filed down to tiny nubbins and replaced with blindingly-white facsmiles may not in fact be a great idea in the medium-to-long-term. If you have veneers, maybe don’t read this; if you don’t, then do and thank your lucky stars that you don’t have veneers.
  • Building The Torment Nexus: If you are aware of the ‘building the Torment Nexus’ meme then this will mean very little to you; if you are, then a) congratulations, you too are WASTING YOUR LIFE!; b) you will very much enjoy this bit of writing (annoyingly it’s a Mastodon thread, but I can’t seem to find a way of unrolling Mastodon so, well, this is what you’re getting), which is a not-particularly-subtle bit of satire about every single tech company in the world (and one in particular).
  • I Have No Tongue: An upfront warning about this one – it describes a lot of very unpleasant medical procedures, and what it is like to experience them, and if you are squeamish then you might struggle with it (I had to stop at various points because it got Too Much for me, I am unashamed to admit); oh, it’s also by someone who has terminal cancer, so, you know, bear that in mind. That said, it’s quite an incredible piece of writing – it’s rare to find someone writing so clearly about such a horrible experience, and doing with clean prose like this is particularly remarkable. I personally found it an incredibly hard read, in the main because the authorial experience replicated many of the same things that my mother experienced in the last year of her life and which I couldn’t talk to her about because, well, she couldn’t talk and it seemed somewhat cruel to ask her to use the little energy she had to write on a tiny whiteboard about exactly HOW it all felt awful, but notwithstanding that difficulty I also thought it was beautiful and sad and one of the bravest things I have read in a long, long time.
  • Irene: I don’t really want to tell you too much about this real-life story, but it is JOYFUL AND HEARTWARMING, and I promise will give you a small glow which will totally compensate for some of the unremitting body horror of the last one. This is, broadly, about the impressions we make on people that we will never know, and the joy of piecing together a story, and how wonderful it is sometimes when the web works in the way it feels, in an idealised world, it should.
  • Oxygen: A short sobriety story, about trying to replace drug use with oxygenation treatment; this is slight but I enjoyed it very much indeed.
  • Frisbee: Finally this week, a piece by Thomas Morris which I GUARANTEE will induce real and powerful feelings of nostalgia for the last carefree Summer of your youth, and the friends you had when you were 17, and the feeling of infinite possibility that you can never identify until you know that you will probably never feel it again – this is about being young, and also, a bit, about Ultimate Frisbee, and it is so, so, so lovely. I promise you, you will not regret reading this – it is utterly pure, in the best way.

By Kay Seohyung Lee

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 08/09/23

Reading Time: 32 minutes

On the one hand, he is a terrorist and as such probably *ought* to be incarcerated; on the other, it’s hard not to cheer a little bit for a prison break so perfectly-filmic in its execution; I’m putting a quiet tenner on Ezra Miller to play Daniel Khalife in the inevitable 2024 Apple TV adaptation.

Anyway, how are you? How has your week been? Have YOU achieved anything as impressive as Daniel? No, I didn’t think so – still, there’s two days left, though, so FOCUS FFS. I have had something of a trying morning writing this as a result of being a *bit* tired and hungover; I went to see Fesshole Live last night which was a lot of fun and which I very much recommend should it ever come to your neck of the woods, but which left me with the overriding impression that there is something terribly wrong with the nation’s bowel health – YOU SHOULD NOT ALL BE SH1TTING YOURSELVES WITH SUCH REGULARITY, PEOPLE OF ENGLAND! IT IS NOT NORMAL!

(I promise that that’s the last reference to inadvertent bowel movements in this week’s newsletter. Sorry.)

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and if any of you would like to unburden yourself of something that’s weighing heavily on your conscience then feel free to tell me EVERYTHING.

By Jeremy CSJ

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST PART OF THIS NEWSLETTER – OR INDEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU MAY FANCY SOUNDTRACKING, WE’RE NOT PRESCRIPTIVE ROUND HERE – WITH THIS EXCELLENT TWO-HOUR MIX OF TUNES AND STYLES COURTESY OF JED FROM LWSTD? 

THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY DO WITH A NAP , PT.1:  

  • DJ Phonetic: Older readers of an Anglo persuasion are probably familiar with puerile (but very funny) ‘comic for adults’ Viz (for those of you fortunate enough not to have spent your formative years consuming the swill that passes for English popular culture: Viz is a long-running magazine in the UK which can best be described as ‘in the style of a classic postwar comic strip for children, but featuring characters who are more likely to carry their outsize testicles around in a wheelbarrow (no, really) than they are to play conkers’; there, you’re all caught up) which for several years in the 90s and possibly beyond featured a character called ‘Ravey Davey Gravy’ who was so addled by pills and techno that they heard repetitive beats wherever they went and as such would find themselves doing the ‘big fish, little fish’ thing in all sorts of unlikely places (it’s better in print, honest). Which is by way of a SEAMLESS intro to this wonderful link, found via Andy, which proves that literally ANYTHING can be a beat – even, er, the historically significant utterances of great men and women from history! DJ Phonetic is a really neatly-made webtoy which describes itself as ‘a beatbox with historical speech’ – taking audio of significant speeches from significant individuals from US history, and using software to identify and isolate specific phonemes from said speeches and letting you use them to make beats with. So you can create a nice, skittering little number from the words of JFK, or something more sinuous out of Richard Nixon’s forked-tongued utterances; clicking different words in the speech transcript selects different elements of the speech to integrate into the loop, meaning each sample lets you make a huge range of different sounds. Honestly, this is LOTS of fun to play around with and made me really want a version of this that uses Hansard records and ParliamentTV archives to spin up something comparable from the UK Parliamentary record. Who wouldn’t want to make some drum’n’bass out of the speechifying of Michael Fabricant? NO FCUKER, etc!
  • Our TR2 Remake: Frame-by-frame community remakes of iconic (sorry) films are a long-running internet ‘thing’ (most recently seen as part of MSCHF’s crowdsourced reimagining of The Bee Movie (they’re now doing John Wick, fyi)), but now they are getting the AI treatment – this project is looking for artists to bring the MAGIC OF GENERATIVE AI to bear on the James Cameron classic, with the film being split into 50 segments and a different artist being assigned to bring each to life using what will almost inevitably end up being a variety of different custom-trained versions of Stable Diffusion and some animation software. As far as I can tell they are currently short by about 20 artists, so feel free to share this with everyone you know so that humanity can one day get the vaguely-flat-looking remake of a 30-year-old classic film that we doubtless deserve.
  • HyundAI: Where ARE all the AI-enabled advermarketingPR projects? Are you not all including at least one AI-juiced idea in every single pitch? WHY ARE YOU NOT MILKING THE ZEITGEIST DRY?!? Well, if this latest bit of digital promo from Hyundai is anything to go by, it’s because it’s still quite hard to make anything public facing and safe out of this tech without it also being fundamentally tedious and underwhelming and, well, just a bit sh1t. This website exists to promote some new SUV or another – because it’s really important that you have a vehicle the size of a small tank to do the school run and go to the garden centre! – and lets YOU, the lucky user, use THE MAGIC OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to explore the CREATIVE AND ARTISTIC WORLD of,  er, ‘the all-new Hyundai Santa Fe’. The user experience involves you either being asked to select from a series of adjectives to generate your own magical image of, er, a big car, or alternatively lets you input whatever esoteric, imaginative prompt you can think of to generate your magical, fantastical vehicular ‘art’ – except, not unreasonably, there are some pretty hefty guardrails in place to stop you attempting to make anything too ‘brand unsafe’, meaning that my request for an image that invoked ‘a meaty landscape of bone and viscera’ was unceremoniously rejected. So effectively you’re forced into ‘imagining’ only the anodyne and dull, and the resulting images are about as exciting as you’d expect them to be based on this sort of policing – there’s also something odd about the outputs and the way there only seem to be about a dozen different positions that the car ends up in, which makes me wonder whether the ‘AI’ here is being applied only to the backgrounds. Basically this is…pretty sh1t tbh (I apologise to the team involved, should any of them happen to stumble across this ‘review’, but they can console themselves with the fact that they are probably all young and have exciting careers before them whereas I am not, and am reasonably convinced that I might be entirely unemployable by 2025 at the very latest), but at the very least means that the bar for ‘branded uses of generative AI’ work is still snake-belly-low.
  • Vispunk: I am struggling slightly to see the name of this company as anything other than ‘Vi Spunk’, but that small issue aside this looks like a decently-useful tool for any of you who want a bunch of reasonably-powerful AI-enabled image manipiulation tools but who have neither the budget nor the inclination to pay Adobe whatever insane licensing fee they are currently asking for their Creative Suite and all the fun Firefly AI tools that it now comes bundled with. Vispunk (could you not change that ‘s’ to a ‘z’? Please? Just for me?) is basically a composite image generator, which combines a few different elements into one – you can sketch out rough shapes, ask the AI to ‘imagine’ them as specific elements and then drag and drop those onto a canvas. As ever, this stuff is FAR easier to understand if you just click the link and play around with it – I don’t think this is professional quality by any means, but as a way of producing quick-and-dirty mockups of stuff it strikes me as pretty useful (and also it doesn’t need you to log into anything to use it, which is no small thing for these AI toys).
  • Keplar: I’ve looked at this site several times this week, and each time I am left thinking ‘no, hang on, I must have got the wrong end of the stick here, this CAN’T be what I think it is, that’s just too mad and stupid and noone in their right mind would ever pay for this service, let alone make actual business decisions based on the ‘insights’ it delivers’ – AND YET. Keplar is very much a nascent idea – the ‘company’ is a homepage and a ‘sign me up for more info’ form and, as far as I can tell, nothing else at present – but WHAT an idea it is! AI-POWERED VIRTUAL CUSTOMERS ON WHICH TO TEST YOUR PRODUCTS AND CONTENT! Yes, that’s right – why risk going to market with a product or packaging or social assets without first using an army of apparently-AI-enabled ‘virtual customers’ to test said products and content first? As far as I can tell, the idea here is that you will use Keplar to spin up a test audience of ‘people’ (not people) with specific interests, desires and preferences (presumably to replicate your target customer segment) and then present them with content or imagery or branding and see how they ‘react’ and whether they ‘like’ it. “So, which tagline have we gone with for the new soda range? How did the focus groups react?” “Well, turns out we couldn’t actually afford in-person focus-grouping, but the coterie of 10,000 virtual consumers we tested it on went WILD for ‘Wet In Your Face’ and so that’s what we’re going with!” I am so, so fascinated by this, in a slightly-appalled way.
  • Stock Music: Well that didn’t take long – a few short months on from the Google ‘text-to-music’ generation toy we have our first ‘sorry, musicians, but your chance to make money from composing stock sounds for the corporate market is pretty much over’ website. Stock Music is made by some art studio in Amsterdam, and lets you select from about 20-odd musical ‘types’ or styles, from podcast soundtrack to d’n’b, pick a duration and then get The Machine to spin you up some ORIGINAL AURAL CONTENT which, based on my brief plays with the site, will be utterly unmemorable, utterly inoffensive and definitely no worse than something you’d have to pay a few quid to license. This is, on the one hand, very convenient indeed; on the other, of course, it does feel like another nail being loudly hammered into the coffin of ‘the ability to make anything resembling a living from ‘creative’ endeavours’. Were I more musically talented (or indeed at all musically talented) I think I would have quite a lot of fun getting this to spit out a selection of different anodyne compositions and then challenge myself to remix them into something passably-listenable; there’s a halfway-interesting project in that idea somewhere should any of you fancy doing anything with it.
  • Map Of The Best (Restaurants): The concept of ‘best’ restaurants is contentious and questionable – one person’s Michelin star is another’s overpriced affront to human decency, after all, and the whole idea is fraught with politics and DISCOURSE, as the recent Vittles debate amply demonstrated – but, in general, more resources to help you find decent scran are A Good Thing, and this is an EXCELLENT example of the genre. A labour of love by…some anonymous coder (thanks, anonymous coder!) which has taken a bunch of data from various restaurant rating organisations (Michelin, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, etc) and mapped it, offering a global rundown of 757 (at the time of writing) different highly-rated eateries for you to peruse at your leisure. You can filter the results by source or price, so you can ensure that you’re not being tempted by the £600-a-head Mayfair w4nkpits, and this is SUCH a useful resource for anyone even halfway restaurant-curious to add to their research repertoire when travelling.
  • Colorword: Oh I LOVE this idea! The execution here doesn’t quite work – he said, churlishly, of a website that has kindly been made by a total stranger – but I really like the concept behind it. Taking the vaguely-synesthesiac premise of ‘what colour would you ascribe to words or ideas?’, this site serves up a selection of words and asks visitors to pick a colour from the RGB palette that they feel best embodies it. What colour is ‘hope’? ‘Jealousy’? The number 7? You pick the colour you feel is most emblematic of whatever concept you’re fed, and then get presented with an aggregate image representing the most popular choices, a sort of collective Rorshach-y inkblot of chromatic meaning, and I would LOVE to see an exhibition based around this idea somewhere.
  • The Glitch Gallery: This, though, really SHOULD be a gallery show – there is some gorgeous imagery in here, the result of software fcuking up and going wrong in interesting and aesthetically-appealing ways. From the blurb: “Imagine yourself implementing a raytracer, generating a scatter plot, or developing a geometric algorithm, and BAM!!! It all blows up in your face! All you get is a colorful flurry, or a mess of abstract shapes. You could react to this by throwing your hands in the air, cursing the gods of linear algebra, and frustratedly starting to look for the bug. Alternatively, take a screenshot, and celebrate that unexpected beauty! These moments are often a really interesting case of “unintentional art” – a collaboration between a human, a computational system, and raw entropy!” This is made and maintained by one blinry, whose website features LOADS of cool little projects which I highly recommend you checking out.
  • Regrub: Italy has a slightly-odd relationship with American-style fast food; on the one hand, when you have pizza you don’t really need other forms of ‘food to eat one-handed on the go’; on the other, the fetishisation of US culture, or at least certain aspects of it, specifically the brash and shiny and LOUD ones (thanks Silvio! WHAT A LEGACY YOU LEFT!!), and McDonald’s weird inability to penetrate the market – certainly in the 80s at least – meant that there was a weird degree of reverence attached to the idea of the burger-in-wax-paper, and some genuinely odd and shonky local chains that tried and largely failed to capture that ‘diners and letterman jackets’ vibe but with an oddly southern European twist (I still remember the aberration that was the ‘Burghy’ experience). Anyway, that’s by way of needless, nostalgic preamble to the introduction of this link, which is to the homepage of a NEW Italian burger chain which I am featuring solely because I love its website and branding SO MUCH – this is the second fast food restaurant website I’ve featured this year, oddly enough, and the second with this sort of aesthetic. Is this a TREND? I don’t care – it’s so nice to see a site that doesn’t feel…flat, and which is generally just sort of silly and fun. MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING PLEASE.
  • Postcard Past: A site collecting present-day photographic recreations of scenes from old postcards, which neatly contrast the stylised presentation of the often-future-seeming architecture depicted in postcards of the 50s and 60s with the reality of today. To quote the project’s curator, “I’m interested in economic, social, and urban history, and what we learn about them when we compare these highly edited, aspirational bits of old ephemera and the built environment of today. Stories about the rise-and-fall of entire industries, institutional discrimination, and the destruction of public transit systems. Racism, as well as resiliency and creativity in the face of that racism. Immigration, real estate booms, and disinvestment. Too many parking lots, so many collapsed banks, tons of financial crime. Civil rights progress. Advances in engineering. Pandemics. Leaps forward in medical care. Privatization of public goods. Secularization. Adaptive reuse.” This is a genuinely interesting bit of social history and a fascinating archive to get lost in.
  • How Cold Is That Library?: A Google sheet collecting impressions and notes on the relative temperatures of various libraries around the world, presumably compiled by a collection of scholars with an incredibly sensitive internal thermostat. This is VERY comprehensive – there are a dozen listings for London alone, from the British Library to the Lambeth Palace Library, but if you choose to travel further afield then there’s data here for centres of learning and knowledge as far afield as Montevideo. You need never be too cold or too hot while studying EVER AGAIN – it’s possible that this is the most useful link that has EVER been in Web Curios, for which you are of course all welcome.
  • Figures In The Sky: This is interesting; this site looks at the different ways in which different civilisations across human history have mapped the stars, and the various constellations and groupings that have been identified by peoples from the Mayans to the Maori, and through a series of star maps demonstrates the differing emphasis placed on the various celestial bodies by people past and contemporary; this is a really lovely bit of webwork by Nadieh Bremer.
  • Dial A Pilot: Are you a nervous flyer? You shouldn’t be – after all, it’s not the flying that kills you, it’s the ground. Still, it’s not unreasonable to feel *slightly* trepidatious at the idea of spending several hours in a gigantic, many-ton metal tube which is held aloft by what may as well be magic (yes, I know that technically it’s ‘physics’ but, honestly, noone has ever managed to explain it in ways that sound anything other than utterly fantastical), and if you or anyone you know is getting the fantods at the idea of air travel then perhaps they might benefit from this rather wonderful little service which offers a dedicated service which puts nervous flyers in touch with actual, real-life pilots who can chat to them and offer reassuring words of counsel to take the edge off the terror slightly (“No, no, there’s literally no chance of surviving, whatever the reassuring little infographic leaflet tells you; yes, you can actually have your innards sucked out of you by the vacuum flush” – that sort of thing, presumably). This is such a good idea, and, seemingly, not a PR stunt for anything, which frankly feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.
  • Level To Explain: Horrible title (and slightly-clunky interface) aside, this is a really nice idea – ok, yes, fine, it’s just a bunch of pre-prompts and GPT API access, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fun little toy. Level To Explain (SUCH A BAD NAME, JESUS) basically ‘explains’ anything you ask it to, to the degree of complexity you specify, in as many words as you need – so, for example, you could ask it to explain nuclear fission in words comprehensible to, say, a GCSE level student, in 500 words or less. It will also do stylistic tweaks, spitting out copy in the style of a magazine article, say, or blogpost – while this is obviously built on generative AI and therefore NOTHING it says can be trusted, it’s also a not-terrible example of exactly the sort of text-wranging work that these machines are best at.

By Guy Vording

ENJOY THE UNSEASONAL ENGLISH HEATWAVE WHILE IT LASTS WITH THIS SUPER AMAPIANO MIX BY DJ STOKS!

THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY DO WITH A NAP, PT.2:      

  • Vita Kara: I remain resolutely immune to the charms of TikTok as a platform – I think, fundamentally, my problem with it is that at heart it’s just TV with very low production values and, well, I don’t like telly – but I found myself properly charmed by this account in which LA artist Vita Kara does a repeated ‘bit’ in which she creates increasingly-elaborate setups to fool the viewer. Every video begins with the line ‘the craziest thing about being creative…’ and each video features some sort of trompe l’oeil-type reveal in which one or more parts of the scene in shot reveals itself to not in fact be what you think it is. Which, fine, is an admittedly ham-fisted attempt to explain what the fcuk is going on here, but I promise you the channel is both funny and charming when you get into it (no, really, it is).
  • Wavacity: Do YOU want an in-browser bit of audio-editing software that lets you clip and fiddle and tweak and layer to your heart’s content, all for free? OF COURSE YOU DO! I was playing with this a bit this week and it reminded me how much *fun* audio editing can be, and how easy it is to make stupid-but-amusing things just by cutting and pasting and clipping – the interface here isn’t *hugely* user friendly, fine, but if you’ve ever used any audio editing software before then it should all be reasonably familiar, and there’s a not-terrible help function on the site should you get stuck. I think I might spend this afternoon using this to take audio from those people who insist on leaving me fcuking Whatsapp voicenotes (SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WANT TO LISTEN TO YOU SPEAK AT ME FOR TWO MINUTES UNINTERRUPTED AND WHAT EXACTLY IS IT ABOUT MY REFUSAL TO SPEAK ON THE PHONE THAT LEADS YOU TO BELIEVE THAT I CONSIDER THIS AN ACCEPTABLE ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION?! Ahem) and chop it up into spoofed murder confessions, and I advise you to do the same (they deserve it).
  • Spoon Planet: Do YOU like spoons? HOW MUCH DO YOU LIKE THEM, EH? Not, I would guess, as much as the person or people (but I rather hope it’s ‘person’ singular, because, well, I’m all about monomaniacal obsession – oh, hang on, I just checked and it is in fact the responsibility of ‘The Spoon Collectors of Southern California, which is just BEAUTIFUL) behind this website, which claims to be the single largest collection of sterling silver spoons on the internet (and, honestly, I am not about to undertake the exhaustive research required to verify or debunk this claim). SO MANY SPOONS! I love this immoderately, in part because of the subject matter (SPOONS!) but also because of the very strong ‘person in their dotage who disapproves of your lifestyle’ tone of much of the copy (I particularly enjoyed the “There is NO charge and there is NO registration required. Furthermore there are no big display ads to distract you” declaration on the homepage; are…are there other, less scrupulous spoon-based sites elsewhere on the internet that DO charge, and which demand a quid to access their ladle-related content goldmine?). Please do take the time to click into the ‘exhibits’ list – there really are an absolute fcuktonne of different types of spoon here, to be fair, and you may well discover a hitherto-unimagined passion to fill in all those empty, vacant hours between birth and death.
  • Ephemeral P2P Hosting: I can’t quite think of a practical use for this right now (look, I went to bet at 1 and I wasn’t wholly sober and I have been up since 6am and typing for two hours straight and I AM NOT AT MY BEST ON FRIDAY MORNINGS OK? I AM SORRY) but there *has* to be something fun you can do with this – this site lets you create your very own ‘webpage that only exists if someone is looking at it RIGHT NOW’ page, which, frankly, feels a bit like magic. For example, I made this Page – I will keep it open in a tab for the rest of the day, so anyone clicking the link should find it visible, but as of tomorrow (or whenever I remember to close my tabs) it will VANISH FOREVER (probably, unless one of you decides to keep the tab open and preserve the mystery). I don’t for a second pretend to understand how this works, beyond vague hand-waving about ‘peer to peer stuff’, but there’s got to be a fun art toy project thing that you can cobble together from the broad principle behind this. COME ON GET TO IT.
  • Bird Photographer of the Year 2023: SO MUCH AVIAN SPLENDOUR! So many special, feathery friends! The winning picture this year is ASTONISHING (although I do wonder about the immediate aftermath and whether or not the falcon was swiftly ingested by a royally-p1ssed-off pelican mere seconds after the shutter snapped), but my personal favourite is ‘Urban Paradise’ by Xiaoke Wang which feels like a particularly-perfect combination of hard lines and natural chaos.
  • Cocoon Toy: ‘Etsy vendors selling weird sh1t’ is hardly a new or unheralded phenomenon, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen something that makes me do quite this much of a double take and a ‘hang on, sorry, *what*?’ as the work of Cocoon Toy, a Ukrainian (I think) creator who makes…what are these? Like something that the Jim Henson Creature Workshop might churn out if the brief was ‘The Clangers (but body horror)’, perhaps – these initially look cute-weird, but a closer look at the selection reveals some…troubling details, like the exposed brains and the, er, weirdly-clitoral nature of some of the creature details. I have no idea which of you is going to click this link and start a whole new collection, but I bet at least one of you does (do send me a photo of your cute little vagina dentata monster in situ!).
  • The Acid Generator: Via the reliably-excellent curation of Things Magazine comes this in-browser synthtoy – yes, fine, there are a LOT of these online, but it’s rare to come across one that makes the lovely, squelchy 303-ish sounds of the classic acid era; if you, like me, ever spent more time than was strictly necessary gurning in dark, low-ceilinged rooms while the Liberator DJs played songs that sounded quite a lot like filing cabinets falling over in an air raid shelter while the sirens blared (it was great, honest) then this will probably bring back some (fractured, strobe-addled) memories.
  • Global Forest Watch: With each Summer bringing news of more forest fires across Europe (and, er, everywhere else tbh), you might not necessarily want to spend time exploring a map showing how the world’s forest cover has changed over the past few decades – still, on the offchance that you DO fancy looking at data that shows quite how comprehensively we’re managing to denude the planet then this is probably the perfect website for you; the standard view shows you where forest cover has increased and decreased worldwide, but there are a bunch of other data layers and filters that you can apply so you can track the impact of industry on tree coverage and see how, for example, the presence of the palm oil industry correlates to the removal of forests. It’s…not a *hugely* cheering picture, if I’m honest.
  • Unsung Heroes of Illustration: This is a LOVELY YouTube channel, which has been going for seven years – it’s run by one Pete Beard, who uses it to showcase the work of illustrators and cartoonists from the mid-19th to early-20th Century. “I had always thought that many illustrators from the past got nothing like the attention they deserved so I decided to make some videos about a few of these almost forgotten talents. The unsung heroes series was originally intended to be about illustrators from what’s known as the golden age of illustration. But I soon realised that meant ignoring many early 20th century illustrators who strictly speaking didn’t fit that description. So I compromised and ended up with parameters of those born between 1850 and 1910. There are also videos about individual illustrators who are personal favourites of mine, mostly but not exclusively from the early 20th century. And there are a range of others on various aspects of illustration, such as children’s books, advertising, art deco or a certain historical period. If it’s illustration then it has my interest. And I very much hope it has yours, too.” This is SO interesting – if you’re a visual artist or historian then you’ll inevitably get more out of it, but even if not there’s so much fascinating material in these videos about culture and history and STUFF.
  • Loch Ness Sightings: I don’t know about you, but I was shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you! – that the recent weekend spent ‘hunting for the loch ness monster’ did not in fact yield the incontrovertible proof of the sea beast’s existence that many had hoped for; still, just because nothing was found doesn’t mean that nothing is there, and it certainly won’t stop tourists from flocking to the area to buy violently overpriced shortbread and some poorly-made, sweatshop-crafted stuffed ‘Nessie’ toys, and to lie about having seen a monster in the water. This website is, apparently THE MOST OFFICIAL tracker of all the various sightings of the mythical beast, and it’s kept very up-to-date – there’s a sighting as recently as 23 August, although to be fair ‘sighting’ is perhaps a generous description for ‘man on loch ness monster hunt claims to have seen some shapes’. There are, though, a bunch of other sightings which have been augmented with PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE, and frankly after looking through some of these I am pretty much convinced of the existence of some sort of Plesiosaur-esque creature in the highland depths.
  • The Whoa API: An API that lets you pull in audio of every single time Keanu Reeves has said ‘Woah!’ in one of his films, meaning that it is now entirely feasible to build a website which has a different ‘Woah!’ sound effect for each button you click – please God can one of you working on something horrible and soul-destroying and corporate please sneak this functionality in under the radar? Because, honestly, who wouldn’t want a bit of Reeves blaring out of their speakers while they attempt to, I don’t know, commission a bit of monumental masonry? NO FCUKER, etc!
  • TokTik: !!WARNING CLICKING THIS LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO ACTUAL BONGO!! With that caveat out of the way, here’s something I am slightly-astonished has taken this long to stumble across my field of vision – it’s TikTok, but for bongo! I think I’ve mentioned this before here, but I’ve never personally been into pr0n (and yes, I am well aware of the ‘no, officer, you must believe me!’, ‘methinks he doth protest too much’ nature of that particular statement) and as such I have given this only the most cursory of glances, but my observations (should you desire them) are as follows: a) this is VERY heteromalegaze centric; b) I don’t think there’s currently any sort of recommendation algorithm or similar built in, so the ‘TikTok for bongo’ idea is superficial at best; and c) I am…confused by the existence of a separate tab on the site for ‘funny’ content (but, per my earlier statement, I am far from a connoisseur of this sort of material, so perhaps this is just What The Kids Are Into these days). Still, I quite like the idea that this will eventually develop into some sort of all-knowing sexual analysis tool that will be able to divine your deepest kinks before even you become aware of them; if it starts feeding you pegging videos within the first 5 minutes then, well, maybe you should just go with it!
  • Ridella: Reader Dylan Kapoor sent me this, a fun little daily game which offers you a series of clues which all point to a single word – try and guess the word with as few clue prompts as possible. Who knew that people were still making Wordle-esque knockoffs in 2023? THANKYOU DYLAN KAPOOR – I have enjoyed adding this to my daily ‘links Matt has to deal with before the day can actually start’ runthrough (current time to complete each day: 83 minutes and rising).
  • Additional: Apparently this was until recently part of the New York Times’ selection of small games, but was discontinued in the past week or so – anyway, someone’s created their own knockoff version (nice to see someone ripping off the NYT rather than the other way round for a change!) meaning that you can continue playing what is basically the ‘Numbers’ round from Countdown as a daily game in your browser. There are five puzzles of increasing complexity each day and I have just had to close the tab housing the game as I have been stuck on the hardest one all morning and if I don’t just accept defeat then I will never finish this fcuking newsletter.
  • Mr Platformer: Finally this week, a VERY old-school platformer in the Atari2600 visual style by Terry Cavanagh, the man behind the iconically IMPOSSIBLE retro-platformer VVVVVV – this starts simple but then gets HARD and OH MY GOD when I say HARD do I mean incredibly, frustratingly, brilliantly, compellingly difficult. You will HATE this but you will also play it far, far more than you will probably expect to – you’re welcome.

By Tadaocern

SIT IN THE SUN AND PLAY THIS LOUD AND ENJOY THE VAGUELY-80s-ISH STYLINGS OF THIS MIX BY KING FU! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Code RGB: Another link from Things Magazine, this is the Insta account ot digital artist Chris Barber, who makes rather beautiful images from code; there’s something really unique about Barber’s style (and I say this as someone who has seen a LOT of generative art over the years – this doesn’t quite look like anyone else’s work, which is rarer than you might think in this field).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Mouth Full of Sardines: Yes, fine, not actually a Tumblr – still, this site deserves SPECIAL PRAISE for being ahead of the game when it comes to the trendiness of tinned fish; it’s been going since 2010, as far as I can tell, and is the personal project of a person who REALLY likes sardines and who seems to have made it their life’s work to review as many different varieties of the fcuking things as possible. I very much enjoyed this – in particular, the section in the FAQ where the author sternly denies have any links to ‘big sardine’ (and in fact the whole tone of the FAQ, which is…VERY SERIOUS; this person doesn’t take their oily fish lightly, as evidenced by sentences such as “I only rate sardines straight from the tin. I eat half at tin by itself, and I eat the other half with saltines. Some tins are better alone and others would be better cooked in a dish. I point this out in my reviews. Rating sardines with other foods would not give the sardines a fair rating.” THIS IS NOT A FRIVOLOUS ENDEAVOUR!).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  •  The End of Social Media: Yes, I know, you’ve read this headline before, too many times; a fair observation, fine, but this is a decent overview by Sean Bonner, someone who’s been around the web a while and who has been a part of enough digital (and non-digital) ‘scenes’ that have been and gone to know when something is dying. The post-Elonification of Twitter has seen too many of these pieces, but I thought this was short and pithy and did a decent job of capturing some of the reasons why this does very much feel like the end of an era – this paragraph in particular felt…true, although I appreciate it is nothing more than anecdote: “ I talked to my son about this and he bluntly said there’s nothing appealing about any of these sites, it’s just people trying to push sh1t on him and he doesn’t see any reason to ever spend time there. No one sees his posts anyway. He’d much rather hang out in a voice chat with a few of his friends. Thinking back to my own childhood and how much time I spent on the phone and how exciting 3-way calling was and even the introduction of Party Lines (though I was never allowed to try them) I can’t really argue with his logic.” ‘Disintermediated communications’ does rather feel like a coming thing for 2024, imho – although for all I know you’re all on Threads resurrecting the utopian social media dreams of Arab Spring-era Twitter (I wouldn’t know; unless it becomes absolutely essential for ‘keeping track of the web’ there is no way in fcuking hell I am signing up for that piece of sh1t).
  • What OpenAI Really Wants: Or, alternatively, the latest slightly-breathless bit of AltmanHagiography! OK, maybe I’m being a *bit* unfair – this WIRED piece isn’t totally uncritical, after all – but I am starting to get slightly irritated at the amount of air that’s being given to all this AGI chat. GYAC guys (shout out to the Popbitch heads!) THIS IS ALL A DISTRACTION FROM THE ACTUAL, REAL WORLD STUFF THAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW! Still, this is an entertaining read which does a decent job of telling the history if OpenAI, its early years and its ‘breakthrough’ moment and the invention of Transformer technology, and how, basically, the people working there still don’t really understand how the systems they make do the stuff that they do.
  • Preparing for a GenAI Future: I’m currently doing a bit of work for some agency group looking at ‘how they should integrate generative AI into their businesses’, and inbetween sawing at my wrists at the pointless, miserable horror of it all (YOU TOO CAN HIRE ME TO CONSULT FOR YOU!) I’ve been trying to articulate exactly what is possible and how it makes sense for knowledge economy businesses to think about this tech and what it might do for them – this piece in the Harvard Business Review is a pretty good overview of some useful principles to bear in mind around generative AI (or at least its current incarnation), specifically the fact that, actually, the main benefits are less in terms of ‘creativity’ and far more in terms of ‘the incredibly boring stuff that actually makes up a violent amount of the working day’. This is practical, pragmatic and a tiny bit boring – but it’s also broadly accurate, which isn’t necessarily something you can say about a lot of the rest of ‘101 ways in which AI will transform your business NOW!’ bullsh1t floating around the web right now (I can only IMAGINE the sort of stuff people are saying on LinkedIn – there’s a reason I only log on there once a week in order to once again set the torched remnants of my professional credibility alight via the medium of ‘posting a link to Curios’).
  • AI and the Dr Doolittle Challenge: This is a genuinely fun bit of academic wonkery which pleased me no end – will AI help us finally TALK TO THE ANIMALS in the style of Eddie Murphy (or, fine, in the style of Hugh Lofting’s 1920 creation)? The question, it turns out, is complicated, not least in terms of the questions around context, intent and interpretation – I mean, read this and then understand that you have NEVER adequately considered the complexities of interspecies communication: “While worms definitely secret chemicals to communicate, we do not know if they ‘talk back’ by secreting chemicals, and if not, what would be considered a response? Can a body turn of 30 degrees be considered a response? There are also many technical challenges. For instance, we will have to determine what are the relevant temporal timescales; would we need to measure secretions every 5 seconds or every hour? These are difficult questions that will remain difficult even if AI Doctor Dolittle’s computational power would improve substantially.” Honestly, this is SO interesting (in particular if you’ve any background in, or knowledge of, philosophy of language) and I would 100% go to a lecture on this exact topic.
  • What Makes A Website Cool: One of several links filched from Kris this week, this is a lovely little piece asking what might be considered to make a website ‘cool’, and how we might think about designing and building more digital things that embody that most ineffable of qualities. I am 100% behind this – I think that’s what appealed to me most about that Italian burger company site I linked to earlier, the fact that it’s…just *cool*, for reasons I can’t adequately describe. Can we all make a secret pact, please? That for the next year or so we will do everything in our power to smuggle small packets of ‘cool’ into whatever godawful work we’re forced to do by capitalism/the bank/societal expectations (delete as applicable)? Not everything has to be joyless and boring and functional, after all.
  • GenZ’s Domestic Sex Block: I’ve had a longstanding theory – with no scientific basis whatsoever, to be clear – that the fact that Italians tend to go to University in the same cities they grew up in (and the fact that, up until the tertiary education system was reformed a few years back, that it was entirely possible to spend literally DECADES doing a single undergraduate degree – this is, I promise, a genuine fact)  is one of the reasons for the country’s famously-low birth rate: you stay living at home, meaning you’re stuck under the watchful eye of your (probably Catholic and reasonably strict) parents, meaning you can’t bone with the reckless abandon you might wish, meaning when you DO finally move out and get your own place at the age of 30something you are too busy making up for lost time to want to get burdened with progeny. Which is by way of long-winded and only-tangentially-relevant introduction to this link, which suggests that GenZ is struggling to get laid because they all still live at home and their parents rather cramp their sexual style; I am including this partly because, well, it made me laugh in a slightly cruel and unfair way, but also because it struck me as a) plausibly true; and b) the sort of bullsh1t ‘insight’ that you could reasonably build a whole campaign around for the right brand (yes, ok, I can’t immediately think of what that brand might be, but I trust you’ll be able to fill in the blanks).
  • CringeTok: Specifically, a ‘creator’ (still hate that word, why isn’t there a decent alternative?) whose whole thing is going back through embarrassing stuff they posted on social media a decade ago when they were a kid and using that as MATERIAL for some ‘relatable TikTok content’- this is interesting to me less because of the person in question (although some of the stuff is genuinely amusing, and once again made me forever grateful that I had my most embarrassing years (aside from the current ones, obvs) away from the web and that literally NO traces exist of my life between about 8 and 26) and more because of the broader idea that we’re now in an era in which people can literally look back at different stages of their online lives, like tree rings or layers of compacted rubbish, and track their evolution and development – it feels like there is something in this, although once again I’m in no way able to adequately articulate how (yes, I know, but in my defence did I mention I only got 5 hours of slightly-iffy sleep?).
  • Where Do Fonts Come From?:Another of those ‘crikey, this industry which from the outside looks incredibly tedious is in fact significantly more interesting and indeed cutthroat than I might have imagined!’ pieces, this time looking at the MAD world of fonts (oh, ok, fine, ‘MAD’ is perhaps hyperbolic, but it’s still pretty interesting); there’s basically a monopoly in fontland, and one company owns most of the fonts and as such makes most of the money, and as you read this you’ll find yourself getting slowly annoyed at the realisation that this is yet another industry which has been effectively dominated by a single player to the detriment of designers – this feels like something that should be ‘disruptable’, no?
  • Overnourished: This is…not a hugely comfortable read if you’re a meat eater, but it’s a timely one given the stories all over the news as I type about chicken farming standards and the general inhumanity of the poultry industry; this piece, by Arianne Shahvisi for the LRB, takes us from battery chicken production to water pollution via Ayn Rand (it makes sense, promise); I honestly had no idea that mass-rearing of chickens could be directly linked to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, but, seemingly, it sort-of can.
  • Rotten Tomatoes: This is a really interesting article – partly as a story of how Rotten Tomatoes, the film ratings site, evolved and grew and eventually became *the* metric by which Hollywood judged its critical successes and failures, and subsequently projected its box office, but also as a story of the unintended and unexpected ways in which systems can unwittingly impact and shape the world around them, and how something as simple as ‘hey, let’s just aggregate review scores so people can easily get an appreciation of the general critical reception of a particular film!’ turns into ‘ok, so the entire US filmmaking industrial complex is now irrationally fixated on the scores listed on this website that it now dictates release schedules and promotional work, and as a result it’s become such a commercially-significant part of the film marketing process that it’s effectively ceased to adequately fulfil the function for which it was originally intended’.
  • The Modern Concert Experience: This is SO interesting to me – I have never been a ‘big gig’ person, and the idea of going to see someone at a 70k capacity venue really doesn’t appeal at all, but it’s fascinating to read about the changing habits and mores of those who do attend the MegaTour concerts by your Taylors or Beyonces and how the ritual around the gig-going experience is developing in the era of streaming video and ‘everything as content for your personal brand’, and the rise in importance of the shared/communal experience (as delivered via your device) – after all, if you didn’t have the iconic Taylor/Beyonce experience, as mandated by the FYP, did you really go to the gig at all?
  • Carlos Alcaraz: This is a GREAT bit of interactive scrollytelling (do we still say that? I fcuking hope not, it really is a godawful aberration of a word) by ESPN, breaking down the particular brilliance of Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz – I am far from being a tennis fan, and so I can’t really vouch for the quality of the analysis of the man’s game here presented, but I am very much a fan of pointlessly-whizzy websites that do fun things with parallax and this is definitely an excellent example of the genre – there’s some really nice use of on-court data throughout which really brings the piece to life and helps illustrate some of the more technical details about Alcaraz’s technique for people like me who can barely lift a racquet.
  • American Oligarchy: This is a very odd story. I had no idea that famed US stock picker Warren Buffett had progeny, nor indeed that his male heir, Howard Buffett, is, seemingly, the very definition of a ‘failson’ – this piece looks at Buffett Junior’s life and, specifically, the ways in which he, his money and his frankly creepy obsession with law enforcement has shaped the town of Decatur in Illinois. Honestly, this will start off feeling a little bit dry but I promise that you will get sucked in by the end – what would YOU do were you born into unimaginable wealth and never had to work a day in your life? I pretty much guarantee that it’s unlikely that you’d spend quite as much time fcuking around with a small town’s police department as this plutocratic weirdo seems to have done.
  • Assault Rifles: I appreciate that you may not think you’re interested in the mechanical and technical differences between the AK47 and the M16 rifles, but I promise you that this is LOADS more interesting than you would expect an article containing the words ‘firing mechanism’ and ‘large-gauge rounds’ to be – this covers design, manufacture, the Vietnam war, pragmatism, cartoons, communications and the importance of focusing on the practical rather than the perfect, and I would imagine that there will be at least seven of you who can use this to draw all sorts of preposterous ‘strategic conclusions’ on LinkedIn (you’re welcome! You dreadful, dreadful people!).
  • The TikTok Exodus: When Silvio took over commercial TV in 1980s Italy, the airwaves were filled with gameshows and football and a by-modern-standards-unconscionable-number-of-BREASTS, the Italianate translation of the Reaganite dream – and because of its geographical proximity and the strength of Italian TV signals, Albanians got to see it all, as they were able to pick up most Italian channels on their own TV sets. As a result, Italy was seen as the promised land of milk and honey (and BREASTS) and the country saw a wave of Albanian immigration as people flocked to try and get a piece of the lovely capitalist pie. Times change, but the principles are constant; now instead of ‘Italian TV’ it’s ‘TikToks by Albanians in the UK flexing about their lifestyles’, but the result – a tide of people wanting to leave a poor country in search of a better life in what is portrayed to them as a far richer one – is largely the same.
  • A Writer Attends The Frankfurt Book Fair: My friend Jay published a book recently – CONGRATULATIONS JAY! – and whilst I’m obviously hugely impressed and in awe of the achievement, I also can’t help but think that it all looks like SO much hard work and effort for frankly uncertain reward, and that the publishing industry looks absolutely HORRIBLE from the outside. That impression was rather reinforced by this (very funny, if also quite miserable) article by Lydia Stryck, who against all better advice goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair to attempt to flog her novel directly to publishers there – it does not, you may be unsurprised to know, go entirely to plan. This is savage – POOR THE AUTHORS.
  • Werner Herzog: Brent Katz writes about getting Werner Herzog to record the audio book version of his forthcoming volume of AI-penned poetry; I make no apologies for the fact that I adore hearing about Werner Herzog and all of his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, and I would have paid actual cashmoney to have been in the room while he recorded a poem written entirely in binary.
  • Forming An Edge: I think I have mentioned the ‘Scope of Work’ newsletter here before – it’s about making and manufacturing, and is honestly one of the most consistently and unexpectedly fascinating things I read. This piece is a perfect example of why I love it – it’s about knives and knife sharpening, and how knife sharpening works, and different techniques and ways of honing a blade to an edge, and it’s interesting and informative and packed with knowledge, and it’s just a genuine pleasure to read (and will make you want to get your knives sharpened).
  • Death Row D&D: Finally this week, a beautiful piece of writing from The Marshall Project (I’ve featured essays from it at various points over the years; it’s a project that works to promote journalism about the US criminal justice system) about playing dungeons and dragons in prison – specifically on death row – and the way in which roleplaying can act as a small consolation to people waiting to die. This really is gorgeous, and very sad, and it has stayed with me all week.

By Ben Frost Is Dead

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 01/09/23

Reading Time: 37 minutes

It’s odd how, despite the fact that my life (and I presume yours – I doubt any school-age kids are reading this and, if you are, STOP IT IT IS NOT FOR YOU) has long-since decoupled itself from the rhythms of the scholastic calendar, I can’t help but feel a vague sense of loss at the start of September – yes, Keats, fine, I’m sure for YOU it’s all ‘mist’ and ‘fruitfulness’, but here it’s ‘six months of largely-horizontal rain’ and ‘that part of the year when the slugs start appearing unbidden through my girlfriend’s floorboards’ (don’t ask) and ‘oh Christ soon people are going to start talking about the fcuking John Lewis Christmas advert and once again I will have to resist the urge to do the ‘down and not across’ thing’.

ANYWAY HAPPY SEPTEMBER WHITE RABBITS WHITE RABBITS!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I would pinch you and punch you if I could only reach.

By Jocelyn Carmes

WE BEGIN WITH A MIX SPANNING JAZZ, R&B AND SOUL FROM TOM SPOONER AND HIS RELIABLY-EXCELLENT VINYL COLLECTION! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT TO THE GUARDIAN THAT I AM RIGHT HERE FFS AND MY RATES ARE VERY REASONABLE, PT.1:  

  • Bland: An unhelpfully-named business/url to kick off with here – IT IS NOT BLAND IT IS VERY INTERESTING AND COMPELLING THANKYOU VERY MUCH – but then again I suppose that if I were the people behind a company that seems, at least at first glance, to be a genuine boon for scammers and criminals and (less law-breakingly, but, morally, about on the same level) telemarketers then perhaps I too would try and deflect attention from it by hiding behind the webaddress equivalent of a giant beige tarpaulin. Anyway, Bland! A genuinely-impressive and almost-entirely-evil (oh, ok, fine, ‘evil’ is probably a stretch, but I don’t think it’s ‘good’ by any means) concept which, basically, lets anyone set up an AI-enabled, fully-voiced robocalling system for, based on the pricing here laid out, about 5p a call! It’s not clear whether this is just a one-way broadcast offering or whether there’s currently any voice recognition, pseudo-interactive layer to this (I think there isn’t, but that there inevitably will be as soon as the tech can handle it), but, regardless, this will let anyone who can be bothered to pony up the cash set up an autocalling system for…well, for whatever they want, which, inevitably, is going to mean that the barrier to entry for phonescamming will end up resting no more than a couple of millimetres above floor level. It’s stuff like this that is going to render the phonecall utterly obsolete, isn’t it?
  • Some Impressive XR Stuff: I continue to be…underwhelmed by AR/VR/XR stuff, in the main – I am still yet to see anything from it that compels me to strap 2 lbs worth of plastic, metal and glass to my face, or to observe the world through my phonescreen – but that’s possibly because most of the stuff that I’ve seen over the past year or so has been related to tHe MeTaVeRsE and as such has had the sad, Zuckerbergian patina of ‘LinkedIn, but all around you’ that all of the Meta Horizon stuff carries with it like a faint whiff of mildew. This clip lurched across my field of vision on Twitter this week, though, and made me momentarily curious again – it’s by some VR outfit called Sidekick, which as far as I can tell is a developer community for people making experimental software in the space (although details are a bit sketchy tbh, so I might have got that wrong), and while the stuff they’re demonstrating is…ok, a bit *functional* (it’s more ‘virtual entertainment spaces and SCREENS IN VR’ than it is ‘LOOK AT THE AMAZING SPACE DINOSAUR DIORAMA THAT YOU CAN EXPERIENCE VIA THE MAGIC OF HEADSET-BASED GRAPHICS’, so, er temper your expectations), it’s also really very impressive; I think watching this was the first time I really got a sense for how multiple screens and things might usefully work in virtual space, and how this might be appealing for both working and entertainment purposes. That said, there was also a significant part of me that is so utterly broken by the internet that all it could think of when watching this clip was ‘god, the goon cave stuff emerging from this sort of tech is going to be deeply, deeply troubling’ which is a sentence that a) I wish I had never had cause to type; and b) I sort-of hope you don’t really understand (if you don’t, and if you feel compelled to google ‘goon cave’, know that you probably oughtn’t do it on a professional device).
  • Singify: As I type this, Radio 4 is running with a story about how Warner has signed THE FIRST AI ARTIST EVER, which is, as is par for the course with much mainstream discussion of ‘slightly fringe tech stuff’, a depressingly PR-led take which completely erases Hatsune Miku from history – JUSTICE FOR HATSUNE MIKU! JUSTICE FOR THE VOCALOIDS! Still, it’s something of a sign of the times here, as is the ease with which you can use a tool like Singify (seamless!) to quickly spin up AI-enabled cover versions of any song you can think of by a whole raft of AI-spoofed artists – you basically select the vocal model you’d like to use (from what seems like a reasonably wide-ranging selection on the site – they tend to skew ‘contemporary internet’, so there’s Lil’ Peep and Bieber and Grande, but no (for the sake of argument) GG Allin, then feed in a song (either an MP3 or a link to the YouTube vide of your choice), hit a button and AS IF BY MAGIC you’ll be given a version of the track with the vocals magically replaced by the artist of your choosing. This is, obviously, incapable of producing anything even remotely listenable – or at least it was for me; perhaps it was my choice of the Morgan Freeman voice model singing Britney’s ‘Toxic’ that was the problem – but it’s bleakly compelling, and (with my regular ‘this is the worst it’s ever going to be’ refrain) it feels like it’s going to be ‘good enough’ pretty quickly; at the moment, though, the best use-case I can think of is for creating ‘comedy’ cover versions, or, for those of you with children, for trolling your kids by ruining whatever their favourite songs are by refusing to play the originals and instead ONLY allowing the AI-generated, Mickey Mouse-voiced alternatives on the stereo.
  • Text To Sing: More AI music ‘fun’ here, this is a Hugging Face-hosted demo which offers a tantalising glimpse of something very fun just around the corner; it basically lets you rewrite songs with new lyrics, and creates new versions of the track with your new masterful wordplay inserted in lieu of the originals. Because it’s just a proof-of-concept there is a finite list of songs you can play with in this demo, but there’s something slightly-magical about the way this works; just get a vague feel for the rhythm and meter of the lyrics and then type whatever rubbish you can think of that vaguely fits, and then hit the button (and wait a bit – Hugging Face continues to be…quite…slow) and listen in awe as your composition is magically tweaked to fit the melody, and your lyrical genius is laid bare. This is, of course, very shonky and doesn’t sound great – but, again, you can absolutely see the potential here for quickly and easily editing audio like this. If any of you fancy using this to write a jingle for Web Curios then, well, that would be nice (but also, perhaps you should find better things to do with your life).
  • Pictures of Paintings: This project is a lot…stranger than I initially thought when I discovered it, but in a pleasing way. Pictures of Paintings is ostensibly just AN Other ‘digital art gallery that you can wander through in your browser’ site, displaying pictures of a variety of world-famous works by Monet and others…except as you look, you might realise that the paintings don’t look quite as you might remember them, and they are collected from all sorts of different galleries rather than representing the collection of a single institution. That’s because the person behind the site – one Yaz Ashmawi, whose personal site I also rather like fwiw – has built it from photographs that he has personally taken of each of the works in question, photos that he’s in each case manipulated and digitally altered, in some cases significantly while in others imperceptibly. To quote Yaz himself, “It’s been built by taking photographs of innumerous frames and paintings and gallery spaces. By swapping them all around with one another and sorting them out I’ve created this unique collection here. I’ve done my best to organise things into coherent sets and rooms for you in order to the showcase these art pieces appropriately. Beware however! I’ve held nothing back with regards to the edits. This project has originated from my own personal love of recreating and re-interpreting of the work of others, and is the result of many hundreds of hours of editing the paintings in these collections. They’re all retouched. In some cases, they vary significantly from their original appearance.” I LOVE THIS – there’s something really interesting about the idea and execution here, the idea of personal curation and tweaking of the works and their placing in a personal virtual space to reimagine and recontextualise them – and it’s a genuinely nice website to wander around for 15 minutes, exploring the themes Yaz has pulled together and seeing the ways, big and small, he’s fiddled with the works.
  • AI Stickers: Do YOU want the power to create digital stickers using THE MAGIC OF AI? No, probably not, because (unless I am massively misreading my tiny readership’s demographic profile) none of you are 12. Still, should you feel unaccountably YOUNG for a moment you can try out this fun service (mobile-only – on which, by the way, MOBILE ONLY SITES ARE SH1T STOP MAKING MOBILE-ONLY SITES PLEASE) which works with Midjourney to spin up cutesy little sticker graphics for use on all your socials based on whatever prompt you feed it (and, I presume, some sort of hacked-together pseudo-API access under the hood).
  • Dream Football Jobs: I confess that the concept of a ‘dream job’ is one utterly alien to me (see also: dreams) – I don’t know about you, but I tend to find that as soon as any financial remuneration is introduced to a process or practice, all the joy is magically leached from it and it becomes NO FUN AT ALL, and that all the jobs that I have ever done which have involved any field that might reasonably be considered from the outside to be ‘fun’ or ‘cool’ are in fact about as far as its possible to be from ‘fun’ and involve dealing with the genuinely borderline-sociopathic (hello, the art world!) or actually turn out to be intensely, tediously mechanical and process-y (hello, videogames!). Still, I concede that there may be some of you reading this who have not yet been ground down to worrying smoothness by LIFE and who might still approach the future with wide-eyed hope and the belief that things CAN get better – in which case (and, er, presuming you like football) this website might be the start of a whole new exciting chapter in your professional career. Getting a (non-playing) job in the football industry is not easy – roles in-house at clubs tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, and there’s no real guide to what the wider ecosystem around the sport might look like, careers-wise – and so this website, effectively a careers portal for the European football industry, is a great place for anyone who’s interested in pursuing a career in the sport to get a feel for the sorts of roles that are out there. At present there are gigs being advertised working for EA Sports in Sweden, Norwich City FC, Sports Interactive (the people who make Football Manager) and, glamorously, to be  a content manager at Benfica in Portugal. Know anyone who wants to move to Lisbon and make TikToks of footballers?
  • Subconscious: Another week, another new tool which seeks to help with the ORGANISING OF THOUGHTS AND INFORMATION; this, though, feels…very ambitious. Rather than being a sort of personal taxonomical note-taking system a la Evernote or similar, Subconscious is a (still very beta) project which, er, is trying to create what I think can best be described as ‘an internet of ideas’. It doesn’t exist yet, but from what I can glean from the website and having a bit of a poke around the Discord, there’s a BIG CONCEPT here about the creation of a conceptual network of open notes, created by anyone and hyperlinked to develop what might best be understood as a sort of universal knowledge graph (yes, I know, and I’m sorry) – it’s not totally clear how this would practically work, but there’s something quite interesting about the idea of a system that allows for the open linking and concatenation of ideas and concepts in much the same way as you have within Wikipedia, but across the whole web. I appreciate that nothing I have written here really explains what this wants to be – LOOK THIS IS QUITE HARD TO TRY AND EXPLAIN BASED ON LIMITED SOURCE INFORMATION – but if you’re interested in broad concepts of information wrangling and tagging and linking then you could do worse than sign up for updates to this; aside from anything else, the associated newsletter contains quite a lot of interesting writing about how we think and how we organise ideas, should you be in the market for such stuff.
  • The TikTok Effect House: I always forget that TikTok has its own AR tech, like Snap’s but, well, different – now, much like as with Snap’s, anyone can make AR lenses using the TikTok tech thanks to the platform’s ‘Effects House’. This is, based on a cursory poke, actually pretty powerful stuff (broadly comparable with the Snap lens tech, from what I can tell) and the tools available to make stuff look generally user-friendly with a decent degree of hand-holding and explanation as to how they work and how you might deploy them. If you want to experiment with building AR lenses and layers this looks like an interesting place to do so, and has the added benefit of the fact that you’re doing so on a platform that people actually use (yes, I know that the data says that KIDS ALL USE SNAP, but, well, I remain skeptical).
  • Wandrer: I LOVE THIS! Such a great use of Strava integration (the ONLY good use of Strava, imho – YOU ARE NOT ‘KING OF THE ROAD’, TONY, YOU ARE A MIDDLE-AGED MAN FROM SYDENHAM AND YOU LOOK RIDICULOUS IN THAT LYCRA!) to make exploring the bits of your neighbourhood that you don’t know FUN and EXCITING! Basically Wandrer rewards you for exploring the area around you – it’s basically a map app that tracks where you go over time (hence the Strava integration) and which incentivises you to travel down roads you’ve never visited, around neighbourhoods you’ve never seen (much like in videogames), thereby turning your daily walk/cycle/jog/limp into an exploratory journey of discovery and giving you a real sense of accomplishment as your increased curiosity is mapped across your local area and you can see your EXERCISE TENDRILS OF DISCOVERY spreading across the map. This is lovely, a really nice bit of pseudo-gamification, and it feels like something that you could borrow and tweak for all sorts of fun purposes should you be so minded.
  • Fancy Parking: As a non-driver I am still frankly amazed that people I know can drive cars (and, in some cases, that they are allowed to – I am sure this applies to every single person currently alive, but there are a few friends of mine who I am very much convinced should not be given license to command a several-tonne wheeled death machine), and even more when they can do stuff that, to my untrained eyes at least, looks like physics-based witchcraft. As a result I felt a strong degree of empathy with this site, which exists to celebrate the craft of what the site’s creator likes to call ‘fancy parking’ – that is, the practice of parking your car in such a way that when you leave the parking spot you can just drive straight out, no reversing, like some sort of car park Fonz. Anyway, this is a website dedicated, specifically, to the act of parking in reverse – no, really, you’re WELCOME!
  • Pair Up: This is an interesting idea – Pair Up is a virtual meeting place for anyone seeking another mind to bounce creative stuff off, from just asking for feedback to collaborating on projects, effectively like a dating app for people who work in design or UX. “A place for creatives to find and offer their time to others with the goal of sharing, learning and problem solving with each other,” runs the blurb, promising that there are 100s of creative professionals worldwide signed up and waiting to collaborate and work alongside YOU. Create a profile, confirm what you’re working on and what your skills are, and use the site to post requests for help or to discuss projects or simply to browse other people who you might find it interesting or useful to collaborate with – this is in beta but already seems pretty well-populated, and there are people on there from across Europe already, so this could be worth a look should you be feeling creatively solitary.
  • Cliquart: A lovely little site by Philippe Caron from Canada, where he explores concepts around generative art; it’s not been going long, I don’t think, but there is some gorgeous work on there (I am personally a sucker for this sort of highly-mathematical type of work, but the aesthetics here are gorgeous too, even if you don’t particularly care for the high concept) and there are a couple of interesting pieces of writing on the site about how his process works and how he thinks about generative art and the intersection between maths and visuals – this is very much worth a click and explore.
  • Copy Magazine: I didn’t, I confess, have ‘high fashion publishing’ high up on my list of ‘industries set to be fcuked to the point of shattering by the advent of generative AI’, but, having seen Copy Magazine, I am on the verge of revising my opinion. Oh, ok, fine, the fashion crowd isn’t going anywhere JUST yet, and there are obviously some not-insignificant questions as to what the fcuk the POINT of an AI-generated fashion magazine in fact is, but, at the same time, the aesthetic here is…actually pretty much on-point, and it’s interesting quite how ‘right’ much of the imagery looks in terms of fitting in with the prevailing aesthetic of the glossy advertising pamphlets that masquerade as ‘magazines’ in this particular industry. You can’t see the whole magazine on the site – it is, though, on sale as a physical artefact from all the usual online retailers of glossy, limited edition style publications, should you wish to see it up close and personal.

By Keita Morimoto

NEXT, WHY NOT GIVE THIS EXCELLENT ALBUM BY FLOFILZ, WHICH I DISCOVERED THIS WEEK AND WHICH I HONESTLY RATHER LOVE, A TRY? IT’S SORT OF LO-FI JAZZ/LOUNGE BUT ACTUALLY GOOD, AND REMINDED ME A LOT OF DJ CAM’S FIRST ALBUM SHOULD THAT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT TO THE GUARDIAN THAT I AM RIGHT HERE FFS AND MY RATES ARE VERY REASONABLE, PT.2:      

  • Magic Circle Enquiry: A reader writes! Tiz Cree got in touch this week to share this link and (very politely) request its inclusion in this week’s Curios – in their words, “We are conducting a Public enquiry created by artists to understand the underlying meaning of art and its role in the world and contribute to our collective understanding of art. This poll is all about getting a pluralist perspective on art, and we would forever appreciate your help sharing it in the newsletter (I will forever appreciate it) The poll is short and anonymous, and it will only take a few minutes to complete. The experience is presented as a chatbot asking playful and reflective questions to explore the infinite perspectives of art, its oddities and dilemmas using elements of storytelling and visual novels. The chatbot and the results will be presented in the international event Mind the Gap: Designing residencies for everyone – London Conference 2023. The experiment is not seeking truths but thoughts, perspectives and desires. Some questions may seem subjective and ambiguous; it’s by design.” This is a) really very quick and not particularly onerous, and so will cost you nothing; b) just a nice, pleasing way of gathering data which I think more people could try and replicate. Tizz said that the results will eventually be published online in some sort of fashion, and ‘students from UCL will make something with the results’, so I’ll share any updates as and when I receive them – in the meantime, though, take a moment and do Tizz a favour (imagine that there is some sort of WEB CURIOS COMMUNITY (there isn’t) and that by doing this you’re contributing to it in some sort of small-but-meaningful way).
  • Deck Gallery: I have expended more words than is probably strictly necessary on these digital pages explaining my particular and deep-seated disdain for the term ‘deck’ when applied to slides; I don’t know why it riles me so, although I think at its root is the possibly unfair belief that the term is used solely to mask the fact that, when it comes down to it, a significant proportion of time spend in the ‘creative’ industries is spent MAKING FCUKING POWERPOINTS and if that fact became widely known the pipeline of eager young things wanting to get into advermarketingpr would dry up almost entirely (“no, no, you’ll spend your days making DECKS; nothing like boring old PowerPoints, FAR more exciting. Now fcuk off to Pret, there’s a good kid”). Anyway, for those of you whose reaction to the prospect of making another 70-slide aberration for an audience of semi-interested morons is less ‘kill me now’ and more ‘where do I sign?’, here’s an EXCITING RESOURCE compiled by a produce designer by the name of Muharrem, who writes “Time and again, I found myself lost in endless searches for deck design inspiration. Realising there wasn’t a dedicated hub for this niche, I decided to create one. This platform is a curated collection for those, like me, who seek that perfect deck design spark. If you’ve crafted a deck that you’re proud of, I’d love to spotlight it here.”Now, I have all the visual and design acuity of a spleen, and so I couldn’t really tell you how amazing the designs here collected are – but they seem nice, so perhaps take a look and see for yourself if anything grabs you.
  • Flagfinder: I don’t know why you might need a website that lets you search the world’s flags based on keywords – stripes! Stars! Union jacks! Birds! Colours! – but, well, in case you do, here’s one!
  • Brain Explorer: I don’t know if any of you have read the ‘About’ section of Web Curios (you should, I took literally SECONDS over that copy) but there’s a reference in there to one of the principal preoccupations of this newsletterblogtypething being ‘the unrelenting horror of being made of meat’, and I very much felt that horror again when I came across this frankly-incredible website which lets you EXPLORE THE BRAIN in a variety of different CG cross-sections, and which will give you all sorts of details about what specific bits of your mind-meat are for and what they are meant to do.  I can’t pretend that I understand much about what this is attempting to tell me, but that’s not really the point – I am just slightly awed (and not a little disgusted and freaked out) by the fact that I can look at an accurate representation of the thing that is allowing me to be aware of the fact that I am looking at an accurate representation of it (if you see what I mean).
  • The List of Graphs:You think you know graphs? PAH! Your pies, your bars and your lines – the stuff of AMATEURS! Here we deal solely in Horton Graphs, Moser Graphs and the mysterious Tutte’s Fragment – and a couple of dozen other types of graph whose functions are, honestly, a complete mystery to me (honestly, what the everliving fcuk is this meant to mean? “The Robertson graph is not a vertex-transitive graph and its full automorphism group is isomorphic to the dihedral group of order 24, the group of symmetries of a regular dodecagon, including both rotations and reflections.” – no, life is TOO SHORT) but which look really, really cool, like mad spirographs of DATA. Please can one of you try dropping a casual ‘and of course, we could always visualise this using a Dyck graph’ in a meeting next week and see if anyone challenges you or whether, as I believe is significantly more likely, people just nod blankly in assent? Thanks!
  • Crab Tales Magazine: Do YOU write short stories with a uniquely-crustacean bent? Do YOU struggle to find a home for your fictional tales of cancrine love and lust and pain and woe? Well STRUGGLE NO MORE! This is, as far as I can tell, a real thing, and it is SEEKING SUBMISSIONS! “Crab Tales is a speculative fiction magazine for flash fiction stories about crabs. We are brand new, so we are currently accepting submissions for our first issue!” I have no more information than this but, well, what more could you possibly want? I expect at least one of you to submit something to this, and I will be VERY DISAPPOINTED in you if you don’t.
  • Vases: Via Kristoffer comes this lovely webtoy which lets you create wireframe vases using a series of different sliders to affect the height, shape, curvature, etc – I know you might not think that this SOUNDS fun, but I promise you that you will lose more time than you might expect trying to make something that you might actually want to have in your home. Part of me wishes that it were possible to export the resulting wireframe as a 3d model, as it would be lovely to be able to 3d print the resulting designs to render them real, but this is very soothing and incredibly pleasing nonetheless.
  • Wingnut Toons: This is why the web is wonderful, and why it’s important to preserve it, and why I love it, and, to a small extent, why Web Curios exists. Wingnut Toons is a site that was first created, according to its footer, nearly exactly 26 years ago, on 22 August 1997, by someone known only as ‘Ronn’, and it is…God, it’s amazing, it’s like a time capsule and and a psychological profile all in one. The site’s contents aren’t hugely compelling, fine (unless of course you’ve long been in the market for an exhaustive-if-poorly-designed compendium of every single Hannah Barbera or Scooby Do cartoon ever created), but I genuinely adore every single aspect of it; the design, the ‘legal disclaimer’ copy at the foot of the homepage, the fact that, because of the fact that this will have been built in Dreamweaver or something similar, all of this will have been coded pretty manually and it will have taken MONTHS to compile and arrange, the fact that it is such a huge labour of love for such a vanishingly-niche concern…(Eh? What? Oh), the sense of someone realising that the web was a place where you had infinite space to explore and share your passions, and that you could ‘own’ that place and make it your own, and that there was a whole world of other people, and their ‘places’, to discover…honestly, I find stuff like this almost unbearably poignant and perfect and compelling and boring and sad and beautiful, which is, basically, LIFE. Yes, that’s right, I have just drawn a poorly-considered connection between ‘a hobbyist website about old cartoons’ and ‘the mystery of existence’ – the only way is up, I suppose.
  • Tiny Desk Korea: NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk Concerts’ has been one of the breakout musical content formats of the recent internet era; now they’re launching a separate offshoot of which focuses exclusively on music from Korea. It’s VERY new and so there are only a handful of performances on there, and it’s aimed at a Korean audience as far as I can tell (and so there’s no subtitling of the inter-song chat), but I’ve been listening to the latest performance by an artist called ‘Sunwoojunga’ this morning as I type, and her voice is gorgeous even if I obviously have no idea what her vaguely jazz-lounge-inflected tracks are in fact about. If you’re into Korean music, or if you’d like to see some brilliantly talented artists you may not have heard of from the other side of the world (to me; obviously I have no idea where YOU might be, but this is my newsletter, not yours and so MY EXPERIENCE IS THE ONLY ONE THAT COUNTS) then this is definitely worth bookmarking.
  • The YouTube Video Clock: Hot on the heels of last week’s Song Clock, the Pudding’s Clock Team (not sure if they do in fact have a dedicated ‘clock’ team, but I like to think so) have spun out this variant, which rather than pulling a song whose title features the current time, instead pulls a YouTube video fragment which references the time of day. This is very smart, and pleasingly-batsh1t; the juxtaposition of content and tone and style you get subjected to minute-to-minute is quite dizzying, and elevates this slightly – I could totally see this as a gallery installation, and not a terrible one. 9:34am was just flagged to me with a video about ‘the execution of Irma Grese’, which was a somewhat dark turn from the cheery YouTuber who just a minute earlier was excitedly informing me that it was in fact 9:33am – it’s this sort of breakneck shift from minute-to-minute that really makes this perfect, imho.
  • Numbers: A website listing lots of numbers along with facts about what is special about each. You need to be significantly more comfortable with maths than I am to understand what most of these mean – seriously, can some explain “3780 is a highly abundant number”? Is that…good? – but there are some lovely little numerical factoids in here which even someone as mathematically-illiterate as me found pleasing. Did you know that 8420 is the number of symmetric ways to fold a strip of 20 stamps? NO YOU DIDN’T STOP LYING.
  • Stick Figures In Peril: Via Caitlin comes this superb Flickr album which offers up the most comprehensive selection of stick figures in peril that you will ever see, ever. In case you’re not 100% sure what I’m talking about here, picture a standard ‘warning’ sign from wherever you live – the sort of thing that advises against particular types of activity, like ‘flying your kite near the power lines’ or ‘putting your hand in the meatgrinder’ – and then imagine hundreds of them from across the globe, a seemingly-neverending parade of nervous stick figures in peril, types of peril so varied that you couldn’t possibly conceive of them all (seriously, just a few rows down is one warning against…getting your leg ripped off by some sort of very specialised ski resort machinery? You cannot BEGIN to imagine the variety of potential injuries that you’re going to see here presented). This is GREAT, although I am yet to find my personal favourite example of the genre (it’s the expression on the face that really makes it for me).
  • You Say Potato, I Say Fcuk You: Winner of the coveted ‘Web Curios Best URL Of 2023 (So Far)’ award (prizeless, I’m sorry to say), I don’t really know how to describe this site because, well, I don’t really understand what it is or why it exists. Ok, that’s not strictly true – it is in fact a long-running (15 years!) webproject by artist Clara Bahlsen, to which people contribute photos they have taken of various anthropomorphised objects; these are presented on the site, and you can pick through everything and filter the images to see commonalities of theme and design that emerge…as to why the cursor is a potato, though, I am fcuking baffled.
  • The Lunar Codex: We have a reasonably-rich history of lobbing our art into space in the hope that it will persuade anyone who finds it that we are worth engaging with rather than crushing under the stiletto heel of an alien spaceboot, and the Lunar Codex is the latest attempt to create some sort of lasting artistic legacy for our species in the stars (or, specifically, on the moon). The first part of the project happened last year, but the main bit of it kicks off later in 2023 – to quote the site, the Lunar Codex is “the first significant placement of contemporary arts on the Moon in over fifty years. While focused on visual art, the Lunar Codex also includes a substantial collection of contemporary books, stories, poetry, essays, music, films, and more. Some have called the Lunar Codex a “time machine to the future.” Others have called it the “ultimate anthology,” and referred to it as a “museum on the Moon.” At its essence, the Lunar Codex is a set of time capsules, a message-in-a-bottle to future generations. This website, LunarCodex.com, is the Earth-bound documentation of the project. It details the NASA programs that made it possible, the rockets and lunar landers we launched and landed with, and our time capsules – put together with off-the-shelf and cutting-edge archival technology, and unique technology developed during the project for color and audio preservation and reconstruction. More importantly, this website provides a manifest of the journey – a record of the art, writing, music, and film, that the project has curated and collected – and the contemporary creative artists whose works are celebrated and preserved in the Lunar Codex. Every piece of human creativity in our time capsules is traceable through the manifests.” I LOVE THIS – apart from anything else, there’s a truly global feel to the curation with artists from over 150 nations represented across painting, sculpture, music and letters, and there’s something beautiful and simultaneously hopeful/hopeless about the endeavour which I find personally rather affecting.
  • Devlin McGregor Pharmaceuticals: Do you remember the TV series (and subsequent film) The Fugitive, about a man on the run from the police, framed for a murder he didn’t commit? No, of course not, it’s OLD and you are all YOUNG and THRUSTING and DIGITAL (and also I think most of you are from the UK, and I think it was very much a US phenomenon). Anyway, the film version of the story involved the following plot point, according to Wikipedia: “Kimble’s wife is killed in an attempt on Kimble’s own life (rather than during a robbery attempt, as in the TV series) as the result of a conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company called Devlin MacGregor, by which the one-armed man is employed” – this website is a terrifyingly-thorough and very real-seeming corporate online presence for that specific fictitious company, and as far as I can tell it’s been made by someone…for fun. WHY? For some reason I find the existence of this site…troubling, though I couldn’t for the life of me explain why that is.
  • Space Invaders Worldwide: Having said a few dozen links back that I didn’t really ‘get’ AR, here I am closing out the miscellanea with a link to an AR app. SOME CONSISTENCY MATT FFS! Yeah, well, BE GRATEFUL because this is actually quite fun, and uses Google’s StreetView-based spatialAI t let you shoot spaceships out of the sky over London (or whichever city you happen to find yourself in, presuming it’s one of the 100 or so that have been properly mapped by the tech). This is…quite fun, and actually really impressive from the point of view of integrating the real-world with the CG visuals, but it does rather suffer from the problem inherent to all AR games, to whit: you look a total tit when playing it, waving your phone around pointed skywards like you’re trying to ward off a hex. Still, this is the best ludic use of AR I’ve seen since Pokemon Go (and that didn’t really need the AR anyway, so doesn’t really count tbh), and you could do worse than give it a try.

By Romain Bernini

THIS MIX, BY DJML, IS ENTITLED ‘A RAINY SUMMER’S DAY’ WHICH FEELS APPROPRIATE AND WHICH IS FULL OF SLIGHTLY-ETHEREAL AND GENTLE SOUNDS PERFECT FOR THE SLOW DESCENT INTO AUTUMNAL GREY AND THE INEVITABLE, UNENDING DAMPNESS OF THE COMING SIX MONTHS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Real Footage: This Tumblr collects screencaps of content from the corners of the internet obsessed with the paranormal and the SPOOKY, and WOW are there some special comments and headlines here immortalised. I particularly enjoyed the story from the person who SWORE DOWN that they saw their dead grandmother’s corpse emerge from the mouth of an octopus, but frankly there is a lot to love in here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • My Hand On Yours: Also via Kristoffer, this one – the Insta feed accompanying the art project of the same name, in which the artist (whose name I couldn’t find) explores ideas of contact and intimacy and online life, making available a digital rendering of their hand which anyone can use to create an image of it ‘touching’ them in some way; this Insta feed collects user-submitted images to the project, so you can see people ‘interacting’ with this digital hand in all sorts of ways; having it rest over theirs, petting their dog, working their mouse, stroking their face…this is odd and strangely beautiful, and you can participate by visiting the project’s main site here and having a play.
  • Sh1t Men: Not in the way you might immediately think – poor the men! – this Insta account collects images of poorly-drawn humanoid figures on roads. Click the link and find ALL your misshapen traffic men needs catered for! Some of these are so half-ar$ed that they are practically art.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Uncertainty and Climate Change: Apologies for once again leading on a longread which focuses on the climate emergency; on the other hand, though, it is…well it is an *emergency*, so perhaps we all ought to be focusing on it a little more? Anyway, this is an excellent (if quite chewy in places – or at least for me, due the extent to which it centres around questions of probability; those of you less maths-handicapped than me might find it a breeze) article by Geoff Mann in the LRB, about the models we are currently employing to work out What Should Be Done as regards mitigating the effects of our existence, and the reasons why statistical probability is an imperfect tool when trying to formulate courses of action in this specific situation. This isn’t by any stretch a ‘hopeless’ piece so much as it is a sensible one, and it helped me think through quite a lot of questions about ‘how predictive models work’ and ‘what we are trying to achieve when we think of the future through the lens of probabilities’ – you can get a feel for the overall tenor of the piece from this extract, but it really is worth reading for any of you with an interest in stats or prediction or, you know, THE FATE OF THE FCUKING PLANET: “increasing or decreasing the complexity of the models provides no answer to the fundamental question of how we can calculate anything at all when there are so many known unknowns, to say nothing of the ‘unknown unknowns’. You can’t solve an equation in which one of the key parameters is undefined: there is no meaningful solution to 2 x we’re-not-sure. One way to deal with this uncertainty is to choose a value or ‘point estimate’ that accords with common wisdom or the modeller’s best guess. But many dynamics have a range of possible outcomes, and the uncertainties are often so extreme that this practice is difficult to justify. Take, for example, the rate of economic growth. Setting aside the fact that different regions will continue to experience growth at very different rates, ‘expert’ estimates of the average annual global growth rate range between 0.5 per cent and 3.5 per cent across the next 75 years. You could simply pick, say, a figure of 2 per cent and run the model, but that will drastically narrow the usefulness of the results. An alternative might be to run it multiple times using a range of values then average the results, but that’s to assume all the values are equally probable, which is highly unlikely. The struggle is to find a sweet spot between illusory exactitude and unhelpful handwaving.” BONUS ORTHOGONALLY-RELATED CONTENT!: this is a piece that’s ostensibly about ‘futures thinking’ and the inherent limitations of the discipline and the models it employs, and while it’s not exactly an overlapping text it does cover some similar ground in terms of the way it thinks of prediction as a science (or, more accurately, ‘art’).
  • The End of the Googleverse: Ryan Broderick writes for The Verge about the end of an era (or at least the potential beginning of the end of an era) – the sociocultural dominance of Google and the power of ‘search’ to shape society. This is a really good read that not only does a decent job of charting the company’s rise and development, but also of examining the question of the extent to which Google really can be said to have meaningfully shaped large parts of the web and online culture (and, as an extension, offline culture and human behaviour/thought) – something which Google has always been at pains to deny (after all, as a quoted Googler says somewhere in the piece, search is downstream of culture), but which, as Ryan persuasively argues, is possibly a simplistic reading of the extent to which ‘thinking of the world as something that can be indexed and ranked and retrieved; was a fundamental change in the way we conceived of things. This is generally great, but a particular treat for those of you who can still remember The Before Times, and who know what an AltaVista is.
  • The Anything Tool: Another excellent explainer about ‘How GPT Works’, which does a really good job of taking the reader through the basics of the tech, the ways in which the launch of ChatGPT was transformative, and which (most importantly, to my mind) does a really good job of explaining how and why the most interesting things you can do with these tools involve their ability to effectively draw ‘conceptual’ (the wrong word, but bear with me) links between disparate bits of data, and how multimodal generative AI is likely to be really interesting from the point of view of innovative use-cases. It also scores points (from me at least) by effectively ending by comparing the tech to spreadsheets, which is a comparison I am increasingly fond of and which is helpful in countering a lot of the ‘CREATIVE MAGIC’ snake oil you will doubtless be getting bombarded with on the daily.
  • AI Images: Not a longread so much as a (series of) longwatch(es), this is an incredible resource for anyone who REALLY wants to get into the science (and maths) behind generative AI for image creation. Honestly, if you are serious about learning about this stuff – not just making stuff, but BUILDING stuff, or thinking about how it gets built – then this is fcuking GOLD DUST: “Critical Topics: AI Images was an undergraduate class delivered for Bradley University in Spring 2023. It was an overview of the emerging contexts of AI art making tools that connected media studies and histories of new media art, with data ethics and critical data studies. Through this multidisciplinary lens, we examined current events and debates in AI and generative art, with students thinking critically about these tools as they learned to use them. They were encouraged to make work that reflected the context and longer history of these tools. As a final project, students collected 500-1000 of their own images, cleaning them to create a unique, personalized dataset. Then, using RunwayML, they extended StyleGAN2’s training data with their datasets to create a custom generative model. Along the way, we discussed the politics of image assembly and archives, the human labor of datasets and content moderation, and more. The course included interviews with AI artists from a variety of perspectives. Students responded to each with short essays highlighting the diversity of thoughts and opinions about what AI art means, how it is made, and the ethics that surround it. This website collects all of the asynchronous video lectures, alongside works referenced in the lectures. Guest lectures and artist talks are also archived, with permission.”
  • Immersive Himalayan Cultural Heritage (With AI): I very much enjoyed this – it’s the first in what I hope will be a series of essays in which Mrinali Singha explains the work she’s doing with various bits of AI-enabled worldbuilding kit to try and create an interactive avatar who can be used to embody the qualities and life experiences and ‘personality’ of a ‘typical’ Himalayan farmer – this is the first in a planned diary detailing her process and practice, the tools she’s using it how it all works, and I am fascinated to see how it comes together; there’s something really interesting about the marriage of this sort of hi-tec kit and the very old-school, semi-anthropological nature of Singha’s artistic practice – in her words, she’s ‘an artist and creative technologist from Himachal Pradesh in the Western Himalayan region of India” and has “been actively exploring immersive technologies and experimental methods for cultural preservation and engagement in the region…writing this piece with the hope of sharing some of the excitement in the field of creative technology and to make it accessible for cultural archivists to perhaps try out with their own projects.’ So interesting, and a tiny glimpse of the potential applications of this sort of avatar-ish tech.
  • How Midjourney Reads a Mugshot: Eryk Salvaggio fed That Fcuking Man’s mugshot to Midjourney’s ‘describe’ function to see what prompts emerged – the resulting article, explaining what The Machine said and trying to parse *why* it said it, is a genuinely interesting read, and one of the more involved explorations of how and why certain tags work the way they do within latent space (with the obvious caveat that, of course, NOONE ACTUALLY KNOWS!). I particularly enjoyed the closing thoughts about algorithmic hauntology and his concept of ‘seance as politics’ inherent in the creation and classification of this sort of digital imagery.
  • Carbon Offsets: You may find this a surprising revelation, but I can be…quite a cynical person – I KNOW, RIGHT? As part of this charming persona (so tired, so tired of myself) I have for years rejected the concept of ‘carbon credits’ out of hand as being an obvious con designed to allow brands, businesses and individuals to keep behaving exactly as they please, just as long as they can afford to throw enough money at a system that DEFINITELY mitigates the cost of their actions; this article in Vox actually does the proper journalistic work of trying to work out if, and if so to what extent, they actually do what they purport to do in terms of ‘offsetting’ the carbon cost of your actions. You may be surprised to learn that the answer is IT’S COMPLICATED – whilst it’s possible that my blanket derision of the whole idea as ‘an obvious scam, you rubes’ has been a bit harsh, it’s also quite clear from the piece that there is, at best, something of a lack of clarity over the exact validity of how credits are calculated, and how offsets can be meaningfully assessed, and there is obviously a LOT of ‘creative accounting’ happening here from an environmental perspective, designed to make the system look as effective as possible whilst at the same time making it very difficult to meaningfully interrogate. Read the piece and come to your own conclusions – personally, though, I find it hard to disagree with this perspective: “if it is so difficult to explain that carbon credits have integrity, it’s equally hard to feel much confidence that these abstract instruments are shifting the climate dial.”
  • What Happened In 2012?: If you listen to a particular type of person, certainly in the UK, you may well get the impression that 2012 was the high point of human civilisation (“THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE ‘LYMPICS!”, they will moan, weeping openly in reminiscence, “WHEN ALL OF BRITAIN SIMULTANEOUSLY ORGASMED IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE AND WE ALL CAME TOGETHER REGARDLESS OF COLOUR OR CREED!”) – according to this piece, though, 2012 was also a year in which A LOT OF WEIRD STUFF STARTED HAPPENING. I really enjoyed this (although part of me does wonder whether you could basically pick ANY year with enough data around it and find a bunch of datapoints that shift markedly from that point on), although it does rather feel like there is a single answer to the question of ‘what happened?’ and that is, basically, ‘2012 was sort of the tipping point for the modern internet and a significant majority of the Western world suddenly, thanks to smartphones and high-quality, high-bandwidth connectivity, started spending LOADS more time on it than they did previously’ – it’s…fascinating and not a little worrying to look at all the things that changed pretty much as a direct result of this shift (and not necessarily for the better, it may surprise you to know).
  • Dynamic Shops: Matt Webb’s thoughts are always worth reading, and this – on his recent experience of ‘dynamic shopfronts’ in a service station – is no exception; this is SUCH an interesting series of observations and questions around retail and physical space and the time it takes to innovate and and and. This isn’t super-long, but it will make you think about LOADS of things (and, for once, none of them are unpleasant!).
  • The Met Museum in Roblox: This is that rarest of things – a ‘metaverse’-y activation that doesn’t absolutely stink! Yes, ok, fine, it’s videogames rather than ‘the metaverse’ (although I maintain that they are basically the same thing tbh), but it’s still a really smart bit of work by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which has partnered with Roblox to create a really fun way to persuade kids to engage with the museum’s contents. Visitors to the Met can download a new app, which directs them around the exhibits using AR, and encourages them to scan specific items using their phones, which unlocks both new information about the artefacts AND (and this is the cool bit) gives you an ACTUAL BIT OF DIGITAL CLOTHING YOU CAN USE IN-GAME! This, honestly, is SUCH a nice idea and a really smart execution, and I am genuinely impressed – in particular when you compare it to the British Museum’s latest forays into this space, which apparently involve ‘NFT collectibles and a dedicated space in The Sandbox’ (although on the plus side, at least noone’s going to want to steal those! Eh? Eh? Jesus, tough crowd).
  • The Broken Promise of NFTs: I don’t know if you paid enough attention to the frothy NFT art bubble of 2021 to remember that one of the promises inherent to the boom was that the tech guaranteed that artists could derive income from ongoing sales of their work thanks to the MAGIC OF ON-CHAIN TECHNOLOGY, and that the smart contracts built into the NFT meant that the original creator of the jpeg would get a cut of any future sale price that said jpeg fetched on the secondary market…did you? Do you remember? Well, no matter, because, er, they scrapped that! Yeah, actually, turns out that artists who sold an NFT now WON’T in fact get any crypto kickbacks if said work inexplicably sells again – thereby neatly removing literally the only reason I can think of that anyone might still look halfway-favourably on the medium. This isn’t a longread – sorry! – but I thought it worth flagging as the final nail in the racistmonkeys.jpeg coffin.
  • How VICE Became a Saudi Propaganda Machine: In 2001 I was doing my MSc at the LSE, and I was friends with a Canadian guy on my course called Chris Camp – he’s now a violently rich corporate lawyer somewhere, I think, but back in the day he was…significantly less straight-laced, and I spent quite a lot of time doing drugs with him and his cousin and, occasionally, another Canadian kid called Chris who used to work for VICE back in Montreal when it really was an underground concern, and who used to tell all these wonderful stories about how MAD AND GONZO it all was (but, mainly, about the industrial quantities of blow that everyone would apparently get through). Anyway, that’s by way of preamble to this piece in Novara by Simon Childs (himself ex-Editor of VICE UK’s News section) which details the extent to which what remains of the former enfant terrible of Western lifestyle media is now basically a sponcon factory for Saudi Arabia and the extent to which that is impacting on editorial (insofar as it still exists). On the one hand, this is a sad footnote in the decline of a genuine media phenomenon of the early-21stC; on the other, it’s also just another story of how, in the end, everyone becomes fat and bald and sells out (HI CHRIS CAMP, IF YOU GOOGLE YOURSELF!).
  • Exploring Exif: OK, fine, this is QUITE technical, and I appreciate that most of you didn’t wake up this morning thinking ‘you know what, I would LOVE to read several thousand words detailing the exact sorts of metadata that gets attached to photographs and what you might do with that data if you were so minded’ (although if you did then please do let me know as I would like to celebrate this small act of psychic connection in some way), but, well, here we are. Read this, look at all the FRANKLY INSANELY GRANULAR data that your phone collects each time you snap a pic, and then start thinking about how you can use this for FUN PURPOSES. If nothing else, I quite like the idea of a ‘phonecam top trumps’ game where you and a mate upload photos and try and beat each others specific data values but, well, as you can tell from that p1ss-poor idea I am neither a game designer or in fact any sort of creative whatsoever, and I am sure you can do MUCH better.
  • Everything In Cooking Videos Now: I very much enjoyed this NYT piece on the evolution of the cooking video in the age of TikTok; if nothing else it’s a really good primer on the preferred visual language of the day when it comes to food (and, frankly, video more generally) – in particular, the breakdowns of the different prevailing styles employed were fascinating, not least the note about a 33s video employing over 40 different shots, which is frankly insane.
  • The Fan-Made Spiderverse: I genuinely had no idea that fan-made Spiderman films were such a big deal, but, according to this piece (also NYT) they very much are – to the extent that a recent crowdfunded example of the genre ended up with a six-figure budget. The article looks at the controversy around that specific film, but that’s the least-interesting bit of it (the controversy: the guy who made it said Bad Things On The Internet in the past, basically; oh, and there’s a bit of ‘it’s not a fanfilm if you raised six figures to make it’ gatekeeping, but, as I said, not that interesting per se); far more curious is the wider SpiderFanVerse ecosystem that exists on YouTube and that this alludes to, and that you can find yourself stumbling into via a few hyperlinks in the piece and which OH MY GOD IT’S SO PURE. Honestly, I don’t think you will find anything this weekend as perfect and lovely as the YouTube rabbithole of ‘kids from all over the world making shonky-but-heartfelt superhero films and putting them on the internet’.
  • An Oral History of Cyberdog: When I was a child and used to go clubbing, my genre of preference was psytrance (literally the least cool flavour of techno in the world, there, beloved of white people with dreads and dogs on strings, the Israelis and the people of Oxford, and, seemingly, NOONE ELSE) and I had a couple of ‘outfits’ that I would wear (I am once again infinitely grateful for the fact that this predated ubiquitous digital photography by several years), one of which included a tshirt from famed purveyor of silly-looking rave outfits in Camden Town, Cyberdog (I thought it made me look INCREDIBLY COOL; in fact, it made me look like a special needs person being indulged by their carers); about 15 years later, I did a one-person immersive theatre thing called ‘You Once Said Yes’, one part of which saw me dancing for five solid minutes on one of the in-store podiums there (stone cold sober, at approximately 3pm on a Friday afternoon – still get slight cold sweats at the memory tbh); all this is to say that this is a shop that MEANS SOMETHING to me, which is why this profile in Time Out made me so happily nostalgic – there will be some of you who will feel much the same way (I hope; please tell me that I’m not the only person who liked psytrance and overlarge trousers).
  • Juggalos: Every few years you get a piece cropping up about ‘The Gathering of the Juggalos’, the annual get together of Insane Clown Posse fans which basically sounds like Reading Festival, if Reading Festival were exclusively attended by the people who work the itinerant fairgrounds of North America – this is another, but is distinguished by the fact that the author here, Micco Caporale, is themselves a (new-ish) Juggalo and so writes from the perspective of a semi-insider rather than an observer. All the classic ICP tropes are here – Outsiders! Faygo! Tolerance! A surprisingly-progressive attitude to race and gender! – but it’s an unusually comprehensive and warm picture; I think I would enjoy the Gathering a lot more than I would Burning Man tbh, based on this piece (although I think I would find the people TERRIFYING).
  • How They Tried To Kill Me: It’s not often you read someone dispassionately recounting how they were the subject of attempted murder by poisoning by the Russian secret services (mostly because, well, they’re dead), but that’s exactly what Elena Kostyuchenko does in this remarkable piece. Kostyuchenko was a journalist at Novaya Gazeta, a Russian paper, when war broke out; the paper’s critical stance of the invasion led to its being closed down shortly after war broke out, by Kostyuchenko went to Mariupol to follow the story anyway, and then ended up in Germany seeking refuge and safety from Russia. And then she was poisoned. This is properly terrifying, mad John Le Carre’ stuff, except, you know, real – the bravery here recounted, and in writing this followup piece detailing her experience, is astonishing.
  • Roddick:I wonder whether there’s something about two-person sports that means they produce the best writing – boxing, famously, has inspired some classic prose from some incredible figures, as has bullfighting (not, I appreciate, a ‘sport’ per se, and not technically ‘two person’, but, well, you get what I mean, right?), as has tennis – this portrait of 90s US tennis star Andy Roddick is up there with the best sports profiles I’ve ever read, and I say that as someone with a vanishingly tiny interest in the sport. Seriously, this almost made me cry – ok, fine, I am somewhat emotionally vulnerable these days but, honestly, it is GLORIOUS and you will come away thinking that Andy Roddick may be your new favourite sportsperson.
  • Daddy Issues: Finally this week, an interview between Robert Kazandijan and Gabriel Krauze in Huck Magazine, about masculinity and fatherhood; Krauze wrote the Booker-longlisted ‘Who They Was’ a few years back (which, if you haven’t read it, is astonishing and one of the best debuts I have ever read) and this transcribed chat covers his and Kazandijan’s thoughts on fatherhood and masculinity and growing up, and…look, I don’t really understand why this is, but I have, as a general rule, very little interest in ‘man’ things, in the concept of ‘masculinity’ or in interrogating it particularly hard (I presume this is as a result of being brought up by a single woman, or because my dad, bless him, has all the emotional openness and availability of a whelk – pretty sure he doesn’t read this, although, er, if he does, SORRY DAD BUT YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE) although it might just be basic incuriosity on my part), and I am never going to have kids and so don’t have any big feelings on fatherhood, and yet this moved me more than I could ever have expected and in ways I can’t quite explain. You really don’t need to be a ‘man’ to read or enjoy this, by the way.

By Michele Poirier Mozzone

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK ARE ALL LIFTED FROM THE GOOD MUSIC NEWSLETTER WHICH REALLY IS GREAT IF YOU WANT REGULAR, NEW, OBSCURE TUNES IN YOUR INBOX)!:

Webcurios 25/08/23

Reading Time: 33 minutes

On the one hand, the mugshot is objectively very funny; on the other, he won’t go to jail and he might end up being President again, which is…less funny. Still, LOL AT THE FUNNY ORANGE MAN PHOTO!

Once again it is Friday and once again I have spent the past six hours typing feverishly with nary a pause for tea; once again, the quality of the output suggests that perhaps I should take a different approach to writing this thing, one which, you know, improves it.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably deserve better.

By Shay Semple

WAKE YOURSELF UP WITH THIS SUPERB HOUR-LONG SET OF *REASONABLY INTENSE* TECHNO MIXED BY DYLAN FOGERTY! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES PEOPLE WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO THE STUFF THAT MUSK DOES RATHER THAN WHAT HE SAYS, PT.1:  

  • The Human Generator: One of the nice things about The Future, or at least the particular version of it that lives inside my skull and causes me no end of sleepless nights as I contemplate the idea of ‘all this but generally a bit worse’, is the insane degree to which we will be able to personalise our experiences. No more the tedious one-size-fits-all ‘will this do?’ reality we’re all used to – instead, we can look forward to an exciting, technologically-enabled existence where we will be able to bend reality (or at least the part of it that lives inside our phone/AR glasses/in-no-way-troubling brain implant (delete as per your own personal vision of The Glorious Tomorrow)) to our whims, ensuring that our experiences are tailored to our wants in seamless fashion. We are, of course, not there yet, instead inhabiting a slightly-odd uncanny valley where we can just about scry the shape of this future through some slightly scifi mists, but it doesn’t quite have the fidelity that we’d expect from a proper out-of-beta version of the product. So it is with this site – The Human Generator is a site which lets you, the user, generate an infinite number of digital people, AI-generated out of nothing, to use…well, it’s unclear what you might use them for, and frankly the fact that they currently render only as straight-on, full-body jpegs means that unless your dreams extend only as far as ‘a gallery of imaginary people, standing and staring at you’ you might find this a bit limiting. Still, there is the germ of something hugely powerful and interesting here – you pick your pose from a selection of options, you select the rough ‘age’ range from the slider, pick a gender, hairstyle and hair colour, and add in some flavour text to give The Machine something to work with (“saturnine, emaciated vagrant with evident skin conditions”, that sort of idea), or even upload a photo to have a specific face integrated into the model, and BINGO, you have your very own DIGITAL HUMAN to enjoy! It’s not hard to imagine version 1.3 of this which exports 3d models that can be used across different gaming platforms, or dropped in to video, and from there it’s a short hop, skip and jump to the concept of a digital AI-powered sandbox into which you drop your characters, give them some ‘personality’ traits and motivations, define a scenario and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. I am basically expecting this sort of thing to end up combined with the AI Town ‘community and relationship’ simulator from last week – you know how there’s a certain subset of people who when they play The Sims like to effectively torture and murder the characters? Give it a few years and WOW will they have some fun new toys to play with.
  • Luma Flythroughs: It’s on the more techy end of the Curios spectrum, fine (and as with all the more techy stuff, I don’t *really* understand how it works – but, well, you don’t come here for accuracy, do you – why DO you come here? I mean, I’m grateful and all but I do occasionally worry that it’s not healthy for either of us), but I continue to be fascinated by the creative opportunities afforded by NeRF video tech – which you will of course recall is that slightly-magic tech that lets you create 3d digital representations of physical space using nothing but some phonecam stills and some really clever maths (I am available for highly-technical presentations, should you wish to book me). This link takes you to a new feature recently announced by LumaAI, which basically lets you take a few pictures of a room or house or whatever and which, thanks to the MAGICAL POWERS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, turns said pictures into a 3d ‘flythrough’ of said space by ‘imagining’ the spaces inbetween the stills (if that makes sense; it might not, to be fair). This is quite remarkable and the examples they have on the site really do look quite amazing – although, on reflection, I wonder whether that’s because they all feature properties that effectively look like CG renders to start with. Still, this is quite mad and very future, and makes me think that all those people charging a premium for drone footage in 2023 might not necessarily be able to do so come 2026.
  • Monumental Labs: You will, as seasoned consumers of The Web and people who, based on the fact that you are reading this, could probably be filed in the ‘reasonably online’ cabinet of humanity, be aware of the phenomenon of ‘right wing social media accounts with classical statue avatars using their fetishisation of past architectural styles as something of a Trojan horse in which to smuggle a bunch of actually quite fashy ideologies and ideas’ – you…you know what I’m talking about, right? GREAT! Anyway, those people spend an awful lot of time bemoaning the fact that “wE dOn’T bUiLd GlOrIoUs TeMpLeS aNyM0rE!111eleventy’ and, as a result, are probably HUGELY EXCITED at the concept of Monument Labs, a company which is promising to BRING BACK THE AGE OF GLORIOUS CLASSICAL-ERA STONEWORK via the medium of AI and robots! Yes, that’s right, welcome to the future in which we use The Machine to replicate the architectural stylings of the past but with (I assume – there’s limited actual detail on the site, tbh) less death resulting from the construction process. “We’re developing the next generation of stone carving robots. With sensors and AI, they’ll complete commissions in hours that previously took months; and execute the finest details flawlessly. By imparting human craft to machines, and driving down the cost of 3D fabrication, we’ll expand the creative possibilities of artists and architects everywhere…We’re looking to partner with forward-looking contemporary and neo-traditional builders to create buildings of beauty and lasting value.” This is, I think, genuinely interesting – in the unlikely event that anyone reading this is in charge of any significant construction projects in the coming months, can I please put in a formal request that you commision these guys to add a custom marble frontispiece to the whole thing? Or at the very least, I don’t know, a bust of my head somewhere? Anyway, this isn’t fully launched yet but you can sign up for updates – the categories into which interested parties can sort themselves as part of the subscription process include ‘architect’, ‘artist’ and the beautifully-baroque ‘lover of beauty’, which has made me inordinately pleased at 739 am.
  • Ideogram: We are very much in the ‘trough of disillusionment’ stage of the Gartner Hype Curve when it comes to generative AI stuff – I have read a dozen articles in the past week alone asking semi-rhetorical questions about whether it’s ALL OVER and THE BOOM IS BUST, although I imagine you still can’t move for cnuts on LinkedIn telling you that IT IS THE FUTURE AND IF YOU ONLY CROSS MY PALM WITH SILVER I WILL GUIDE YOU THROUGH IT LIKE SOME SH1TTY CORPORATE VIRGIL. The truth, of course, is significantly less shouty and definitive than that – the more accurate appraisal, to my mind at least, is that this is just a slight corrective born of the fact that people are beginning to understand that making The Machine do anything *actually useful* with these tools is harder than ‘just typing some words’, but the potential utility is still pretty mindblowing. Anyway, that’s by way of unnecessarily long-winded preamble to Ideogram, a BRAND NEW text-to-image engine which might not SOUND hugely thrilling (how quickly we become jaded!) but which is interesting for three main reasons: 1) based on my cursory fiddling with it, it seems to me to be only a step or two less good than Midjourney (I imagine this is built on top of the latest Stable Diffusion iteration, but obviously have no fcuking clue), but with the benefit of not having to use fcuking Discord to access it, or indeed of having to pay cashmoney; 2) it doesn’t seem to have any restrictions on reproductions of famous people, which is always ‘fun’; and 3) it can produce readable text based on prompts rather than the ‘like writing, but not in fact real words’ glyphs that you got with the previous iterations of this sort of tech. Which all combines to mean that if you want to create an image of, say, The Donald in striped prison pyjamas holding a sign that says ‘“B-Wing’s Little Slut” (for the sake of argument) then now you can! WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!
  • The Message: I like this idea a lot, although I can’t for the life of me think of a way to do anything with it (that’s a failure of my own creative imagination (lol) rather than anything to do with this being entirely pointless, probably) – The Message is a site which has ONE FUNCTION, specifically to let anyone with more Twitter followers than the last person to do so ‘claim’ the Page and display a message of your choosing. At present it’s been squatted by Rob Manuel’s Fesshole account, but anyone with more than a million followers could, if they so chose, claim their right to scrawl their digital graffiti on the homepage for…well, for an almost certainly vanishingly-small number of people to ever see. Still, I do like the idea of digital spaces that allow people to carve out ‘ownership’ in this limited way-  there’s something quite nice about applying the same concept but with social media images, like maybe allowing anyone to put up an image from Insta with the only caveat being that each image selected needs to have more ‘likes’ than the last (for example – no idea whether the Insta API would let you do that, but work with me here). I am fairly certain that literally noone who is ever going to read this has more than a million Twitter followers, but, just in case, if you could see your way to making the site direct to Curios that would be lovely thanks.
  • The Rijkscollection: I have waxed lyrical about the digital brilliance of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum before – their digital work is almost always wonderful, and demonstrates a real understanding of how the form and function of the web can augment the experience of exploring artworks. This, though, is not in fact by them (as far as I can tell) – instead it appears to be a hobby project which lets you pull a selection of works from the museum’s collection and display them in a 3d virtual space for you to navigate and explore in your browser – which, fine, is not wholly novel (I think I have been covering ‘digital art galleries which let you wander through corridors looking at art on walls’ for literally a decade now) but in this case is really wonderfully executed, and which has a pleasingly-flexible selection of works which you can arrange in all sorts of ways. The site uses the museum’s API (a museum API! See?! God I love this place) to let users input search terms to ‘curate’ the selection of pieces visible and then pull them onto the virtual walls, along with accompanying explanatory texts, meaning every visitor’s experience of the works will necessarily be different based on what they keyword-pull from the archives – try throwing in random words and see what comes up (I can highly recommend ‘dogs’, fyi).
  • BeFake: I have been writing this fcuking newsletterblogtypething for approximately 13 years, give or take a few months, and in that time I have seen SO MANY frothy social networks appear and disappear – Ello! Peach! Yo! So many others whose names I am genuinely grateful I have forgotten! – but I think that this might be my favourite variant to date. BeFake is, basically, ‘BeReal but for AI pictures’ – the idea is that you will get a prompt each day which encourages you to share a photo with your friends on the network, a photo which you have manipulated and messed with via the POWER OF AI to create something…well, something that looks like the vast majority of other AI art, to be honest, but still, I have no idea how long it will take for literally everyone using this to get bored of sending their friends photos manipulated to make them look like superheroes or bongo stars (everyone manipulated by AI image toys ends up looking like a superhero or bongo star, it is The Law), but this might be a fun distraction for a few days.
  • An Abundance of Beasts: An online beast generator, using (I presume) Markov chains to generate an ENTIRELY NEW imaginary creature, presented as though plucked from the pages of a mediaeval tome, complete with manuscript-style illustration. Pleasingly, the names are drawn from a list of real animals, whereas the descriptions are machine-generated, meaning you get weird little juxtapositions like this one: “Lambs have tawny coloured hair which turns contrariwise, and they are as swift as a bird. They are beautiful in life but not after death. They have the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a fish or serpent, a gaping mouth full of teeth, a belly like a beast and the tail of a dolphin, and are the enemy of sailors and all other humans.” See, doesn’t that sound more interesting than the actual truth?
  • Viewports: I think I’ve written here before about the difficulty of doing webdesign in the mobile era when you have to just sort of basically accept that whatever you build will end up looking like total dogsh1t for at least one user because it’s literally impossible to code for every single one of the approximately three-million different screen proportions and configurations that exist in the mobile ecosystem – this site is a glorious ‘celebration’ of that diversity produced by Set Studio, which looked at over 120,000 datapoints and identified over 2,000 different viewing ‘sizes’ and DEAR GOD if your job is making stuff that’s designed to look nice on a phone then you will feel VERY SEEN (and then possibly want to go and lie down and have a small cry at the horror of your professional existence).
  • Onnu Jonuson: I have long been a sucker for a nicely-made ‘hey look, we’ve turned our album into a website!’ project, and this, by one Onnu Jonuson who I believe is an Icelandic singer-songwriter, is a really beautifully made piece of webwork. As far as I can tell, the site will add another song each month over the course of a year, with each having its own full-bleed video that accompanies the track – at present there are three on the site, each of which is a genuinely lovely slice of guitar-folk-pop, in the gentle NOrthern European style that will be familiar to anyone who knows the work of Jose Gonzales, etc. The ‘about’ section of the site explains that the songs were written variously in the 90s and over the past year, and are in part inspired by the artist’s experience of living with muscular dystrophy, which, honestly, isn’t something you tend to hear acoustic balladry about as a rule. The few films I’ve watched are beautiful, and as a rule this feels…just lovely, really.
  • The World YoYo Contest: If you are from the UK and Of A Certain Age (ie old) you will recall a weird moment in the 1980s where Coca Cola ran a promo across all its brands where you could collect rungpulls and send them off in exchange for a BRANDED YOYO – because it was the 80s and there were only 4 TV channels and videogames didn’t really exist and there was no internet, a whole nation’s worth of bored kids all got involved, meaning there was a 9 month period in which primary school playgrounds up and down the country were full of children trying and mostly failing to learn YoYo tricks (and then, when they realised that they were HARD, turning the toys into frankly-terrifying weapons – I definitely remember one kid sticking sharp things to the outside of his, turning it into the sort of weapon not normally seen outside of fantasy RPGs). Anyway, this link takes you to the official site of the 2023 YoYo World Championships, where you can watch a selection of videos of people doing frankly insane things with spinning wheels and threads – I had no idea that there were so many different categories of YoYo-ing, but FCUK ME is this impressive and, on occasion, quite a lot like some sort of very weird martial art. Also lol at the fact that there’s an over-40s category – YoYoing is evidently a young person’s game.
  • AirPano: ALL OF THE PANORAMIC FOOTAGE YOU COULD POSSIBLY ASK FOR! So much 360 footage! So many aerial shots! I know that panoramic and 360 photography is a bit old hat these days – how quickly we get jaded! – but these will, I think, remind you of how cool this stuff can look.
  • The Midnight Run: Ok, this is IRL rather than online (DON’T BE SCARED!) and is only viable for those of you who are in London (SORRY!), but I love The Midnight Run and I think it’s been on hiatus for a bit and I want to recommend it to you all as it’s SUCH a nice thing to do – started by poet and writer Inua Ellams a few years back, The Midnight Run is a walk/tour/exploration of the city over the course of an evening; previous iterations ran literally overnight, but the timings have been tweaked so this runs from 6pm-midnight or thereabouts. I’ll just quote the blurb, as it tells you all you need to know: “The Midnight Run is a walking, arts-filled, night-time cultural journey through urban spaces. It gathers strangers and local artists together to explore, play and create, whilst the city sleeps. The Midnight Run aims to break down social barriers and provide a platform for established and emerging creatives, bringing moments of genuine interactive creativity. Past MNRunners have enjoyed a  spectrum of activities including life-drawing, choral singing, puppetry, wrestling, cocktail making and tai chi, all whilst exploring a city as a group. The Midnight Run was established by Inua Ellams in 2005, since then, there have been 48 events nationally and internationally. This special Midnight Run will take you on an adventure to celebrate the City of London’s 21st century revival of London’s ancient Bartholomew Fair, exploring nocturnal life of the Square Mile, The City of London. The route will journey past iconic City buildings as well as lesser-known nooks and crannies of the Square Mile as we celebrate a return to cultural activity. Come ready to explore, play and create. The Run will be facilitated by Midnight Run Founder, Inua Ellams and two of his long-standing MNR collaborators, Vicky Wright and Kit Caless, all being joined by other local artists.” When I’ve done these before they’ve involved writing poetry, doing ‘parkour’, making up stories about the city, and seeing London in ways distinct and different to the quotidian – I really can’t recommend this enough.
  • Lockheed Martin Apparel: When I was a kid growing up, there was a brief vogue for ‘cool’ kids (for the avoidance of doubt, I was not one of them) to wear bomber jackets emblazoned with inexplicably-pedestrian brand names; Technics I could understand (decks, innit), but I was constantly baffled as to why anyone would want to walk around with VHS manufacturer ‘TDK’ emblazoned across their shoulders. Still, that’s nowhere near as WTAF as this foray into streetwear by, er, everyone’s favourite purveyor of fiery death from the skies Lockheed Martin, who have quietly launched this apparel store in South Korea. The ‘Hot Summer’ collection – HOT AS IN FIERY BOMBARDMENT, AMIRITE?!?! – features a selection of tees, some of which are daubed with the (I have to concede, pretty cool-looking) LM logo, some of which have some nonsensical-sounding tech jargon printed over them, and all of which celebrate the inherently-SEXY pursuit of ‘dropping large-scale ordnance from the skies in pursuit of DEMOCRACY (probably)’. This is so far beyond parody and satire that I don’t really know what else to say here – other than that should any of you have access to a South Korean shipping address I quite fancy this one please.

By Motonori Uwasu

WE CONTINUE THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A THROWBACK TO 2003 AND WHAT I THINK IS THE ONLY SOUNDTRACK ALBUM TO A BOOK I HAVE EVER HEARD, IN THE SHAPE OF “I, LUCIFER” BY THE REAL TUESDAY WELD! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES PEOPLE WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO THE STUFF THAT MUSK DOES RATHER THAN WHAT HE SAYS, PT.2:      

  • Sgt Prepper’s: I don’t, as a rule, like to mock particular lifestyle choices here – aside from the fact that it’s, well, mean, it would also feel a little like taking my slingshot out while still firmly ensconced inside my greenhouse (what do you mean ‘spending so much time online is an appalling waste of the mysterious gift of life granted to you by an unknown power’?) – but I will make an exception for preppers. LOOK LADS IF EVERYTHING GOES TO TITS AND SOCIETY COLLAPSES DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT A HANDFUL OF SCOUTING BADGES AND A LEATHERMAN IS GOING TO KEEP YOU SAFE?!?! Still, I am featuring this site because, well, LOOK AT THE NAME! That sort of punnery deserves celebrating, although I do slightly wonder at the fact that The Beatles’ lawyers have yet to clamp down on this (maybe Paul’s secretly planning for the apocalypse – although on reflection I think Ringo’s the more likely of the surviving members to have a well-appointed bunker somewhere in Herefordshire) – again, I know it’s mean to mock but, well, I couldn’t help but laugh at the image of the father and son enjoying some quality pre-apocalypse moments by the campfire about halfway down the Page (just below the various links taking you to cheery inventory items such as ‘three months of emergency food’ for a mere £557 – think of the lols you and your son will have as you hunker down and heat the rations!) – I very much get the feeling that the general vibe of the average visitor to this site is more ‘she took the kids, Dave, she took the fcuking kids; I love those kids, Dave’ than it is ‘let’s you and I spend a pleasing few hours catching, skinning and gutting a rabbit, son,  while we discuss The Facts of Life’.
  • Knuckle Tattoos: Have you ever wondered what it might look like if you were to have a pair of four-letter words tattooed across your knuckles? OF COURSE YOU HAVE (personally I always quite fancied ‘FISH’ and ‘CHIP’, although I also have a personal soft spot for ‘CNUT’ and ‘EYES’) – and now you can visualise that thanks to this simple, single-function website, where you type in any 8 letters you like and watch as they get emblazoned across a pair of digital fists. Entirely pointless, just the way we like it.
  • Crate: I know that I spend an awful lot of time complaining about how dreadful everything is and how the web is basically THE DEVIL (I don’t mean it, of course; the web is a neutral thing, it’s the PEOPLE who ruin everything), but I do genuinely believe that there is something wonderful and amazing about the fact that the past 20-odd years of human history have, thanks to the internet, led to an absolutely incredible shift in our understanding and acceptance of the fact that *other people’s brains work very, very differently to our own*. I appreciate that, fine, that possibly sounds a touch facile (facile? Me? FCUK OFF), but I don’t think it’s an overstatement to suggest that 30 years ago we simply didn’t have the same perspective on the fact that our brains are all wired ENTIRELY DIFFERENTLY and the way in which, as a result, we relate to and parse and file and manage information and thoughts and concepts is multivariate and infinitely-different; I think about that each and every time I come across a service like Crate, which is basically a knowledge-and-information-management interface for all the stuff you find online – it’s an Evernote-ish system, basically, which lets you tag and file everything you come across online into ‘crates’ (DO YOU SEE?!?!) which are arranged via theme and which you can refer back to and annotate and cross-reference, and which over time will apparently learn how you ‘think’ and as a result apply a degree of automated taxonomical wrangling to stuff as you browse…which, honestly, I personally can’t for a moment ever imagine needing or wanting but which I appreciate might, for a certain type of brain, be the most useful thing ever.
  • Images of AI: I do love me a visual cliche, and there are few visual cliches more entrenched at present than the way in which ‘AI’ as a concept is represented by some sort of ‘person with visible circuitry’ or ‘brain that is also circuitboard’ picture – while obviously it’s in-part just sort of funny when you start to see this sort of lazy pattern in the wild, there are also more serious questions around the extent to which this sort of visual language can end up codifying certain concepts without really meaning to – which is why Deepmind (the Alphabet AI people) have worked to develop a selection of imagery to represent its AI work, imagery which (based on the examples I’ve seen, at least) feature NOT A SINGLE CYBERPERSON (and certainly no alluringly-sexy female-presenting ones) and instead use a more interesting selection of visual cues to represent the wider concept of machine intelligence. These are all available for free use (as far as I can tell), should you wish to illustrate your tedious and empty corporate ‘thought leadership’ content about AI with something marginally less stereotypical than usual. Oh, and there are video versions of these too should you so desire them – MERRY AI CHRISTMAS!
  • Concert Archives: A BRILLIANT resource, this, which compiles photos and setlist and footage and audio from ALL OF THE GIGS IN THE WORLD! Well, ok, fine, not quite ‘all the gigs in the world’, but seemingly quite a few of them – search by bandname, location or venue and get an incredible array of user-captured images and audio from a dizzying array of artists covering a frankly insane timespan – there’s footage on here of gigs from the 90s ffs, which is slightly amazing to me. Want to get footage of Pat Benatar’s recent gig in St Louis? No, I can’t for a moment imagine that you do, but you can!
  • The Wizard’s Guide to Statistics: I may have mentioned this before, but I am bad at maths; I know that it’s often painted as a lazy opinion to have of oneself, and that noone is ‘bad’ at maths so much as they are victims of poor teaching methods and mediocre schooling, but I promise you that beyond a certain degree of complexity I can literally *feel* my brain becoming smooth as I try and wrap it around concepts like ‘logorithmic scales’. Anyway, as a result of my double-figure-IQ number prowess or lack thereof I have always struggled slightly with statistics and probabilities and as such I was both charmed and hugely grateful for this excellent little webtoy which does an excellent job of teaching you stats from the ground up with a selection of simple interactive puzzles which talk you through, step-by-step, the BAFFLING WORLD OF FRACTIONAL PROBABILITIES. I can’t pretend that I don’t still feel incredibly thick when confronted with numbers, fine, but I at least now understand a bit more about exactly *how* I am failing to understand.
  • Awful But Great: Twitter limps on, but the fact that they killed Tweetdeck this week (parenthetically, it’s remarkable that I have been using that product for over a decade, on a daily basis, and that I have found it personally and professionally incredibly useful, and that despite this and the fact that I am squarely in the middle of their target ‘power user’ market for it I would rather stick pins down my urethra than consider paying That Fcuking Man a single penny to continue doing being able to access it – truly, an astonishing bit of anti-brand-power there) means that I might finally be forced to bid a final farewell to ‘social media’ – still, accounts like this one make me think that maybe it’s worth sticking around a bit longer. A BRAND NEW COMEDY/MEME ACCOUNT, IN 2023!!! Whodathunkit? ‘Awful But Great’’s full title is ‘Awful Taste But Great Execution’, which should tell you everything you need to know about the content – there is some genuine gold on here, I promise.
  • The Song Clock: Another fantastic bit of webwork by The Pudding, this time abandoning visual stats-based storytelling in favour of making a clock which will, when you load it up, play you a song featuring the current time in its title. Taking the songs from Spotify, there are nearly 9,000 potential tracks that could play over 1,440 minutes of a day, so bookmark this and check in every now and again to hear exactly how amazing, say, 9:28 by Daisha Macbride is (genuinely amazing how many people have released tracks named after very specific times of day – I do wonder what exactly happened at 9:28 one day in Daisha’s life to cause her to memorialise the moment in song).
  • Robots: Watch the robots ‘dance’. Pick up the robots. Throw them around. Watch them get back up again. SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
  • Uninhabitable Earth: DON’T WORRY NOT YET! But, er, soon! This is a nice (lol ‘nice’!) visualisation by German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost that collects data about imminent projected changes in climate worldwide (and related data around projected sea level rises, etc) and maps them on a globe which you can rotate and explore to get a picture of exactly where things are likely to get particularly ‘spicy’ over the coming years as we all start to realise that, hang on, this stuff is ACTUALLY HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. This is…sobering, not least because it’s the first series of projections I’ve seen which starkly points out quite how spectacularly fcuked Italy is going to be – I appreciate that for most of you this is of less import, but, well, I have something of an affection for the my mother country and whilst it’s a horrible, racist, bureaucratic sh1tshow full of some of the most irritating people on Earth (CIAO RAGA’!) I’d also prefer it to not become 50% uninhabitable by 2050, which does rather look like it might be SLIGHTLY on thecards.
  • Online Safari TV: Neatly segueing from the last link (SEAMLESS!), here’s an opportunity to appreciate some of the planet’s natural bounty before we set fire to it all – SO MANY WEBCAMS! SO MANY CRITTERS ON CAMERA! Whether you want to spend your day admiring the albatrosses (albatri?) in New Zealand, or hedgehogs in Munsterland, all of your ‘spying on cute animals without their knowledge’ needs can be fulfilled at this link.
  • Leonardo: I know it’s not really ‘cool’ to praise Google these days, but I can’t help but feel a deep and abiding affection towards the company for its ongoing commitment to producing high-quality, free webwork around the arts – Google’s Arts and Culture division is a rare example of a company really putting its heart and soul behind a non-commercial endeavour in a way that you can’t imagine, say, Meta doing (although based on an approach I received from them about 9 years ago they pay APPALLINGLY). This latest bit of work is no exception – an exploration of the life and work of Da Vinci, from sketches to designs to artworks to inventions, with a combination of wonderful scans and archives to explore, and some more interactive AI-enabled gubbins which let you do things like combine concepts from Leo’s notebooks to generate ENTIRELY NEW IDEAS AND IMAGES. This is just great, and far deeper than it need be.
  • 16 Colors: This is an INCREDIBLE resource and community based around 16-bit style pixelart – if you’re of an age whereby you can remember the Amiga, then that’s basically the aesthetic here. Honestly, this is an amazing repository of a particular style of art and a genuine pleasure to spelunk around.
  • Metazooa: Occupying the coveted ‘last miscellaneous link of the week’ slot is this cracking little game based around natural taxonomy – NO WAIT COME BACK! It is, I promise, genuinely fun – each day, your task is to guess the MYSTERY ANIMAL, by narrowing it down based on guesses as to its position amongst the various types of creature known to man. “The animal kingdom (Metazoa, in Greek) is full of our distant relatives… some more distant than others. This game is about finding out how similar any 2 species of animal are to each other. Your goal is to figure out today’s Mystery Animal in as few guesses as possible. Wrong guesses will narrow down the answer by taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) The more your guess has in common with the answer, the more you will learn about the Mystery Animal.” Honestly, this may seem incredibly difficult but you’ll get your head around it after a few guesses and will be busting out terms like ‘mustilidae’ before you can say ‘order of the species’

By Grace Brooks

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF 80s-INFLECTED TRACKS COMPILED BY BOGDAN RA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Fcuking Advertisements: This is quite incredible – a Tumblr collecting the sort of dodgy ads that I would imagine you stumble across when perusing low-rent bongo sites (not that I’d know, obvs), all ‘meet hot singles in your area!’ and ‘welcome to the world of free sex!’ (without a doubt the single most depressing formulation of this particular ad style, to my mind), and featuring some genuinely astonishing ‘artwork’ – there was one about halfway down the first page that made me do a proper double-take because JESUS (you will know what I mean, I think).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Pattern Up: The Instagram of art collective Pattern Up, which has been doing vaguely-AdBusters-esque schtick for a while now and whose work here collected gives you a feel for their general vibe – a bit ‘Fuct-by-way-of-Dazed’, but not terrible for it.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • The Real Cost of Good Films: Our first longread of the week is a genuinely brilliant essay looking at the modern economics of making art, specifically films, and which takes in the practical mechanics of the movie business, AI and authorship, the streaming economy, attempting to make a living from ‘creativity’…honestly, this is SUCH a good read that does a superb job of explaining and contextualising lots of the disparate elements that make up the modern cultural economy, although it will almost certainly leave you feeling a bit short-changed by the future; the numbers in there about the relative degree of choice available via streaming vs, say, DVD rental stores are probably not going to be a huge surprise to you, fine, but seeing them laid out that starkly does rather make one think ‘hang on…this is…this is sh1t’.
  • AI, Power and Governance: An excellent overview in Foreign Affairs Magazine about the current state of play as regards AI regulation and the global conversation around if, how and when it might be implemented – if you’re already across these issues you won’t necessarily find anything startlingly new in here, but it’s an excellent primer to the questions at play and some of the potential answers, with specific reference to the twin axes of the US and China and how a workable, mutually-effective regulatory framework for global AI deployment might potentially be arrived at. What’s fascinating about this is how quickly you get to stuff like “A regime designed to maintain geotechnological stability would also fill a dangerous void in the current regulatory landscape: responsibility for governing open-source AI. Some level of online censorship will be necessary. If someone uploads an extremely dangerous model, this body must have the clear authority—and ability—to take it down or direct national authorities to do so” – which feels ‘right’, but also something which you can imagine is going to be an absolute FCUKER to define, agree upon and implement. GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!
  • The Time For Grimoires: Your semi-regular dose of Ethan Mollick on AI now – and your regular reminder to subscribe to him, because he is SO GOOD – in which he sets out a useful way of thinking about ways of using AI within an organisation or workplace, and specifically the concept of encoding knowledge of what ‘works’ (or at least what seems to, this week) in repositories (he uses the terms ‘grimoires’, as in spellbooks, as he is obviously a massive nerd, and, well, more power to him, frankly). As he writes, “companies can develop useful prompts that do serious work and capture them in corporate grimoires, prompt libraries that encode the expertise of their best practices into forms that anyone can use. I would expect individuals to similarly come up with their own spellbooks of prompts to automate their work. And I would hope that more academics, government agencies, and open source developers would be creating freely available prompt libraries for everyone” – honestly, this is VERY GOOD ADVICE and 100% the most useful thing that you or your employer could currently be doing in terms of ‘making this stuff practically useful to your business or life in general’.
  • Farrow On Musk: One of my least favourite parts of the past year and That Fcuking Man’s purchase of Twitter has been the fact that for Professional Reasons I have had to become a MuskWatcher, and as such have spent a LOT of time reading his words and listening to him talk, and reading about his history, all of which means that there was nothing in this week’s profile of Elon by Ronan Farrow that was particularly new to me – that said, it’s a very good overview of the odd and unique position he occupies in current geopolitics through Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, and his insane wealth, which almost-but-not-quite skewers the thing that noone really seems to want to say out loud – specifically, that Musk is increasingly not just fash-adjacent but, well, fash. I mean, seriously, just look.
  • China and the Metaverse: I know, I know, the ‘M’ word is so 2022! Still, despite the fact it’s currently something of a punchline, I remain moderately-bullish about the eventual prospect of ‘people spending significant swathes of their waking lives inside virtual environments that to an extent mimic or seek to replicate aspects of physical reality’ (I mean,you can see why they went with ‘metaverse’ instead, can’t you?), even if that prospect might be a reasonable way away. This piece in Politico looks at steps that China is making to get an early start on regulating and managing whatever this digital space might end up being – in news that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to China over the past few decades, it turns out Xi’s regime is working in developing and implementing “a “Digital Identity System” for all users of online virtual worlds, or metaverses. They recommended that the digital ID should work with “natural characteristics” and “social characteristics” that include a range of personal data points like people’s occupation, “identifiable signs” and other attributes. They also suggested this information be “permanently” stored and shared with law enforcement “to keep the order and safety of the virtual world.” The proposals even provides the example of a noxious user called Tom — an ideal stand-in for whoever uses the fledgling technology, for instance for gaming or socializing — who “spreads rumors and makes chaos in the metaverse”; the digital identity system would allow the police to promptly identify and punish him.” On the one hand, this sounds obviously somewhat dystopian; on the other, literally anything at all you read on VR/XR tech makes you realise that it’s an absolute tracking and surveillance paradise, and that whatever flavour of metaverse (lol!) you end up experiencing it will involve someone watching your every move and either trying to imprison you or sell you something. FUN TIMES!
  • The AI Bongo Marketplace: Fair play to new tech outfit 404 Media – launched this week by ex-VICE staffers who’ve jumped (sinking) ship from Motherboard to start their own news platform – who absolutely hit the ‘vaguely zeitgeisty AND salacious’ jackpot with one of their first stories, this piece about the various places where people are posting the insane AI bongo they are generating with open source tools. In fact they did a follow-up piece focusing on the VERY WEIRD AND NICHE stuff being produced on the fringes of the scene which, honestly, made me feel intensely grubby and like I needed my hard drive cleansing, despite being largely SFW-ish – both pieces feel a BIT like they were written because the authors knew full-well that people will click on anything about AI or bongo, but equally they are interesting and detailed looks at the sorts of scenes that are spinning up around sexual imagery in the AI world, and some of the miserable ways we can look forward to this stuff playing out in wider society. As an aside, I had to do some digging around Stable Diffusion mods the other week and found myself briefly purusing the Unstable Diffusion Discord and DEAR GOD THE STUFF THAT PEOPLE ARE MAKING MY EYES! On the one hand, it’s very weird and quite horrid; on the other, I do slightly admire the commitment of a lot of men online (of course it’s men) to the concept of ‘a challenging w4nk’.
  • Do Insects Feel Joy Or Pain?: I’m going to shortcut to the answer to the headline here – some of them might do, yes. This is FASCINATING and so much better-written than it needs to be, and will make you think even more highly of bees than you did beforehand – and, quite possibly, make you want to become a Jain. Honestly, this made me want to create a small apian playground and just watch the little guys play.
  • Adieu, Skyblog: I had literally never heard of ‘Skyblog’, but apparently it was a French social network which predated Facebook and which has been around for 20 years, and which finally shut down this week as a result of slowly-dwindling user numbers – I am personally fascinated by local social networks and their strange, occasional local persistence in the face of the Big Platform Juggernaut. There were times in the late-00s if you worked in social media where you had to know about things like Hyves in Holland, or VKontakt in Russia, and each was oddly, weirdly distinct in terms of interface and character and functionality, before everything got smoothed to blandness by Insta and the rest; from what I was able to glean from poking around Skyblog this week it was a bit MySpace-y, but I would genuinely love to read a more in-depth and personal history of the platform and how it arose and how it was used – also, what is it with France and its weirdly-future adoption of tech stuff like this (see also: Minitel)? Genuinely curious should any of you happen to have any insight into this,
  • Dazi: I know, I know, THERE ARE TOO MANY ‘TRENDS’ AND THEY ARE MOSTLY BULLSH1T AND MADE UP! Still, allow me to make an exception for this piece from China, which specifically references the current vogue for young Chinese having what they term ‘dazi’ – perhaps best described as ‘temporary plastic friends’ who they hang out or interact with for very specific purposes like ‘having lunch at work’ or ‘going to yoga’. “Sha has an online games partner. Initially, she knew nothing about the partner’s gender, age, or where he or she lived, but this did not prevent them making appointments to play games together. “We later added each other on WeChat to collect and exchange cards for the games. It was then that I learned my partner was female and that she was studying at an elite school in the United States,” Sha said. “I do not talk to her about studying or living abroad. All we discuss is the video game…If you happen to know a very compatible person, it is natural to develop an intimate relationship. But there is a tacit understanding between myself and the dazi. We are partners, our communication is casual, and to avoid pressure, we don’t interfere in each other’s lives apart from our interests.” I find this fascinating – this sort of nakedly-transactional approach to personal relationships and the stripping back of interactions to the bare bones of ‘what I get out of it’, and the idea of this being not just acceptable but desirable.
  • Creating Animated Cartoons With Character: This is AMAZING, and if you or anyone you know is an aspirant cartoonist this is 100% the best link of the year, hands down. In 2010, Joe Murray (the artist who did ‘Rocko’s Modern Life’ among other ‘toons from the 00s) wrote a book in which he set out everything he knew about making cartoons for TV, or the web, or for short films – he recently realised it’s being sold at extortionate markups by specialist booksellers, and so has chucked a PDF of the whole thing up online for free. Honestly, this is an incredible resource full of practical advice and wisdom – while, fine, the world has changed a lot in terms of distribution and platforms in the intervening 13 years since this was first published, the content about craft and storytelling and narrative techniques is still golden.
  • DissociaTok: When did it become definitively impossible to know whether or not you could take something at face value? It’s hard to identify an exact moment, but it feels like it was at some point in the last 5 years or so that I basically decided that I could no longer assume the sincerity of any opinion or outlook or belief expressed online. So it is with this piece, all about the people online (mostly TikTok) who present themselves as having ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’, perhaps more commonly known as ‘multiple personalities’, and who create content talking about, and often dramatising, the conflicts and interrelationships between the different identities that form part of their ‘systems’…and dear God this is Tulpas again, isn’t it? Whilst I don’t for a second doubt that DID is a thing for some (vanishingly small number of) people, I also harbour…strong feelings of disbelief that these people are also the ones who film themselves wearing cat ears and whose personalities are also conveniently-tropey anime-inflected egirl characters. Can we maybe collectively decide to…NOT take teenagers seriously all the time when they talk about sh1t like this, maybe?
  • Cool Quitting: This feels like the sort of thing that will end up being a small case study on an MBA course somewhere – as a result of the fact that kids are getting hooked on nicotine all over again thanks to the vaping craze, there’s now a whole new industry springing up to ‘disrupt’ the ‘quit smoking’ market previously dominated by the less-than-vibey Nicorette, now being infiltrated by a bunch of new brands with dropshipping-style aesthetics and design-y fonts. In fairness this does feel like one of those areas where the current marketing buzzword of ‘community’ does make sense, but it’s also lightly amusing to see how a very old product set is being retooled for a new generation.
  • Learning To Do A Backflip: Ok, this is a video – SORRY I KNOW IT IS IN THE WRONG SECTION I AM SORRY – but in my defence it’s an NYT short which won’t embed, and so I have to link it like this. This is a film in which artist Nikita Diacur builds an avatar of himself in virtual space and tries to teach it to perform a backflip, unaided – honestly, this is 100% one of the best bits of video art I have seen all year, and I promise you it is worth every single minute of its 10m runtime (and I NEVER say that about video art, a medium for which I generally have less-than-no-time).
  • New Farmer: Another not-super-textual link (SORRY), this is a lovely art project by Bruce Eesly which uses AI image generation to present a photographic record of a forgotten moment in 20thC British agriculture: “After the Second World War, scientists developed new super-productive varieties of crops that – with large inputs of fertilizer, pesticides and water – could produce more food than traditional crops. This became known as the Green Revolution and paved the way for the industrial agriculture of today.” Except, obviously, that’s not true and it never happened. A lovely bit of fake history with some really nice use of AI – very much a sort of Scarfolk vibe here, albeit one with less of an air of creeping menace.
  • The Media and Graham Linehan: Graham Linehan is a genuinely sad case – a man whose mental disintegration has been documented in near-realtime over the course of the past decade, as his unhinged obsession with transgenderism (specifically, transwomen) has led to him becoming largely ostracised from the comic community that once adored him, and has seen him lose friends and family as a result of his monomaniacal and increasingly-offensive, hurtful and borderline-criminal behaviour. Linehan’s been in the news this week in the UK thanks to the right-wing press which have been bolstering his preposterous claim about ‘cancellation’ by the Edinburgh Fringe – this article does a good job of explaining exactly why pieces suggesting he was being ‘silenced’ are, as ever, wide of the mark, and questions the ethics of reporting without question the views of someone who, by any objective assessment, is teetering on the brink of a fairly serious breakdown as though they are ‘mainstream’.
  • My Generation: Oh, Generation X! So forgotten! So ignored! Although tbh I have long thought that we’re quite lucky on that front, really, as if people stopped to look and think for a second we’d be quite rightly excoriated for having basically entirely abnegated our responsibilities for anything. This piece, though, argues that IT’S ALL THE BOOMERS’ FAULT whilst also taking some slightly-lazy swipes at the cultural conservatism of those that came after us. I have a degree of sympathy for the arguments here about boomers, specifically about the sadness of how their youthful hope and idealism quickly calcified into something rotten in the 70s and 80s, but, in general, I found the article frustrating and ill-focused and I didn’t think the focus on music as a central thread necessarily worked with the other themes…still, it’s rare to read something this long and in-depth about MY PEOPLE (fine, I am a ‘young’ gen x, but gen x nonetheless) and as such you might find it interesting.
  • Harmony Korine: I went through something of a Harmony Korine phase in my teens – Kids was a genuinely transgressive film at the time, and Julien Donkey Boy has stuck in my memory more than it probably ought to have done – but I haven’t really thought about him or his work for years; turns out he’s still out there and preparing to launch a new…film? Blinx (his word; I hate it)? Whatever, he’s planning to launch something – a video project starring Travis Scott and all filmed in heat sensitive vision, which is part of an ongoing ‘conceptual universe’ being created by his new digital culture production art collective called EDGLRD…I mean, look, so much of this piece sounds literally like a 17 year old’s idea of what is ‘cool’ being reported on by someone significantly older who REALLY wants to ‘get it’, and I don’t know how many of the ‘ideas’ here represented are anything other than brainfarts from an overindulged former-enfant-terrible, but, equally, Korine’s early work was genuinely cinematically and narratively interesting so there’s at least an outside chance that whatever all *this* ends up being will be worth paying attention to. Then again, rereading this, maybe it won’t: ““This is Home Invasion,” Korine says, pointing at a computer monitor inside the house. On the screen plays security–camera and GoPro footage of masked men and women, wearing horns, rampaging through various Miami McMansions, tying up various innocent-looking families. “We’re trying to gamify movies,” Korine says. So Home Invasion is designed to look, at times, like a first-person shooter, and inside the film the home invaders are sometimes playing games —the idea being you can scan a QR code and play along with them. “What we’re trying to do is to build some mechanism that allows people to interface with the footage and basically remix, or make their own, films,” Korine says. They also have been experimenting, Korine says, with replacing the faces of the home invaders with the faces of babies. That film, he says, has a title too: Baby Invasion. Korine has EDGLRD cofounder and head of production Joao Rosa, a grave, priestlike native of Brazil, cue up some sample footage: terrifying.”
  • Why Bill Watterson Vanished: The internet knows all about how the creator of Calvin and Hobbes is a famous recluse, with little interest in discussing his famous and beloved creation; I’ve not, though, read much in the way of analysis about why, until this superb article which, I must admit, left me feeling VERY SEEN in more ways than I had expected. There is something very particular about the sensation of a long-running creative endeavour, and specifically the feeling you get when you have been doing something for a while of the *shape* of it, and how that shape both reflects and imprisons you, and how ugly and blemished and misshapen and personal it is, and, honestly, I genuinely felt more shocks of self-recognition reading this than I did with any other link this week. Not, to be clear, that I consider Curios to be either a particularly ‘creative’ endeavour or to be in any way comparable to C&H, but more that I know exactly what it is like to find yourself using what you make as a primal screaming session (so to speak).
  • The Comebacker: A truly excellent short story by Dave Eggers – it is technically sort-of about baseball, but not really (and, in any case, baseball is like boxing in that reading about it is infinitely less boring than watching it), and I had to stop reading it at various points to pause and admire the construction and the writing and the sense of style – it feels like a piece of 20th Century short fiction, which I mean as a very high compliment indeed.
  • Expectation: Finally this week, a short piece of writing byAbigail Thomas who is 81 and, unsurprisingly, starting to think about dying. This is beautiful and, I promise, in no way morbid or sad, and the penultimate line is worth chewing over.

By Butternut Collage

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 18/08/23

Reading Time: 37 minutes

Oh wow, turns out that when I take a week off my fingers sort of forget how to work and my brain gets gummed up and basically this is all a LOT harder than it normally is; apologies in advance for any appreciable drops in quality (lol) that you notice compared to the usual standards.

Anyway, HI! I’m back! It was, I have to admit, genuinely nice to be back in Italy for a a few days, not least as I was able to remember what ‘fruit’ is like (it’s nice, turns out, we should try selling it in our shops, could be revolutionary), and it was also lovely attending Naive Yearly last week (honestly, such an interesting event for anyone who cares about ‘making interesting, small stuff on the web’ and I can’t recommend it enough for next year – don’t worry, I am desperately antisocial and won’t try and talk to you, so don’t let my potential presence put you off in any way), and now I am back in London and, well, it’s currently a bit less lovely and I rather wish I was still in Cosmopolitan Europe tbh.

Still, I have sought to distract myself from the fact that all indicators suggest a country desperately trying to return itself to the 1980s in every way possible by writing a newsletterblogtypething, so the least you could do is be grateful ffs.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you know you’ve missed me, stop lying to yourselves.

By Ruth Shively

WE COMMENCE THIS WEEK WITH A MIX OF GENUINELY GREAT SONGS FROM THE PAST 60-ODD YEARS BY LIVERPUDLIAN ARTIST-POET-TYPE-PERSON ROY! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS HONESTLY FINDING IT QUITE HARD TO BE BACK IN ENGLAND AFTER SPENDING A MERE 72H IN A COUNTRY IN WHICH STUFF ACTUALLY WORKS AND WHERE PEOPLE SEEM GENERALLY LIKE THEY ARE NOT ON THE VERGE OF BURSTING INTO TEARS AT A MOMENT’S NOTICE, PT.1:  

  • Countercloud: We begin this week with something QUITE SERIOUS – or, at least, something that vaguely waves in the direction of QUITE SERIOUS implications. You may have heard that there are one or two elections coming up next year – elections which, it seems fair to say, will probably set a new standard for mad febrility, unpleasant campaigning and obsessive, irrational partisanship – and you may also be aware of this thing called ‘AI’ that people have been getting excited about of late…well, Countercloud is a (very bare-bones, admittedly – the public-facing part of this amounts to nothing more than a video so far) proof-of-concept bit of coding/hackery that outlines just one of the potential ways in which politics and The Machine might collide in the coming year or so to INTERESTING EFFECT. Countercloud is a project set up by a pseudonymous infosec person, and basically goes like this – 1) AI goes out and scrapes the web for new news stories around a certain theme or topic; 2) AI determines which articles to respond to based on a degree of pre-training around what is ‘interesting’; 3) AI writes a counter-article to a specific piece of news, attributes it to a fake journalist profile, and then posts it to the CounterCloud website along with AI-generated images and sound clips, and fake comments by fake readers to create the illusion of a real audience; 4) AI goes to Twitter, searches for accounts and tweets that are relevant to the article that’s just been written, and then posts links to the AI-generated articles, followed by posts that look like user commentary, conspiracy theories, and even hate speech. See? You don’t even need people anymore! Do you remember all those stories about the Russian Internet Research Agency a few years back? CAN YOU IMAGINE!?! Now before we all start running in circles waving our pants over our heads and scream-crying about THE DEATH OF TRUTH AND DEMOCRACY, it’s important to bear in mind that this *IS* just a demo and it *IS* only working in a controlled environment, and there’s nothing to suggest that the created content is super-convincing or likely to CHANGE HEARTS AND MINDS…but, then again, it’s quite mind-boggling that this is already something that could in theory happen tomorrow, and that, to continue labouring a point, THIS IS THE WORST THAT THIS STUFF IS EVER GOING TO BE. There is going to be some reasonable money to be made in the next 12 months for any organisation able to do some ‘digital political literacy education’ work, should any of you feel like chasing down some public dollar – the rest of us might just want to brace for some genuinely stupid politics in 2024 and beyond.
  • Text Jesus: A few short months after ‘Chat With The Koran’ (I may be misremembering the exact title, but it was basically that), and riding the coat-tails of Twitch’s AI Jesus (I just checked in with AI Jesus, btw, and he’s currently dispensing spiritual counsel about battered fish (no, really), so that’s nice), comes the inevitable, long-awaited CHAT WITH JESUS – a GPT-based interface, trained on the Bible and through which you’ll be able to ask the Risen Christ anything you fancy (it’s…unclear whether or not you can jailbreak Jesus into offering smiting advice, but I encourage you to try). Not only can you access Jiminy Christmas via a single, simple app interface – according to the screenshots on the page, premium users can avail themselves of a whole pantheon of heavenly counsel, ranging from Mary, Joseph (I don’t, based on my admittedly-fuzzy recollections of my pseudo-Catholic upbringing, recall Joseph actually having that much of a place in the Bible beyond his general status as ‘helpful cuckold’, but perhaps I’m misremembering here) and the disciples, and it includes both the New AND Old Testaments (I wonder how it reconciles the…somewhat differing styles of Godliness outlined in each?), and the bottom of the page contains the single greatest one-line review you could hope for, from an anonymous user: “it helps with a lot of things”. WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FOR? Oh, and in case this writeup felt too benign and sunnily-optimistic, let me once again remind you of the imminent future in which EVERYONE HAS ONE OF THESE BUT YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT FLAVOUR. Is my interlocutor being guided by a digital representation of a benign and peaceful deity, or the in-phone embodiment of Jeffrey Dahmer? FCUK AROUND AND FIND OUT!
  • AI Twins: I presume that this has sprung up in response to the recent wave of Twitch streamers who’ve created AI versions of themselves (you will doubtless recall the Dutch stream kiddy who I featured the other week who’s basically outsourced their job to the CG version of themselves – that, basically) – now YOU TOO can create your very own AI version of yourself (or at least the bits of yourself that can be reduced to a predictive text-like algorithm and represented via what looks, from the sign-up page at least, an off-brand MeMoji. It’s unclear exactly how this is going to work – it’s a waitlist signup page so far rather than anything more substantive – but the ‘conversation’ between an influencer’s AI avatar and their ‘fan’ presented on the homepage suggests that you’ll basically train it on your content and it will basically create a semi-autonomous digital puppet that you can monetise in various ways (premium chat for your superfans on a pay-per-message basis, that sort of thing). Fandom in 2023: spending several hundred quid on Taylor Swift tickets and spending several hundred more on merch; fandom in 2025: spending hundreds of quid on a premium-rate messaging service so you can further indulge your parasocial relationship with the digital puppet of your favourite influencer. PROGRESS OF SORTS! BONUS CONTENT: this is an interesting little article about what it might end up being like when we’re able to create ‘copies’ our ourselves and digitally-outsource bits of our personalities (‘weird’, mainly).
  • AI Town: You will of course recall with absolute clarity a link from a few months ago, dumped in the longreads section, which described an experiment by MIT in which they created a digital ‘town’ with AI agents who ‘lived’ and ‘talked’ and generally lived ‘lives’ within the simulation…well, this is that but live and in your browser, so you can peer into the sandbox and see what these little digital citizens are doing and, honestly, I could quite easily sack this whole newsletter thing off right here and quite happily just spend the next few hours variously clicking on the different citizens wandering around the central vegetable patch and seeing what is going on in their heads. Right now, Alice (the village’s resident conspiracy theorist, from what I can tell) is chatting to Bob (he likes trees, seemingly) about how he should really listen for the trees SECRET WHISPERS, while Kurt has been avoiding conversation with Lucky because (to quote Kurt), he’s been ‘going through some personal stuff lately’ (although he doesn’t seem inclined to give details; maybe Lucky will press him for answers)…yes, ok, fine, this is not exactly a compelling narrative that’s being built out here (it’s not ‘The Archers’, is what I’m saying) but I can’t help but be charmed at the digital doll’s house and the idea that this is JUST THE START and that this sort of model creation (environment and personalities and interactions) will become easier to set up and play with…this honestly feels really exciting, in a ‘yes, ok, fine, it’s rubbish NOW, but you can see the possibilities, right? RIGHT?’ sort of way. Also it affords me the opportunity to make what is almost certainly the 300th reference to ‘Little Computer People’ in the past couple of years of writing this fcuker.
  • Beard Style AI: I am not including this website because I think it is good; I am instead including it because I wish each and every one of you – each and every one of US! – the confidence of the person who set up this website which lets you upload an image of yourself and which will use THE MAGIC OF AI to return to you a selection of allegedly high-quality pictures in which you will appear with a selection of luxuriant and well-coiffed beard styles, ALL FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF £10! In fairness the service does promise to send you ‘hundreds’ of pictures, so perhaps this is a worthwhile investment for someone wishing to set up a selection of alluring profiles on, I don’t know, findmeabeardedmanwhoisntintopaleo.com or Scruff or whatever your preferred matchmaking platform might be. Still, £10! Lol!
  • The Bulwer Lytton Prize: After the Lyttle Lytton earlier this year comes the latest celebration of full-length, full-fat, imaginary awful prose in the shape of the 2023 Bulwer Lytton contest, in which (as you doubtless know by now, but let me refresh your memory) contestants are challenged to “compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.”. You know the drill by now: click the link and marvel at the artistry of the collected openers submitted by a selection of twisted minds, and glory in the beauty of the prose. Every single one of the entries here collected is a ‘winner’, but my personal pick is this gem: “Jonathon Emerick’s obsession with cinema meant he constantly lived his life mimicking the movies he studied, so on this Sunday he dramatically prepared a rich elaborate foodie meal like Jon Favreau in Chef, invited his friends to dine with abandon like Babette’s Feast, and of course after dinner, fed the leftovers purposefully and firmly into the disposal as if he was Peter Stormare feeding Steve Buscemi into a Fargo woodchipper.” Beautiful, and I would read the fcuk out of the rest of that.
  • TextFX: Another gorgeous bit of experimental webwork with a dash of added AI from the Google Arts and Culture Labs – this time letting you play around with words, offering users a selection of tools which harness generative AI and the lyrical brain of Lupe Fiasco. The site was “designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career…TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.” I have had a play around with these and they are SO interesting, and…not-terrible, in their own way – and there’s something intellectually fascinating about spelunking around in latent space like this (if you see what I mean, which, fine, I appreciate you may not). You can use this to do LOADS of different things with words – find similes to anything you feed it, make your text…odder and more unexpected, find alliterative words, find ‘intersections’ between words and concepts…my ACTUAL POET FRIEND Rishi said that this looked ‘not bad and maybe even useful’, or words to that effect, and I can think of no higher endorsement than that tbh. Regardless, though, of your propensity to pome, this is a lot of fun for anyone who enjoys words and messing about with them.
  • Singularity: “We have a process that pushes the boundaries of human experience. FEED THE SINGULARITY”, burbles this website, inviting you into its SHINY WORLD in which you scroll and click (or at least try to – the interface is occasionally a *bit* shonky) and IMMERSE YOURSELF in the tripartite values of UNIFIED, CURIOUS and FEARLESS…I am 100% certain that you won’t be able to guess what this is selling you until you get  to the end, and even then you’ll be largely baffled as to what the everliving fcuk is going on – without wishing to ruin the surprise here, I would like every single one of you working in the service industries to bookmark this for the next time your business is contemplating a website refresh because, honestly, it is SOMETHING ELSE. I applaud the madness behind it, but would…question taking consultancy advice from anyone who signed off on this copy.
  • Internet Onion: This is a repeat appearance for this project, which I featured last year and which is back with ALL NEW CONTENT in 2023 – per last time, “The “internet onion” is a perennial website anthology about the possibility of love online. Launching late each summer, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN INTERNET ONION is readable for 5 weeks — a typical shelf life of a non-refrigerated onion. As its title suggests, it will live and then start to decay, resulting in a mostly dead onion by the end of summer.” Scroll or click through each layer of the ‘onion’, with different content on each layer which takes you ‘deeper’ into the concept being discussed by the various artists and writers contributing to the project – this year’s ‘onion’ is about ‘love’, specifically “the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input. But even people who can’t communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other “love inputs” that might allow us to “reach across the chasm of a seamless signal”? What is expressing “real” love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?” Gorgeous.
  • AI Simulations: Bored? WHY FFS ONLY BORING PEOPLE GET BORED. Still, if YOU are such a ‘boring person’ then you might find some momentary distraction in this selection of GPT-powered scenarios in which YOU are tasked with coping in a very specific situation – as an FBI hostage negotiator, for example, or a military strategist, or, er, as someone who is trying to leg it from a restaurant without paying. As I think I’ve previously mentioned, there’s something rather fun about the idea of using GPT (other LLMs are, of course, available) as sandboxes or DMs, and there’s a wide enough range of scenarios here to keep you occupied for an hour or so inbetween spreadsheets and bouts of sobbing.
  • Blocklayer: I am, I think, the least-practical man I know; while my friends have almost all to an extent embraced the multifarious joys of DIY and home improvement, and seemingly every single one of my contemporaries owns a toolbox and, on occasion, several copies of the Screwfix catalogue, I remain stubbornly incapable of doing anything more than rewiring plugs or, if pressed, painting walls (LOOK I HAVE LIMITED TIME THE INTERNET DOESN’T READ ITSELF FFS) – if, though, you are one of those people for whom the word ‘spackling’ holds no fear, or for whom the prospect of spending several days with plaster dust in your wrinkles and nails in your mouth and for whom the phrase “load-bearing wall” is cause for mild-excitement rather than white-knuckled terror then WOW will you enjoy this site, which basically lets you specify exactly what you want to build (sheds! Stairs! Fences! ACTUAL HOUSES!) and will spit out in return a range of information about lengths and cuts and quantities and all the sorts of detail you’ll need to actually go about MAKING A THING! You now have no excuse not to start building the extension, is what I’m saying here.
  • The Quest of Evolution: There’s something almost…strange about coming across NFT/web3 projects in the wild in 2023, like you’ve stumbled upon the last living outpost of a tribe once feared and renowned but now struggling to survive in a new and modern world which no longer makes sense to it. So it is with THE QUEST FOR EVOLUTION (the title isn’t capitalised, but it feels like it ought to be), which is a VERY shiny site (there’s obviously some real money somewhere behind this, though fcuk knows whose, or how, or why) which claims that it is THE HOME OF CRYPTO NOVELS (again, my caps – also, what the fcuk is a ‘crypto novel’, and what makes you think that anyone wants such a thing?)! The explanation on the site is the usual mix of grandiose claims (REINVENTING THE NOVEL) and incomprehensible word mulch such as “We believe that existing paradigms of collaboration for creatives are too rigid and centralised, and want to re-imagine what it is to augment value through collaboration and common ownership. Creators that use our platform will be rewarded with both royalties and ownership, made possible by blockchain and smart contracts with in-built royalty splitters and our native $QEV token…O
  • ur mission is to induce and collect artistic collaborations to create Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) commodities which have monetisation value to third party licensors in large industries like film, gaming, the metaverse, merchandise and publishing. We want to offer a gamified framework that incentivises people around the world to be part of multimedia masterpieces, rewarding them fairly for their creativity (Intellectual Property), while actively supporting social causes.” – God, it really makes the soul SING, doesn’t it? A look at the ‘novels’ available on the site suggests that there’s not been HUGE takeup here, and while the works might well be canonical masterpieces that will one day be spoken of in the same breath as works by Woolf and Kafka and Austen I am not attempting to buy a fcuking token to buy a fractional stake in one to find out. Baffling – but, again, I would love to know where the money here is coming from as the site does not look cheap.
  • Random Garbage: Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter really is one of the best resources currently available for anyone seeking to make any sort of sense of the current lumpy morass of ‘internet’ ‘culture’ (I don’t know why, but neither of those words, despite being perfectly adequate descriptors, really seem to quite…fit anymore, but I can’t for the life of me conceive of better terminology at 827am on a Friday morning and so I’ll just have to keep using them) – Ryan has finally done something I have been meaning to do with Curios for years but which I have always been far too lazy and disorganised to actually get round to organising, to whit creating a sort of ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button for all the links he’s ever featured in his newsletter. Click the link, hit the button and get some GREAT OLD MEMETIC CONTENT from the past 3-4 years, spoonfed to you from the Garbage Day archives. The stuff Ryan writes about means that this tends more towards the ‘funny/weird video/tiktok’ end of the spectrum rather than ‘cool and interesting links’, but as a way of getting a random shot of internet culture injected right into your veins then it’s pretty much perfect.

By Alex Schaefer

NEXT UP HAVE WHAT I CAN ONLY CALL ‘SOME CRUNCHY AND ANGULAR BEATS’ (FOR WHICH DESCRIPTION I CAN ONLY APOLOGISE) BROUGHT TO YOU BY AUTECHRE! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS HONESTLY FINDING IT QUITE HARD TO BE BACK IN ENGLAND AFTER SPENDING A MERE 72H IN A COUNTRY IN WHICH STUFF ACTUALLY WORKS AND WHERE PEOPLE SEEM GENERALLY LIKE THEY ARE NOT ON THE VERGE OF BURSTING INTO TEARS AT A MOMENT’S NOTICE, PT.2:  

  • The Supermind Ideator: I genuinely adore the name of this project, an little experiment into AI and concept development by MIT, which puts me in mind of the supercomputers from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (you may be the sort of person fortunate enough not to have a small part of their brain taken up by the fact that one of the computers which came after Deep Thought in the HHG2 mythos was ‘The Milliard Gargantubrain’ but, well, I am less lucky, sadly) – it’s not QUITE that ambitious in scope, I don’t think, but you can always try asking it the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything’ and seeing what happens. The Supermind Ideator (seriously, my internal voice is incapable of saying that without some Brian Blessed-style vibrato) is an intriguing beta product (you need to sign up for access, but it seems to be granted quickly and indiscriminately) which is designed to help you break problems down into sub-questions – you feed it a question you want to explore, or a problem you want to solve, and The Machine will do various sub-tasks, like breaking the problem down into sub-questions, say, or spinning up analogies for the problem, or the larger problems that your problem is a subset of…basically a bunch of early-stage critical thinking work which might be helpful in terms of recontextualising or reframing an initial question in a way that allows for better, deeper or smarter investigation. This is, I think, hugely interesting, and based on a cursory play this week could be genuinely useful as an early-stage tool when considering questions of planning and strategy (or just if you want a really high-level thinking companion to help you get out of Tony’s party tomorrow night).
  • Europeana: OH GOD EUROPE HOW I MISS YOU AND YOUR SHONKY, CHARMLESS PUBLIC SECTOR WEBSITES FOR EU-FUNDED PROJECTS! No, really, I genuinely mean that – there’s something so joyless and dry about the way in which seemingly all digital things that the European Union has a hand in are presented which, perversely, I find really pleasing and which I now find myself nostalgic for in the post-Brexit horrorshow in which the UK now exists. Anyway, pathetic FBPE-style nostalgia aside, this is a GREAT resource – “The Europeana website provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with access to Europe’s digital cultural heritage. Why? To inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about our history and culture. To share and enjoy our rich cultural heritage. To use it to create new things. We give you access to millions of items from providing institutions across Europe. Discover artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.” SO MUCH HISTORY! SO MUCH ART! SO MUCH FOOTAGE! Honestly, even if you can’t think of any reason why you might have need of footage of Dutch people playing street hockey in 1934 you should be glad that this archive exists – I promise you that there will be at least one thing that’s peculiarly-interesting in every search you do, so just chuck in some random keywords and see where you end up.
  • Obaa Life: Yes, ok, fine, this is an NFT project, but it’s a genuinely-aesthetically-interesting one, and as such I feel justified in including it – from what I can tell (which, admittedly, isn’t a HUGE amount – I do wonder whether the whole NFT thing might have crashed and burned less spectacularly were it not for the fact that the language around it has been, and continues to be, so utterly cnuty and incomprehensible, although I suppose one might argue that said cnutiness and incomprehensibility is exactly befitting for a movement built on snake oil and lies) this is mint in which each ‘piece’ is a digital representation of some sort of monocellular organism, rendered in digital 3d; there’s some sort of guff about how “obaa is a collective organism: a dividual. she embodies multiplicity in the way she divides, merges, and harbors other beings. her translucent membrane serves as a lens, distorting and refracting creatures and microplastics as she engulfs them and spits them out.  obaa unfolds on multiple time scales, on the order of milliseconds and hundreds of years. each obaa is synced to a real world timezone, and changes throughout the day. every organism in obaa is mortal, with lifespans in the range of months to years” but, honestly, give a fcuk, I just really like the way in which the little…blobs? are rendered tbh.
  • Stanza: I do love me a ‘preposterous business model that is never, ever going to work’ website, and Stanza is very much an ur-example of such a thing – would YOU pay £2.50 a month (admittedly not a high bar, fine, but just wait til you hear what you’re paying FOR) to have a digital assistant automatically put new episodes of TV shows that it thinks you might be into into your calendar so that you can rest assured you will NEVER MISS A NEW BIT OF CONTENT? Not only that, but it will do the same for televised sports games…er, that’s it actually, sorry. So, £2.50 a month, then? Honestly, I think I sort of admire the chutzpah here but, equally, who thought this was a viable idea? I would LOVE to see the business plan here, and the estimated market value – “well, everyone watches TV, and everyone likes certain shows, and everyone hates missing the shows they like…so yeah, I reckon the potential market is somewhere in the region of ~5bn people, so that’s a year 5 revenue projection of £130bn annually, yeah; you in?”. NB – based on my appalling track record of ‘picking winners’ in business, politics and indeed wider society over the past decade or so, we can be confident that you will all be signed up to Stanza by 2030 and I will be w4nking for pennies on a street corner somewhere.
  • Dead Parents What Now?: This is a GREAT idea – but its US-centricity made me think that there has to be an angle here in other countries, or indeed for a central repository of ‘deadmumanddad’ info worldwide. Dead Parents What Now? (such a good url too) is a site whose sole purpose is to offer helpful, practical advice on what you have to do when your parent or parents die – who do you call? What do you have to do about finances? What’s the best way to keep the dealers/debt collectors off your case? Where to divest yourself of the three kilos of meth that you unexpectedly discovered in the shed? ALL THIS AND MORE! I just finished wrapping up my mum’s affairs in Rome, a mere 13 months after she shuffled off this mortal coil, and FCUK ME was that a long and slightly-baffling and entirely-frustrating experience; I can’t imagine it’s ever fun, and so a simple, one-stop-destination for all your deadmumanddad needs is a genuinely smart concept which I am slightly amazed no bank/insurer has done a content-led campaign around (fun, parental death-related TikToks! What’s not to love? God, I really am borderline unemployable these days, aren’t I?).
  • Face Studio: Generate fake AI faces on-demand – a bit like thispersondoesnotexist, except you can specify the gender, age and ethnicity of the faces you’d like the machine to spit out and which therefore can be used to populate an entire fake corporate website with a credibly diverse and not-necessarily-beautiful (seriously, try generating ‘white men in their 40s’ and you get some surprisingly non-model-like results, it’s almost refreshing) cast of spoofed employees.
  • The Week: On the one hand, this is sort-of an interesting idea; on the other, I think I would personally rather grate my shins rather than do anything of the sort, but I appreciate that there are people reading this whose approach to life might be more collaborative and hopeful than mine and so I share it in the spirit of ‘you do you (but, to repeat, I would literally rather die). The Week is a participatory group experience designed to facilitate thinking about and discussion around the climate emergency (I don’t like the phrase ‘the climate emergency’, turns out; I might see if ‘the planetary clusterfcuk’ catches on by way of alternative) – per the site, “Recently, it’s been hard not to notice how fast the climate is changing. Experts say it will get worse really rapidly. The Week is for those of us who want to know how this will affect us, in the next 10, 20 or 30 years and what we can do about it. Too often, this issue feels abstract and overwhelming. The Week is a way to engage this issue, for real, with our friends, family or colleagues. It doesn’t tell us what to do, but empowers us to make up our own minds. So that we can say down the line: I knew what I needed to know, I did what I need to do and I have no regrets…You get together 3 times, during a week (hence “The Week”). Every time you watch a 1 hour documentary film episode. And then the heart of the experience:  a guided conversation for 30 minutes (or more if you want) to make sense of it all.” So, basically, apocalypto book club! The site suggests you can do this with friends, family or colleagues – so if your idea of a good time is spending three nights a week watching something that explains how everything is banjaxed and then additional supplementary time having heartfelt conversations with other people about what the fcuk, exactly, we’re meant to do about it, then, well GET INVOLVED! I’ll be elsewhere, drinking to forget.
  • Roggle: A very simple ‘game’ which I have to admit to playing far more of this week than I expected (or, frankly, than I can justify) – Roggle asks you to do one thing and one thing only: GUESS THE SEARCH TERMS USED TO GET THE RESULTS SHOWN ON SCREEN! I appreciate that for most of you this will likely sound as thrilling as watching paint dry – maybe less so – but if you’re anything like me and have therefore based a significant part of your personal and professional self-worth over the past couple of decades on being marginally less shi1t at Google than anyone else you know then you too will ADORE this.
  • The Snellings Museum: Oh YES – this is practically perfect, and a labour of love, and the sort of thing that makes me want to point at big brands with HISTORY and HERITAGE and say “LOOK YOU LAZY FCUKS IF LOVELY SNELLINGS CAN DO AN ARCHIVE THEN YOU CAN TOO FFS!” Roy Snelling was a Norfolk man who set up a shop selling televisions in the area in the mid-20th Century – Snellings still exists as a business, but the Snellings Museum is a separate concern, a digital recreation of Roy’s archive of television kit and memorabilia which has been in storage since 2016 but which is faithfully reproduced here through photos of old stereo and hifi and TV equipment, all of it looking like it smells slightly of burning dust and the 1970s and, honestly, you will probably appreciate this more if you’ve a deep and abiding love for Cathode Ray Tube-based devices from 100 years ago but, regardless, it’s hard not to be charmed by both Roy’s story and the existence of the museum.
  • The Sri Chinmoy Marathon: Do you think you’re HARD? Do you eat 10ks for breakfast? Do standard marathons no longer hold any joy for you? Do you look at people contemplating a sub 3h20 time for a single 26 mile track as, frankly, pathetic amateurs? No, of course you don’t, literally noone who fits that profile would ever conceive of sitting reading 8,000 words about ‘stuff on the internet’ when they could instead be doing their knees serious, tarmac-related damage! Still, if you happen to know anyone who is feeling all Alexander-ish about the world of distance running (no more worlds left to conquer, etc) then you might want to point them at this race, which starts in 12 days in Queens, NYC, and which takes place over a 52 day (yes, that’s right) stretch around a single block, with each participant looking do do an average of nearly 60 miles a day (SIXTY MILES A FCUKING DAY FFS) until they’ve done the full route of just under 5000k. You have 12 days to train and get yourselves to NYC – please, readers of Curios, one of you prove me wrong about your general fitness and physical prowess! But, er, don’t die! Or, if you do, please don’t hold me responsible.
  • The League of Pigs: A YouTube channel featuring pigs, racing. The pigs are small, they are nimble, and the races are…significantly more compelling than you might expect them to be. No word from the organisers whether the threat of the loser being turned into sausages is what compels them to such speeds, but let’s hope not and just enjoy the spectacle.
  • Retroflix: This is the latest in a long line of ‘sites that exist to give you a single portal via which to watch a whole bunch of old, out-of-copyright films from The Past’ (see also VoleFlix), Retroflix has a decent-looking selection which, based on a cursory examination, is a little lighter on ‘mad scifi and horror schlock’ and a bit heavier on ‘sub-Hitchcockian 50s thrillers’, and which might be pleasing for any of you looking to hide from modernity for a while via the medium of forgotten cinema.
  • Tote Design: You might think that the website for a webdesign company would best be served by demonstrating the sort of clean, shiny, functional UX/UI that said company is capable of, and that it would probably make sense for it to present a clear sense of ‘what the agency has done’ and ‘how to get in touch with it should you want to book a commission’ – but you would be WRONG, as the correct sort of website is in fact exactly like this one, by Japanese design shop Tote Design, which is possibly the most-confusing and yet most-enjoyable examples of ‘hang on, no, sorry, wtf?’ webwork I have seen in ages and which is even better for the fact that it’s meant to be a shopfront.
  • Insects: I don’t know who any of you are (oh, ok, fine, I know who a handful of you are, but I like to think that there are some of you who I don’t know, whose lives and hopes and dreams remain a mystery to me and who as such exist as nothing other than orbs of pure digital potential in my mind) and as such I have NO IDEA what some of you might be compelled to make with this MASSIVE dataset of a million or so high-resolution, annotated images of insects, but I hope that it is something odd. If nothing else there is no excuse for you not using pictures of random beetles on your next website’s 404 pages.
  • Bandit: On the one hand, this might be a great idea; on the other, I have never been in a band (amazing that someone with my ELECTRIC PERSONAL MAGNETISM and uncanny ability to reach Grade 4 classical guitar wasn’t snapped up for the ‘charismatic frontman’ role when I was in my teens, really) and so I have no clue whether this app, which I have mentally described as ‘Tinder/Grindr for musicians’, is the sort of thing that might appeal to bandmates seeking the final, triangle-playing component in their world-beating skiffle covers outfit. Musicians sign up, complete their profile with their instruments, styles and location and whatever examples of their skills their care to share, and those seeking musos can scroll and swipe to their heart’s content. I guess this is simply a modern equivalent of those old ‘four piece seeks drummer (must be able to count)’ classifieds from the NME 50 years ago, so maybe THIS is the way you’ll find your musical soulmate.
  • Sprites From Old Fighting Games: A GDrive containing collections of sprites from old 16-bit fighting games (think Final Fight, that sort of thing) – this came to me via Daniel Benneworth-Gray, who rightly pointed out that the folder full of ‘character on fire’ models would make a genuinely awesome design for a silk scarf, should any designers be reading this (er, designers with access to a silkscreen printing setup, specifically).
  • Kiezcolours: Oh this is GREAT! Kiezcolours is a website which lets you select any area of Berlin on a map and which creates a small colour-based postcard for you based on the land usage of the area you’ve chosen – so the colours on your personal postcard, and the sizes of each colour field, will reflect whether the area you’ve selected contains more residential land, or parkland, or water, or whatever, and as such you can create a very personal little graphic that reflects the character of your neighbourhood. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH and immediately got to thinking about how you might tweak this for London – number of chicken shops in a certain area, perhaps, or the tube lines that run through it…honestly, this is such a beautiful idea from concept to mechanic to execution, and I adore it.
  • Yarn: Via the lovely Lee Randall comes this super little site – type in any word or phrase and it will search an incredible archive of video for clips containing the terms you specified. This feels OLD, but it was new to me and it’s honestly quite magical – I just typed in ‘I wish I was dead’ on a whim, and I got a quite incredible clip of a man seemingly being beaten to death with a very large, very floppy, very heavy-looking rubber pen1s, which frankly is all the reason I need to recommend this pretty much unreservedly.
  • New Word Order: An excellent game by Monkeon – your job here is to guess which of the three words or phrases or terms was used first, then second, then most recently. Compelling and surprising and frustrating in equal measure, my main takeaway from this is that many neologisms aren’t in fact as new as I thought (chiz chiz).
  • LCD Please: “Papers, Please” is rightly-regarded as one of the best ‘games as art and political commentary’ pieces of the past decade or so – the game, if you’re not familiar with it, tells a series of poignant stories through the medium of you as the player processing people through the immigration and asylum system – and this anniversary edition reimagines it as an LCD Game And Watch title from the 1980s. The gameplay is necessarily simplified and streamlined, but it doesn’t lessen the impact of its message, and the recreation of the style and interface of the games its aping will be a Proustian moment for anyone who grew up in the 80s.
  • How Many Cities Can You Name?: British cities, to be precise. That’s it. Name cities. You may not think that this sounds hugely compelling, and you’d probably be right, but despite that fact I have been stuck on 29 for ages and am now basically compelled to keep staring at this until I can think of a 30th (I am so, so embarrassingly bad at geography).
  • The Uncolouring Book: Via last week’s b3ta, a lovely toy for the more visually-creative among you (this basically makes me feel like some sort of untermensch, but I appreciate that there are those of you for whom ‘the visual’ is a less confusing and terrifying concept and who will therefore probably enjoy this a lot more than I did) – The Uncolouring Book is a lovely little idea, which invites you to draw the lines around the colours (the reverse of a colouring book, DO YOU SEE?!?!) to create images – you get a splotch of colour or two, a rough prompt and some simple line-drawing tools to draw what you see; it’s like looking for shapes in clouds really (yes, I am sh1t at that too, why do you ask), and I think you might enjoy it.
  • Clone-A-Lisa: Matt Round has done it again – can YOU create a passable clone of the Mona Lisa in just a minute? TRY IT AND SEE! This is very fun, despite how aggressively-sh1t I am at it.
  • Wip3out In Your Browser: Wip3out was the game that made games cool. I don’t care what you say – prior to the PlayStation, and Sony’s insanely-aggressive marketing campaign that saw consoles fitted with copies of this game installed in the backrooms of actual nightclubs so that people boxed off their t1ts on pills could deal with those moments when it all ‘got a bit too much’ after the third dove and cling onto the controller while they attempted to process the pixels breaking across their field of vision, videogames were so uncool that you’d rarely find anyone admitting to actually enjoying them; after Wip3out, everything changed. People would spend 5 hours at the ‘afterparty’ (lol such a highfaluting name for something that literally means ‘sharing space with whichever dreadful people still have drugs and energy at 5am) entranced by the speed and the visuals and the soundtrack (the music here still fcuking BANGS, by the way) and it basically created the aesthetic for a specific type of ‘cool’ for a few years in the mid-90s (and made a whole generation of people, now in their 40s and 50s, fetishise the work of The Designer’s Republic to a degree that was probably unhealthy on reflection), and this is THE WHOLE GAME PLAYABLE IN YOUR BROWSER! Honestly, this is FCUKING AMAZING (and hard, so so so hard, especially if you don’t have a controller) and if you are Of A Certain Age then there’s a strong possibility you’ll just want to lock yourself in a room for 36h with this and a bag of questionable tablets engarved with various poorly-rendered designs. DRINK WATER (but not too much).

By Tania Font

I TEND NOT TO LIKE THE TERM ‘AMBIENT’ BUT I CAN’T THINK OF A BETTER ONE FOR THIS MIX WHICH IS BY DIMA SAFRONOV AND IS NOT ONLY GREAT AND SLOOOW AND VERY CHILLED BUT ALSO HAS THE INCREDIBLE TITLE ‘MIX TO LOWER THE FOAM IN A GLASS OF BEER’!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Identifying Cars in Posts: Send this anonymous person an image of a mystery vehicle from a social media post and they will, seemingly unerringly, tell you what sort of vehicle it is. I mean, for all I know they could be making this sh1t up – I am in no position to differentiate between a Toyota Camry and a Dodge Suppository (I am, as you may have guessed, right up at the edge of the limits of my knowledge of vehicular models here), but noone seems to be screaming ‘LIAR’ at them and so we shall just assume that they’re a preturnaturally talented car identifier.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Loved Orleer: On the one hand, the advances being made in AI-generated video are coming thick and fast, and the latest versions of Runway let you produce some pretty-impressive stuff with a bit of work; on the other, this Insta account posting machine-created movies is fcuking HORRIBLE and as such I recommend it unreservedly.
  • Tada Gaku: Glorious animations in watercolour – and other styles, if you scroll back a bit – done with a combination of techniques and demonstrating a beautiful eye for style and composition

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • LLMs and How They Work: Yes, I know, AI IS BORING AND YOU DON’T WANT TO READ ANY MORE ABOUT IT! You ought, however, to have learned by now that Web Curios contains a tedious strain of didacticism which means that I don’t care what you want to read and instead will continue to present the stuff that I think is useful and important until you either get worn down and exhaustedly concede defeat or until the point at which I alienate my final reader and finally reach the apogee of the newsletter writer’s experience (specifically, a newsletter with no subscribers, a sort of zen state of publishing which I seem to have been working towards for years) – and so, I present to you a really good explanation, delivered simply and helpfully in language that anyone can understand, of what LLMs are and how they work, by Simon Willison. I promise you that knowing a bit about how these things function is REALLY useful, not least in terms of your ability to distinguish between what they might be useful for and what they definitely are not useful for (this week I read something written by someone on LinkedIn – and yes, I know, but someone else sent it to me for comment, it’s not like I hang out on there I promise – which ran “by focusing on the mundane tasks that can be taken off our plates by AI, the IR profession stands to miss out on the huge opportunity AI provides to elevate what we do. No, AI can’t replace the “Relations” element of Investor Relations (thankfully – that’s the best bit!), but it can do things that an IR team of 1, 2 or even 20 will never be able to do.”, and it struck me as exactly the sort of blandly-moronic, generalistic pronouncement that someone who didn’t have the first fcuking clue how this sort of stuff works would make; don’t be that person, basically).
  • What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing: The unwritten second half to this article’s title being ‘…because it produces so much terrible, terrible prose’; this is a very good article in Noema Magazine by Laura Hartenburger in which she explores what it is that makes writing ‘good’, and the extent to which those assessments may need to be rethought based on what LLMs are ‘good’ at, and the extent to which that ought to make us reconsider where the value in prose lies; in particular (and I know that I’ve touched on this before over the past year or so) I have an increasing belief that the rise of LLM copy will do a gentle (and timely) job to maybe undermine the fetishisation of ‘clean, simple, monosyllabic, short-sentence copy’ in favour of something, well, more…baroque, if you will (I am not, to be clear, suggesting that everyone write like me – I would quite like to write less like me, if I’m honest, but am sanguine about the fact that the wind has changed and the ship has sailed (see? LOOK AT THOSE METAPHORS, MIXING LIKE OIL AND WATER)). Again, though, the theme/fear at the heart of this is the question of what we might lose when we lose the propensity to practice – and we will never know (unknown unknowns!).
  • AI Comes For The Thumbnail Industry: We’re at an interesting point in the hype cycle for generative AI at present, very much heading towards the slough of despond (or whatever it’s called when you get into the post-initial-peak slump) – familiarity is breeding a degree of contempt, and I’m hearing a lot of ‘well it can’t take my job so frankly I don’t see what the fuss is about tbh’. To which sorts of statements I like to point to pieces like this in response, because JUST BECAUSE IT’S NOT AFFECTING YOU RIGHT NOW DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD IN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS YOU SOLIPSISTIC PR1CK. Here Rest of World looks at the cottage industry of YouTube thumbnail designers which has built up over the last decade or so in the developing world, making attractive visual assets for YouTubers at low, low prices (comparative to the West, obvs) and whose business is starting to be undercut by automated services trained on billions on the fcuking things and which can create a fairly standard ‘bug-eyed amazement’ thumbnail and a bunch of A/B variants in approximately seven seconds for 10p. As with all this stuff, it bears repeating – it won’t kill the whole market, it certainly won’t kill the very top-end, and it may even create interesting new adjacent gigs…but this stuff is very bad news for the bottom-to-middle end of any market this tech touches.
  • AI For Creativity: The inimitable and always-useful Ethan Mollick writes about how to think about LLMs in terms of creative output, and how to potentially use them as part of your creative workflow. As I think I might have said before (so many words, so much repetition), whilst I don’t personally think these tools are particularly useful for actual idea generation, they can be super-helpful for eliminating all the terrible ideas that your colleagues will come up with without the need for a soul-crushing ‘brainstorm’ where people just say things like ‘what about a hashtag campaign?’ as though those words a) mean anything; b) have any value.
  • Making a Visual Novel with AI: Jay Springett, whose work on worldbuilding I linked to a few months ago, writes about some of his workflow attempting to pull together a visual novel in the solarpunk style, using various AI tools for the visuals; this is very practical, but I found it an interesting explanation of both the limitations and the practical steps you need to take to make something with a visually consistent style and that exists within a ‘defined’ area of latent space.
  • Boning In The Robotaxi: On the one hand, I am not wholly convinced that this entire article isn’t a piece of fiction – I mean, try verifying any of this. On the other, there is something so beautifully modern, so awfully dystopian, so perfectly San Francisco about the story that I couldn’t help but share it. You may have heard that self-driving cars are taking over San Francisco as the various companies seeking to convince us that no, really, this IS just around the corner offer heavily-discounted rides to the techies and the VCnuts zooming around the city, occasionally running over a homeless addict (probably) – well, per this piece, an unintended consequence of this is that people are taking advantage of the lack of a human driver to finger each other in the backseat (I paraphrase, but that’s basically it). SO MANY QUESTIONS! Do they wipe down the upholstery afterwards? Does ANYONE? Did the person who penned this read or watch ‘Cosmopolis’ in the period immediately preceding its genesis? Do the people apparently doing the boning really not care that they are obviously being filmed throughout?   Anyway, I look forward to automated vehicles becoming the 21st century phonebox – used largely by addicts looking for somewhere dry and secluded to tie off and shoot up – or for the spin-off enterprises that will result from having a theoretically-secluded, private mode of transport at your disposal; haircuts while you travel? Dentistry on your way to the meeting? Your in-car hairdresser? THERAPY WHILE U WAIT! Honestly, the possibilities are endless, the fingering’s just the start.
  • The Side-Effects of Home Monitoring: Another Rest of World piece, this looks at the way in which domestic surveillance tech (your Ring analogues, basically) being employed in India by wealthy families and homeowners to exert an additional degree of tracking and control over their domestic staff, monitoring their working patterns and timekeeping, and exacerbating existing dynamics of power and control through the (thinking charitably) unintended consequences of their function: “unlike office employees, domestic workers — mostly women with minimal education — have no control over what the apps track. There is no app interface for domestic workers and a typically a security guard appointed by the housing complex marks their attendance on the apps. In fact, 14 domestic workers told Rest of World they did not even  understand all the features of the apps. For instance, MyGate offers a rating system akin to Uber, where residents can rank domestic workers across parameters such as attitude, punctuality, and quality of service. But unlike Uber’s drivers, workers on MyGate cannot see their ratings nor rate the employers.”
  • The History of Corporate Presentations: Not the first time I’ve featured a piece on the wild and crazy and ROCK AND ROLL world of those people who used to make and arrange large-scale corporate presentations in the era before PowerPoint, when there were actual specialist companies creating the ‘son et lumiere’ for, say, IBM’s 1974 All-Hands jamboree in Aspen. There’s loads of great detail in here, and it really is a very different world – my main takeaway, though, is that specialisation is A Good Thing, and the idea that ‘everyone is good at making and delivering presentations’ is one of the great corporate fallacies of the last 30 years and one which has led to more wasted time, bored staff and pointless, terrible slides than anything else in the history of work. I mean, just read this and think how much you’d rather have The Muppets than listen to Jeannette’s stilted delivery and clumsy slide transitions: “At the height of Mesney’s career, his shows called for up to 100 projectors braced together in vertiginous rigs. With multiple projectors pointing toward the same screen, he could create seamless panoramas and complex animations, all synchronized to tape. Although the risk of disaster was always high, when he pulled it off, his shows dazzled audiences and made corporate suits look like giants. Mesney’s clients included IKEA, Saab, Kodak, and Shell; he commanded production budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in the multi-image business, that was cheap. Larger A/V staging companies, like Carabiner International, charged up to $1 million to orchestrate corporate meetings, jazzing up their generic multi-­image “modules” with laser light shows, dance numbers, and top-shelf talent like Hall & Oates, the Allman Brothers, and even the Muppets.” Seriously, next time someone asks you to do a presentation I suggest you stick your neck out and demand additional budget for a light show and maybe some sword swallowing at the very least.
  • All The ‘Girl’ Trends: On the recent (well, past few years’) series of ‘girl’-related trends (‘hot girl summer!’, ‘girl dinner’, ‘sad girl literature’, etc, ad nauseam) and what they ‘mean’, specifically in terms of the packaging and commoditisation of femininity and the term’s rejection of traditional tropes of ‘womanhood’…your mileage will vary here, but personally I found this simultaneously an interesting look at ‘what it means to perform femininity in 2023’ and a depressing ‘wow, it’s astonishing how much this stuff stays exactly the same when you look beyond the specific language being used to describe / determine it’ bit of ‘everything is marketing and you are always someone’s mark’ analysis.
  • Hacking Real Estate: Yes, sorry, this is an Insider piece and as such is a bit sh1t; equally, though, it’s a(nother) useful reminder that the current generation of young people is the most hustle-y and materially-obsessed since the 80s, even though they don’t necessarily like having it pointed out to them. So it is that ‘being a landlord’ is being repackaged from TikTok upwards as ‘hacking housing’, and ‘gouging your tenants as hard as you can’ is ‘getting your bag’ and, honestly, there’s a degree of cold-eyed ambition and drive about all of this that I find slightly terrifying (but which, I concede, I might empathise with a lot more were I in my 20s and staring down the barrel of several decades of penury rather than, as is probably likely for me, some cancers and a rapid decline) – I do think there’s something inherently interesting in the rise of ‘the hack’ as a concept, and the idea that every system, product or process can be tweaked or optimised to deliver better/preferable/optimal results, if only you know the MAGIC KEY, and the extent to which that is a good/bad/massively exploitable thing.
  • Singapore In Colour: A beautiful visual essay exploring the colour palette of modern Singapore, through its architecture and residents and decoration – it’s such a glorious way of learning about and exploring the citystate, and you can go neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, visualising the palette of each individual area as you. This really does feel like a love letter to the place, and it’s a lovely bit of digital storytelling by the Straits Times.
  • Water in Jordan: This is a SUPERB piece of writing about the city of Amman in Jordan – and indeed the country as a whole, its history and development and its present and its future – seen through the lens of the climate crisis and the water shortages which are facing the country now and which will almost-inevitably worse in the immediate future. Honestly, this is so so so interesting – it teaches you SO MUCH while at the same time being a wonderfully-written article, and its clear that Ursula Lindsay knows the city intimately; she tells a story of a country whose future suffering is born of years of exploitative mismanagement of assets of private interests left to run unchecked, and where, as with so many things in so many places, the main hope for ameliorative change comes from small, grass-roots organisations that seem capable of a degree of perspective absent from business and state. I found this excerpt particularly telling – sound familiar to anyone, this? “…The state withdrew from its role as the primary provider of public education, healthcare, and social housing, and instead became increasingly “involved in real estate development as a facilitator, regulator, and provider of indirect subsidies for multinational corporations.” 11 These subsidies include cheap land, infrastructure, and tax breaks. The high-end projects that have ensued, according to Daher, “are extremely exclusive … built at the expense of water resources and green patches … and work to push the poor to the outskirts of the city.”
  • London Restaurants: A rare OLD piece of writing now – don’t worry, the ceaseless pursuit of THE NEW will resume forthwith – this is a piece in the London Review of Books from 2019, which looks at the history of the London restaurant scene and its genesis in the late-19th/early-20th Century, and how its existence depends to an almost exclusive extent on the various immigrant communities who brought their cuisine, their culinary skills and their labour to England’s capital. This is SO GOOD, both on the history of the restaurant sector and its evolution, but also on the food and the logistics and the way in which the restaurants changed the city and vice-versa. There’s something poignant about the coda to the piece, in which the author asks what will become of the capital’s food scene in the wake of Brexit and the inevitable departure of people who worked as chefs and waiters and pickers and and and and…well, we know the answer now don’t we? Fair play to the non-metropolitan-elites who voted for Brexit – they really did manage to royally fcuk this aspect of London, which I imagine is no small consolation for, well, EVERYTHING ELSE.
  • It’s OK To Be Bad At Games: This will probably appeal most to people who a) like videogames; and b) know who Bennett Foddy is, or at least know what QWOP is, or Getting Over It, but should you tick either or both of those boxes then you will find a lot to enjoy in this interview. Foddy, for the uninitiated, is a game designer whose works are notable for their frankly insane mechanical difficulty – click the QWOP link and familiarise yourself with the vibe – and who in this interview talks about why he makes them, why they are so hard, and, significantly more interestingly, about the relationship between designer, player and the work itself, and how these elements are in dialogue with each other in games as they are in few other mediums. The extent to which you enjoy this will depend in part on the degree to which lines like “a lot of this stuff is about metacognition. Looking inward on the process of learning to play a video game — on what it feels like — is a lot of what playing a video game is about” make your teeth itch, so, well, see how you get on.
  • Doppelganger: Naomi Klein (No Logo, Shock Doctrine, etc) writes about her experience over the past few years being repeatedly confused with increasingly-bastsh1t fellow author of bestselling non-fiction Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, Vagina), and how it feels having your identity so consistently and completely undermined in people’s consciousness by the actions of another over who you have no control. This is an excerpt from a forthcoming book on the subject – I don’t know whether I want to read a whole 300-odd pages of this, but I very much enjoyed Klein’s discussion of how one’s sense of self is so intimately bound up in others’ sense of what our ‘self’ in fact is.
  • It’s Bloodsicle Time: I did not expect an article about feeding frozen blood to zoo animals to be one of my favourite pieces of writing of the week, but this really is glorious – I can’t quite explain why, but I adore the voice here and found myself narrating it in a slightly-bored tone as I read.
  • When Trucks Fly: It’s been a good week for ‘unexpectedly excellent pieces of writing about stuff I did not expect to be interested in’ – see also this AMAZING article all about the monster truck scene and the people whose idea of fun is ‘flipping a truck with tyres the size of a small house 360 degrees off a ramp’, which, as with all the best examples of this sort of writing, is equal parts ‘affectionate bemusement’, ‘kooky characters’, ‘wow, country people, eh?’, and ‘the city slicker author gets in over their head’, and is all the better for hitting each of these beats with perfect timing and weight.
  • The Best: Finally this week, a piece of short fiction about an author and a sex addict. No, it’s not THAT sort of writing. I enjoyed this a lot, and I think you might too,

By Nigel Van Wieck

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 04/08/23

Reading Time: 37 minutes

I had a genuinely-chastening professional experience this week which I will share with you because, well, it contains a LESSON of sorts. I was asked at short notice to record a podcast on Monday to talk about That Fcuking Man and the Twitter rebrand, and I said a happy ‘yes’ because, well, I’m a middle-aged white man and as such I not only love the sound of my own voice but feel it desperately important that as many people hear it as is humanly possible. Now, whenever I have recorded this particular podcast in the past it’s always been a down-the-line interview with the host which then gets chopped into the requisite pieces for inclusion; as such, I was blithely unconcerned about little things like ‘prep’ and ‘knowing what the fcuk I was talking about beyond the superficial’, because, well, I could always do pickups and stuff. Great!

Except they have changed the format, and instead of that what was now required was that I go to a room in Soho and sit with two actual other people and have a ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION on a range of issues that would then be lightly edited to make up the first half of the episode; oh, and the other people are ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALISTS who go on telly and stuff. So, er, turns out that if you just show up with only a vague. half-ar$ed idea of what you’re going to say you will very quickly find yourself quite out of your depth, and feel very embarrassed, and probably make quite a poor impression on people who, on reflection, you possibly ought to have tried a bit harder to impress.

So the lessons here are multiple: 1) DO YOUR FCUKING PREP YOU ARROGANT CNUT; 2) when you see people on telly being really funny and knowledgeable, chances are they have notes – MAKE SOME NOTES YOU ARROGANT CNUT; 3) maybe apply antiperspirant to your temples, because it turns out that this sort of embarrassment really does make sweat absolutely HOSE from your forehead and you will find this very, very embarrassing. Basically, it’s things like this that have led to me having the stellar ‘career’ that I have.

Anyway, I am off to Rome next week to sign a piece of paper (no, seriously, literally one – THANKS, ITALIAN BUREAUCRACY, ONCE AGAIN YOU AMAZE AND DELIGHT!) and so Web Curios will be off; I’ll be back in a fortnight, presuming I’m not dead of shame or anything else.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should listen to me lest you end up doing THIS every week for the rest of your days

By Kate Breakey

WE KICK OFF WITH A (RELATIVELY) NEW MIX BY DJ FOOD WHICH MAKES A WHOLE LOAD OF 70s/80s MUSIC SOUND GENUINELY GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH  WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE COSTA AD THEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE SAME AS PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THERE BEING NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR BANKING ADS, PT.1:  

  • AI Kwebbelkop: One of the potential benefits, we’re told, of just sort of lying down and letting the future happen at us will be when we can finally sigh with weary contentment and hand over the reigns of whatever quotidian drudgery we currently undertake to pay the mortgage – why work yourself when you can send your AI avatar out into the digital fields to work the content farms? Obviously this isn’t *quite* how it’s going to work out – or at least, it isn’t if you’re you or me, but does in fact appear to be how it’s going to work out if you’re (apparently very popular) Dutch YouTuber ‘Kwebbelkop’ (no, me neither – anyone speak Dutch?), who recently announced after 15 years(!) of streaming that they were retiring, and that instead of appearing on-stream themselves they would instead be delegating all future video work to…AI KWEBBELKOP! As of the beginning of this month, the channel has posted two new videos, both of which featuring a cartoony avatar and what seems, based on my relatively cursory analysis (look, I am 43 years old and I am not sitting through more than about 2 mins of Minecraft YouTuber, even in service of this fcuking newsletter), to be AI-generated voicework. Obviously I have no idea what the workflow is here, but I presume that this means that Kwebbelkop (feels very silly typing this over and over again, fyi) can just record themselves playing the game for 30m, knock out a quick script, juice it with an LLM trained on their general style and then text-to-vid/text-to-speech it and sync the whole thing – the whole process taking a matter of a couple of hours rather than, say, a whole working day. The comments on the AI-generated vids are…confused, in the main, and I have no idea if this is going to be embraced by the streamer’s fans, but it’s an interesting idea (and, if you ask me, a perfectly-reasonable response to spending 15 years gurning at the gamera while playing digital LEGO).
  • The Sprite MixTape Generator: I have to say, given the fact that all this AI stuff has been FCUKING EVERYWHERE for nearly a year now – and, frankly, has been workable tech for a couple – it’s genuinely dispiriting to see how few interesting or creative or fun or imaginative uses of the tech there have been by the world’s assorted army of advermarketingprdrones. I mean, FFS, you’re supposed to be CREATIVE POWERHOUSES ffs, and yet you give me…stuff like THIS. ‘THIS’ being a ‘brand experience’ from nobody’s favourite brand of carbonated sugar water Sprite, in which “Sprite and Complex teamed up with OseanWorld to celebrate 50 years of hip hop with an AI-Powered Digital Art Experience. Let your words and creativity become the canvas that generates your very own custom mixtape artwork.” What might that mean in practice? What sort of interesting and exciting combinations of generative AI technology will this multi-million dollar brand and the marketing geniuses who steer it through the choppy waters of the zeitgeist come up with to surprise and delight me? It’s…a mixtape cover generator! Yes, that’s right, engage in a vapid conversation with a natural language chatbot that will ask you some bland bromides about your ‘connection’ with hiphop (sample question: “Hey [USERNAME]! Great to meet you. Now, let’s dive into your hip hop preferences. How do you usually discover new hip hop music? Any favorite platforms or methods?”) and then use the answers to generate a ‘mixtape cover’ whose look depends on your interactions with the bot. WHY? WHY DO I WANT A MIXTAPE COVER?! I DON’T HAVE A FCUKING MIXTAPE FFS! WHY IS THERE AT THE VERY LEAST NOT A BASE-LEVEL SPOTIFY INTEGRATION SO YOU COULD MAYBE CREATE ONE FOR ME? IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? Also why is the artwork so small, and so utterly sh1t? HOW DID YOU FCUK THIS UP SO BADLY?! Given the amount of fascinating, creative, surprising and imaginative stuff there is out there on the big old internet, brands creating stuff like this is, frankly, miserable and dispiriting. DO BETTER FFS IT’S NOT EVEN YOUR FCUKING MONEY.
  • EXPTV: Joining a long and storied list of ‘sites on the internet that are basically like the sort of weird hinterland TV that you used to occasionally stumble upon at 230am on Channel4 in the 1980s’ – I’ve featured several of this sort of thing in Curios over the years (no, I don’t keep a list ffs), and this is a particularly nice example. “A 24/7 live TV channel, broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera”, or so its description says, this is SUPER – like old-school MTV fed through a John Waters filter, and with a programming schedule that includes slots such as ‘Incredibly Strange Metal’ and ‘Kung Fu Wizards’. If you’ve ever hung out in a very particular type of bar (often with significant quantities of old film memorabilia and a pseudo-50s kitsch aesthetic) then you will recognise THE VIBE of this channel from the sort of thing they would have had wordlessly playing on a single corner-mounted television – this is excellent fun, and really well-curated (based on my admittedly cursory examination), and frankly feels like the sort of thing you could happily chuck on in the background on a Friday evening while you get very, very stoned and play stupid boardgames.
  • Move It, With Pepsi!: I mean, technically this is called ‘Muevelo Con Pepsi’, but I thought I’d do the heavy lifting of the translation for you (I’m nice like that) – rejoice, everyone, we’re back in the metaverse! One of the side effects of having seen a LOT of really bad ‘metaversal’ projects over the past 3 years or so is that you start noticing certain details that are specific to the 3-4 different software platforms that every single brand has unquestioningly used to build their deeply-miserable, empty, soulless, 3d brand purgatories – so it is that when I arrived in PEPSI’S EXCITING LATINO DANCE WORLD (it is not exciting, and, honestly, if I wanted to create a brand activation that ‘celebrated’ the rich and varied and INHERENTLY PHYSICAL world of dance from central and southern America I would probably consider doing it in a medium that, I don’t know, existed) I immediately recognised the particular ‘jump’ animation applied to avatars by this particular metaverse vendor and I felt, momentarily, at home (interesting aside – if all these things are built on the same platforms, why aren’t they more…interoperable, and why is there no way for users to easily switch between worlds on the same platform? Is it because none of these things are really ‘metaverses’ at all? MAKES YOU THINK). Anyway, this is incredibly sad and pretty much the antithesis of the fun, vibrant and carnival-esque atmosphere you might associate with Latinate dancing – but, on the plus side, you get to wander around this empty digital space and look at huge screens on which you can see ‘creative director and actor’ Beau Casper Smart teach you some dance moves in the metaverse (dance moves which, to be clear, you can’t attempt to replicate or mimic because the functionality simply isn’t there! It’s great!) while his eyes scream “THINK OF THE PAYCHECK THINK OF THE PAYCHECK”. Honestly, this is superb and DEFINITELY worth the six figures in agency and platform and talent fee that this inevitably required. WELL DONE EVERYONE!
  • Pamera: This comes to me via occasional Web Curios contributor and digital artist Damjanski, who writes “Hi Matt,hope you do well. You might enjoy this app (disclaimer it’s very stupid)”. Well, that sort of description was bound to hook me in (I am nothing if not a predictable sucker for dumb digital ephemera, after all), and, honestly, this is SO FUN! Pamera is a really simple idea – an iPhone app that uses machine vision to ‘see’ whatever you take a photo of and then (probably) the GPT API to take whatever objects it’s ‘seen’ and use those as the basis for a poem written about whatever object or scene the machine has ‘perceived’. THIS IS SO FUN – and, case in point, an interesting and cute and enjoyable and surprising and creative use of generative AI tech. It’s easy to imagine some small builds on this – you could let users choose from a variety of poetic forms, for example, or poetic styles, or apply tonal filters to the outputs (“make it more redolent of consumptive melancholia, please!”) – but in general this is pretty much perfect. THANKYOU DAMJANKSI!
  • Experience Business: I have something of a fraught relationship with the world of ‘BUSINESS’ – on the one hand, I need to earn money and, because I am lazy and the very opposite of ‘entrepreneurial’, to do so I tend to need to operate within the confines of the existing corporate world; on the other, I find the world of BUSINESS very, very silly, and, largely, ridiculous, and tend to ACT OUT a bit when I am around people who treat it like it’s serious. Which is, perhaps, why I enjoyed this site so much – it’s the (perfectly reasonable and very nicely-made) online home of the KKL concert hall in the Swiss city of Lucerne, specifically the branch of the venue that rents out its various spaces for corporate events, and I don’t think I have ever seen a shinier and more fancy way of showing off the fact that they have nine separate spaces that you can book for your skullfcukingly-tedious quarterly marketing all-hands. You can whizz around the building in 3d! Each of the rooms has its own dedicated 3d model thing, and some copyritten blurb about what makes it special (‘The multifunctional hall becomes the hall you need for your event.’ – I mean, really, this is great)! Honestly, this really is wonderful – it’s really good, but, I might argue, perhaps a TOUCH overengineered. God I love the Swiss.
  • Poisons Help: Have you ever thought “I really wish I felt safer in my pursuit of my amateur mycology hobby, but my terrible memory and failing eyesight mean I can’t ever be fully confident that the fungi I’ve just picked aren’t in fact going to make my bowels liquefy and my blood turn to mulch”? WELL IT’S YOUR LUCKY DAY! Poisons Help is a Facebook Group whose sole purpose is apparently to answer questions from mushroom pickers about whether or not that really is an Ammanita Phalloides, and whether they do in fact need to go to A&E about the strange numb prickling they’re starting to experience all down their left-hand side – or, based on the most recent comments on the Page, whether their dog needs to be rushed to the vet RIGHT NOW. This is a lovely community and super-interesting, and one which feels like it could form the centre of a rather dark story in which an ostensibly-minor spat over community etiquette six months ago inexorably leads to a passive-aggressive withheld response to a ‘shroom-based query and a tragic, avoidable death a little further down the line.
  • The Screw Project: This feels vaguely familiar, but apparently I have never featured this before (or certainly not in the past 8 years or so, and, honestly, NOONE FCUKING CARES OTHER THAN ME) and so it’s fair game – The Screw Project is a wonderful and slightly-unhinged idea by the creators of the ‘smile screw’, a new design for screws/screwdrivers that someone came up with in 2014 and which is functionally-identical to the normal flat/phillips screw of tradition, but which looks like a smiley face and so is therefore, objectively, better. This site features a map of all the different places in the world where someone has sought to make the world a marginally-cheerier place by installing smile screws in their home or establishment (aside from anything else, smile screws have the very particular benefit that, unless someone happens to have a very idiosyncratically-designed screwdriver on their person, noone can mess with your screws) – there are, at the time of writing, only 66 instances of smile screws being used in the world, which feels…low, tbh, which is why I encourage all of you to buy a pack and a special smile screwdriver from the website and spread the smile screw gospel far and wide.
  • Lennybot: I featured a previous iteration of this project a few months back – it previously used natural language search to create a useful, searchable archive of podcast episodes, but that has now been extended to cover blogposts and writings as well. This is interesting less because of the content (sorry, Lenny – although if you’re DESPERATE for more product marketing insights then maybe you’ll find something to love here) and more because of the sort of proof-of-concept nature of the project in terms of the whole ‘look at what you can do with a corpus of information and some light generative AI on top of it ffs!’.
  • Liar Liar: One of the interesting (lol!) things about the coming AI revolution is the odd, asymmetric information dynamics that it’s goint to introduce – as I think I’ve previously bored on about, the world becomes marginally more unpredictable when everyone (for example) has their own personal AI-enabled digital assistant in their pocket and they are all potentially different and customisable, and you never have the slightest idea whether the person you’re interacting with is the sort who just goes with the ‘default Google Helper’ avatar or an enthusiastic hobbyist who’s decided to install ‘Tatepilled Waifu Companion’ on their iPhone 24. Or indeed when you have no idea whatsoever whether the person who you’re chatting to online has installed a piece of tech like Liar Liar on their machine – this is a (almost certainly TOTALLY BULLSH1T) service that purports to let anyone install it on their machine, after which they can use the tech to run realtime AI-assisted polygraphic analysis of anyone their videochatting with, based on the tech’s assessment of a bunch of physical signals as observed through the cam feed. To be clear – polygraphs are questionable tech at best, and that’s with actual sensors attached to actual physical people; the idea that there’s software that can make any sort of accurate assessment of whether or not someone’s telling the truth based on ‘machine-observable physical signals’. The site claims to use  “Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG), a technique that detects subtle color changes in the face, indicative of your heart rate. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s also monitoring for eye movements, facial expressions, and body language, each providing valuable data to the AI. With all this information, the AI uses psychological know-how to interpret it all. Sudden eye movements, particular facial expressions, or specific body language, all add up to reveal a potential deception. The tool combines these individual signs, often undetectable to the human eye, and uses the cumulative data to offer an accurate assessment of truthfulness. It’s the seamless integration of technology and psychology that makes LiarLiar.AI a powerful ally in lie detection.” It’s TOTAL BOLL0CKS – but, obviously, the unsettling thing is that despite the completely unscientific claims being made here and the fact that’s, to repeat, TOTAL BOLL0CKS, you can equally imagine stuff like this being applied to all sorts of real-life situations, and this sort of dodgy tech being used to take real decisions that impact real people’s lives, and it’s stuff like this that we should be worried about rather than the killer machines imho.
  • The Civic AI Observatory: An interesting new initiative by the smart people at Newspeak House and NESTA – to quote, “Nesta is partnering with Newspeak House to establish the Civic AI Observatory. Rather than being just another AI initiative, the Observatory will be a space in which people can come together to learn about AI calmly and safely, and talk about relevant work. The Civic AI Observatory will host events tailored to diverse groups from civil society, from leaders, to funders and capability-builders, to practitioners. There will also be a newsletter and an online community: ways to stay abreast of developments in AI of relevance to civil society. We can’t predict the outputs of the work but we have some outcomes in mind. If the Civic AI Observatory works well, people in civil society will: have a better understanding of AI technologies have a better grasp on the kinds of value that AI can add, while being well-informed about trade-offs and risks be better connected to people asking similar questions.” If this sounds like you or your organisation, get in touch.
  • The Japanese Paper Film Project: “In the 1930s, several Japanese companies produced films made on paper (“kami firumu”) instead of celluloid. The Japanese Paper Film Project preserves the surviving movies and promotes scholarship about these films. From 1932 – 1938, two Japanese Companies dominated the paper film market. Most well known are REFCY, based in Tokyo, and Katei Toki (“Home Talkie”), based in Osaka. They produced animated and live action films and often in color. Moreover, many of the films contained synchronized sound tracks on 78rpm vinyl. Given the short period of production, the varying paper quality, and WWII’s devastation, very few Japanese paper film prints survive. Now, almost 90 years later, the handful of surviving prints are beginning to deteriorate. Thus, this project is racing against time to preserve the films before they disappear entirely.” This is SO INTERESTING – you will recognise the style here, but I had no idea that this is the animation technique that resulted in that very particular look and feel. If you want to see clips from the films that are being preserved you can see them on the project’s accompanying Twitter (SUE ME ELON YOU CNUT) account. 
  • Audio Atlas: It’s interesting (to me, at least) that the past six months or so’s frothiness around AI still hasn’t seen a decent natural language music search crop up yet, not even from Spotify (or have I missed something) – this is another attempt to create such a thing, and it doesn’t *quite* work. Type in the sort of thing you need to soundtrack (I just gave it “I need a soundtrack to a film which pans slowly over a field of corpses”) and it will spit out a selection of suggested tracks in seconds. Having said at the start of my writeup that this doesn’t *quite* work, I now find that it’s given me at least one reasonably decent suggestion based on that macabre prompt  – the gimmick here is that it’s a sales tool for a licensing library, giving you the ability to license a track in two clicks after listening to the preview. This is reasonably-smart, although I still maintain that as soon as the text-to-music stuff gets really good then all these music libraries are going to be utterly banjaxed.
  • The Web Fractal Clock: This is mesmerising and brilliant and beautiful, and I want it on a giant digital screen in my house for evermore (it is also very easy to read, I promise, you just need to take a moment to work out what’s going on). Seriously, this is so so so cool and ought to be a massive installation somewhere so if one of you could sort that out that would be great please thankyou.
  • AI Concerts: Via Andy comes this TikTok account which creates…surprisingly good covers of famous tracks, redone by AI so as to make them sound like they’re being covered by a bunch of cartoon characters – sadly all said characters appear to all be from Spongebob and Phineas & Ferb, and other titles that I was too busy being too old to ever have really have had a cultural relationship with, so I can’t gauge the quality of the voices, but the accompanying CG ‘concert’ videos are really excellent and in general this is a fairly-uncomplicated Good Time.
  • CubeTrek: Not, sadly, a new IP in which the crew of the Starship Enterprise grapple with the mysteries of the TimeCube (which, now I come to think of it, sounds…quite good?) but instead a rather cool service aimed at the climbing and mountaineering communities and which effectively uses GPS tracking to create a 3d visualisation of the journey you take up a mountain; like Strava, basically, but for people with more walking poles and a generally casual attitude towards trudging past a few hundred frozen corpses on your way to the summit. This actually looks pretty cool, and I like the fact that it hooks up to Google Earth to let you show your best hikes in a CG flythrough – personally-speaking I think they’re missing a trick by not having some sort of 3d printing option here, but I increasingly think that I am the only remaining person alive who remembers that 3d printing is even a thing (but seriously, who wouldn’t want a perspex cube into which had been laser-etched the route of their greatest ever ascent – NO FCUKER, etc!).
  • Make 8bit Art: 8bit art generators are not new and, frankly, are a bit ten-a-penny and I wouldn’t normally bother including them, but I’ll make an exception for this which is genuinely pleasing to use and which even I managed to make something not-entirely-repellent with in just a few short seconds.

By Stipan Tadic

WE NOW GO BACK TO 1996 AND ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MIXES OF THE TIME WHICH YOU CAN PROBABLY SKIP IF YOU’RE NOT INTO TECHNO BUT IF YOU ARE THEN YOU WILL ENJOY THIS – THIS IS BITTER & TWISTED MIXED BY MRS WOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH  WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE COSTA AD THEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE SAME AS PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THERE BEING NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR BANKING ADS, PT.2:  

  • General Index: “General Index is a shapeshifting encyclopaedic project by Ill-Studio focusing on factual information from all of human knowledge gathered into a corpus of abstract ideas and practical things’”. So, er, that clears things up then. General Index is slightly-baffling initially, but does start to make sense once you click through a bit and land on the accompanying semi-explanatory site which delivers some context behind the dizzying, shifting taxonomy of everything that flashes across the homepage (it will make sense once you click the original link, I promise you). I like this a lot.
  • EVIDENT Images of the Year 2023: Would you like to see some images of REALLY REALLY SMALL THINGS, all pretty and iridescent? GREAT! Some of the things that these people have managed to capture are insane – the individual scales on a butterfly’s wing, ffs! SO SMOL! – although best not speculate too hard about whether or not the red-backed salamander whose skull is so beautifully captured in cross-section is doing ok.
  • Casehopper: A (theoretically) genuinely good and positive use of generative AI! No, really! Casehopper is a service designed to help legal practitioners dealing with immigration applications in the US accelerate the speed with which they process said applications, offering assistance with the doubtless-formulaic process of information compiling and submission. Basically you (the lawyer) feed in all the information you have into the system and it will knock out the required documentation required by law, all in the appropriate legalese – or at least that’s the promise, but obviously I have no way of verifying whether or not the outputs are decent or whether by using this service you’re effectively condemning your clients to a swift return to whence they cane via the cheery repatriation mechanisms of the famously-accommodating US immigration system. Still, this feels like…a Good Thing? I mean obviously we’d like in a world in which each individual’s immigration request was dealt with humanely by a real person, but given that almost the exact obverse of that seems to be true and that The System is already basically a gigantic and unpleasant bureaucratic meatgrinder then it sort of makes sense to attempt to play the system using a bit of light automation – if, of course, The Machine does the job properly, because the caveat to all of this is that a bad-but-quick solution makes everything worse so much faster. Let’s…let’s hope for the best, eh?
  • Unspun Heroes: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is a project by my mate Simon, but I promise that even were it by someone who I hated and wished a painful death on I would probably still feature it because, well, it’s a GREAT idea and I wish I had thought of it (and the name tbh). Unspun Heroes is a music label which answers the single burning question which I imagine has been on your lips for YEARS (whether you have been aware of it or otherwise), to whit: “Is it possible to find under-appreciated albums and reissue them on vinyl?” – and thanks to Unspun Heoroes, the answer is now a loud and unequivocal “YES”. The site is both a place where writing about favourite underrated records lives, and will eventually become a place where you can buy said limited edition reissues of classic, underappreciated records on lovely environmentally-friendly (insofar as that’s possible) physical media. This is a great idea (damn you Simon) and a lovely thing for all those middle-aged men amongst you who think that a record collection is a substitute for having a personality.
  • The BBC on Mastodon: How are you all getting on in the middle of the Great Social Media Revolution? Have you managed to stick it out on Threads/Bluesky/Post/T2/Mastdon? Are you enjoying the very 2023 experience of posting the same thing (with a small degree of platform-specific tweaking) to six different platforms and finding that noone cares on any of them? Isn’t it great? No it is not great, it is sh1t, and part of me does rather pity the poor people at the BBC who have been tasked with running the Corporation’s new presence in the Fediverse and who, I fear, will be Skeeting into the void rather. Still, this is A Good Thing and exactly the sort of thing the BBC *should* be experimenting with if you ask me, and as ever with the Beeb they are being very thoughtful about how they approach the whole thing: “This is an experiment – we will run it for 6 months and then decide whether and how to continue. We aim to learn how much value it has provided and how much work and cost is involved. Does it reach enough people for the effort we need to put in? Are there risks or benefits from the federated model, with no centralised rules or moderation and no filtering or sorting algorithms? We’re learning as we go, and we’ll write about what we discover in the hope that it might be useful for others. The BBC will continue its other social media activity in the usual places. Looking ahead, could we move beyond Mastodon to other ActivityPub applications for publishing content? And would this provide us with some insulation from the risks that might be created as other social media platforms continue to change and evolve? And will large, planet-scale social media platforms persist or are they gradually disappearing? What are the alternatives and what will we have in 10 years time?” Honestly, I am so so so glad that an organisation exists that can and will do this sort of thing, and I am happy to pay for it.
  • Songwriters: A new bit of dataviz exploration by the Pudding, this latest example of their now-signature ‘TELL STORIES WITH NUMBERS AND SCROLLING’ style looks into the number of female songwriters involved in penning modern hit singles, and the oddity of the fact that, per their investigation and analysis, while half of the songs they analysed that made the Billboard Hot 100 top 5 had all-male songwriting teams, only one had an all-female songwriting team. This leads them down a rabbithole of enquiry that takes the reader on an interesting journey through songwriting trends and which while so doing does a decent job of gently explaining some of the innate sexism inherent in the way the music industry functions and moving onto the manner in which this data tells the story of men controlling women’s work and money and agency throughout the course of the past 70 years – as the site puts it: “Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence.” An excellent example of how to do BIG THEMES in a way that doesn’t feel preachy or heavy-handed (and, as always, just great data-led communications – these people really are consistently excellent).
  • The Constitute Project: A project designed to let anyone compare the contents and composition of national constitutions worldwide: “New constitutions are written every year. The people who write these important documents need to read and analyze texts from other places. And citizens need to know, and to be able to understand, what’s in their countries’ foundational documents. Constitute offers access to the world’s constitutions so that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics—using an inviting, clean interface.” This is FAR more interesting than I’d expected – yes, fine, I am an ahistorical ignoramus, what of it – and I didn’t think I’d find myself spelunking through the previous iterations of the Italian constitution with quite such relish. It’s impossible not to feel a slight ‘fcuk me the weight of history’ moment when you look at some of the dates on this stuff (or, potentially, to think ‘hm, maybe it might not be a terrible idea for us to perhaps come up with something to maybe update the Magna Carta a bit?’).
  • Design Spells: I don’t *think* this is actually anything to do with the occult, but, just in case, Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any hideous eldritch familiars which may manifest at the foot of your bed as a result of your use of this website. Design Spells is a newsletter – ALL OTHER NEWSLETTERS ARE FALSE GODS THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE TRUE NEWSLETTER AND THAT IS THIS ONE – which exists to highlight small, lovely, often inessential design features which you might otherwise have missed. From their description, “Do you remember the micro-interaction that made you smile? Or the Easter egg you stumbled upon in your favorite app? These design details might go unnoticed by many and have little impact on the metrics that today’s apps are optimized for. They probably won’t appear in any product roadmaps or company OKRs. Nevertheless, these details are not pointless. They infuse life, personality, and fun back into the web. They spark joy and reward those who find them with a sense of delight. They represent the last bastion of hope against the backdrop of a homogenous web. It is at the intersection of design and engineering where these details are made possible. It is here that the real magic happens.
    That’s why we started Design Spells — to celebrate and showcase the design details that feel like magic.” I am 100% a fan of this ethos – I will forever hold a candle for those sites that feature pointless-but-happymaking bits of UI or UX work, and personally think that anyone working on any deadly-dull bit of faceless corporate busywork make it their mission to include ONE incredibly-silly thing hidden somewhere no right-thinking person will ever click (I am 100% putting a secret ‘link to furry bongo’ on the next digital project I work on and that is a GUARANTEE).
  • One-Take Video: A bunch of new AI-ish features introduced by Vimeo and being bundled together as their ‘One-Take Video’ offering – this might all be super-useful if you’re a creator, but as with loads of this stuff all I can see when I look at it is a bleak future for lots of people currently making a living as video editors and scriptwriters and the like; I can’t tell you the amount of old rope money I’ve earned from cobbling together half-ar$ed scripts for videos I know that noone will ever watch (as you can tell, I bring my a-game to that sort of work!) and now these b4stards are STEALING THE VERY FOOD FROM MY MOUTH by offering functionality like ‘automatic video scriptwriting’ (and a bunch of other stuff too, like teleprompting and AI-assisted topline video editing). This might be useful, but it has slightly-hamstrung my future earning potential and so THANKS FOR NOTHING VIMEO YOU FCUKS.
  • Ratatan!: A Kickstarter! This one is a shoo-in – it’s for a new videogame created by the same team that developed cult hit Patapan! a few years ago and which is now seeking funding (and has in fact achieved its goal in a matter of days) to develop a brand-new esoteric-looking rhythm-based game in which, as far as I can tell, you play rhythm games to lead a cute army of critters against ANOTHER cute army of critters! The official blurb says: “Ratatan is diving onto the roguelike scene in this combination of rhythm and side-scroller action. Players can move to the groove alone or team up with friends in multiplayer mayhem suitable for up to four players!  Engage in huge melee brawls with more than 100 characters duking it out for supremacy. Defeat your enemies by riding the rhythm of Ratatan’s catchy, toe-tapping soundtrack in this delightful, heartfelt adventure!”, but all you really need to know is ‘CUTE-BUT-VIOLENT RHYTHM GAME WITH SLIGHTLY-MAD VISUALS’ and that should give you the general idea.
  • Diarrhoeacoffee: ANOTHER KICKSTARTER! This one also already-funded, but…significantly sillier. This also feels like a bit of a cheat – it’s an LG project, and I wasn’t aware that Big Business used Kickstarter like this tbh – but also means that I don’t feel bad about making fun of it. The device being crowdfunded here is a whizzy new coffee machine which it seems LG is about to add to its range – the gimmick here is, in part, the fact that it can hold two coffee pods simultaneously which allows you to BLEND DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAFFEINATED BEVERAGE! I know – IT’S WHAT I HAVE DREAMED OF TOO! If that wasn’t enough, though, LG’s design team have obviously been worshipping at the church of the infamous(ly ineffectual) Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, because this coffee machine is a(n admittedly pretty cute-looking) tripod design in nice, reassuring, Baymax-style curved white plastic…which, unfortunately, deposits the coffee from a central nozzle in a manner that can only be described as ‘a bit like watching it take an unpleasantly-liquid bowel movement’. Look, I promise I’m not exaggerating – click the link and watch the promo video and try and get past the fact that it looks almost exactly like your coffeemaker is, effectively, browning into a demitasse for you. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE YOU CANNOT.
  • Sch1zo.net: It’s important to caveat this link, I think – when you spend a lot of time online, you often come across sites and work by people who are somewhat…outside the norm, shall we say, and in such cases I always try and make sure that if I do feature the site in question I do so in a manner that doesn’t feel like I’m making fun of anyone or punching down (I have no idea whether I succeed in this endeavour, but I promise I do try). In this case the site’s creator, one Sebastian Prusak, openly mentions on the homepage that the work of creating and maintaining it is in some way part of his recovery from severe schizophrenia, and the content of the site reflects that – the bio section is (to me at least) incredibly poignant, but the real draw for me is the art – I have seen…a lot of ‘outsider’-type art websites, but it’s rare that I see anything so…interesting. The work itself is sort-of mathematical-geometric, with lots symbolic references, but the most fascinating thing to me is the navigation interface which seems to try and create an interlinked thematic map of Sebastian’s works, based on…criteria I don’t quite understand. I can’t quite explain why, but this really stayed with me this week and I think it’s quite remarkable.
  • Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023: The winner’s announced on the 8th September, but while you wait for the STARS TO ALIGN (lol) for the lucky victor you can peruse the nominees on this webpage (or, if you’re able, pop to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to check out the exhibition that accompanies the contest). These are obviously FCUKING AMAZING if a *little*-too post-produced for my taste – it’s cheesy, true, but the Pandora pic is quite cool, though my personal pics for the win this year are the solar flare shots because WOW, frankly.
  • The Sounds of Space: In fact, while looking at the images at the last link, why not accompany your wide-eyed appreciation of the majesty of the cosmos with this soundboard of THE ACTUAL SOUNDS OF SPACE? It’s not, fine, a hugely-compelling soundtrack, but there’s always the outside possibility that if you download the audio files and run them through a bunch of filters/enhancers you’ll be able to hear something TERRIFYING AND ALIEN.
  • Woodward Draw: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this GREAT game in which you’re asked to come up with as many different four-letter words as possible simply by changing one letter at a time – the goal is to find all of the SPECIAL words which have been given a delightful pixelart illustration, and which you can ‘collect’ like some sort of mad, acquisitive;linguaphile. If you have a small kid who is into vocabulary, I reckon this is probably a good 30 mins in which the sticky-faced little treasures might just be quiet, should you be in the market for such a thing.

By Anastasia Samoylova

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY NOEMA AND FEELS LIKE A PERFECT ‘WATCH THE SUN COME UP AFTER SOMETHING OF A HECTIC FEW HOURS’ SELECTION, SHOULD THAT BE OF USE TO YOU THIS WEEKEND OR INDEED EVER! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Bowiesongs: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, it’s a lovely project which feels Tumblr-adjacent and it’s written with such erudiet affection that it’s an easy recommend – Bowiesongs is a long-running site (it’s been going since at least 2009 ffs!) which features essays about, er, Bowie’s songs (and, latterly, songs about Bowie), and it’s still going (the latest update was last week) and, honestly, this is LOVELY and really well-written to boot (which it’s fair to say isn’t always the case with this sort of stuff).
  • Knobfeel: A sadly-defunct website but one whose ethos I very much enjoy and approve of – while it existed (2013-17 RIP) it served solely to offer reviews of various pieces of hifi equipment based on how good it felt to turn the knobs on said hifi equipment. As someone who regularly sighs when observing the unique beauty of a slow-closing kitchen drawer I very much enjoy the fact that this existed (and am frankly confused as to why it stopped – how could anyone possibly get bored of writing this stuff?).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • SeoulTribe: One for the K-Pop fan in your life (IS IT YOU?) who wants to branch out a bit from the Blackpinks of this world and spread their musical wings slightly (but not so much that they ever leave Korea), SeoulTribe is (was? I hope not, though the bio does rather suggest it might be on hiatus) a place where its creators shared recommendations of Korean music outside of the more mainstream/large-scale K-pop acts.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Search and the Meaning of Information: I thought this was an excellent and interesting article on the way in which the past 25 years of search engines have altered our relationship with information and what we consider the POINT of it to be – the central thesis here, that all information providers are either ‘librarians’ (people who point you at more information that you can use to deepen or better understand or further contextualise your query) or ‘physicians’ (who instead just point you at the answer and don’t bother you with extraneous info or context), struck me as a potentially-useful way of looking at the world and, even if you don’t agree, the general points made around what is lost when one ‘just’ gets the answer without having to think too hard about it and how the intersection of generative AI and search might possibly impact the issues raised in interesting and baroque ways.
  • Elon and X (Again): Oh, fine, in case any of you really care then here’s the ur-writeup of the whole ‘Elon Musk’s history with the letter X and how the story behind his initial obsession with it proves once again that the man is literally a 14 year old boy somehow magically become the world’s richest human’ – it’s largely the same stuff as in the Twitter thread I featured last week, but rendered more readable, although it does contain some genuinely great quotes which I hadn’t previously been aware of (in particular the line about x.com being ‘the coolest url in the world’ is just PERFECT – note, also, that Musk was already 29 years old at that point and really should have been beyond this sort of thing). BONUS MUSK – I was asked to talk about the ‘X’ thing on a podcast this week, in the unlikely event you want to hear any more about THAT FCUKING MAN (and, also, some stuff about Nigel Farage – really selling it to you, aren’t I?).
  • The Mastodon Problem: I appreciate that an article that can best be described as ‘a detailed and deep investigation into all the reasons why people who tried to move from Twitter to Mastodon mostly didn’t manage to do it, or if they did they tended not to bother sticking around very long’ probably doesn’t have mass appeal, but let me attempt to draw you in by explaining that it’s actually a really good breakdown of all the ways in which users bounce off a product or experience and, while it’s obviously quite specifically software-tech-y it’s also full of general principles that can probably be usefully applied elsewhere if you’re in the process (or the general practice) of building things and trying to get people both to use them and to keep using them).
  • How Large Language Models Work: I know, I know, you don’t want to hear any more about AI and you don’t need to know the technical details about how the fcuk they work (to the extent to which anyone is able to adequately explain it, in any case) – I know this, and I hear your weary pain. BUT! Given the seemingly-inevitable advance of this stuff into every single corner of every single element of your working life, it’s probably not a terrible idea to have at least a passing idea as to what the fcuk is happening beneath the hood every time you type ‘please turn this bulletpoint list into a 2,000 word report because I honestly think that if I have to write any more of this pointless tripe I will actually attempt to drown myself in the sink’. This is a very, very good primer which is about as ‘layman’s terms’ as it’s possible to be, and I promise will give you at least a base-level grounding in the science behind the magic.
  • Why The Artists Will Lose The Lawsuits: I am not a lawyer – SHOCKING, I KNOW – and as such I am obviously in no position to make assessments about the likely progress of the various copyright cases being brought against the various AI companies by artists, writers and the comedian Sarah Silverman; I have checked, though, and the author of this piece at least went to law school and so as such is at least in-part qualified to opine on the issue. According to this person, Silverman in particular has no legs to stand on based on US law, and in particular the specifics of copyright law: per this section, “The thing about copyright is that, as the name suggests, it is all about stopping people from making copies of the work; importantly, you cannot copyright an idea. Therefore, you can’t stop people from creating their own creative works, like lists that mention your works or analyses of your creations, which is called transformative work.¹ Parodies, for example, are transformative because even though they often involve the use of copyrighted material, they transform the material in a permitted way. The AI companies are going to wipe the floor with these litigants using copyright law as their towel because it’s basically impossible to argue that machine learning isn’t transformative use.” Now obviously different rules apply in different territories, but I find it hard to see much beyond the argument presented here.
  • Russian Propaganda and the Videogame War: An interesting look at how and where the Russian administration is placing propagandistic messaging around the country’s invasion of Ukraine in various digital spaces, in particular gaming environments, as a means of attempting to secure hearts and minds – this feels very kitchen sink future (by which: grubby, mechanical, now and also VERY SCIFI), but also like the sort of thing that anyone who’s been banging the whole ‘THE METAVERSE IS JUST VIDEOGAMES’ drum might want to reasonably point at as another datapoint that proves they’re right.
  • The Robots Are Already Here: I’ve spent much of the past few months having increasingly miserable-sounding conversations with middle-aged friends about when exactly will be the time when we jack in this white collar stuff and instead decide to get an HGV license and some hi-vis, based on the not-unreasonable assumption that the full automation of manual labour is a few years behind the full automation of ‘doing stuff with words’ – and then this week I read this article and realised that perhaps even attempting to outrun that particular wave is futile. Here the New York Times profiles a bunch of different businesses working on developing the latest in labour robotics for factory floors and the like – despite the title, though, I didn’t leave this piece thinking ‘our days are numbered and I will never work again’ so much as ‘Christ, am I going to have to retrain as someone who fixes the robots? I DON’T WANT TO’, so I suppose that’s a positive of sorts.
  • RCTA: ‘RCTA’, I hope you’re unaware, stands for ‘Race Change To Another’ – this article purports to raise the lid on a NEW ONLINE SUBCULTURE in which people claim to be able to alter their ‘racial characteristics’ by, you know, just WANTING IT really really hard. “Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”” This is, obviously, a mental riff on the whole longstanding otherkin-esque Tumblr sickness (see also: lucid dreaming, Tulpas, etc), and the sort of behaviour which I am increasingly convinced is just an example of kids on forums deciding to see if they can fool a bunch of clueless journalists into treating their sh1tposting as ‘A REAL THING’; honestly, if you were a 14 year old and you came to the realisation that 90% of lifestyle journalism in 2023 is seeing whatever odd internet sh1t the algorithm decides to feed you and then profiling it in all seriousness because all culture is a 2dimensional plane now then you would TOTALLY run a year 10 competition to see who could be the first to get “Thatcherpilled” into a national newspaper as a NEW YOUTH CRAZE. The alternative, of course, is that there are some people who do actually believe this, and that’s far too scary a possibility to entertain.
  • Supercars for Prom: On the one hand, I don’t for a second want to make fun of the London kids profiled in this piece who have taken to celebrating their secondary school ‘prom’ by hiring influencer-style supercars to be photographed next to; on the other, there will never be anything funnier than seeing an objectively-slightly-overweight teenager who you get the feeling still gets told off for not making their bed or for talking back to Auntie posing in front of a Huracan while making gang signs.
  • On Fan Entitlement: This is a really fascinating piece, exploring an increasingly-interesting and complex question – what is it, exactly, that being a ‘fan’ means in 2023, and what exactly is the relationship between object of fandom and the fans themselves, and what, exactly, are we celebrating when we say we are a ‘fan’ anyway. Riffing on the increasing number of celebrities (cf Doja Cat, etc) who have of late come out to suggest that perhaps some of the behaviour of the people who make up their fanbase is…a little unhinged, and the subsequent fan backlash against artists who are perceived to not be ‘grateful’ enough for the army of borderline-obsessives whose ‘love’ pays their bills, this is perhaps more interesting in terms of what questions lie underneath. “Historically, fans have felt entitled to celebrities because they’ve been aware that the artist is a product; they give love, dedication, money and time to artists, and they expect something in return – that’s the Faustian bargain that celebrities have to make,” runs one quote from the piece – but isn’t what fans get from the artist…the work? I wonder whether there’s something in here about the digitisation of culture – and its subsequent ubiquity, and the fact that you can in theory listen to any song by any artist at any time any where for no money, that has divorced the relationship between an artist’s work and any ‘value’ to zero in the eyes of fans, and, if so, what exactly does lie at the heart of the relationship between the two. See also this piece, about the frankly unhinged way in which BookTok has latched onto hockey players and how said hockey players and their wives are not hugely happy about being objectified like this – and the equally-unhinged response of said BookTokers when the subject of their obsessions says that maybe he might like them to leave him alone a bit.
  • The Thirst Trap Chefs: A month or so ago, Facebook (yes, I know, but there are Professional Reasons why I have to use it, leave me alone) decided, for reasons known only to Maths, that I was in fact a gay man, and as such the advertising and promoted content in my feed changed…quite drastically, and OH MY DAYS did I see some eye-opening content that shows the lengths some content creators will go to to tap into the doubtless-lucrative bongo-adjacent cheesecake market (I appreciate that this will make me sound uncharacteristically-naive, but I had NO IDEA that there were knitwear brands whose whole marketing strategy seems to be ‘let’s photograph men who look like bongo actors in the scene JUST BEFORE they get totally naked and start with the sexy touching’, for example)). Anyway, that’s by way of long-winded preamble to this piece profiling a bunch of male chefs who’ve worked out that making desserts and kneading dough while topless (and, er, occasionally pretending to perform cunnilingus on a pre-baked loaf of sourdough) will bring a certain type of eyeball to your content – which, fine, more power to you, lads, but equally, per the last article, I would be VERY SCARED about some of the people for whom you’re becoming some sort of pinup.
  • When Did People Stop Being Drunk?: An important investigation into when, e exactly, in recorded history everyone stopped being mostly p1ssed all the time as a result of the fact that the water would kill you and so you HAD to drink booze to stay alive. A great read, and contains wonderful historical information such as: “in the archdeacon court of Colchester there were 756 prosecutions for drunkenness between 1600-40, comprising around 2% of all offenses in the court.In an online project detailing over a hundred fatal accidents from Tudor England, we find multiple people falling drunk into ditches drains, or rivers, one of which is a priest. We also bare witness to a drunk driving accident “Edwardes had too much of the drink and drunkenly hit one of the horses with a stick so hard that it left the road and pulled the cart up a hill in the field, overturning it.”. It’s sort of funny to think that we might look back at the current era and ask “so, when did everyone start being basically stoned all the time, then?” (for me, 2020 since you ask).
  • Why Does Scandinavia Love Metal?: Is it the whole ‘it’s dark for 5 months of the year’ thing? Is it the trolls? Is it a reaction to the region’s reputation for quiet, calm and order? Or is it, perhaps, a simple reaction to the fact that Scandi countries are rich and liberal and as such tend to have really excellent music teaching, meaning that loads of kids are actually really competent musicians and so are perfectly-placed to get involved with the technically-complex and often quite demanding rhythms of METAL? Or are they all just DEEPLY SATANIC? A combination of all of these things, quite possibly (oh, ok, fine, the Scandinavians are not, per se, ‘deeply Satanic’), as this interesting little article outlines – this is also just a good reminder of the fact that there are always multiple explanations available for anything, and which you choose to focus on can be an interesting and useful way of changing perspective and thinking differently (there, you can now allocate all the time you spent reading Web Curios at work this afternoon to ‘strategy and planning research’. You’re welcome!).
  • Dancing With Devil Daggers: Devil Daggers is a relatively-obscure indie videogame available on PC; you probably haven’t played it (I haven’t played it), but that doesn’t matter – this piece is all about the experience of playing it, but more specifically about the very particular experience of ‘flow’ in games (or indeed anything else), and that sensation of smooth-brained oneness with ones fingers or limbs that occasionally kicks in when you’re in a state of grace, and, honestly, I LOVED the writing here and the way in which author Hayes Gelmacher describes that very particular sensation of almost weightless, frictionless DOING that very occasionally comes upon one. You really don’t need to play games to enjoy this, I promise you.
  • The History of Tomb Raider: Or, specifically, the history of Core Design (the studio that developed the original) and all the people who were involved with the first game and its subsequent sequels, and how it all went sort-of wrong. This is very much an ‘inside industry’ piece, which is no bad thing – you get a very real sense for the working environments at the time, and also the (still obviously not-exactly-resolved) resentments and tensions that resulted from the combination of immense success and huge pressure and LOADS OF MONEY and also ‘being men in the 90s/00s’. If you have ever worked in or around games (or frankly in production of any sort tbh) then a LOT of this will be very familiar to you.
  • How I Became A Modern Bootlegger: On being, briefly, a middle-class drug dealer in North America, ferrying weed over long distances in a rental car – this is a great piece, less about how ‘cool’ it is to sell drugs (it is not cool) and more about the very particular niche that selling weed has occupied in American culture for a few decades (a not-unreasonable part-time profession for a certain stripe of college-educated liberal, basically – if you’ve read any contemporary American fiction over the past 40 years this is a trope you are probably intimately-familiar with) and the people who occupied it, and the general concept of ‘slacking’, and, finally, the way in which the legalisation of marijuana across much of the US has quietly closed this particular loophole, for better or worse.
  • Against Curation: I think the ‘c’ word as used here fell out of favour about 10 years ago, when EVERYTHING was curated and EVERYONE was a curator – here, Jonathan Nunn writes in Vittles about the way in which ‘curation’ has extended to the UK food scene, and specifically the sort of food that gets offered at festivals and ‘street food’ and ‘farmers’ markets across London and the rest of the country, and how, as a result of ‘curation’ and the flattening of culture based on a series of datapoints, this effectively amounts to an identikit procession of dishes drawn from a narrow selection: “the food options of the entire world can be portioned out into ten categories: burgers, pizza, katsu curry, burritos, mac n cheese, pasta, doughnuts, churros, hog roast and halloumi fries.” Nunn writes brilliantly about food and place and culture, and this is a typically-excellent article about what happens when, at heart, you tRuSt ThE dAtA too far.
  • We Are All Animals At Night: On working nights at a ‘Gentleman’s Club’, as a dancer – this is not about ‘what it is like working as a stripper’ so much as it is ‘what it is like working nights and specifically nights in a space that marks you as being slightly different from other people, and if you’ve ever spent any extended periods working the night shift (whether in adult entertainment or otherwise) then this will resonate with you, I promise.
  • One Day It Will All Make Sense: Finally this week, a truly brilliant essay by the exceptionally-talented Tabitha Lasley whose work I’ve featured in here before and here writes in Granta about an affair and being a writer and success and fear and superstition and therapy and luck and, honestly, this is a superb piece of writing and I promise it leaves you with a feeling that, perhaps, everything is going to be ok, maybe, and frankly that should be enough to recommend it to you.

By Marc Dennis

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 28/07/23

Reading Time: 35 minutes

God, it’s been an awful week for bloviating cnuts, hasn’t it? SHUT UP NIGEL SHUT UP ELON SHUT UP AND FCUK OFF AND SHUT UP!

Sadly, though, they won’t do either of those things, and we will continue boosting and bolstering their utterances, however untrue or unhelpful they are – that’s simply just how things work here at the fag-end of temperate civilisation.

Otherwise it’s been a good week for everyone with stocks in energy companies and air conditioning units and, on balance, a bad week for literally everyone else (and, frankly, even those people aren’t going to outrun this, however well their portfolios perform).

Still, links! Links will make it better! CLICK THE PAIN AWAY!!!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and maybe we could all club together and buy a grand hotel in Cleethorpes in preparation for the apocalypse-induced ascent of the English coast to its new status as a sweltering summer holiday destination?

***TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

The Tiny Awards are over! We have a winner!

We received over 1500 votes across the nominated sites – thanks to everyone who voted, who shared the link and who said nice things – and the winner of the inaugural Tiny Awards 2023 is….*drumroll*…ROTATING SANDWICHES by Lauren Walker!

Congratulations to Lauren (and also, ahem, to me, who had the GREAT TASTE to feature the site when it launched last year), who is the proud recipient of $500 (thanks to ZINE) and the official Tiny Awards trophy which will be winging its way to her as soon as it’s finished!

BUT, there’s more! If you click here, you can see the full list of EVERY SINGLE nominated website – over 300 fun little homemade and whimsical web projects for you to explore and enjoy, and which is, honestly, at least a full rainy day’s worth of interesting and odd and cute.

Kristoffer and I have honestly been overwhelmed by the support and interest people have shown, and will definitely be doing this again next year (barring injury or death) – til then, though, THANKYOU TO EVERYONE who participated in any way, you are all wonderful and I love you immoderately and damply.

***END OF TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

By Paul Anthony Smith

THE MUSIC BEGINS IN IMMENSE STYLE THIS WEEK COURTESY OF A FOUR-HOUR MIX OF ITALO-DISCO AND SPACE FUNK AND, HONESTLY, YOU CAN ALMOST SMELL THE COCAINE! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO’S GOING TO EDINBURGH FOR FRINGE TO TRY AND CHECK OUT NATALIE PALAMIDES NEW SHOW AS IT IS EXCELLENT, PT.1:  

  • Hoodmaps: I have been slightly-obsessed with this all week whilst at the same time knowing that this is almost certainly SUPER-OLD NEWS for some of you (specifically, those of you younger than me – this very much feels like ‘something that was big with kids in approximately 2021). Still, as someone once told me (ERRONEOUSLY) ‘the internet is not a race’ (if it isn’t a race then, well, what have I been *doing* with my life?!), and as such we can all hopefully enjoy HoodMaps together even if we are TRAGICALLY LATE to it. But, er, what is HoodMaps? Well (glad you asked, thought you’d never get round to it) it’s MAPS! Of your (neightbour)hood! Annotated with comments from all the other people who’ve previously visited the site and seen fit to leave a little comment tagged to a specific area of a town or city which offers an often-poetic description of what the area in question is *actually* like! This is CHAOTICALLY-BRILLIANT, not least because the comments are seemingly-unmoderated which means that you get wonderfully-bitchy notes on certain areas (personal favourite: “rich gay couples looking for a third”, although I also have a soft spot for London’s Surrey Quays which simply reads ‘DECATHLON’) – I haven’t yet seen anything horrible or racist, but obviously there’s always a slight risk. As far as I can tell this is generally local kids leaving the notes – I’ve looked at various towns and cities I’ve lived in, and each time have just become mesmerised by the tapestry and texture of the city that’s revealed in the comments (yes, I know, pretentious, but, also, true!). I am currently writing this just to the West of an area charmingly-tagged as ‘knife crime central’ – find your own zone!
  • Escape Plan: Have YOU ever wondered what it would be like to be trapped in a house fire, desperately fighting through your suddenly-unfamiliar, smoke-filled surroundings in attempt to reach safety and fresh air before your lungs start to burn from the inside-out? Lol just wait a few years and that will be summer lol! Until then, though, why not ‘enjoy’ this interactive EXPERIENCE brought to you by Meta in conjunction with the US Government in which you get to experience the first-person…er, experience of being stuck in a burning building – will YOU be able to get out in time, or will you become a virtual Roman candle? This is quite slick and, despite the fact that there is no jeopardy whatsoever and I was experiencing it in a slightly cold flat in North London, I felt…moderately-anxious at points during the game (is that an endorsement?) – those of you with an Oculus gathering dust on your shelf may be pleased to know that there’s a VR option too, meaning you can have a TERRYFINGLY-IMMERSIVE HOUSE FIRE EXPERIENCE which sounds, honestly, a bit much. Still, if you do try the VR version, why not ask a friend or family member to wave a pair of curling tongs around your head while you try and escape for a bit of what the Merlin Entertainment Group refer to as ‘4d immersion’? You can thank me later.
  • Drake Related: I appreciate that ‘being plutocratically rich’ probably has its downsides – one of which is the fact that a near-infinite number of grifters will come to see you as an easy mark, and you will have to suffer a succession of sales pitches and propositions from people who want to charge you large sums for terrible ideas. Still, try as I might I can’t excuse Drake – or whichever entourage member has been delegated the job of ‘Drake’s Global Senior-Vice-President of eCommerce’ – for this online shop, which is…ok, how best to describe this? You remember a couple of years ago when all the dreadful metaverse consultants (WE STILL SEE YOU WE WILL NOT FORGET) were peddling ‘shopping…in the metaverse!’ solutions, and there was a spate of sad, unloved 3d worlds in which you could jerkily-navigate a poorly-rendered avatar while looking at digital representations of pairs of jeans which you could click on to be taken to an entirely-separate online storefront? OF COURSE YOU DO THEY WERE THE BEST OF TIMES! HALCYON DAYS! Anyway, this is…that, but in 2d! Yes, that’s right, someone’s convinced Drake(‘s team) that the best way of shifting the warehouses of ‘Champagne Papi’ (I pretzel myself with second-hand shame at that nickname every time)-branded tat is to create a(n admittedly nicely-rendered) selection of rooms from Drake’s mansion (and his garage, and, er, his private jet) in 2d, which contain certain objects which can be clicked on and then purchased. So, to be clear, you have to navigate across seven or so separate web pages and play ‘hunt the interactive elements’ on each, before clicking on something to be taken to a separate website to actually buy anything…oh Drake! I am personally quietly convinced that someone somewhere has charged a six-figure sum for this and, honestly, I applaud whichever enterprising crook is responsible, not least because this exact online shopping experience has been underwhelming customers for about 15 years.
  • 100 Years of OBB: If you’ve spent any time working in communications, you will at some point or another have come across the classic brief format that is ‘come up with ideas to promote our corporate anniversary!’ (I know! I am tumescent at the very reminiscence!) – similarly, if you’ve ever come across such a brief, you will at one point or another have pitched ‘use your incredible archive of corporate history (so fascinating!) to create an interactive digital exhibition, one which tells the STORY (sorry) of your thrilling brand while at the same time subtly promoting the visionary strategy that will see you bestride the coming century like the BUSINESS COLOSSUS you are!’, usually safe in the knowledge that the actual budget is about a tenner and there’s no way they’ll want to spend the money to make anything good. AND YET! Amazingly, for the centenary of the Austrian state railway company OBB they have done EXACTLY THAT and created this rather nice web experience which takes you through the past 100 years of, er, trains in Austria. This is, fine, probably not of HUGE interest unless you’re an Austrian train enthusiast (works both ways), but I am genuinely charmed that someone actually did one of this in real life, and there’s some genuinely interesting social history in here. Also, LOTS OF TRAINS.
  • Encounter Stories: This is a rather lovely photography portfolio site – Marion Lepretre has built it to host a bunch of pictures she’s taken of people she’s met while travelling the world, with each photo accompanied by a vignette of the person’s life, narrated by (I presume) Marion herself, and with some light doodly animation overlaid over the top of the images to create a sort of mini-documentary-style feel to each individual shot. There are about 15 on here, I think, and going through them and listening to their stories and the connection Lepretre made with them was, I found, a very pleasant way to spend ten minutes.
  • The Rebel Library: Launched this week by XR, Rebel Library is a resource dedicated to compiling a reading list for the climate emergency(/apocalypse – delete depending on your current response to the weather): “Any library is always a work in progress. And with the rich landscape of climate and ecological literature evolving faster than ever, there has never been a more exciting time to build a showcase of books. This virtual library is born of our love of reading, and our joy in sharing our discoveries. Whether you are browsing for your next good read, building a book-list, or simply looking for inspiration, see this as a resource to use and share. You should be able to find most of out featured books in your local library  (find your nearest library by searching your local council website, or use https://www.gov.uk/local-library-services if in England & Wales) or by ordering online from Hive.” While the site obviously can’t host any works for copyright reasons, it’s looks like being an interesting resource for anyone who wants IMPROVING BOOKS TO FUEL THE FEAR (or, alternatively, just a place to get some decent recommendations for smart work).
  • The GPT Forecasting Challenge: This is an interesting little quiz/test – Nicholas Carlini has pulled together this series of 25(ish – sorry, I forget the exact number and I don’t have time to check now as it’s 745am and time’s a-wasting) questions designed to test how well you can predict ChatGPT’s ability to accurately perform a specific task. It’s not, fine, the MOST engagingly-designed web experience, but while we wait for every single thing in our lives to get the full VR treatment (HOLD ME BACK!) then I’m afraid you’ll just have to manage your expectations. Anyway, I found this super-interesting, not least as a way of assessing whether or not I in fact have any meaningful understanding of the actual, real-world capabilities of LLMs (I do, mostly, it seems) and there’s probably value in using this as a bit of a training and education exercise should you be in the invidious position of being responsible for the AI education of your professional peers.
  • The History of Acid House: Much as with the 1960s, I rather suspect that if you can remember the Acid House era with pinpoint clarity then you probably weren’t really there (either that or you leaned VERY HARD into the lifestyle, haven’t come down since 1991 and now have those terrifying, ice-blue eyes possessed only by Hollywood Nazis and the most serious of pills’n’speed casualties) – still, for any of you who would like to give yourselves a FULL MUSICAL EDUCATION, or alternatively to remind yourselves of what exactly you were meant to be listening to while yomping around a field past Junction 16, this will be an invaluable resource. There are over 700 tracks compiled here, with new ones being added all the time – it’s interesting (to me at least) to remind oneself of how…*simple* the tracks are, and how relatively-gentle. The fact that the people who were into this at the time will now all be in their 50s is…confusing to me, I must confess.
  • Acronymy: FABULOUSLY-GEEKY WORD FUN! Which is what *I* would have called this website, suggesting, not for the first time, that I am fcuking awful at naming things. Acronymy is a FAR better moniker, and it’s a silly/fun project to boot, seeking to create acronyms for 270,000 English words (so far they’re at just over 5,000). Type in any word you can think of and you will be invited to invent an acronym for it, as well as being shown any acronymic suggestions that previous visitors have left. So it is that I discovered that some smart person somewhere in the world has already acronymed ‘horse’ as ‘hoof owning rideable strong equine’, which, honestly, is just applause-worthy. This is basically like some massively-multiplayer word game, which is very much something I can get behind.
  • LinearA:: I think this is the second time in a month or so that I have found cause to mention the ancient written script that is LinearA, suggesting…actually, no, I have literally no idea what, if anything, THE UNIVERSE is attempting to communicate with me here – if YOU have any ideas, please do share. Still, ineffable grand plan aside, this is a really interesting site (although one which really doesn’t explain itself very well), where you can look at a bunch of scans of VERY OLD ROCKS which have been inscribed with LinearA script – you can see the original sample of the writing, a transcript of it, and detail of what each individual element has been translated to mean, so you can (with a bit of patience, and thinking, and squinting) start to get an idea for how it was used to construct sentences and communicate ideas. This really is fascinating, but requires a bit of effort to get your head round.
  • Diamond Journey: Welcome back to Web Curios’ LUXURY WEBSITE IDIOCY CORNER! It’s been a while, but we’ve got another excellent example of some proper high-end webwork and insane, meaningless copy for you – this time courtesy of the DEFINITELY IN NO WAY ARTIFICIALLY-INFLATED AND MORALLY DUBIOUS AT BEST diamond industry! This starts strongly – “My diamond has so much to tell me”, the site solemnly asserts, while showing you a photo of a strangely-blue-tinged woman who honestly looks like she’s just realised that the bump she just did was not, in fact, cocaine at all – before really raising the bar with some world-class examples of meaningless copy (“My diamond’s story begins with time itself” deserves some sort of a prize, I think) and an almost risibly-cheap looking image of a precious stone that tumbles down the screen as you scroll…then really hits its stride with this line, which manages to be both grandiose and oddly-gauche and childlike “Somewhere between 1bn and 3.5bn years ago” – that’s…quite some date-range there, isn’t it? – “When the Earth was still shiny and new. Before dinosaurs, before humans, before just about everything” – honestly, just click the link and revel in the very, very shiny and rich idiocy (and that’s before we get to the claims that diamonds are ethically fine actually honest guv because, honestly, I don’t necessarily think that that’s strictly true). An absolute classic of the ‘stupid websites for very rich people’ genre, this.
  • Eyes on Asteroids: You might be forgiven for watching the weather reports this week and thinking ‘you know what? Maybe an asteroid strike would just be a sweet mercy compared to the likely nature of the next few decades’ – in which case, you will very much enjoy this NASA webpage which tracks the movement of asteroids around the Earth so you can see exactly how close we’re coming to total planetary annihilation on a monthly basis. There’s even a section which tells you the next five closest asteroid pass-bys (there’s one the size of a house whizzing past us tomorrow, for example), and now I sort-of want to buy a telescope.
  • Listen Later: Not an entirely new idea, this, fine, but a good one and a smart use of modern text-to-speech tech; this is basically ‘Pocket, but if you wanted to turn all of those unread Curios longreads into a podcast rather than simply another overlong email you’ll eventually delete unread’. From the site’s creator: “ListenLater.fm generates a personalized podcast feed for you to listen to. You let it know about articles you’d like to read later. When you do, it adds a spoken version of the article to your feed for you to listen to whenever your ears are free…Adding new things to listen to is simple. When you’re on a computer, the easiest way to add new articles is through our browser extensions. When you’re on your phone and want to add an article, it’s simple to share an article via email. You can also use our bookmarklet to add new articles. Listening’s a breeze. You get your own custom podcast feed, that you can subscribe to in any podcast app. Anything you send to ListenLater.fm will be kept there for you to listen to on your own time.” The service is free for upto 5 articles a month, with a subscription required to do more than that (which feels fair – after all, text-to-speech at bulk costs money), and in general this strikes me as a super-useful tool.
  • ChatGPT Fashion: This isn’t, fine, a hugely-groundbreaking thing on its own, but it struck me that it’s a useful proof-of-concept for how AI-assisted shopping can/might/should work – it’s a very rudimentary hack, but basically you tell the platform whether you’re looking for ‘male’ or ‘female’ style, give it a suggestion of the sort of outfit/vibe/look you might want to sport and The Machine spits out a bunch of fashion advice AND (and this is the clever bit) links to actual clothes that you can buy from actual retailers that correspond to its sartorial suggestions. As I said, not exactly earth-shattering – but simple, smart and an obvious way in which this could work in a way that feels useful to consumers rather than just an AI gimmick layer.
  • Statistically-Improbable Things: A Reddit thread in which people share stories of things that happened to them that are improbable in the extreme, many of which will basically end up convincing you that the Final Destination films are in fact documentaries and that WHEN IT IS NOT YOUR TIME IT IS NOT YOUR TIME. Seriously, I can’t stress enough quite how many of these made me wince out loud (no, you’re wrong, that DOES make sense) and vow to be incredibly careful when washing up anything made of glass.

By Alessia Morellini

WE TRAVEL BACK IN TIME 25 YEARS NOW WITH THIS SUPERB ALBUM OF D’N’B REMIXES OF DUB WAR!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO’S GOING TO EDINBURGH FOR FRINGE TO TRY AND CHECK OUT NATALIE PALAMIDES NEW SHOW AS IT IS EXCELLENT, PT.2:      

  • The Loose Ends Project: I can’t pretend that this didn’t make me a *touch* emo when I discovered it this week, but it’s broadly the good sort of emo, I think – it is SO SO SO LOVELY I MIGHT CRY (again). The Loose Ends project exists to take the knitting projects left unfinished by people who’ve died mid-knit and hand them over to skilled third parties who finish the work started by the deceased and then pass the finished article back to the person’s loved ones, giving them a final memento mori in, er, wool. Honestly, it’s impossible to think about this in any meaningful way without tearing up a bit (or at least it is if you’re me) – even better, it’s an international initiative and they welcome new volunteers, so if you’re a skilled knitter and perler and you fancy doing something genuinely wonderful for someone then you might want to consider signing up. I know I always say stuff like this and that by so doing I also slightly ruin the otherwise lovely projects I feature here, but this very much feels like something that is the PERFECT charity-type partnership for the right sort of brand (I HATE MYSELF AND I AM SORRY).
  • South Pole Signage: Brought to you by the South Pole’s premier website brr.fyi (one of the Tiny Awards finalists, fwiw), this is a superb collection of mundane signage employed at the planet’s southernmost pole – which, fine, probably doesn’t SOUND compelling, but there is something so so interesting about the ways in which people have to think about their environment when somewhere hostile and remote and where collaboration and having to just sort of get on with stuff is hugely-important. To quote the post’s author: “I’ve always been fascinated by routine, mundane activities and infrastructure in extraordinary contexts. It’s why I’ve gleefully written about the everyday realities of life and how they play out in Antarctica – topics such as laundry, wastewater infrastructure, credit card fraud, voting, automated teller machines, mud, and doors. In the seven months I’ve been at the South Pole so far, I’ve kept up my fascination with the day-to-day tasks involved in keeping the station going. Yes, we’re at the actual, real-life South Pole. Yes, it’s -100°F outside. Yes, we’re isolated for 8 months straight. Yes, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and an extraordinary, novel set of circumstances. But also – We live here! And living in a place means that it will develop a certain rhythm. A certain set of norms, customs, fault lines, battle scars, inside jokes, remembrances. Day-to-day reminders of the folks who have left their mark on this place over the years.” This is glorious (as is the whole site tbh).
  • Forum Games: I love this in ways that I don’t think I can adequately explain. Via last week’s B3ta comes this wonderful subsection on the GiffGaff community forums (for non-Anglos, GiffGaff is a provider of mobile telephony solutions) in which various users are running (and seem to have been running for YEARS) little ‘games’ in which they invite other users to do such ostensibly-tedious things as ‘count up to 200, and back to 0 again, using only prime numbers’ or ‘let’s all write the days of the week in order over and over again’ and, honestly, there are HUNDREDS of people ‘playing’ this stuff, just logging into the thread to type ‘13’ or ‘29’ or ‘TUESDAY’, and…I don’t know what to make of this, to be honest, whether it’s something deep and pure and beautiful or whether it’s basically the equivalent of caged chimps scrawling inchoate messages on the concrete floor whilst bemerding the gawping schoolkids. There are threads here that have been going for THREE AND A HALF YEARS ffs, demonstrating an unwavering commitment to The Bit. I honestly have no clue whatsoever you should do with the knowledge that this exists, but I like to imagine one of you will be having a moment of Damascene clarity and purpose right now.
  • Sonic Cartoon Frames: Ignore the ‘Are you 18?’ Imgur disclaimer that pops up when you click the link – I can assure you that this is entirely SFW in every way (unless you have some sort of deep erotic attachment to the Sonic the Hedgehog universe, in which case I suggest you might want to perhaps address that) – because this is not bongo, it is instead an unfathomably-large collection of individual animation frames from the old Sonic cartoon series – there are over 2100 cells here, which I can’t imagine for a second any of you will have a use for but which I like to think will inspire at least one of you to train a local version of Stable Diffusion on this to create the greatest Sonic cartoon creation engine EVER (a boy can but dream).
  • The AI Baby Generator: This is fabulously stupid and fcuked up – well DONE everyone! The AI Baby Generator helps you answer that age-old question – “were I to have children with that person over there, what would our kids potentially look like?” – via the medium of shonky AI imagework, letting you see exactly how hot the offspring of your union with literally anyone in the world could eventually become. This is, as you have probably worked out by now, a laughable grift being run by opportunistic shysters that is patently targeted at the VERY STUPID – sorry, but I refuse to believe that anyone with an IQ in treble figures is shelling out a tenner to receive a grand total of FIVE AI-generated images in return – but which is also probably going to end up taking a lot of money from the mad and delusional too; the fact that they explicitly offer ‘see what the spawn of the union between you and the celebrity who you have an increasingly-unhealthy parasocial crush on!’ as a service suggests that they have no qualms whatsoever pandering to the lonely stalkers of the world. Perhaps my favourite thing about this, though, is that the ‘Premium’ pricing tier (a bargain $27!) secures you not only some photos but ALSO ‘A 7-Page Future Child Personality Report’! That’s right – not only will they chuck in a few extra poorly-’shopped photos of your imaginary baby, they’ll also drop in some GPT-styled rubbish about how it’s almost certainly going to be an empathetic genius! This does feel a bit…grubby, doesn’t it?
  • Climate Conflict: This is a sobering read – not, frankly, that we ought to need one, based on, you know, ALL THE BURNING. Still, if you’d like to take something of a deep-dive into the areas most likely to suffer significant political and social upheaval as a result of the rise in global temperatures and general fcukery of the coming years’ weather patterns, this is a useful resource – it provides a region-by-region overview of the relative threats facing each region (climate-related, economic, political) and focuses on Nigeria as a case study of some of the likely impacts of shifting climate on the socioeconomic fabric of the country. This is obviously quite miserable reading, but, equally, it’s quite important.
  • The Rochambeau Club: Thanks to Alex for sending this to me – The Rochambeau Club is a fascinating fictional brand (it reminds me a bit of both skincare brand Vacation and the equally-fictitious US football team Asbury Park) representing an old-school US country club, the sort of place that (as a non-American) I imagine being the setting for an infinity of Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger shoots, where preppy teens stalk languidly across manicure lawns whilst blitzed off their tits on Adderall and Xanax (I have, perhaps, read more American campus novels than is strictly healthy) before one of them gets murdered as part of some sort of ritualistic cult practice (I have also read too much Ellis/Tartt) – except the funny thing here is that the Rochambeau Club doesn’t in fact exist at all, but does seem to be selling a natty (and pricey) line in wine, and loafers, and a few other things. As Alex said, “I wonder if the particular genius of Rochambeau is it lets people buy into the rich & preppy fantasy, but with the plausible deniability that you’re doing it ironically so you’re not a massive tory”, which seems like a reasonable explanation tbh.
  • Illustration Chronicles: This is GREAT! Compiled by Dublin illustrator Philp Kennedy, “Illustration Chronicles explores a history of illustration through the images, illustrators and events of the past 175 years. Every few months the site picks a topic to explore. These topics inspire the types of work that get selected and once a piece has been chosen, the year it was made gets marked off the project timeline. Illustration is a fascinating subject and yet its history is rarely told. This project aims to champion the medium and bring some inspiration, insight and knowledge to readers everywhere.” Honestly, this is SUCH a rich archive, and so beautifully curated and explained – if you’ve ever enjoyed a visit to the London Cartoon Museum (and if you haven’t, why not?!) then you will absolutely adore this site.
  • Artemis: Another in the near-infinite series of ‘we can automate the tedious business of engaging with your kids on an imaginative/emotional level!’ companies being facilitated by AI, Artemis exists to let parents automatically create illustrated bedtime stories for their kids based on a series of prompts – as you’d expect, this is built on an API meaning there’s a need to buy tokens to build the content and as such this could get expensive quite quickly; BUT, on the plus side, you’ve not had to spend any time thinking about how to bore your kid to sleep! Obviously I jest – even the childless like me are aware that sometimes, just SOMETIMES, parents don’t have the time or the energy to come up with a Disney-standard original story to accompany bedtime – but I find something particularly-distasteful about Artemis’ insistence that using its tools will ‘help build empathy in your little one’ which, honestly, sounds like emotionally-manipulative bullsh1t. Anyway, I think that this sort of thing serves mainly to illustrate the inherent limits in generative AI as a narrative tool – everything I have made with this is so bad that I would genuinely bet on myself to do better, and I basically hate children and wish I was dead, so.
  • Public Photos: Do YOU take photos? Do YOU have an Apple account on which you store them? Do YOU wish that there was a really easy way to take all those photos and turn them into a public-facing webpage with basically no work at all? If the answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘yes’ then a) wow, I know my readership significantly better than I thought; and b) YOU ARE IN LUCK! There’s a waitlist to use the service, but, honestly, this couldn’t be simpler and is a potentially lovely alternative to chucking everything on Insta.
  • First Versions: SUPERB PRODUCT HISTORY WEBSITE! Per it’s strapline, “Everything had a first version: here you can find it!” Want to learn about the first ever Singer sewing machine? OH GOOD! Want to be able to go through a dizzying archive of frands and products and see how they started? YES YOU DO! If you’ve any interest in the history of brands then this is a wonderful resource – it’s a VERY old school website, so perhaps lacks some of the user-friendly gubbins that a modern user might ideally expect, but, well, there’s a history of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and of Barbie, and of Tequila, and how many other sites can say that? NO FCUKERS, etc!
  • Solar Grazing: I’ll be honest – there is one reason and one reason alone why I am featuring this website, and it’s not the subject matter. Solar Grazing, it turns out, is the practice of, er, grazing sheep near solar farms. “The American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA) was founded to promote grazing sheep on solar installations. ASGA members are developing best practices that support shepherds and solar developers to both effectively manage solar installations and create new agribusiness profits. We are a not for profit trade association founded for and managed by sheep farmers who became solar graziers. In our industry, we are facilitating research, best practices, and leading the way to co-location at solar arrays with solar grazing.” So there. Boring, isn’t it? I tell you what isn’t boring – the association’s logo, which I would honestly have on a tshirt tomorrow and which I would have on a poster, and which I genuinely and unironically love more than almost any other piece of design I’ve seen all year. TELL ME I AM WRONG, I DARE YOU.
  • Faster Displays: Occasionally I stumble across website that represent industries so niche that you wonder whether you’re the only non-industry person to ever visit them (the last link being a case in point) – so it is with this INCREDIBLY nicely-designed website promoting a company that makes those cardboard Point Of Sale Units that you see erected at the end of a checkout lane (for example). And yes, I know, that’s what I thought, but, I promise, by the time you’ve finished scrolling this you’ll find yourself feeling unexpectedly-thrilled by the excellent deployment of corrugated cardboard that’s on display here.
  • Recently Extinct Species: Presented without comment: “This website attempts to document the world’s many recently extinct (126ka–present), missing and rediscovered species and subspecies. An impossible task given that many of these have no doubt gone extinct without ever being recorded by science (termed “Dark extinctions”). While many others are so little known that there is scarcely anything to document now, and so in a secondary sense are lost as well. Luckily, it is possible for us to learn more about them through the discovery of (sub)fossil remains or (re)discovery of specimens in museums and private collections. This combined with increasingly sophisticated scientific methods of study, invariably driven by brilliant minds or technological advances, can help to recover these foregone species from the informational abyss. Most importantly, this ‘new’ information can hopefully help rediscover them as living populations. Different species have different life histories, and no single method of attempted capture/documentation can succeed for the entire gamut of living species which inhabit vastly different environments from snowy alps to peat bogs, and have greatly variable lifespans, life stages, traits and ecological niches. Developing idiosyncratic capture methods greatly increases our chances of success, and potentially offers us an extremely rare second chance to save them from extinction.” I recommend you go to the ‘animals’ section and just scroll down and read the topline taxonomy to get a scale of the dizzying extent of what we have done.
  • Identifive: This is INFURIATING, mainly because I am so so so bad at it and I can’t quite explain why that is. Each day, your task is to find the single complete five-letter word hidden in the grid, wordsearch style – it can be forwards or backwards, vertically, horizontally or diagonally. You have a few opportunities to reduce the size of the grid to make the task easier, but know that that is CHEATING and that I think less of you as a result – honestly, I have sworn at this SO MUCH this week and you will too.
  • SNES Party: Finally this week, a speculative one – I only found this this morning via Andy, and I wasn’t able to make it work for me in the cursory three minutes I spent fiddling with it at approximately 634am today; that said, Andy’s a thorough man, and if he’s linked to it then I expect it almost certainly DOES work, in which case WOW are you in luck – this site lets you load up one of an insane selection of old SNES Roms, and then share the link with upto four friends for EXCITING MULTIPLAYER FUN! So you could play Final Fight together, or Super BomberMan (I nearly failed my IB because of Super BomberMan – good times!) or any one of about 100 different titles; practically crack cocaine, this, if you can get it running.

By Richard Vergez

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY TOAKA AND WHILST I CAN’T REALLY ACCURATELY DESCRIBE ITS STYLE I CAN INFORM YOU THAT THE SOUNDCLOUD TAGS ON THIS ONE ARE ‘TROPICAL’ AND ‘BALEARIC’ AMONG OTHERS, AND THAT THOSE FEEL BROADLY ACCURATE AND I THINK YOU WILL LIKE IT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • La Muerte De Un Perrito: Not, as far as I can tell, anything to do with the death of any small dogs whatsoever, this Tumblr instead posts a bunch of vaguely dreamy, vaporwave-inflected art which I find strangely-appealing.
  • Hazel Terry: Not, in fact, a Tumblr! Still, this blog collects (as far as I can tell) nothing but Red Riding Hood-themed content, art and design and craft, and as such *feels* Tumblr-ish, and, as we have long-since decided (or at least since *I* have long-since decided), that’s what counts.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Stephanie H Shih: Excellent ceramic work which mimics non-ceramic objects – it’ll make sense when you click, I promise, and the execution’s far better than you’d expect; the used condom in particular is masterful (I am being wholly serious here).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • The Louvre Is Rebranding: I think it’s fair to say that almost everyone alive in the Global North has probably heard far, far more about the rebranding of a largely-unused website than they might ordinarily wish, and as such I’m disinclined to give That Fcuking Man’s latest GALAXY-BRAINED business decision much by way of additional attention. That said, if you’re interested in reading the backstory about why That Fcuking Man is obsessed with the letter ‘X’ and how this is all basically a result of him getting comprehensively schooled by the big boys of the PayPal Mafia back in the day, then this link here will see you right (sorry, it’s a Twitter thread (I AM NOT CALLING IT FCUKING ‘X’ I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE) but, well, you’ll cope). The rest of you, click the main link to read a lovely bit of satire by McSweeney’s which basically nails the whole thing in typically stylish fashion. Will Twitter become WeChat? Will they ever bother changing the logo across all the various products? Will…will it go back to being Twitter in a few months when That Fcuking Man realises that you cannot create a single-letter brand (as my friend Rob points out, it didn’t work for Q Magazine and it won’t work here)? Is Elon Musk the only person alive who really, really misses that late-00s era in which every single FMCG product acquired an ‘XXXTREME’ variant to appeal exclusively to baggy-trousered teenage masturbators? ONLY TIME WILL TELL!
  • A Good Prospect: I’m conscious of the fact that the past few Curios have all majored quite hard on topics around commodities extraction and their environmental impact, but, well, I’m reading quite a lot about it at the moment, and it’s interesting (to me at least) and it’s important, I think, and, well, you can always skip the first few longreads and go straight to the end where it tends to get more fictional and emo if you like. For those of you who can be bothered, though, I unreservedly recommend this superb long article in which the author visits the most recent mining industry jamboree which took place in Canada earlier this year and which featured a buoyant atmosphere as the various Rio Tintos of the world gloried in the fact that the global demand for minerals and metals engendered by the need for rapid electrification of everything means that they are QUIDS IN for the next few decades – and, because theirs is an industry now central for the GREENING OF THE PLANET, they can now basically claim environmental credits and kudos merely by dint of existing! This is, honestly, so so interesting – a picture of an industry I know nothing about, and one which is so inherently-connected to the way in which modern society is going to develop over the rest of the century and beyond.
  • The GPT Revolution is a Fantasy: An indicator of how quickly AI is moving at the moment is the speed at which we’re shuffling along the Gartner hype curve – barely 10 months on from the initial ChatGPT release, we’re now firmly into ‘trough of disillusionment’ territory, with articles cropping up asking whether GPT-4 is getting dumber (to which the answer is: inconclusive, but probably not actually) and whether in fact the hype around the utility of LLMs is overblown (to which the answer is: yes, in lots of ways, but also really not at all in others and it’s the others which you need to pay attention to I think). This piece by Paris Marx is similarly disillusioned, but for slightly different reasons – they posit that the lies about its big-ticket efficacy (cf ‘IT WILL CHANGE SEARCH FOR EVER’ – er, not yet it won’t!) are effectively covering up all the way sin which it is fcuking things up already, left right and centre, and the ways in which it’s soon going to be used to fcuk up even more. I’m broadly in agreement with Marx’s overall thesis, although I think I’m probably more bullish on the long-term impact of this stuff – honestly, I do firmly believe that AI is going to be an overall boon to us as a species; I also believe, possibly more firmly, that the intervening bit of time between now and ‘it being an amazing and transformative tool that makes everything better’ is going to be incredibly fcuking messy and not a little unpleasant.
  • Cnut-ing AI: My semi-regular link to Ethan Mollick’s blognewsletterthing next (although in Mr Mollick’s defence, his title is significantly better than mine); this week, he writes about the futility of attempting to keep generative AI outside of the workplace, or to control its use in any meaningful way, and instead offers a series of principles to help organisations and leaders integrate the useful bits of it into their practice and workflow to best effect. Honestly, if you’re in any way involved in the thankless and miserable task that is ‘integrating this tech into our business in a way that makes us more productive and ultimately richer whilst at the same time hopefully not resulting in us sacking 90% of the workforce’ then there will be huge swathes of this that you can effectively copy and paste.
  • AI For Newsrooms: With the news last week that Google was touting an AI assistant to newsrooms to ‘help’ (lol) journalists churn the content even faster, and the constant stream of media outlets embarrassing themselves by getting caught out using GPT-generated copy without telling anyone (there was an astonishing example from London on the Inside the other week – sadly corrected within 24h, and not archived for posterity – where they did a whole ‘places to watch the women’s world cup in London’ post which it was clear had been entirely GPT-penned because NONE OF THE PUBS IT FEATURED EXISTED), it feels timely that Nieman Lab has compiled this selection of different newsrooms’ stated approaches to the use of machine-generated words in their work. I genuinely hope that none of you have to write any ‘we use AI’-type disclaimers for your businesses, but, in case you do, this might contain some useful pointers of things you should think of.
  • China & Tech Momentum: More on China this week; this is long-term China watcher and author of a regular annual ‘Year in China’ roundup Dan Wang on the current state of innovation in the country and the extent to which it’s likely to be impacted by factors both economic and political. Really interesting, if a touch wonk-y: “A gradual slowdown in economic growth won’t break technological momentum. But politics might. Start with the external environment: fewer large markets are open to Chinese technology exports than ten years ago. For any Chinese product that might rise to the attention of a Congressperson, the US is fairly hostile. Europe remains open, but it too is grumbling about protection. A huge blow to Chinese tech firms in recent years was the loss of the Indian market. One of the many surprises 2020 was the deadly skirmish between Chinese and Indian troops that erupted after decades of relative calm. In the aftermath of the brawl, India’s government locked Chinese companies out of a market many staked growth plans on. India is not fully closed, and Chinese firms still have a lot of markets to export to. But that set has shrunk, and who can be sure that Beijing’s diplomatic and military posture won’t hurt markets for other entrepreneurs?”
  • China’s Data Classification Class: Another of Jeffrey Ding’s translations of local Chinese reporting, once again on the phenomenon of ‘data cleaners’ – a growing professional class employed to annotate and ‘clean’ the training data used to create nascent AI models. This is SO interesting, not least as a potential glimpse into what is likely to become a not-insignificant global industry over the next few years – how do you feel about a future in which the two remaining jobs for people to do are either helping to train baby AIs or helping dying people wipe their ar$es? I feel pretty good about it, ngl.
  • How Saudi is Buying the World: One of the big stories of the summer from the world of football has been the emergence of the Saudi league as an economic powerhouse, doing much what the Chinese league did 10 years or so ago and buying up a host of Europe-based star players on contracts so eye-wateringly generous that even a man of such NOTORIOUSLY HIGH moral fibre as LGBTQ+ ally Jordan ‘I’ll do anything to help (as long as ‘anything’ doesn’t mean ‘refusing to support a nakedly-homophobic regime’s international sportswashing project’)’ Henderson can’t help but be tempted. This is the rough hook for this decent New Statesman piece which looks at the many ways in which MBS is flexing the petrodollars to secure his subjects’ futures. I personally found the Black Panther stuff running through the article an irritating distraction (sorry! I just hate Marvel films!), but other than that this is a reasonable overview of the what and, to an extent, the why of the Saudi project.
  • Ad Industry Losers: As a rule I try not to feature too much writing about advermarketingpr, mainly because the vast majority of it is awful tripe which says the square root of fcuk all and is written for, and by, idiots. On this occasion I’ll make an excepotion, though – this interview in Contagious with a guy called Michael Farmer is, on the one hand, a puff-piece to promote Farmer’s new business book, but on the other is a genuinely smart read which delivers a selection of what I consider to be self-evident truths about the agency model (not just advertising – PRs could learn from this too) and why it is, fundamentally, fcuked (and not getting any less fcuked). “I think creativity really is divorced from business practices generally across the industry. The focus on creativity is a bit of a cop out. It’s easier to be creative than it is to deliver growth. But if you do it [deliver growth], you get paid highly for it. The consulting firms get paid five times the cost of their people, agencies get paid two times the cost of their cheaper people. There’s a huge difference.” INJECT IT! INJECT IT INTO MY VEINS!
  • How To Search: Once again I find myself linking to Gwern – sometimes there’s no choice, you know. This is SO GOOD and SO USEFUL and, honestly, every single one of you should read this because it will make your lives BETTER. Gwern is a famously massive geek – I don’t know them, but I get the impression that this is not a designation that they would argue with particularly – and this is a MASSIVELY GEEKY and also HUGE guide to being good at Google. Honestly, even now at the fag-end of the first search era when the core product is a bit broken and a lot of the cool tricks you used to know simply don’t function any more, there is SO MUCH BENFIT to be gained from getting just 5% better at ‘finding stuff on the internet’, and this, if you manage to read and digest it all, will probably improve your Googling ability by about 15% which basically makes you an informational Superman. I’m only half-joking (and I am firmly convinced that ‘being good at search’ will be a useful skill for longer than ‘prompt engineering’) (but, er, don’t come and laugh at me if that turns out to be very wrong indeed).
  • Going Viral Sucks: This is, fine, not a wholly-original point of view, but it’s interesting to hear it articulated so cogently by someone who (I am pretty sure) is of a generation brought up on the TikTok virality lottery and tHe CrEaToR eCoNoMy and the idea that a few million views once every month or two can pay your grocery bills…it does make me wonder how much longer the current top-ranking social media model (to whit: put enough coins in the machine (upload enough content to our platform) and you have a chance to WIN BIG (get 10m views and earn a cut of ad revenue)) is going to fool people for.
  • Modern Moderation: A WIRED article that looks at two recent moderation-led online dramas – Reddit’s ongoing meltdown around the site’s refusal to meaningfully-acknowledge the role of its hundreds of unpaid mods in making the site a broadly-functional bit of internet rather than the unusable sub-Chan basement it would otherwise have become, and BlueSky’s inexplicable failure to stop people using hatewords in their usernames which has spiralled into a not-insignificant existential crisis for the nascent Twitteralike – which, fine, are VERY ‘internet culture’ and a bit inside-baseball, but, equally, is an excellent series of examples of why content moderation is, I think, one of the most significant and significantly-underestimated fields of the modern era. No joke – am increasingly of the opinion that future versions of us will look back at the past 20-odd years and be astonished that we applied so little thought and rigour and care to administering communities that are as significant as those meatspace arenas we spend so much time legislating around.
  • Internet Cafes: Possibly my favourite nonfiction read of the week, this one, and another excellent piece of reporting from Rest of World (I have said this before but it bears repeating – it is SUCH a good outlet), looking at the phenomenon of internet cafes and the different ways around the world in which they have reinvented themselves to stay relevant (or, in some places, the ways in which they haven’t and are therefore dying). This is fascinating, not least because of the national variations in the demographics of who uses them, and what for, and because of the sense of intense nostalgia the whole article will elicit in anyone who ever had to spend 30m slots checking their emails at a glacial pace while travelling (also, a special shout out to the many, many men I have observed over the years using internet cafes to unashamedly enjoy their favourite flavour of bongo – WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?).
  • Expanding the Cirque Brand: I have never seen a Cirque du Soleil show, and am unlikely to ever do so – that said, the brand is internationally-ubiquitous and even though I’ve never seen the spangles up-close I could give you a vague idea of what I thought the brand ‘means’ (sorry). The people who run it, though, don’t think it ‘means’ enough, specifically not to young people and certainly not to the sort of people (ie me) who would rather eat their own faces than pony up several hundred dollars to watch people in spandex do the splits 40 feet above their head – which is why they have brought in some BRAND CONSULTANTS to help them expand Cirque’s relevance and bring new product lines to the fore, and, basically, turn it into something akin to the Hard Rock Cafe’. This is, obvjectively, very, very funny, though you get the distinct impression that the two brand consultants, whose agency Cirque is working with and who feature heavily throughout, may be…less-thrilled with the tenor of the piece. “They keep group chats with their clients going all day, sending articles, songs, videos or TikToks that relate to the work, which in Cirque’s case they call “Cirquecore.” “Has there ever been a CIRQUE Barbie?” read one recent text from Cultique. “HERMES’ new fragrance is ‘the sun as perfume,’” read another. “I also am interested to think of Cirque’s performance as religion,” Ms. Unger wrote to the group one day. “People are more spiritual than ever, esp. Gen Z.”” Just…wow:
  • Messi in Miami: The New Yorker paints a lovely, if slightly sad, picture of the madness of Messimania in Miami, and the feeling of knowing that you’re watching one of the greatest humans ever to do a specific thing doing that specific thing for almost the last time.
  • Planes, Trains and Souzamaphones: This is VERY OLD – 13 years old, in fact! – but it is written by my friend Timo who shared it with me this week, and it is funny and heartwarming and feels appropriate to feature in the here and now because it very much smacks of an Old Era of the web, and an Old Era of social media, when everything was a little more hopeful and open and we were still excited at the possibility of THE WEB CONNECTING US ALL rather than, as is more the case in 2023, being terrified of exactly what the people with whom we are now connected are thinking and doing and saying and poisoning the information table with. This is the story of how Timo tried to beat the ashcloud – REMEMBER THAT, EH? – and make it back to the UK for a gig. Did he make it? READ THE PIECE AND FIND OUT FFS.
  • Ken’s Last Movie: Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed something of a lack of BARBENHEIMER content in Curios over the past month – this is mainly because a) I generally have no interest in cinema; b) I figure you have probably seen enough of it elsewhere not to need my EXPERT CURATORIAL INVOLVEMENT. I will, though, make an exception for this little piece, which tells the strange, slightly-sad story of the breakdancing-and-softcore flick ‘Delivery Boys’, directed by Ken Handler – the man whose mother named the ‘Ken’ doll after him, and who as a result of his parents’ insane wealth basically never had to work a day in his life. As the author describes it, this piece basically answers the following BURNING question: “How did a self-styled auteur with money to burn end up directing a raunchy sex comedy held together with breakdancing scenes? Delivery Boys is a mystery wrapped in an enigma: a turducken of a tale that stuffs race, class, and sex into the worn carcass of an absurdist plot, brines it in a little sexual harassment and trusses it up with the workaday labor of the adult film industry.” This may be the most 80s thing you will read all year.
  • Overdosing on Russian Propaganda: The inimitable Gary Shteyngart (let me take this opportunity to once again recommend to each and every one of you his novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’, one of the best books I have ever read and certainly the very best about How The Web Is Fcuking Us’) recounts his experience of sitting and watching five entire days of Russian TV and What It Tells Us About The War. This is very funny in parts, but also very, very sad indeed – there’s something about the repeated underlying violence of the rhetoric and the subject matter of the shows Shteyngart describes that’s honestly very bleak, and makes me quite disinclined to want to go and live in Russia anytime soon (aside from the whole ‘warmongering dictator’ thing).
  • Jungle Wedding: I don’t ordinarily include links to stuff I’d classify as a ‘hate-read’, and I don’t quite think this essay fits that exact bill, but it’s fair to say that I didn’t…wholly warm to the narrator here. That said, it also made me laugh out loud a number of times and I appreciate that I might just have a lower tolerance than some of the rest of you for the general ‘no-nonsense Lesbian who’s in touch with her spiritual side too!’ tone of the authorial  voice. This is the story of how Melissa Johnson attended a wedding ceremony in the Guatemalan jungle (yes, Ms Johnson *is* from Los Angeles! How did you guess?!) and how she and her intrepid party of celebrants and attendees (and local guides, who I really hope were well-remunerated for their work because, honestly, this sounds like a LOT) conquered (or at least broadly survived) the jungle.
  • Ron’s Place: I love this story and I love the pictures and I love the fact that there’s a happy ending (no spoilers) – Ron’s Place is the home of a now-deceased artist called Ron Gittens who lived in Birkenhead and whose house became, over the course of his (obsessive, ever-creating) life became a living monument to Ron’s craft and basically to whatever was going through the inside of his head at any given time. This is a wonderful, and sensitively-written, portrait of a classic outsider artist, and I now really want to visit the house and see the work (particularly the leonine fireplace which, honestly, is a masterpiece).
  • The Greatest Scam Ever Written: A pretty astonishing tale of mass fraud, this – come for the incredible story of how Patrice Runner created a system that over years scammed tens of millions of dollars out of gullible, lonely and vulnerable people worldwide who would write to ask a French psychic for their fortune (it all makes sense, I promise); stay for the bit at the end where Runner goes to trial, and which features one of the most astonishing attempted defences I have ever heard deployed in law. Seriously, the chutzpah is AMAZING and I am half-tempted to see whether I can use it as justification for one or two ‘spicy’ campaign ideas I have in the locker.
  • Friendship: Finally this week, Devon Gayelin in the Paris Review writes about friendships and romantic relationships and how they interrelate and how, eventually, they die, and this is beautiful, beautiful writing.

By Oleksander Shatokhin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 21/07/23

Reading Time: 32 minutes

I had a genuinely unsettling experience last night; I was at some sort of PR event thing (it’s organised by a friend of mine, attendance was an act of solidarity rather than an endorsement of an industry I fundamentally despise, honest guv) and it turned out that an unsettling number of people in attendance had at one point or another worked with me at various points in my unsuccessful and peripatetic joke of a ‘career’, and so I ended up standing there while various people I know to varying degrees exchanged ‘amusing’ anecdotes about my professional (mis)demeanour(s) while I stood there feeling not unlike Hugh Grant in that bit in Four Weddings when he gets seated at a wedding table with all his ex girlfriends.

Anyway, hi to anyone I saw yesterday and, also, fcuk you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and one day (ONE DAY) people will stop going on about that fcuking email I sent that time.

By Piero Percoco

WE KICK OFF WITH A MIX OF WHAT FORMER EDITOR PAUL DESCRIBES AS ‘AMBIENT, DUB AND FOUND AUDIO’, AND WHO AM I TO ARGUE? NO FCUKER, ETC! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHAT SORT OF SOCIOPATH YOU HAVE TO BE IN ORDER TO SCALE THE DIZZY HEIGHTS OF THE SUN’S SHOWBIZ HIERARCHY, PT.1:  

  • Viola The Bird: We start this week with something…nice! Someone got in touch last week to gently chide me for kicking off the previous edition of Curios with a link that was basically a small glimpse into the future of AI-enabled killer war machines (SORRY MARTHA), and as such this week we open with a link that, honestly, you’d have to be a cold, dead, unfeeling husk not to be charmed by – ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?! Ahem. Viola The Bird is the latest digital toy thing by Google, which uses machine learning to help you play the role of a preturnaturally-talented avian cellist, playing along to a selection of big ticket classical numbers like Holst’s ‘Planet’s or ‘Ode To Joy’ – I presume that the ‘machine learning’ element of this is whatever code exists under the hood to ensure that your spastic scrapings translate into something halfway-melodic, because it’s pretty hard to create anything too cacophonous – instead, enjoy the soothing rhythm you fall into as you use your mouse (other input devices are available) to draw the bow back and forth across the strings in vague time with the prompts as beautiful, feathery and magnicficently-purple Viola makes sweet, sweet music from your machine. This is lovely, and, honestly, if you’ve had a trying week I’d probably just stop here because it only gets worse from this point onwards.
  • AI TV: Well this is interesting. You will, of course, recall that a few months back I featured a link to an academic paper which detailed a Stardew Valley-style AI simulation in which individual AI ‘characters’ existed and interacted in a game space to create emergent narratives and a weird sort of computer-generated soap opera – you…you do remember, right? Well this is different, but similar (ish). Imagine a near future in which you can create TV shows other dramatic formats with AI – you have a cast of characters, you throw in a scenario, and *poof!* – a wild script appears! It’s obviously intensely scifi and barely-probable-sounding, but, equally, according to this series of Tweets, it’s also not a totally implausible concept. This is a thread by a company which calls itself The Simulation and which is claiming to be in the process of developing an AI-enabled narrative sandbox which does exactly that – the thread shares a bunch of (what they claim are) AI-generated episodes of South Park, where by The Machine has been trained on a bunch of scripts and the art style, and can now (apparently) spit out whole episodes with dialogue and animation and a vague ‘narrative arc’ and…ok, look, this is obviously dogsh1t in terms of the script (there are no jokes, for one – insert your own gag about its fidelity to the South Park model here, should you wish, but know that I am judging you for your lazy humour) and the voices (also all AI-generated) but, again, I think if all you see here is a poorly-written and poorly-acted script that reads as though it was written by someone who has heard of the concept of ‘humour’ but never actually laughed out loud in their life then you are perhaps missing the point. This, to once again tap the sign, IS THE WORST THIS TECH IS EVER GOING TO BE. Except, to make everything more confusing, there are slight hints that this isn’t quite what it seems – the company behind the animations and the tech is called ‘The Simulation’, and it lists its address as ‘Baudrillard Drive, San Francisco’ (BAUDRILLARD, HYPERREALITY, DO YOU SEE?!?!), which, based on my cursory research, doesn’t actually exist. Basically I have no real idea what’s going on here or what is real and what is fake (welcome to our collectively-uncertain future!), but I do know that those of you still holding on to the belief that human creativity is somehow a magical and unique quality that can never be replicated by machine are in for a series of rude awakenings in the coming few years. Fine, YOU don’t want to watch AI-generated South Park – but I bet there are enough people who will happily consume the machine dreck to make this an economically-attractive model for the content providers to aggressively pursue.
  • Stable Doodle: This flashed me RIGHT BACK a couple of years, to…2018-ish, when OpenAI’s very first DallE toys started appearing and we first got the opportunity to hamfistedly sketch an outline and have The Machine turn it into a horrible, blocky, muddy approximation of a landscape. GOOD TIMES! 5 or so years later, here’s a new version of the same schtick, powered by Stable Diffusion and which is significantly more powerful and significantly less ugly in its outputs – sketch an outline, add a prompt and watch, amazed, as your imagined creation comes to life! This is really impressive and pretty fun, and for those of you who either have a Wacom (other stylus interfaces are available) or who are better than I am at drawing with your mouse, it’s actually a pretty useful tool for creating mockups and quick visualisations (and, as I have just discovered, it is GREAT for creating really, really grotesque faces).
  • Dream Generator: Another in the occasional series of ‘links to really, really impressive devices hacked together with AI to create something genuinely fun, and which I am including here because I desperately want one of you who reads this and who is SUCCESSFUL and WELL=RESPECTED and INFLUENTIAL (lol who am I kidding, you are all just webmongs like me) to sell this sort of thing to a brand because, honestly, HOW ACE IS IT?’ – the Dream Generator is a proof-of-concept device which has been cobbled together from…a bunch of different bits of kit (the fact that the person behind it, one Kyle Goodrich, works for Snap suggests that they might have access to *slightly* better tech than you or I), and which is effectively a camera with an inbuilt AI filter, which lets the photographer apply a bunch of different AI effects to any image they shoot using a lovely little analogue selection wheel. This is SO NICE – frivolous and silly, obvs, but (in the same vein as the AI photobooth or the AI astrology machine) it’s also just delightful and playful and FUN, and basically I remain convinced that the first brand to make something interesting and playful and REAL WORLD using this sort of tech will absolutely clean up from a PR point of view. Which, I know, is an awful sentence to type, but sometimes I can’t help myself. BONUS ADDITIONAL COOL LITTLE HACKED-TOGETHER AI STUFF: this is another wonderfully-imaginative use of image-analysis and generative text tech – a projector which generates a new, short kids’ story and accompanying visual slides each time you turn it on, and which (despite the fact that the stories are, based on this video, somewhat on the simple side) hints at the possibility of some genuinely amazing toys and games. ADDITIONAL BONUS HACKED-TOGETHER AI THING!: this person put a GPT-enabled text-to-voice version of themselves inside a Big Mouth Billy Bass, which, honestly, is possibly the best elevator pitch for a Black Mirror episode I have heard in years.
  • Tommy Parallel: It increasingly feels like the entire metaverse/web3.0/NFT (yes, I know that these are all separate things, but, equally, they all sit in the same mental filing cabinet in my head, the one labelled ‘snake oil and lies’) house of cards is being held together solely by the luxury and fashion industries, who, despite the fact that the whole schtick appears to have been revealed as one of the more frothy bubbles of recent years, seem happy to continue chucking significant sums of money at VIRTUAL WORLDS and DIGITAL CAPSULE COLLECTIONS and ON-CHAIN TRANSFERABLE BIT-BASED CLOTHING SOLUTIONS, which suggests that some people somewhere are still forking out actual fiat cashmoney for this rubbish. WHO ARE YOU, MYSTERIOUS PURCHASERS OF DIGITAL OUTFITS FOR AVATARS THAT WILL NEVER BE USED? Anyway, that’s by way of poorly-written and overwrought (nothing if not self-aware over here) preamble to this latest metaversal aberration, this time commissioned by Tommy Hilfiger and purporting to be…what, exactly? You can buy digital outfits, obvs, which you can then take into a variety of uninhabited virtual worlds whose names you’ve never heard of (Hiberworld, anyone? No, thought not. Although in fairness this stuff does work with VRChat so that you can wear your Tommy drip next time you’re hanging out with all the racist echidnas), you can take your avatar running around a largely-featureless 3d cityscape, entirely uninhabited and with nothing to do…WHO IS PAYING FOR THIS? WHO LOOKS AT THIS AND THINKS ‘YES, THIS IS AN EXCELLENT USE OF BUDGET AND TIME? And, perhaps most puzzlingly of all, who agreed to sign off on this without bothering to check that the English was at least correct? I don’t know about you, but “Show of your style in every world and bridge your online and offline identity” [sic] doesn’t scream ‘premium product’ and HIGH-END LUXE to me. In the vanishingly-unlikely event that anyone reading this has any insight into how and why this exists, please can you tell me?
  • The Return of r/Place: In what is being taken by the Reddit community as a naked bit of PR flummery following some…testing times for the platform, Reddit’s open, collaborative pixelart canvas, Place, has returned for its third iteration, a mere year or so after its last appearance. Obviously this doesn’t quite have the whole ‘shiny and new’ thing going for it anymore, but I still find the general premise and air of collaboration between strangers immensely-pleasing. You can see the canvas-in-progress by clicking the link, and the subReddit has a nice timelapse of the first 24h of the project – it will be fascinating to see where this ends up over the course of the next few days, and the extent to which the politics around the site and the overall issues of API access, moderation, and community vs corporation play out in the eventual artwork (there are…quite a lot of angry messages directed towards the site’s hierarchy dominating the canvas at the time of writing).
  • Human Shader: Orthogonally-related to Place, this is a really interesting (and hugely geeky) little project which has seen a bunch of people working together to solve a bunch of equations, each of which when solved gives an RGB value for a specific pixel within an image, which eventually resolves into an image when all the colour codes have been worked out. Yes, I know, but click the link and I promise you that this will make significantly more sense. This is WONDERFUL, incredibly, incredibly nerdy, and the sort of thing that will briefly give you faith in the wonderful things that people can achieve when working in collaborative concert (now if only we could apply this sort of effort to stuff that matters!).
  • LLaMa2: Would you like to play around with Meta’s new open source LLM? No, you probably don’t care, do you, what with us now being all jaded about the magic of ‘chatting with The Machine’ – still, it’s here, and if you’d like to test it out you can do so courtesy of this version being run on Perplexity. YOU’RE WELCOME!
  • Love Will Save The Day FM: Love WilL Save The Day is a music newsletter compiled by Friend Of Curios Jed Hallam – over the past few years its grown into a proper community of music lovers, and tomorrow there is an ACTUAL RADIO STATION launching, created and curated by the people brought together by Jed’s crate digging and curation. It’s not live yet, but you can sign up to get notified when it kicks off – this is SUCH a nice thing, and a wonderful example of how the web really can bring people together to make lovely stuff (he says, in uncharacteristically-Pollyannaish fashion).
  • Expo 58: Journey back in time by 55 years and visit a digital recreation of the 1958 Expo which, it transpires, was the first big international exhibition-type event after WWII and brought together nations and international institutions to present their vision for a utopian future born from the ashes of conflict. This site lets you take a tour in glorious 3d-modeled CG through the various pavilions of the original Brussels site, accompanied by slightly-less-glorious descriptions delivered by robotic-sounding avatars that are reminiscent of the character models of world leaders from the earliest versions of Sid Meier’s Civilisation series. I really like this – it’s fun, interesting, nicely-presented, and as far as I can tell it’s been put together as part of someone’s Phd research which, frankly, feels like an insane degree of effort and the sort of thing for which one ought really to just be given a doctorate. Kudos to Dr. Anastasia Remes, whose work this apparently is.
  • Storehouse A: I LOVE THIS! It’s a few years old now, I think, and, if I’m nitpicking, it’s a bit shonky in terms of some of the functionality and interface, but the general idea – a gallery-style space which you, the user, explore in the now-legendary style of an ASCII roguelike and through whose corridors you traipse, interacting with the various exhibits and reading poetry and generally just taking in the intensely-web1.0 vibes of the whole thing…as its creator explains, it’s “A text and typography–based virtual exhibition showcasing interactive visual poetry inspired by the lexicon of NetHack” and, honestly, it’s so much nicer than something rendered in poor-quality, low-poly metaversal 3d. There’s a lesson here somewhere.
  • Project E-Ink: On the one hand, times are tough and money is tight and I don’t for a second imagine that anyone reading this has a spare £2,800 to drop on a piece of digital wall tech which exists solely to present newspaper frontpages on a gorgeous, hi-res e-ink display – on the other, I genuinely like this and find the idea of having a rolling selection of frontpages displayed in my kitchen properly appealing. So, er, if anyone who’s ever thought ‘wow, I do love Web Curios, I wish there was some way in which I could show Matt my appreciation’ is reading this, here’s a way! I mean, come on, it’s only fair.
  • Get Well Soon: Well this is quietly devastating. Get Well Soon is an online artwork by Sam Lavigne and Tayla Brain which simply and powerfully collects messages of support scraped from crowdfunding website GoFundMe – specifically, messages left on fundraising campaigns seeking to raise money for medical treatment. “The comments posted on gofundme.com’s medical fundraisers form a revealing archive. These messages express care, well wishes, sympathy and generosity in the face of personal adversity and systemic failure. This is an archive of mutual aid in response to a ruthless for-profit health system. It is an archive that should not exist.” Take a few minutes to read a selection of the messages – this really does kick you right in the gut, and rightly so.
  • Chiptune Archive: Would you like a browsable archive of over 200,000 pieces of chiptune music ripped and scraped from all around the web and playable through a minimal music player? YES YOU WOULD! Obviously your enjoyment of this will largely depend on your appetite for music that sounds like it’s being generated from an NES operating right at the very edge of its capabilities, but presuming that that’s your thing – who doesn’t love the bloops and the burbles? NO FCUKER, etc! – then this will prove a hugely-enjoyable resource. As far as I can tell this is basically the chiptune MOTHERLODE.
  • The Deep Dive: My occasional quest to direct my few remaining readers to other newsletters continues with The Deep Dive, a genuinely great publication which every week sends out a selection of links to super-in-depth YouTube documentaries about a range of different topics. The growth in longform, incredibly-specific documentary deep dives has been one of the more interesting elements of YouTube’s evolution as a platform, and there are some genuinely talented creators making some truly exhaustive enquiries into pop culture, history, music and the like – this is a great way of discovering more of them (although, to be clear, to get the most out of this you will also have to commit to watching about 6h of YouTube doc a week, which may not be compatible with things like ‘having kids’ or ‘having a life that doesn’t involve staring at screens for 80% of your waking existence’).
  • Seal Rescue Ireland: The TikTok account of an Irish seal rescue charity. All of the joy of seals (SO CUTE! Basically like big wet dogs! LOOK AT THEIR FLIPPERS!) with none of the drawbacks (possibly a bit TOO big! Very damp! Smell of fish REALLY STRONGLY!) – this really is a balm for the soul.
  • The Comedy Pet Photo Awards 2023: I don’t know whether it’s the simple fact that it’s been going for a few years now and that there’s a finite number of different ‘funny animal photos’ that it’s possible to capture, or whether the world is simply too fcuked at the moment for me to find solace in a picture of a tortoise messily eating a dandelion (am…am I dead inside? Maybe I am), but I don’t feel that this year’s selection of nominees and winners for the latest Comedy Animal Photo Awards are quite up to scratch – still, you may feel differently, and I will concede that the ‘dog in the weed’ shot is a really nice piece of photography.

By Alicia Savage

OUR NEXT MIX SEES US RETURN TO THE WELCOMING ARMS OF TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER AND HIS RELIABLY-EXCELLENT SELECTION OF OLD SOUL AND FUNK ON VINYL! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHAT SORT OF SOCIOPATH YOU HAVE TO BE IN ORDER TO SCALE THE DIZZY HEIGHTS OF THE SUN’S SHOWBIZ HIERARCHY, PT.2:      

  • Printernet: This doesn’t feel like a new idea, but let’s not worry about that – let us instead glory in the wonderful marriage of analogue and digital that is embodied in Printernet, a service which lets you pull together a collection of ONLINE WORDS and have them printed out and delivered to you as an actual magazine – you can select up to five ‘content blocks’ which will be compiled, printed, bound and mailed to you at your request, all for $10. Which, fine, is possibly quite a lot of cash for what is effectively a printing service, but I very much like the ethos behind it and the idea of taking the online offline, and, honestly, I’m almost tempted to set up a ‘print on demand’ service for people to get old editions of Curios in magazine format (because, honestly, what could be more wonderfully, blissfully pointless than a newsletter full of links WHICH YOU CAN’T CLICK ON? Art, I tell you, art!). Via Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s newsletter, which is very good.
  • Sweden Sans: Sweden has its own font! You may have been aware of this already, but I confess to being momentarily thrilled by this discovery – it sent me down a small, momentary rabbithole and made me wonder whether every nation on Earth has its own national typeface, and if so whether these are collected anywhere, and what they might all look like (Guatemala: pleasingly rounded; Tajikistan: aggressive serifs; that sort of thing), and whether or not we should, if these don’t already exist, host some sort of international typography design contest…also I’m intrigued as to the usage rights here, and whether there’s some sort of smallprint buried on the site somewhere which suggests that by using Sweden’s font you’re effectively granting ownership of whatever you write to the Swedish state…If anyone can shed any light on the whole ‘typefaces for countries’ thing, please do let me know.
  • Is This How You Feel?: It does feel rather like all the Bad Climate Stuff is happening rather faster than we anticipated – I’ll be honest, I was expecting to have long since shuffled from this mortal coil by the time the whole ‘the earth is basically now just a red-hot fiery space marble’ thing kicked off, and yet here we are in July 2023 with everything looking quite a lot like this might be the beginning of the end (or, more accurately, the end of the beginning) – which makes this link particularly timely. This project is by one Joe Duggan, and is a few years old now – in Joe’s words, “From 2014 to 2015 I approached the world’s leading climate scientists and asked them to respond to one simple question: How does climate change make you feel? Their responses were truly moving. 5 years since the project launched – as Australia burns and floods simultaneously and meaningful global action on climate change appears to be painfully slow if not, totally non-existent, we are revisiting the original contributors and asking them the same question once more.’ITHYF 5′ is a collection of these letters.” The letters here collected, from scientists talking about how they feel about their work, and its meaning, and its possible impact, are heartbreaking – even more so when you realise that you’re looking back at statements written several years ago, and that in the intervening years we have, collectively, achieved what feels very much like the square root of fcuk all when it comes to ameliorating the climate mess.
  • Texts From My Ex: This very much feels like A Bad Idea – still, that’s never stopped us before and is unlikely to do so now! Texts From My Ex is a service which will analyse any conversation thread you feed it (you can, if you’re feeling particularly security-agnostic, give it access to your WhatsApp account, or, more sensibly, you can just feed it the text) and determine the ‘health’ of the relationship embodied in the chat, with the basic premise that it can give you an assessment of how you and your significant other (wife, husband, colleague, gimp) communicate and relate to each other. This is a promo gimmick for a dating app, as far as I can tell, but the premise here feels like something that people might actually be interested in, given the current focus on analysing every single aspect of one’s relationships for ‘toxicity’ and ‘boundaries’ and oh god please can everyone stop talking like an airport self-help book it makes me want to die.
  • The Graphic Design Archives: “The Graphic Design Archive (GDA) at Rochester Institute of Technology documents and preserves the work of significant American graphic designers active from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as selected contemporary designers working in the modernist traditions. The GDA is a collection maintained within the Cary Graphic Arts Collection and supports all areas of design education at RIT as well as research by scholars from around the world. While many of the GDA collections represent the complete surviving work of a particular designer, some are smaller sample collections that document a portion of a designer’s career. The collections contain original source materials documenting the designers’ working lives, and include such unique items as original artwork, sketchbooks, sculptures, architectural models, reliefs, and printed samples (tear sheets, proofs and sample issues of publications). In addition, many of the archives includes photographs and slides, as well as audio tapes and film.” This is a SUPERB archive for anyone interested in the history and practice of design.
  • Tiler: A fun little webapptoything built by Deepak Gulati and based on the Internet Archive’s record of an old catalogue of ceramic tiles, this lets you create a vast array of different tiled and tesselated patterns from the classic designs from the 1800s. If you’re interested you can read more about the project here, but otherwise it’s just a really enjoyable tool to fiddle with and make pleasingly-geometric patterns.
  • Uranienborg: Roald Amundsen, as you all doubtless know, was a Norwegian arctic explorer and all-round action man who lived in the late-19th and early-20th century and is something of a Norwegian national hero – this website is all about the house he lived in, which is now a museum but which those of you unable to make the pilgrimage to scandiland can explore via the medium of this site, which lets you see a detailed 3d scan of the property and explore its various rooms and learn the stories behind Amundsen’s life – I appreciate that not everyone will derive intense satisfaction from the ability to explore a three-dimensional model of the toilet of a 19thC Norwegian house in which a renowned explorer once defecated, but for those few souls who have been waiting their whole life for such an opportunity then, well, YOU’RE WELCOME.
  • The Perpetual Stew Club: This is, I appreciate, Very New York (specifically, Very Brooklyn), but I am charmed by the fact that this is happening (and also Annie Raewerda who’s responsible makes a bunch of internet stuff I really like and so I’m happy to pimp her projects). This is a small website alerting people who live in New York to the fact that Annie has been cooking the same pot of stew for (at the time of writing) 43 days now, and that if they want to try some they can come to one of her weekly stew evenings where she doles out the slop and people can bring their own ingredients to contribute to the forevermeal. The concept of ‘perpetual stew’ is not a new one, but there’s something very NOW about the idea of this sort of frugal, communal eating project (or, again, perhaps it’s just VERY NEW YORK) which I very much enjoy. This feels very much like the sort of thing Vittles might end up replicating in London (and I mean that in a nice, non-snarky way).
  • Blackout: Digital toys that help you create blackout poems are not new per se, but reader Thom Wong sent me this variant on the theme which rather appealed to me; each time you visit the page you’re presented with one of nearly 10,000,000 excerpts from Project Gutenberg which you can then turn into your very own little pome by exposing a selection of words. Simple, but there’s something pleasing about the fact that each reload gives you the chance to create something utterly unique.
  • Enigma: Cards on the table here – I do not understand this AT ALL and as such I can’t adequately assess whether it actually does what I think it’s meant to do or whether it’s just an elaborate and nicely-designed hoax. Still, those of you with a better understanding of cryptography might be able to enlighten me as to whether this is a Real Thing or not – this is (apparently) a working model of the Enigma machine, famously used by The Bad People in WWII to hide their nefarious communications from The Good People. This model seems to be a working digital representation of the encryption mechanism, showing you in detail how the cryptographic mechanism functioned – but, as stated, the lack of anything resembling an ELI5 narrative for idiots means that I’m left staring at the graphics on the page like an orangutan attempting to master binary. Maybe you’ll fare better. Still, it LOOKS nice.
  • Dudel: A lovely little creative apptoy, this – every day the app gives you a different shape which you can use as an inspirational canvas on which to draw. This is based on the basic principle that we all see shapes and patterns in everything, much in the same way as we see shapes in clouds, and can function either as a soothing quotidian creative exercise OR as some sort of long-running Rorschach test whereby you can undertake an ongoing assessment of your own mental health (if you find yourself turning the shapes into corpses three days in a row, seek help!).
  • Reflect: Many years ago I briefly became obsessed with Evernote- which, you may have heard, is going through something of a time right now – until I realised that, actually, I don’t actually care that much about ordering and sorting the vast piles of crap in my head after all. Still, if you are someone who wishes that they had all of their memories, their thoughts, the weird little lists that they make on the back of receipts, their dreams and their brainfarts all linked and annotated and interconnected then you may find that Reflect is the perfect solution for you – as is the law in mid-2023, it obviously has an AI LAYER (fcuk knows why, if I’m honest, but I think there’s a vague ‘turn your scattered thoughts into coherent prose via the magic of GPT’ thing built in here), but the main sell here is the annotated infodump and the whole ‘extension of your brain’ thing – it’s priced at $10 a month, which you may or may not think is worth paying for what’s basically just a fancy digital filing cabinet for your extended brain.
  • World of Playing Cards: Have you ever lain awake at night dreaming feverishly of a future in which you can have every single piece of information about the historty of playing cards at your fingertips? REJOICE FOR THAT FUTURE IS HERE! World of Playing Cards is a pleasingly-old-school site which has obviously been aroujnd for a while and which seemingly exists for no other purpose than to afford the curious and the obsessive an opportunity to glory in the wonderful ludic history of suits and face cards and jokers and the like. This is, honestly, GREAT – the section of ‘playing cards from around the world’ is a partciular highlight – although I confess to being a bit disappointed that there doesn’t appear to be a section dedicated to the ‘exotic’ playing cards which every 1980s schoolchild purchased on trips to The Continent (if you claim otherwise, know that I know you are lying).
  • Rail Cow Girl: In a week strangely replete with Norwegian links, this is the YouTube channel of a train driver who films her beautiful, relaxing, picturesque journeys across Norway, though snowfields and past fjords, encompassing some stunning scenery. This is basically the pinnacle of ‘slow TV (or at least I presume it is – these videos are LONG, and as a result I’ve only seen bits of them and so can’t totally guarantee that it doesn’t all get a bit ‘Aliens’ around the three-hour mark).
  • You Are Atlas: I always say this, but I am SUCH a sucker for sites that track the number of people currently visiting them and which alter their content accordingly in reaction – You Are Atlas is very silly and totally pointless (just how we like it) – it tells you how many people are currently on the site, and tells you that if noone is there  the sky will fall (the site’s visitors are Atlas, holding up the sky – DO YOU SEE?). To date, the sky has fallen 352 times – keep this webpage open forever and ensure that it NEVER FALLS AGAIN.
  • James Yawn’s Rockets: A wonderful example of monomaniacal online weirdness, this – James Yawn has been maintaining this website for YEARS, on which he documents his enthusiasm for, and adventures in, home-made rocketry. James apparently specialises in making propellant from sugar, which sounds, frankly, insane and like the sort of thing that were you to attempt it in London might get you in not insignificant trouble with The Authorities, but which you can probably get away with if you like in, say, North Dakota and your nearest neighbour is approximately 60 miles to the West. Anway, if you’d like to experiment with blowing things up – and, quite possibly, yourself, and your neighbours – then you will ADORE this. NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for injury or criminal charges resulting from your use of this website, or indeed for any lists that you might end up finding yourself on as a result of manufacturing 300 kilos of sucrose-based rocket propellant in your kitchen.
  • Fudge: Tetris, but backwards! Yes, I know that that makes no sense whatsoever but I promise that as soon as you start playing it will all fall into place (lol).
  • Snip It: This is a fun little game, knocked up as part of an AI games jam – explore inside different classic paintings, clipping away elements to see what lies within, and behind, the different canvases. This is imaginative and really nicely made, considering it was hacked together in a couple of days, and it’s a good example of some of the ways in which generative AI can be used to accelerate the development of things like this (and, creatively, how the idea of ‘imagining outside the frame’ can be used for ludic purposes). BONUS AI ART GAME: this is a version of 2048 which uses AI-generated image assets; derivative, but, again, a nice example of how this makes reasonable-quality in-game artwork available to all (mobile only, FYI).
  • All of the Flash Games: Look, this is a truly incredible resource and it contains basically every Flash game ever made, and if you spent any time on Newgrounds or similar in the early-00s then this is basically like time travel. You will get NOTHING ELSE done today if you click on this link – but, look, your job’s pointless and we’re all dying, so who the fcuk cares, eh? BONUS FLASH ARCHIVE: more games here!
  • Big Ben: Finally this week, Matt Round has created something genuinely brilliant – a word game which thanks to its ingenious construction presents you with an entirely different puzzle depending on the exact time, to the second, that you land on the site. This is so, so smart – the almost-infinite replayability, the simple game mechanics, the nice touches like the day/night cycle in the background…honestly, Matt is SO GOOD at these things, and I am always slightly baffled that he’s not permanently assailed by agencycunts like you (and, ok, like me) begging him to make cool things for their dreadful clients (to be clear, I have no idea whether Matt would actually take these commissions – so, er, sorry Matt if you are now inundated with requests for stuff that you would rather eat your own face than build). This is GREAT, and incredibly addictive.

By Christopher Burk 

 YOUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SUPREMELY-CURATED SELECTION OF OLD GROOVES AND LOUNGE AND PSYCHEDELIA MIXED BY AL USHER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • 1 Million Cakes: I can’t in fact confirm or deny whether there are indeed a million cakes here, but there are certainly LOTS.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Manuel Alvares Diestro: Via the excellent Things Magazine comes the Insta feed of photographer Manuel Alvares Diestro, whose imagery focuses (mostly) on high-rise and urban architecture in incongruous locations. You may not think that sounds like your sort of thing, but you are wrong.
  • Toon Joosen: Cut-out, collage-y art with a strong focus on the interplay between image and text, this is excellent work.
  • Gregory Climer: Gregory Climer makes textile-based art which features imagery drawn from gay porn; I never thought that I would want a quilt embroidered with a low-res pixellated image of a leather daddy, and yet, well, now I find that that is EXACTLY what I want.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Starmer: A typically-superb bit of writing and analysis in the London Review of Books which looks at the current incarnation of the Labour Party under Keir (KEITH LOL!) Starmer, and, with every indication being that that Tories are heading for an historic kicking in 2024 (please god, let the kicking be terminal), what the UK might expect from Labour Government. Whilst I’m possibly less-certain than author James Butler that Labour are quite as much of a shoo-in as he seems to think (never underestimate the capacity of ‘the left – inverted commas because, well, ‘left’ doesn’t really feel like the right designation for this lot – to fcuk themselves spectacularly on the home straight!), I otherwise found myself nodding along throughout this article, which offers a reasonably-dispassionate assessment of Starmer’s authoritarian and very-much-centrist-at-best leanings and why that perhaps doesn’t bode hugely well, either for the country or for the party’s prospects of securing more than one term. As Butler points out, “The point isn’t just that those around Starmer are more cautious and less ambitious than they make themselves out to be, but that their supposedly revisionist energy calcifies all too easily into dogmatic assertion and a dreary repetition of past approaches. Promising to stick to Conservative spending plans for two years – a carbon copy of Blair and Brown’s commitment in 1997 – is an example of this. Blair inherited the best economic situation a Labour government had ever seen; a Starmer government will inherit a smoking ruin. Cloning New Labour’s policies is not a route to replicating Blair’s deft reading of his political moment.”
  • Green Extractivism: An excellent essay by Leandro Vergara-Camus, contributing to the growing corpus of literature I’ve read this year that gently points out that just ‘going green’ perhaps isn’t the absolute end to questions around sustainability. This is really, really interesting, and not a little sobering, around questions of resource extraction and what exactly we mean when we talk about ‘green’ initiatives, and the extent to which it’s even a meaningful label whan what we really mean is not so much ‘environmentally friendly’ as ‘environmentally unfriendly in a different way to that which our current setup is’, and how we might want to start thinking about global economic justice and redistribution in ways that are fairer and more equitable to those nations which currently hold the keys to our current vision of a ‘green’ future.This is published as part of the Land and Climate Review, which contains a lot of smart writing about related issues and is generally worth a read should you be interested in this sort of thing (or if you just want to feel really, really miserable about the future).
  • The World China Is Building: An interesting-if-flawed article in Noema, looking at the extent to which much of the future extractive economy referenced in the above piece is owned by China, and how in fact many of the countries in the second world are, increasingly, also effectively owned by China, and what that means in terms of East/West relations and the future of imperialism in the 21st Century. This is FASCINATING stuff, but there are a few things that gave me pause – for a start, I could have done without the (not particularly successful, to my mind) authorial digression at the start of the piece into what one can learn about a nation’s character from its poetic styles; also, I checked with my friend Alex who knows about China and who lived there and he was…somewhat sceptical about some of the claims made in the piece, based on stories such as this one and this one which give some idea of quite how fcuked the Chinese economy currently is, which rather gives lie to the broad ‘THE NEXT EMPIRE’ vibe which suffuses the piece. Still, a decade or so on from the peak of the ‘Belt & Road Initiative’, it’s interesting to see how far and wide China’s influence – and, depending on your perspective, control – now extends.
  • Frivolous Mental Health: Freddie De Boer writes a slightly-ranty screed, which I found myself nodding along with wholeheartedly throughout, about the weird ways in which Western society characterises mental health and the commodification of both the broad concept of mental illness and the vocabulary that exists around it by social media, and the simultaneous consecration of mental illness as INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT and NO BIG DEAL and and and. Honestly, I firmly believe that the past ten years or so of ‘mental health discourse’ will at some point in the future be understood to have had an actively-deleterious impact on our ability to talk seriously and meaningfully about the insides of our heads and what they feel like.
  • Working With AI: A rare Benedict Evans link now – I sort-of assume that Evans is widely-read enough that if you want to read him you already do, but will make an exception for this piece as it’s a really good bit of thinking and writing about The Coming AI Jobs Apocalypse. This is significantly more optimistic about AI and the world of white collar work than I am – but Benedict Evans is smarter than I am, so I would probably be inclined to listen to him rather than me. His overall thesis is that there is no practical reason why this latest wave of automation should have a greater or lesser impact on the way in which we work and global employment levels than previous waves of automation (cf the printing press, the textile mill, etc), and he lays out his arguments persuasively – I would say, though, that I have two main objections to the thinking laid out here, to whit: 1) AI automation is categorically different to other previous forms of automation insofar as it grants the potential to eliminate whole swathes of professions, including the ones invented to replace the initial disappeared jobs – the comparison often used is ‘well, photography didn’t kill painting’, but in this case you’re eliminating not just the process of painting *but the need for a person at all*, which feels to me to be categorically different on a fundamental level; and 2) I think Evans, and a lot of the more utopian (or less-dystopian) commentators on this stuff severely underestimate quite how many people’s jobs involve producing pointless stuff that noone cares about and which doesn’t matter, and quite how easy it will be to give those tasks to The Machine because, well, NOONE CARES and IT DOESN’T MATTER.
  • AI is an Existential Threat: This piece offers an interesting bit of analysis on what the author perceives to be the *real* threat of AI – not the apocalypse, not the job losses, but instead the fact that, if it progresses as it currently looks as though it might, it may well render us even more intellectually lazy and bovine than we already are. I know this sounds like doomer hyperbole, but think about it for a second – if you now have the ability to, say, create an AI-generated summary of a complex, three-hour Parliamentary debate without reading it, or if you can spin up an article from bulletpoints someone else has given you in a matter of moments…when, exactly, is your thinking happening?
  • Interaction Design: Oh this is so so so good. Rauno Freiberg has written this wonderful, chatty, discursive guide to interaction design, talking you through what it is, why it’s important, what makes certain design ‘good’ or ‘bad’…honestly, as someone who (as I think I may have mentioned one or two times before) has all the visual acuity and elan of Helen Keller, stuff like this is like watching Penn and Teller explain magic tricks. Honestly, this really is wonderful and I found myself learning without quite realising it.
  • The Decline of Lemon8: Are any of you still using Threads, then? I logged in briefly to check on it yesterday for a thing I was writing and MY GOD is it horrible (also, Instagram people – what is WRONG with them? They’re like a different species, specifically a really dreadful one) – all BRAND BANTER and horrid, vapid engagement-bait (and Gordon Ramsey, which for reasons I can’t adequately understand upset me most of all), and I can’t personally understand what the point of it is and why anyone would choose to use it. Given the news that engagement stats on the platform have fallen off a cliff after the first week of use, it may not end up being the runaway success that Meta hopes – this piece looks at TikTok’s recent Insta-like, called Lemon8, which those of you who bother keeping up with these things will recall launched in February to a LOT of buzz and a high app store ranking, but which now, a mere five months later, appears to be something of a graveyard populated solely by brands and with no real people to make it interesting. It’s described by one quoted commenter as ‘too crafted and curated to the point of blandness’ which in itself feels like a warning to Threads. Anyone remember Google+, another service which used cross-promotion with an existing massive digital platform to lure a massive initial userbase before slowly dying a painful death because at no point did anyone actually need or want it? Well, exactly.
  • Portugal and Drugs: The Washington Post looks at Portugal’s drugs laws, over two decades from the country’s decision to decriminalise consumption of all drugs for personal use, including the purchase and possession of 10-day supplies, and how they have impacted society – the sad news, at least for those of you who like me have long been advocates for this sort of approach, is that it doesn’t appear to have been a total success, with visible drug addiction increasingly seen as a national blight and an increasingly fractious debate taking place about the extent to which it can be considered a ‘right’ to choose to spend one’s time blissed off one’s tits on skag while the state looks after you. The main thing I took away from the piece, on reflection, was that once again this seems to boil down to a question of money and funding, and this could be read as much as a failure of government to adequately follow-through to mitigate the inevitable consequences of their policy as it could be a failure of the policy itself.
  • The Bronze Age Pervert: ANOTHER piece touching on the ‘crisis in modern masculinity’, although at least this has the benefit of not being written by Caitlin Moran. This starts interesting but then, to my mind at least, spends far too much time attempting to analyse the undergrad-fash ‘philosophy’ behind the persona of The Bronze Age Pervert, a Romanian guy who studied in the US and who realised a few years ago that you can make decent wedge from presenting wafer-thin ‘thinking’ dressed up in macho garms. If nothing else, this is very much worth reading for the insight it will give you into why all the ‘greek statue avatar’ social media accounts are actually fash, as well as the way it contributes to my broad ‘everything going wrong with the world right now, and in fact over the past decade or so, can be attributed to the aggressive intellectual astroturfing of a generation carried out by a small cadre of very, very rich right-wing American men seeking to reinforce their position of socioeconomic dominance by the propagation of ‘traditional’ values’ thesis.
  • Liberland: Apologies for the Unherd link, but this is worth a read if, like me, you are endlessly-fascinated by the micronational aspirations of the libertarian/web3/crypto class. Liberland, you may recall, is a not-really-extant micronation which putatively exists on a small strip of contested land between Croatia and Serbia, and which is described by its president Vit Jedlička, as “a nation of 700,000 people, with embassies in 80 nations,and relations with countries like Haiti, Somaliland, and Malawi.” In reality it’s basically a bunch of cryptob0llocks and will never come to anything, but I do enjoy these sorts of takedowns of mad projects like this – also, as an aside, if even an outlet like Unherd which is significantly more ‘libertarian-friendly’ than most looks at your project and goes ‘nah mate, this is mental’, then perhaps you have a problem.
  • NPCs: You can’t move this week for broadsheet explainers on the NPC streamer trend on TikTok – you can read one here, if you like, or here – but I thought this take, by Rene over at Good Internet, was worth sharing; he rightly points out that this isn’t really new at all, and is just an extension of the odd relationship between online viewer and online creator/performer that has existed since the early days of the web, and that there is in fact limited difference between people doing this sort of thing (gaming the algo, giving the people what they want for money, etc) and, say, MrBeast, who is effectively as much a slave to The Machine as these kids tic-ing and sibillating into the mic for 7 hours a pop. At the end of the day we’re all going to end up effectively w4nking for pennies on the internet (metaphorically or otherwise) – these people have just got there slightly quicker than most of us.
  • 50 Rappers, 50 Stories: This was only published overnight I think, so I haven’t had a chance to read all of the vignettes in this New York Times piece, but the ones I have read (Phonte, Violent J, 50 Cent) have been GREAT – each of these short pieces gives an insight into an artist’s career journey and their relationship to the wider industry, and I can honestly say that Violent J’s story in particular made me go all emo for a second. There’s a wonderful range of featured artists here and there will be at least one who you’re a fan of, promise.
  • How Search Began: Oh this is SO INTERESTING – this piece looks back at Syracuse University library in 1970, where the first ever terminal-based textual search engine was invented; and yes, I know that that doesn’t necessarily scream MUST-READ ARTICLE, but trust me when I tell you that this is fascinating. Aside from anything else, it’s astonishing that we are currently using technology and systemic architecture that is, at heart, basically the same as it was 53 years ago – it’s slightly amazing that the coming era of AI-enabled natural language search will be the first major update to the way we interrogate digital texts in half a century.
  • Scotti’s: A love letter to a Farringdon sandwich bar by Isaac Rangaswami for Vittles – if you know London you will be able to immediately picture Scotti’s from the descriptions, even if you’ve never visited, and the pen pictures of the staff and the regulars and the food and the chats are just perfect. If you don’t want a slightly-greasy chicken escalope sandwich by the end of this then there’s probably something wrong with you.
  • The Climate Hoax: This is a super-interesting story which I am slightly surprised didn’t get more traction – then again, Novara’s something of a niche site and oxygen of indie journalism has rather been sucked up by the Byline Times’ Wootton exposé. Ash Sarkar writes about being approached about a story purporting to be about leaked Government documents…which in fact turned out to be a complete fake, orchestrated by a middle-aged advermarketingprcunt to attempt to raise awareness of the climate crisis. This really is fascinating – partly because, on one level at least, it’s a really impressive bit of PR (the whole ‘leaving things in the back of cabs’ is a legitimately brilliant tactic), but on the other it’s incredibly irresponsible and, you could reasonably argue, works to undermine more legitimate communications efforts on the issue. Whatever your perspective, my main takeaway is that there is literally NOTHING ON EARTH that middle-aged men working in communications can’t look at and think ‘you know what? I could fix that; I could do that BETTER’ (and, er, I know whereof I speak).
  • Super Meko Land: A tightly-written little scifi-ish short story by the mysteriously lowe-case merritt k – this is really very good, not least because it’s pleasingly pared-back.
  • The Hole: This week’s final longread is not, in fact, that long – still, it’s a glorious little portrait of a relationship by Nicolaia Rips in the Paris Review, and I adored this line especially: “A ghost is like a pet or a child, and I’m not responsible enough to handle a poltergeist.”

By Philip Lindeman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: