You know what the only thing worse than being governed by absolute cnuts? Being governed by stupid cnuts.
Why is it that every time a tranche of texts belonging to the powerful get released they only serve to demonstrate what total and utter fcuking intellectual pygmies said powerful are? It happened with the Musktexts last year, when we got to see exactly how craven and fellatory the world’s billionaire classes are capable of being with each other, and it’s happening again here in the UK with the release of the Hancock Whatsapps, which surely must mark the point at which Miss Coladangelo awakes from the deep hypnosis that can be the only explanation for her apparent infatuation with that chinless moron and runs for the fcuking hills.
BUT! You’re not here for this! In fact, depending on where you are reading this from there’s every chance that the preceding two paragraphs will have meant nothing to you whatsoever Which, frankly sets you up perfectly for the rest of the week’s newsletter, which as a result of minor sleep deprivation is possibly even lighter than usual on thematic consistency and internal coherence. Apologies in advance and all that.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if anyone wants to read 100,000 of my What
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN TRAIN AN LLM ON THE HANCOCK TEXTS AND FINALLY BE DONE WITH THE REPELLENT LITTLE MEATSACK’S PHYSICAL EMBODIMENT, PT.1:
- Wist: I was out last night with some people and we got to talking about tech and AI and stuff like that (I am a thrill in real life as well as online!), and I realised that I was basically being a slightly-doomy Cassandra about everything (this may shock you, I appreciate), and so I want to start this week with something which when I saw it made me genuinely excited and slightly giddy about the future, just to prove that I am in fact capable of feeling normal human emotions like ‘broad positivity’. Wist is…well, it’s another one of those things which is basically as close to being scifi witchcraft as it’s possible to be without invoking that Charlie Brooker TV show which we’ve all agreed we can’t mention anymore in the context of mad, futuristic technology. Whilst it doesn’t quite exist yet, you can sign up for the beta waitlist if you’re an iOS or VR user – the idea here is that using a combination of various cutting-edge bits of visual tech, users will be able to take photos and videos and then…well, basically, step inside said photos and videos and wander around within them. I KNOW, RIGHT?! The effect, from what I can tell, is like some sort of volumetric Kinect-y rendering, and I think this uses NERF or similar to capture the video and make it 3d-navigable, and whilst the examples on the site look, fine, a bit grainy and flickery, there’s something astonishing about the fact that an idea like this – which is, to reiterate, literally the sort of thing that we have spent the past 50-odd years being shown in scifi – is now close enough to being real to actually properly envisage. Whilst this sort of thing is a long way away from being mainstream (or even, fine, particularly good), you can absolutely imagine where this ends up – and, with a bit of imaginative stretching, you can conceive of variants on stuff like this where it’s hooked up to AI and you can engage in various conversational interactions with the people captured in these 3d memories…basically this is quite astonishingly future, and it made me momentarily quite excited. SEE? POSITIVITY!
- Beatmachine: This is great as well and I really really want one – so, er, if any of you fancy organising some sort of whipround, that would be great. Beatmachine is, very simply put, a freestanding physical arcade cabinet which doubles as a sort-of sequencer/beat machine, and which basically turns the act of making music into a sort of pub game, and it looks SO MUCH FUN. “The Beat Machine provides an active, physical experience to help you break free from obsessing over details and find new inspiration.Use your own external instruments, VSTs and MIDI controllers. Everything you make is instantly synced and can be imported anywhere.” There are various different modes – you can do free composition, but there’s also an Arcade mode with challenges to complete…you can export whatever you make in whatever format you want, you can plug the machine into other kit…OK, fine, so it’s probably no better than Ableton in terms of what you can make with it, but it just looks like the sort of thing that you’d have a really good time messing around with (and which would be BRILLIANT with a bunch of friends and quite a lot of booze) – basically I want one of you to have a party and book one of these as part of the entertainment, and then invite me along so I can spoil the whole thing with my aggressively-arrhythmic tinkering. Is that ok?
- Prime Voice AI: I remain…somewhat bemused at the current tenor of the discussion around the ongoing AI boom, specifically given how terrifyingly worked up everyone got about deepfakes four or five years ago when they weren’t actually that good. Now here we are with the ability to create photorealistic imagery of basically anyone doing anything, and animate it, and add realistic voices, and yet noone seems to be particularly worried about how easily this stuff can be created and distributed for a whole variety of potentially-nefarious purposes. Oh ffs, there I go Cassandra-ing again, Sorry. Anyway, this link takes you to the ElevenLabs beta website where you can try their new voice-synth toy Prime Voice, which will read out any text you feed it with a quite astonishing degree of vocal fidelity – this stuff is REALLY good now, incorporating natural stresses and pauses and inflections based on punctuation and word-choice and assumed cadence. Seriously, just copy this paragraph and type it in and be amazed – it even gets the ellipses right, which shouldn’t impress me quite as much as it just has done.
- The Land: I stumbled across this website this week and it made me briefly wish that the UK was a little more like Germany (wealthy, functional, European). The Land is a project which aims to promote the German region of Baden-Württemberg as a place to visit, live, invest and generally just enjoy, and this website is a really nicely-made showcase for all the reasons why it’s a particularly nice part of the world. There’s nothing super-spectacular here, fine, but I was charmed by both the design (which is the sort of thing I’m more used to seeing from large energy companies attempting to humanise their ESG efforts) and, if I’m honest, just the general feeling of cheerful optimism engendered by the whole thing – it gives you the impression of a country in which, I don’t know, the entire ruling political class isn’t attempting to fcuk the populace with knives. Anyway, whether or not you’re interested in visiting Baden-Württemberg or not (and having been there briefly last year, Stuttgart really is a very nice city), this is an excellent example of how to make a site that’s both informative and pretty. Can you imagine anyone making something like this for, I don’t know, Wiltshire? You can’t, can you?
- Centuries of Sound: A superb project, this (and one which has been going since 2017, and which I am slightly aghast I haven’t featured here before). “Centuries of Sound is an attempt to produce an audio mix for every year of recorded sound. Starting with 1860, a mix is posted every month until we catch up with the present day. The scope is more o rless everything, music of course, but also speech and other sounds, the only limit being that music and sounds used must be from that year.” The project’s up to 1944 as of January this year – having dipped into a few of these this week, each show is a wonderful time capsule and if nothing else will make you really, really glad that the 1960s eventually happened because Christ alive was pre-rock’n’roll music grating.
- Take It Down: This is unequivocally A Good Thing – an initiative spearheaded by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Take It Down is a project which works with major digital and social media companies to allow young people to share images that they fear might be circulating of them online, adding a hashed version of said images to the global database of non-consensual and therefore non-shareable nude images. “Take It Down is a free service that can help you remove or stop the online sharing of nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos taken of you when you were under 18 years old. You can remain anonymous while using the service and you won’t have to send your images or videos to anyone. Take It Down will work on public or unencrypted online platforms that have agreed to participate.” The service works wherever you are in the world – these image databases are international, after all – and a bunch of the biggest social platforms work with this tech, meaning it should be effective across Insta, Facebook, OnlyFans and Pr0nhub. This is very much worth sharing with any young people you know (or even old people who you think might need to protect against the possibility of those photos of Swingers’ Thursday being leaked).
- The Machine Learning Landscape: If you work in or around any sort of SaaS product, you will doubtless have seen those mad ‘state of the marketplace’ charts that do the rounds every year or so, in which you’re confronted with threemillion logos all desperately vying for market share – well this is one of those, but for the machine learning and AI world, and JESUS THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM. This is partly an interesting ‘fcuk me, this is already a very crowded marketplace and is only going to become moreso’ link, but also a potentially-useful bookmark should you be having to do any industry analysis around any of this sort of stuff.
- Pineapple: Is ‘making a LinkedIn profile’ the sort of thing that kids are now railroaded into doing when still at school as part of ‘careers planning’ or similar? Are we all basically now forced into developing a PROFESSIONAL PERSONA even before our still-largely-inchoate personalities have properly coalesced? GREAT! For those young people for whom the prospect of penning inspirational thought leadership screeds to an audience of businessmongs doesn’t appeal, there is now an alternative – Pineapple is selling itself as ‘LinkedIn for GenZ’, which, well, WHY? It’s more visual, fine, and you can apparently show ‘the whole you’ rather than, presumably, the carefully-curated partial version you’re teasing elsewhere (MUST I show the whole me? Can I not keep part of ‘me’ for myself, or my friends? What if I don’t want to share my WHOLE SELF with my fcuking colleagues? EH????), and, er, the website’s quite glittery, and they promise that people from your FAVOURITE BRANDS are there to network with…but these things are only as useful as the network they bring with them, and I’m not 100% convinced of the utility of the platform if the only people on it are other children carefully-curating My First CV. Still, it’s probably got stickers and stuff, so who am I to judge.
- Houston LGBT History:. I am not queer and I am not from Houston, much to my chagrin, but still found this archive a super-interesting record of LGBT politics and history – from scans of old zines to recollections of political organisation from the 60s, 70s and 80s, from a staggering collection of old club flyers and posters to a wonderful selection of photos of queer bars and the murals and posters that decorated them, this is just a great bit of archival work and a pleasure to browse around.
- Cult Cinema Classics: One of those occasional, wonderful YouTube finds – Cult Cinema Classics is a SUPERB channel featuring a huge range of old movies, all available to stream in full. You may not think that what you really want to do with your weekend is to watch a host of ropey Westerns from the 1940s and some similarly-unstoried Italian sexploitation trash from the 60s but, actually, that is EXACTLY what you want to do. This has LOADS of…well, loads of frankly terrible-looking cinema, if I’m honest, but it’s all free and lots of it’s probably so bad it’s good, and they have classic stoner-scare public propaganda film ‘Reefer Madness’ which is always a good watch and, look, it’ll make a nice change from another mediocre film about fcuking superheroes, won’t it?
- Diaries of Note: This is a great project – Diaries of Note began in January, and throughout the course of the year will present a different diary extract from The Past: “Every day, beginning on 1st January 2023, a new (old) diary entry will be published on Diaries of Note, with each entry appearing on the same day and month as it was originally written. Every single diarist will be different—nobody will appear twice—which means that by 31st December 2023 you will have been transported back in time by 365 people. In January alone, for example, you will read the journals of Katherine Mansfield, Andre Gide, Keith Richards, Beatrix Potter, MC Escher, and 26 others. Some will already be known to you; others you will be meeting for the first time. Some entries will be no longer than a few words; others will need a little more of your attention.” This week alone we’ve had the dizzying tonal juxtaposition of H Rider Haggard and Cynthia Plaster Caster, to give you an idea of the breadth of subject being covered here – this is SUCH a nice thing to add to your morning reading routine, if you have the time.
- Shayne Goes To High School: I’ve always had something of a soft spot for people reading excerpts from old diaries – many years ago I went to a night called ‘Cringe’ in London, which was basically an open mic at which anyone could present a teenage diary, or bit of poetry, or indeed anything embarrassing that they had produced when but a callow teen (my personal embarrassment is now forever immortalised in print, for better or ill), and, honestly, it is SUCH a good night out – which is exactly what is happening on this TikTok channel, in which Shayne reads from her high school diaries. Shayne is (I think) maybe a few years older than I am, and so her experiences are all BIG HAIR and RA RA SKIRTS and, whilst there’s literally nothing in any of the things I have listened to so far that in any way suggests this is likely, part of me is sort of hoping that this veers into Bret Easton Ellis-style nihilistic horror (but it probably won’t).
- The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute: “CARI, or Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, is an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now…CARI defines a consumer aesthetic as a visual movement unified by overarching attitudes and themes that survived long enough or became popular enough to be appropriated by capital (a bar that is being lowered constantly as our cycles of cultural propagation accelerate). Aesthetics are grouped here roughly by the time of their peak ubiquity, but many of them have examples to be found well outside that range as each movement spread from avant-garde settings to vernacular use.” This is SO interesting – you can search the archive based on the year an aesthetic was first observed, or when it dropped out of fashion, and even if (like me) your personal aesthetic is ‘increasingly-sad-eyed-tramp’ you will find much to interest you in here, and lots to learn. I don’t know about you, but I am planning on remaking my entire personality in the style of ‘SportsBrut’ from hereon in.
- Ben’s Door:A webcam which captures a man called Ben as he enters and leaves his apartment. This is entirely pointless, but pleasingly so – and I particularly enjoy the fact that visitors to the site can, in the unlikely event they so desire, buy a range of merchandise featuring the slightly-blurry images captured by the doorcan. I am now slightly tempted to by a mug featuring a slightly-out-of-focus image of the back of a man I have never and will never meet.
- Watsky’s New Album: Watsky is a VERY late-00s phenomenon – someone who went VIRAL in the way you can’t really get anymore, when a video of him rapping went EVERYWHERE circa 2010 and he ended up on the Ellen show, and then with a music career…Jesus, they were more innocent times, weren’t they? Anyway, for what Watsky says is going to be his last album he’s launched an OLD SCHOOL ARG! Half of the tracks have been made available online, but the other half need to be unlocked by fans who are currently collaborating on a Discord to unlock clues and unravel the mystery around the remaining songs. This is QUITE INVOLVED – if you want to take part you’ll need to be the sort of person who’s willing to get into the weeds with filetypes and names and a bit of light cryptography, but even if not there’s enough associated links and bits and pieces to make it an interesting puzzle to observe at a distance. Can we bring ARGs back, please? It feels like they should soon be a lot cheaper to run with the addition of modern AI gubbins.
- 1 Dataset, 100 Visualisations: A beautiful idea, this, demonstrating the impact of different design choices on a single dataset and showing some of the many, many different ways in which it’s possible to present data in an attractive and readable fashion. Basically this demonstrates why there is literally no excuse for your graphs to look boring anymore (unless, of course, YOU are boring).
- Anyone: Hadn’t we all agreed that noone likes talking on the phone, and that in fact we would go to almost-absurd lengths to avoid having to actually speak to anyone on our personal telephony devices? Seemingly not according to this new app which offers…actually it’s not totally clear what it offers, other than the frankly-horrific-sounding promise to connect you with a different stranger each day for a 5-minute telephone chat. WHY???? What the everliving fcuk am I going to get out of having a stilted vocal interaction with someone I don’t know and will never meet, an interaction with no discernible purpose and which I imagine will see both interlocutors spastically flailing for things to say to each other beyond “so, what’s the weather like over there?” and “would you like to invest in my NFT proposition?” Maybe this is an idea that comes across as less psychotic to the North Americans amongst you, or any of you who are less fundamentally antisocial than I am, but I am genuinely at a loss as to how this could be anything other than staggeringly awkward (or just full of unpleasant people breathing heavily at you while they paw themselves).
- Proud of Jesus: On the one hand, I generally try not to feature things in Web Curios that look like the product of the mentally unwell or vulnerable – on the other hand, the person behind this is seemingly seeking to shift crypto, so I feel little compunction in making fun of them. I have literally no idea what is going on here, beyond the fact that the creator of this site seems obsessed with Elon Musk and whether or not he is, in fact, PROUD OF JESUS, and apparently the crypto being sold will enable you to demonstrate via the medium Proud of Jesus tokens that you are, in fact, NOT ASHAMED OF CHRIST. On the one hand, this is obviously the work of a graffiti lunatic; on the other, maybe it’s worth investing JUST IN CASE? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
By Jana Brike
OUR NEXT MIX IS A PLEASINGLY-SQUELCHY SELECTION OF ECLECTIC BEATS MIXED BY LEENA!
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN TRAIN AN LLM ON THE HANCOCK TEXTS AND FINALLY BE DONE WITH THE REPELLENT LITTLE MEATSACK’S PHYSICAL EMBODIMENT, PT.2:
- The AI Chapbook Gallery: This is an interesting collection of AI projects created by students as part of their course on new media art: “The 18 chapbooks presented below were developed in Spring 2023 by first-year undergraduates from the CMU School of Art in an introductory new-media art studio course taught by Professor Golan Levin. One of the units in this course is concerned with the artistic use of “AI” tools for generating images and text. In order to prompt students to experiment with these tools and develop an understanding of the “grain” of this medium, students were asked to use tools including ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate illustrated chapbooks. These artist books were then physically produced through Lulu.com, an online print-on-demand service.” It’s really interesting to see the different directions the various students chose to go in with these projects, and the range of outputs, and, oddly, the weird similarities that begin to emerge when you look at selections of AI art like this for long enough. This won’t change your mind about how good or otherwise this stuff is, but it’s really interesting to see the ways it’s been manipulated – personally I very much enjoyed the Alien Playboy magazine, but there’s loads of interesting work in here.
- RadioGPT: After the Spotify AI DJ announcement last week, here comes another indication that perhaps Ken Bruce is getting out at the right time (I appreciate that for any of you reading this outside of the UK – or indeed any of you under the age of about 40 tbh – the name Ken Bruce will mean less than nothing but, well, as should have become self-evident by now, I don’t really write this for anyone other than myself anymore) – this is productised AI radio! “RadioGPTTM harnesses the power of GPT-3 — the technology that powers ChatGPT — as well as Futuri’s AI-driven story discovery and social content system, TopicPulse, to create content that’s tailored for local markets, 24/7. Then, that’s paired with the AI voice technology to bring that content to life!” So what this is offering is a full-service automated radio service, with the ability to pull in regionalised content from a variety of sources and use it to produce a ‘seamless’, 24/7 stream of programming…As with all this stuff, I can’t imagine for a second that this will sound anything other than a bit sh1t right now, but, equally, that in about a year this sort of thing will be getting used for the graveyard shift on radio stations worldwide and people will barely notice.
- The AIAAC Repository: Admittedly a less-than-catchy name, but a super-useful resource if you’re keeping an eye on the current AI explosion and whether or not it’s, broadly speaking, working out well for us all. “AIAAIC is an independent, non-partisan, public interest initiative founded on the belief that AI, algorithms, and automation, and the organisations and individuals involved in their design, development, and deployment, must be transparent and honest about their aims and how they go about pursuing them. AIAAIC believes that everyone should know when they are using or being assessed, nudged, instructed or coerced by an AI, algorithmic, or automation system, understand what the system is trying to achieve and how it works, appreciate its impact, and be able to make informed decisions based on clear, concise, accurate, accessible, and timely information. AIAAIC’s mission is to make AI, algorithms, and automation transparent and open.” The whole website’s interesting, but the link here takes you to the page from which you can access their rolling database of AI ‘incidents’ – or, less euphemistically, times when fcukups have occurred as a result of the use of AI systems. So, for example, you can learn about the massive transport chaos caused in China recently as a result of a GPT-penned news alert falsely claiming that traffic restrictions had been released, and a host of other things besides!
- MarioGPT: You may have seen (or you may not; I concede that it’s possible that you have better things to do than spend every single waking hour plugged into the web like some sort of latterday Alex DeLarge) the academic paper the other week which showed how researchers had managed to cobble together a system that generated playable Super Mario Bros. levels at the touch of a button – well now they’ve chucked the code up on HuggingFace, meaning you too can experience the joy of attempting to navigate a machine-generated hellscape of Koopas and blocks. This is interesting more in a ‘look what we will one day be able to do’ way rather than a ‘wow, this is incredible RIGHT NOW’ sense – the levels created (in my limited experience, at least) are only playable about half the time, and they’re not…fun, exactly, but it’s another window into a future in which the tedious business of level designedgets outsourced to The Machine.
- TalkToChatGPT: This is quite amazing, in a slightly-hacky sort of way – this is a Chrome extension which gives you a speech-based interface for GPT, so you can talk to it out loud as though it was some sort of AlexaPlus-style voice assistant. It can speak in multiple languages, meaning you can set it up to work in Italian or French or German should you wish to use it to practice your linguistic skills, and if you’re skilled (and, frankly, worryingly-obsessional enough) it would in theory be totally possible to plug this into a model and create some sort of rudimentary android-type thing…Oh God, this is totally being used in sexbots already, isn’t it? Oh.
- Alice: A website where Alice falls down the screen. Why is Alice falling? I haven’t got the faintest idea, but I very much like the design of this and the playful interactions the website sets up for you. A PLEA – can any of you reading this who make websites please make a concerted effort to include more weird and pointless and fun stuff in your work this year, please? We’ve got a limited amount of time before the vast majority of digital design work gets homogenised to paste by The Machines, so before that happens I’d like some more esotericism and whimsy. Please.
- Emulait: An early contender for my favourite product and product name of the year, this – Emulait is a BRILLIANT idea and one of the nicest bits of design I’ve seen in a long time. Starting from the central theory that it might make bottlefeeding babies a more pleasant and natural-seeming experience if the bottle were morelike a breast, Emulait (launching later this year) will offer a range of bottles for infant feeding which are designed in a range of shapes which mimic, well, breasts, in a variety of different sizes, with nipples which also match the design of their human equivalents. These look SO INCREDIBLY COOL – honestly, they are genuinely rather beautiful – and they are even planning to offer a service whereby you can scan your own breast and get a bottle crafted based on its shape. Obviously I don’t possess breasts and am unlikely to ever find myself in the market for baby weaning materials, and as such appreciate that my opinion on this as a product is probably worthless – but, for what it’s worth, I think this is super-cool and very fun, and whilst I might have one or two doubts about exactly how necessary any of it is I am very glad that it nonetheless exists.
- Mememorph: Can you think of anything more HILARIOUS than communicating with everyone you know via the medium of famous visual memes in which you’ve swapped out the face of, say, Scumbag Steve or Success Kid of Toasting Leonardo with your own? NO OF COURSE YOU CAN’T THAT WOULD BE HILARIOUS! Ahem. Let me be clear that I am not endorsing this in any way – they want to charge you $7 to get a bunch of poorly-AI-rendered ‘Your Face Here!’ pictures ffs! – but it’s worth clicking the link to see exactly how shonky the resulting images look. It’s interesting (or at least I found it interesting; you may, of course, choose to disagree) that there were lots of these memes which I simply didn’t recognise without the famous face attached to them, which is curious in terms of exactly what we are recognising when we see these things. Anyway, this is a terrible, grifty piece of sh1t which is definitely not worth any money at all; equally, though, I can’t help but think it would be quite funny to start communicating with friends and acquaintances using only me-centric memes.
- Playdough Surgery: Have you ever wanted to learn about exactly how surgery works, but have always been put off by all the blood and viscera and tendons and meat and gristle? Playdough Surgery is here to help! This is a YouTube channel which posts occasional videos showing specific surguicakl procedures being undertaken on plasticine (and occasionally felt) models so that you can see all the cuts and stitches and incisions and tweaks without any of the associated unpleasantness. These are both really, really impressive and significantly cuter than they really have any right to be – look at the little smiling hernia! Look at its little face! – and is the sort of thing which, who knows, might inspire your four year old to get into medical school and earn enough money to keep you in your dotage. Fingers crossed.
- The Maskverse: I would LOVE to know how many of these things they have sold – should anyone have any vague idea about this, or how I might go about finding out, please do let me know. The Maskverse is an EXCITING NEW CONTENT PLATFORM which accompanies The Masked Singer in the US, and which allows SUPERFANS of the show to…er…buy an NFT associated with it, in exchange for the ability to watch ‘exclusive content’, vote on who they think will be eliminated each week (votes which have no material affect on anything), and EARN POINTS (there is no detail as to exactly what one might do with points once earned, but, well, who cares?? POINTS!!!) – but WHY?! Honestly, I think this might be the sh1ttest and most pointless attempt yet to ‘make NFTs a thing’ – why in the name of shuddering fcuk your average TV watcher in bumfcuk Nevada is going to want to ‘connect their Web3 wallet’ to this website in exchange for the square root of fcuk all is beyond me. Still, once again I offer my sincerest congratulations to whoever it was who managed to sell this concept to the network at what I presume was the height of the mad frothiness of the NFT bubble – you absolutely SCAMMED these morons, congratulations!
- Feeeed: This looks like a smart and useful addition to your app roster (if you’re on iOS, at least – us poor Android users are once again an afterthought, chiz chiz). Feeeeeeeeeeed (sorry, but I can’t be bothered to pay attention to the exact number of vowels I’m meant to use here) is a smart product which basically acts as an RSS feeder on your phone, but which basically lets you pull in any website you like as a feed, including email newsletters and subReddits; think of it as Google Reader (sob!) but still alive and on your mobile.
- Texts: Still not live yet but accepting signups for beta testing, Texts is a service which promises to fix one of the greatest annoyances of the modern age – to whit, the fact that there are approximately 300 separate communications platforms which are in common usage and as a result we are now expected to maintain friendships and contacts across Whatsapp and Insta and Twitter and Discord and SMS and Snap and TikTok and Email (personal AND work) and Telegram and Signal and, don’t fcuking know, Ello and Peach and and and and oh god so tired. Text, when it launches, promises to consolidate all of these messages into one universal inbox, which, frankly, sounds heavenly.
- Books On Graphic Design: A selection of recommended books on the art and craft of design, selected and compiled by Theo Van Burden: “Books on graphic design (and typography) is an independent selection of books on graphic design and typography, curated by designer Theo van Beurden. Each book has been individually selected and manually added to the list, which is subject to change. Books are occasionally added or removed. Under the motto “don’t judge a book by its cover”, the format focuses on the title, author, publisher and volume of the books.” This is, to be clear, just a bunch of links to books about graphic design, but there’s something very pleasing about the, well, design and look and feel of the whole project.
- The Next Thing To Do: I love this – The Next Thing To Do is a…narrative? Story? Poem? Whatever, it’s a series of thoughts, statements, ideas, all structured around questions of capital and labour and property and self, and presented as a series of nested, drop-down declarations – honestly, there’s something about this bullet-style structure that I find rather beautiful when applied to prose writing, and this, I think, is a gorgeous example of this specific genre of writing. It reminds me a lot of RishI Dastidar’s super Saffron Jack, written with a not-dissimilar structural approach and another strong recommendation if you enjoyed this piece.
- Revolutionary Papers: “Revolutionary Papers is an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South. It includes over forty university-based researchers, as well as editors, archivists, and movement organizers from around the world. The initiative looks at the way that periodicals—including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, and newsletters—played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies and art practises. Operating as forums for critique and debate under conditions of intense repression, periodicals facilitated processes of decolonization during colonialism and after the formal end of empire, into the neo-colonial era. Revolutionary Papers traces the ways that periodicals supported social, political and cultural reconstruction amidst colonial destruction, building alternative networks that circulated new political ideas and dared to imagine worlds after empire.” This is a very academic collection, but for anyone interested in the history of leftist thought and ideas, and the way in which they were presented and articulated globally throughout the 20th Century, this is a potentially-invaluable resource.
- The Gagwriter: The link here takes you to a Reddit post, which at first glance might be a bit baffling. What IS that device? What is it for? How does it work? LET ME ENLIGHTEN YOU! The Gagwriter is a prototypical device which lets the user type using their mouth – the interface is basically a dildo which has been modified with buttons and levers and suchlike so as to enable anyone to place their mouth around it and, with a combination of tongue and lips and jaw, type as normal. Yes, I know what you’’re thinking – WHERE CAN I GET ONE? Sadly this is a one-person hobby project and as such doesn’t appear to be commercially available anywhere, but the creator of this frankly magnificent device has apparently made the blueprints and build instructions available for download on this site; sadly the site wants me to register, and, if I’m honest, I am not about to had over my email address to anyone who refers to me as “a naughty bunny” on their landing page, so I’ve not been able to check whether or not the instructions are legitimate or even workable. Still, I like to imagine that at least one of you will be fearless and curious enough to click through and embark upon a DIY project for the ages. Just IMAGINE turning up on your first day at a new job with one of these – ”But you said I could bring my own keyboard”. An astonishing example of human creative ingenuity, engineering chops and, frankly, deviance.
- Plagiarism for Profit: Found via last week’s B3ta, this is a great game which challenges you to replicate the slightly-crap MS Paint drawings it presents you with – the closer you manage to get to rendering the perfect poorly-drawn penguin, for example, the more points you get. Surprisingly fun, to the extent that I caught myself doing that weird ‘tip of the tongue sticking out of the corner of the mouth’ thing people sometimes do when they are REALLY concentrating on something.
- Super Star Trek 25th: This is cute – a VERY OLD Star Trek game from the late-80s, reskinned with the graphics from a later Star Trek game from the mid-90s, playable in your browser. It’s more a pleasant relic than something you’re likely to spend hours playing, but it amused me for 10 minutes or so and I’ll take what I can get these days tbh.
- Doom3 In Your Browser: It can only be a matter of weeks before someone’s got Doom Eternal running on an Apple Watch, surely? Doom3 – the one that noone really liked because of the fact that it had a really annoying mechanic whereby you couldn’t hold a torch AND shoot at the same time,making the whole game an exercise in frustrating, dark death – was at the time of its release a PC-meltingly high-spec title, which makes it all the more remarkable to see it running in your browser at a reasonable clip. Partly just a really impressive bit of coding, partly a fun way to kill an hour while you wait for the weekend to start, and partly a reminder of that weird period in game design where everything looked like it had been put through a filter the colour of slightly-stewed tea and everything was VERY SERIOUS.
- WebGamer: If Doom3 isn’t enough for you – YOU INGRATES FFS! – then try this site, which offers you a portal to a bunch of reasonably-fancy browsergames; a few of them you will have seen in here before (the Slow Roads driving experience, for example) but others are ALL NEW and, frankly, if you can’t find something to distract you in this collection then you should probably just accept the fact that you’re terminally bored and just do some fcuking work for a change.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- BurgessBlog: Not in fact a Tumblr! But, you know, it FEELS like one, so. This is an old blog by Adam Roberts, in which he worked his way through the fiction of Anthony Burgess in chronological order, recording his thoughts as he went. Obviously it helps if you have an interest in Burgess or a degree of familiarity with his work, but, more generally, I find that these sorts of projects always offer interesting angles and reflections on an artist’s corpus elicited by this sort of close, structured reading.
- National Trust Scones: Also not a Tumblr! But so lovely, and SUCH a great resource for those of you who like scones AND have a National Trust membership; this blog has spent several years attempting to visit every single National Trust property in the UK, and assess the quality of the scones on offer in the cafe of each. There is, apparently, only one left to tick off the list – the NT property at Giant’s Causeway, in case you were curious – and so there’s a pretty definitive ranking that’s emerged – if you’re looking for a project for the coming years, you could do worse than making it your mission to sample the 50 best National Trust scones available to you (I think that this may well be the most middle-aged suggestion I have ever made in Web Curios, and feel that I ought to somehow compensate by linking to some sort of darkweb 2cb marketplace (but I won’t).
- Kiszkiloszki: AN ACTUAL TUMBLR! FULL OF COMICALLY-ANIMATED ART GIFS! Just like the olden days, frankly.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Farine Furniture: I don’t *quite* understand what is going on here, or what the criteria for inclusion on this feed are – as far as I can tell, it’s dedicated to bread (and occasionally butter sculptures, and occasionally cake) that looks a bit like furniture, or other stuff? Look, I appreciate that this is a frankly pitiful description, but you click the link and then come back here and tell me how the fcuk YOU would communicate its contents.
- Many Worlds Vision: This was sent to me by its creator, Claudia – the feed depicts dreams she has had, as visualised by AI, along with some words about said nocturnal hallucination…ordinarily, let’s be honest, listening to other people talk about their dreams is approximately as fun as a bit of light trepanning, but this is actually rather nice; I think it’s the genuinely surreal air that the juxtaposition of words and images create which makes the feed work, but this is pleasingly curious in a way that I wasn’t expecting it to be. Claudia is also involved in the very good Dense Discovery newsletter, which has nothing to do with dreams but which is a good weekly roundup of words and links about design and semi-related matters and which you could do worse than checking out.
- Avery Portraits: I’m including this not because I think the work here featured is particularly special – it’s not, to my mind – but more because of the fact that person behind it recently had to fess up to the images not in fact being photos at all – they are (of COURSE) AI-generated. There’s no suggestion that the artist was attempting to hide this, more that they hadn’t made it explicitly clear – but, to go back to the deepfakes point way back up top, this is another example of quite how easy it’s increasingly going to be to pull the wool over people’s eyes.
- My Girl With A Pearl: This is SUCH a good piece of museum/gallery comms – the museum which usually houses Vermeer’s ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ has loaned it to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for their big Vermeer show; while the painting’s elsewhere, the gallery is showcasing a variety of ‘interpretations’ of the original on this Insta feed, with submissions collected from creatives and artists all around the world. Playful and fun and a brilliant way of drawing attention to the museum even when the most famous piece from its collection is elsewhere.
- Life Imitates AI Art: Images of things that look like AI fcukups but which are in fact real. You know how a couple of years ago there was a real glut of stuff being described as ‘cursed’? Like that basically. These will make you feel *funny*.
- Regret Counter: An Insta feed sharing people’s phone notes about the deviant stuff they got up to on a night out. Skews VERY NYC/Brooklyn, to my mind, and there’s a very strong whiff of “I’m MAD, me!” about many of these lists of substances ingested and CRAZY things done, and, look, there is literally NOTHING less cool in the world than taking an obsessive list of every drink you drink and drug you take – but, er, that said, I am now an OLD MAN and as such there was something quite pleasing about living vicariously through lists like “1 Dexie, Two pizzas, 1xbottle Moet, 2 beers, 2gs Ket, 400ml codeine” and knowing that the hangover is someone else’s.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- On Technological Progress: Dave Karpf writes persuasively about why it’s important that people shift from a generally ‘optimistic’ perspective when it comes to new tech to one that’s characterised by a greater degree of pragmatism. This isn’t about being a miserable doom-peddler (not like I need any help in that regard, frankly), but instead about a series of ways of thinking and critical frameworks that it might be sensible to adopt when thinking about emergent tech. As Karpf rightly points out, it’s not being negative or doomish to point out that our largely-uncritical embrace of significant digital change up til about 2015 hasn’t exactly resulted in the glorious future we were promised coming to pass. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but this is a useful overview of the general tone: “Throughout my adult life, tech optimism has been the dominant paradigm. This did not change in the aftermath of the dotcom crash. It just went on hiatus for a few years (until Web 2.0 provided the intellectual scaffolding for a recommitment to technological enthusiasm). Along the way, we have stopped regulating tech monopolies, we have reduced taxes on the wealthy, we have let public-interest journalism wither, and we have (until oh-so-recently) treated the climate crisis as a problem for someone else, sometime later. The most powerful people in the world are optimists. Their optimism is not helping.”
- The Case For Shunning: This has been linked to a lot this week, but if you’ve not read it it’s a really well-argued piece of writing about why, actually, it’s a Good And Proper Thing to hold people to account for the things that they say and do, and that it’s important to remember that when person A says that they are being silenced in the modern world what it actually tends to mean is that a bunch of other people have listened to what person A has to say and concluded that person A is in fact a total ar$ehole and they don’t want to hang out with them or listen to them or reward them for their ar$eholeness anymore. This was prompted by the Scott Adams thing this week (which you can read more about here if you’re not already familiar with the guy’s mad racist schtick), but frankly can be applied to anyone shooting their mouth off on social media, or the radio, or television, or in newspapers, or on their own website, about how they are simply not allowed to say the thing that they are currently saying very loudly indeed.
- Garbage Island: This is a few weeks old now but is a good piece of writing which examines a question which I honestly think is being underscrutinised at the moment – to whit, what is all this AI content going to do to the general level of human knowledge and understanding? I was talking to a friend in the pub on Sunday about the idea of a ‘water table’ of common knowledge, a sort of baseline of ‘stuff that is generally known to be true’, and the fact that the general prevalence and growth in popularity of conspiracy theories and general mad stuff is evidence of the fact that this theoretical water table has been to an extent polluted by the web; if you factor in the inevitable flood of machine-generated jank copy we’re already seeing, and the deepfaked video and audio, and the fact that noone appears to be really thinking about what happens to information gathering and sourcing and checking if we just blithely accept the prose spat out in answer to our questions by the black box inside Bing or Google…well, it scares me a bit to be honest. FCUKING CASSANDRA AGAIN FFS! Anyway, it’s not just me saying this – Ryan says it too (but better, damn him).
- Welcome To The AI APIs: RIGHT ON CUE! OpenAI this week announced that they’re launching APIs for both ChatGPT and Whisper (their autotranscription service), which means that you can expect this stuff to really explode in popularity now that every single business in the world can build a chat interface on top of its website. Equally, it will now be LAW that every single advermarketingpr pitch presentation will contain at least three ideas built on this tech,and they will all be pointless and sh1t. Not YOURS, though. Yours will be great.
- Using Bing: Have you got access to the new Bing yet? I got let in this week and it’s…yeah, it’s really impressive, much as it pains me to say so. If nothing else, your Junior Account Executives really have no excuse whatsoever for delivering crap research anymore, because this thing is REALLY good and market overview and topline analysis stuff. In this post, the increasingly-essential Ethan Mollick looks at some practical tips for wrangling Bing to do what you want it to – if you’re interested in the practical use of this stuff as a Centaur-like augmentation of your ability to do your tedious office job, this really is worth a read (and probably a sub too).
- Noone Knows You’re Human: Or, “how are you going to prove you’re a real boy in a world in which machine-generated content is increasingly-indistinguishable from human-generated stuff?’. It’s a good question – one of my vague positive hopes for all this stuff is that we are going to see a sharp uptick in content and comms that mines the outer edges of the bellcurve, given that the centre of it is exactly where most machine-generated stuff will sit. If I had one piece of ‘strategic advice’ to give you (LOL! Advice! LOL!) about how to approach advermarketingpr in 2023 and beyond, I would suggest ‘aggressive humanity’ as a watchword. No, I don’t understand why people don’t pay me more for these nuggets either, it’s a genuine mystery.
- Late Night TikTok: I had, I confess, totally forgotten that TikTok had a livestream feature – but it does, and according to this slightly-odd Insider piece, at nighttime it comes alive with VERY WEIRD STUFF. This is interesting in part because of the fact that livestreaming is still just sort of this weird, niche pursuit – despite the fact that it’s been technically viable for years, there’s still a slightly fringe-y vibe to the whole thing which seems to attract a certain coterie of people who approach it almost as outsider artists (or maybe it’s just that it also attracts people who have a degree of genuine mental illness, who knows) – and in part because, honestly, if people will watch the stuff described in the piece while they are attempting to manage their insomnia then they will TOTALLY watch whatever AI-generated claptrap The Machines manage to imagine.
- Dude Perfect Are Making A Theme Park: Do you remember Dude Perfect? Sure you do! Those fratboyish American guys who made early YouTube bank by posting all those videos of them landing increasingly-elaborate trickshots and were one of the first channels on the platform to go truly globally stratospheric – yes, that’s right, THEM! You almost certainly haven’t thought about them for years, or at least I hadn’t, but this week I learned that a) they are still going, and still very successful; b) they are in fact SO SUCCESSFUL that they are going to open a fcuking Dude Perfect-themed ThemePark. Which is…amazing, but is also interesting in terms of what it tells us about modern brandbuilding (sorry), and the continued importance of lore (SORRY) and consistent worldbuilding and messaging, and how insane it is that a bunch of blokes who make videos of themselves throwing balls with uncanny precision have made enough money out of it to build rollercoasters about themselves. Should this sort of trend continue, I fully expect MrBeast to open MrBeastWorld on the moon before I die.
- Bold Glamour: In this week’s “Dear God, I am so glad I am not young” news, have you seen the Bold Glamour thing? Following on from that TikTok filter which made old people like me lose their sh1t by showing them a de-aged version of themselves and causing no end of tearful nostalgic recollection, now comes one designed to mess with the heads of GenZ by offering them the chance to see what they look like as a perfectly-made-up, glow-cheeked stunner, all via the medium of AR filtering. Seriously, if you’ve not checked this stuff out yet this week then you owe it to yourself both to read this piece and then to go spelunking online for other videos showing off the tech because it really is insane; we are, what, a few short years away from this sort of thing just being standard, aren’t we? At which point welcome to a world in which noone ever wants to meet in person ever again for fear of shattering the carefully-constructed AI-curated illusion of perfection established through digital interactions.
- How Shock Sites Shaped The Internet: This isn’t the first of these articles I’ve featured over the years, it’s true, but I continue to be a sucker for articles that look back on the old days of the web and all of the awful stuff that was on it (to be clear, there is still awful stuff on the web but now you don’t have to go to specific sites to find it (it just shows up on Insta, unbidden, apparently)). This piece, once again in VICE, looks at Goatse, TubGirl, 2G1C and the rest – how they came about, their place in internet culture, and whether or not we’ve become desensitised to this stuff as the web has aged. I am genuinely curious – do today’s kids (say, 17ish) get exposed to the same amount of genuinely appalling stuff that I know I saw online in the early days? Anyway, this is a pleasingly-grubby spelunk around the old corners of the web, although sadly it doesn’t mention lemonparty (NB THIS LINK IS VIOLENTLY NSFW SO BE WARNED) which I think is a sad omission which I am personally happy to correct.
- £2 Buses: Francisco Garcia writes in The Face about the current temporary scheme to offer £2 bus travel on all routes around England – this a great piece of journalism, big picture and human interest combining to create a picture of the forgotten corners of the UK, where the buses come twice a day and all the old people know each other.
- The Taliban’s Afghanistan: An excellent piece of writing about the current state of play in Taliban-governed Afghanistan, in which David Oks writes about the practical realities of life in Kabul and elsewhere after the West’s departure. This is genuinely fascinating, and offers perspectives I’ve not read elsewhere – it also presents a picture of the difficulties faced by the ruling clerics in an age in which their subjects all have phones and TikTok and the allure of Western capitalism and its decadent enticements is no weaker than it must have been for Soviets listening to bootlegged rock’n’roll tapes smuggled across the Iron Curtain in the 70s and 80s.
- The Amstrad Em@iler: Chris Smith’s ‘Mule Britannia’ newsletter returns with this excellent piece about the history of the Amstrad Em@iler (and yes, that is exactly how it was written – it was MODERN, do you see?), one of the most incredibly sh1t internet-enabled devices in history and one which basically brought down an entire company. This is, I promise, far more interesting than a tale of electronics marketing in the 1980s has any right to be.
- Ian Fleming: I don’t, personally, find James Bond in any way interesting or appealing – it might be the fact that I am the living antithesis of the debonair spy, or it might be that he’s a two-dimensional character written with all the flair and complexity of an episode of Hollyoaks, take your pick – but I really enjoyed this extract from John Higgs’ recent book about Bond and the Beatles. In it, Higgs recounts the life circumstances that led to Ian Fleming beginning the series and gives you a sense of the deeply-odd man that gave birth to the…deeply odd Bond. An excellent portrait of an old-fashioned eccentric – also, bonus points for the detail that Fleming made reference to spanking his wife in a letter to his brother-in-law, a detail which I feel perhaps ought to be investigated more fully .
- Jehovah’s Witnesses Facts: Ozy Brennan read a book called ‘I’m Perfect,You’re Doomed’, all about the experience of growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness – this is a collection of some of the things they learned along the way. SO SO SO GOOD – all religions are mad (I’m sorry, but they are), but even by the standards of terrifying sky gods these are some…esoteric beliefs. FULL of good stuff, including this moderately-insane passage: “Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t get cervical cancer because they know not to have sex while menstruating. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t get AIDS, because they don’t have gay sex or get blood transfusions. Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t raped, because they call on the name of Jehovah and Jehovah will send angels to scare the rapists away.” How…how nice for them.
- The Elliott Smith YouTube Experiment: This is a really lovely piece of writing. Starting out as an attempt to create an Elliott Smith-only YouTube profile by manipulating the algorithm, it ends up being a far more interesting meditation on algorithms and digital rabbitholes and what it is to have a ‘healthy’ relationship with content and artists and oneself. This is weirdly affecting, in a way in which writing about algorithms very rarely is.
- Teens in Malls: OK, so this is a VERY AMERICAN piece insofar as it’s about teenagers hanging out in the food courts at malls which is not, for most people,a very British thing – still, it doesn’t matter whether this speaks to your personal adolescent memories or not, as, regardless, it’s just a perfect piece of observational journalism – Jamie Loftus talks to the kids, gets a feel for the places they hang out, and constructs a truly kind and generous series of thoughts and observations about youth culture and growing up and PLACE as an idea, and all sorts of other things besides. Honestly, even if you normally have no truck with Americana this really is worth reading because it’s gorgeous.
- The End of Love: Finally this week, a piece published on Valentine’s Day about Merritt Tierce’s experiences of dating, and the 100+ dates she’s been on in the past years, and this is honestly one of the best things I’ve read about ‘modern love’ (whatever that means) in an age. Very funny and also very sad, this is a proper treat and I would have happily read another 10,000 words of it.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- Well done these people on making a bandname that I genuinely have no idea how one might say out loud – they’re called (({o})), apparently, which ought to really annoy me but I will forgive them because this track sounds a little like standing outside a chiptune rave after you’ve just gotten off a flight and your ears are still all slightly blocked and I rather like it.
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