NO MORE JOBS! WE WILL NEVER WORK AGAIN!

Except, sadly, that’s in the future and noone has quite worked out what happens between the here and now and the ‘magical, tech-greased future’. Still, let’s not worry about that too hard – let’s focus on the Terminator sh1t instead!

(as an aside, it’s been interesting to see the lack of references to EA, longtermism and accelerationism in any of the coverage of this – it seems like a not-insignificant oversight if you’re trying to understand where the various conflicting ideologies at play here are coming from)

Anyway, I imagine you’re all still desperately trying to digest the three tonnes of orange confectionary you extorted from your neighbours earlier this week and probably feeling a touch under the weather – what better way to sort yourself right out than with approximately 100 links with literally no overarching theme whatsoever?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you print this all out you can probably use it as reasonable kindling for your weekend bonfire so never say I don’t do anything for you.

By Afarin Sajedi

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A GENUINELY WONDERFUL SELECTION OF OLD BLUES AND CRACKLY COUNTRY-TYPE SOUNDS WHICH IS PERFECT FOR A RAINY FEW DAYS SUCH AS THOSE WE ARE CURRENTLY STUCK WITH IN LONDON! 

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T FEEL HUGELY REASSURED ABOUT THE AI FUTURE AFTER BLETCHLEY, PT.1:  

By Robin F Williams

SOMETHING OF A BREAKNECK CHANGE OF MUSICAL PACE HERE WITH AN HOUR-LONG D’N’B SET FEATURING HARRY SHOTTA AND A BUNCH OF OTHER EXCELLENT MCs BUT WHERE IMHO THE DJ IS VERY MUCH THE STAR – THIS IS PROPERLY EXCELLENT SO TURN IT UP LOUD PLEASE! 

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T FEEL HUGELY REASSURED ABOUT THE AI FUTURE AFTER BLETCHLEY, PT.2:        

•  Let’s Get Creative: I might quibble the title here – this describes as a ‘collection of online creativity tools’, but, honestly, they’re not creativity tools, they’re a selection of gorgeous, silly, fun little internet toys (many of which you will OBVIOUSLY recognise from Curios passim, with about ⅓ of these having featured in here at various points over the past decade or so) – there is a whole afternoon’s worth of guileless play waiting for you behind this link, and were it not for the fact that I have a CAST-IRON SENSE OF DUTY I would totally fcuk off right now and spend the next couple of hours making increasingly-complex courses on Line Rider.
• Weather Photographer of the Year: A TOPICAL LINK! How are YOU enjoying Cieran? Damp, isn’t it? If you prefer to experience your weather in pixellated two dimensions rather than the cold, blustery reality of meatspace then you will almost certainly adore this selection of fabulous images taken by meteorology enthusiasts over the past 12 months – the snowflake photo is particularly remarkable given it’s apparently taken on a mobile, but it’s hard to argue with the sheer…well, METAL-NESS of the ‘Christ The Redeemer in a lightning storm’ shot.
• Spaceborn United: Not, sadly, a non-league football team with a remarkably scifi backstory, but instead an organisation that is dedicated to exploring the science that will permit people (or, to use their in-no-way-unsettling terminology, ‘mammalian lifeforms’) to reproduce in space! On the one hand this isn’t a ridiculous proposition – should we eventually decide that we want to export the human virus to other planets and eventually galaxies, it seems likely that these will be multigenerational journeys and that as such we’ll at some point have to work out how to bone, and breed, in no-grav states. I spent a bit of time reading around this this week, and it is genuinely interesting…but at the same time, I don’t know, there’s something about this website (the design, the not-totally-hi-res imagery, the language…) that makes me wonder whether the whole thing isn’t some sort of sinister front for something totally other (to be clear: it almost certainly isn’t a front for anything sinister at all, probably. PROBABLY).
• Carbon Date The Web: SUCH a useful tool, this, made available by Old Dominion University (no, me neither, but I am grateful) in the US, which lets you plug in any url you like and get a rough idea of when it was first spun up – which is HUGELY helpful for a bunch of different reasons, as you might imagine, and is generally A Good Thing. I tried it on Curios and it was pretty accurate – ymmv, but as a rough way of working out how long a site’s been around, it’s super-helpful.
• Simply Scripts: Do YOU like films? Do YOU like films scripts? Do YOU want access to a frankly dizzying number of them, all conveniently arranged at a single website for you to browse and read and learn from to your heart’s content? Do YOU want to scrape them all, feed them to an LLM and go about creating your very own Hollywood-grade work in a matter of mere minutes? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN! Simply Scripts is a website that, well, collects scripts – there are other sections on the site (radio, theatre, unpublished works…seriously, there is a LOT), but the link here takes you to the ‘Film’ subsection where you can find full original scripts for everything from 101 Dalmations to Zootopia, and as a resource for anyone who wants to learn the craft of screenwriting this is pretty much unparalleled (but, er, please don’t do the thing I suggested about feeding this all to an LLM if you don’t mind).
• MUD Resources: This is quite old school and VERY geeky, but also a bit of classic Old Internet Culture and as such, well, CLICK AND LEARN. The ‘MUD’ here stands for ‘Multi User Dungeon’, some of the earliest shared online spaces ever to be created where people first started to explore how the whole idea of ‘actual people made of meat existing as textually-embodied digital avatars in a nonexistent world interacting with each other’ might actually work in practice (and, as I now feel personally obligated to mention every time this topic comes up, the origin of what is still the best ever thing written about community and society in digital space. “My Tiny Life”) – obviously MUDs are clunky and weird and probably of limited interest to a modern web user, but this stuff is so incredibly significant in terms of the ways in which our present online habits and social mores have developed, and this site offers an excellent way to learn about their history and mechanics, and, should you desire, to play around with a couple of still-extant communities.
• The QR Code Menu Printer: Ok, this doesn’t actually exist – instead it’s a set of instructions for building your own, which, fine, requires a degree of practical skill far beyond me and which therefore I can’t vouch for beyond the general sense of ‘I like this idea, it amuses me’ – but I very much approve of the concept. One Guy Dupont has hacked together this small device which exists to perform one single, simple function, to whit: printing out menus that restaurants still insist on presenting as digital-only documents via QR code. Basically all this is is an thermal ink printer with a wifi connection, but there’s something so perfectly…well, so perfectly middle-aged-man about the techy overeingineering of the solution here that really appealed to me. It requires 10 components, all of which you could have delivered to you by Monday if you fancied making me REALLY HAPPY and building one yourself.
• Octostudio: Are we still doing the whole ‘hey kids, learn to code, you’ll have a job for life!’ thing? Hm, probably not. Still, regardless of your bullishness or bearishness at the future job prospects for code monkeys, there’s no denying that a basic facility with the principles of ‘how software works and what it does’ is a genuinely useful thing to have (regardless of whether The Machine lets us touch its software ever again) – and, well, making stuff is fun! If you have young people in your life who you think would enjoy ‘making things with code’ then Octostudio looks like a decent way in – it self-describes as “A free mobile coding app developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab”, which is decent pedigree, and it seems to offer a pretty gentle introduction to the basic principles of ‘how code works to make machines do things’: “young people can create interactive animations and games using a mobile phone or tablet anytime anywhere. Take photos and record sounds, bring them to life with coding blocks, and send to family and friends.” This could be a fun toy for the right sort of kid, maybe.
• Cambrian Chronicles: Who doesn’t want a YouTube channel whose sole purpose is  to provide animated explainers of ‘Welsh and Brythonic history’? Who can, hand on heart, tell me that they know off the top of their head what ‘Brythonic’ means? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! You may not think you care about this stuff, but I got surprisingly sucked in by a video documenting extinct animals that might have roamed the Welsh hills some 1500 years ago and it’s entirely possible that you will too.
• CJS Gallery: I have a particular soft spot for bad, vulgar art – not just unskilled pedestrian stuff, but work that is a combination of horrible AND violently-expensive and ostentatious, the sort of stuff that has come to basically define bits of Frieze to a certain extent, or the kind of work that you find in the ‘art’ section of Harrods (which, by the way, if you have never visited I can recommend unreservedly – it’s a spectacular bejewelled graveyard to taste) or in the shops at the Bellaggio in Vegas – which perhaps is why the TikTok account of this Dutch gallery spoke to me so hard. I don’t want to spoil the joy of this by describing it – it really does benefit from going in blind, so to speak – but I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by suggesting that the likely buyers for this sort of thing are the sorts of people who three years ago would have been loudly trading apes. Imagine if Tony Montana was a) real and b) alive in Miami RIGHT NOW and in the market to redecorate his mansion and c) had just banged about six kilos of his own product – this is EXACTLY where he would shop.
• Wylder: To be honest, the timing of this link is a bit off – early November is not, to my mind at least, the time when people are desperate to get out into the GREAT OUTDOORS and start rambling and hacking and all that sort of bucolic fun. Still, I found it this week and that’s therefore when you’re getting it – Wylder is an app which is designed to encourage people to get out into the natural environment to walk and explore, and which sets you daily challenges and encourages community and, look, this is TREMENDOUSLY well-meaning and very much A Good Thing, but also rather has the slightly-knitted vibe of a COUNCIL INITIATIVE…because that’s basically what it is. There’s UK Government money in here somewhere, and it’s a Falmouth County Council project, and I really want this to succeed despite the aforementioned wholemeal knitted tweediness of the whole thing because it’s a nice idea and I can totally see the value – I can imagine it being of interest/use/help to people in their 50s or 60s, maybe, although should anyone of that age bracket be reading this, feel free to get in touch and tell me whether or not I am massively misrepresenting you here.
• GDK: This is the website for a small chain of fast foot restaurants in the UK called ‘Gourmet Doner Kitchen’. They sell kebabs. THEIR WEB PRESENCE AND BRANDING IS SO GOOD! Seriously, what is it this year with fast food chains getting serious about their marketing – I think this is the third or fourth really excellent piece of digital brand work I’ve seen in this sector in 2023. I still don’t want to eat a fcuking doner kebab, fine, but I would like to congratulate whoever’s responsible for this which is just far more fun than it needs to be (and I am a sucker for the juxtaposition of ‘doner’ with ‘lambo’).
• Restaurants In Peace: Another lovely piece of digital memorialisation in the shape of this project which seeks to keep a record of restaurants that have closed – it’s operating in a couple of dozen cities across North America, but the site suggests it’s planning to expand to more places, and the site’s simple functionality lets you add memories for any restaurant you wish to commemorate, and I would LOVE this for London; I think restaurant memory writing is always evocative and beautiful, and there’s something poignant and lovely about creating a crowdsourced record of the memories people have of places that were special to them (108 Garage RIP).
• Collaboration Cookbook: I really like this idea, and it’s a nice example of community organisation principles in practice: “The collaboration cookbook is a living resource that includes recipes for real creative projects. Each recipe is an instruction for an activity, initiative, or experiment that is the products of people working together in creative partnership.” So here you’ll find instructions to help organise all sorts of different things – book clubs! Conferences! Record labels! Neighbourhood support schemes – in simple, easy to follow language; anyone can in theory add to these instructions with their own expertise, with the idea being that the ‘Cookbook’ will evolve into a general resource for collaborative action – this is INSANELY hippyish and the sort of thing I would normally be disgustingly cynical about because, well, that’s the sort of miserable cnut I am, but actually it turns out that I can’t be cynical about this at all and it’s just a really nice initiative.
• Bathmates: Another example of high-end branding coming to…unexpected markets comes in the form of this company, which, er, as far as I can tell sells pumps which claim to help men achieve ‘better’ erections. Which, to be clear, I am including not because I imagine any of you are necessarily in the market for such a thing – NO SHAME if you are, though! We could all use better erections! – but because it has the branding and webdesign of a very different sort of company, one which exists to , I don’t know, sell you tastefully-curated financial services products rather than a penile sleeve which somehow uses…water? to make all your insecurities disappear (there is a real dearth of info on the site as to how the fcuk this is all meant to work – WHERE DOES THE WATER COME IN HERE?!) – and yet here we are! This is really slick, really clean, and makes me wonder whether we’re just at a point now when we’re all relaxed enough about sex and sexuality that we’re going to see mainstream ads for clitoral suction devices on the tube (which, to be clear, would be totally fine, as long as they’re nicely art-directed!).
• Guess You: A new game by perennial creator of online distractions Monkeon, this lets you play ‘Guess Who?’ against the computer, with the wrinkle here being that, by answering a short series of questions about your appearance, the machine will attempt to identify which of the Guess Who? characters you most resemble. This will be funny for you exactly once, but it’s worth it.
• QwertyTiles: It continually astonishes me how fcuking terrible so many people are at typing, despite the fact that we all spend so much fcuking time stuck in front of a keyboard-based interface – if you’d like to get marginally better at typing instructions to The Machine while at the same time pretending you’re playing a game rather than effectively doing Mavis Beacon then, well, you will LOVE Qwerty Tiles, which sets you a ‘type the cascading letters in order and in time’ challenge and which will absolutely kick your arse if you put it on ‘Pro’ mode.
• Neighborle: A daily game where you’re tasked with identifying which countries share a border with another given country – so today, for example, you’re challenged with identifying the border neighbours of Sweden. You might find this incredibly, almost patronisingly, easy – I am some sort of geography untermensch and this left me feeling SO STUPID I actually had to turn off the computer and go for a walk.
• Angry Pumpkins: On the one hand, this is a shonky Hallowe’en-themed Angry Birds clone; on the other, this has been made entirely with AI, from basic code to assets, and as such is worth a look as a curiosity. As ever, THIS IS THE WORST IT WILL EVER GETzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
• The Basement Chronicles: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is this truly astonishing achievement – you remember the golden era of point-and-click adventure games, as embodied by LucasArts and titles like Day of the Tentacle and The Secret of Monkey Island? Well imagine those games but NEW and playable IN YOUR BROWSER RIGHT NOW – WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! The Basement Chronicles is a really incredible achievement – a 90s-style point-and-click game, complete with voice acting, all playable in your browser (and I think it works on mobile too); the graphics are great, the animation’s lovely and while the script and gameplay are, fine, not a patch on the actual retail classics of The Past, and, yes, the voice work isn’t exactly stellar (you can toggle this in the top-right if you’d like to turn it off), this is still FCUKING AMAZING and the best way of spending the next hour of your life that I can think of that doesn’t involve a hypodermic syringe and the blank wonder of forgetting.

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS SELECTION OF BEATS IN THE NOW-CLASSIC UNKLE/NINJA TUNES STYLE SELECTED BY JAMES LAVELLE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• James Elliott:  James Elliott is a man in Scotland who carves things out of wood, and this is his Instagram feed which is basically a collection of the most satisfying craft-y videos I have seen in months, and which will not fail to soothe you on some fairly fundamental level.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Joakim Eskildsen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

In a departure from recent weeks I am not going to open by talking about how everything is terrible (HAPPY NOW ADAM?!) – instead, I am going to recommend a play to you, should you be in a position to be able to get to a theatre in London in the next month, and then I am going to fcuk off and have a shower and leave you with the links, of which there is a particularly fine selection this week (especially in the longreads, where there really is something for absolutely everyone) (unless you’re illiterate, in which case you may struggle) (and also won’t have been able to read this, rendering this whole, largely unfunny riff entirely otiose).

Is it…is it better when I say everything’s awful? Maybe it is.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you are still here despite that frankly appalling attempt at an intro then, well, I salute you.

By Piero Percoco

(NB – images are lifted from This Isn’t Happiness, about which more in the Tumblr section down there)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A PERFECTLY-POPPY AND STUPENDOUSLY-MIXED SELECTION BY DJ SABRINA THE TEENAGE DJ, WHICH VERY MUCH ISN’T MY USUAL SORT OF THING BUT WHICH I FOUND MYSELF ENJOYING TO A SURPRISING EXTENT THIS WEEK AND WHICH YOU MIGHT TOO!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT CONCERNED THAT IT IS YET TO RECEIVE ITS INVITATION TO THE FORTHCOMING AI SAFETY SUMMIT BUT WHICH PRESUMES THAT IT’S JUST LOST IN THE POST OR SOMETHING, PT.1:

ByCinta Vidal

WE GO BACK TO 1996 NOW WITH THIS GORGEOUS AND VERY AUTUMNAL RECORD BY DJ KRUSH AND TOSHINORI KONDO WHICH REALLY IS VERY LOVELY INDEED AND WHICH I URGE YOU TO LISTEN TO IF YOU DON’T KNOW IT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT CONCERNED THAT IT IS YET TO RECEIVE ITS INVITATION TO THE FORTHCOMING AI SAFETY SUMMIT BUT WHICH PRESUMES THAT IT’S JUST LOST IN THE POST OR SOMETHING, PT.2:

• Recursive Recipes: I like this a lot – it’s very silly, fine, but also it works far better than it needs to given it’s basically just a one-note gag taken to an extreme. “A recursive recipe is one where ingredients in the recipe can be replaced by another recipe. The more ingredients you replace, the more that the recipe is made truly from scratch.” So pick from one of the recipes on the site, select how many you want to make and then start clicking to see exactly how ‘from scratch’ you want to get and how long it will take you and how much it would cost if you were to try and do EVERYTHING. This feels vaguely orthogonally related to the old ‘making a toaster from scratch’ project from what feels like DECADES ago –oh God it was 2010 I am SO OLD – but just a bit sillier. Via Giuseppe, whose newsletter is always excellent.
  
• Tertulia: This is an interesting idea: “Inspired by the informal salons (“tertulias”) of Spanish cafes and bars, Tertulia is a new way to discover books through all the lively and enriching conversations they inspire. Tertulia serves up book recommendations and book talk from across social media, podcasts, and the web — all in one app which incorporates seamless book purchasing. If a book has moved someone enough to get them talking, you can find it, buy it, and share it on Tertulia.” There’s an interesting co-ownership element to the project, in which members who pay a fee to get cheap books, free shipping, etc, also have an ownership stake in the company which allows for a say in governance decisions and an eventual share of any profits it might one day make – while it’s unlikely anyone’s ever going to get rich through this, it’s a really nice example of collective organisation and practical community-building without reference to DAOs or NFTs or crypto of any sort (see, it IS possible!).
• Maps.fm: This comes to me via my friend Ben and is SUCH A GOOD IDEA (and another example of ‘mapping stuff is just a generally good and useful thing to do from a UX/UI point of view, turns out’) – Maps.fm’s simple gimmick is to let you look at a map of the world and then select podcast episodes that are about or related to a specific location on said map. Want to instantly be able to access every single podcast ever recorded about Swindon? No, of course you don’t, but should you ever find yourself gripped by such a mad compulsion then WOW are you going to be well-catered-for. Podcast discovery is famously terrible, and while this doesn’t fix that it does offer a really helpful way of, for example, researching somewhere you’re going on holiday, or a specific area of historic interest, or of finding some genuinely obscure shows in which people talk very, very seriously about some intensely-local concerns (“Episode 23 of ‘Malmesbury Matters, and we’re delving deep into the one-way traffic plans for the village and talking to Tony about his divorce and subsequent custody battle”).
• Notes: I rather love this – the website of Nicolas Soleriou (a lovely name, fwiw) contains a page which is devoted solely to quotes that he has found and thought worth keeping, along with a small line or two of context explaining why he thought it worth noting down, and, honestly, there is something so interesting about this, the chosen quotes and Nicolas’ reasoning for finding them meaningful, like (per all my favourite things) getting someone else’s internal monologue delivered directly to one’s inner ear.  To quote Nicolas, “I like a good quote — As shallow as some can be, I’ve often enjoyed the invitation to think that they extend. I’ve been grossed out by how some people abuse famous words. Quotes are everywhere. Most of the time used as marketing tools or worse, twisted to bring a feeling of wisdom to a piece of content. Simplification is necessary and I’ve come to appreciate the imperfection of language, as a mere mirror of our own imperfections. Famous words, stuff heard on the streets, friends, family, graffitis… Rather than just hoarding them in a pinterest board, google doc or some other terrible place on the internet, I’ll have them live here. I can’t write. I tried. So I’ll just add a short note to each post. It all goes somewhere, hopefully.” I really adore this.
• 2 Girls 1 Comp: This is, I promise, TOTALLY SFW despite the iffy name – nothing to do with scatplay (NO COME BACK) this is instead the wrapper page for a series of little tech/art projects which hack GTAV in various interesting ways to MAKE WORK; so there’s SanAndreas.TXT, which basically adds a Souls-like ‘memories’ mechanic to the game, allowing anyone with a specific mod installed to leave messages to other players (anyone with the mod can both write and read messages in-game), or there’s Every Thing, “A mod that sequentially spawns every object from the GTA V prop database until the game ultimately crashes under the weight of every thing.”I have said this before, I know (but, well, you try writing about stuff on the web for over a decade without repeating yourself every now and again! It’s hard!), but there’s something really interesting about artists using gameworlds as canvases like this and it’s something I genuinely feel has a lot of untapped potential from the point of view of Interesting Communications Techniques.
• Latecomer Magazine: I’m always interested to see a new online publication, particularly one which launches with a website as pleasingly-shiny and nicely-made as this one – that said, I appreciate that not everyone will be hugely here for a publication which looks set to explore and espouse ideas around longtermism, the previously-fashionable but now hopelessly-outmoded progenitor of the currently-zeitgeisty Effective Altruism (and now Accelerationist) movements. Still, presuming that Latecomer isn’t going to start publishing too much mad, borderline-fashy stuff about how it’s ok to let poor people starve actually because by focusing all the world’s money and attention and resources on hyper-future tech we’ll be saving the lives of TRILLIONS of future people, it might be worth keeping an eye on; the initial slate of articles is interesting and (from an admittedly-slightly-cursory-reading) not overtly insane or evil – from the editor’s synopsis, “Allison Deuttman writes on how close we are to a future of molecular manufacturing, and what’s holding us back. In my interview with Steve Hsu we talk about the future of machinic and biological intelligence, and how they intersect. Casey Handmer makes the case that abundant green energy is not only going to beat climate change, but also unleash our technological potential. We also have articles that explore the history of the future—how historical contingencies become permanent values. Almost fifty years ago James Yorke named the field of “Chaos Theory”—in his retrospective, he considers what chaos means for our prediction abilities. Jonathan Ratcliffe compares Russian Cosmism with contemporary Longtermism and illuminates their shared ideological ancestor. Finally, Xander Balwit interrogates the pricing of nature, and how we’ll value it when it ceases being productive.” Worth a look (but Web Curios accepts no responsibility if it ends up going full mask-off nutter in ~6m time).
• The Mangrove Photography Awards: I know I tend to be a bit sniffy about photo competitions, in the main because THERE ARE SO FCUKING MANY OF THEM DEAR GOD IS THERE ANY PHOTOGRAPHER IN THE FCUKING WORLD WHO HASN’T WON ONE OF THESE FCUKING PRIZES ahem, but this one pleased me no end, mainly because of its specific focus and its aim to raise awareness of the need to protect mangrove swamps as a particular category of ecosystem but also because it features photography and photographers from places that don’t always tend to feature in these sorts of competitions. There are thousands of entries on the site, but you can see the winners here
  – my personal favourite is the one from Colombia featuring what is by a long, long way the most Muppet-looking bird I have ever seen (you will know it when you see it), but, as ever, PICK YOUR OWN!
• Music-to-Image: Fun little toy hosted on HuggingFace which lets you feed it any audio you like and receive an image ‘derived’ from that audio in return. When I tried it earlier this week you were able to use a YT link, but that appears to have been killed so you’ll need to upload an MP3 or similar, but I can highly recommend just recording yourself singing along to something on your phone and just using that because WOW will you be upset at how ugly the visual interpretation of your warbling is. Your ‘vaguely-subversive but ultimately futile act of corporate rebellion’ task for this afternoon is to surreptitiously get audio recordings of all of the senior management in your company, use this to get a visual interpretation of their voices and then upload said visual interpretations to the company website to show the world what these people are really like inside. GO ON DO IT WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE TO ACHIEVE TODAY?
• Biscuit Shells: Via the surprisingly-personable stationery retailer Present & Correct on Twitter comes this link to a Japanese retailer who, as far as I can tell, exists only to stock those wafery biscuit shells into which companies like Kinder stuff chocolate-flavoured paste, in a frankly dizzying array of shapes and sizes and designs and flavours and, look, I can’t make head not tail of the pricing and shipping details given my ability to speak Japanese is literally zero but I like to think that there will be at least one of you who will see this link and be compelled to spend the next month ordering, filling and then distributing tiny wafer christmas trees, so it feels worth including.
• The Genrerator: On the one hand, this is a silly, simple little gag website which uses (I presume) Markov Chains to generate a seemingly-infinite array of made-up music genres inspired by legendary (and legendarily niche) music magazine The Quietus – it just gave me “50s Kyrgyzstani Downtempo–Lofi Disco Folk”, for example, which sounds great; on the other, though, thanks to the MAGICAL AGE OF GENERATIVE AI through which we’re now living/limping (delete per your degree of optimism) it’s also a fun way of seeing if The Machine is able to imagine what these invented genres might in fact sound like. Why not try spinning up a few of these and then feeding them to the Google music lab generator thing, or Riffusion from last week? Who knows, you might discover some HITHERTO UNIMAGINED new form of music that will for the first time bridge the aural gap between man and machine – although judging by Riffusion’s attempt at the aforementioned Kyrgysztani grooves, that seems unlikely.
• Bionicle Media: I am vaguely aware of the fact that Bionicles were a toy range that were VERY POPULAR with kids perhaps 10 or so years younger than me – if YOU are a millennial who feels nostalgic about this particular brand of aggressively-marketed plastic tat then will THIS be the memoryhole for you! “In 2005, a BIONICLE fan named Auron began collating official BIONICLE content and offering it for download via links in forum threads on BZPower. As the task grew and more people joined the effort, Auron’s Downloads evolved into a new independent website, BioMedia Project. The contributions and work of dozens of fans over the ensuing years have made it the largest repository of official BIONICLE media in existence.” Music! Fonts! Old comics! All the Bionicle media you could POSSIBLY want! Cancel Christmas, it’s impossible to top this.
• ANHVN: A genuinely charming personal website by Anh, a designer and artist – this is where they keep their various personal projects, and while there’s a bunch of interesting work in here (and their blog is lovely), the thing that really struck me about this was the GORGEOUS little four-panel projects that introduce each individual project with a small origin story as to how and why it came to be; it’s such an unexpected and novel way of introducing work that really brings it to life, in part through Anh’s art style but also because there’s something that just works about the four-panel narrative as a setup. A really beautiful tiny project, this.
• Another AI Video: This one’s a short using Midjourney and Pika Labs to create and animate – again, it’s…limited, but again I am seeing genuine progress in terms of the quality of the visuals and animation, and I encourage you to keep an eye on this stuff because the pace of improvement around the edges of AI animation is really quite dizzying at the moment.
• Tory Or Not Tory: On the one hand, it’s total rubbish to presume that you can tell someone’s politics by the way they look; on the other, this little game that asks you to identify which of the two MPs you’re presented with is in fact the HORRID CONSERVATIVE based on their faces alone is surprisingly easy to win, suggesting that there perhaps IS a specific cast of the eye or mouth that’s common to all of those of A CERTAIN TYPE (personally I tend to find the flesh-coloured lips the biggest giveaway, but see what you think).
• Dropy Blocky: Horrible name aside (really, SUCH a horrible name; try saying out loud under your breath and you can’t help but inadvertently grimace as you do), this is quite a fun little timewaster that basically asks you to play a simple version of Tetris across various levels against the clock.
• Which Way Round?: A game designed to separate the shape rotators from the wordcels, I did surprisingly well at this for a few levels before suddenly hitting quite a hard spatial awareness wall and feeling very embarrassed at my complete inability to manipulate a three-dimensional object in my imaginary headspace. See whether YOU are better equipped to manage the whole ‘existing in meatspace’ thing with this little game, which asks you to keep track of what direction a specific object will be facing in after a series of rotations around an axis – like one of those ‘shell/marble’ games that gullible kids (ie me in Florence when I was 15) get fleeced by on bridges, except here there’s no cheating going on and so if you get the answer wrong there’s noone to blame but yourself.
• Halfsies: The last of the ‘nicked off B3ta’ game links this week comes in the shape of this simple-seeming but deceptively difficult ludic diversion in which your sole task is to seek to divide the shapes exactly in half. “Easy!”, I hear you cry – come back and say that around level 12.
• The London Tube Station Memory Game: I think every single Londoner must have seen this one by now, but in case not – HOW MANY TUBE STATIONS CAN YOU GUESS FROM MEMORY?!?!? This is GREAT – difficult, frustrating and the sort of thing that you can use to start REALLY bitter arguments between you and your friends and your family and your partner as to who is the REALEST MOST AUTHENTIC GORBLIMEY LONDONER (blood will be spilt).
• Suika: Our final cute timewasting distraction of the week comes in the form of Suika, a simple-but-surprisingly-addictive little number where you basically just have to smush fruits together in pairs – think of it as that 2048 game, but with grapes and melons instead of numbers and you’ll be fine. This is REALLY satisfying, and will suck you in surprisingly fast, so possibly finish that spreadsheet before you click this one.

By Maisie Cowell

WE FINISH UP THE MUSIC WITH THIS SORT OF WORLD MUSIC LOUNGE-TYPE SELECTION BY PHIL MILL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Mosher Mags: An account whose sole purpose is to post photos of articles and photoshoots from old emo/metal/rock magazines from the 90s and 00s. Presuming that they remember to excise all the laudatory LostProphets interviews, this seems like good, clean retro run.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Kelly Lu

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It does rather feel, doesn’t it, looking at the world over the past few weeks and indeed for much of the past couple of decades, that much of recent history has been, well, a mistake. Can we do it all again, please, but different?

HELLO HOW ARE WE ALL DOING? Is everything colossal and jagged and terrifying? Is the future – and, frankly, the present – looming at you in sinister, hefty fashion? Do things BODE, generally speaking, and not in a good way?

Yeah, I know, sucks. Still, for the next…ooh, probably two or three hours if you click EVERYTHING and pay close attention…you can forget all that in favour of the delicious, soothing, nourishing (not nourishing – Web Curios has approximately the same sort of nourishing qualities as an MP3player, probably a Zune) smorgasbord of links and words I have arrayed before you – there are some genuinely CRACKING things in Curios this week (none of them the bits I’m responsible for, to be clear) and so hopefully this will go someway towards soothing the fantods, at least for a short while.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are still beautiful, whatever THEY might be saying behind your back.

By Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH AN IMPECCABLE SELECTION OF DETROIT TECHNO, SPECIFICALLY ‘THE BEST TRACKS EVER’ ACCORDING TO OLLY CHUBB! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS SPENT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THIS WEEK THINKING HOW INCREDIBLY HARD IT MUST BE TO BE AN ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALIST, PT.1:  

By Heeey Studio

NEXT, ENJOY THIS GORGEOUS SELECTION OF TRACKS PICKED BY TEJU COLE TO ACCOMPANY HIS LATEST BOOK!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS SPENT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THIS WEEK THINKING HOW INCREDIBLY HARD IT MUST BE TO BE AN ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALIST, PT.2:      

• The Unbrexit: I don’t ordinarily link to websites for venues that I have never been to – and, let’s be honest, that I am unlikely to ever visit – but I will make an exception for the website for this pub which is somewhere in Germany (the town of Ahaus, specifically – I have literally no idea why this nondescript town near the Dutch border, which according to Wikipedia is mainly known as a place where the German government, in its wisdom, chooses to store spent nuclear waste, decided to body the Brits this hard, but I am glad that they did) and which since 2017 has been a very weird-looking celebration of intensely-mediocre English pub culture. They do quizzes! It wouldn’t surprise me if they had the Only Fools and Horses pinball machine! This is very odd, but perhaps the strangest thing about it is how much it looks like a very, very bad pub built into a 50s council estate in South West London – honestly, it’s UNCANNY.
• The Early Office Museum: Two things here: firstly, this is a classic Curios site, monomaniacal and obsessive and poorly-designed, all the good stuff – if you want a really DEEP dive into the workings of the early office life, and a trove of images and information about how the world of work operated in the earliest days of organised, mass-scale white collar and clerical labour then WOW are you in for a treat; secondly, this has perhaps my favourite angry, impotent scream of rage about THE MODERN INTERNET I have seen on any website – specifically, the screed at the top of the homepage railing against people pinning images from the site to Pinterest and thereby royally-screwing the site’s traffic and general raison d’etre, which basically ends up saying “EITHER PINTEREST GOES OR THE MUSEUM DOES!”. Sadly the screed appears to have been posted several years ago, and, well, Pinterest persists, so I think that the forces of The Bad Web have once again emerged victorious – still, here at Web Curios we pour one out for the Early Office Museum and mourn its passing. Also, fcuk Pinterest, such a horrible website.
• Kinetic Verbs: Some glorious examples of typographic animation here – the work here is beautiful and clean and really imaginative, and will appeal to any designers or animators of typography-freaks among you.
• Romance Covers: The dataviz wizards at The Pudding have turned their attention to the romance novel market in their latest bit of analysis, or more specifically to the COVERS of said romance novels – how have the various hunks and beefcakes and damsels in varying degrees of distress depicted on the jackets changed over time to better represent the shifting morals and mores of the times? This is really interesting – I was particularly struck by the fact that it seems that 2015 was PEAK NAKED for the covers, with lovers depicted on books in subsequent years being more decorously-clad in what is perhaps another sign of the rather more stentorian moral times in which we live. The piece also looks at representations on diversity and the style of the covers (illustrative vs photographic, etc), and is, as ever with The Pudding’s work, a brilliant piece of digital design and usability – there are SO many nice touches here, including the ability to compile the covers that catch your eye from those referenced into ‘reading lists’, and frankly anyone working in the aesthetic side of digital publishing could do worse than learn from the work these people are doing at the moment imho.
• Goose Generator: Who wouldn’t like a website which when you click on it generates a selection of seemingly-always-different low-resolution images of the faces of geese in pleasingly-cheery primary colours? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Photos Of Tiny Things: Or, to give it its full name, ‘The Nikon Small World 2023 Photomicrography Competition’ – but tbh ‘photos of tiny things’ tells you all you need to know. This year’s selection are, as per, VERY VERY SMALL, but equally are pretty fcuking amazing – I think the second-place pic of the match being struck is my personal favourite, although I appreciate that an appreciation for photos of fire is probably considered a bit basic, but I also very much liked the 8th placed shot which looked to me as though Klimt and Schiele had decided to team up and get into abstracts a bit – you, though, must as ever feel free to pick your own. NO YOU MUST.
• Musing: I really really like this idea – it’s not a novel one by any stretch of the imagination, fine, but there’s a certain unspoilt purity in the ‘just speke your branes anonymously’ model and it seems to be implemented neatly-enough here. “”Musing” is a deep and reflective thought or contemplation. So if you are looking for a place to share your thoughts, ideas, or just want to write something down, this is the place for you. No feedback, no likes, no comments, no followers, no friends, no ads, no distractions, no bullsh1t. just you and humains thoughts somewhere on planet earth. No account needed, only the date, the message, langitude & latitude “within an area of 500 meters” are saved. Your thoughts will vanish naturally cause only the first 100 messages are displayed. You can be shocked, surprised, amused, or just bored by what you read, but this is the beauty of it.” This feels like an early coding project by a kid tbh – not that that’s a bad thing – and I am pleased to be able to report that there is NOTHING HORRIBLE on there (at least at the time of writing), whether by accident or moderators’ design; most of the contributions seem to be from South and Central America at present, so a bit of Spanish might help if you want to take the emotional temperature of a small subset of the world’s population via this site.
• The Righting: This is an interesting idea, in a ‘know your enemy’ sort of way (NB – I don’t think that my politics will come as any surprise to anyone who reads this newsletter, but, for the avoidance of doubt, I can’t help but think of the right wing in modern western politics as being the ‘enemy’ – sorry to anyone of a more conservative bent who might be reading this, it’s almost certainly not personal) – The Righting presents a daily selection of headlines being served up by the right wing media (in the US, in the main, which means it’s obviously a very particular (very mad, very hateful) type of right wing we’re talking about) to give an overview of the talking points being pushed today. Obviously for non-US people this is of less immediate interest, but, personally-speaking, I think anything that the US wingnuts are shouting about now is increasingly-likely to be the things that your Badenochs and Bravermans (and, eventually, Melonis and the rest) will be shouting about in six months’ time (because, and sorry to be a conspiratorial broken record about this, but, IT’S THE SAME MONEY FUNDING ALL THESE PEOPLE) are yelling about over here in six months or so and as such this is worth keeping a vague eye on.
• Oort: This is so far from my area of expertise – or even, frankly, comprehension – that I feel a bit guilty including it, but I figure there may be a few of you who get a kick from it. Do you program? Do you do so specifically in Rust? Would you like a(n apparently) fun game which lets you both practice your coding skills AND control a fleet of spaceships and eventually code a sort of Star Wars-type AI that can compete in tournaments against other similarly-minded people? WELL GREAT YOU WILL LIKE THIS THEN!
• Neon Flames: This is quite a simple browser toy that lets you create rather pretty abstract images from a limited colour palette – it’s not that exciting per se, but I realised that everything you make with it past a certain point starts to look like an incredible image of deep space nebulae taken by Hubble, and when you think of it more as a tool to create an infinite number of imaginary galaxies, I don’t know, it becomes a lot cooler. There’s something quite soothing about this – seriously, if you’re feeling a bit frazzled I can highly recommend 5 minutes of abstract galaxy painting to take the edge off a bit.
• All Of The Slide Rules: OH GOD THIS IS PERFECT. Would you like access to the greatest collections of slide rules ever assembled by anyone ever? Would you like to access the combined archival knowledge of the six greatest collectors of slide rules ever to exist? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is the archive collection of the Oughtred Society, which apparently existed to celebrate how awesome slide rules are – each member has their own interstitial page before the site links to their archive of images of slide rules – let me just reiterate: THEIR ARCHIVE OF IMAGES OF SLIDE RULES – and each archivist gets a small pen portrait and, look, I need to reproduce this in its entirety because it is SO GOOD and SO PURE: “Louis Gotlib grew up after slide rules had largely been replaced by electronic calculators. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina and has been a chemistry teacher for thirty-two years. One day around 1996 he saw a catalog from the MIT Museum Shop where old slide rules were being sold, bought a few, looked around on ebay and the web, and has been collecting ever since. Louis has been an Oughtred Society member since 1997 and was recently selected to serve on the Board of Directors. Louis has a special fondness for slide rules and calculating devices with a chemical orientation but his collection of 1300 items covers as many makers and specializations as possible. Louis has published papers and given presentations on slide rules, cell biology, and chemistry education. He also coauthors study guides for students taking standardized tests and plays chess. Louis can often be heard in his classroom saying things like “put that calculator away and just think for a moment!” We are privileged to present HERE Louis’s collection of slide rules.” Basically if you don’t love this then you are a bit dead inside. BONUS SLIDE RULE CONTENT: bizarrely I also came across this longread about the history of the pocket calculator this week which contains quite a bit about slide rules and which suggests to me that there is some sort of grand plan afoot and it involves units of measurement.
• Old People Reminisce: Or, to give this Reddit thread its full title, “what do young people get completely wrong about past decades?” Obviously this is ALL GenX/Boomer nostalgia and as such your mileage will vary immensely – I am linking it here, though, because there are enough of these that aren’t totally obvious that it made me think it might make an interesting read for anyone younger than, say 20, or something for those of you with kids to share with them as a futile way of attempting to bridge the increasingly cavernous gap between you (LOL!).
• Tooth Antiques: Have you been searching with an increasingly-frenzied degree of frustration for a one-stop-shop for all your dental horror-related needs? Have you been looking for that one, perfect, impossible-to-find gift for your odontophobic partner? WELL LOOK NO FURTHER! Tooth Antiques is an online emporium dedicated to selling stuff made out of old teeth – human teeth, to be clear. Stuff like jewellery and clothing and dolls and keyrings…the shop is based in Canada and ships internationally, and the FAQ is very clear to point out that all their teeth are legally and ethically sourced…so GO FOR IT! (thanks to Rina for the tip!)
• Literally All Of The AI-Generated Bongo: THIS IS A LINK THAT TAKES YOU STRAIGHT TO AN AWFUL LOT OF PICTURES OF A VERY EXPLICIT NATURE AND WHICH YOU MAY NOT REALLY WANT TO SEE SO BE WARNED! Ahem. I’ve been tracking the relationship between AI image generation and sex for several years here in Curios, and the main reason I include this – aside from the fact that it’s horrific and weird and gross and troubling and funny and awful and HORRIBLY FUTURE, obvs – is that it struck me when I saw it that comparing it to The Machine Gaze, Shardcore’s work on AI and bongo from three years ago, is a pretty amazing showcase of the speed of change of this tech. The link takes you to a website which is both a free AI bongo generator AND a rolling showcase of all the images being churned out by said AI bongo generator – to be clear, as with 99% of all AI-generated bongo, this is intensely cisheteronormative and you’re not going to find much here to interest you if you want anything other than a narrow range of waifu-level archetypes covered in wallpaper paste, and, honestly , there’s something really quite unpleasant about the same themes and styles of image occurring over and over and over again…look, I don’t have any particular viewpoint on the ‘generations have been ruined by bongo’ argument (I simply don’t have the data to draw on, tbh), but it’s hard not to think as you scroll, numbed to the spaff and the ahegao faces and the infinitely-recurring pixie noses, that something very peculiar has happened to male sexuality over the past few years. ANYWAY, this is sort of repellent and dizzying and mad (seriously, if you want to feel a moment of very real bodyhorror vertigo I suggest you go to the ‘generate’ tab of this website and look at the preconfigured tags that you can use to create your own smut – it…it doesn’t feel like a healthy way to conceive of sex, this, does it?), but I managed to find a small window of comedy by toggling the ‘tags’ view on the top menu and seeing exactly how badly the AI gets some of these wrong (seriously, there is some WONDERFUL unintentional comedy in there – ‘surfing’? ‘Lumberjack’ ‘NUCLEAR VAULT?!?’) – in general, though, I can’t pretend that this is anything other than depressing and a bit gross.
• Puzzmo: This is a) a great source of daily new puzzle games; and b) a really smart idea for driving interest and adoption of a thing (I think). Puzzmo’s gimmick is that it’s limited access to people with the SKILLS: “Puzzmo combines newspaper favorites like Crossword Puzzles, modern classics like Typeshift, and some brand new puzzles created by me and a small team of artists and designers. For now, Puzzmo is locked. Every day we’ll mail out 500 keys so that only puzzle-loving humans can get in early. If you’re interested in receiving a key – or just having some fun – the first step is solving today’s puzzle.” So anyone can play the daily puzzle, but access to the whole site is limited to people who are into puzzles enough to keep coming back and trying to get on the waiting list, and the competitive aspect will drive interest…yeah, I think this is smart (and the puzzles are good) and as a way of ‘growth hacking’ (sorry) it struck me as  decent.
• Can You Break The Algorithm?: This is imho a bad title for what is an excellent game – by the same people (AlgorithmWatch) who made Moderator Mayhem a while back, this is another game which also works to educate the player  as to the difficult questions and decisions inherent in managing content at scale. Here, you’re cast as the CEO of an imagined social platform (which is definitely Twitter), and over the course of about 30m gameplay (longer if you take your time) you’re asked to make decisions on moderation policy and platform functionality and how to spend investor money over several rounds of fundraising before you get to the eventual holy grail of the IPO – lots of the examples are drawn from the real world, and if you’re the sort of person who’s followed this sort of news at all over the past decade then you’ll recognise much of the material. This is fun, and does an excellent job of showing how incredibly fcuking difficult moderation and community management is – but it also does an excellent job of demonstrating just quite how hard certain platforms and, specifically, individuals have fcuked it of late. Yet ANOTHER example, by the way, of how good game design can work wonders in terms of helping to communicate HARD AND OFTEN BORING STUFF.
• Quest At The Museum: Ok, so you need to be able to physically make it to London’s Natural History Museum to play this, but I LOVE it as a concept and it’s the sort of thing that could be adapted for anywhere really with a bit of work and imagination. It’s basically a scaled-down, kid-friendly D&D adventure, using the museum as a game space, designed by…someone anonymous (sorry, brilliant person who designed this, but I can’t find your name anywhere on the site) who has made the whole thing available to download for free here – honestly, how good does this sound? “Ever walked the halls of the Natural History Museum and thought “this place needs more riddles, dragons, and sword fights?” If so, you’re in the right place. We created this game for my daughter’s 11th birthday. It was a lot of work-and fun! So we’ve chosen to make it available for anyone who wants to play. It takes you around the museum, using the exhibits as encounter arenas. The dinosaurs are dragons. The stairs are the Cliffs of Insanity! You get it.” Charming, a great idea, a generous thing to make it freely available, and totally the sort of thing that you can use as CREATIVE INSPIRATON for anything you like – I am serious when I say that the current boom in D&D means that you have never had a better chance to pitch that extremely-geeky activation that you have always dreamed of (also, if anyone can be fcuked, I reckon that there is genuine mileage in creating a ‘UK General Election 2024’ D&D module – I am 100% serious on this, I think you would be AMAZED at the interest if you scripted it right).
• Wind Waker: I have never been a Nintendo kid and so never played this version of Zelda, but you don’t have to be familiar with it to enjoy this remarkable little tech demo – someone’s basically recrated the whole sailing mechanic from the game and made it playable in-browser, and while there’s not really anything to DO per se there’s equally something undeniably soothing about pootling around the azure waters in your little vessel, collecting rupees – there’s also another mode where you can play a sort of endless runner-type game, but personally I’m just here for the aimless sailing.
• Little Chef: Can you combine all the different ingredients to make all the different possible recipes? This is charming – the look and feel is gorgeous, and there are all sorts of little easter eggs in the animations of the various different kitchen elements to discover, but, equally, I got so frustrated by my inability to find all the various combinations of ingredients after about 15m that I had to go and have a fag, so well, your mileage may vary (by the way, if you’re struggling to get things into the pot, aim for the right hand side – seems to help).
• Benjamin Davis: Benjamin Davis designs games – this is his personal website where he showcases his work. Several of his latest projects are app downloads, but if you scroll down the page a bit you can find a dozen or so small browsergames which are PERFECT for whiling away a few bored minutes while you choke back the tears between powerpoint slides and meetings (a few of these need Flash, but you can get a really nice modern emulator for that here if you want one) (this link via the always-excellent Paco, btw).
• Hands: It’s rare that you see something in the world of browsergames that stands out aesthetically – there’s a certain tendency towards pixelart or 8/16-bit, as a rule – which is perhaps why Hands charmed me so immediately; it’s got the very particular look and feel of a certain type of mid-90s CD-ROM game, the photos and stop-motion animations style giving it a very specific vibe which is enhanced by the lightly-surreal nature of the setting and the puzzles and…well, you’ll get the idea. Your goal is to get the hands to meet, and clasp – see how you get on. Can we maybe have more stuff designed in this style, please? It’s awesome, sort of ‘maximalist post-Soviet collapse’, if I had to name it (as you can tell, there’s a reason I don’t specialise in the creation of neologisms).
• Frasier Fantasy: Our final miscellaneous link this week is SO BEAUTIFUL and SO PERFECT and, honestly, if you like Frasier (the original, not the apparently appalling remake which I am refusing to really acknowledge) then you owe it to yourself to play this. Made in (I think) a Gameboy Colour RPG emulator-type engine, this game is a top-down, GB-style adventure in which you play as Frasier trying to get everything ready for one of his legendary soirees – except obviously there are hurdles to overcome. It will take you a while to get the hang of it, and there are some frustrations around the pace of the text at first, but you’ll get into it and once you do it is JOYOUS – I promise you, the writing is tonally superb and you will be reading all of the lines out in the character voices, and, seriously, I had 20 minutes of pure, unalloyed pleasure with this yesterday and I think you will too (one tip – when you save the game just hit the ‘action’ button when it says ‘saving’ as otherwise it’ll take ages) – this is just good, clean, healthy fun (and hopefully makes up for the AI bongo a few links back, for which I now feel sort of guilty).

By Flora Anna Buda

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX IS BY ELADO AND IS A JOYOUS SELECTION OF DISCO AND FUNK AND ASSORTED OTHER SIMILAR STUFF THAT HAS MADE ME MOMENTARILY FORGET THAT THE SKY IS CURRENTLY THE COLOUR OF GRAPHITE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Patrick Bergsma: Patrick is a Dutch artist who works with Japanese pottery and bonsai, and his Insta feed is just GORGEOUS.
• Salvos: This is a New York sandwich shop’s Insta account, which I discovered because of this lovely profile and which I am linking to not because the sandwiches are amazing (although they do look nice) but because there is something so lovely about the fact that it’s just a bloke, a bike, and Insta feed and a cooler full of portable snacks. This is exactly the sort of thing that also gets ruined by being profiled in the New Yorker and by being featured in newsletters like this (oh, ok, not like this – cooler newsletters with cooler readers, probably), so let’s hope that doesn’t in fact happen.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By  Sophy Rickett

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Well, fcuk.

I obviously have no idea who reads Web Curios, but it seems reasonable to assume that some of you are Jewish – I hope your families and friends and loved ones are ok. It’s less likely that any of you are Palestinians, I think, but in case any of you are then I hope the same for you too.

Beyond that I obviously have nothing useful or informed or helpful to say about a situation that is incredibly fcuking bleak, other than perhaps to remind everyone (and, as ever, myself) that sometimes it’s ok not to publicly opine about every fcuking thing because, per this excellent and ever-relevant Tweet, you are not a fcuking embassy.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you could probably do with some interesting links and internet ephemera to take the edge off so, well, here you are.

By Anthony Gerace

LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH A FOUR-HOUR SET FROM MR SCRUFF, WHICH IS NOT ONLY LEGITIMATELY GREAT BUT ALSO CAN’T FAIL TO PUT A SMALL SMILE ON YOUR FACE WHICH, FRANKLY, FEELS LIKE IT MIGHT BE NECESSARY THIS WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH DOES WONDER WHETHER THIS MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE SOME SORT OF POST-TRUTH RUBICON (BUT RATHER HOPES IT ISN’T), PT.1:  

By Aistė Stancikaitė

NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY THIS SET BY THE KLEPTONES FROM THIS YEAR’S GLASTONBURY? AND IF YOU ENJOYED THAT THEN WHY NOT ENJOY THIS ADDITIONAL SET OF THEIRS, ALSO FROM GLASTONBURY?

THE SECTION WHICH DOES WONDER WHETHER THIS MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE SOME SORT OF POST-TRUTH RUBICON (BUT RATHER HOPES IT ISN’T), PT.2:      

• JD In The Metaverse: I do enjoy those occasional moments in 2023 when you get reminded of that frothy, idiotic period a year or so ago when a surprising number of people who you’d think ought to have known better were suckered into paying significant amounts of cash for…a really crap level in a sub-Roblox digital sandbox that a grand total of, at best, 60 actual real people would ever experience – and here’s another one! This is Jack Daniel’s demonstrating that someone at ‘metaverse platform’ Spatial really saw them coming, with this IMMERSIVE EXHIBITION which…oh, fcuk it, seeing as someone evidently SLAVED over this copy I will here reproduce it in full: “Jack Honey Art, Beats + Lyrics welcomes you to “The Verse”, an immersive VR experience that celebrates visionary artists and musicians that push the urban art culture forward. This out-of-this-world exhibition showcases incredible urban artwork, iconic photo collections, a larger-than-life musical concert, and a bar where you can actually order Jack Honey to be delivered right to your door.” Which, of course, translates into an empty, soulless virtual space – which, if you’re a connoisseur of these dreadful things as I by now sadly am, you will notice is VERY SIMILAR to the empty, soulless virtual spaces created for all the other brands on the Spatial platform, because it turns out that there are only a set number of off-the-shelf metaverses and, well, people are lazy – which is weirdly incredibly lo-res and, er, doesn’t seem to load properly! Special mention too to the ‘art gallery’ on level 2, which seems to be almost entirely broken – excellent quality control, everyone! I really, really hope that the people involved with this have had to have some very specific, very pointed conversations about budget and impact – how many bottles of JD Honey do you think were ordered through this? I think…three!
• The Journey: Staying with pointlessly-shiny websites that don’t really make any sense, here’s a GLORIOUS example of ‘budgets? PAH! We work in luxe, darling, and budgets are things that the little people have to worry about!’ as an ethos. LVMH is apparently a VERY INNOVATIVE COMPANY in lots of different ways – while you might think that the best way to learn about that innovation might be to, I don’t know, read the business’ annual report, or to look through its portfolio of companies, or to listen to a talk with their head of innovation, you are WRONG! The best way, it turns out, is to access ‘The Journey’, a text-lite and VERY gnomic website which itself is just a portal to a bunch of equally-confusing and similarly-gnomic other websites! I love this so much – the fact that it uses copy like ‘navigate through LVMH’s new innovation territories and opens windows into the Group’s possible futures!’, which means literally nothing! The fact that it’s not really clear why you would want to click on anything! The fact that for some reason all of these innovative concepts are presented as strange, mirrored rectangles in some sort of strange space desert! The assumption that I have either the time, or the patience, to spend a few hours parsing whatever the fcuk LVMH thinks this all means! Well done EVERYONE, this is very special indeed.
• The Working Class History Map: Working Class History is a project dedicated to surfacing the stories of ‘ordinary’ people from around the world who have shaped the communities or environments in which they have lived; to quote the project’s ‘About’ page, “History isn’t made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people. It is our struggles which have shaped our world, and any improvement in our conditions has been won by years of often violent conflict and sacrifice. WCH is dedicated to all those who have struggled in the past for a better world, and who continue to do so now. To help record and popularise our grassroots, people’s history, as opposed to the top-down accounts of most history books.” The project has recently launched a new map interface, which you can use to find stories from specific places to dive into – for example, looking at Italy I have just learned of “ Tommaso Pesci, an innocent farmer who was murdered by fascists two days previously. His funeral procession was led by a column of the Arditi del Popolo, Italy’s first militant anti-fascist group, who marched armed with knives, bayonets and walking sticks. The killing prompted in response the first action of the Arditi outside Rome, who successfully prevented fascists from entering Viterbo for three days.” You could lose days to this.
• Vedeo: AI video continues to be, well, a bit shonky, but IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET BETTER AND EVENTUALLY IT WILL BE GOOD ENOUGH. Vedeo is a website that collects examples of AI-generated video and animation, submitted by creators and enthusiasts, and is a decent place to bookmark if you’re interested in keeping track of the tech’s development and spotting the exact point at which it flips from ‘no, everyone in this video looks like they are made of fuzzy felt, I feel incredibly discomfited by their teeth’ to ‘I am literally never hiring another video editor again’.
• Wikiloc:Do YOU love the great outdoors? If you’re reading this it seems…unlikely, tbh, but I suppose it’s possible that some of you might spend SOME time away from screens every now and again – anyway, if you’re the sort of person who has ‘kit’ and owns dubbin wax then you might find Wikiloc useful, a site which collects information about walking trails and hikes across the world, and makes them available for anyone to search and download and access via an app. This has been going for 17 YEARS, which feels frankly remarkable and made me feel warm and fuzzy in an unexpected, healthy, bosky sort of way.
• IKEA Instructions For Anything: A cute little AI toy on HuggingFace – type in anything you like and The Machine will generate a cute little illustration in the style of IKEA self-assembly furniture instructions (I promise this will make sense once you click the link). I particularly enjoyed giving it things like “pointless office drudgery”, which would make a truly EXCELLENT motivational poster imho.
• International Pet Photographer of the Year: I’ve just noticed that this site has the surprisingly-aggressive banner legend ‘UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT’ running across the top of the homepage, which makes me wonder whether there is some sort of dark beef underpinning the change, whether the previous conveners were found to be taking kickbacks from ambitious Borzoi snappers or something. ANYWAY, we will probably never know, so best to focus instead on the photos of the LOVELY ANIMALS – these are obviously great photos, but I can’t help but also find them…incredibly, endearingly gauche, in the same way as those staged studio portraits that your friends get of them and their partner and their kids, and that you have to smile at and pretend to like while all the while wondering what the everliving fcuk happened to their sense of aesthetics (fortunately the friends in question don’t read Curios – or at least I really hope that they don’t, otherwise this is going to get quite awkward). I strongly recommend that you click into the ‘creative’ category for some truly wonderful staging and post-production, including one portrait of a dog that looks almost EXACTLY like someone’s run it through a ‘make this photo look like a pencil drawing’ filter from a seaside arcade photobooth (also, there is one particular dog on that page who you know will never forgive their owner – you’ll know the one when you see it).
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year: MORE CRITTERS! These are obviously all sorts of amazing – the winning photo, which you may already have seen elsewhere, is particularly gorgeous this year – but my personal favourite is the one of the mollusc…well, *squirting* (although special mention also to the genuinely-unhinged shot of the people bothering the dead snakes, which is…Jesus). NB – there are a reasonable number of pics in here of animals that are wounded or dead or dying, so, you know, caveat emptor and all that.
• We Are Learning: Ostensibly this is a platform that lets you create animated CG training videos using a bunch of pre-rendered avatars who you can give scripts to and who will ‘act’ out vignettes and scenarios to make training more ‘engaging’ – but, honestly, give a fcuk. The appeal of this, to me at least, is the ability to use it to bring the terrible scripts spat out by that AI script generator that I linked to earlier to life – THINK OF THE BRILLIANTLY-TERRIBLE THINGS YOU CAN MAKE! You need to pay to get full access, but there’s a free tier which is worth playing around with (but only for frivolous purposes, please).
• Cocoa Press: I don’t imagine that many of you are domestic confectioners – still, in the unlikely event that one of my vanishingly-small readership is in the habit of making elaborate sculptures from criolla in their spare time then BOY do I have the toy for you! Cocoa Press is basically a 3d printer for chocolate – for the low, low (ok, not actually that low at all, but, come on, YOU CAN 3D PRINT CHOCOLATE FFS!) price of $1500 you can get a machine with which you can create, I don’t know, A SCALE MODEL OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS OUT OF CHOCOLATE! A BUST OF YOUR OWN FACE, OUT OF CHOCOLATE! A FULL-BODY-CAST OF YOURSELF THAT YOU CAN EAT IN SOME SORT OF BIZARRELY-SEXUAL CANNIBALISTIC RITUAL…OUT OF CHOCOLATE! Can one of you please get one of these and let me know how you get on? Thanks!
• The Good Song Club: Many years ago, in the halcyon days of circa 2010 when everything was NEW and SHINY and HOPEFUL (or, more accurately, we were stupid and naive and blind to what was already happening) there was an excellent if short-lived website called This Is My Jam, which basically worked as a single-idea social network; anyone with a profile was able to have a single song up on there at any given time, the idea being that you will always have a particular obsessional favourite track of the moment, and that the site was a place to share and celebrate your current obsessions and where you’d go to share your new ones…anyway, it was lovely but sadly doesn’t exist anymore (because nothing pure ever lasts), but I was reminded of it by this site, which exists solely to share links to good songs on YouTube. I like this – more of these VERY SPECIFIC single-use networks, please.
• The Birdsong Visualiser: This makes SUCH lovely artworks, honestly – you need to jump through a couple of hoops to produce the images, but it’s pretty easy and the outputs really are gorgeous in a slightly-70s-design kind of way. The idea here is that the software works to produce a visualisation of different audiofiles of birdsongs, which render as sort of negative-orange explosions…wow, I really am making a pig’s ear of this – just rest assured that that you’ll get something genuinely cool looking if you follow the instructions.
• Paper Toys: Specifically, SPOOKY PAPER TOYS! This is a frankly mental collection of print-out-and-cut-and-fold-and-keep model instructions, running the gamut from ‘spooky houses’ to ‘shrunken heads’ to, er, ‘spooky biplanes’ (it does feel like a *bit* of license has been taken around the ‘spookiness’ of some of these, but given the generosity in making them all free to download it seems somewhat churlish to complain). The papercraft candelabras are genuinely cool-looking, in particular, and would grace ANY table – there is a lot of really cool stuff here if you and your friends/family/flatmates feel like spending an evening with the scissors and the pritt stick.
• Hummingbirds: “Published between 1849 and 1887, English ornithologist John Gould’s monumental work depicts and describes all the known species of hummingbirds at the time—comprising 418 lithographic plates and information on 537 species.” THERE ARE SO MANY PRETTY ILLUSTRATIONS OF VERY SMALL BIRDS HERE. No idea what you might do with them, but I’m sure you’ll think of something.
• Google’s History: I know it’s not cool, and I know that it is Just Another Fcuking Business, and that at heart it’s motivated by the pursuit of profit and shareholder value just like every other soulless capitalist enterprise, but I must confess to still having a soft spot for Google as a business – there’s something about the brand that will always remind me of those early days surfing the web (YES, IT WAS JUST LIKE SURFING, WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT?) and the endless possibilities afforded by the textbox and the places it might take you, limited only by your own imagination (and possibly your own fear and embarrassment about what you might find and how you might feel about it), and, well, I know that everything’s adverts and sales funnels here in 2023, but I still feel that old nostalgia. Which, perhaps, is why I enjoyed this rather pretty but of scrollytelling, which takes you through the evolution of the company’s search offering from the mid-90s to the present day. If nothing else it’s just really stylishly-built, and a reminder that the Google design team really has been consistently excellent for a long time now.
• Observable Radio: I don’t quite know what this is, but I think it might be something that some of you find appealing – it self-describes as ‘a found footage anthology podcast of retro and analogue horror’, and the blurb reads as follows: “Late at night, from an isolated satellite communications installation, an unnamed Observer secretly broadcasts a bizarre transmission to a nearby facility. In the wake of a global communications disruption following a near-miss with a comet, he has begun to detect mysterious signals from other worlds. With no one but an isolated colleague that he can trust, he shares a series of seemingly impossible signals, unsure of what to do next…” This sounds pleasingly-weird, if you’re in the market for something seasonally-spooky to feed into your lugholes.
• The Museum of Youth Culture: I am slightly embarrassed that I had no idea that this existed – still, I do now, and I think I might pop down there this afternoon and have a look. For those of you not able to hop on the tube to Shaftsbury Avenue and visit in person, though, you might enjoy the Museum’s website – here’s the blurb: “Museum of Youth Culture is a new emerging museum dedicated to the styles, sounds and social movements innovated by young people over the last 100 years. Championing the impact of youth on modern society, the Museum of Youth Culture is formed from the archives of YOUTH CLUB, a non-profit Heritage Lottery & Arts Council Funded collection incorporating photographs, ephemera, objects and oral histories celebrating our shared youth culture history. From the bomb-site Bicycle racers in post-war 1940s London, to the Acid House ravers of 1980s Northern England, the Museum of Youth Culture empowers the extraordinary everyday stories of growing up in Britain.  Throughout the pandemic the Museum has received thousands of submissions from the general public through a highly successful online campaign, ‘Grown Up in Britain’ inviting the public to submit their own photographs showing us what it was like growing up across the country and challenging traditional stereotypes about young people.” You can also get to the Subculture Archives from the homepage, which is an INSANE resource of cultural ephemera from the past 60-odd years of UK youth movements and which I imagine might be of use to quite a few of you – you have to apply for access, and there may be a fee for commercial use, but I think it might be worth it.
• Wol: We still don’t have a compelling use-case for AR, but while we wait for one to emerge why not amuse yourself with this in-no-way-necessary but still oddly-touching experience by Niantic, which lets you interact with a small, digital owl which appears on your table or floor via the magic of your phone, and with which you can ACTUALLY TALK thanks to the magic of voice recognition – I mean, fine, Wol wil likely bore the everliving sh1t out of you with their warblings about THE FOREST and THE REDWOODS, but it’s kind-of cool to play with for 5 minutes and made me think that there is, potentially, a market for this sort of thing once the whole ‘conversational’ element gets up to speed; it’s not hard to imagine some sort of unholy crossover between this and the Meta AI avatar stuff, in which a 3-inch tall Kardashian homunculus squats on your kitchen floor and tells you you look fabulous (I mean, that sounds hideous, obviously, but I am sure you can think of something less overtly-unsettling).
• The Worst SubReddits: Or, specifically, the most fcuked-up – I think it’s important to point out that there are some links in here to things that are GENUINELY AWFUL, and in the main I wouldn’t recommend clicking on any of them, but also that scrolling through and reading the descriptions (and the occasionally horrified reactions of other posters who did not heed the advice and did, in fact, click) is kind-of horribly compelling and a nice, bracing jolt of ‘wow, the human zoo is a genuinely repellant spectacle and perhaps it would be for the best if we just let the rising seas take us”. I don’t know which of the examples here listed gave me the biggest ‘OH GOD I KNOW I SHOULDN’T CLICK BUT THERE IS SOME SORT OF HORRIBLE, LEMMING-LIKE COMPULSION FORCING MY FINGERS’ feeling, but it was probably one of the ones relating to the seemingly-not-uncommon-as-you-might-think fetish for self-castration; but, er, PICK YOUR OWN! NB – I am not joking when I say that you really, really don’t want to click most of the links in this thread.
• The GoodEnough Guestbook: Finally this week, a small-but-lovely webtoy by a group of software developers in Minnsesota, who’ve set up this webpage so that anyone who visits can send them a message – draw whatever you fancy, and it will be MAGICALLY sent to their Tiny Printer and, er, printed. You can see a gallery of messages that others have sent, but I just love the idea of there being this small device in a corner of their office that every now and again whirrs with a missive from a stranger somewhere miles away, and I honestly think that this should become a general part of life – I would very much like to be able to send ANYONE a small sketch or message that will be printed on a very small roll of paper and possibly stuck to a ‘wall of messages from strangers’ that grows over time. SO PURE AND CHARMING, which isn’t something I feel we’ve had much of a chance to say this week.

By Emily Geirnaert

OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS SUPERB TWO-HOUR SELECTION BY LOVESHADOW WHICH CONTAINS SOME GENUINELY AMAZING STUFF THAT I HAD NEVER HEARD BEFORE AND WHICH I THINK YOU WILL VERY MUCH ENJOY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Alice Zhang: A designer who’s running a project on her Insta page where she’s designing a different poster each day for 100 days – there’s some really nice work here across a range of styles and aesthetics which is worth delving into.
• Milwaukee Public Library: A rare example of a public institution that is GOOD at social media, I am never going to visit the Milwaukee Public Library but I am very glad that it exists.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Don McCullin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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:

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!

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!

By Molly Bounds

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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:  

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!

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!

By Seth Armstrong

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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:  

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!

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!

By Kay Seohyung Lee

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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:  

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!

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!

By Ben Frost Is Dead

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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:  

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!

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!

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)!:

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:  

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!

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!

By Butternut Collage

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: