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

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

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

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

By Ruth Shively

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

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

By Alex Schaefer

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

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

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

By Tania Font

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Nigel Van Wieck

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

By Kate Breakey

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

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

By Stipan Tadic

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

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

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

By Anastasia Samoylova

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Marc Dennis

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

***TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

The Tiny Awards are over! We have a winner!

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

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

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

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

***END OF TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

By Paul Anthony Smith

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

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

By Alessia Morellini

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

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

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

By Richard Vergez

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Oleksander Shatokhin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

By Piero Percoco

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

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

By Alicia Savage

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

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

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

By Christopher Burk 

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Philip Lindeman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hi! I’m back! Has…has anything been happening? Did I miss anything?

LOL JK! Sadly I missed NOTHING – one of the side effects of being an occasional pseudo-journalist (not this, to be clear – I promise you I am under no illusions as to what THIS is, and it’s certainly not journalism) is that holidays don’t really exist – and they certainly don’t when your beat happens to be ‘social media’ and when That Fcuking Man and Adam Mosseri combine to drop two of the biggest stories of the year in a week when ordinarily I should have been catatonic with drink and sun and souvlaki. So it is that my planned ‘take two weeks largely offline’ ended up instead being ‘spend a week fighting Twitter’s rate limit (and my own very strong desire to fcuk it all into the sun and just ignore the whole horrible mess) to try and keep up with the news’ – still, I FILED COPY AND THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS.

Anyway, I am back now and have once again plugged myself into The Feeds in order to bring you – yes, YOU! – some INTERESTING AND ECLECTIC CONTENT.

YOU DON’T GET THIS ON THREADS. Which, presumably, is why it has 10m+ users and Web Curios…doesn’t. Perhaps I should take notes.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and next time if you ask nicely I’ll send you a postcard.

***TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

While I was away, the shortlist for the Tiny Awards was announced – you have until Monday to vote, if you haven’t already, so please take a moment to visit the website, check out the nominations (a genuinely lovely selection of projects, chosen by our esteemed selection committee, and which I think present a beautiful cross-section of what the web can be when it’s small and non-commercial and personal and playful and FUN). Vote! Share the URL! Tell your friends!

The winner will be announced by Matt Klein over at ZINE next week – after which we’ll put a link to all the entries up on the website, so you can enjoy the 300+ sites that were submitted. Thanks again to everyone who’s shown an interest and who’s participated in any way – it has been so, so heartening seeing people’s enthusiasm, and it’s hugely appreciated.

***END OF TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

By Henrietta Harris

OUR FIRST PLAYLIST OF THE WEEK IS A LOVELY SELECTION OF TRACKS PULLED TOGETHER AS PART OF THE MARKETING FOR CHUCK TINGLE’S NEW NOVEL ‘CAMP DAMASCUS’, AND WHILE I WOULDN’T ORDINARILY LINK TO PROMO STUFF I WILL MAKE AN EXCEPTION FOR THIS BECAUSE CHUCK CONTINUES TO BE ONE OF MY FAVOURITE ONLINE PEOPLE AND ALSO BECAUSE I AM A SUCKER FOR THE WHOLE ‘SOUNDTRACKS FOR CHARACTERS FROM NOVELS’ THING WHICH IS GOING ON HERE, AND ALSO BECAUSE I JUST REALLY LIKE THIS PARTICULAR SET OF SONGS! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY FCUKING HOPES THAT THE SUN GETS TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS, PT.1:  

By Tajette O’Halloran

NEXT, ENJOY THIS TECH-HOUSE SET SENT INTO ME BY READER RAF – THANKS RAF! – WHICH IS A PERFECT INTRO TO YOUR WEEKEND! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY FCUKING HOPES THAT THE SUN GETS TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS, PT.2:      

• XAi: I am loathe to give That Fcuking Man any more of the publicity he so desperately craves, but on the other hand this initiative does claim to have as its ultimate aim ‘to understand the true nature of the universe’, so it feels like we should probably pay at least a bit of attention. What is XAi? Noone really knows yet, or at least not until the press conference happening on Spaces later on today – still, what we can say for certain is that there are no women involved (‘ONLY MEN CAN POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE TRUE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE’ is 100% something I can imagine That Fcuking Man thinking on some fairly ingrained level), and that, based on his previous burblings about the dangers of ‘woke’ AI and his recent charming decisions to amplify the beliefs and viewpoints of such charmers as Carlson, Tate et al, there’s a pretty strong likelihood that what we’re going to end up with is a chatbot that seeks to ‘understand the universe’ by ‘just asking questions!’ about, say, the right of trans people to exist, or why George Soros might in fact be the devil. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE, etc etc.
• Love The Work More: Now that Cannes is once again done and dusted for the year, it’s time to look back over the runners and riders and winners and losers to see which of the work can be mined for ‘inspiration’ (lol) – except to access the full list of winners and the work, you need paid access to the Lions site. Or at least you used to need that – thanks to this site, anyone can now get the list of winners and details of what the fcuk they did for free! Which is obviously genuinely useful if this is the sort of thing you have to do for a living (I am so, so sorry), although I personally have a fairly strong belief that if all you’re looking at for inspiration for your advermarketingprbollocks is other advermarketingprbollocks then your work will be intensely mediocre at best. Still, if you’ve ever wanted the ability to go back and see all the people who won a bronze lion in 2002, or to see whether or not you can lift a 20 year old bit of creative wholesale two decades later (you can, trust me) then this will be PERFECT. A quick aside – was there anyone who *didn’t* win a Bronze Lion this year? It certainly doesn’t fcuking look like it (I mean, obviously *I* didn’t, but hey ho).
• The Labyrinth Locator: I have mentioned here before that I have something of a ‘thing’ for mazes and labyrinths (and also that one of my favourite ever novels is about a man who designs them for a living – it’s called ‘Larry’s Party’ and it’s by Carol Shields and I recommend it unreservedly), and this website gave me a genuine frisson of joy when I stumbled across it this week – you can search by city, by country, by geographical radius…basically you have no excuse whatsoever for not using this every time you go on holiday to find the nearest maze to your destination and going and enjoying it (NB – obviously you don’t have to listen to my mild hectoring on this subject, but I promise you that MAZES ARE ACE).
• HyperMegaTech: I try not to feature too many sites that are just tryingto flog you a thing, but I’ll make an exception for this because it looks very cool indeed and I think quite a few of you might be into it. HyperMegaTech is a company that makes handheld consoles, and their latest versions, launching in a few months, look GREAT – they’re designed to look a bit like an original Gameboy but with a colour display and better graphics, and the consoles cost the frankly insane amount of £49, and come pre-loaded with a bunch of classic, licensed games (you can get a Capcom version which comes with SFII, Mega Man and a load of other games from their catalogue, or a Taito version which does the same but for, er, Taito) and which you can buy additional cartridges for to further bolster your collection…look, obviously this might be a massive con and I offer the usual ‘caveat emptor’, but it looks GREAT.
• Cosmos: I’m not 100% certain that anyone particularly *needs* a site/app which can best be described as ‘Pinterest, but with a minimal aesthetic and a generally ‘cool’ vibe, designed for designers and visual creatives to moodboard with’, but, well, here it is anyway! This isn’t publicly available yet, but you can sign up to the waitlist should you be so minded.
• Molecule of the Month: A PERFECT CURIO! Well, near-perfect – a perfect Curio would probably feature fewer people from Eton, but still. Molecule of the Month is a site which has been apparently going for YEARS – it self-describes as “one of the longest running chemistry webpages on the internet. Each month since January 1996 a new molecule has been added to the list on this page. The links will take you to a page at one of the Web sites at a University Chemistry Department or commercial site in the UK, the US, or anywhere in the world, where useful (and hopefully entertaining!), information can be found about a particularly interesting molecule.” I am honestly FASCINATED by this – the longevity! The fact that it appears to be an almost-entirely UK-based endeavour! The inexplicable popularity of the site amongst current Eton students, who seem to be contributing a disproportionate number of the molecules and links here! Anyway, this month’s featured molecule is White Phosphorous (nasty) nominated by one Roderick Edmonds of, yes, Eton (special shoutout to his collegemate from a few months ago, by the way, the fabulously-named Henry Goss-Custard), but take a moment to scroll back through time all the way to 1996 and marvel at the fact that this has just kept on going and going and going. Why? I HAVE NO FCUKING CLUE, but it pleases me a great deal.
• RedditSpeak: Plug in any subReddit you care to name and listen as this site reads out the posts to you one by one. So, for example, you can keep this open in a tab and have it read you every single ‘AITA’ post while you work – or (and I am ashamed to say that this is exactly what I ended up doing with it) you can just plug in your favourite bongo sub and enjoy the explicit descriptions being read out in a joyless robotic monotone, which I personally found very, very funny indeed (NOT IN A SEXY WAY).
• CloneDub: This is interesting – can’t vouch for how well it works, but the concept is a fascinating one. CloneDub lets you take any audio recording in English and turn it into an audio recording in a number of other languages, but keeping the vocal style and intonation of the original. So, for example, YouTubers might use this to quickly create a translated audiotrack for their content which keeps the style and inflections of their native speech, or you could Cyrano your CEO into being fluent in Hindi. This feels like it could be used for some fun things if you’re marginally more imaginative than I am.
• The Realtime Air Pollution Map: You may not want to spend too much time looking at this – after all, there’s enough other stuff to worry about, amirite? – but should you fancy staring through yet another porthole into the terrifying apocalyptic future that increasingly seems to await us as we continue to blow past environmental targets with the sort of breezy abandon that increasingly smacks of a collective deathwish then you might enjoy this site, which offers you a near-realtime overview of air quality around the world. On the plus side, London’s looking pretty good this morning! On the minus side, you REALLY don’t want to be on Sanli Street in Hefei right now (or indeed pretty much anywhere in South East Asia tbh).
• Visible Earth: WOW. I am slightly amazed that I hadn’t linked this before, but WHAT a resource this is – consider it a small antidote to the last envirohorror link. Visible Earth is “a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet”, and it is wonderful – it turns out if you zoom out far enough, everything looks sort-of ok!
• The Drone Photo Awards 2023: I have included this for a few years now, and I find that I am getting an increasing sense of ennui around drone work in general – so much of this stuff is so compositionally-similar that it very much blends into one uniform style, and nowhere is that more evident in the ‘Weddings’ category which does rather feel like one big cliche made JPEG (also lol at the fact that one of the wedding images in the ‘commended’ category is titled ‘Heaven’s Gate’ – er, guys, you…you do know the connotation there, don’t you?). Still, there are still some interesting shots in here if you dig around the categories – in particular the ‘Abstract’ shots are rather beautiful, although, if you dig in, often for rather miserable reasons.
• Bavet: This is the website for a chain of pasta restaurants in Belgium, and not the sort of thing I would normally bother featuring were it not for the fact that the branding is so insanely EXTRA and I genuinely love the fact that they lean into it so hard, from the copy to the site itself. I am very, very far away from being the target market for this sort of place (about two decades away, to be exact), but it’s refreshing to see a brand that feels fun in a way that isn’t moodboarded and focus grouped to fcuk (I am going to feel very, very silly if one of you emails me from Belgium to explain that, in fact, that is exactly what this in fact is).
• TwitterGPT: Thanks Alex for sending this my way – plug in any user’s Twitter handle and this site will give you a GPT-juiced description of WHO THEY REALLY ARE. This is more funny than anything else – although it absolutely nails me inside a paragraph, which is a bit dispiriting: “this individual is likely involved in the field of web curation or content aggregation. They frequently mention and promote a newsletter called “Web Curios,” which suggests a professional interest in curating and sharing interesting online content. Additionally, they express a need for a holiday, indicating a potential career in a demanding industry.” WELL QUITE.
• Goblin Bet: You will, of course, be familiar with SaltyBet, the now-legendary site that spawned the AutoBattler game genre and which has been going for years and which lets visitors bet fictional currency on the outcome of an infinite series of character battles between superheroes and game protagonists – well this is that, but with a vague fantasy bent. So if you’ve ever wanted to put 50 imaginary quid on the outcome of a CPU vs CPU fight between (as is happening at the time of writing) a vampire and an adult brass dragon (and, let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then this will be pleasing in the extreme. I’ll be honest, I expected to bounce off this immediately but then found myself 15 minutes later becoming surprisingly invested in whether or not I’d make back by losses by putting a longshot 100 on a kobold, so be warned (also, I think that might be the geekiest thing I have written here in some time and I really hope my girlfriend doesn’t bother reading this week’s issue).
• The Zone: This is really interesting – the Zone is a lightweight TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) which you can play either in-person or through the website, and which is based on the premise that most of the players will die and as such frees you to engage with the scenarios and material in a freer way than you might otherwise – you’re not playing to win, after all, so go wild with your imaginations. The web interface is particularly impressive, to my mind, and allows for some pretty sophisticated online play, and the scenarios are plentiful, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to roleplay (NOT LIKE THAT) but who doesn’t always have time for a full campaign session, this could be a pleasing addition to your personal panoply of games.
• Yeti Upsetti: If you’re Of An Age, you will have fond memories of Ski Free, a game that came bundled with old versions of Windows in which you played a tiny skier who competed on a downhill course and who would, if you played for too long, inevitably get devoured by a yeti whose clutches it was impossible to escape (you can play that here, should you so wish – and you do, I promise you). This version lets you play as the yeti – try and devour as many skiers as possible before you die of hunger. This is VERY SATISFYING, not least the animation as the yeti chomps down on yet another Salomon-clad home counties dweller.
• Windows Defender: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is this BRILLIANTLY-designed game in the style of Vampire Survivors – I’m not going to try and explain it as I’d only make a pig’s ear of the attempt, but it’s simple and fun and so, so nicely put together, to the point that I’d almost describe it as ‘elegant’. This is 10 minutes of genuine, no-brain fun and it will CLEANSE YOUR SOUL, I promise.

By Mia Risberg

WE CLOSE OUT THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF DISCO AND FUNK AND LATIN TUNES COMPILED BY DOM WILLIAMS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Ipikan: Thanks to Andrea for sending this my way – Ipikan is a French craftsperson who makes embroidery, often of anatomical things. So if you’ve ever wanted a beautifully-made bit of cross stitch of an anatomically correct human heart – and which of us hasn’t? – then this will very much scratch an itch for you.
• Atelier Simon Weisse: As far as I can tell, this is the Insta feed of a special effects studio which has most recently been engaged by Wes Anderson to make miniatures and dioramas for his latest self-indulgent pastel opus (sorry, but) – if you’d like to see a bunch of REALLY impressive model trains and canyons and markets and all sorts of other things (and you do, these are amazing and scratch that very particular miniaturists’ itch) then you will very much enjoy this.
• Who Shot Duncan?: As previously mentioned, my pop culture knowledge is patchy at best, but I am pretty sure that Duncan Killick isn’t in fact a celebrity (yet) – but that doesn’t stop him running his Insta account as though he is. Duncan photoshopped into headlines, Duncan being papped, Duncan launching a celebrity fragrance…it’s all here. I imagine that this is significantly funnier if you know Duncan in person, but it’s still gently amusing even for strangers (or maybe just me), and his commitment to the bit is genuinely laudable.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Karlis Rekevics

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO!

I am always reminded around this time of year of that time approximately nine years ago, when I was still working at Hill+Knowlton and Web Curios was (remarkably) published on the company’s actual, proper corporate website, and I chose to open a late-June edition with a riff about how I was alone in the office because all of my colleagues were either necking pills in a field in Somerset or snorting cocaine off the tanned midriffs of Central European hookers on the Croisette. I then went for something of a ‘long’ lunch with a mate, during which I received a phonecall from the company’s global head of digital in the US who had received…some complaints, and who was informing me that a) that week’s edition of Web Curios was sadly nuked from the web; and b) I should probably sober up, as there was an ‘awkward conversation’ in my future.  MEMORIES!

Anyway, how are you all? Have you had your fill of grim disaster bongo? Have you worked out exactly which of your internal organs you’re going to sell first to keep up with the repayments? Have you w4nked yourself dry after winning some leonine statuettes? DID YOU BRING THE DRUGS?!?!?!

Frankly I don’t care about the answers to any of those questions, as I am off on holiday for a couple of weeks and Web Curios is OFFICIALLY OFF DUTY until mid-July. Take care of yourselves, try not to die (but, if you must, do so cleanly), and don’t forget about me while I’m gone YOU FCUKS.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you’re at Glastonbury PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN FFS.

***A SMALL TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

Thanks so much to everyone who nominated a site – we were slightly overwhelmed by the volume and quality of entries, and I got a bit emo about it tbqhwy. The selection panel is currently whittling down the entries, and the final nominations for the public vote will be announced in a week or so on the website – check back there, or follow Kristoffer’s newsletter, or just wait til I’m back and I’ll tell you then; voting will be open for ages, so there’s no rush. THANKS AGAIN TO EVERYONE WHO HAS GIVEN EVEN THE MOST CURSORY OF FCUKS ABOUT THIS SMALL ENDEAVOUR, IT IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

By Philipp Keel

WE BEGIN WITH A RARE ANDREW WEATHERALL BOOTLEG OF SOME MID-90S HIPHOP, WHICH I APPRECIATE IS A CONCATENATION OF WORDS WHICH MAY WELL MEAN NOTHING TO YOUNGER READERS BUT WHICH I I PROMISE MEANS THAT THIS IS WORTH CLICKING ON!

THE SECTION WHICH IS ALREADY BRACED FOR THE GRIM INEVITABILITY OF THE ‘SUBMARINE SON’ NETFLIX SIX-PARTER COMING IN 2024, PT.1:  

By Chad Wright

YOUR NEXT MIX IS THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF SUPREMELY-SUMMERY HOUSE-Y SOUNDS MIXED BY LABEL8! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS ALREADY BRACED FOR THE GRIM INEVITABILITY OF THE ‘SUBMARINE SON’ NETFLIX SIX-PARTER COMING IN 2024, PT.2:    

• The Whale Carbon Project: It feels uncontroversial to point out that a significant proportion of the industries that exist around carbon storage, carbon capture and carbon offsetting are at heart massive lies, designed to provide large corporations with the fig leaf of environmental responsibility whilst at the same time enabling them to continue merrily with the sort of business practices that are slowly fcuking us into the sun, environmentally speaking – still, I couldn’t help but fall slightly in love with this website/initiative which is, insofar as I can tell, trying to convince us that we can store excess carbon in, er, whales. Oh, ok, fine, it’s not *quite* that mad – but it does, if I’m reading this right, suggest that businesses should be able to claim some sort of carbon offsets by, er, helping to protect the plankton-hoovering undersea mammals. “Blue carbon is the carbon captured by marine and coastal ecosystems, and is an essential component to slowing the impact of climate change. Whales play a key ecological role in the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but they have so far been largely overlooked by blue carbon and biodiversity initiatives.There are currently few incentives for industries to take measures to avoid harming whales. The Whale Carbon Plus Project is developing methodology based on remotely sensed images to quantify the contribution of whales to carbon sequestration and ecosystem resilience of the open ocean, and compensate ocean stakeholders that actively protect them.” Is this a thing? It feels…honestly, it feels like total bullsh1t, but I am obviously a know-nothing bozo when it comes to science and am willing to concede that I quite possibly don’t know what I’m talking about (on the offchance that any of you understand this stuff, er, can someone explain it to me please?).

• Wikihouse: With the news this week that the simple act of ‘not being homeless’ in the UK is set to start costing upwards of three million pounds a day (I exaggerate, but only slightly) I can imagine that for some of you the possibility of building your own home, mortgage free, might seem rather more appealing than spending the rest of your in hock to the bank. Wikihouse is a really interesting initiative designed to help people who want to build their own home in a manner that’s affordable, sustainable and modular, and which offers all the guidance you need to get started. “WikiHouse is a manufactured building system for houses (actually, it can be used for many kinds of small building). It uses structural timber (usually plywood) sheets which are cut to 0.1mm precision, and assembled into basic building blocks, which can be delivered to site, then rapidly and accurately assembled by almost anyone, even if they don’t have traditional construction skills. Unlike some other manufactured building systems, WikiHouse is not produced in a large multi-million pound factory. WikiHouse parts can be digitally fabricated using a 4’x8′ CNC machine. This means that parts can be manufactured by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in local micro-factories, that can be set up for a fraction of the cost. In fact, thousands already exist. Timber panels, e.g. plywood, are the perfect material for fabricating WikiHouse. Plywood is stronger and less sensitive to humidity variations than traditional sawn timber, and it is lighter than bricks, concrete and steel. This is translated into a much faster fabrication, more rapid assembly on site without heavy lifting equipment, and appealing internal finishing.” Such a good idea, this, which feels like it ought to be better known than it currently is.
• Sh1t British Pics: OH GOD THIS IS GOOD. A Twitter account – a BRAND NEW Twitter account! Fresh ish on a dying platform! – which exists solely to share terrible images of British cultral history culled from the Getty Images archives. So you’ll find gems like ‘the boyband Blue opening an exhibit at Madame Tussauds’, say, or, more specifically, ‘Eastenders’ Gus and his girlfriend are denied entry to the Brit Awards afterparty at Movida in London (2006)’. This is AMAZING, and mines very much the same sort of vein of low-culture English weirdness that you’ll find in the similarly-wonderful Daytime Snaps run by my friend Nick – fine, you’ll have to be British to really get the most out of this, but you’ll forgive me the occasional anglocentric link because, well, LOOK HOW SH1T EVERYTHING IS HERE LET ME AT THE VERY LEAST OCCASIONALLY ROLL AROUND IN THE FILTH. Also, can you believe that “Stelios Haji-Ioannou Launches Easy Pizza – Press Conference (2004)” is a thing that a) happened; and b) demanded a photocall? Madness.
• Sentr: Do any of you play in a Sunday League football team? Or perhaps you’re of an age where instead you spend your weekends driving your offspring to take part in matches where you and a selection of other parents spend a happy 90 minutes screaming spittle-flecked imprecations against the poor fcuker who’s giving up their free time to watch your Bambi-legged progeny flail across the grass in pursuit of the ball. Either way, if you take your weekend agonistic entertainment TOO SERIOUSLY then you may well adore this new company which basically lets you keep REALLY ACCURATE STATS about your Sunday league team so that you can once and for all prove WITH STATS that Fat Tony actually improves the team’s performance by an average 0.3pts a game when you stick him out on the right wing and basically ignore him. On the one hand, this is pretty cool and a smart idea – on the other, it does equally feel like the sort of thing that will lead at least one member of the side to start thinking of themselves as some sort of stats/data genius and producing FBRef-style  pizza charts to demonstrate why it is actually vital that they play a traditional trequartista role (and never track back).
• Show Your Stripes: Whilst the idea of visualising climate change as a series of strips of colour along a timeline (look, click the link, you’ll see what I mean – what do you mean ‘ffs Matt your descriptions are a fcuking joke’?) isn’t new, I think this website is; created by the University of Reading, this site lets you pick any country you like and see exactly how scary the ‘everything’s getting hotter!’ trend looks for that specific place. These are…troubling, frankly – I just went and looked up Italy and the way all the lines go maroon after about 2013 did rather look like Bad News – so if you’d rather not have a bracing dose of climatehorror today then perhaps skip this one.
• Bagel Reviews: On the one hand, I can’t imagine that there are two many of you who are desperate for a small website which exists solely to review the various bagels available in various places in the US; on the other, for all I know I might have a sizeable and VERY HUNGRY American readership for whom this will be an invaluable resource.
• WebPills: Another website collecting examples of notable and high-quality webdesign, these collated by one Ludovic Losco (fabulous name, by the way). This has some really nice work on it – again, most of which I’ve not seen before – and as an inspiration source it’s very good indeed.
• Counter Forms: I love the design of this site SO MUCH. “Counter Forms is a platform that champions emerging, discursive, antipodean type designers. Driven by typographic research, education and advocacy, we publish original typefaces and texts towards a more accessible, diverse and equitable future.”  The homepage is arranged as a series of notes-in-windows, a bit like digital post-it notes, and there’s something particularly charming about the way the interface design makes the content feel…fluid and personalisable in a way.
• Trashfiles: SO MUCH HIGH CONCEPT! “A captivating user-generated archive meticulously documents the presence of discarded items across the globe. This collection not only provides visitors with a thought-provoking experience, encouraging them to contemplate the impact of our actions on the environment, but also serves as a wellspring of digital assets for artists and designers seeking to craft works centered around ecological themes.” This is simultaneously fascinating and depressing – basically anyone is invited to take a LIDAR scan of discarded packaging materials that they find and upload it to the site, creating this ongoing digital record of the physical detritus with which we’re slowly (and, increasingly, quickly) suffocating ourselves and the planet.
• AI-Enabled Webscraping: Yes, I know, it’s a VERY BORING heading – but, equally, this is potentially very useful and so I shan’t apologise for it (SO THERE). This site’s called ‘Kadoa’ (no, me neither) and it basically lets you perform reasonably-complicated web scraping tasks with no coding required, all thanks to the MAGIC AND POWER OF AI. Which, if you’ve an idea for anything that leverages publicly available data at scale, could be really useful.
• Zelda Builds: I imagine that either you or someone you know is currently obsessed with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and, specifically, the crafting system which means that you can literally build gyrocopters and laser cannons and, astonishingly, rudimentary computational devices in-game (I think, parenthetically, that I find ‘how other people play videogames’ one of the best and most interesting ways of really understanding that OTHER PEOPLE’S BRAINS WORK DIFFERENTLY – I simply do not think, or play games, like this, and I can’t help but feel a vague sense of intellectual inadequacy when I see this sort of thing) – if so, then you or they will LOVE this website which basically collects all sorts of examples of the frankly-INSANE stuff that people are creating, along with rudimentary instructions as to how to build them, and, honestly, it’s making me want to buy a Switch.
• The Big Picture Competition 2023: The annual Big Picture photo context rolls around again, and this year’s crop of winning entries is typically strong – my personal favourite from the category winners is the woman and the wombat because, honestly, YOUR HEART IT MELTS.
• Noramoji: A VERY SPECIFIC website, this, which exists to do one thing and one thing only – collect examples of the typography used in the signage of Japanese shops, and render them usable as digital fonts. Would YOU like to remake your website entirely in kanji that replicates the exact styling of a small ramen cafe in Okinawa? GREAT!
• The News Minimalist: I do think that there’s a really interesting coming trend in AI-enabled assistants that, for example, each morning do a sweep of the web and present a tailored roundup to you based on your interests and in a style (written or visual) that you’ve previously specified – basically RSS with knobs on. I see the News Minimalist as being part of that vision of the future – it’s a smart idea, which is designed to create a newsfeed including only ‘the most significant’ stories, delivered in summary with no visual clutter, using GPT4 to analyse a range of stories, grade them for significance and then produce the summaries you see on-site. There are obvious questions about the methodology and the ability of an LLM to meaningfully gauge ‘significance’, but the principle here is really interesting and it struck me as a smart and imaginative use of the tech.
• Design Archives: This is an AWESOME resource – basically this is all the graphic design stuff on the Internet Archive, in one place, searchable and browsable and just THERE, waiting for you to access it and magically become some sort of Le Corbusier (NB – it is vanishingly unlikely that you will become Le Corbusier as a result of this link).
• A Field of Flowers: Ok, it’s not a field so much as a website – MUST YOU BE SO LITERAL?! – but, still, it’s lovely and there are LOTS of flowers. I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to Kristoffer’s vision of the web as a garden, and stuff like this feels like a pleasing evocation of that concept.
• Crossbows and Catapults: I confess to letting out a genuine squeal of pleasure and exitement when I discovered this last weekend – to people of a certain vintage, Crossbows and Catapults was THE most incredible board game in the world, practically a real-life videogame in which you BUILT AN ACTUAL CASTLE and then spent a frantic 3 minutes SMASHING IT TO FCUKERY with ACTUAL CROSSBOWS and ACTUAL CATAPULTS and, seriously, in an era in which the Atari2600 was still considered a pretty cool piece of tech and we had to pretend that Manic Miner was fun, this was pretty much the exciting thing in the world. I never had a copy – POOR DEPRIVED MATT – but now I can banish the disappointment and resentment I feel towards my poor, dead mother for depriving me of the sweet, plastic-y siege playset by backing this (already massively overfunded) Kickstarter, which promises to once again welcome me into the world of plastic ramparts and satisfyingly-sprung crossbows and ballistas. Seriously, if you’re not familiar with the original game then click the link and be AMAZED (if you are, I imagine you’ll long since have given the campaign all your money).
• The Rear of the Year Quiz: To the non-Brits amongst you, the concept of a country having a long-running national award given to the pleasingly-callipgyian celebrity of the year might seem…a bit weird? To those of us, though, who have grown up on this sceptered isle and fondly remember the weirdly-asexual photoshoots that saw famouses of the calibre of Carole Vorderman and Daniel Radcliffe (no, really) smiling coquettishly over their shoulders as they displayed their prize-winning buttocks, though, this quiz – which challenges you to remember who won each year – will be a pleasing trip down memory lane (also, if any of you get all of these right then you have a series of problems and I strongly suspect that you might be on some sort of official register).
• The Great When?: A brilliant little game, this, made by Monkeon: “There’s loads of archive footage of London uploaded to YouTube. We’ll play you a random one, starting at a random moment. Your challenge? Guess what year it is.” Aside from anything else it’s a useful reminder that it is nearly impossible to tell the late-80s from the mid-90s, which feels…weird, but possibly speaks to the sort of horrible national stasis that we went through in the fag-end years of the last great Tory horrorshow.
• Blood In Baldur’s Gate: Last up among the miscellania this week is this tie-in game to promote the forthcoming launch of the Baldur’s Gate 3 videogame; this is a light, browser-based detective game with a neat twist, whereby the narrative that develops over time (it’s been running a few days, with new plot developments dropping every 24h) being in large part determined by player votes on where to go and what to do as you (the player and character) investigate a mysterious murder. This feels a bit like the Fallen London games, vibe-wise, and I very much like the way it builds community into the gameplay- really interesting series of mechanics here which I think could usefully be tweaked and lifted for other stuff, should you be so minded.

By Dana Powell

LAST UP THIS WEEK WE HAVE A WHOLE NEW ALBUM FROM WEB CURIOS FAVOURITE OLOFF WHICH I GENUINELY THINK IS A GREAT-IF-WONKY-RECORD AND WHICH I WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU ALL TO HAVE A LISTEN TO BECAUSE IT IS UNLIKELY THAT YOU WILL HEAR ANYTHING ELSE LIKE IT TODAY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Fire Hydrants of Europe: You…you don’t really need me to describe this for you, do you? Please note, this features EXCLUSIVELY European hydrants, so any of you filthy perverts looking for the South American variants will have to look elsewhere to fulfil your dark fetishistic desires.
• The AI Experiment: I am, in the main, now entirely bored of AI art styles (there are occasional exceptions, but it feels like there’s too much stylisation baked into the current models which means I can’t see beyond the Midjourney-ness, if you see what I mean), but I quite enjoy this Insta account which creates fantastical historical pictures of grizzled old prospectors standing outside a sepia-tinted Castle Greyskull (for example). You could literally RUIN a child’s conception of truth and falsehood with stuff like this, which I would imagine is exactly what is quietly happening to pliable young minds the world over (which is a nice thought, isn’t it?).
• High School High: Examples of excellent design and typography from oldschool US high school yearbooks, mainly from the 70s and 80s. SO MUCH GOOD MATERIAL.
• Rohit Roygre: Rohit Roygre is a man who is giving up fizzy drinks, and is posting daily updates as to his progress to TikTok (and then reposting them on this Insta, because why not?). You may not think that your life will be improved by a nondescript South Asian man posting a video each day in which he proudly proclaims ‘No fizzy!’, but I promise you that it really will.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Sebastian Bieniek

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It has, it’s fair to say, been something of a trying week for stumpy-fingered populists.

More than enough ink has been spilt on That Fcuking Man and the parties and the lies (and my thoughts on him remain unchanged); a similar amount continues to be spaffed on That Other Fcuking Man and whether or not he’ll end up governing from jail; and yet, because of the packed nature of the week’s news schedule, it feels like Silvio’s been rather ignored. Which, given that his CV includes (deep breath) cruise ship singing, an improbable and incredibly-murkily-financed property empire (it’s interesting to note that when Nanni Moretti made the film ‘Il Caimano’, an oddly-familiar tale about a Northern Italian property magnate who pivoted to media and then politics, all the while backed by a lot of money from organised crime, writs from Silvio there came a-none!), the literal transformation of an entire country’s media landscape and, as a result, its relationship to money and capital and consumerism and STUFF (not to mention sex), the football clubs, the whole ‘managing to get elected not once but three fcuking times’ thing (there’s a strong argument to suggest that Italians are the most masochistic of all the European nations, until one looks closer to home and realises that the English remain unbeatable), the rampant tax evasion and collusion with some incredibly unsavoury parties over the years, the friendship with Putin, the whole period where he seemingly spent every single European summit making gags about how he really didn’t want to fcuk Angela Merkel, the rampant libido (and the hookers, and the underage hookers, and the mistresses and the affairs and the open promotion to cabinet positions of attractive TV presenters for fairly transparent reasons), the messianic delusions, the constant feeling that everyone was laughing at Italy BECAUSE THEY WERE…Oh, Silvio, what you gave us!

In the main this week, though, I was sad that he outlived my mum, because she fcuking hated that cnut.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, e spero che Silvio venga inculato dal diavolo giornalmente.

By Klaus Kremmerz

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A MIX THAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘ADHD HARDCORE’, AND WHICH I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY TOO MUCH ABOUT OTHER THAN SUGGESTING YOU GIVE IT A TRY AND TURN IT UP LOUD AND DON’T BE SCARED AND JUST SORT OF TRY AND LEAN INTO THE GENERAL, TERRIFYING INSANITY OF THE WHOLE THING, AND WHICH WHILST NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL ‘GOOD’ EXACTLY IS CERTAINLY INTERESTING AND WILL DEFINITELY WAKE YOU FROM WHATEVER TORPOR YOU MIGHT CURRENTLY BE AFFLICTED WITH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED THAT NOONE’S YET SEEN FIT TO MAKE AI SILVIO, PT.1:  

By Melody Tuttle

NEXT WE HAVE SOME D’N’B WITH THIS EXCELLENT EP BY ANAIS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED THAT NOONE’S YET SEEN FIT TO MAKE AI SILVIO, PT.2:    

• Chicken Orb: With everything continuing to get, well, significantly more expensive, perhaps its time that we all became a bit more self-sufficient when it comes to our food? With that in mind, let me present to you THE CHICKEN ORB! Have you ever thought ‘you know, I’d really like to have a chicken but I just don’t know whether their foraging and general behaviour is compatible with my lovely urban garden’? WELL FEAR NO MORE! The chicken orb is, basically, a Zorb for fowl – you basically lob the bird into the spherical cage and it can wonder round freely, but it means you can more easily confine it to a certain bit of garden without the need for complex enclosures and runs, and you can also avoid chasing the s0dding thing round the garden when you want to wring its neck/put it back in its coop (delete as applicable). To be honest, I can’t really imagine any of you having a desperate desire for one of these, but I was just so charmed by the idea of this that I couldn’t help but include it. OH GOD, I just had a vision of recreating that game from old-school ITV staple Gladiators but with chickens – that is streaming content GOLD, I tell you, and I will franchise that idea to you for a cursory fee. Form a queue.
• The Brian Butterfield Diet Soundboard: Even by the standards of Web Curios (ha! Standards! lol!) this feels like…something of a niche gag, but, equally, it both made me laugh and reminded me of a reasonably-amusing sketch and so into the newsletter it goes (just in case you ever wanted a window into the…rigorous selection process undertaken round here). Peter Serafinowicz is not *just* The Tick and a recurring character in The Cornetto Trilogy, he’s also a very funny writer who briefly had his own sketch show back in the day, one of which sketches featured a character called Brian Butterfield who had a very particular diet that he was trying to sell you. A touch of Mr Creosote about this, but not in a bad way – I genuinely hope that there is at least one of you who remembers this fondly and who gets a good hour or so’s amusement out of blasting the phrase ‘PORK CYLINDERS’ from your speakers at nosebleed volume to the increasing bemusement of friends, lovers and colleagues alike – the site also features a link to the sketch on YouTube, so you can at least make some sort of vague sense of this if you’re so inclined.
• Privateer: One of the side effects of writing this rubbish for over a decade now is that you end up learning things about yourself and your obsessions – for example, I have reaslised that I have a real bee in my bonnet over the whole concept of ‘space junk’, and have over the years spent more time than was perhaps strictly necessary writing here about how if we’re not careful we’re going to wall ourselves into our own atmosphere with a mile-thick layer of discarded metal (this is hyperbole, before anyone with a significantly-better grasp of physics feels the need to explain to me why this is not in fact possible). Anyway, it seems I am not the only person who feels this way, as a bunch of rich and famous Silicon Valley types, including Steve Wozniak, have set up Privateer, which is, seemingly, a company whose mission is to work to clean up the Earth’s orbit and get rid of some of the defunct satellites, forgotten ‘we sent X to space!’ marketing stunts from the early-2010s and other junk (or, at the very least, to map and track it to make it easier to avoid). This is really interesting, and sensible-sounding, and obviously super-scifi, but, if I’m totally honest, the main reason I am linking to it is because their main corporate sponsor is watchmaker Omega and halfway down the Privateer homepage is what is, honestly, the most insanely-cheesy ad-photo I have ever seen, just slap-bang in the middle of their ‘we’re a serious company doing serious business’ pitch. Oh, and they are based in Hawa’ii, too, for which I am sure their are excellent spacefaring reasons but which also makes it sound like a *bit* of a cushy gig.
• The CopyPasta DB: I saw something floating about the web this week, inspired by the Reddit protests, that made the point about the utter ephemerality of online culture and the fact that, if you’re, say, 35 or below then a lot of the places you spent your youth online, the things that you read and watched and made and experienced, simply don’t exist anymore, and how weird that is in terms of a sense of how one came to be oneself (I am mangling this somewhat, but hopefully you get the general point) – anyway, that came to mind again when looking at the CopyPastaDB, ‘the web’s largest archive of copypasta material’, or at least so it claims and I have no reason to doubt it. Obviously you all already know this, but just in case: “A copypasta is a block of text that is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites. The block of text is not necessarily written to become a copypasta. However, the text is usually of a viral or outrageous nature, often with comical undertones. This makes them extremely appealing to copy and paste.” Longform textmemes, basically, which were often initially based around horror fiction but which now have come to encompass everything from repurposes Reddit edgelordery to a *lot* of weird Tumblr stuff. This is, basically, VERY VERY ONLINE, and hence simultaneously really interesting and also excruciatingly-embarrassing to its very core, and I love it.
• Ooakfinder: This is an interesting idea. Etsy has for a few years now felt like its rather strayed from its ‘artisanal makers and individual craftspeople’ ethos to become a bit more like what eBay ended up being – to whit, a place packed with stuff that’s actually mass-produced and being sold by larger retailers in a way that presents them as being much smaller than they in fact are’. If you’d like to try and ensure that whatever you’re thinking of buying from Etsy (or elsewhere – this seems to work with most retail sites as far as I can tell) is in fact an original piece or whether it’s ripped off from someone else, or being sold in multiple other locations online, then this site will do EXACTLY that – it’s basically just cobbling together a bunch of reverse image search stuff under the hood, but it’s no less clever or useful for that.
• Felicity Ingram: I tend not to feature fashion photography on here, not least because I don’t know the first thing about either of those two topics, but I’ll make an exception for this site which is the personal portfolio of one Felicity Ingram whose work is just GORGEOUS and whose site is such a wonderful showcase for her pictures. This is such beautiful photography and webwork, honestly.
• Slow Jamastan: I tend to be…wary of people who seem intent on setting up their own countries – they tend towards libertarianism, in my experience, and libertarians tend to, not to put too fine a point on it, be either cnuts, or morons, or a uniquely-unpleasant combination of the two. That said, Slow Jamastan – a sovereign nation apparently founded in late 2021 – doesn’t seem to bear any of the hallmarks of a mad libertarian horrorshow (in the main I can tell this because a) noone seems to be talking about crypto; and b) nowhere on the website do they talk about age of consent laws, another troubling obsession of the ‘let’s start our own nation and do what we like!’ obsessives); instead, Slow Jamastan’s politics are described as “Dictatorship (on most days – sometimes The Sultan passes the suggestion box around)” which, you know, sounds ok! This is obviously a gag, but also…not a gag, based on the amount of effort and thought that has gone into the site, and, honestly, given the past week’s activities on both sides of the Atlantic I can sort of see why running away to a micronation and battening down the hatches might seem appealing.
• RajShahi Gosford: The Facebook Page of an Indian restaurant in New South Wales, Australia. Their use of memes is…astonishing, frankly, and the sort of thing I would honestly like to see at least one of you pitching as a sincere ‘strategic pivot’ to one of your more staid clients in banking or FS. This came via Garbage Day, which I imagine you are all subscribed to but which if not you really ought to be.
• Blend: On the one hand, this new shopping app (based in the UK, and found via Martin Bryant’s rather good newsletter about new-stage UK startups) which effectively purports to be ‘TikTok, but for clothes!’ sounds like it could be very smart and with some clever tech under the hood; on the other, in an era in which everyone is fcuked for money and the world continues to buckle under the weight of all the pointless crap we insist on buying and shipping around the world before depositing it in landfill to not decay over a period of centuries…well, is creating the ultimate, addictive, infinite-swiping fast-fashion portal really a responsible thing to do? God, I know, I sound po-faced and prissy as all fcuk, but, equally, IF WE DON’T STOP CONSUMING LIKE THIS WE REALLY ARE GOING TO BE VERY VERY VERY SCREWED INDEED. Still, lovely interface and IT KNOWS WHAT I WANT so envirofears be damned!
• Hillside: This is rather lovely. Hillside was an experimental architectural project from the 60s, which was built in Montreal and still stands today – per Wikipedia, “HABITAT 67, or simply Habitat, is a housing complex at Cité du Havre, on the Saint Lawrence River, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie. It originated in his master’s thesis at the School of Architecture at McGill University and then an amended version was built for Expo 67, a World’s Fair held from April to October 1967. Habitat 67 is considered an architectural landmark and a recognized building in Montreal.” The link takes you to a site where you can download an interactive walkthtrough of the architect’s original vision for the project, designed in the latest iteration of the Unreal Engine with all of the high-end photorealism that delivers; I sadly don’t have the requisite kit to do anything with this, but the demo video looks gorgeous and I do love the use of this high-end digital rendering software to explore imagined spaces and counterfactual urban scenarios; in general, this is just a really nice way of bringing Safdie’s original vision to life.
• CPUMade: I’m slightly amazed that I haven’t seen more of these – CPUMade is a tshirt design site which is – yes, that’s right, you guessed it! – AI POWERED! Create your designs using…some GAN, it’s not a particularly amazing version, and then put them on tshirts which you can either get printed on demand and shipped to you OR which you can make available on the site for others to buy, at which point you get a small kickback. The likelihood, to my mind, of anyone ever buying an AI-designed tshirt based on someone else’s prompt-tickling is vanishingly small, but on the other hand there’s a limited amount for you to lose in spending three minutes creating some vaguely-threatening tees and hoping some moron coughs up for them.
• Landing Love: Examples of nice webdesign from all over the internet. That’s literally it – but whoever curates this has a good eye (or, at the very least, similar taste in webwork to me) and as such this is a great resource for design inspiration or some light plagiarism (also, loads of these were totally new to me, which, I promise, is no mean feat).
• Click Bath: Do you feel STRESSED? Enervated? Like Ren from Ren & Stimpy when he gets all het up and his eyes get all bloodshot and he starts twitching and fitting? Hm, maybe lay off the cheap cocaine for a few weeks, eh? If, though, you can’t blame your jitteriness on several grammes of poorly-cut pub gak (or perhaps even if you can) then you might enjoy Click Bath, a site which exists solely to provide you with a soothing sound bath (at some point in the last year or so I learned what a ‘sound bath’ is and I am genuinely angry that I have to carry that phrase in my head) – click either of the panels on-screen to produce a soothing sound which you can tweak the tone and pitch of depending on where exactly you tap. Your appetite for this will probably be closely linked to your enjoyment of incense and your ability to perform an adequate downward dog.
• Pick Your Paranoia: Make your own ‘This Is Fine’ cartoon, with the addition of one of a selection of very modern paranoias – from climate change to El*n Fcuking M*sk, to guns to AI – which you can then save and share through whatever channels you see fit. Will it make the bad things go away? No, no it won’t, but laughing bleakly about it makes it better, right? Right?
• Read Something Wonderful: This is a lovely idea – Read Something Wonderful is maintaining an archive of links to excellent pieces of longform writing, with the overarching premise that the best writing isn’t always the newest, and that someone should probably be preserving links to classic journalism or essays. The site’s very simple – there’s no tagging by topic, for example – but if you’re happy to be guided by the editorial team and just read ‘something interesting’, regardless of theme, then this is a great place to bookmark and dip back into when you’re at an online loose end.
• The Cloud Appreciation Society: Do you like clouds? NOT AS MUCH AS THESE PEOPLE DO! Still, if you’ve ever wanted to get access to a genuinely enormous collection of photographs of your cumulocirrus, your nimbus, your stratocumulus (these may not in fact be actual, accurately-named types of cloud, for which apologies), along with cloud-inspired poetry and art, and cloud NEWS and cloud FACTS, then this will be some sort of dream come true – there is also a shop on the site, and I genuinely wish I could drive so that I had an excuse to buy the ‘I Brake For Clouds’ bumber sticker. I love this with an almost sinful degree of passion.
• Wooden Cocks: As I regularly say in Curios, I genuinely have no idea who any of the people reading this are, or where you are, or what you’re into (apart from, to at least some degree, overlong newsletters) – which means that I am genuinely curious to know whether there will be one of you who, on seeing this link and clicking it and discovering that there is an auction taking place in Brighton next week at which will be sold (and I quote) “ELEVEN CARVED WOODEN PHALLUS, 33CMS LARGEST”,will think “AT LAST!” and bid to take them home. To be clear, you don’t need to tell me (and I really don’t want to know) – it’s just that I find the idea vaguely pleasing. Anyway, the lack of detail on this auction page is possibly my favourite thing about it – are the phalluses (phalli?) old? New? Suspiciously-worn? Notched? Unless you bid we will never know.
• Connections: On the one hand, the NYT’s games section has apparently just stolen the ‘Wall’ section from much-loved, super-geeky UK TV show ‘Only Connect’, which is pretty sh1tty behaviour; on the other, this is such a good game and, much like Only Connect, you will feel like some sort of intellectual colossus if you complete one (or at least you will if you’re me).
• Grimace’s Birthday: This is rather fun, by global obesity-peddlers McDonald’s – it’s an in-browser Gameboy game, in which you play as noone’s favourite fast food mascot Grimace as you skateboard around some pleasingly-16-bit-ish levels, grinding and jumping and collecting milkshakes and, honestly, this is pretty good (I have a strange feeling that they might also have produced a limited run of actual GBA cartridges for this too, although equally I might be imagining that and, honestly, I’m running a touch late this morning and don’t have time to check – wow, that was both an admission of slapdash practice AND a tedious sentence none of you wanted or needed to read – GO ME!).
• The Capcom Retro Games Archive: Capcom were my favourite ever client in videogames – fine, I had to promote some occasionally-shonky titles (noone remembers MotoGP05 with any fondness, and sadly noone remembers by accompanying PR triumph either – but I will always know that there was only one person for the Daily Sport headline ‘Bikers Have Bigger Cocks’, and that that person was ME!) but equally they were such fun to work with and let me basically do whatever I liked (possibly overstepped the mark with the Heather Mills thing for Bionic Commando, but, well, they were Different Times), and so I was charmed to see that this week they have launched Captown, a little digital museum featuring art and design and tributes to some of their best and most-loved titles…AND the Capcom Retro Games Archive, to which I have here linked, which lets you play a bunch of classic titles in-browser. Final Fight! SFII! Mega Man and Mega Man II! Oh me oh my! Honestly, this is your afternoon sorted (and, once you realise how incredibly fcuking hard these are, possibly the rest of your weekend too).

By Sanya Kantarovski

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS SUBLIME SELECTION BY NEIL DIABLO THAT YOU COULD PROBABLY DESCRIBE AS ‘CHILLOUT’ BUT WHICH IS LOADS BETTER THAN THAT MAKES IT SOUND AND IS BASICALLY THE DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE OF THE FIRST MIX SHOULD YOU NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Amy Goodchild: Amy Goodchild is an artist working with procedural generation; her Insta feed is a lovely selection of her work which is mathematical and precise and geometric and also very, very human, in a way that this sort of stuff doesn’t always land. This is beautiful.
• Daisuke Kajima: Incredible, dense drawings of dizzingly-angled urban environments, rendered in simple lines – this stuff is wonderful.
• Books On Maps: You might need to speak Italian to get the most from this, but it’s a lovely idea – the account posts shots of pages in books referring to a particular place, alongside shots of that place. Simple, but there’s something lovely about seeing the physcial reality of the narrative suggestion. This comes from Pietro Minto’s weekly newsletter, which is in Italian but which is easily machine-translatable and is always full of interesting stuff.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Jake Kennedy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It’s ok, everyone, you can stop worrying about the killer future AIs – RISHI AND JOE ARE SORTING IT!

Of course, as any fule kno, the main reason you should stop worrying about the killer future AIs is because they’re significantly less of a problem than non-killer present AIs, which are currently being wrangled by usual dreadful suspects in order to ‘maximise shareholder value’ and ‘deliver productivity gains’ and ‘optimise output delivery’, and all those other familiar phrases that mean ‘fcuk you, the worker, with a variety of interestingly-shaped and insufficiently-sharpened knives’.

Before we dive into this week’s exciting selection of links and the perennially-disappointing words that accompany them, let me take a moment to once again plug THE TINY AWARDS!

Thanks to everyone who’s shared the url and written about this so far – nominations are open for at least another week, so if you know of a lovely, home-made, artisanal, whimsical, fun, cute, playful, silly, pointless, joyful, troubling or sinister website that YOU feel deserves to win a small award, a small cash prize and a small, hand-carved trophy then PLEASE TELL US ABOUT IT!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and at least one of you is someone who I met on Wednesday evening and who was really kind about Curios and to whom I don’t think I was sufficiently grateful, so THANKYOU LOVELY TALL PERSON WHOSE NAME I HAVE UNACCOUNTABLY FORGOTTEN!

By Todd Alcott

YOUR FIRST MUSICAL OFFERING THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS INSANELY-COMPREHENSIVE PLAYLIST BASED ON JAMES BALDWIN’S RECORD COLLECTION AND WHICH IS A SUPERB SELECTION OF BLUES AND JAZZ AND GOSPEL AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER STUFF! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T HELP THAT APPLE’S VISION OF THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE ONE IN WHICH YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TELL WHETHER SOMEONE IS QUIETLY WATCHING BONGO, WHICH FEELS A BIT ODD TBH, PT.1:  

By Sanjay Suchak

NEXT UP WE HAVE SOMETHING FROM LITERALLY 13 YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS DOING THE PR FOR STREET FIGHTER IV AND MADE THIS HAPPEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T HELP THAT APPLE’S VISION OF THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE ONE IN WHICH YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TELL WHETHER SOMEONE IS QUIETLY WATCHING BONGO, WHICH FEELS A BIT ODD TBH, PT.2:  

• Migration Search: Via Giuseppe’s newsletter comes this interesting piece of datawork; Mohamad Waked has analysed search data from countries that are among the top sources of migrants worldwide to draw inferences about the gap between the dreams of those fleeing their homes to seek a better life and the often stark reality of what happens to them when they leave; the discrepancy between the places that, based on search data, people want to go, vs the places where they eventually end up, is not a little heartbreaking. I find work like this, that digs into search in interesting and vaguely-oblique ways, properly fascinating; oh, and this also feels like it is ripe for being the basis of some BIG STRATEGIC WORK, for the right client – it’s PURE INSIGHT, after all.
• Close-Up Photographer of the Year: ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE! Surely there can be no more niche categories of photography to celebrate? Still, this is a particularly good one – there are various categories within the overall award, but I’ve chosen to highlight the ‘minimal’ selection because, well, they’re just rather elegant and so well-composed; personally-speaking my favourites are either the out-of-focus Roth-esque abstract (you’ll see what I mean) or what I am convinced is the sexiest seal that has ever been captured on film (again, you will see what I mean; I don’t use the word ‘sexy’ lightly but, well, PHEW) (to be clear, I do not in fact find seals or any other aquatic mammals ‘sexy’).
• Black Screen Videos: One of the things that is genuinely dispiriting about working in advermarketingpr (only one, mind) is the experience that every single one of us has had of making a thing for a client, a thing that involves lots of painful wrangling and approvals and ‘creative discussion’ and multi-layered sign-off processes that serve only to bevel away the edges of any remaining idiosyncracies that ‘thing’ might once have had, and putting that thing out into the world and finding that literally noone cares (mainly, in my experience, because the ‘thing’ is a pointless piece of branded content that noone in their right mind would ever choose to experience). This link is for all of YOU, the ones who’ve spent 5+ figures of client money on videos whose viewcount even now hovers in the mid-100s (and that’s with the ad spend) – here is a video that pretty much features nothing but vidoes of a black screen an no audio, for hours and hours at a time, videos which have, collectively, TENS OF MILLIONS ON VIEWS. Feel good about your work yet? To be clear, these videos do serve some sort of purpose – people use them as a way of ensuring their computer keeps running, say, or to be able to clean a laptop – but, objectively, I find this very funny and suggest that any of you who are still having to make branded content for social media just send your clients this link and tell them that it’s all pointless and we should just, you know, stop.
• WebAmp: WinAmp, but in a browser! Hang on, what do you MEAN you don’t know what WinAmp was? ARE YOU BUT CHILDREN? WinAmp, for those of you younger than about 40, was how you used to listen to CDs (oh ffs) and eventually MP3s back in The Olden Times, with ACTUAL SKUOMORPHIC BUTTONS TO CLICK ON and designed to look both like an oldschool tape deck (oh ffs, again) and a graphic equaliser and a mixing desk, and, honestly, I didn’t quite realise how nostalgic I was for this specific era of digital music and interface design but, turns out, the answer is ‘quite nostalgic’. I remain convinced, by the way, that anyone using AI to create a modern-day equivalent of the WinAmp music visualiser thingy could probably get some decent numbers out of it, so, er, go on, do it.
• Sex Education: Given this week’s news that the UK is absolutely riddled with the clap (although I don’t for a second imagine that YOU, dear UK-based reader, is anything other than squeaky-clean of mucus memrane) (to be clear, I don’t ‘imagine’ you at all) (I should probably leave this now, shouldn’t I), it feels timely to share this excellent YouTube playlist featuring 8 reasonably-newly-uploaded sex education videos from The Past. One them is even all about VD and how not to get it, and features around the 12:45 mark an actor playing a sailor who looks so much like notorious South London comedian Arthur Smith that I had to pause it to check it wasn’t in fact him. These are ACE – partly, obviously, because anything talking about sex from The Old Times is slightly-ridiculous (despite the obvious biological evidence to the contrary, it is a simple fact of life that people in The Past didn’t really fcuk), and partly because they are so perfectly ripe for sampling and splicing and remixing – you could make something like THIS, for example.
• A Digital Wall: I can’t say I really understand what is going on here in any meaningful way – it’s a webpage! On it are what look like bricks! Each brick is a link to a resource or video about bricklaying or cement! Each time you click a brick and visit a link, that brick disappears, never to return! Yeah, I mean I have literally no idea what is going on here but there’s something really nice about the way the site deconstructs itself as you explore it, and I could probably construct some really clunky metaphor about the wall vanishing as you learn more (but I shan’t, as you don’t deserve to be treated so shabbily).
• Turing Trains: This actually made my brain ache as I tried to make sense of it, which suggests that I have probably not been taking it as easy as I might want to (or, perhaps more simply, that I’ve not gotten any better at formal logic since I last failed to adequately grasp it back in 1997. Basically this is a website all about designing computational systems based on simple train track layouts, using points as a means of creating a binary 0/1 differential via which you can create rudimentary programs – the site explains the principle and then lets you play around with various different configurations to learn how it all works and let you eventually mess around with your own designs (if you’re significantly smarter than me, at least). Beautifully, all of these layouts can be constructed in real life using iconic wooden model train brand Duplo (other, less expensive train sets are I believe also available), which has put me in mind of a wonderful analogue computer built entirely via a vast, snaking children’s trainset. Seriously, wouldn’t that be cool? YES IT WOULD.
• Painfinder: A smart little GPT hack, this – Painfinder is trained on a bunch of complaints by people across a range of different professions (it’s unclear where those are sourced from, but it’s not hard to imagine that a bit of light Reddit scraping could get you a decent corpus, for example), and uses natural language wrangling to let you ask it questions like ‘what are the things that haberdashers find MOST annoying about their job and wish they could improve?’; The Machine then spits out a bunch of suggestions for things that you might reasonably try and innovate around in that space, based on the pain points identified (painfinder, DO YOU SEE?). This is simple and, I’m almost entirely certain, probably not going to unlock a billion-dollar business idea, but, equally, it’s not a bad way of exploring a specific professional category and it’s a smart use of an LLM to do some mid-weight research lifting.
• Beautiful QR Codes: Someone on Reddit got Stable Diffusion to redesign QR codes to make them artworks (or at least that’s what I think they did – annoyingly OP at no point in this Reddit thread explains how they achieved the effect), and, remarkably, said QR codes still work, opening up the possibility of creating functional AND aesthetically-pleasing meatspace>digital pointers. This is really smart, and you will 100% see these in a significant (and, eventually, annoying) number of ‘trend’ presentations over the next few weeks.
• Murat Erdem: I don’t think that anyone reading this is in Turkey, but, on the offchance, could any of you please explain to me who Murat Erdem is and what, exactly, is going on in these videos? Because from what I can tell, this TikTok channel consists solely of a man with a moustache that can only be described as ‘luxuriant’, hair that can only be described as ‘coiffed’ and a line in open-necked shirts that can only be described as ‘powerfully erotic’, basically just sort of gazing at you with the sort of unabashed sexuality only usually deployed by professional courtesans. Perhaps it’s best not to know what’s going on here – just look into Murat’s eyes and enjoy.
• Giftwrap AI: This is a GREAT idea. Have someone to buy a gift for who you don’t like enough to bother thinking about? Ask AI for suggestions! Don’t want them to know that your selection process was so utterly half-ar$ed? Buy from GiftwrapAI, which will use some sort of AI magic to select an appropriate gift but then send it in a hand-wrapped package with a handwritten note to make it look like you give more of a sh1t about the recipient than you in fact do! This is perfectly-horrible, and feels oddly indicative of The Now – not least because the ‘AI’ is total fcuking bollocks (I told it I wanted a gift for my girlfriend who likes cats and high-end fashion, and it suggested some whiskey tumblers and a scrimshaw set – so I’ll let you know in August whether or not it managed to tap into her deepest unknown desires or whether I am in fact now the owner of some unwanted drinking paraphernalia and a broken relationship).
• Kingly: I stumbled across this old webcomic this week, and got gradually sucked in. Kingly is about, well, a king – a stupid, childish king, and the people who live in his court and exist to facilitate his existence. It starts slowly and you’ll need a dozen or so strips to get into the rhythm of it, but there’s something pleasing about the running gags and the callbacks and there are occasionally some really sharp gags, and there’s something bleakly funny about the clueless boy-king and the very real misery of their subjects. Which, I appreciate, sounds like the most miserable comic ever, but, well, TRUST ME HAVE I EVER LET YOU DOWN?
• The Crowbox: You’ve seen The Crow, right? Classic 90s film, awesome soundtrack, massively goth, features a LOT of crows? GREAT! I don’t know about you, but my main takeaway from that film (other than a brief and ill-fated desire to own a latex trenchcoat) was that it would be massively, immensely cool to have a corvid army at your command (fine, also quite smelly and a bit raucous, but omelettes/eggs, right?) – and so, THE CROWBOX! Ok, fine, it doesn’t specifically promise you a corvid army, but what it DOES do is give you the opportunity to attempt to train the famously-smart avians to do things (not, again, necessarily ‘your bidding’, before you get visions of them, I don’t know, fcuking off to Tesco to pick up milk and skins). Here’s the blurb: “The CrowBox is an experimentation platform designed to autonomously train corvids (the family of birds crows belong to). So far we’ve trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they found on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to work with wild corvids and see if we can get them to learn to use the box, then to optimize the training protocol to see how quickly they can learn from each other. That’s where you come in. Different corvids learn at different speeds and in different ways, and the only way to figure out the best way to teach them is experimentation. The more people try different things the faster we’ll all figure out how to work cooperatively with crows. Once we’ve got the system optimized for teaching coin collection we can move to seeing how flexibly they can learn *other* tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue. The idea isn’t to get rich off found coins – we want to change the world through learning how to cooperate with other species.” Honestly, how much do you love the vision of a future in which man and crow exist happily and in near-symbiotic harmony? Basically this is a skinner box for reinforcement behaviour – you’re training the birds to associate (in the first instance) the depositing of coins with the release of food – so this could be of interest to any of you who like to think about how best to manipulate the minds of others as well as anyone who just wants to hang out with crows a bit.
• CityGuessr: ANOTHER DAILY GUESSING GAME! This one asks you to work out what city is being shown on a zoomed-in section of map; you can get various helpful clues and hints in exchange for lowering your eventual victory score, but I am personally so appalling at geography that I have been able to get a grand total of none of these since I found the site last weekend, even with all the clues. DON’T LAUGH IT’S REALLY HARD.
• Mineplacer: A really nice riff on the classic Minesweeper game – here you’re tasked with placing the mines in the right place on the grid based on the warnings around them (a task which is far easier to get your head around if you read the description on the website rather than the frankly crappy attempt at explanation you just got from me).
• The Array Game: The ultimate clicker game. There is no artifice, no pretence, no window dressing. Just make the numbers go up. And up. And up. There’s something almost scary about this – like, it’s not even trying to be fun, so why have I had it open in a tab all week and why have I stopped typing at least a dozen times this morning to switch back to it and do some more clicking? It feels…quite weird to have certain sensitive dopamine-producing corners of your brain tickled so obviously, and it does rather feel that someone somewhere is laughing at us stupid monkeys. Click. Click. Click. Click.

By Falk Gernegroß

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY UNIVERSAL CAVE AND IS A GENUINELY GREAT SELECTION OF 70s SOFT ROCK AND LOUNGE-TYPE SOUNDS AND, I PROMISE, THIS IS PERFECT SUMMER AFTERNOON MUSIC!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Banana Bruiser: Pictures made by bruising bananas. Will, if nothing else, make you want to go and send messages to the future in your local supermarket (now I have written that I *really* want to start bruising ‘don’t trust Alan’ onto every single bunch in Tesco).
• Miniatua: Via Andy comes this excellent Insta feed curated by a modelmaker who creates the most amazingly detailed minatures of old computing systems and office equipment and, oddly, a tiny, tiny dartboard. This will scratch that very particular part of your brain which enjoys the tiny and perfectly-formed, and possibly make you consider miniaturism.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Sally Kindberg

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

One of the side effects of writing Curios (other than a generally unhealthy posture and attitude towards my fellow man, RSI, chronically-stained teeth as a result of approximately seventeen daily litres of very strong tea and a complete inability to ever really ‘switch off’ to any meaningful degree) is that, despite having a media diet that might reasonably be described as ‘omnivorous’, there tend to be whole swathes of pop culture to which I am basically entirely blind.

Which means that occasionally there are weeks like this one in which multiple stories break which are totally mysterious to me and which leave me feeling like some sort of informational Helen Keller. Why are Holly and Phil fighting? Why is it bad that Taylor Swift is dating that man (and how is it possible that, much like the musical output of Rita Ora, I have never, ever knowingly heard a song by The 1975?) Why is it the law that every single newspaper article this week needed to make reference to Succession, and can it stop now? SO MANY QUESTIONS!

Do YOU have questions? If they are mainly around ‘what exciting links and treats has Matt prepared for us this week’ then, well, YOU ARE IN LUCK!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I personally don’t think that anyone who refers to themselves as ‘Matty’ should be trusted, ever.

By Maysey Craddock

WE KICK OFF THE MUSICAL BITS THIS WEEK WITH THIS LONG-AND-WORTH-EVERY-MINUTE MIX OF BEATS BY SUNJU HARGUN!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE SCHOFIELD THING BUT WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR ANYONE USING THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY MAKE EQUIVALENCES BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALITY AND PAEDOPHILIA BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE ARE FCUKING CNUTS, PT.1:  

By Romina Bassu

EASE YOURSELF INTO THE NEXT HEFTY SLICE OF LINKS WITH THIS HOUR-LONG SELECTION OF AMBIENT WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘HAPPILY SHIMMERY’, COMPILED BY FERGUS! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE SCHOFIELD THING BUT WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR ANYONE USING THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY MAKE EQUIVALENCES BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALITY AND PAEDOPHILIA BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE ARE FCUKING CNUTS, PT.2:      

• Lost Books: This is presented more as a conceptual curiosity than as a recommendation – I am in the middle of a bunch of decent novels written by real people at the moment (general point – in the unlikely event anyone ever reads this sh1t and thinks “ooh, the person responsible for this SPARKLING and in-no-way overwrought prose is exactly the sort who I want recommending fiction to me!”, feel free to email me and ask for reccs as I will happily oblige) and so didn’t really have the appetite to fork out actual cashmoney for one of these. BUT! The idea is…interesting. I stumbled across the ‘Lost Books’ collection via this Newsweek piece which profiled the man behind them, one Tim Boucher, who over the past year or so has used a selection of AI tools to create over 100 ‘novels’, also AI illustrated, which are all available to purchase for around £3 a pop from this website. Boucher’s fairly sanguine about the limitations of his work – they are short (around 2-5k words, so ‘novel’ feels like a stretch) and rather than being recognisable formal exercises in story writing they tend to be interlinked fragments or vignettes from a broadly-imagined world (this to get around inherent limitations in the ‘memory’ of LLMs which prevent them from holding concepts such as ‘characters’ and ‘motivation’ over extended periods of creation), and Boucher says he’s earned $2k over the past year. Which, to be clear, is not a lot! And is definitely, on a pay-per-hour basis, not worth the amount of time it’s taken him to make all these! It is, though, really interesting that there *is* a market for this stuff, however, small, and his notes on the worldbuilding aspect of what he is doing here were interesting to me in terms of how these sorts of tools, whilst obviously a long way off being able to create anything that a discerning reader might actually want to consume, could actually be really rather helpful in doing some of the gruntwork of fleshing out the corners and edges of an imagined environment or scenario.
• Bottell: What are the sort of tasks and topic expertise you’d be willing to outsource to a faceless, anonymous machine’intelligence’? Diet? Exercise? Reading material? Training regime? How about ‘the care of your children’?  ARE YOU FCUKING INSANE WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!? Nonetheless, that is EXACTLY what new business Bottell is offering – an offer which, I feel reasonably-confident predicting, will not end up with this business being a household name anytime soon (can you imagine the sort of insurance you would have to have for this sort of thing? Especially in the US? Er, guys, you do…you do *have* insurance, right? Created, allegedly, by two parents (I don’t know why, but I am…skeptical here) the blurb on the site literally says (I paraphrase): “we relied on Google search for parenting advice, but it was so unreliable and hard to know who to trust…thank God for ChatGPT!” I mean, yes, LOL at the idea that you believe the hallucinatory LLM to be *more* trustworthy than the search engine, but wevs. This is obviously a very silly, very bad, very doomed idea, but, also, it’s slightly depressing that someone somewhere thinks that there are enough stupid people out there who would pay $5 a month for what is literally a GPT3.5 API call with two lines of prompt baked in. That said, given the insane amount of parent-focused research and literature and video that, say, P&G has in its vaults, I would be amazed if one of the Proctoids (for example) is currently working on the Pampers equivalent of this.
• MagicFlow: Do you DO productivity? Are you the sort of person who has a Pomodoro clock on the go at all times, who chunks their day into 15m segments to better optimise the GOLDEN HOURS OF MENTAL FLOW? Do you optimise and track and WANT TO IMPROVE wherever possible? Wow. What’s that…what’s that like? I don’t think I’ve felt any real ambition for personal betterment since about age 13 when I briefly started doing situps in my room at home (it lasted a week after I saw no notable improvement and decided, honestly, that heroin chic was probably here to stay and I could forego the sixpack), but I appreciate that not everyone is so content to limp towards the grave as I am and that some of you might want to LIVE YOUR BEST WORKING LIVES. For you, then, comes MAGICFLOW (whose creator actually got in touch with me as part of their PR efforts and who I hope really doesn’t regret so doing as a result of this pseudo-writeup), an app designed (in the main at least) for the coders amongst you and which offers you the chance to analyse your productivity and output to work out what is distracting you and how you can best organise yourself to WORK BETTER WORK HARDER WORK STRONGER! This does, my slight reticence aside, look like it tracks an impressive amount of detail and might be helpful in determining when and how you work best. Equally, though, do you REALLY want to be able to crunch code more efficiently? Maybe, you know, just…be slow! Be inefficient! Because, honestly, it really doesn’t matter. Was…was this the writeup you were looking for?
• Metaphor: This is interesting if not-entirely-successful; Metaphor is a natural language search engine (no idea what it’s built on, maybe DDG or something?) which invites you to structure your queries differently to attempt to surface better results. This is VERY bare bones, and won’t in any way replace whatever your regular search solution is but it does, based on my cursory playing this week, offer some interesting results – I tried to get it to throw up a load of interesting linky sites and it gave me some genuinely good ones, including a few properly obsecure sources I never see cited anywhere; however, it didn’t surface Web Curios and as such I can’t in all conscience recommend it to you. Sorry.
• Anti-scraping SiteText: I don’t, if I’m honest, have a whole load of confidence in the fact that this will make a blind bit of difference, but I suppose it can’t hurt to try. This is the attempt to create a standard bit of code that webdevs can install on sites, much like the classic robots.txt that’s used to instruct crawlers for Google and the like not to scrape the site for info or whatever – this, the code’s creators hope, will become an accepted standard way of indicating to whatever the next iteration of the OpenAI feeder bots looks like that you don’t want them to ingest your work to feed The Machines. Except, well, the code’s creators also admit that there’s obviously no way to compel said scrapers to comply with the request, so it’s all basically at the mercies of the scrapercreators…but, well, we live in hope, eh? It seems fairly obvious that any and all sites with any serious desire not to be subsumed into the Great Content Blob of 2023 should probably implement this and cross their fingers.
• Free Weed Books: What do YOU do when you smoke weed? Me, mainly I offer overpriced strategic consultancy services (lol, jk!), but I know that others like to read or play videogames or engage in an increasingly-paranoid exploration of The Dark Cabal That Really Rules The World, or sometimes draw or write or doodle…Free Weed Books is an online resource that lets you download and print a bunch of what can charitably be described as ‘kids colouring books for very stoned adults’, which will give you things to colour in and prompts to write about and games to play and effectively bills itself as a JOURNAL FOR YOUR LIFE which, objectively, I find very, very funny – imagine that you die at some ripe old age, and you bequeath your secret collected diaries and journals to family and friends who solemnly open them, only to find…a bunch of sticky, jam-smeared colouring books full of gnomic utterances like “PR, The Musical – script idea!” and “shorts for ducks”. I am now slightly regretful that I will never breed and will therefore never be able to disappoint my progeny in this manner.
• The 8-Track Tape Store: This bills itself as the world’s largest collection of 8-track tapes for sale, and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc! The physical shop is based in California, but they ship internationally should you be in the unlikely position of having an 8-track tape player and nothing to listen on it.
• Sightful: We’re on the cusp of another big moment for AR, in which people once again try and persuade us that it’s a technology whose time has come – and, in fairness, Snap continue to produce some really cool stuff using the tech, and there’s no doubt that Appple’s new headset will raise the profile of mixed reality stuff to a huge degree and make it all feel ‘cool’ again in a way that it hasn’t for a few years, but…but, well, I still don’t REALLY see the point tbh. Which is a shame for this new laptop brand which looks both SUPER sci-fi and also HUGELY pointless – but, honestly, so scifi! Imagine, if you will, that your regular laptop has not just the one screen but an INFINITY of them, all hovering around the space in your field of vision, all arrangeable however you like and customisable and…doesn’t that sound horrid and overwhelming? Still, HERE IT IS! “A 100-inch Screen In Your Backpack!”, screams the blurb, not bothering to ask whether a 100-inch screen is TOO BIG (it is) – you also need to wear the accompanying AR glasses to see the aforementioned virtual AR screen, but that does have the benefit of privacy. I honestly can’t conceive of a situation in which this makes any practical sense – for a start I imagine the processing power required to keep this 100-inch virtual AR monitor going with multiple apps means performance is utterly banjaxed beyond a certain point – but for those of you who’ve always dreamed of being able to carry your Goon Cave with you wherever you go then this is probably some sort of sticky vision of paradise.
• Milky Way Photographer of the Year: On the one hand, these are astonishing images of the majesty and unknowable wonder of the infinite vastness of the cosmos; on the other, they are SO filtered and HDR’d and generally post-produced that, if I’m honest, they’ve started to take on the general aesthetic cast of AI-generated imagery to me. I wonder if that’s going to be a side-effect of the Midjourney boom – that a certain style of very-digitally-altered photography is going to become less appealing due to its ostensible similarity of machine-created images? Or maybe I’ve just been aesthetically poisoned, it’s possible.
• Supertape: Oooh, this looks like a great idea for musicians. Supertape is basically a new, simple, website tool for people who make music – the idea is that it functions a bit like a more flexible LinkTree or similar, with the aesthetics and personalisability of a website but the automation and centralisation of a linkcollector. You create the site using Supertape, plug in all the other bits of your MUSICAL EMPIRE (YouTube, Bandcamp, Spotify, merch platforms, socials, etc), and thanks to MAGICAL INTERNET PIPES, each time you update one of those your central Supertape will automatically pull said update into its CMS and neatly rework the frontpage to reflect it. This is currently free and in beta, and it looks like a really useful product imho.
• Terrible Terms: A superb collection of examples of the worst possible ways in which one might design a ‘Terms and Conditions’ consent page online. Some of these are genuinely evil, and I wonder whether there are circumstances in which you might be able to get away with actually using them on a real website – you know how certain videogames in the past used to have code that rendered them unplayable if users couldn’t pass copy protection? Something like that, but for online services. Like, I don’t know, as a means of guarding against bot activity, or as a more-annoying Captcha? Obviously this is a terrible idea, but I now really want to see one of these in the wild somewhere.
• Community ModerAItion: Obviously you probably wouldn’t trust this in real life, yet, but it’s another canary in the coalmine for What Is Coming Soon. This is called MadLad and is an AI-powered community management bot for Discord; you can train it on the specific rules and guidelines for your channel, set its conversational tone and various other guardrails per your wants, and then let it loose to answer user questions and filter content and, presumably, wield the banhammer when necessary…The pricing here looks punchy, frankly, for something which as per most of this stuff at the moment is just sellotaped together from API parts and has no moat whatsoever, but, equally, if you consider that for most games companies these days ‘Discord Moderator and Community Manager’ is a proper job with a proper salary you can see the commercial value in spending $30 a month rather than $3000 a month…AND THAT’S HOW THE JOBS APOCALYPSE HAPPENS, KIDS! THANKS, THE MARKET! THANKS, CAPITALISM! Sorry.
• Food Photos of the Year 2023: The annual Pink Lady-sponsored awards have rolled round again (I wouldn’t normally mention the sponsor, but in this case feel compelled to because of the slight ridiculousness of the idea that an apple can sponsor anything) and here collected are a dizzying number of photos of food and people enjoying food and the process of preparing food and, look, a lot of these are really really great but (again) an awful lot are also SO post-produced as to look like CG, and there are approximately 20% of these which, honestly, are in terms of lighting and composition and framing and subject literally EXACTLY the sort of stuff that I see dozens of times a day now made by machine and, seriously, if you can look at this and think ‘yes, the future of photography as a discipline is definitely rosy!’ then, well, you’re a more optimistic person than I am (which, I concede, is not that hard).
• Adel Faure’s ASCII Website: I don’t know who Adel Faure is, but I adore their website which is all in ASCII and contains ASCII art and pixel art and tools for making your own, and some ASCII games, and, honestly, is just lovely and generous and overall a pleasing place to spend 10 minutes clicking around.
• APPARLE: A truly horrible name (seriously, try saying that word out loud and then spend a few seconds spitting to get rid of the odd-but-inescapable feeling of having a mouth full of cotton wool) for a fun little game – guess the retail price of the pictured garment, in USD, in as few guesses as possible. Each guess gives you a new tidbit of information, and you’re told whether your last try was too high or two low…yes, ok, fine, this *is* technically a Wordle variant but let’s pretend I hadn’t promised to never include one ever again and just move on.
• Ice Cream Van Simulator: A very small, very simple game in which you have to sell ice cream to kids – kids who get VERY ANGRY and a bit murderous if you get their order wrong. This is about 5m worth of fun, max, but those five minutes are very much leavened by the fact you can run over the children; fine, it screws your high score, but GOD the satisfaction.
• Setris: This requires a download, fine, but it is VERY GOOD – after last week’s Tetris-y game from Matt Round comes this variant on the old classic, in which the bricks turn to sand as they land and you need to match colours rather than make straight lines…it takes a couple of minutes to get your head round the mechanic, but I promise you that it becomes second nature after a few goes and quickly becomes genuinely fun as you work out strategies.
• Slide To Unlock: Finally this week, if you are yet to try the most brilliantly-frustrating mobile UX game EVER devised then, well, TRY IT NOW. Mobile only, and you will HATE this (but also quietly love it and wish that you had thought if it; SO clever).

By Dani Orchard

 OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS DISCO-ISH SET MIXED BY DJ CRAZY P WHICH I ENJOYED DESPITE GENERALLY NOT REALLY GIVING ANYTHING RESEMBLING A SH1T ABOUT DISCO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Horsegiirl420: I don’t personally find ‘person DJs whilst wearing a mask’ a particularly compelling proposition, but the success of Dangermouse, Marshmello and, now, Horsegiirl420, suggests that I am in a minority. There’s a backstory to this in which the person behind the mask is some sort of society ‘it’ girl, but, honestly, who cares? It’s someone DJing who is cosplaying as Paris Hilton cosplaying as a horse, what’s not to love?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Maud Madsen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE WELCOME TO WEB CURIOS IT IS FRIDAY HOW ARE YOU?

Oh. Sorry. Still, for those of us in the UK it’s yet another three-day weekend (as I believe it is for those of you residing in North America), so hopefully the illusion of freedom will cure at least a bit of what ails you.

I’m off to Brighton for the rest of the day, so will leave you with this week’s crop of words and links and pictures and music and wish you a genuinely wonderful weekend. Have fun, and try not to die if you can help it (but, if you must, do so SPECTACULARLY).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably go to the pub RIGHT NOW.

By Albert Reyes

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS BY JOE MUGGS AND IS A PERFECT BALEARIC ACCOMPANIMENT TO WHAT MIGHT IF WE’RE LUCKY ACTUALLY BE A SUNNY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY REMIND YOU ALL TO PUT ON SOME SUNSCREEN THIS WEEKEND, PT.1:  

By Jaehoon Choi

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THIS NEXT SECTION WITH AN EXCELLENT SELECTION OF WHAT I AM RELIABLY-INFORMED IS A MIX OF DARK BREAKS AND DIRTY FUNK?  

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY REMIND YOU ALL TO PUT ON SOME SUNSCREEN THIS WEEKEND, PT.2:    

• You, In Data Breaches: A nice little interactive explainer about data breaches and the sale of personal information online, which uses your email address and public records from places like HaveIBeenPwned? to give you a neatly-personalised overview of the sorts of datapoints about YOU that might currently be floating around the web’s dark marketplaces. Presuming you’re not a total infosec moron this shouldn’t be particular news to you – but, er, CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS, KIDS! – but the way it uses personalisation to communicate what’s otherwise a slightly-dry bunch of information in marginally-more-engaging fashion is a nice touch, and the whole thing’s a decent bit of educational explainer work by ABC Australia.
• Absolut NFTs: I know, I know, NFTs? What is this, 2021? Still, this sparked momentary interest in me, not because I think it’s anything resembling a good project but because various business commenters have been gently talking up web3 and NFTs again, in the wake of Nike’s Swoosh project doing better-than-expected numbers for its first digital sneaker drop (fwiw, I think this is a classic case of it being very, very important that you don’t use one of the largest and best-loved brands in the world as any sort of representative case study for the general appeal of this sort of sh1t), and so I thought I’d take a look at Absolut’s latest foray into the world of digital lies and snake oil. Unsurprisingly, it’s a mess! Specifically, it’s effectively a collaborative limited-edition merch drop, in conjunction with Italian designer Seletti, who has designed a…a lamp? Is it a lamp? Fcuk knows, honestly…anyway, they have designed something in conjunctgion with Absolut, and there are a limited number of these real-life things that you can get hold of…but to do so, first you need to mint an NFT of a digital version of one! And then redeem that digital version for the IRL one! WHY?!?! WHY DO I NEED TO DO THIS?!?! WHY THE DIGITAL STEP?!?!? Once again, an NFT-related activation that serves to prove, in the main, that there is STILL no use case whatsoever for a link to a jpeg, however much Ethereum you tell people it’s worth.
• QR Draw: Create a QR code in the image of any photo you choose – this is, I think, possibly about 15 years old, but it’s FINALLY RELEVANT now that we live in an age in which people know what QR codes are and, occasionally, even scan them. If nothing else I reckon some QR codes designed up using the right people’s faces, stuck up in public places, guerilla-style, would get pretty decent traction. Depending on whose fizzog you choose to use and where you choose to put these, I think you could have rather a lot of fun – or, depending on how evil you’re feeling, run a very efficient phishing scam.
• Motion Design Principles: Oh this is SUCH a good site – an interactive explainer with beautiful scrolling animations and, as you’d expect, stellar motion design, which gives you a comprehensive (well, comprehensive for me at least; those of you who are less visually-inept may find it a bit thin) overview of why motion design is an integral part of overall webdesign, and how you can use specific techniques to direct users’ attention and gaze, and how specific effects and bits of motion elicit particular feelings, and how those can and should be used to communicate more effectively online…this is stellar, and SUCH an appealing piece of design work in and of itself. Built by Zajno, a digital studio in California who are obviously very, very good at what they do.
• The New Photoshop Stuff: So this is a demo video by Adobe showing off all the new stuff that is coming to photoshop (NO CAPITAL ‘P’! NO ‘™’! FCUK YOU ADOBE YOU APPALLING CNUTS! FEEL THE FORCE OF MY IMPOTENT RAGE!) imminently, and which is, as with so much of this stuff, borderline-magical. Or at least it looks borderline magical in the demo – basically this integrates all the fancier GAN image-AI techniques (autofill, autoreplace, that sort of thing) directly into the photoshop product, so you can (for example) replace my horrible, tired eyes that look like two p1ssholes in snow with some far more appealing peepers in a couple of clicks and a few keystrokes. The theory here is dizzying, although in reality it’s probably going to look a little more like this example than the hyper-polished demo suggests. Oh, and while we’re doing mad AI editing stuff, this is another impressive demo demonstrating how simple it is to swap out one person for another – although it’s depressing that as ever with this stuff it features nearly-naked women (ffs, developermen, can you maybe not?), for which my curatorial apologies.
• AI, Adverts and Hyperpersonalisation: I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but about 5 or 6 years ago a friend of mine asked me to do a panel at some marketing conference in London about creativity and digital technology; I shared a stage with people from Twitter and Google and I made myself very, very unpopular by basically telling the assembled audience of generic media w4nkers that there would come a point in the not-too-distant future where the lowest tier of ad creation would be automated to the point of rendering about 60% of them otiose – the machines would smash together an infinite number of creative variables (copy and image) and automatically A/B test them to fcuk, and determine the most effective creative, and buy the inventory, all without needing more than one or two actual people’s involvement. And lo! IT IS BASICALLY HERE!  Click the link and watch the (admittedly slightly annoying) TikTok hustle guy demonstrate how AI can be used to create literally millions of hypertargeted, hyperpersonalised ads with limited effort – and know that, whilst they look crap now and probably wouldn’t work, THAT THESE ARE THE SH1TTEST THAT THEY WILL EVER BE. If you can look at this and not think ‘hm, I don’t foresee great career prospects for the people who design and make the sort of crap, low-margin, high-volume ads like this’ then, well, you’re either a moron or VERY optimistic – but, either way, I strongly believe you are wrong.
• AInsights: ‘Insight’ – the very WORST word in agencyland! So meaningless! So traduced! So vapid! Still, if your job involves having to come up with spurious REVELATORY TRUTHS which you can then deploy to sell more plastic tat to people who by now should know better, you will know the particular tedious pain of having to read seventythreemillion vaguely disparate sources about a sector or industry and cobble them into a coherent six-slide upfront before the ‘creative’ people get to talk. This website – called, upsettingly, ‘Glasp’ – offers you help with that. This is, I promise, actually quite interesting – feed it a bunch of sources and it will basically make connections between them, draw parallels, extrapolate links and generally attempt to create a plausible narrative. Whilst it’s unlikely to deliver the KILLER INSIGHT (sorry) that will lead to you being garlanded with laurels and paraded through the streets like a victorious Caesar, it’s a useful way of testing theories and getting some initial light thinking done, and it’s the sort of tool that I can imagine being particularly useful to junior planners or strategists as a way of helping them think about stuff.
• Mind Video: Another SUPER SCIFI link, this time technology which literally reconstitutes video imagery from brainscans and offers the tantalising possibility of being able to watch other people’s dreams (we’re only about a decade from Strange Days FINALLY being a reality, which, on reflection, perhaps isn’t the cause for celebration I might have initially thought). This is dry and technical but also, frankly, utterly amazing and another ‘crikey, I did not think of this as a potential use-case for GANs’ thing that, I find, is helpful in maintaining a sense of wonder and positivity about all this moderately-terrifying AI progress.
• Search Gizmos: As previously discussed here, search is currently a bit broken – Google’s gone to sh1t, the new Bing is, despite all the AI gubbins, still as sh1t as it ever was (you can have all the conversational features you like, but if the search product the bot is using is as fundamentally second-tier as Bing is it’s unlikely to deliver many real benefits), and we’re still waiting to see whether AI integration will make a meaningful, positive difference to the way search in general functions (I am…unconvinced, personally, but then again I am a know-nothing bozo with a spectacularly-unpopular internet newsletter and Google is, well, a bit more successful than me, so perhaps I should just listen to Sunder). In the meantime, you might find this website (compiled by Tara Calishain) helpful – it contains a bunch of useful tools and tips and tricks to make Google work better, and to search Wikipedia more effectively, and links to all sorts of other useful search tools, and frankly this is probably the most useful link in this week’s Curios and YOU ARE WELCOME!
• Design Life Cycle: This is interesting: “Designlife-cycle.com is a work-in-progress project by design undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis – Department of Design.  Designers and consumers should have quick access to full information about the full life-cycle and embedded energy of common design materials and products. Without having this information at our fingertips, efforts toward sustainability are seriously hampered, if not an outright sham.  What are the things we use every day made of? Where do the materials that make it up come from, and what steps do they undergo in their processing to become the things we use?  How are they disassembled and recycled, and where do the materials go after use? How much energy is involved in this process at every step of the way, not just when we plug something into the wall to charge it?” This contains a LOAD of student work, looking at individual products and how they are made and what the externalities of that making are, and where the waste goes…in part just fascinating about modern manufacturing and capitalism in general, in part a bit of a worrying environmental reminder about just how terrible all this relentless consumption tends to be for the planet, this is also a useful place for product / category research, should you ever be in the market for it.
• Vacation With An Artist: This is odd. Vacation With An Artist is an initiative that in theory lets anyone book a ‘holiday’ with an artist somewhere in the world – you pay a fee for their time, for the use of their space and for materials, and for the duration of the experience you will effectively be apprenticed to them, learning their practice and craft and (so the blurb goes) developing your own skills unto the bargain. You obviously still have to stump up for travel, food and accommodation, but there are some genuinely interesting people who you can go and stay with if you’re so inclined (part of me wants to just go and hang out with bespoke cobblers Deborah and James, wherever in London they might be – they just look nice, don’t they?). My only slight cautionary note is based on the fact that the majority of artists I’ve met in my life aren’t *necessarily* the most garrulous people in the world, and I’m not 100% certain that they’d be able to maintain the requisite veneer of sociability, but that might say more about the calibre of person I associate with than artists in general. I am now slightly obsessed with the idea of spending 4 days in Catania learning how to restore wood – there are some really cool-sounding things on here, it’s worth having an explore.
• Kenny Logins: A password generator which uses the lyric book of 1980s American rocker Kenny Loggins, the man whose vocals soundtracked Top Gun amongst other things, as its source material. A single-note gag, but a pretty good one.
• Sunstream: THIS IS SO SO SO BEAUTIFUL. “Sun Stream is a digital clock in the form of a 24-hour song that shifts based on the amount of a visitor’s “available light.” Loosely inspired by the concept of Circadian Rhythms, 14 sun positions are mapped to 14 audio loops. Additional sound layers are generated in real time, while bells softly mark the passage of hours.” I can’t stress enough how much I think this sort of design – temporal, environmental and reactive – feels underexplored, and a hugely-fertile area to think about in terms of creative work. But, er, please don’t fcuking ruin it by using it to sell orange juice or something.
• Warms: This is rather lovely; it looks a bit like a ‘Life’ cellular simulation, but it isn’t one – instead, draw linear shapes and watch as they then animate, based on rules derived from their length and the curve and direction of the lines. Simple but really rather lovely.
• Doom In Teletext: You’ll need to be technically-minded to make this work, but if you’d ever asked yourself ‘I wonder if it is technically possible to make Doom run on ancient UK text information service Teletext’ then you will be thrilled to know that the answer is “YES YOU CAN!”.
• Puzzlemoji: Can you communicate the title of a film using only three emoji, in such a way that a GPT can correctly guess the movie in question? Yes, you probably can, you are after all smarter than The Machine (still, just), but that doesn’t stop this daily puzzler from being pleasingly-fun.
• TimeGuessr: Ooh, this is a good one – guess the geographical location AND the year in which a bunch of famous photos were taken. This is really addictive, I warn you.
• DayBrix: The latest game from Matt Round over at Vole, this is DEFINITELY NOT Tetris, and DEFINITELY DOESN’T draw any inspiration from it whatsoever – it is, fine, a game in which blocks fall from the top of the screen and you, the player, is tasked with arranging them into lines, but it is DEFINITELY NOT Tetris. It is DayBrix, and it is a lot of fun (even though I am really, really sh1t at it) – there’s a daily challenge, and an arcade mode, and the music in particular is far, far better than it needs to be.
• Screwball Scramble: OH MY GOD THIS IS A HIT OF PURE UNCUT NOSTALGIA RIGHT INTO MY VEINS! Screwball Scramble, for the uninitiated, was a motorised game released in the 1980s in which you had to get a ballbearing across a bunch of different obstacles, each controlled in its own way with a level or slider or button; the game required concentration and patience and skill, all the sorts of things that kids naturally lack, and as such was both INSANELY FRUSTRATING but also the coolest thing in the world re it basically being an IRL version of something like Marble Madness. And now it’s BACK, rendered in genuinely-gorgeous CG which really LOOKS like the cheap plastic that the original was made from, and which neatly recreates the insane anger you will feel as your ball caroms off the penultimate obstacle and you’re forced to restart the whole thing. I promise you that you have NO IDEA of the effort of will it’s currently taking for me not to sack off the rest of this and just play this for the rest of the morning (SEE MY STAKHANOVITE DEDICATION AND MARVEL!).

By Jérôme Masi

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS CRACKING CROSS-GENRE MIX OF SUNSHINE-APPROPRIATE BANK HOLIDAY BANGERS BY SAIGE SOUNDS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Airplane Facts With Max: Max is an airline mechanic, who makes videos on his Insta feed about planes that aren’t really about planes at all. Max’s delivery is VERY deadpan, which makes these videos 100% funnier than they would otherwise be.
• Barry Webb: Barry takes macro photographs of very small things – these are GORGEOUS, particularly if you’re a mycology fan (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc etc).
• Cooking For Bae: Bad food, photographed badly. You know what you’re getting with this, fine, but WOW is there some stellar content on here. There’s one shot of a battered sausage, chips and mushy peas which contains foodstuffs of a colour I have genuinely never witnessed before.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Dolf Kruger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: