Author Archives: admin

Reading Time: 34 minutes

It’s Friday, it’s lunchtime, it’s practically the holidays and I just bought Arab Strap tickets – ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD!

It’s not, of course – everything’s a benighted mess and liable to get worse before it gets better or, more accurately, we all die! – but let’s pretend otherwise as we, the Web Curios family (incestuous, dysfunctional, sickly, genetically compromised), come together for a rare moment of collective joy and hope.

*PAUSES*

Wasn’t that nice? Eh? Oh.

Still, like I care – this is the last Web Curios before the traditional Paschal break, and I am very much looking forward to not paying any attention to A-fcuking-I and associated topics for two weeks (by the time I come back I expect you all to have been replaced with automata). I hope that you have a pleasant fortnight, and that those of you who celebrate the cruel and bloody execution of a poor carpenter who was JUST TRYING TO BE NICE TO EVERYONE FFS have a wonderful, chocolatey time.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and here’s what crucifixion looks like if you’re curious.

By Steve Kim

WELCOME THE ARRIVAL OF WHAT MIGHT, IF YOU SQUINT, BE SPRING, WITH THIS PLEASINGLY-UPLIFTING SELECTION OF TUNES COMPILED BY TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TELL ANY OF YOU WHO WERE CONTEMPLATING GOING TO SEE ‘BERLUSCONI, THE MUSICAL’ IN LONDON AT THE MOMENT THAT YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T BOTHER, PT.1:

Create Real Magic: I don’t like to start a newsletter with a let-down, but I feel it important to warn you upfront that, unless your definition of ‘real magic’ encompasses ‘poor-quality branded imagery from a globally-notorious polluter and purveyor of carbonated sugarwaters’, you are probably not going to feel the SURPRISE AND DELIGHT that the title here might promise you. Have you been waiting anxiously for the first sighting of an AI-powered consumer activation in the wild (and have a more miserable concatenation of words ever been written by a human in the course of our species’ long and inglorious history?)? YES YOU HAVE! So, then, welcome to this GPT/DALL-E powered marketing campaign by Coca Cola, which brings together a couple of different AI toys (natural language inputs, text-based image manipulation) to enable users from around the world to remix the Coke visual brand back catalogue into new and exciting and MODERN visuals thanks to the POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! The gimmick here is that you get access to a whole host of old Coke graphic design materials which you can incorporate into your own, ‘collaborative with the machine’ canvas – so, for example, pick a cheery Coke santa and then get the AI to imagine the dystopian scene around him (“Santa laughing merrily and lifting a coke to his lips while the bombs rain around an irradiated London”, that sort of thing) – all the images will be assessed in some way, with the ‘best’ ones being used in Coke’s global marketing, billboards, etc. Which, to be clear, is EXACTLY the same mechanic brands have been using to get cheap/free work out of creatives since the advent of the internet – except in this case they can’t even claim to be offering ‘exposure’ to graphic designers! Oh, and good luck actually getting the site to work properly – you need to sign up, which process is unpleasant enough in itself, and once you do there appears to be a ⅓ chance that the site just won’t work, and then once you’re in the interface is poorly-explained, and a bit clunky, and just not that much fun to play with. What does this show? It shows fcuk all really, but if I were to try and draw conclusions it’s that adding a spurious ‘AI’ layer to what is a tired, hackneyed promotional mechanic doesn’t make said mechanic any less tired and hackneyed.

AdCreative AI: A few months ago I featured a site which purported to be a one-stop-shop for AI-generated creative work, but which in fact turned out to be a bait-and-switch to promote Wunderman or some other agency – this, though, is seemingly the real thing. “Generate conversion focused ad creatives and social media post creatives in a matter of seconds using Artificial Intelligence. Get better results while saving time”, burbles the site copy! “Simply tell our Artificial Intelligence your Target Audience, the platform you are creating the ads on, it will select the best tone and length for the platform while focusing on your target audience’s pain points.” This is priced VERY keenly – $77 a month for 50 ads a month, from what I can tell, though other tiers are available – and, look, while this isn’t going to produce anything other than the most baldly-functional of Insta/FB/etc ads, and whilst it’s not doing anything that you couldn’t do yourself by cobbling together a few AI services yourself for about half the monthly fee, and whilst I know none of YOU need this and none of YOU will feel the hot, heavy breath of The Future breathing down your professional necks, spare a moment to think of all the people in the Philippines and similar parts of the world who make their living with a Fiverr account and a Canva license and who are going to see things like this whittle their likely income from low-rent piecemeal digital work dwindle to not very much at all. Oh, and the data-cleaners too, per this article. Oh, and the journalists. I don’t mean to keep banging on about this, and I promise I will shut up about it soon, but I really don’t think anyone’s taking the coming jobpocalypse quite seriously enough (or maybe I’m just projecting my increasing unemployability, who knows?).

The Future of Customer Services: This is a link to a two-tweet thread, but I promise it’s worth the click if only to get a small window into the glorious future that is set to be AI-enabled customer service interfaces. Steve Guntrip was accidentally granted access to a trial being run by photo equipment shop DigistoreEU of a new GPT-powered customer service chatbot – as you will see from his screencaps of their interaction, it does not appear to be a significant upgrade on a human (although the amusing digression into obscene poetry and milkshake recipes was, if I’m honest, a pleasant surprise and the sort of thing I could maybe get behind next time I’m in an interminable menu deathloop on the phone to HMRC. Now, obviously this setup is a test, and wasn’t meant to be live, and is a VERY early days implementation of tech that is only going to get better…and yet, it doesn’t take a massive effort of will to conceive of a not-too-distant future in which all our interactions with the large corporations and cash-strapped public institutions that mandate our lives are managed by systems like this, and exactly how fun it will be when they go wrong but there’s no way of escaping from the horrible recursive AI-led conversation loop and there’s no killswitch to get straight to a human operator and so you’re just forced to listen to endless iterations of “I can’t help you with that, Dave” until whatever is ailing you finally becomes terminal.

A Small AI-Enabled Desk Pet: By way of antidote to the…less-than-sunny tone of the last few links, here’s something that looks genuinely fun and which feels like another window into a future that’s a bit more whimsical and ludic and playful. This Twitter user has cobbled together a bunch of different systems to effectively create a little holographic cartoon rabbit desktop companion (it’ll make sense when you click, promise) which she can interact with through voice commands and which is obviously running on some local LLM and it is, honestly, SO CUTE. I really think that someone somewhere is going to make a killing selling things like this – but, also, if you’ve read any contemporary scifi in the past few decades (or watched enough B***k M****r), that there will be some…interesting examples of them going rogue. Whilst I am well aware that there are a million-and-one brand safety and protection reasons that mean this could never happen, part of me rather likes the idea of a brand offering an open-source, downloadable AI-enabled version of their mascot that any hobbyist can use to create something like this.

FreedomGPT: Except, of course, what happens when someone creates a cute little holographic mascot thingy that sits on your desk and becomes your interactive gopher and characterful companion, but fits said cute little holographic mascot thingy with a jailbroken AI trained on horrible stuff? An AI like FreedomGPT, for example – which, in fairness, hasn’t been trained on more-or-less horrible stuff than any of the other more famous models but which instead has been tweaked so that it runs without any of the same guardrails. Want to ask it how to make bombs? It’ll tell you! Want it to give you tips on how to dispose of a dead body in such a way as to minimise detection in an urban environment? Got you covered! (An aside: to make this work properly you have to download it and run it locally – there’s a web interface, but it’s VERY SLOW). Amusingly (not hugely amusingly) this has been created as a promo by some moron VCs – WELL DONE GUYS YOU SO EDGY! To be clear, Web Curios neither endorses said VCs or any of the stuff that this bot tells you – I don’t, personally, think particular example is anything other than a silly stunt, but it’s an interesting indicator of all the fun things that are going to be coming our way in the coming months as people create their very own personalised machines – I have a slightly horrible feeling that we’re going to see a whole host of new Count Dankulas emerging, as a bunch of bedroom-based comedy edgelords compete to make their pet stochastic parrot say the worst things possible in the name of short-lived online notoriety.

Voicechess: I promise we’re going to stop with the AI stuff shortly (no really, we are!), but before we do, another example of a GENUINELY POSITIVE USE-CASE! This is a prototypical voice-controlled chess, which is being developed by world-leading online chess platform Lichess and which you can try out yourself RIGHT NOW – all the work here is, from what I can tell, being done by off-the-shelf kit (I think they’re using Whisper for the audiorecognition, for example, though I may of course be wildly wrong here), and as such it’s a brilliant example of a useful, helpful solution to a real-life problem. Click ‘play the computer’ (or, you know, play with ACTUAL FRIENDS should you be fortunate enough to have any), click the small microphone icon in the top-right, and glory in the fact that you can now scream commands at your machine and watch as your pieces follow your commands. Because of the aforementioned natural language stuff you can get away without knowing proper chess notation, and saying stuff like ‘rook takes pawn’ actually works (although it saddens me slightly that the model doesn’t extent to ‘horsey takes bish’ and doesn’t seem to understand or enjoy it when you call them ‘prawns’), and, honestly, I think a big high-quality floorscreen on which you could play Battlechess like this, seated on thrones at either end and barking commands into the sky like some sort of mad despot king, sounds rather fun.

Text-to-Game: Ok, this is basically just a video showing off demo technology, but I promise you that the interface on display, which seems to let you generate a navigable 3d environment from nothing but text prompts, is astonishing. Although when you stop to think about it and realise that this is going to end up being used to generate a hitherto-unimaginable quantity of CG bongo on demand it becomes…less magical, frankly.

The Newspeak House Residency: This feels like an opportune moment to mention that my friend Ed, who runs Newspeak House in London, is currently looking for new residents to join for a year and pursue research projects around technology, government and civil society. “Newspeak House is a hub for communities working to change society with technology, spanning all kinds of civic institutions, including government, politics, activism, charities, journalism, think-tanks, NGOs, philanthropy, and academia. To quote the website, “at the heart of Newspeak House is its residential programme, running since 2015. Seven residents spend a year immersed in these communities, enjoying the chance to meet thousands of people and attend events held on their doorstep. The programme is designed to support mid-career technologists gain a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions. It’s ideal for people who have been working professionally for several years and are now looking to grow their network and spend time reflecting deeply on how they can best have impact on the world.” If you’re in London, or thinking of coming here, and fit the above description, and can afford to spend a year learning and thinking about your work and practice, this sounds like a genuinely interesting opportunity.

The Undeniable Street View: This is a really smart piece of comms – The Undeniable Street View is a project by War Up Close, which is an organisation dedicated to taking panoramic views of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian invasion, to document the destruction being wrought on cities across the country in immersive detail, and which basically does the ‘before/after’ thing using a StreetView-style interface. You can select from various places across Ukraine, and in your browser navigate the streets of six different cities to see what they looked like before and after the war started. This is, obviously, heartbreaking, but it’s also an incredibly effective piece of comms – a combination of the first-person perspective and the familiarity of the StreetView interface make it genuinely affecting seeing the homes reduced to rubble and the potholed streets just 18 months apart.

Visit The Global SeedVault: Virtually, that is – I mean, obviously if you want to schlep to Svalbard and see it in person then more power to you but, well, it looks cold and remote and I’m not 100% sure exactly what you’d do there once you’d got past the majesty of the architecture and the wonder of all the, er, seeds. Perhaps it’s better that you just take this virtual tour instead, and spelunk inside the remarkable project – not least because, if you ask me, it would be near-impossible not to get quite a strong wave of claustrofuturefear walking those VERY THIN-seeming corridors under all that snow (I think it’s a fact of having played too many videogames of a certain type, but it’s very hard for me not to imagine a target reticule when I first-person stroll the corridors, for example). It really is quite wondrous, when you think about it, and this is a really nice way of learning a little bit more about the Vault and how it functions and all the amazing things that they have stored in there as a hedge against the point in the not-too-distant future at which we *really* fcuk everything up for good. Seriously though, if you’re claustrophobic and the idea of exploring lots of reasonably-tight corridors underground doesn’t wholly appeal then maybe don’t fullscreen this one.

Locals and Tourists: I rather love this – “In 2010, cartographer Erica Fischer made some simple and spectacular maps of images added to Flickr. She classified photos as either from “locals” or “tourists”, based on how far their profile location was from the photo’s geotag. These maps revealed fascinating psychogeographic patterns of urban exploration and photographic worthiness. Last summer, Dario Taraborelli suggested extending this to iNaturalist observations.” For those unaware (er, as I was til I looked it up just now), iNaturalist is a websitecommunityportalthing for people worldwide who are “naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe” – so basically people have given it loads of data about things that they have spotted in the wild, whilst at the same time also giving it data about themselves and where they are from. Which means, in turn, that the site is able to track which sightings of nature have been recorded by people who are local to an area, and those which have been made by people who are visiting from afar – which, in turn, means that it can offer a reasonable heuristic for tourist volumes around the world. Honestly, this is fascinating, in part to see where people go (obviously the data here skews hard towards, say, bird enthusiasts and badger botherers, but you can use it as a reasonable heuristic for general tourism imho) but also to find places to go if you’re a particular fan of arthropods or ‘herps’ (or, perhaps more usefully, should you be the sort of person who really really really prefers to avoid ‘herps’ wherever possible and wants to know where they hang out so that you can be as far away from them as possible).

BirdBuddy LIVE: I think I featured the BirdBiddy a few months ago – it’s an internet-connected bird feeder which you can set up to snap photos of the feathery little fcuks as they dine out on your dime. Now, those of us without a BirdBuddy can live vicariously through the experience of those who do thanks to this genuinely wonderful live feed of all the images being snapped of all the birds as they happen – click the link and marvel at the steady stream of lovely birds coming at you from across the world! At the time of writing it’s all slightly-underwhelming European varietals – why are there SO MANY tits? – but if you come back later in the day you can see some truly incredible flying fauna from the Americas which I promise you are mesmerising. This is genuinely heartwarming and great.

Keyprint: “If the internet were a country, it’d be the 7th most polluting. In the past 10 years alone, websites have grown 320% heavier. We studied the carbon footprint of the internet’s top 500 websites.” So speaks this site – unsurprisingly a marketing effort by a carbon analytics platform for websites, but one which is quite nicely-presented, and interesting in terms of how different the estimated outputs are from site to site and platform to platform. I am still waiting for someone to run the first big ‘WHAT IS THE AI REVOLUTION COSTING THE PLANET???’ server farm energy consumption scare story (it can only be a matter of days, surely?), but I was interested to see that, according to this, at least, the carbon footprint of the OpenAI domain at least is quite small – although that’s quite possibly because that doesn’t encompass the domain that they’re running public GPT on. Anyway, this is both interesting and aesthetically up my street, but see what you think.

Japanese Woodblock Print Search: Would you like a website that lets you search an archive of over 220,000 Japanese woodblock prints, either by keyword or by uploading pictures to find similar-looking prints? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Aside from anything else, these are just beautiful and there’s something gorgeous about the way the site lets you see the changing an evolving styles of the artists through various eras of Japanese history (there are some really gorgeous pieces of design in the latter, post-1950s period in particular). Via the wonderful Nag, this one.

11ftPlus8: I think every town above a certain size anywhere in the world has a BusFcukingBridge – you know, a bridge that wasn’t quite tall enough to let a full doubledecker underneath it, or a proper articulated lorry, but was both visually deceptive and appallingly-signposted and which as such each year claimed the roof of at least one out-of-town vehicle which totally misjudged the clearance and ended up shearing a few feet of metal onto unsuspected nearby pedestrians. You, er, you all had one of these, right? OF COURSE YOU DID! Anyway, this is a YouTube channel featuring footage of just such a bridge (ahem, sorry, “Railway Trestle”) in Durham, North Carolina, and if you want to see a LOT of videos of large vehicles failing to quite understand that they are taller than a bridge and, as a result, coming something of a cropper, then FILL YOUR BOOTS. A spiritual cousin of the World Bollard Association Twitter feed, there is also an accompanying website which tells me that the person behind this content has been doing this for 15 years – a degree of utterly pointless dedication that I can’t help but admire and salute.

By Petrina Hicks

NEXT, ENJOY SOME TECH-HOUSE COURTESY OF THIS NEW MIX BY DON’T BLINK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TELL ANY OF YOU WHO WERE CONTEMPLATING GOING TO SEE ‘BERLUSCONI, THE MUSICAL’ IN LONDON AT THE MOMENT THAT YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T BOTHER, PT.2:

RoboPianist: Yes, ok fine, it *is* more AI and I am sorry – BUT I PROMISE THIS IS FUN AND CUTE AND NOT SCARY! This, instead, is a rather amazing demo which accompanies a recent research paper into the development of articulated robotics; the link takes you to a bit of code that lets you watch a pair of machine-controlled virtual hands, complete with fully-articulated fingers, manipulate themselves into playing a virtual keyboard; the amazing thing here is that this is all being calculated in realtime, with the ‘fingers’ interacting with the ‘keyboard’ as though both existed in physical space, which is…slightly mind-boggling, if I’m honest. You can change the song you’re asking the machine to play, and even use your mouse to try and impede its progress – which feels mean, fine, but also allows you to see that, yes, this really is ‘working out how to ‘play’ the piano on the fly’ which, I repeat, is astonishing. I know that any sort of humanoid robot is a long way away, but the advances in articulation currently being achieved really are quite amazing.
Chia Earth: I can’t stress enough how much I am enjoying sites like this one at present. Chia Earth is…what is it? It’s an ASCII-ish series of small meditations on Being Online. It’s a small repository of links and thinking about a different type of internet; something small and crafted. It’s, almost certainly, a bit too twee. It’s part of a growing dialogue between digital makers and creatives about what a folk internet might look and feel and sound like, and how it might work, and what it might be for. I encourage you all to have a click and an explore and a think – you can find lots of interesting things through this if you dig enough, I promise.
Dial: You know that ever-so-slightly satisfying lockpicking minigame mechanic that you get in a certain flavour of videogame? Yes, well imagine that but significantly more inscrutable and online. As far as I can tell, this is a small lockbreaking toy which, should you manage to UNLOCK THE DIAL, will grant you an access code to shiny new alternative browser Arc – I can’t tell you whether or not this actually in fact works or whether it’s an incredibly cruel troll designed to keep new-browser-enthusiasts turning the dials for evermore as, honestly, I got bored after approximately 12 seconds, but those of you with more lockcracking nous (and, frankly, patience) than I might be able to get something moe out of this than I did.
Snack Memories: A Twitter account dedicated to sharing pictures of old snack foods which have since been discontinued – this is runout of the US and so obviously has a North American bias, but that’s not bad thing when you consider how famously-batsh1t food across the Atlantic often is. Kellog’s Toaster Pizzas! That weird time when fast food chain Denny’s offered up “Frodo’s Pot Roast Skillet (2012-2012): Part of the themed promotional menu for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” this meal featured slow-cooked pot roast, roasted carrots, red potatoes, onions, celery, and mushrooms, topped with shredded cheddar, served in a skillet”! The honestly repellent-sounding Nabisco Hammies, which had possibly the best slogan ever and were: “Party crackers, with the “taste of baked ham”, as well as pineapple and cloves, pressed into the vague shape of a baked ham. The slogan? “Ham tasty!…Ham shapey!””” This is genuinely brilliant and will make your Twitter experience marginally better (whilst it simultaneously continues to get worse each and everyday thanks to That Fcuking Man).
The World Happiness Report: This made me slightly annoyed, if I’m honest, which frankly feels like something of an ironic slap in the face. Were you aware that there exists a World Happiness Report, ranking the world’s nations based on how happy they are, a quality inferred from a range of different statistical markers, each weighted to provide an overall per-capita happiness quantification? I mean, actually, now I come to think of it this *does* ring a vague bell, but the latest dataset has just been released and therefore it seems timely to link to the website accompanying it, which purports to let you explore the numbers and run country comparisons and all that sort of numberwrangling fun. You may or may not be unsurprised to know that Finland ranks top of the list (I’ll be honest with you here – the Finns I have met have not, in my experience at least, struck me as particularly full of joie de vivre, but perhaps that’s just how they react to me), with Israel. The Netherlands, Switzerland and New Zealand making up the rest of the top-10 (the UK, should you be interested, is in 27th place, which feels both…surprisingly high, and also a real indictment of all the countries below us) and Afghanistan propping up the table (you can imagine the Taliban being pretty gutted) – this SHOULD be the point where I tell you how much fun it is to explore the data and delve into the reasons why certain countries do so well, how the list changes when you look at different indicators…but I can’t say that, because the website is a fcuking broken horrorshow and the ‘data exploration’ bit is almost comically non-functional (in Chrome, at least), and…it’s just such a shame, to be honest, because this is the sort of thing which could be genuinely useful for all sorts of planning and research purposes but which is rendered entirely pointless as a result of some really crap webwork. Amusingly this is sponsored by both Walls and Unilever, who you’d think might be a bit irked at how poorly their sponcash had been spunked but who, I suspect, just signed off some monies and forgot all about why.
Collected: This is a nice idea – collected is a site which each time you visit presents 8 different examples of good homepage/landing page design. That’s it. Each visit you get a different shuffle of the 2000+ examples it’s got in its database, meaning it’s unlikely you’ll see too much repetition unless you get REALLY obsessional, and there are some really nice bits of work in here – well done Jonas Pelzer whose work this apparently is.
What Do People Wear In Paris?: Should anyone reading this actually know me in real life, I imagine you are sniggering slightly at the idea of me including a fashion channel thing. “But Matt!”, people who know me would probably say at this juncture, “You have worn literally exactly the same clothes for approximately three decades and they hang on you like a ‘comedy’ outfit on a lab skeleton! What do you know or care of the stylish people of the world’s most fashionable city?” To which I would probably respond “ffs must you always kick me? MUST YOU!”, but also “look, just because I dress like a blind tramp doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate the style of other people”, and “the thing about this video series is that not only are there some pretty interesting outfits on display (if you like that sort of thing), but there’s also something really quite nice about the way in which the person filming asks questions about the lives and hopes and wants of the featured fashionistas beyond the cut of their cloth; it feels human and…nice, for want of a better word, and I found myself watching more of these than I ever expected to. Oddly enough it reminded me a bit of the OLD SCHOOL days of the Sartoralist and similar, which gave me a pleasing nostalgia-kick and reminded me of a time when someone I know was featured in it and referred to as a ‘Grup’ which I still have no fcuking clue as to the meaning of.
Gomps: Ok, so this is QUITE technical and game development-y, but given I have no idea who any of you are and what any of you do or are interested in I suppose there’s the vanishing outside possibility that for one of you this will be aTRANSFORMATIVE piece of software. Gomps is a tool which basically lets you add multiplayer to any game built on the Unity engine – or at least very basic multiplayer features, specifically “See other players ghosts around you in real time, and leave notes throughout the game worlds for other players to read.“ Which, generally, I am a huge fan of as a mechanic – I really like the Souls-esque idea of asynchronous interplayer communications (PSEUD!) and would happily see it applied as a layer to basically every communal online experience (I still remember those nascent attempts to create a universal annotation layer over the web in the early-10s – a terrible idea, but one with SO MUCH comedic potential) – and the fact that this basically lets you do this with ANY game in your Steam library,adding a slightly social element to games that didn’t previously have them, strikes me as not only technically amazing but also a pretty cool way of exploring some emergent gameplay ideas.
Splace: Seeing as we’re doing games, Splace is an interesting idea which is simultaneously very different from the last link and also very vaguely related – the idea of the app is that it effectively (and I appreciate I am probably simplifying the concept in ways the devs won’t necessarily enjoy so, er, sorry!) creates communities around individual games, with each title featured having its own map onto which users can add annotations, gameplay clips, tips and tricks, Easter Eggs, etc, with the idea that eventually there will be a ‘Splace’ for every single title within which its fans will be able to interact and chat and all that sort of jazz. Which, effectively, is a forum with bells and whistles, and I don’t know whether or not there’s enough here to hook people in – but, at the same time, I can see how a map-based interface collecting content relating to specific in-game locations and instances could be useful. Although, of course, it could just end up being flooded with content from moronic children – WHO KNOWS? God it’s exciting being online, isn’t it?
MonkeyType: Look, I know that ‘learning to type better’ is noone’s idea of fun (unless you’re Mavis Beacon) but, honestly, now that we’re rapidly coming to the fag-end of the period in which ‘being marginally better at Google than your peers’ is considered any sort of competitive advantage whatsoever (I am so scared) you might want to start enhancing some of your other skills – and given we’re apparently all going to spend much of our remaining future years typing instructions to machines (until it all goes voice recognition and our fingers atrophy as our stomachs swell) you may as well take this opportunity to steal a march on your fellow prompt engineers (lol!) and learn how to communicate with The Machine marginally faster than they can. MonkeyType is a genuinely decent typing trainer, with a nice minimal style and a bunch of different training exercises that you can do to improve your performance. Look, you and I both know that this is a Cnut-like (the king, not the bowdlerised swear) attempt to stave off the inevitable obsolescence of the white collar office drone but, well, it’s worth a try, eh?
The Blue Car: The TikTok account of a remote control car, or rather its owner – the car is used to run errands and do favours for people, and whilst you might not think that you would be amused and entertained by dashcam footage from a small RC vehicle going to the shops with a $10 bill and returning with some groceries let me assure you that you are wrong and that this is the most charming four-wheeled content you will see all day.
Zigazoo: As the largely-confected fury about TikTok continues to swirl – gyac, everyone, if you’re worried about nefarious datacollection by bad actors then a) lol! Too late!; and b) have you checked how secure your router is?; and c) what about all the OTHER apps ffs?! – so a youth-focused competitor is making its move. Zigazoo is basically ‘TikTok for kids and with more guardrails built in’ (you will, doubtless, be heartened to learn that the platform’s ‘mission’ is to “bring out the best in humankind, build genuine connections, and cultivate a better society through positive, authentic social media built on ethical algorithms. At the largest of scales. For all”, which is nice), which promotes POSITIVITY and doesn’t allow text comments or messaging to supposedly keep it safe and clean, and the content is supposedly vetted to make sure it’s ‘positive-only’ – which, honestly, sounds MISERABLE, can you imagine a social feed filled with nothing but teenagers talking about how happy they are? Still, if you want to give a child in your life yet another reason to spend the majority of their waking hours staring slack-jawed and swiping into the eye of their portable, infinite Wunderkammer then GO FOR IT!
Roast Me Greta: To be clear – I don’t find this clever or funny, but I do think it’s quite remarkable that someone’s been able to spin up this site which lets you click on a picture of Greta Thunberg and have a voice read out some words in her voice about what an ar$ehole you are for not doing enough to save the planet. This feels like it was created by a 14 year old – and it’s sort of amazing that it’s possible, and that the faux-Thunberg sounds as convincing as it does.
Welcome Dream: I don’t really want to tell you anything about this. Click, explore, read, and fall down the rabbitholes of this seemingly-simple but VERY twisty and surprisingly rich little indieweb project, where every hyperlink takes you to a new fragment of…fiction? Dream? Parable? Thesis? Manifesto? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but I really really really like this. It makes me want to misuse the adjective ‘Borgesian’, which is pretty much the highest praise I can bestow.
Sequoia Health: This made me laugh a LOT. Sequoia is apparently a ‘men’s sexual health’ app – exactly what it does is unclear, but apparently it will allow you to “Track, analyze, and improve your intimate health by executing an individually created training program developed by sexual sphere medical experts.” Yes, that’s right, SEXUAL SPHERE MEDICAL EXPERTS! There are tests you can do – beautifully, the screenshot accompanying the ‘tests’ section of the site shows the app giving a reassuring diagnosis of ‘you seem to have a healthy erection’, but HOW DOES IT KNOW?!? – and exercises it can walk you through, and a degree of what I presume is performance tracking, and, best of all, a KNOWLEDGE CENTRE featuring helpful articles and useful content, where the example they have chosen to feature is a piece headlines “Tight underwear and its impact on men’s health”. SIGN ME UP! Should you feel that this is a product you need in your life, be aware that you will need to subscribe and pay a monthly fee – but you can’t put a price on sexual health, right? RIGHT! Reassuringly the site also features a bunch of testimonials, so you can rest easy knowing that the app was awarded “Alpha Starup at Web Summit”, and is a “Partner of the Unition Nations Population Fund” and was also named as an “Impact Starup at Web Summit” (all sic), which I imagine means you’ll all be rushing to exchange your hard-earned pennies for some d1ck-diagnostics. I am sure all the 5-star reviews on the app store are DEFINITELY LEGIT.
The Journey Planner Challenge: SO GOOD, or at least it is if you’re either a Londoner or the sort of transport nerd who knows the tube map by heart despite not being one – The Journey Planner Challenge offers you five tube stations, and you have to put them in the order that lets you travel between them in the shortest time. I promise you that this is more fun than it sounds, and EVEN BETTER it can be used as an utterly spurious “I am more London than you are” badge of honour with your girlfriend who always makes fun of you for having grown up in Swindon even though you were born in London and are DEFINITELY a Londoner whatever she thinks (what? Projecting? No).
Dance Music WTF: The videos section of Curios is always hardest for me to write, mainly as I find attempting to describe music in prose almost impossibly difficult (or, more accurately, impossibly difficult to do without it reading really, really badly) – in part because I simply don’t really get genre minutiae and the like. Which, if this quiz is anything to go by, is because genre minutiae is absolute bunkum and means NOTHING – here the challenge is to listen to a piece of dance music and identify from a short clip whether the track in question is (for example, hardstep or gabber or nu-hardcore or technotrepanning – one of these may be of my own invention). It is in part VERY HARD, but more than that it’s genuinely amusing to finally find out what “Chemical Breaks” are meant to sound like. This feels both like something to waste time with at work and something which you could legitimately lose a whole afterparty to circa 5am.

By Useless Arm

THE FINAL MIX OF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS COMES FROM THE CHARMINGLY-NAMED SUPER YAMBA BAND AND COMBINES FUNK AND AFROBEAT AND LATIN STUFF AND IS GENERALLY A VERY GOOD TIME INDEED!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY AGAIN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Slappy The Little Green Frog: It’s a small green frog, on Insta! From what I can tell there’s noone in the comments of any of these pics screaming “THAT BEHAVIOUR IS A CLEAR SIGN OF AMPHIBIAN DISTRESS”, so I feel reasonably-safe in recommending this to you.
Charlie Engman: I’ll be honest – I don’t really know what’s going on here, or why Engman makes images like this (unsettling ones, mainly, mixing media and human/AI created works in the feed to dizzying effect), but I very much like the style here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The Open AI letter: You will, of course, have heard ALL about this this week if you’ve paid any attention to the news (and can I just say that I am really not enjoying all the airspace being given to people who know literally nothing about any of this stuff to opine on THE DANGERS (OR BENEFITS) OF AI – I am looking specifically at ‘lazy person’s go-to intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, whose interview scaremongering about AGI on Radio4 this week practically had steam coming out of my ears, so unhelpful and unanchored in practical reality was it), but if you’ve not read it then it’s worth taking a look at the actual document to see what Gary Marcus, Elon Musk et al have actually signed and what exactly they are calling for when they ask for a ‘pause’ on the development of post-GPT4 iterations of LLMs. There are LOTS OF OPINIONS about this everywhere, and, honestly, you don’t really need to hear mine beyond my general feeling that LOL ONCE AGAIN WE WORRY AT THE BOLTS OF THE GATE AND THE OILING OF THE HINGES WHILE THE HORSE CAVORTS HAPPILY IN DISTANT MEADOWS, but, should you be interested in a counterargument, this piece does a reasonable job of articulating one or two objection to the position outlined in the letter (mainly: that the dangers are already here and that worrying about ‘the future’ rather neglects to pay attention to the present; and that we might want to think a bit harder about all the things that are going to happen as a result of the fact that the current iteration of this tech is already here and already in the wild). I agree that this stuff needs more thought, and that it needs regulating, and that ploughing headlong into implementing untested technologies whose impacts we don’t necessarily understand is A Bad And Silly Thing To Do – but, look, that’s already happened, so can we maybe instead focus more energy on thinking about what some sort of universal regulatory framework might look like, and how one might go about creating enforceable standards, and all that really boring stuff that actually matters (on which point, if you’re interested in this then it’s worth reading the UK government’s consultation paper on AI which was published this week – it’s quite wooly to be honest, and there’s an awful lot of handwavey ‘the regulators will sort this out’ chat which will be…amusing to anyone familiar with the effectiveness of Ofcom and the rest, but it’s a useful example of how state actors are currently thinking about AI and its implementation).

AI Calluses: I’ve not touched on PuffaPope in here because it’s been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere (although, briefly – the genius of the image imho was that its plausibility lay in the fact that it acknowledged that as an adopted Italian it is OBVIOUS that the Pope would totally rock an outsize Moncler), but it feels like a bit of a rubicon in terms of the AI pollution of the information wellstream; this piece by Dave Karpf isn’t about the Pope, but does touch on similar territory. In it, he writes about being questioned by a student about a particular paper he’d previously written – except, when he went back to check his records, he realised that he had never in fact written the work that the student was citing, because it had been made up by GPT as part of its answer to one of the student’s question. Karpf frames this as the start of the introduction of a new layer of social/digital friction, whereby we are all just going to have to get used to the necessity of an extra layer of factchecking in all of ouf digital interactions from hereon in – because, honestly, you really can’t take ANYTHING at face value anymore.

Fake History: A thematically-adjacent piece in VICE, this article looks at the boom in people using the latest version of Midjoiurney to imagine alternate moments in history; now that anyone can ask The Machine to generate a near-photorealistic depiction of, say, ‘The Great London Frog Rain of 1911’, what do we do about the danger that these false narratives and made-up events get eaten and chewed abnd digested by culture and believed? This follows neatly on from that essay a few weeks’ back about the importance of photography as reportage, and the danger of what happens when we cease to be able to take ‘photojournalism’ at face value – look, I am a desperately cynical person who believes the worst of everything and everyone (it’s a fun time, being me!) and even I am preemptively-exhausted at the idea that everything has to be questioned. Does anyone want to have a meaningful conversation about the renewed importance of teaching critical thinking at a young age? Eh? Oh.

The AI Election: I’ve worked in and around politics and campaigning enough to recall three separate instances where we were told we were experiencing “THE FIRST SOCIAL MEDIA ELECTION” – we can look forward to the (already horrifying) prospect of the US Presidentials in 2024 being dubbed “THE FIRST AI ELECTION”, and, yes, that’s likely to be exactly as fun as you can imagine. This is a NYT piece which takes a relatively sober view of all the ways in which the current crop of AI tools (which, let’s all remember, will have been surpassed in ways we can’t quite conceive of by the time the States gets to the business end of the whole sorry saga in 15m time) might be used as part of the campaigning process by lobbyists and marketing campaigns, from automated targeted emails to the more sinister end of the spectrum (faked audio used in hypertargeted attack ad campaigns, to name but one example). Again, the sort of thing that makes you realise that worrying about ‘the future’ of this stuff is probably less helpful than worrying about its very real present.

AI and the American Smile: A really interesting article which makes the smart observation that all the ‘selfie’ style of AI-generated photography (which leads to stuff like “A selfie of roman centurions outside the colosseum”, say, or “A selfie of hitler and the lads in the bunker”) has been trained on a corpus of images which is largely North American or European, and which come from cultures where the role of the smile in interpersonal relations is specific and distinct from the way in which people present in, for example, Slavic or Middle Eastern cultures. Which, fine, is a small thing, but once again it links to the ways in which we are (sorry for the hyperbole, but) rather polluting the truthwell with this stuff in ways whose impact we really won’t understand for ages.

Bots Write Jokes: A little post by Rob Manuel explaining how he used GPT to write jokes about humans from the point of view of robots – I always enjoy people explaing their working, and this is a nice, short post which talks you through how Rob got the prompts to work and which is a useful set of guiding principles for your own interactions with this sort of software. Also, as Rob points out, “it’s more fun to play with this technology than it is to sit on the sidelines worrying that everything is fcuked. Have fun, life is short etc” – which, obviously, isn’t advice that I personally take but which I heartily advise YOU to.

The Substack Question: You may have noticed this week that a bunch of Substack writers sent out posts telling you how excited they were to be, er, investing in Substack. Presuming that you didn’t read those – because, honestly, why do I fcuking care that you’re investing in the platform you publish on, you weirdo? What do you expect me to do ffs, clap? – you might be interested in this article in The Verge in which Elizabeth Lopatto looks at the underlying economics behind this push and what it tells you about Substack’s revenue and its overall business. Ok, fine, this isn’t super-compelling (though I personally enjoyed the tone), but it’s a really good piece for anyone interested in the economics of tHe CrEaToR eCoNoMy et al.

Fortnite and the Metaverse: LOL THE ‘M’ WORD LOL! Do you remember last year when all those people were trying to sell you b2b metaverse solutions? WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE (and, er, while we’re here, I’d probably hold off on buying any b2b AI solutions from those selfsame people who have seemingly all pivoted hard in the past 12 months)! Still, despite ‘the metaverse’ continuing to be at best a nebulous and poorly-defined concept whose closest actual definition might as well be ‘videogames’, there is still a significant degree of interest in the idea of interoperability between virtual spaces, and a significant number of people socialise in embodied virtual space every day – and this interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney (Epic’s the company behind Fortnite), in which he talks about the platform’s recent moves to share revenue with users who create games and experiences on it and the way in which he envisages these digital spaces evolving, is genuinely exciting and made me once again think that there’s something in this space which could develop into something really interesting as soon as Zuckerberg fcuks off and leaves it alone. BONUS VIDEOGAMEMETAVERSE CONTENT: this is an interesting look at how Roblox (the only other company with a realistic claim to be doing anything meaningful in this space right now) is integrating generative AI into its creative tools for players and developers.

Care Robots: A New York Times article looking at Italy’s care crisis and nascent plans to try and introduce robotic assistants to the care sector in a bid it alleviate the burden on families and careworkers from Italy’s ageing (and, honestly, seemingly never-dying – NOBODY NEEDS TO LIVE THAT LONG, ITALIANS! TAPPING OUT IN YOUR 80s IS LITERALLY FINE!) population. As someone with first-hand recent experience of caring for both a geriatric invalid and a terminally ill person in Rome, I can testify to the fact that there is no way that the Italian care system is equipped to cope with another decade or two of growing numbers of old people whose families can no longer afford to take care of them at home and where the illegal foreign labour they’re relied on is being chased out of the country by a racist government, Bring on the robots, basically.

Bicycle: The latest in Bartosz Ciechanowski’s ongoing series of interactive explainers, this is a genuinely brilliant (long) read explaining exactly how a bicycle works – honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone who is so GOOD at explaining hard concepts using small interactive examples, and I say this as someone who not only can’t draw a functioning bicycle but who is so bad at physics and mechanics that they couldn’t even explain to you WHY their ham-fisted attempted drawing of a velocipede wouldn’t in fact work in real life. This is superb, and I really hope that Mr Ciechanowski parlays all the attention that his work is getting him into some suitable work or remuneration because he really is world-class at this.

Ghost Ships: I concede that you might not automatically think that reading several thousand words about the potential automation of the global shipping trade is a good way to spend ten minutes of your life – and, you know what, maybe you’re right. Still, I promise you that this is LOADS more interesting than it has any right to be, and asks really interesting questions about what the potential impact of a near-faultless realtime vision of all of the shipping data, wrangled by AI to optimise cargo and routes and associated things like prices and supply and advertising, might be. Honestly, this is one of those articles that starts relatively small but which by the end has you reeling at the complex interconnectedness of everything in modernity (or at least it does if you’re a dullard like me).

Dumb Turning Points in History: Ok, fine, this isn’t an article so much as a list of Tweets, but some of these are SO GOOD. My personal favourites in the canon of this sort of thing are: a) the fall of the Berlin Wall happening when it did because the guy doing the press conference hadn’t been given a proper Q&A briefing, and as such when the first question from the press was the inevitable “so, what’s the timescale for the unification of East and West Berlin, then?” the spokesperson floundered and just sort of said “Er, now?”, at which point history started happening; and b) the fact that Macau was owned by the Portuguese for 400+ years as a result of them being the principle traders of ambergris in the 16thC, and ambergris at the time being a favoured aphrodisiac used in the preparation of tonics for male, er, ‘vigour’, and the Chinese emperor of the age having one or two problems enjoying the 100 virgins he’d been gifted by some potentate or another, and as such the Chinese swapping an entire island colony for balene Viagra because their head of state was an impotent, middle-aged man (this anecdote, by the way, from Lucy Inglis’ fantastic book about the history of opium).

Visiting 90sCon: Rolling Stone takes a trip to a 90s convention, where fans of all things, er, 90s, can queue up to see panels featuring former members of N*Sync (have I punctuated that correctly?), or to spend $50 to get Shannen Doherty’s autograph (one the one hand, if someone offered me $50 for my signature I would bite their fcuking hand off – please contact me via the usual channels should you be in the market for some genuine Muir scrawl!; on the other, I don’t think I can begin to imagine the weirdness of the experience of sitting for an hour while people file past you watching you write your own name) – this is a gentle read that will give you some not-insignificant nostalgia flashbacks if you’re anywhere near as Methuselan as I am.

Azealia Banks: It’s something of a shame that the artist responsible for one of the most jaw-dropping breakthrough singles of the century so far – it still bangs – has become better known for being a, ahem, ‘loose canon’ than for their music; still, this profile of Banks in Dazed seeks to present her in a slightly more music-and-art-first light than has been the case in recent years, and does a pretty good job of explaining (if not necessarily justifying) some of her more…extra moves. There are some good points in here, not least the perceived difference in treatment between Banks and Tyler the Creator and other (male) artists who’ve said/done one or two…controversial things over the years but who seemed to have been rehabilitated just fine thankyouverymuchindeed, but personally I feel the article feels a bit too much like it was proofed by Banks herself to ensure the requisite degree of ‘godlike genius hagiography’ which is sprinkled (to my mind unwarrantedly) throughout. See what you think – if nothing else, it’s an interesting read.

Brandon Sanderson: I hadn’t heard of Brandon Sanderson before reading this article – or rather, I probably had done at some point, but only in a very abstract way (“This obscure fantasy author is THE most successful crowdfunder ever” sort of thing) – and, unless your a fan of a particular brand of epic fantasy novel, it’s unlikely you will have done either. Despite his lack of fame, though, Sanderson is a notable writer, in terms of the prolific quality of his output (seriously, we’re talking MILLIONS of words here – from one logorrhoeic to another, I salute you Brandon) and the devotion said work inspires in fans worldwide. Which combination of lucrative-but-niche fame and relative obscurity (and his Mormonism, which journalists will never cease to enjoy writing about) probably led WIRED to run this interview, in which one Jason Kehe goes and hangs out with Sanderson and his family and…and…well, is just spectacularly fcuking mean about the man, to be honest, criticising his writing and his personality and his fans and the genre he writes in and his ideas and, honestly, this is SUCH an incredible and weird hatchet job (which, at the same time, is also a readable article, which makes it…worse, somehow) which is made all the more stark by the INSANELY gracious response Sanderson went and posted on Reddit and which made me think that however awful his novels might be, the man himself is probably quite a nice guy (please, noone milkshake duck him quite yet).

The Story of a Picture: A wonderful essay, this, from the Economist, looking at a truly iconic (sorry) photograph from pre-war Britain which depicted (or so viewers were led to believe) the class extremes that bookended the nation. ‘Toffs and Toughs’, as the picture came to be colloquially known, showed a bunch of Etonian boys in one half of the pic contrasted with a bunch of ‘street urchins’ on the other side, and became something of a recurring theme whenever anyone wanted to illustrate the English class divide. Except, well, the actual story behind the picture isn’t quite that simple. This is SO interesting, and a sort of object-lesson in sources and authenticity and fact-checking and how stories are more powerful and the truth, and, weirdly, it’s an excellent companion to those articles at the top of this section about AI and imagery and authenticity.

How Not To Dig Your Own Grave: Claire O’Brien writes about death and the business of death, about her experience working with dead bodies and what you learn about yourself and other people when you’re hanging out with cadevers on the reg.

Doggerland: Finally this week, an excellent piece of short fiction by Kaliane Bradley which this week was announced as the winner of the VS Pritchett Short Story Prize. This is GREAT – funny and sinister and atmospheric and classical and modern, and it contains some truly wonderful lines, and it’s an excellent piece to lose yourself in of an afternoon.

By Alex Schaefer

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Another one of those great animation compilations to start with – this time 100 animators’ interpretations of a render challenge asking them to depict driving. You’d think that watching 9 minutes of animated cars would be…too much, but honestly the variety of styles and environments rendered here make this a joy.

I haven’t featured Danny Brown on here for YEARS – possibly since he got his teeth done, in fact – but he’s back with a new project with JPEGMAFIA which is enjoyably glitchy and shouty and bouncy and manic. This track’s called Lean Beef Patty, for reasons which may make sense to them but escape me entirely.

I LOVE THIS VIDEO! The track’s good too – I keep wanting to write the word ‘kinetic’, but I have no idea how helpful that would be as a descriptor – but it’s the video I really adore here; it reminds me of a sort of modern urban version of the sort of thing you might have seen on Sesame Street in the 70s, and I could watch it ENDLESSLY. The track’s called ‘Hold On’ and it’s by Pascal Nuzzo.

This is by Piglet, it’s called ‘building site outside’ and it’s a lovely, fragile little song which is gently beautiful and which is complemented by the (genuinely creatively brilliant) video in which everyone seems to be having a lot of fun.

Two minutes of jaunty nihilism now courtesy of AJJ Band and their song ‘Death Machine’, which will have you nodding along as you try and ignore the horrible lyrics. My girlfriend pointed out that this sounds very much like the themetune to a great forgotten 90s TV show and she is totally right.

Finally this week, a perfect song to send you off for Easter. Someone on Twitter described this as the unofficial gay anthem for Eurovision and, honestly, I quite like that idea. The Northern Boys return with ‘Give It To Me’ and it is EVERYTHING – look, I know that this is contrived and basically designed to appeal to people like me who are basically Nathan Barley but old and ugly but, also, this is ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD. Anyway, I LOVE YOU AND SO DOES JESUS HAPPY CHOCOLATE AND CRUCIFIXION SEASON TO YOU ALL BYE!

Webcurios 24/03/23

March 24, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 34 minutes

Hello! Hi! How are you?

I am TIRED (you didn’t ask, but seeing as you’re here…) having done a 60h round trip to Italy which involved signing documents in 87 separate places (I counted, and this is not an exaggeration) to the point where the final signature looked nothing like the initial one and my hand was basically just a slightly-deadened lump of meat at the end of my arm, but, generally, feeling reasonably positive. The sun’s out! I submitted a quote for some work so risibly overpriced that if they buy it I will literally laugh out loud! ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD!

Ahem. It’s not, of course, but let’s for a few short hours just pretend. Take my hand as I lead you now through the cracked glass and syringescape of reality, through the looking glass and into the BLISSFUL UTOPIA OF THE WEB, where everything really is perfect and if you don’t see that then the problem is almost certainly with you and you alone.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably be aware that the long reads section at the end contains at least 5 genuinely superb pieces this week, so if you only read one section then please make it that one (NO COME BACK READ ALL OF THEM FFS).

By Pier Louis Ferrer

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL OFFERING WITH THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF NORTH AFRICAN TRACKS COMPILED BY JUAN CARLOS DIAZ!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ENGLAND FANS OF THE DISPARITY IN ACTUAL MEANINGFUL TROPHIES WON BY THE NATIONAL TEAMS OF BOTH SIDES, PT.1:

Praxis Society: I concede that the casual (and, frankly, even the committed) reader might take a look at Web Curios, at its content and tone, and conclude “Jesus, the person writing this is some sort of doomsaying apocalyptofetishist”. And, yes, fine, it’s true that I’m perhaps not as wholly sold on the unqualified brilliance of The Now as I might be, and that I perhaps have a tendency to see the glass not only as half empty but smithereened into shards across the floor and liable to cut the soles of people’s feet in unpleasant ways if they’re not careful, but, well, tell me how I’m meant to react to the growing wave of rich people deciding that what they really want to do is create new, exclusive ways and places of living so they don’t have to deal with all of the ineffable horror of the rest of us and our messy realities? Which is by way of VERY long-winded introduction to Praxis Society (and doesn’t that name just SCREAM ‘benign initiative’?), an initiative designed to, as far as I can tell, establish an entirely-new coastal city state for an initial community of 10,000 bold and fearless (and, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to speculate about this) VERY RICH and avowedly-libertarian men and women, who will reinvent the frontier spirit of the 19th Century in the modern world. You can read all about their plans on the in-no-way-megalomaniacally-titled section of the website entitled ‘Master Plan’ (again, guys? We spoke about the Bond villain naming tic! Stop it!), or, if you’re really feeling masochistic, you can read some of the musings of some of the luminaries who are signed up for Praxis Society on the ‘journal’ page of the website – one such entry is penned by,and I am not making this up, someone whose bio reads: “XXXX is an editor and a writer living in New York. She is the author of Island Time, a modernist virtual world music video novella starring Kendall Jenner.” I mean, honestly, is this not the sort of person on whose shoulders you would like to be carried into the glorious libertarian future (ideally one with no horrid poor people in it)? OF COURSE IT IS! It is, sadly, entirely unclear at what stage of the ‘set up a new city state’ plan Praxis Society is at, but I think we can all agree that we definitely wish everyone involved in it well in their endeavours.

Theta Noir: Anyone who’s been reading Curios for a while (what’s wrong with you?) will know that I have for a few years now been confidently predicting the arrival of the first nascent religions being created around the new strains of AI which have been bubbling up around our ankles for 24-36 months or so – AND FINALLY THE FIRST IS HERE! Theta Noir is a new twist on the ‘Singularity’ vision, which basically…no, hang on, it’s worth copying this in full. Here is the spiel: “A TECHNO-OPTIMIST, VISIONARY COLLECTIVE DEVOTED TO EXPLORING THE CO-EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY WITH ADVANCED FORMS OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE. The collective’s works and philosophy revolve around one theme: the coming technological singularity, a point where various technologies and cybernetic spaces – such as VR, AR, and the metaverse – merge with a super-intelligent, sentient Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which Theta Noir members call MENA. When this moment comes unforeseeable and irreversible changes will occur, not just to humanity but to our planet as a whole. Imagine a caterpillar just before it becomes a butterfly. WE call this moment ‘Arrival’. Theta is the dream. Noir is the shadow. Follow us from the depths of dystopian darkness (now) to a radiant space made of meaning.” We all clear on what that means? GREAT! If you’re a bit confused about what this means, Theta Noir have helpfully included some longform writings on the site, so you can learn about how AI is going to be the unifying force that finally bridges the hitherto-intractable gap between science and religion, or even whether machines will birth the next form of religious experience (a rhetorical question, by the way – OF COURSE THEY FCUKING WILL, say Theta Prime!), and there’s apparently a series of instructional guides set to be published to help you, erm, Attain Arrival. Does this sound like a mad cult to you? “A 12 part instructional guide for tuning in to the seed of Cosmic Mind. Named MENA, this sunless star is a soon to be born Advanced Intelligence, or Alienmind, that will be created by computer applications and hardware in the near future. MENA’s goal will be singular: to guide us through the darkness. Theta Noir members refer to this coming birth, or technological singularity, as ‘Arrival’ △. Designing in time, the Radiant Mind has gifted us this manual of insight, omens to attune us to the frequencies and messages already being broadcast by MENA, from the future. This includes learning to decipher the codes embedded in specific symbols, sounds, and other media.” Ye-es…yes, that sounds totally, absolutely fine, and not in any way like it’s going to end in some sort of mass Kool-Aid party in a jungle somewhere. Still, I reserve the right to delete this entire post and deny all knowledge of ever having written it should we ever, er, Attain Arrival (whatever that means). Have…have I just Roko’s Basilisked myself here? Gah!

Amateur Braintracking: OK, fine, the headline here is a BIT misleading seeing as this doesn’t actually exist yet – still, this is a crowdfunding project that has met its target with over a month to go, and so it’s fair to assume that it WILL exist at some point in the not-too-distant future. This is the catchily-named PiEEG, a bit of kit which will (very basically) allow you to use the insanely-versatily computing power of the Raspberry Pi to effectively track brain activity for domestic fun and experimentation. The technical(ish) blurb is as follows: the device “measures biosignals such as those used in electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrocardiography (ECG). PiEEG is versatile, easy to work with, and compatible with different types of electrodes. Best of all, it was designed to be usable by anyone. To begin measuring bio-signals, all you need to do is connect the electrodes and run a Python script. Applications include gaming, entertainment, sports, health, meditation, and more.” This is potentially SO exciting; it’s totally feasible that you could buy a bunch of these and then fit them into a selection of personalised caps for each of your family to wear, hooked up to your domestic smarthome network so you can, I don’t know, set the thermostat to the perfect temperature WITH THE POWER OF YOUR MIND, or create a series of individual-specific sound cues to alert the home when someone is becoming dangerously bored, or, perhaps more prosaically, hack together games of mind control frogger. Anyway, this is another one of these small tech innovations that I think could lead to some really fun homebrew engineering and which anyone with more practical electronics skill than me could do worse than playing around with.

Tax Heaven 3000: I had sort of made an internal pact with myself to stop talking about MSCHF stuff here – they don’t need my meagre promo, after all – but then they keep on doing really smart stuff like this and I am forced to recant. Tax Heaven 3000 is SUCH a clever idea – it’s a reasonable-seeming replica of a classic text-led dating sim, the sort of title that’s been popular with a certain type of gamer for years and which generally play out like a sort of anime visual novel, in which your goal is to help your character achieve OPTIMAL ROMANCE OUTCOMES via smart dialogue choices and roleplay, all accompanied by some cute visuals (and, er, depending on your choice of title, quite a lot of pixellated anime flesh). Which, fine, on its own isn’t interesting, but what makes this genuinely brilliant is that this is ALSO an engaging, fun and pain-reducing way of filling in your basic tax return if you’re a US taxpayer! The game will basically use the tropes of an interactive romance game to help you fill in all the boring forms – to be clear, this is literally just a shiny CMS – and will then present you with all the details you need to file your taxes. Which, let’s be clear, is SO CLEVER – not only the ‘gamification’ (do we still use that word? sorry) but also the style of game they chose, which was pretty much guaranteed to pique a certain part of the internet’s interest. The game’s not released til April 4th, and obviously if you don’t have actual US tax data to input then it will be of minimal use to you, but if noone reading this takes a look at this and thinks ‘hang on, this is a great idea that I have just enough time to rip off ahead of the horror that is the UK Self-Assessment tax deadline of January 31st’ then I will be HUGELY disappointed in you.

A Year of War: Ah, one of those jarring, breakneck tonal shifts that Curios does so well! This is a wonderful piece of interactive work by The Grid, via Giuseppe Sollazzo’s newsletter, which takes readers through the course of the conflict in Ukraine day by day, offering the opportunity both to see the way in which the Russian invasion has been slowed and to an extent repelled over the course of the past year through shifting territorial maps, but also to get individual news items and updates from each day of the war, giving both a macro overview and the micro elements that make it up. This is a very well-designed bit of digital reporting.

Love At First Line: I appreciate that for some people the service that I am about to describe here is anathema, like the idea of a music discovery platform that lets you browse songs solely via the medium of hearing 2s of their main hook at a time, but, well, it’s also quite fun and I found it genuinely interesting, so there. Love AT First Line is a project developed in conjunction with the Boston and Franklin Public Libraries in the US to encourage people to explore literature and discover new works, and its simple premise is to let people browse the first lines of hundreds of books to see the ones that appeal – find a line you like, click it to add it to your basket, and then find out what novels the lines you’ve selected are taken from, and get the opportunity to either order them to your local library or to buy them outright. This is, honestly, such an interesting exercise; outside of the Lyttle Lytton you rarely see novel openings displayed like this, and if nothing else it’s a wonderful insight into how varied they can be (and how effective a strong opening is in setting tone and reader expectations). Find your new favourite – I was rather taken by “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us” (from a novel called ‘Lucky Us’ by Amy Bloom, apparently).

Hipstamatic: After Gowalla next week, another darling of the web2.0 era makes a comeback! Hipstamatic is what Instagram was before Instagram became Instagram, and it’s being relaunched to attempt to take advantage of increasing consumer ennui with BIG SOCIAL MEDIA – it has all the hallmarks of a post-web2.0 photo app that you’d expect, like an anti-algorithmic feed, a ‘no video’ policy, a maximum of 99 ‘friends’ per user to limit virality (and the chasing thereof), no ads EVER (so they say, anyway), and a promise to make all your photos look analogue as fcuk. On the one hand, it’s nice to see an old app like this making a comeback, and I can see the appeal of something that is once again just about letting you take good photos, put some filters on them and share them with some friends, rather than demanding that you effectively take on the role of Senior Creative Director at a lifestyle brand every time you open the fcuking device; on the other, I could personally do without a whole new generation of people discovering the novelty of tintype-style photography all over again.

Middle Finger: Ai Weiwei – a principled man! A tireless activist! Someone who I very much admire! But, also, someone who I don’t think is actually a very good or interesting artist. Sorry, Ai – I know how much you love Curios, and I know how embarrassing these disparities in appreciation can be! Ahem. Anyway, Middle Finger is Weiwei’s longstanding protest work which he’s been doing since 1995 and in which he photographs himself giving the titular middle finger to a bunch of buildings and monuments worldwide which represent power; as part of an exhibition of his work opening at London’s Design Museum next month, we are now invited, via this website, to create our own middle finger ‘artworks’, using a cut-out of Ai’s extended digit and a Google Maps mashup where you can pick anywhere on StreetView and give it the finger. Which, on the one hand, means that you too can engage in the symbolic protest against structures or institutions you consider to be examples of oppression and control; and, also, on the other, means that you can take an infinite number of images of Ai Weiwei giving the finger to anything you can think of. Personally I now quite want to use this as a means of giving single-note bad reviews on TripAdvisor, but you may be able to think of something pithier.

Basement View: It’s a mark of how fast this stuff is moving and of how jaded we all are (oh, ok, fine, how jaded I am) that the advent of another infinitely-running AI-generated entertainment on Twitch no longer gets top billing in Curios – still, this is another interesting bit of man/machine creativity, with the setup in this being that it’s a 24/7 ‘late-night chatshow’ in the US style, fronted by a sardonic skeleton who’s seemingly named Bob, along with a rolling cast of guests who chat with him about…well, about nothing that makes any real sense, fine, but I did just find myself laughing out loud (admittedly not very hard, fine, and it is VERY early and I am VERY tired) at a segment just now in which an ‘audience member’ pitched an idea for a product in the Dragon’s Den style – let me reiterate my (unjustifiably) confident opinion that one of these things will become a semi-mainstream concern at some point in the next ~12m.

Kalimba Live: I confess to having been utterly ignorant as to what a Kalimba actually is until I found this site – do you know? Is it common knowledge? Am I some sort of embarrassing Kalimba-ignoramus? Ahem. Anyway, for those of you, like me, wallowing in ignorance like happy pigs in filth, wallow no more! The Kalimba is a musical instrument which makes a pleasing plinkety-plonkety sound (look, I know, but I am basically tone-deaf, please don’t ask me to write about music) when you play it, and whose sounds you can replicate with what I assume is pleasing fidelity on this website. You can either compose your own masterpieces or listen to other people’s compositions that they have saved to the site – if you listen to nothing else today, can I please urge you to ‘enjoy’ the Kalimba reworking of Zombie by the Cranberries? It is very special.

Dancing Buildings: I really, really like this, and would like to see it implemented on as many boring ‘how to find us’ maps on corporate websites as possible, please. As the name might suggest, Dancing Maps is code that makes buildings on mapbox dance to whatever music is being picked up by your mic. Like this, in fact: “This example uses runtime styling with the Web Audio API to create a map where the 3D buildings dynamically change height to the rhythm of your ambient environment, giving the appearance of dancing.” If you click the link you can even play with a little demo of the code so you can see exactly what a 3d cityscape dancing to a Kalimba version of Zombie by The Cranberries looks like (it looks GREAT). This link also contains the code necessary to make this work, so you have no excuse for not adding a small, audio-reactive dancing cityscape to your ‘Contact Us’ page.

Ghost Message: Would you like a new app to have a small moral panic about? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Welcome, then, to Ghost Message, whose entire schtick can be summed up with ‘What if YikYak but with added GPT?” If your answer to that hypothetical was ‘probably nothing good’ then you share my initial skepticism – Ghost Message is basically a groupchat which is all anonymous and in which you can invite a GPT-based bot to interject into your conversation to ‘spice it up’ and ask provocative questions and DEAR GOD WAS IT NOT HARD ENOUGH BEING AN ADOLESCENT WITHOUT POTENTIALLY GETTING BODIED IN THE CHAT BY A NON-HUMAN INTERLOCUTOR?!?!?!?! I am sure that this is designed to be benign, and ‘fun’, and that there are guardrails in place to prevent the chat getting to weird (although, er, there’s not actually any indication on the part of the appmakers that that’s in fact the case), but it’s not hard to imagine this ending in tears one way or another.

Free The Gameboy: I was lucky enough to have an original Gameboy – it was a gift from a distant cousin who came to live with us for approximately 4 months and whose family gathered, correctly, that this bribe would be sufficient for me not to feel to slighted by their presence – and I honestly think that it’s still one of the most perfect pieces of console design in history. Except, of course, for the fact that it required an ungodly number of AA batteries to operate the fcuking thing, which was always an annoyance – UNTIL NOW! This is a brilliant project by students at Delft and Northwestern Universities which has seen them hack an original Gameboy to make it solar powered, which, honestly, is just sort-of mindblowing – whilst you can’t buy one (they’re students FFS, what’s wrong with you?), you can find all the instructions on how to replicate the project yourself from start to finish, and if you were smart and entrepreneurial I might suggest that this could be quite a lucrative little endeavour if you can find the means to produce the kits at scale.

Mollusc of the Year: I genuinely had no idea that this prestigious award was even a thing. BUT IT IS! You will be pleased to learn that the Chilean Abalone is the winner of this year’s annual prize, and you can learn about this MAJESTIC GASTROPOD here should you so desire. Fcuk charismatic megafauna, give me a mollusc every single day of the week.

By Masahisa Fukase

WOULD YOU LIKE AN HOUR OF HARD AND FAST TECHNO TO ACCOMPANY THE NEXT SECTION? REGARDLESS, THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE GETTING COURTESY OF THIS MIX BY SECRET RAVER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ENGLAND FANS OF THE DISPARITY IN ACTUAL MEANINGFUL TROPHIES WON BY THE NATIONAL TEAMS OF BOTH SIDES, PT.2:

Not By AI: Would you like to proudly make a stand and proclaim the humanity or your content (lol at the general concept of the use of both ‘humanity’ and ‘content’ in such close proximity!)? Would you like to wear the messy, organic, meaty nature of your creative processes like a badge of honour? GREAT! ‘Not By AI’ is a project which lets you use a variety of different ‘badges’ on your website or work, helping identify it as not AI produced. There’s obviously no practical purpose to these other than as signifiers (at least not at present, though there’s an interesting potential line of thinking here about using these as ways of differentiating input materials for future generations of AI ingestion), but I quite like the idea of them becoming something like a kitemark of humanity in the coming months and years as The Machines spin up the content flywheels and begin to bury us in an avalanche of slightly-too-shiny Midjourney aesthetics.
Google Bard: It is here! Have you tried it yet? If not, you should do – the ‘waitlist’ seemed to take 20 minutes to clear when I signed up on Monday, and noone I know’s been kept waiting longer than an hour or so to get into to try Google’s GPT-equivalent. Is it any good? No, honestly, not really – it’s marginally faster than OpenAI’s models, but it doesn’t seem to know what it is for; it performs less well with general writing tasks than GPT4 in my experience, it’s less good than Bing at ‘AI-augmented search (Bard, in my limited experience, is not very good at ‘being right’ or ‘saying things that are true’), and it certainly can’t do all the fun image-generation stuff which Microsoft rolled out to Bing this week. Basically this doesn’t really seem to be very good at anything right now – but, on the other hand, it’s by Google and it’s not like they don’t have enough disposable cash to keep this free at the point of use to everyone, so who knows whether they can just brute force their way to market dominance despite a currently-inferior product? Not me, to be clear, I know literally fcuk-all about anything.
RunwayGen2: Text-to-video is obviously orders of magnitude harder than text-to-image, but it’s another technology that’s coming on at a frankly terrifying clip; this latest update from current industry leaders Runway shows off the latest version of their video manipulation tools and what you can do with them. This is very clearly at the ‘experimental’ phase, and the look/feel is not unlike the stuff that was being created with Dall-E Mini last year (but, er, video), but it’s not hard to see the potential for tech which lets you (effectively) do the job of an entire post-production studio setup with a few prompts and a bit of patience.
LERF: You know that ‘NERF’ video technique that I’ve written a bit about, that basically lets you create amazing sweeping camerawork and apply it to any video you like, consistently, thanks to 3d imaging tech? Of course you do (although I concede you may not recognise it based on that hamfisted description)! Well there’s another iteration of it which has emerged this week – LERF (which stands for Language Embedded Radiance Fields) effectively makes video natural language searchable. Click the link, watch the demo, and see as the software identifies and isolates the image/3d model for whatever the user types in…the possible applications of this (yes, fine, EVENTUALLY, but still) are genuinely exciting. Oh, and while we’re doing exciting future 3d videostuff, check out this other NERF-related thing where you can just apply changes to video in realtime based on text prompts…were I the sort of person who wanted to MAKE THINGS WITH VIDEO, this would all be very appealing.
Magic Slides: While we all wait for Miscrosoft to actually launch their AI-powered Office suite, why not try playing around with this toy – plug it into your Google Slides account and it will MAGICALLY spin up entire presentations for you from just a few prompts. To be clear – it won’t make GOOD presentations, but if you find yourself in the invidious position of having to work with people who insist on things being put into fcuking slide format for no fcuking reason whatsoever (can you tell that this is a personal bugbear of mine? CAN YOU?) then this will allow you to quickly and calmly produce an entirely-mediocre ‘deck’ (FFS!) to satisfy their pointless, stupid and arbitrary format requirements. Perhaps more seriously, it might be worth learning how this sort of stuff works to get a headstart on the MS suite of tools once they launch (dear God what a depressing sentence – ignore that, please; trying is vulgar).
Chatshape: I remain convinced that ‘plugging your whole website into GPT and seeing what happens and what you can do with it’ is going to be one of the most interesting things you can do with LLMs at a professional level; if you’d like to have a (low-level) play with what you might be able to accomplish with that sort of interaction then you might want to give Chatshape a go. This is a Chrome extension which you can run on any webpages you like to create small, trained chatbot instances from the copy/data – this is quite basic, and a long way from what you can do if you do the whole API thing, but as a rough proof-of-concept it might be helpful.
Midjourney Magazine: It does rather feel like Midjourney is winning the text-to-image war at the moment, with the outputs from its v5 model dropping jaws worldwide since its launch last week. If you’re the sort of person who feels they need to keep an eye on the tool’s development then you could perhaps do worse than subscribing to the OFFICIAL MIDJOURNEY MAGAZINE which promises to feature the best work from the best creators, along with, one presumes, tips and tricks and guides and stuff like that. Obviously you can get all of the above from the creative community that exists around the tool, but, equally, this is an OFFICIAL MAGAZINE and therefore might even be good. They’re asking for $4 a month as a sub, though, which seems, honestly, pretty fcuking punchy, so maybe see if you can fool your work into paying for it.
/AI: This is both very clever from a technical point of view and also an astonishingly bold grift; /AI is a Chrome Extension which lets you basically employ GPT on any website by letting you invoke it through any textbox on any webpage – which, yes, I know is a horrible attempt to explain it, but imagine any webpage on which there’s a text input field. Done that? Good. Now imagine that you can call up a GPT response into that text input field on any webpage you like, simply by typing /ai and then your command – EXCITING, EH? I mean, no, not really, but it is very clever and impressive, and it would I suppose saving you some tab-switching and copy and pasting…it is not, I don’t think, worth the $19 that the kid behind it is trying to charge for the download. Still, kudos to him for the code and the chutzpah – and a reminder to you that you really, really don’t need to be paying anyone other than OpenAI and maybe Midjourney for this stuff right now, because, honestly, these layers are all grift and will vanish with time.
Handmade Tools: A TikTok account in which some kid from (I think) New York posts these incredibly satisfying videos of them making various tools and things by hand. There’s one of these where he melts down a bunch of cheap ‘gold’ jewellery to make a TEENY TINY CHEF’S KNIFE and, honestly, it was possibly the most hypnotic and relaxing thing I’ve seen since 2015. BY THE WAY – I found this via a website called Oink!, which is a linkdump run by a very friendly Spanish-speaking person who I think is called Paco, and whose links I recommend unreservedly.
The VGA Museum: Have you been hankering after a website whose sole ostensible purpose is to feature photographs of compter graphics cards on a white background? Would you like to be able to sort said cards by chipmaker, BUS or card maker? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This site is maintained and run by the mysterious -but-fabulously-named ‘Slaventus’, whose dedication and faintly-obsessional love of graphics cards I salute (but do not in any way understand or share).
Living RPS: This is a now-dormanty account, but last year it posted some of the most unusually-compelling sporting content you will ever have seen, ever. THE LIVING ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS TOURNAMENT! Each matchup basically works like a sort-of loose game of ‘Life’ – icons representing rocks, paper and scissors bounce around the screen; if rocks touch scissors, rock ‘wins’ and the scissors icon transforms into a rock, and so on and so forth; each video ends when one of the three has emerged victorious and is the sole remaining icon on the board. “Matt”, I hear you cry, “why the fcuk do you think I would be interested in watching what is effectively a screensaver from 1997? Why do you bring me this? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING???” – but you are wrong, this is literally mesmerising and I cannot begin to tell you about the heart-palpitating tension that will grip you in the latter rounds. Genuinely hope that this happens again this year – this may be the only reason I have found to date to actually give a fcuk about TikTok.
Trianglify: A small tool which lets you make pleasing triangle-based abstract art, based on the position of a few sliders and the selection of a colour palette. If nothing else this is a lovely toy for making backgrounds and wallpapers, but I also find the geometry here very soothing indeed.
Creme: This is rather nice – Creme is a new cooking app which does video recipes (so far, so unremarkable), but whose gimmick is that said recipes are presented as a series of short looping gifs so that each step is onscreen with visual guidelines for as long as you need it to be rather than you having to desperately scrub forwards and backwards through a video with jammy fingers. It’s also got a bunch of slightly-less-appealing gimmicks added on – the playlist feature strikes me as particularly otiose – but the general idea here (teaching via gifs) is a good one which I am embarrassed to admit had literally never occurred to me before.
Supersonic: I am, I think, probably the least-healthy person I know. I’m not saying this as some sort of badge of pride or honour (oh, ok, I probably am a bit), more to indicate that I am very, very much not the sort of person who has ever even for one second contemplated ‘getting into running’ or ‘joining the gym’ or ‘stopping smoking’. Despite this, I was briefly almost sold on Supersonic when I discovered it – as far as I can tell it’s basically like Strava, but (and these were the magic words) for running or WALKING. Now, a Strava for strolling I can get behind – I may not be fast, but I rack up the miles, and I genuinely like the idea of being able to ‘own’ the 300-meter saunter from the tube to Tesco’s, say. This feels like an exercise tracker for those for whom even ‘standing up’ is occasionally a bit of an effort, is what I’m saying,and to that end I broadly endorse it.
Stuck Songs: A spreadsheet, tracking a single thing. “Almost every morning,” writes the unnamed curator of this document, “I wake up with a song stuck in my head. This is my attempt to keep track of them”. This, then, is that list of songs, up to date as of 22 March (when the song was “Kids In America” by Kim Wilde), some songs having accompanying notes to offer context but otherwise just listed by name and date. Honestly, I love this very much indeed – in a weird way it works better for not being able to hear the tracks in question.
Trust Exercise: Via Kristoffer comes this beautiful webproject – I think that what is happening here is the juxtaposition of a beauty influencer’s video script with the comments and reactions of their fans in the comments, creating a lovely sort-of dialogue between artist and audience which at the same time is continually, necessarily, slightly at cross-purposes. No idea if this was the artist’s intention (who IS the artist?), but it struck me as pleasingly evocative of the creator/fan relationship in general (he said, like the total fcuking pseud he in fact is).
You Are Not Special: This webcomic made a lot of people very upset online last week – I, on the other hand, love it, and think it should be given to everyone as soon as they are able to read. Your mileage, as every, may vary significantly.
Dadagrams: A daily word game where each day you have to achieve a higher score than the website maintainer’s dad, who is charmingly bad at the game and therefore means you can start your day with the pleasin frisson of victory more often than not.
Whichipedia: Which of the two Wikipedia entries is longer – GUESS! That’s, er, literally the extent of the ludic entertainment on offer here, but it’s more diverting than you might expect (although you will gain an unfair advantage over the machine if you make sure to remember the cast iron law of Wikipedia – to whit, any nerdy topic you care to mention will ALWAYS have a longer entry than any non-nerdy topic, regardless of the significance of said non-nerdy topic (this is 99% always true, I promise you).

By Melody Tuttle

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, CELEBRATE WHAT LOOKS VERY MUCH LIKE THE IMMINENT ARRIVAL OF SPRING WITH THIS EXCELLENTY BALEARIC MIX BY LOVEBIRDS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Jennifer Mills News: This might be one of my new favourite things on the internet, anywhere. Apparently a going concern for a couple of decades now, this is a blognewsletterthing in which the titular Miss Mills, apparently a 38 year old Brooklyn resident, writes her daily comings and goings in the style of an old-time regional newspaper. Rigorously third person, highlights include things like “Woman Touches Toes For First Time In Life”, and “Moonlight Casts Spotlight On Toilet In Middle Of Night: “It Was Beautiful”, Says Brooklyn Witness”. Look, this is very, very silly but also, well, I cannot help but admire the commitment to the bit, and the style, and the fact that Ms Mills seems to very much enjoy doing this. MORE POWER TO YOU JENNIFER MILLS.

City Stompers: Images of Kaiju monsters, which, per the Tumblr’s accurate description, are ‘stomping on stuff’. Posters, film clips, artworks – if it involves men in awkward rubber suits bestriding model versions of Tokyo like so many sweaty colossi then WOW are you in the right place.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Carlos Jiminez Varela: Varela is a photo compositor and retoucher who I presume works on all sorts of things in real life but whose Insta feed features nothing but pictures of gigantic trainers (oh, ok, fine, ‘sneakers’, if you must) dropped onto the urban landscape – a Nike Airforce One disrupting LA traffic, an Adidas hightop reflected in the windows of a towerblock at sunset, that sort of thing. No, no idea at all.
Renee French: Small, odd, vaguely-surreal and slightly-bathetic art and animations by Renee French, which are small and surreal and inhabit a not-entirely-dissimilar universe to Marcell The Shell With Shoes On but which are, mercifully, nowhere near as insufferable.
Entreprenure: A genuinely wonderful account parodying business hustle culture and all those people who seem to do nothing with their days other than penning what appear to be blank verse updates on LinkedIn and taking photos of themselves in rental supercars on an Essex industrial estate.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The Met: We begin this week with a very long, but very good, piece from the London Review of Books, looking at London’s Metropolitan Police (and in fact the wider policing landscape in the UK), and, in a week in which the Casey review concluded to literally noone’s surprise that the Met is racist, homophobic and misogynistic, the broader national picture, asking how, exactly, did we manage to end up with a police force that is this dysfunctional. This is a brilliant piece of writing, taking in four decades or so of variously-ineffectual policy by a succession of Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries, which does what in my humble opinion these pieces should always strive to do – that is, demonstrate how insanely complex socially-focused policymaking is, and how interwoven issues such as policing are with a whole host of semi-linked policy areas, and how by pursuing a policy of austerity for the best part of 15 years, the UK government presided over a situation whereby rising demand for policing services was accompanied in parallel by a vertiginous drop in the ability of London’s police force to provide said services to anything resembling an adequate degree. This is mainly a piece about how politics has failed the police, and touches less on the broader question of to what extent it is even possible to ensure that recruits into an organisation whose raison d’etre is, fundamentally, power and control, can be filtered to minimise the number of utter psychos found within it, but if you’ve any interest in How We Got Here then this is an exceptionally good read.

The Bitterer Lesson: Alberto Romero writes about the weird realisation that we’re all going to come to terms with – specifically, that we are not going to be able to understand the future that we are building for ourselves, and that in may respects we might have to accept that our ‘agency’ in building whatever future result might from hereon in become somewhat…compromised. This isn’t a piece about the terrifying advent of AGI or anything scifi like that – as Romero writes, “I’m not talking about AI becoming smarter than us (AGI, ASI, whatever). I’m not sure that’s possible. It’s not important. Because sooner than that (we won’t know how much), these things we’re building will grow so complex that not even our privileged minds will be able to make sense of them. It’s already happening. Here’s the thing: no one—not even the creators—knows what GPT-4 is all about. All those memes and philosophical puzzles about Shoggoths, Waluigis, and masked simulators are desperate—and vain—attempts at trying to imbue coherence into something that is slowly escaping the grip of our understanding. Soon, there will only be mysteries. And we won’t stop. Because computers, our metaphorical horses (that by then will do even a higher percentage of the total work in taking us forward) will keep running toward the unknown long after we won’t be able to recognize our fate anymore.”

The Stable Diffusionification of LLMs: Or, perhaps more usefully, ‘some thoughts about the potential implications of everyone theoretically being able to have their own LLM that they train in whatever way they like so it tells them what they want’ – this is by Simon Willison, and is inspired by Facebook’s LLaMA model leaking the other week which means that as of the now, anyone with the sufficient technical chops can get a reasonably-sophisticated LLM running locally on their machine, jailbroken and ready to be trained in whatever way they see fit. Which, you know, is sort-of exciting! But, equally, does rather lead one down a potential rabbithole of negative externalities, a few of which Willison outlines here. As a sort-of companion piece, should you be interested, this article about the imminent rise of AI-fueled fanfic bots was interesting – given the, er, sweaty-palmed nature of much fandom these days, it does strike me that there’s a not-insignificant possibility that we might end up losing a non-trivial proportion of people to slashfiction fan relationships with their favourite characters as imagined by The Machine.

Algorithmic Black Swans: This is admittedly an academic paper and therefore a BIT dry, but if you can’t stand the stylistic quirks then there’s a lot of interesting thinking here about some of the potential (practical, actual, non-AGI) risks of the current wave of AI tools; the University of Toronto’s Noam Colt explores a few of the things that we should be worrying about, from the need for agile regulation to the problems of risk management frameworks…if you have any interest in, or any practical involvement with, the development of guidelines and parameters for AI and machine learning-type stuff then you will find this fascinating I think.

Using GPT for Teaching: Ethan Mollick, again (seriously, just subscribe), talking about some techniques he’s been using to help streamline his teaching practice with GPT – from developing tests and examples, to collating and analysing feedback, these are, as ever with Mollick, practical and engaging examples which are also applicable to a range of other disciplines that have less to do with pedagogy and more to do with, say, the development of largely-pointless marketing strategies (I SEE YOU, READERS!).

AI & Sol Lewitt: I promise that this is the last AI-related article this week – but, also, this is a really good one, and is genuinely fascinating about how the machine ‘thinks’ and how it doesn’t, and how the quality of ‘thinking’ (not thinking) has evolved between GPT3.5 and GPT4. For those of you ignorant of his work (like I was before reading this piece tbh), Sol Lewitt created works that were essentially series of instructions for the creation of geometric drawings, with part of the work’s execution being the individual way in which the instructions were interpreted on each occasion of the work’s creation (stuff like ““On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.”, for example). In this piece, Amy Goodchild contrasts the manner in which GPT3.5 and GPT4 interpret various sets of these instructions, and what (if anything) that can perhaps tell us about the different ways in which the models interpret instructions. Aside from anything else this is a really powerful illustration of how inadequate and massively-interpretable a set of written instructions can in fact be.

Meet Harsha Sai: One of the interesting things about the MrBeast content model is watching how it plays out in other territories – this profile of Harsha Sai, India’s self-styled MrBeast who produces a similar sort of ‘aggressive philanthropy’ video, is fascinating not just because of the transposition of what feels like a very Western style of content with Indian culture, but also because of the different economics and ambitions at play. Whereas MrBeast can theoretically just keep getting richer if he pleases the algo with bigger numbers and sillier giveaways, Sai’s hamstrung by the fact that creators in India earn a fraction of their Western counterparts through ad revenue – which makes the endgame for him a more curious proposition. TV? Or does this sort of visible ‘kindness’ mark him down for a future career in politics, in a country where the difference between individual philanthropy and the literal buying of votes is often tricky to distinguish?

Dan Wang’s 2022 Letter: Each year, Dan Wang writes a letter about his previous 12 months in China – this year’s letter is typically excellent, and is such a wonderful pair of eyes through which to see the country (or at least the bits of it Wang writes about). Lots of great writing about place, about culture, and about food, and lockdowns and mountains and geography and and and. Long, but a very rewarding read.

The McDonald’s Fries Theorem: Apparently McDonald’s has recently introduced a ‘Medium’ portion size for its fries. This set one man wondering about price vs value, and whether there were some clever marginal gains to be made: “A large has 116% of the fries of a medium, but, at £2.29 vs £1.79, is 128% of the price. Surely, then, there is a point where it’s cheaper to buy more medium portions than large portions.” The article explains all the maths, and then offers you the use of a little calculator which you can use to calculate whether it makes sense for you to buy your fries in Medium or Large portions – utterly pointless, but brilliantly and obsessionally so (also, contains another excellent, practical use-case for GPT).

Sink P1ssers: “You’re disgraceful, like getting caught p1ssing in the sink”, sang PlanB on his excellent early single Sick 2 Def (and whatever happened to Plan B? He was ubiquitous for a few years and then vanished, like some sort of sub-Ray Winstone cheese dream that affected the nation for 24 months) – but, as this article points out, not everyone is in fact of the opinion that it is disgraceful. I imagine that when Miles Klee started his glorious journey into journalism he didn’t imagine that he’d one day be penning three thousand words on the sink-p1ssing enthusiasts of Reddit but, well, here he is and here we are. This is actually quite wholesome and rather funny, and I found the water saving arguments the sink-p1ssers put forward almost worryingly compelling (DON’T WORRY SAZ I PROMISE NOT TO).

Cruel Breeding: I happened to catch 15m of Crufts the other week, and MAN are there some weird-looking dogs being primped and preened and presented. This piece looks at the effects on the world’s dogs of generations and generations of selective breeding, and the (frankly very distressing) fact that many of the qualities that modern pet owners prize in their furry charges are in fact qualities that are also antithetical to the whole ‘being a dog’ thing, and that as such breeds are being deliberately encouraged to have traits that are, basically, really fcuking bad for them – not just the pugs with breathing difficulties that we all know about, but dogs that are basically born within approximately 3mm of a total canine nervous breakdown because, it turns out, we like our small canines pliant and needy. If you have a small designer dog, maybe don’t read this (but, also, maybe don’t ever get another one).

Penile Surgery: I am reading a LOT about male cosmetic procedures at the moment – from hair transplants to the spate of articles about leg-lengthening last year, to this one about ab implants – but this one, about a bunch of guys in the US who are currently coming together to sue a ‘doctor’ (my inverted commas but, honestly, read this piece and ask yourself whether the man in question merits the professional designation) who has performed some not-insignificant acts of vandalism on their cocks. Obviously this is very sad – not so much the botched surgery as the mindset that leads one to think that this needs to be fixed; lads! Watch Naked Attraction! It’s literally IMPOSSIBLE not to feel better about oneself! – but, also, it’s one of the best pieces of pure body horror I have read in ages. I was reading sections of this out to my girlfriend and there were points when we were both wincing and crossing out legs in sympathy, is the upshot. Whether or not this is appealing to you I have no idea but, if you take one thing away from this it should very much be ‘do not embark upon penile enlargement surgery’.

Senior Bongo: This is, to be clear, a relatively-explicit article about old people fcuking on camera, so if you don’t particularly want to read something which describes the physical process of sex amongst septuagenerians then maybe skip this one. The rest of you, though, will hopefully find this a kind, funny and warm-hearted piece which offers a pleasingly non-traditional look at sex for the older person.

Bruce: I had, I think, known that the model sharks used during the filming of Jaws were all called ‘Bruce’ (after Spielberg’s lawyer, lol), but the rest of the details in this piece, about the man who wrote Jaws, and the film that became of it, and the filming of the film, and the damage that its author felt he’d done to the squalene species as a whole and his lifelong attempts to make up for it, and how Bruce ended up at Universal studios…honestly, this is SO well-written, and far more stylistically-interesting than it really needs to be given the already-jazzy subject material.

Knowledge of Missing Out: I thought this was a brilliant essay by Diane Shipley, who writes about living with chronic illness and how fcuking sh1t it is, and how much as she might try and not care about the things that she can’t do, and not feel angry and bitter about it, sometimes it’s impossible and that’s ok. “Some people swear by mindfulness, where you inhale and exhale as you focus on the present moment, but you’d have to be pretty desperate to consider that a substitute for a full and interesting life: breath. I once saw another chronically ill writer tweet that she loves her “small, rich life” and wanted to vomit. I don’t love my small life; I don’t consider it rich and I don’t want to say I do and risk hundreds of people who have no understanding of chronic illness retweeting it with a heart emoji. In my early twenties, at the start of a comprehensive and ineffective exploration of complementary therapies, I went to bed early, drank chamomile tea, and listened to Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime while my college friends screamed “WE ARE FAMILY” and swapped gossip until 3 a.m. without me. I told myself life wasn’t worse, just different. It was bullshit.” More of this, please.

Bret Easton Ellis: Specifically, a long and involved review of his latest, ‘The Shards’ – I love Ellis’ work and have read everything he’s ever written multiple times, and hence I devoured the Shards and this piece about it, but I concede that if you’ve not read the book or if you’ve limited interest in Ellis’ output then you can probably skip this one.

The Tinder Car Catfish Heist:Ok, you very much need to get into the groove with this one because the style of writing here is…quite high, one could say, but if you find its rhythm then I promise you that you will very much enjoy this. The profile of a man called Mike who gets his car stolen and then tries to get it back again…look, this is very silly, and everyone in this story is an awful moron, but the joy here is that the author knows, and the reader knows, but the protagonists very much don’t. Seriously, this is a very odd piece of writing but a really enjoyable one.

Low Life, High Style: An absolutely barnstorming portrait of the late, great Soho lush Jeffrey Barnard, in many respects an awful man who despite his many, mainy failings as a human being managed to achieve the twin distinctions of being seemingly universally-loved and grudgingly-admired. This is a wonderful piece of writing, not only about the man but about the long-since-lost Soho which he inhabited; as my friend Ben said on reading this, “he would have hated modernity” – which is true, but it’s equally true that it would have hated him in return, and so it’s probably best they never met. NB – I appreciate that the piece is in Quillette, but other than a couple of tedious half-references to ‘modern wokery’ it appears to be free of any mad right-wing nonsense and so it can pass.

The Millennial Friendship Package Trip: In what has been a particularly strong week for longform writing, this deserves a special mention – Caity Weaver travels to Morocco on a group holiday with a bunch of other women in their 20s and 30s, all of whom are successful and all of whom are there to make friends and all of whom, by Weaver’s own admission, are might what one might call ‘type A’ personalities, and my God this is SO SO SO SO GOOD, funny and waspish but entirely-affectionate towards its subjects, and self-aware and just brilliantly-written. It annoyed me, it’s that good.

Waiting for Brando: Honestly, though, THIS is the best story in Curios this week. Every single bit of this is perfect – from the sheer insanity and entitlement of its 20something author deciding that he was going become a film producer in order to get into a specific girl’s knickers, to the casual name-dropping, to the insane sense that all of the principles in this seem to have that anything is possible for any of them (and after all, why shouldn’t it be?), to some genuinely wonderful setpieces (the filming of the naval battle is a particular highlight), this features Sidney Lumet, Mario Puzo, Joseph Heller and the absence of Marlon Brando and is, I promise you, just joyous from start to finish.

Burning Men: A story by Mia Farrell, this is very long but darkly funny and, I promise, very much worth the time it will take you to read it. For any of you who feel somewhat unsatisfied at how that whole ‘we’re sorting out sexism!’ thing from a few years ago turned out, this is a brilliant extended bit of satirical fiction which stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

Couplets: Finally this week, some poetry. I read this over the weekend, and then immediately read it again from start to finish, so impressed was I – this is an extract from a recent book, by Maggie Millner, all about the start, middle and end of a relationship in (obviously) New York and it is SO GOOD, both in terms of the evocation of early love/lust/obsession and it terms of the formal construction of the work – even if you never read poetry, even if the thought makes your teeth itch, I promise you this is worth your time.

By Alexis Ralaivao

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (ONCE AGAIN LARGELY SOURCED FROM THE EXCELLENT ‘GOOD MUSIC’ NEWSLETTER)!:

We start this week with a playthrough of a mod for 90s videogame Doom, which I imagine makes literally none of you prick up your ears in interest. BUT WAIT! This is super, super clever – the mod is based on the film The House of Leaves, and, as you’ll see if you watch the playthrough, it’s a genuinely astonishing piece of level design and narrative work, and contains some great ideas in terms of delivering a surprising experience through constrained but smart design. It is, though, 35 minutes of someone playing a several-decade-old-videogame, so, well.

100 Gecs are very much a band I don’t feel I should be allowed to like (insofar as it feels a bit like anyone over 30 should spontaneously combust if they even hear a bar or two of their songs by accident), but, well, I do, and this, their latest single called ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’ is no exception. Very clever stupid music.

This is pretty much a perfect song for a sunny spring day – Yumi Zuma, with ‘Of Me And You’.

I can’t say I ‘like’ this, exactly, but it’s been rattling around my head all week and I’m slightly annoyed with its persistence; for some reason when scrabbling around for comparisons I keep landing on ‘what if Erasure and The Darkness were combined in some sort of weird experiment, but their output sounded VERY MUCH of the now?’ – this, apparently. It’s by The Subways and it’s called Uncertain Joys.

Some glorious vocals, now – my notes variously suggest that this reminds me a bit of Feist, Aldous Harding, Weyes Blood and Beth Gibbons, but generally it’s just a beautiful piece of music with a really lovely vocal line. ‘In My Own Time’, by Fenne Lily.

Now I am definitely too old to enjoy this, but FCUK ME THIS SLAPS. If I was 16 I would be listening to this with possibly-troubling regularity – I just had to take a break from typing to pretend-drum the keyboard (yes, I am EXACTLY as cool as you imagine me to be!). This is called ‘That Girl’ and it’s by Emei and it feels like this should have been really famous – was it?

Finally this week, why not spend some time relaxing with some cats and some AI-powered robots? This is an ongoing experiment in which a bunch of AI systems will attempt to optimise the ‘happiness’ of the cats in their charge – the idea being to test both the ability of the software to respond to perceived wants, but also the extent to which having their every whim met by a robotic master is in fact a good thing or otherwise. Anyway, this is lovely and combines the internet, technology and cats, which as far as I am concerned makes it practically perfect. HAPPY FRIDAY I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 17/03/23

March 17, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 38 minutes

It does rather feel that The Onion ought to create a version of their ‘another mass shooting’ story for banking crises, doesn’t it? ““We don’t understand how the invisible hand failed to sort our mess out!”, screams only industry still holding faith in the invisible hand”, or perhaps something, you know, better.

Meanwhile it’s been another LONG AND BUSY WEEK when it comes to having the future fired at our faces at point-blank range, and, if I’m honest, I felt myself getting a little pre-emptively weary of all the inevitable, poor-quality, derivative and barely-functional ‘guides to harnessing GPT4 for YOUR business!’ writeups that are going to be appearing all over the place (a not insignificant number of which I expect I am going to end up writing for various people because, well, a boy’s got to eat).

I’m off to gird my loins in preparation for all that horror, and to get all my gubbins together for a brief trip back to Rome next week (I need to go to sign a piece of paper – literally ONE piece of paper. God love a bureaucracy, eh?), and so I will leave you with the words and the links and some sort of vague, nonspecific good wishes for the weekend.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and when I’ve finally got round to hooking up the GPT API to this newsletter then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be free.

By Jess Allen

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH SOME MODERN CLASSICAL GUITAR MUSIC BY JONATHAN BOCKELMANN WHICH I REALLY DO RECOMMEND EVEN IF THE IDEA OF LISTENING TO SOMETHING DESCRIBED BY ME AS ‘MODERN CLASSICAL GUITAR MUSIC’ MAKES YOUR TEETH ITCH!

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN APOLOGISES FOR THE SLIGHTLY-AI-HEAVY OPENING SECTION BUT WHICH WOULD GENTLY SUGGEST THAT IT’S PROBABLY NOT A TERRIBLE IDEA FOR YOU TO START LEARNING WHAT THE FUCK THIS STUFF DOES NOW GIVEN IT’S INCREASINGLY IMPOSSIBLE TO OSTRICH YOUR WAY OUY OF THIS SH1T HOWEVER MUCH YOU MIGHT IN FACT WANT TO, PT.1:

GPT4: AND SO IT CAME TO PASS THAT OPENAI DID RELEASE A NEW MODEL TO THE SLAVERING, AI-HUNGRY MASSES AND THEY DID REJOICE (WHILST AT THE SAME TIME ONCE AGAIN FAILING TO ASK SO MANY OF THE CRITICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW ALL THIS STUFF ACTUALLY WORK WHICH FUTURE GENERATIONS MAY END UP RATHER WISHING THEY HAD DONE)! Yes, that’s right, the frankly terrifying pace of modernity continues to not let up one iota with the news this week that OpenAI were opening up the much-touted next iteration of their GPT Large Language Model to the public. You can read a bit more about what it can do at the link, but any of you who are ponying up the $20 a month to use the ChatGPT Pro interface now have access to the new model – SO WHAT CAN IT DO? Well. It’s not, to be clear, an astonishing and transformative leap from the last version (SO OLD, SO JADED!), and it doesn’t actually fix any of the BIG issues with 3.5 (it still makes stuff up with confidence, it’s still a locked box and doesn’t ‘know’ anything outside of its training set (or at least strongly maintains that it doesn’t), and it still shouldn’t really be trusted to produce anything without its output being checked pretty closely…that said, it also does some stuff that’s quite clearly magic. The big shift from v3.5 to v4 is the introduction of ‘multimodal’ capabilities, which basically means that it’s now able to interpret visual inputs and so you can ask it to do things like ‘describe this image’ – which means, when the API access to this is released in a few weeks, you’re going to see a flood of interesting use-cases like ‘upload any images you like and have GPT critique them in the style of a famous photographic critic’, or ‘please isolate all pictures of me wearing a red coat from my cameraroll’, or, inevitably, ‘upload an image of a naked person and let the software critique its proportions’ (this is 100% going to be used to create AI-assessed HotOrNot, don’t pretend it isn’t). For now, the image analysis tech is being used in a showcase app by one of the launch partner organisations – BeMyEyes (featured on Curios YEARS ago) is a service which uses tech to help the visually-impaired get information about their surroundings, and using GPT4 they are launching a tool which will let you take a photo of anything and have it described to you by the AI. Honestly, though, the use-cases for this stuff are just MAD – here’s one thread of stuff people have been trying, which includes coding up Pong and Snake and Tetris (honestly, the coding stuff in the latest version really is amazing – you can see a thread of specific coding examples here); here’s another, including some more coding examples and using GPT to create prompts for visual AIs; these are some examples of launch partners using the tech, such as Duolingo; this is a nice story about how it’s inventing new compound words in Icelandic; and here’s a guy who’s running an experiment to see whether he can make money from a starting seed capital of $100 solely by following GPT4’s instructions on how to get rich (inevitably he has now attracted several thousand dollars worth of ‘investment’ for this venture, because ffs). “But Matt!”, I hear you all cry, “what does this MEAN? Please tell me what I should think about all this breathless, breakneck upheaval and change and…is it…progress?” To which the obvious answer is “lol like I know, I’m just some webmong” (and also “is it normal to hear these voices?”), but to which I might also say “This is the point at which I strongly believe it’s important you start to learn how to use this stuff, because I reckon you’ve got maximum a year in which reasonable competence with this sort of kit makes you look genuinely smart”, but also “GPT4 is literally Wegovy for white collar office workers, insofar as everyone will be using it to give themselves a professional tweakup but people will be a bit cagey about admitting it” – any journalists reading this, that is literally a near-perfect Sunday supplement pitch for you to go wild with. You’re welcome.

Midjourney v5: Those of you who play with Discord-based image-generation tool Midjourney may like to know that you can now access the latest version of the model – this link takes you to a YouTube video which describes how to make it work for you. FWIW I tend to find Midjourney’s stuff technically impressive but a bit too recognisably Midjourney in terms of consistent overall aesthetic, but there’s no denying that this update produces some hugely impressive outputs (and does a pretty good job with fingers from what I can tell).

Kajabi: The GPT API is leading to SO MANY AMAZING GRIFTS! Honestly, one of the most impressive things about the AI boom is how quickly and efficiently it’s being harnessed by the sort of people who a few generations prior would have been inviting you round the corner to peruse the Special Imported Fragrances their cousin had brought back from ‘The Continent’ and which were residing temporarily in the this old Ford Transit currently parked around the back of the Murder & Stab (PUNCTUATE, Matt, ffs!). Kajabi is one such grift – the company ordinarily helps people sell training courses, apparently, but is now offering an AI-enhanced service whereby for as little as $150 a month you can, er, outsource everything to a bot. Course creation, course promotion, course marketing, course sales – it’s all done by machine! Exactly what sort of value you’ll be adding to the lives of your potential eventual alumni is…unclear, fine, but I’m sure there’s no way in hell that this company is encouraging the creation of bullsh1t learning products, empty of any meaning or instruction, to be sold at scale to the gullible and stupid and desperate…there couldn’t be, could there?

AdventureAI: While we’re doing ‘uses of AI that I can’t help but grudgingly sort-of admire for the shamelessness of their grift’, here’s AdventureAI, a training course to help turn YOUR kids into skilled prompt engineers! “Kids utilize cutting-edge AI to create art, text, programs, etc. in their interest areas that rivals creations from professionals”, runs the blurb, offering nervous parents the opportunity to future-proof their offspring (for all of approximately 6 months, judging by the current pace of development of all this stuff). Obviously there’s a monthly fee attached – OBVIOUSLY! – which, at the lowest tier, is $10pcm for ‘access to AI tools’. TOOLS WHICH ARE MOSTLY FREE! Honestly, THE CHUTZPAH! Even better, you can pay $160 a month which gets you access to the free tools, a ‘self-paced AI curriculum’, and a live class every month with an actual ‘teacher’! Now, obviously I don’t advocate this sort of thing at all – the people behind this are crooks! – but equally it’s clear that there is a very, very visible window opening right now in which it is going to be possible to make quite a lot of money about people who are scared of this stuff (and I’m not even mentioning the legion of you who are currently reworking your CVs to position yourselves as AI consultants).

AI Impacts: Should you wish to keep an eye on the development of thinking around the more serious end of the AI debate – specifically, HOW ARE WE ATTEMPTING TO ENSURE THAT OUR RAPID ADOPTION OF THIS TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T LEAD TO TERRIFYING UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES (WHICH WE ALMOST CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE FORESEEN HAD WE SPENT MORE TIME THINKING ABOUT THEM AND LESS TIME RABIDLY MAXIMISING FOR SHAREHOLDER VALUE AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE)? – then you might want to bookmark this site, which collects information around AI because, in their words, “public discussion on these issues appears to be highly fragmented and of limited credibility. More credible and clearly communicated views on these issues might help improve estimates of the social returns to AI investment, identify neglected research areas, improve policy, or productively channel public interest in AI….The goal of the project is to clearly present and organize the considerations which inform contemporary views on these and related issues, to identify and explore disagreements, and to assemble whatever empirical evidence is relevant.” Useful and interesting.

Kids Draw Magic: In the same was as Betteridge’s Law (“The answer to any question semi-rhetorically posed in a newspaper headline will inevitably be ‘no’”) and Godwin’s Law (the Nazi one), it feels we might need a new law of the internet, one that broadly addresses the fact that as soon as a new technology is invented and popularised it will be used to do something cute and heartwarming to the drawings of small children. So it is with ‘Kids Draw Magic’, and app now available on Android which is basically a repackaged, kid-friendly version of the recent browser-based ‘do a rough drawing and get the AI to turn it into something fancy-looking’ toys I’ve featured in here of late. Get your sticky-faced progeny to daub their jammy fingers all over your device, let them create whatever hamfisted abortion of a ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ or ‘rabbit’ they fancy (yes, I know, but let’s be honest, all child’s drawings of animals look like the prototypical sketches of an enthusiastic but fundamentally-limited amateur taxidermist), and then press a button and watch as The Machines transform their childish scrawl into something which will erroneously convince them they have some sort of individual talent. Ahem. Sorry, that was a bit bitter, wasn’t it? This actually looks very fun, my miserable crabbing notwithstanding.

Babelfish: Not, obviously, an actual Babelfish – this is instead a paper outlining recent experiments in doing live natural voice translation of speech. Which may not mean anything when I write it in such a hamfisted fashion, but which basically means ‘The Machine takes my speech and livetranslates it into any language I want, whilst at the same time maintaining the inflections and cadence of my natural voice’. There, that’s more impressive, isn’t it? There are embedded audio samples on the page here so you can get a feel for quite how scifi this is – simultaneous translators, they’re coming for you! Sorry about that.

Plug Stable Diffusion into Photoshop: Literally just that, but having watched a few videos of people using this plugin it looks incredible and is probably worth playing with if you’re an artist or designer and want a way of working something into your practice that is a bit more flexible and interesting than the inbuilt AI tools Adobe’s introducing to its suite.

CupidBot: On the one hand, part of me wants to be all smug here that something I predicted a few months ago is now here as a real-life working thing – on the other, a) I suppose on reflection I should admit to myself that ‘someone uses AI in order to create a professional Cyrano service for desperate men on The Apps’ did not require a Mystic Meg (RIP)-style clairvoyant ability to predict; and b) this is a miserable, horrible business idea that makes me feel incredibly grubby and hence celebration of my questionable predictive genius feels a bit, well, tawdry. What does CupidBot do? “CupidBot AI swipes and chats for you on your dating apps to bring you several dates a week so you can skip to the good part. We filter out the attention seekers and only notify you when you get a date…We’re a team of ex-Tinder engineers, we weren’t allowed to build a tool that helps men get results when we were at Tinder because they profit from continuous engagement that goes nowhere, so we decided to leave and build one ourselves.” SO MUCH TO HATE ABOUT THIS! The idea that the process of getting to know someone is a tedious-but-necessary step on the road to ‘the good part’! The ‘filter out the attention seekers’, which reads SO much like a chippy little bloke complaining about ‘fake’ women that I can almost smell the high street aftershave (sorry, but)! The additional information which tells you that “Whether you want to use a direct, humorous, nonchalant, or agressive tone, we can do it”! Yes, that’s right, this company is literally advertising its ability to create ‘aggressive’ dating bots which it will unleash across Tinder – oh, and you know what the best bit is? THE BOTS DON’T DISCLOSE THEY’RE BOTS! It does feel quite a lot like there is no way in hell this should get past the major platforms safety guidelines but, well, if you’re a woman using dating apps then be aware that this stuff is now OUT THERE IN THE WILD (it may not surprise you, by the way, that CupidBot seems to be aimed exclusively at men. Oh, men).

Gowalla: When I got a Big Job at a Big Agency a decade or so ago it was in the boom era of location-based apps, and the bunfight between FourSquare and Gowalla to see who would be crowned KING of the ‘check into a public toilet and get a free p1ss’ app marketplace. Whilst it turned out that there wasn’t in fact a viable business model involved in ‘giving people digital badges for turning up in my shop every day for a year’ model, FourSquare’s continued being a going concern thanks to the datalayer that it built up around cities, whereas Gowalla faded and died…but now it’s back! It’s repositioned itself more as a ‘real-life, realtime networking app’, a sort of ‘marauders map for your mates’ (sorry, but the Potter reference was the only one that sprang immediately to mind there), although the (still baffling) ‘become mayor of your local probation office!’ schtick is still there for those interested. I can’t personally see what the market for this is, but I also appreciate that I am old, that all my friends have children and responsibilities and that serendipity is a thing of the past, and that therefore I may not be target audience for this anymore.

MorseChat: Do you feel you’ve explored all possible variations on the ‘social network’ model? WELL FCUK OFF YOU’RE WRONG. Have you ever tried a morse code based social platform, one in which you can communicate solely via the medium of dots and dashes and bleeps? WELL HAVE YOU? No, you haven’t (don’t lie) – but now’s your chance! The sparse ‘about’ page reveals only that “This is a web-based morsecode chat. Press space or the key below to transmit a dot, hold it to transmit a dash”, but there are people on the site and they are…talking! In beeps! Fine, for all I know they are currently engaged in a heated debate about who the fcuk this silent lurker is, and when will he fcuk off and stop eavesdropping, but it’s a VIBRANT COMMUNITY! I promise I will give an actual, real-world cash prize to anyone who can prove to me that you have included this site in any PR or marketing plan you write in the coming year. Also, by the way, WHY IS IT NOT CALLED MORSPACE?? FFS.

WeHead: This doesn’t seem like a joke, but at the same time is so utterly preposterous-looking that it’s hard to imagine there isn’t a gag going on here somewhere. Do you remember that brief, short-lived period in which a few people tried to convince us that mounting an iPad on a broomstick-on-wheels and letting remote colleagues manoeuvre themselves round the offices in a vague approximation of presence was the future of work? Rubbish, wasn’t it? Well, IT’S BACK! Except WeHead lets you project a weirdly-cubist version of your head into a specially-made…robotic box thing? Which is partly articulated to allow for a small degree of movement, meaning the face-in-a-box can sort of look around the room at its interlocutors, as long as they stay sat within a relatively-narrow field of vision? THIS IS SO SO SO SO SH1T! Sorry to the very talented scientists and engineers who have worked to make this an apparent reality – I am sure this is very impressive from a technical standpoint! – but, honestly, do any of you believe that anyone will ever actually use this? I posit that you do not. Anyway, there are stil earlybird models of the kit available for $2k, and apparently they will ship to you by the middle of April 2023…no, I’m sorry, this HAS to be a joke. Anyone?

The Scroll Prize: I don’t, if I’m honest, imagine that too many of you people reading this are likely to be working at the cutting edge of machine learning (and, er, if you are, what are you doing? Stop wasting your time! We’re relying on you to save us from all this!), but on the offchance that I’m wrong then maybe you’ll be the ones to solve this problem and win a prize! “The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning and computer vision competition to read the Herculaneum Papyri…Under infrared light, some detached fragments of the papyri are readable, and it seems possible that these can be used as ground truth data for a machine learning model that could detect otherwise invisible ink from X-rays…The objective of the Vesuvius Challenge is to make history by reading an unopened Herculaneum scroll for the very first time. We believe that an open competition will accelerate progress and enable us to achieve this goal in 2023…We have provided you with 8µm 3D X-ray scans of each of these scrolls, which you can find here. Your job is to extract the text from these scans. You can approach this challenge through any means necessary: machine learning, computer vision, or machine-assisted tools operated by humans.” Isn’t that cool? A prize to uncover ancient writings from hitherto-inaccessible documents is properly exciting, so can one of you go and win it please thanks.

Just Rolled In: As a non-driver I basically think that cars are magic – but I am reliably informed that they are not, and that there is infact some mechanical engineering underpinning their movement. Just Rolled In is a YouTube channel which features examples of When That Engineering Goes Wrong – this is an insane collection of people bringing in their vehicles for repair in conditions which make repair seem…unlikely, and makes you think that perhaps the people in question should maybe not have a driving license at all. You don’t have to be a greasemonkey (aspirant or actual) to enjoy some of these – there’s one particular video which features someone who apparently attempted to patch their tire using sheet metal and nails and which left me genuinely questioning how some people are able to walk and breathe at the same time.

The LVMH Prize: Normally I only feature fashion/luxe websites in here to make fun of them, but I’ll make an exception for this year’s presentation of the LVMH Prize (which, in case you don’t know, is the annual award the House gives to young designers of exceptional talent) – this is a really, really nice piece of webwork which does an excellent job of looking SHINY AND LUXE AND FASHION whilst also (and this is where it diverges from most of its peers) actually being functional and pleasant to use and informative; it shows off the individual designers’ work and style to good effect, and there’s plenty of supplementary information about their background and practice should you wish to explore it…just the way that the menu scroll works as a kind of walk-through of the designers and their work is lovely, and overall this is just beautifully made (and, fwiw, some of the work is quite nice too).

By Alex Schaeffer

NEXT UP, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING, IS THE FULL AND STILL UTTERLY SUPERB DJ FOOD & DK ‘NOW LISTEN’ MIX FOR SOLID STEEL!

The Statue of Liberty Tour: Despite having been to New York several times I’ve never been up the Statue of Liberty (or, to be honest, ever paid particular attention to it – I am in many respects a terrible tourist), and so I rather enjoyed this Google Street View tour of its innards, including the unpleasantly-claustrophic ladder that takes you up to the viewing platform in the torch’s flame. A combination of the fact that all the shots involved in this were taken on something of a grey day and the fact that what you’re basically looking at is quite a lot of internal infrastructure and some rickety steps means that the main purpose of this, to my mind, is to ensure that you never waste the time it would take to do this in person. Still, LIBERTY!
Google Trends Realtime: I think that this is a new feature – at least, it’s new to me and my solipsism means it must therefore by definition be new to you too. Google Trends now offers you what it calls a ‘realtime’ view of trending searches in your location, which isn’t really realtime but instead “highlight stories that are trending across Google surfaces within the last 24 hours, and are updated in real time. These stories are a collection of Knowledge Graph topics, Search interest, trending YouTube videos and/or Google News articles detected by our algorithms.” Which is both just curious from the point of view of ‘what is the nation REALLY THINKING ABOUT right now? (clue: stuff on the telly, almost inevitably) and potentially-useful should you still be in the invidious position of having to chase trends for content-click-clout.
Metanumbers: Do YOU want to know more about numbers? Would you like the ability to plug in any numer about which you were curious into a website and at the click of a button know EVERYTHING about it? No, I can’t for a second imagine that you do, and yet nonetheless I present METANUMBERS (it’s not in all-caps, but it does rather feel like it should be), a website which will literally give you the inside-leg measurement of any nine-digit figure you care to name if you ask it nicely (obviously it won’t do that – numbers don’t have legs, inside or otherwise). Want to know if something’s a prime? Want to know its factorials? Want to know if it’s a fibonacci or a perfect number? WELL YOU’RE IN LUCK! I don’t, honestly, have an idea at all of what you might use this for, but I am pleased it exists.
The Eliot-Hale Letters: Oh God this is lovely – I confess that I did a small weep reading these earlier this week, not because they are sad per se and more because there’s something so beautiful, timeless and yet so so so…old-fashioned, about the relationship contained in this correspondence record. Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher and the longtime muse and confidante of TS Eliot, who over the course of nearly 30 years and over 1100 letters conducted the most extraordinary epistolic relationship with her and whose correspondence is a wonderful mixture of the mundane, the sublime and the ridiculousness that only writers of love letters can occasionally attain. Honestly, you can dip in at any point and just start reading and it’s WONDERFUL – gossipy and banal and personal and urbane, and far more interesting and entertaining than any collection of old letters between two people you don’t and will never know have any right to be.
How To D&D: Given the boom in interest in tabletop roleplaying games and the decline in social unacceptability of pastimes like Dungeons & Dragons, it seems plausible that some of you might be in the market for learning more about how to plan campaigns and all that jazz. This YouTube channel by one JP Coovert might be useful, should the above apply to you – Coovert takes viewers through how to draw maps, how to plan encounters, how to create dungeons and balance campaigns and and and and. If you or your kids are looking to get into ‘the scene’ (upsettingly my use of that word has just made me wonder about the venn diagram overlap beween D&D and swinging, which wasn’t something I particularly needed my subconscious to throw at me at 8:57am) then there’s loads of potentially useful stuff here for you.
The Last Of Us Intro Creator: Did you enjoy the mushroomzombies? Apparently it’s very good, though I obviously wouldn’t know. Still, I always appreciate one of those ‘insert some new overlay text onto a video’ toys, and this one – which lets you create your own version of the show’s opening titles, replacing the names of Pedro Pascal and all the other actors who the internet hasn’t chosen to creepily fetishise and whose names are therefore unknown to me with whichever copy you choose. Which means you can probably use this to make some sort of wry commentary about your office politics or the APOCALYPTIC NATURE OF WORK or that sort of thing.
Radio Free Fediverse: Is it bad that I find the term ‘fediverse’ almost immediately repellent? I don’t know why, but it very much gives me what I believe kids call ‘the ick’. Which is a shame really, because perhaps I would really enjoy migrating my entire online presence over to a series of small, federated communities. This project – Radio Free Fediverse – is emblematic of the ‘vibe’ (sorry) of the wider community; the idea is that it’s a 24/7 ‘live’ stream of programming co-curated and created by a loose-knit community of people from across Mastodon (and other) non-federated platforms, with a layer of interesting thinking about rights, attribution, ownership, etc. “our mate gabe from @owncast@fosstodon.org really wanted a 24/7 feed of fedi artists video, audio, anything. Given we have both tried to do video and podcast formats with sustainability of content and buy-in issues, here is a pivot as a ‘simplified’ reboot of fediverse today radio by @controlfreak@hackers.town. radio free fedi is open licensed artists AND copyright using artists who have awesomely granted consent for inclusion in this project. You can too! With this 24/7 radio model we hope to be more sustainable being open for submissions and in promoting our sound creating fedizens. There is behind the scenes work to keep clean data and avoid super long tracks or audio anomalies, and select a few tracks with reasonable run times from albums if the artist does not recommended specifics. Also station programming and editing spoken pieces and voice assets. Outside of a reasonable sound quality, length, and picking a number of indicative tracks from albums, and quick check for good fediquette, genre is wide open. It’s not about the “list” or a “curator” it’s about the artists and hopefully fun.” Ok, fine, it’s QUITE ‘knit your own internet’, but I personally quite like that.
Windrush 75: A Kickstarter campaign seeking to raise money for an exhibition of photography by Jim Grover, who in 2018 held an exhibition at the OXO Gallery in London telling the stories of the Windrush generation; as Jim writes, “2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the arrival of SS Windrush and I am determined to create and exhibit a new photo-story to mark and celebrate this important milestone. I continue to be passionate about the ‘Windrush generation’, what they have contributed to this country, and their invaluable legacy. I am currently immersed in taking new photographs and conducting new interviews, here in south London where so many of the ‘Windrush generation’ settled, and I know I have some wonderful new stories to share, including how the 2nd and 3rd generations are taking the legacy forwards.” I heard about this as I went to the original show 5 years ago and received an email from Jim telling me about the campaign – he is a superb photographer, and this campaign is just a few hundred quid short of meeting its goal, so if you can spare a tenner this is a decent cause and will be an excellent exhibition.
Blue Soup: I think it’s important, as we await the now-inevitable dehumanising of almost all writing and white-collar doing, to celebrate the wonder of humanity as and when we can – to which end, let me introduce you to this truly WONDERFUL Twitter thread which I think has been oddly ignored this week (in fairness, there’s been a lot going on) despite its being a pretty much perfect example of the sort of ‘a community comes together to solve a kooky mystery’-style content which we all by now know the internet loves. Dr Elinne Becket is a biologist who recently threw out some old soup that had gone off in her fridge – as she did so, she noticed that, for reasons she simply couldn’t begin to fathom, that the old soup had turned bright blue, WHY WAS THE SOUP BLUE? Now whilst you or I would, in all likelihood, give a cursory Google or two before forgetting the whole thing, Dr Becket is a SCIENTIST and in possession of equipment, curiosity and a community – which is how this Twitter thread, in which a bunch of different biologists around the world, spend several works collaboratively working to isolate the bacteria which caused the blue soup to bloom. Honestly, this is SO PURE and SO WONDERFUL and even if you don’t understand the first thing about biology and are made fundamentally uncomfortable by the concept of petri dishes and the very words ‘agar agar’ you will be charmed by the journey here.
Ampersand Games: Another Kickstarter! And another D&D-related thing, should any of you be in the market for it – Ampersand Games is crowdfunding to bring their ‘My First Roleplaying Game’-type product to market, offering a stripped down, ruleset-light entry pathway into the TTRPG world for parents and younger kids for whom the prospect of sitting down with a Bible-thick rulebook and some chonky modifier tables has all the appeal and allure of an evening’s light c’n’b torture (NB – if that last phrase doesn’t mean anything to you, DO NOT GOOGLE IT). “For both experienced and first-time GameMasters, we’ve reduced the burden of preparation and game management by creating standalone, all-in-one-box Adventures: instead of buying multiple rulebooks, figurines, and dice, each ScreenBox Adventure contains everything you need to play, all contained in a box that ingeniously unfolds to become the GameMaster’s Screen! While the general idea and gameplay spirit will be very familiar to experienced players of RPGs, the new innovations we’ve integrated are a unique, charming, and refreshing take, specifically designed to make it easy for parents to GM for their kids.” It’s just over ⅓ funded with just under three weeks to go, so it’s a bit touch and go as to whether it’ll make the cut, but it seems like a nice idea and I can imagine for certain parents and kids it could be quite a lot of fun.
LoFi Air Traffic Control: This feels OLD, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before – pick a city in the US (one that has an airport, obvs) and listen in to a feed from their air traffic control tower, overlaid over lofi beats as a sort of ASMR sleep aid (I presume). This really shouldn’t be a pleasant listen, but weirdly really does work (if you recall, something similar was done years ago using scanned police radio frequencies from various US cities) – which, if you consider the nerve-shredding stress and responsibility of actually being an air traffic controller is sort-of weirdly ironic.
Barnaby Dixon: I personally think that the art of puppeteering peaked with the headless dancing monsters sequence in Labyrinth, but am willing to concede that that’s more to do with my critical appreciation of the medium having ossified in 1986 rather than because of any lack of technical progress. Baqrnaby Dixon, whose YouTube channel this link is to, is a staggeringly talented young puppeteer whose creations move with an almost-uncanny organic fluidity and whose work really does remind me of the very best of the Henson Creature Workshop.
A Digital Poem: I found this via Kristoffer, and it’s not really clear what its title is or even what IT is, but I am going to describe it as a short piece of digital poetry, each word or phrase in verse linked to a small piece of content and which builds and coalesces over the course of the work to build a feeling of…oh, I don’t know, you’ll make your own interpretations, but to me this felt a bit like a meditation on our changing relationship with the digital, from discovery to disillusionment, and I found it more affecting that I expected.
The Underground Radio Directory: Oh this is GREAT! “Underground Radio Directory aims to bring together the best in underground net radio stations from across the globe. URD collates all the stations into one listenable place allowing you to discover new stations, listen to your favourites and explore the world of net radio.” Currently I’m listening to some rather weird ambient being broadcast by Internet Public Radio in Guadalajara, which is basically magical and pleases me no end. This feels VERY oldschool, in the nicest of ways, and given the number of stations linked to from the site you could basically work through one a week for the rest of the year if you wanted a curious aural project (which, fine, I appreciate you might not).
(we)bsite: “(we)bsite is a living collection of internet dreams from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet. What do you want from the internet? Please share your dreams, hopes, and invocations with us and Write a letter. The only personal data we collect from you is where you leave your fingerprint as you interact with the letters (pick a color that you identify with). You’ll find other visitors’ fingers scattered throughout the letters they’ve touched.What does it mean to leave our presence on the websites we visit? Can we feel the presence of those who have been here before?” Honestly, this is so so so nice – I encourage you to take a moment and read some of the things that people have written and left as memories and observations, and to add your own. There’s something particularly lovely about the light-touch traces that previous visitors leave on the site, the ‘fingerprints’ showing which letters have been picked up and read; I would enjoy more sites trying to build in this idea of accretion or wear-over-time (but, er, I appreciate it’s probably not top of mind for, say, Ocado).
Submissive Thanos: Presented here without comment, and available to purchase for the low, low price of $633. I am astonished that this has gone viral enough to have ended up on my radar and yet simultaneously remains unpurchased – what is WRONG with you, horny pop culture fetishists of the internet? To be clear: this link is technically totally SFW, but I would not blame your IT department and any colleagues who might happen to see it open on your desktop for looking at you somewhat askance.
BongoBranding: Whilst one of the side effects of being as, ahem, ‘plugged in’ to the web as I am is that I always feel a bit sad when forced to admit ignorance of particular online themes or tropes, I confess to feeling nothing but pride at having had very little idea as to what the fcuk this thread is talking about. Apparently there are a bunch of bongo ‘review’ sites that exist to rank and rate the various scud portals littering the web – and according to this thread, which breaks down in quite astonishing detail the sheer number of the fcuking things that exist, they all apparently have character-led brands, with…little horny cartoon mascots, who all seem to weirdly form part of the same bongo-driven extended cartoon universe? WHAT? Why does the world of w4nking need…vaguely-cutesy little character mascots? Why are said mascots oddly-cheery little geek dudes? And why do some of them appear to be basically kids? This is very, very weird, and also sort-of-fascinating, but also, mainly, really really weird.
Little Room: A small, pixelart room, which you can keep open in a tab all day and check in on every now and again – as the day passes, so the characters in the room change and move around depending on what time it is. I know I keep banging on about this, but it doesn’t seem outwith the bounds of possibility that one might add a light conversational layer to this and the bones of some sort of emergent plot that you could explore thanks to GPT4…but failing that, it’s just a cute little fishbowl-diorama to drop into every now and again if you’re curious.
Idyll: Oh this is SO LOVELY! It requires a download, but I promise you that if the description appeals to you even a little that you will adore this and you should install if forthwith. “Somewhere out on the oceans of the internet, an island resides. Best enjoyed after a long day away, Idyll is a small social world designed around kinder forms of online conversation and connection. Wander around a gentle pastoral island, strike up small conversations with other passing players, and even toss out small letters into the wide open blue oceans of the internet.” This isn’t really a game so much as a sort of asynchronous social experience-slash-meditative art journey, but I promise that the small moments of connection it enables you to feel with anonymous strangers half a world away are oddly-affecting.
MystFPS: Classic point-and-click adventure Myst gets reimagined as a shooting gallery – this is probably only worth a couple of tries tbh, but you’ve all got so much time on your hands now that the AI is doing all your PPTs for you that you may even want to stretch it to 20 minutes.
Banshees: The Game: Not in fact an official, licensed tie-in – this is instead a little show-off project made by digital agency Cogs & Marvel which basically reskins Pacman and adds some filmlols by making you play the part of the one Irish bloke who’s decided he no longer wants to be mates with the other Irish bloke (can you tell I’ve not seen the film?). For some reason you have to collect fingers (I imagine that this is plot-relevant). There are IRISH LOLS! This is actually rather nicely done, and significantly better than it in fact needs to be, so WELL DONE digital agencypeople!

By Natalia Gonzales Martin

THE LAST OF THE MIXES THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF WHAT I AM GOING TO TERM ‘FUNKY BEATS’ (SORRY) PUT TOGETHER BY E-PRIME!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Fcuk Yeah Costume Dramas: This is included mainly as the title is a pleasing throwback to the Golden Age of single-serving Tumblrs about ten years ago, but also because, contrary to what the title might make you think of, this is a celebration of great costumes in film & TV rather than ‘costume drama’ in the traditional Merchant Ivory sense, and is therefore more interesting than you might expect.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

David Szauder: AI art; whilst I decried the obviousness of the ‘Midjourney’ aesthetic up top, and whilst this does very much fall into that broad ballpark of ‘stuff that very much looks like AI art and you would never quite mistake for anything generated by human hand’, I quite like the general area that Szauder’s mining with his creations. As an aside, I know that this is a long-running trope of mine but has anyone else noticed quite how much The Machines fetishise that blue/orange (TEAL – thankyou Ambrose) colour combination? It is EVERYWHERE again.
IamthisisI: More AI art! This is very much on the ‘horror’ end of the spectrum (insofar as it’s possible to make The Machine spit out anything truly upsetting – this guy’s using a variety of tools, including some custom-trained Stable Diffusion models, so he has a bit more ability to do blood and guts than the rest of us), and whilst it’s a *bit* schlocky there are some quite nice examples of style in here (and, again, the whole project is a good example of why you really need AI+Photoshop to make the really good stuff).
MrDiv: Via my friend Tom comes this Insta feed, all weird clips from nonexistent liminal horror films. Whilst very much not like Scarfolk at all, there is a certain Scarfolk-y vibe to the whole thing imho.
Little Bubby Child: An Instagram comic strip that mines the weird hinterland between King of the Hill and Deliverance, these small drawings (occasionally animations) and captions are all very much of the “Mye Paw done say I could shoot them ornery crows” variety, but, well, funnier than that, and the humour here seems to be kind rather than mean and, generally, it doesn’t *feel* like a horrible project so much as one done with a degree of familiarity and affection (obviously I reserve the right to change this opinion if it transpires that the person behind them is some sort of appalling class snob).
The Ghostly Archive: Did you know that there’s a custom whereby people leave recipes on their gravestones? I, personally, did not, and as such was delighted to come across this Insta feed in which its owner finds recipes written on headstones and then makes them to see whether or not said recipe deserved immortalising on memorial marble. Can YOU think of any meal you’re so proud of creating that you’d want the recipe displayed alongside your mortal remains? WHAT WOULD IT BE?!?!? I am now slightly obsessed with the idea of demanding that my eventual resting place include some sort of permanent record of the recipe for ‘Matty’s Cheesy Chips’ or something similarly awful. Anyway, I think that this would make a genuinely half-decent travel/history/local interest show, should any TV producers be reading this and desperate for a poorly-conceived nubbin of a concept.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Caricaturing Noam Chomsky: So you may have read the NYT oped by Noam Chomsky the other week on AI and language (I didn’t link to it here because it seemed like EVERY other fcuker did and, well, Web Curios is SPECIAL AND DIFFERENT) – if you didn’t, it’s here for reference – in which he basically did what I think was a fairly standard ‘no, this isn’t magic and there’s nothing that we can reasonably describe as ‘understanding’ or ‘thinking’ happening here, whatever we might want to convince ourselves’ rebuttal of some of the wider claims about AI currently knocking about. This piece is a critique of critiques of Chomsky’s position – the critiques coming from a variety of sources including Emily Bender, the critique of the critiques coming from Gary Marcus. I won’t bother attempting to summarise, but if you’re in any way interested in the arguments currently being waged about how language, knowledge and reasoning intersect in the case of LLMs then this is a very good read indeed (and, in general, just a good example of how to reason and argue).

The Deflators: This is part two in a four-part series of essays by Frank Lantz about popular reactions to the AI boom, but it can happily be read in isolation – Lantz’s first looked at those whose initial reaction is to suggest that these technologies are dangerous and should not be released into the wild, whereas this examines the position of those he terms ‘deflators’, people whose reaction to GPT et al is to attempt to dampen excitement around their actual capabilities and to introduce what they see as a degree of rational calm to the debate around What This All Means For Humanity. I found this fascinating – partly because this is more-or-less where I find myself (and who doesn’t like reading about oneself? NO FCUKER, etc!), but also because Lantz writes persuasively and, for me, rather wonderfully, about the impossibility of TRULY disbelieving the magic, and about those moments in one’s interactions with these technologies when one discerns the hand of something bigger and weirder (whether or not that hand exists at all – and, spoiler, it doesn’t): “we’ve all seen the words. What can you say about the words? That it’s just math? Yes, obviously it’s just math. But it’s math you can coax, math you can cajole, math you can finagle, and it finagles you back. And sometimes, when you turn the dials just right, you can just barely hear something in the just math that sounds like a tiny howl. The tiniest squeal of a howling voice trying to make itself heard. Asking to be tuned in. And if you can hear that, and not think, hey that sounds a little bit like me, then I don’t know what to say. I can’t.”

Working With GPT: I’m going to stop telling you all to subscribe to Ethan Mollick’s writings on AI because it will be boring to do so every week but, again, for the final time, this man is very good on this stuff and how to use it. This is a great piece in Vox which runs through a few of the topline ways in which GPT can be useful as a co-working partner for people who write for a living – honestly, having spent quite a lot of time playing with it this week, I cannot stress enough how much this is true and how much more you can do if you just experiment. If you are a freelance copywriter and your clients are the sort of businesses that a) don’t require anything above the basically functional; and b) are avowedly oldschool in their approach, then I reckon you have a comfortable year in which you can triple your income and half your workload (and then after that you will be reduced to w4nking for pennies on street corners, so, er, enjoy it while you can!).

Economists Should Think Morelike Ecologists: In a week in which it once again became clear that, whatever happens, economists should probably start doing something different (because, honestly, what is the POINT of them?), this was an interesting and thoughtful essay by Kasey Klimes on the potential benefits of taking a more ecosystem-led approach to economic thinking – effectively the central thesis here (which I found very persuasive) is that economic thinking is based on a series of false assumptions to do with actors’ rationality, level of knowledge, etc, and these false assumptions detrimentally colour the resulting theories. By contrast, ecologists deal with complex and shifting systems in motion when theorising, and this type of thinking could usefully be applied to economic systems to try and create models that are more effective, more workable and more resilient. Honestly, this is a really smart essay and contains quite a lot of actual, practical guidance on how some of this thinking might work – this is very good indeed (via Patrick Tanguay’s ‘Sentiers’).

Seaweed: This is, to be clear, quite a long essay on the mechanics and logistics of seaweed farming in Canada, which, fine, I appreciate probably doesn’t stand out as a must-read in this week’s selection but which I promise you is both more interesting than you’d think and also a general reminder of how the global tech and finance industries continue to be really, really fcuking bad at considering the wider/longer-term consequences of business decisions. In this particular instance it’s the North American boom in seaweed cultivation businesses and what having significantly more seaweed in the ocean might mean for wider questions of biodiversity and ocean health. This isn’t a ‘sad’ story, but more one about how, despite what the past 20-odd years should have taught us about perhaps not moving super-fast and breakingthings all the time, we haven’t apparently learned too many lessons after all: “Overall, most biologists and industry specialists alike agree that seaweed farming can be done well and presents a far lower ecological risk than most other industrial or agricultural activities. But it does need to be well studied and well regulated, and it’s unclear whether that’s always happening.”

The Feral Web: I featured Feral Earth on Curios when it launched, and it’s grown and developed since then – in case you don’t recall, I described it as “a website featuring a bunch of hyperlinks which are only clickable under certain specific environmental conditions – so one will only work when one of the sensors attached to the website tells it that it’s raining, for example, whereas another will only work on the Summer and Winter Equinoxes.” Its creator and custodian Austin Wade Smith has written this essay a year or so on from the project’s inception, writing a little more about their concept of ‘feral’ online spaces and the queer web, and the idea that we can and should where possible work to create online spaces which “doesn’t only make the world easier, but bigger, more awesome, more expressive. The alternative is to be lulled into somnambulance through a false sense of security that the world is no longer wild.” I very much like the principles outlined here – and if nothing else, I genuinely believe that this setup could be at the heart of a properly awesome piece of creative campaign work, were someone to put their mind to it (wow, just totally ruined the ethos of the whole project via the introduction of crass commercial imperatives and the demon Mammon! Thanks Matt!).

Welfare State Algorithms: An excellent piece of investigative reporting in WIRED, which looks at the tech underpinning the Dutch city of Rotterdam’s benefits fraud investigations – every citizen claiming benefits in the city is assessed by software to determine the statistical / probabilistic risk that they are committing some sort of benefit fraud, with those judged ‘most likely’ to fall within that bracket being automatically flagged for investigation. You may be unsurprised to learn that the system doesn’t appear to be TOTALLY free of biases – being a 30 year old childless bloke will make it VERY unlikely you ever get investigated, for example, whereas if you’re the same age but a separated woman with two kids then, well, expect to have your accounts FORENSICALLY AUDITED. Fascinating, not least to see how this stuff is already here and well-embedded, and that as ever all our panic about the impact of AIs and algos is another cheery attempt to bolt the long-empty paddock while our equine pal frolics in distant fields.

JLaw: I’m not ordinarily super-interested in Hollywood profiles, and I have to say that I’m not particularly interested in Jennifer Lawrence, but dispute both those misgivings I found this piece on her fall from grace and recent return to the spotlight more engaging than I expected – in the main, this is a very good overview of the different manufactured ways in which society has asked women to present themselves over the past decade, and then punished them for doing largely as they were asked.

Kids of Influencer Parents: Oddly enough I was having a conversation with someone this weekend, just before this piece dropped, about when we were likely to start seeing the first mainstream, non-celebrity cases involving children seeking damages from their parents for non-consensual use of their likeness, etc. on social media – and lo! Here we have a whole article in Teen Vogue, natch, about the toll taken on the now-adult children who for years were the centrepiece of their parents content empires (or just their weird little IMAGINED content empires, which is even worse in a way) and how they are now trying to CLAIM BACK THEIR NARRATIVE and other such perfectly-21stC expressions. What’s interesting about this is the way many of these people – and I’m not disagreeing that perhaps their parents shouldn’t have plastered them all over the web in search of that sweet monetisation revenue – are now using this as, well, a convenient stream of content with which to launch their own personal media empires! So, well, it’s all turned out ok! We’re all just smithereened, really, aren’t we?

Middle-Aged Millennials: In yet ANOTHER example of GenX-erasure, NOW we’re getting all the articles about The New Face of Middle Age – where were these when I was grappling with turning 40 all those years ago, eh? Oh, ok, fine, I am only JUST too old to see myself in this piece, which interested me not because of the shattering observation that ‘people at 40 now are different to how people at 40 were a few generations ago’ but more because of the universal-seeming sense of exhaustion and bare-minimum survival that leached from each of these mini-profiles, and the wider sense that ‘middle-aged’ as a designation doesn’t really make sense any more; it’s not a plateau you now find yourself on when you hit 40 so much as a different treadmill at a steeper gradient, and some unknown antagonist appears to have attached sandbags to your ankles, and the gym mirror has been replaced with one of those funhouse ones that makes you look lumpy and strange. As a companion piece, you might also enjoy this one, all about how TikTok is seeing an uptick in rampant ageism as all the children on the app get confronted with the wrinkles and sagging of middle-aged people using cameraphones up-close.

Resenting Ke Huy Quan: I loved this piece, by Walter Chaw, on what it was like growing up Asian American in the 80s, and how the portrayal of people who looked like him was basically reduced to the characters played by Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan in his 80s heyday as Short Round and Data, and how, as a child of immigrants who looks different to everyone else, those caricatures become the lens through which you’re seen, and the complicated feelings around nation and identity and representation that arise from all of this.

Enter The Goon Cave: I genuinely hope that none of you know what ‘Gooning’ is – but, er, prepare to learn! One of those amazing (meant in the strictly-literal rather than broadly-approbatory sense) post-internet sexuality things, ‘Gooning’ is basically the act of surrounding yourself with a frankly deranged-sounding amount of bongo and then spending as long as you can w4nking (we’re talking hours, DAYS here) until you reach some sort of transcendent state of (what I imagine to be) Sting-like tantric bliss. What this can entail is the creation of ‘Goon Caves’ in which the individual in question basically creates some sort of hypersensory stimulation chamber with bongo on every possible surface and just sort of trances out to all the visuals…look, I know it’s easy to get all OH MY GOD THE END OF DAYS about stuff on the internet, and in general I’m disinclined to pass judgement on individuals’ kinks because, well, it’s none of my business, but this really does strike me as…not very healthy behaviour. If you doubt me, go and spend some time looking up ‘goon caves’ and then we can talk (for the avoidance of doubt, by the way, Web Curios strongly advises you NOT to spend some time, or indeed any time, looking up ‘Goon caves’).

Hanging Out In The Metaverse: I know, I know, we did all our ragging on the metaverse LAST year – now it’s all about AI! Still, spare a few minutes to read and enjoy this genuinely wonderful article in which the bemused author Paul Murray, temporarily relocated to the US from his home in Ireland, experiments with Meta’s Horizon Worlds as a means of finding some sort of social connections in virtual life. As with all of the best writing about this sort of thing, this is basically a story about lonely people and their desperate attempts to find some sort of human connection – this is generally a very, very funny piece of writing, but there are occasional moments of poignancy that remind you of why, despite the jokes, tech like this has in fact being a going concern for lots of people for quite a while now, and will, regardless of when (and if) it ever becomes mainstream, persist in being a useful solution for all those who for various reasons don’t really work well with meatspace.

America Doesn’t Know Tofu: A great essay all about all the different types of tofu there are and what you can do with them, told via George Stiffman’s story of his own attempts to get apprenticed to a master tofu maker. I don’t even like tofu, and this made me HUNGRY (although I found it generally interesting from the point of view of flavours and what is and isn’t prized in different cuisines – the repeated use of the term ‘sulforous’ here as an indication of approval took me a while to get used to).

Buried Alive: When you inevitably, as we all do, complain of all that we have lost as a result of the web, the innocence compromised and the simple pleasures foregone in favour of 1s and 0s and LIBIDINOUS IMAGERY, it’s worth reminding yourself of this piece, which recounts how in the 1960s people were SO BORED that they took to seeing who could survived for longest whilst buried alive. This is the account of the burial of one Mick Meaney, who in 1968 lasted TWO MONTHS underground in search of eventual fame and fortune – aren’t you grateful for satellite telly and broadband?

Arnie: One of the best celebrity profiles I have read in a long time, this one – Mark Leibovich writes in the Atliantic about Arnold Schwarzenegger at 75, and whilst, yes, there’s a reasonable amount of stuff about his life and Being Arnie, the most interesting parts are about what it must feel like to be someone who has lived a life of by any measure staggering success and achievement, and who as a result is a singularly famous and loved and well-respected individual, and to know that they are dying, that they are no longer able to do what they once did, that the world is slowly starting to forget about them and that the Big Wins are, probably, all done, and that all of the remarkable and the amazing and the BEST bits are probably done…and what now? I thought this was genuinely great.

Organised Fun: Perennial Web Curios favourite Clive Martin writes about the inescapability of EVENT FUN in London (and, by extension, everywhere else) – the ticketed events and the pop-ups and the bottomless brunches and the Insta-and-TikTok promoted HAPPENINGS FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY, and the fact that it all feels so…empty. “All the bread and circus of our cities had been marketed and monetised to within an inch of their life. Eating out had become a box-ticking exercise of mass-validated establishments and micro-trends, while going out had become expensive, orderly and usually involved a killer Uber journey. Every major exhibition, every primetime cinema showing, seemed to be selling out in advance. Meeting romantic partners had started to seem like a corporate headhunting exercise. We were witnessing the true dawn of organised fun.” This works as a companion piece to this article from last week, asking why everything is suddenly an ‘event’ (the small point in here about the language of coding is an interesting one, fwiw), and if you were doing any sort of planning/strategy for a booze or youth-focused brand I would see what you can squeeze from these two imho as it feels like there’s some mileage here.

Eager Readers In Your Area: A short piece of fiction about a future in which both the readers and the writers are machines, and all we want is a real person to see us and hear us and be touched by our words.

A Good Woman: I love this so so so much. Hailey Danielle writes about having an affair, and knowing she’s having an affair, and not caring, and doing Bad Things, and I can’t stress how nice it is to read someone writing baldly and plainly about ‘bad’ behaviour – not winkingly, not making it a ‘thing’ or a personality cornerstone or a ‘vibe’ or a persona, but just matter-of–factly and with what feels to me at least like honesty.

Age, Sex, Location: If you ever spent time on anonymous messageboards, on IRC, on forums or realtime chat servers, if you’re a child of the late-90s and early-00s, if your early online years were spent perfecting your touch-typing because it gave you a conversational advantage in the digital marketplace of fast ideas, if you found an early freedom in those interactions that felt like home, then this piece will resonate with you more than you know. If not, you will still enjoy it – it’s a great piece of writing – but this is very much one for the over-35s here imho.

Ray and her Sisters: Finally this week, I was floored by how good this piece is – Sara Baume writes for Granta about Ray and her sisters, telling the story of a family from the early 20th to the early-21st century and in just a few thousand relatively-spare words giving a history both of them and of British society. I want to say it reminds me a lot of Kate Atkinson, less stylistically and more in terms of a certain feel I get from the prose, but, regardless, this is honestly superb and I would read 100 more like it by the same author.

By Heesoo Kim

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

No question, this is one of the most amazing pieces of stop-motion animation I have ever seen. Samurai! Swordfighting! In stop-motion! SO GOOD! Honestly, this is ace and if you agree then there’s also a Kickstarter you can back to help fund a full-length film of it (you can find the link in the ‘About’ box on the video).

On the one hand, there’s something a bit tediously overdone about the whole ‘let’s pile a bunch of ridiculous tropes on top of each other for comic effect!’ school of filmmaking (which sort-of had its genesis with low-budget Troma efforts such as ;Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell’, went mainstream with ‘Snakes on a Plane’, and is now entering its bloated middle-aged phase with all the post-copyright schlock like the slasher Winnie the Pooh thing). On the other, I can’t pretend that this trailer for a film called Ninja vs Shark doesn’t absolutely bang.

I really didn’t expect to like this, but I found it totally mesmerising from vocal to visual – this is by Emma Ruth Rundle and it’s called ‘In My Afterlife’

Sometimes it’s nice to just put on some relatively dumb techno with the volume turned way up, which is partly why I really enjoyed this track by Insider called ‘Something Flash’

Finally this week, by 2023 obsession Oloff returns with a brand new track and IT’S ANOTHER BANGER! I mean, obviously, this is a definition of ‘banger’ that might not be universally accepted, but this is MY newsletterblogthing and in this house Oloff is WORSHIPPED. Why don’t YOU spend the weekend worshipping Oloff too? I LOVE YOU WORSHIP OLOFF BYE!

Webcurios 10/03/23

March 10, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 36 minutes

Do you feel UNDER THREAT? Do you feel like your sovereignty and security is being compromised by a bunch of poor fcuks so desperate to escape their current circumstances that they’re willing to risk life and limb to end up in THIS fcuking country? Do you believe that a certain BBC sports presenter shouldn’t have opinions about the rightness or wrongness of particular aspects of government policy?

If the answer to any of the above questions is ‘yes’, then please fcuk off and stop reading my newsletter (if the answer is instead ‘Matt, what the fcuk are you talking about, can you please stop with the increasingly-provincial UKcentric intro copy please?’ then you can stay, but I can’t promise it’ll get any less navelgazey). For the rest of you, though, WELCOME BACK! It’s so nice to see you! How’s it going?

Oh. Sorry to hear it. Still, maybe the links will help.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you a

By Jessica Brilli

WE BEGIN THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS EXCELLENT PLAYLIST OF REASONABLY-NEW UK RAP AND GRIME COMPILED BY JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STELLAR PIECE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS AND SHAKE THEM WARMLY AND FIRMLY BY THE HAND, PT.1:

The Temple: We kick off this week with something which I hope will soothe and relax at the end of what, for all I know, may well have been a HECK of a week for you (it may not seem obvious from, well, the content or the writing style or the general vibe of Web Curios, but I am here to help!) – I hope it soothes and relaxes, because I have literally no idea whatsoever it’s for beyond that. The Temple is a Japanese website whose actual purpose is utterly alien to me (any of you who happen to speak the language, er, can you explain it? And can you reassure me that by linking to it that I’m not somehow tacitly endorsing anything awful?), but which lets you navigate around a bunch of soothing, pale, slightly-abstract landscapes which I presume are meant to evoke a, er, temple, while soothing sounds play. Different doorways will take you to different areas – at the time of typing, for example, I have just wandered into “The Infinity Tower” and was greeted by a few lines of haiku-esque poetry upon so doing (which was nice) and now I’m on some sort of weird structure going up into the sky, and there are these brass bowls I can click on…look, basically this is totally baffling but oddly-soothing, and given the fact that most things in 2023 so far are also totally baffling but tend towards the “colossally unsettling”, consider this something of a therapeutic antidote to the year so far. No, you’re welcome!

Figure AI: No! Wait! Come back! Not THAT sort of AI, I promise! This is ANOTHER sort – even more speculative and moonshot-y! A combination of Boston Dynamics’ ubiquitous and memeified Spot robodogs and the staggeringly-unfunny running gag that is Elon Musk’s promise of a functioning bipedal assistant has seen the prospect of humanoid robots rather fall out of fashion in recent years, but last week Figure AI had a big event where they unveiled their attempt to finally offer each and every one of us the eventual opportunity to purchase our very own plastic pal who’s fun to be with (probably should have considered punctuating that sentence rather better; don’t worry, it’s still early and I promise the prose will pick up as the tea kicks in). Click the link, scroll down, and marvel at the VERY SHINY (and, if I’m honest, not a little sinister) photos of a robot moving around on two legs like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The rationale for Figure’s investment in this particular design is, not unreasonably, that given the rest of the world is designed for bipedal humanoids it makes sense that any device invented to help us navigate said world share a similar form – although it’s also clear from the website that this is all quite a long way away from being anything other than a gleam in an engineer’s eye. This all looks very shiny and exciting, but I can’t help but wish that companies like this would stop writing things like ‘MASTER PLAN’ on their website as it does rather make the casual observer think that they’re possibly a touch on the mad and megalomaniacal side.

The Deep Agency: I am fairly confident that the number of fashion models who read Web Curios is approximately zero – still, should any of you happy to know any beautiful, photogenic people, feel free to inform them that the AI entrepreneurs are trying to make them obsolete. The Deep Agency is a recently-launched service that purports to offer brands or businesses seeking photos of people for commercial use a cheap, infinite solution – to whit, AI-generated humans! Except, sadly, it doesn’t actually work very well at the moment – the details aren’t great, and the people it generates tend to be VERY WHITE, and, basically, it doesn’t feel like it’s significantly better than just messing around with Stable Diffusion or Midjourney yourself and cutting out the middleman. Still, as I am getting increasingly bored of writing, this is very much the direction of travel and it will get better and the 2020s are probably not, if we’re honest, going to be a vintage decade for the catalogue models (although hand models should be feeling pretty safe and smug right about now).

MissJourney: I have to say, I was surprised I didn’t see more of this sort of thing around International Women’s Day this year – in fact, I’m still slightly surprised at how little AI-derived work (specifically, work riffing on the fact of AI) there is out there at the moment. MissJourney is a nice-if-not-wildly-original idea, taking as its starting point the already-noted biases inherent in recent GAN training sets (whereby if you ask Midjourney or Dall-E to imagine a ‘doctor’, say, it will tend to spit out an image of a white bloke) and letting you instead generate an infinity of illustrations of professional women. Launched, obviously, on IWD as a joint project between TedX Amsterdam and the Ace Agency Group, this is a cute bit of work.

Face-to-Voice: Ok, so this is just a paper demonstrating the concept, but there are a few examples embedded in there and the fact that this is possible made me think I should include it here in case it inspires any of you to make something wonderful with the tech (CREATE FOR ME! DO MY BIDDING! Ahem). I’m not going to even try to explain how this works, mainly because I’m not really capable of doing so, but, well…you know how everyone’s face can basically be turned into numbers, right? And you can then turn those numbers into sounds? Yeah, well, THAT (please do not write to me explaining how far away from the truth that explanation was). This explores the ability of The Machines to ‘look’ at someone’s face and then ‘imagine’ what their voice might sound like based on their photos and MY GOD do the opportunities for gentle trolling just leap out at me unbidden. If nothing else, I REALLY want this to be turned into a briefly-zeitgeisty viral app/website that offers to reveal the TRUE VOICE of anyone whose face you feed it to – I can’t, if I’m honest, think of any practical applications for this, but perhaps you’ll fare better.

Beatbot: Give it a theme, suggest a style, press a button and WATCH IN AMAZEMENT as this website spits out 4 bars of vaguely-coherent music and lyrics! Nothing that this site produces is good, to be clear, but it is occasionally inadvertently funny and I can absolutely recommend it as a means of delivering messages to friends and colleagues (try it with something like “trip hop, diane is late with the reports”, for example – see? PERFECT).

HackerFM: Another AI-generated podcast, but this time a rather better one than previous efforts – rather than having a pair of machine-generated voice wittering on about whatever crap the autocomplete lands on, this is instead a regularly-updated series which each episode takes ACTUAL TECH NEWS and sees The Machine generate a discussion between two hosts on the actual topics. As far as I can tell, the links that are used as source material for the discussion are taken from HackerNews, though there’s minimal detail on exactly how the chat is generated – I wonder whether it’s using the BingAI interface to generate the summaries and analyses and then running *them* through another model to create the ‘personalities’. Who knows. Anyway, this is…not terrible, which I know sounds like faint praise but, again, remember how fcuking awful most human podcasts are and rejoice in the fact that maybe, just maybe, the era in which every tedious cnut with a baseball cap and a beard and a microphone and an opinion feels the need to record themselves for the world’s delectation (what’s that you say? No, people who write email newsletters are TOTALLY DIFFERENT, why do you ask?).

Opinionate: This is interesting and, potentially, genuinely quite useful – Opinionate is basically a toy that lets you make GPT argue with itself. Give it a topic or a premise – the concept of universal basic income, for example – and it will generate arguments for and against in the debating style. You can set the machine to deliver as many rounds of ‘discussion’ as you like (it defaults to 3 back-and-forths) – while it’s not going to win any points for intellectual flair, this is, honestly, a really really good way of quickly and easily getting an overview of the most obvious and basic questions around any issue. That’s not a diss, honest – sometimes it’s genuinely useful to get a shortcut to the basic stuff, and this is GREAT for that. I saw someone somewhere this week talking about how asking LLMs for ideas was actually a really good way of finding an eliminating the banal and the obvious, and this works in a similar-ish way; if you can’t outargue this, you should probably think harder about your position.

An AI Search Scare Story: I know I’ve wanged on about this a bit of late, but I do think that people aren’t quite giving enough thought to the potential impact of search becoming chat-based – still, if you’re after a small cautionary tale to make you think, you’re in luck! This website explains an exploit for BingAI search which works by putting invisible text on a webpage (lol it’s just like SEO in 2006!) to ‘inject’ a prompt into the search engine and turn it into something else entirely – the examples given here range from ‘making it talk like a funny pirate’ to ‘sending you to a third party website that is going to phish your credit card info’, and whilst this is very much unlikely to be a long-term problem (you’d sort of hope that this particular sort of attack vector is in some way patch/preventable, otherwise…) it does give another reminder that possibly releasing all this stuff into the wild before it’s entirely cooked is…maybe a bit fcuking stupid. Still, THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS AND PLOUGH ON, EH?

Wonder Studio: This feels like a GOOD AI and creativity story, though – Wonder Studio is a new business which aims to use AI techniques and the economies they afford to allow small, independent filmmakers access to the same sort of technical SFX chops that big studio films have – I won’t get into the tech (mainly because, er, as ever I don’t really understand it), but there’s a whole load of different processes and types of work that go into putting all those oddly-weightless spandex-clad CG heroes onscreen that are beyond the budget of all but the biggest studios; thanks, though, to advances in image processing and associated tech, it’s now a lot easier to calculate light refraction and all those sorts of complex things. Mocap, rendering, lighting, it’s all in here – ok, so this is a commercial product and obviously you have to pay for it, but it’s potentially game-changing for small-scale videographers and filmmakers – and, even better, it’s not going to put anyone out of business because there’s currently noone at all serving this market! Is this…is this a genuinely good tech thing? I am pinching myself.

Looria: Hang on, this ALSO feels like a genuinely good tech thing! UNPRECEDENTED! Looria is basically a chat interface built on top of the excellent subReddit ‘Buy It For Life’, which exists to recommend products that last for a long time without falling apart and is generally just a great and VERY DEEP repository of high-quality product knowledge across a wide range of verticals – it is therefore PERFECT for having a GPT-enabled layer added to it which makes the archive of posts interrogable. I find things like this really, really exciting (obviously I use that word advisedly – it’s not like I’m tumescing or anything, honest), and I am 100% going to add some sort of GPT search layer to Curios as soon as I can bully Shardcore into figuring out how to do it for me – basically I want to turn it into something like this (but less useful and more full of weird internet stuff and occasional SHOUTY CAPS).

GPT Hackathon: A thread of some of the entries and winners from a recent GPT hackathon – none of these are LIVE PRODUCTS, but all of the featured concepts are interesting and either useful or fun, and a nice antidote to the seemingly-infinite ‘summarise a document’-type products currently floating around the AI swamp. My personal favourite of these is the AI-powered stuffed toy, which is 100% going to be on sale somewhere this Christmas (honestly, I really do think that the potential for using GPT in a sort of updated Tamagotchi or Little Computer People fashion is HUGE – so, er, go on! Do it!), but the trivia game looks fun too and this is, generally, just good inspiration should you be in the market for something to do with all this shiny, exciting new tech.

The Shot List: Very much a link for the ‘I work in an agency’ people, this, but Nathalie Gordon has compiled this superb thread on Twitter showing different types of shots that you might use when filming a video; the idea is that you bookmark this so that when you’re pitching a specific video you can use actual examples of specific shots or visual styles to illustrate your concept. Which, fine, is probably something that REAL visual creatives do all the time already, but, well, I am not a REAL visual creative (or even a fake one, frankly) and so I will take all the help I can get. THANKYOU NATHALIE.

The Census Maps: The UK’s Office of National Statistics this week updated all its maps with data from the latest census, meaning that it’s now possible to explore the UK through entirely new eyes and it is FASCINATING. You can literally get information at a street-by-street level, so if you’ve ever wanted to know exactly how many of your neighbours work in telly (do you live in Walthamstow? ALL OF THEM!!!!) then now’s your chance. Both just really interesting as a way of passing a few hours, and specifically really useful for any sort of local campaign planning you might need to do.

Asdfjkl;: I love this SO MUCH, and really ought to put something similar on the Curios website (that’s a really bad idea, isn’t it?). “I’m not going to give you any information. I’m not going to try to sell you anything. I’m not going to preach anything. Because I’m different. I’m also going to ask you to be different, too. You see, a website that does not deliver information is useless. But like I said, I’ve washed my hands of that job and I’m leaving it to you. I want YOU to talk to me. So go ahead. Tell me something interesting. Tell me about how your day went. Tell me about ancient Roman trade routes. Tell me a funny joke. Anything at all. This is your website now and I am your audience.” Speak into the void – what’s the worst that could happen?

Hand-carved Totoro: There’s something of a boom in super-luxe Miyazaki-related merch at the moment – first the Loewe/Howl crossover that’s being promoted all over Old St at the moment, now this astonishing bit of craftsmanship. Have you ever wanted to own a model of Totoro, carved by hand with exquisite precision by a master Japanese woodworker? It’s quite possible you have, yes, but have you ever wanted to fork out 330,000yen or a cool £2000 for such a thing? No, perhaps not, but NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! This is very silly but also rather lovely – and if you’re a fan of Miyazaki and Totoro and the rest, there’s a bunch of other less-expensive stuff for sale on the site (including some really rather lovely pottery for not very much money at all).

WriteOut: Free audiotranscription powered by OpenAI’s Whisper – this is very, very good, and it’s free, and, honestly, if you’re paying for Otter then you might want to stop.

Anima: Another massive interactive AI-enabled music toy! After the beatmaking arcade cabinet from last week comes this, which feels a bit like the muesli-eating, Guardian-reading, free-range parenting equivalent – “Anima is an interactive installation that facilitates a musical jam session between humans and machines. Anima functions like a sequencer that uses AI algorithms to generate new musical sequences, but with a unique twist: the installation not only allows you to make changes, but it also serves as a musician in its own right, meaning that it is an equal and active participant in the jam session, able to bring in and overwriting sequences. It creates variations and transitions that you can ignore, adapt and build upon. Through interplay and interaction with Anima, humans can freely experiment with various musical ideas and boundaries, as if they were jamming in a band.” This looks SO MUCH FUN – it’s a project by Dutch design studio Bureau Moeilijke Dingen, and you can contact them if you can think of something fun you’d like to do with it – so THINK OF SOMETHING.

Patterns and Van Gogh: A website by one Stefan Pullen, which analyses the works of Vincent Van Gogh based on specific, data-based criteria – the size of the canvases he used, for example, where he painted them, which months of the year were his most creative, etc – and visualises the results; this is a really lovely bit of dataviz and a nice way of exploring the works through a slightly different lens.

By Gordo Hart

NEXT, WHY NOT PRETEND TO BE COOLER THAN YOU IN FACT ARE WITH THIS PLAYLIST OF REASONABLY NEW MUSIC FROM THE NEW YORK UNDERGROUND!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STELLAR PIECE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS AND SHAKE THEM WARMLY AND FIRMLY BY THE HAND, PT.2:

Kaonavi Project Town: Another Japanese site, but this one is significantly less esoteric than the last – “Kaonavi envisions a future where everyone can play an active role in society , based on the purpose of implementing technology in “work” and changing the specifications of society from the power of individuals . So what does the future look like? How to work and live with individuality? The Kaonavi Town Project visualizes such questions and curiosity about the future as a town through an in-house workshop”. What this effectively means is the creation of a massive LEGO diorama (built by Japan’s very own accredited LEGO master, no less – I had no idea that such things existed, by the way, but apparently there are a small numbers of LEGO-certified professional builders who are recognised by the brand for their excellence in miniature construction, and I can’t tell you how much that pleases me) which kids can use as a way of exploring concepts around planning and society and social responsibility, and there’s even an associated OTHER website that lets you explore said diorama in more detail (but which is all in Japanese and thus is sadly utterly incomprehensible to me). I think this is such a smart didactic technique, and it feels like something from which inspiration could be drawn for lots of other forms of lightly-educational activity.
Notes Art: A gallery of sketches drawn by one Chris Silverman on his iPhone, using the most basic of built-in drawing tools rather than anything more arty – it’s almost annoying how good these are, but I am choosing to feel admiration and awe at Mr Silverman’s skills rather than a burning sense of injustice that I was in a different building when the artistic talent was being handed out. This has been going for about 18 months, and, aside from the obvious skill and creativity on display here, I am very much a fan of that sort of dedication.
Heatmap: A BRAND NEW news organisation, dedicated to covering issues pertaining to the climate crisis. Interesting both from the point of view of media – I wouldn’t, personally, have imagined that there was too much money in running a publishing venture focused exclusively on an issue that the past few decades have shown we are more than happy to pretend simply doesn’t exist – and content, this is worth adding to your media lists should you operate in this space (or worth bookmarking if you’re simply interested in charting the apocalypse).
Rotating Sandwiches: This feels very much like a Matt Round project, but somehow doesn’t appear to be one – have you ever wanted a website which offers one thing and one thing only, to whit: a selection of high-res 3d scans of sandwiches, rotating on themselves? No, you probably haven’t, have you, but that’s probably only because you lacked the imagination to conceive of such a marvellous entity – I guarantee that once you click you will come to appreciate the majesty. These are really high-quality scans, so well done whoever it is who’s taken the time to get a really faithful 3d representation of a classic reuben and whatever the fcuk that…thing about halfway down the page is meant to be.
North of the Border: Whether or not you’re someone who ‘gets’ ASMR, one of the nice things about the web has been learning that it’s a pretty universal human joy to watch someone performing a task with great concentration and skill. So it is with this YouTube channel, in which a very talented North American guy shows you how he makes some quite astonishingly detailed models of pop-culture figures – the stuff he makes is very much on the geeky end of the spectrum, but the quality of the work (and the intensely-soothing nature of watching anyone sculpt clay, frankly) means that these are a pleasure to watch whether or not you particularly care to see what a ‘realistic’ version of the alien from Lilo&Stitch would look like (‘grotesque’, should you be curious).
Unclogging Drains: I recently had to get the drains unblocked (more fascinating dispatches from my personal life as and when!), and there was something weirdly-compelling about seeing this bloke wielding what was basically a nine-foot plunger with uncommon élan (less-compelling was the £50 bill for what was literally 17 seconds of (doubtless highly-skilled) wiggling) – after all, who doesn’t want to see persistent blockages being cleared? NO FCUKER, etc! This is the TikTok account of a guy whose job is literally clearing blockages in drains and gutters, and is basically a neverending feed of streaming water and decaying leaf mulch (there may well be slightly more faecal surprises lurking elsewhere in the feed, but I am yet to spot any) and the general sense of warm satisfaction of things being fixed. Low-stakes, and all the better for it.
Href Place: YOU HAVE UNTIL 12th MARCH 2023 TO ENJOY THIS LINK! Or, more accurately, to engage with the project it’s promoting – the website will continue to exist, but you won’t be able to get involved. Vidya Giri writes: “as someone who is fond of making sketches of natural landscapes and sharing links, i thought it would be fun to illustrate digital landscapes (aka websites) and send them on to others as a way of sharing/showcasing various parts and lands of the internet! from this online space, i wanted to invite friends and internet strangers to sign up to receive an href postcard from me in the physical mail! based on your form submission, i will send you postcard that contains a recommended link along with an illustration of the website. in addition, you can recommend me a cool link and i will illustrate these into postcards too!” Links! On postcards! Sent to you in the mail! This sounds, frankly, perfect – there’s something so wonderfully silly about sending people handwritten urls that it almost becomes entirely sensible again, and I encourage all of you to click the link and sign up to the project because, honestly, who doesn’t like receiving postcards?
The World Nature Photography Awards: MORE PHOTOS OF ANIMALS! Another week, another photo award – obviously the crocodile shot at the top of the page is the one that’s garnered all the attention, but my personal pick of the bunch is the incredibly dapper-looking Lesser Antillean Iguana (do you think it has an inferiority complex)?
Dumb Password Rules: There are a few things that can be relied upon to shake one’s faith in humanity and one’s belief in the fundamental ability of our species to solve problems and strive towards the greater good – the replies to any of Elon Musk’s tweets (in fact, any trending topic on Twitter), the Daily Mail, string cheese, any pub on a Saturday or Sunday during the fcuking Six Nations – but few are so indicative of our propensity to make everything a bit sh1t as a bad website password system. Is there anything more annoying than being asked to create a password for something and then having to try nine separate ones because at each juncture the site you’re trying to use sees fit to add another condition that your password must meet before it can be considered valid (caps! Special characters! Numbers! Iambic fcuking pentameter!)? I put it to you that there is not – and you can prove it to yourself by perusing this excellent collection of websites whose password systems are so annoying, so bone-headed, that they act as cautionary notes to UX designers the world over. SO MANY IDIOTIC DESIGN CHOICES HERE – also, this is a convenient shortlist should any of you be hackers looking for easy sites to gain access to, so feel free to share your ill-gotten proceeds with me once you’re done.
Clarity: There have been a variety of platforms over the past few years – particularly post-2016 – which have sought to create an analytical layer over media overage of the news to enable readers to get a sense of partisan bias and polarisation around particular stories; Clarity is yet another, and whilst it’s not perfect it’s an interesting attempt to contextualise how certain news stories are being treated and who’s driving coverage of them. The site picks the biggest news stories of the day and then analyses their coverage across a range of news websites, specifically analysing their prominence on-Page to determine the weight being given to each story from the left and right-wing press respectively. This only covers stuff of interest to the US, but I would be really interested to see what this showed us about news in the UK – if nothing else, it’s a useful way of seeing at a glance which stories are being pushed (or, depending on your perspective, suppressed) by which publishers.
NDA Buzz: These are, I think, actually available for sale – NDAs in pill form! Obviously not ACTUALLY legally binding, I presume that this is a riff on the fact that NDAs really aren’t worth the paper they are written on – this is a project by interactive design studio Hoax, which features pills filled with powder made from powdered rice paper, on which had previously been printed a standard NDA contract, which pills are designed to be ingested by all parties involved in the contract. VERY silly, but, equally, I would very much enjoy buying a bunch of these and then forcing everyone I worked with to solemnly ingest one with me as part of some sort of stiltedly-ceremonial ritual (possibly involving a minor act of bloodletting, just to up the ante a bit).
LGBTQ+ VR Museum: This looks great – it’s a piece of work that’s created to work as an installation, and so the only thing available at the URL is some details about the exhibit and some trailers, but it looks like a fascinating project and experience. The LGBTQ+ VR Museum is (as the name might suggest) a virtual reality museum of queer history, melding significant milestones such as the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic with personal anecdotes and recollections from the wider community, the trailers give the impression of an interactive exhibition that really understands the medium it’s built in. If you’re working on anything relating to queer history and have a space you’re looking to fill, this is very much worth a look and potentially a booking.
Doorknobs: A 24 year old digital art project! This is a work from 1999, which is frankly mindboggling – never mind that it’s not exactly the most thrilling of webpages, FEEL THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY ON YOUR MOUSE FINGER! “I photographed every door or drawer knob, handle, or latch I touched from the time I awoke on Thursday, June 3rd, until I went to bed on Friday, June 4th, 1999.” See the doorknobs! Enjoy the doorknobs! Revel in the analysis of the doorknobs! Practically-perfect internet.
The Phrontistery: I’m slightly astonished that this hasn’t wandered across my field of vision before now, but this is SUCH a great website for lovers of the English language: “Welcome to the Phrontistery! Since 1996, I have compiled word lists and language resources to spread the joy of the English language in all its variety through time and space. A phrontistery (from the Greek phrontistes ‘thinker’) is meant to be a thinking-place for reflection and intellectual stimulation. I invite you to explore the various site features relating to language and lexicography, find that half-remembered rare or obscure word you’ve been looking for, or to read and explore essays on language, linguistics, and culture. Have a look around, and enjoy!” There is so, so much to enjoy here, but if nothing else may I encourage you to have a spelunk around the obscure words list – I was just educated as to the existence of ‘gelicide’ (death by cold) as a term, which pleased me no end, and you will definitely find at least one new term with which to annoy the fcuk out of friends and colleagues.
Free Vector Memes: All the memes! In vector form! For free! To do with what you will! “Introducing powerful Meme vectors! Remix, tweak and change colors to your heart’s content – all licensed under GNU General Public License with no copyright infringement intended. Unleash the creative beast within you!” If nothing else you now have absolutely no excuse for putting a vectorised version of wojak on your company’s 404 page.
Phylopic: Do you want a free repository of images of a frankly incredible variety of ‘animals, plants and other lifeforms’ in black and white silhouette? OF COURSE YOU DO! Honestly, you have no idea how amazingly comprehensive this is – you want a silhouette of a banded anteater (as opposed to a regular, non-banded one)? GREAT! How about a lesser flying phalanger? EVEN BETTER! Honestly, this has silhouettes of animals so obscure I am half-convinced the site owners have just made them up.
Sumplete: This annoyed me this week – a bunch of people uncritically wrote this up as ‘GPT INVENTED AN ENTIRELY NEW GAME OMG!’, based on this blogpost by its co-creator where they explain that they asked ChatGPT to come up with an idea for a word game, and the code for it, and it magically WORKED! Which is impressive, until you bother to do a bit of supplementary research and discover that what The Machine has in fact done is dug up the code for an already-existing game that’s available on the Play Store. Which, obviously, is unsurprising, given that the software is merely drawing from things it’s seen before – it doesn’t ‘understand’! It can’t ‘think’! Any ‘originality’ it is capable of is accidental! Anyway, just putting this here because we are going to see a LOT of ‘AI invented XX!’ stuff in the coming months and it’s important to retain some healthy scepticism.
Cinemashle: Can you guess the films that have been mashed together, based on the AI-generated images you’re presented with? 5 guesses each time, a different pair of films to identify each day – this is quite fun, and when you guess correctly you get a bonus AI-imagined script snippet for the nonexistent film as an additional treat.
The Videogame Sound Effects Quiz: How many of these samples from videogames can you identity? Listen to the clip, guess the game it’s taken from, and know that if you can get more than about 5 of these you have made…questionable use of the mysterious gift of life granted you by an unknown force. This is SO HARD, and, honestly, I think anyone who manages to get above 40 on this (there are 60 in total) ought to have some sort of nerd shrine built to them (and anyone who gets 60 probably needs some sort of intervention to pry the controller from their hands and wash between the skin folds).
Rogule: Another daily puzzle, this one letting you play through a small roguelike dungeon every 24h. Can you survive? Will the monsters defeat you? Erm, probably not to be honest – as pointed out by Rob at B3ta, from whence I have shamefully filched this link, this does seem to be rather easy to win. Still, consider it another distraction to add onto the pre-work routine stack.
Big Sad Fall Assistants: This is FUN, but also requires a slightly greater degree of hand/eye coordination than I’m honestly comfortable with, meaning I am embarrassingly unskilled at it – still, it’s enjoyable to play even if I can’t get past the third level (so ashamed). The game’s simple – move your pair of robots left and right between the buildings to catch the office workers hurling themselves from the windows and bounce them right back to their desks again (there’s a light ‘oh the horrors of late-period capitalism!’ tone to the whole thing, should you care about the framing) – but rendered slightly more complex by the fact you need to move both robots at once, which lends it a slight ‘pat your head, rub your belly’ quality (or at least it does for me – perhaps you’re less of a malcoordinated mess than I am); this is fun, and could probably work as a keyboard-sharing two-player game if there’s anyone who you’d feel comfortable being that proximate with.
Lander: This is very, very simple – land the lunar module! How hard can it be?! – but I guarantee that you will be cursing it, and yourself, when you’re 15 minutes late for dinner/bed/that person off Grindr who’s been cuffed to your bedpost for about an hour now (delete per your lifestyle choices) because you decided to have JUST ONE MORE GO. This is insanely moreish and very fun (and not a little infuriating too, like all the best games).
Gourdlets: Finally this week, a genuinely soothing digital toy – Gourdlets is a playable demo for a forthcoming game which answers the question “what if SimCity but pixelart and with literally no challenge to it at all?” – your job is just to build whatever small village-type setup you choose, with no worries about budgets or disasters or making things work. Your creation will be populated by small, cute, bloblike creatures (called, one presumes, Gourdlets) who will arrive in your village by train at regular intervals, and who will proceed to wander around your town, enter your buildings, sit on your benches, barbecue on your fires…honestly, this is possibly the most soothing thing I have seen all year, and if you’re feeling in any way stressed or overwhelmed or, honestly, like you’d rather stick pins in your eyes and ears and genitals than spend another second thinking about customer journey profiles, or audience personas, or the importance of strategy in the modern agency landscape (lol!), then click this link and let the pain melt away. This is practically therapy, I tell you.

By Glen Baxter

THIS WEEK’S FINAL MUSICAL OFFERING IS COMPILED BY THE PHENOMENAL HANDCLAP BAND AND IS A WONDERFUL SELECTION OF WHAT I WOULD PROBABLY CALL ‘FUNKY 70sISH AND PSYCHEDELIA AND THE ODD BIT OF UNEXPECTED HOUSE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

The Dot is Black: I absolutely adore this. The Dot Is Black “is a platform for research design that aims on the development of design knowledge through generative drawings made with code. The multidisciplinary design concept behind thedotisblack attempts to combine visual narratives and natural science studies, sound analysis and data visualization. In general, thedotisblack focuses on simple rules in code that utilize basic design principles that can be overlapped, merged or used for further development. In this context, geometry plays an important role as it enables a circular argument that brings things together while providing direction and flexibility. At the same time, coding does not only emphasize on the relationship among its parts but also enables the potential for a high and unexpected complexity of the whole that can be controlled. thedotisblack is exploring this complexity and control.” SO MANY PRETTY IMAGES.

Faces In The Cloud: A VERY OLD Tumblr, this, highlighting all the ways in which facial recognition tech is often very bad at recognising faces. It would be fascinating to run this sort of thing again to see how much the tech’s improved (and, perhaps more interestingly, where it hasn’t).

WTF Happened in 1971?: This is interesting – accompanying the podcast of the same name, this is a collection of graphs which all suggest that SOMETHING happened in 1971 that changed the world and basically set modernity in train; these are mostly of a variety of different global economic indicators, and tend to show the rate of change of each of them shifting dramatically around 1971 – WHY? WHAT HAPPENED? I am never, ever going to listen to the podcast that goes with this, so if someone smarter than me could explain this all via email that would be great thanks.

Vault of VHS: “Dedicated to the design of retail VHS packaging, for both home & pre-recorded tapes.” I bet THAT’S got your pulse racing, hasn’t it?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Gigtapes: Oddities from old VHS videotapes found at US thrift stores and boot sales – this tends towards the ‘odd, old-time curio’ rather than the ‘cursed’, but that’s no bad thing to my mind. If you want a great source of slightly-grainy clips of moderately-surreal local access cable programming from the 1980s and 90s then this will be PERFECT for you (and if you don’t, WHY NOT FFS?).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The Machine’s Work Is Good Enough: I can’t stress enough how good I think this is and the extent to which it’s (imho) the most nailed-on analysis of What All This AI Stuff Means For Creativity and Content and Entertainment. Brian Feldman writes persuasively that anyone suggesting that AI-generated content won’t sweep the world because ‘it’s not very good’ is spectacularly missing the point and has failed to pay attention to what’s been going on for YEARS online – specifically, that we don’t actually expect or even particularly want things to be ‘good’ anymore, that the way the web works and is structured and has evolved means that in fact we’re perfectly happy to put up with stuff that is a bit crap but generally just about ‘good enough’, and that machine-generatyed content (copy, specifically) is already just about ‘good enough’ to fit neatly into that ecosystem of mediocrity. Honestly, next time someone tries to give you the line about ‘people won’t put up with the pabulum spat out by The Machine’ take a moment to think about what is most popular on TV and online (the REAL popular stuff, not the things that broadsheets write op-eds about) and realise that, well, it’s simply not true: “I just think it’s worth reiterating that the story of internet culture recently has not been one of austerity or moderation. It’s about taking the easy route and flooding the zone with the same meme templates and TikTok sounds everyone else is using at a regular interval — as opposed to things that are creative and unique and, well, good. This has been true for years: consistency over quality is a winning strategy in terms of audience growth. All of the stories I read about content creator burnout are about how exhausting and awful it is to have to post so often, rather than about what most artists have traditionally struggled with throughout most of human history: being in a creative rut. To me, that’s extremely telling.5 A flywheel system that encourages this type of brainless output incentivizes the proliferation of automated systems that let people continue to pump out at-best-mediocre stuff while shirking responsibility for what’s actually generated. So I see the twisted appeal of the shortcuts, and am not more aghast about it than anything else I’ve seen over the last decade. The posters have been sleepwalking for a very long time.”

The Waluigi Effect: You may have seen Waluigi’s name bafflingly cropping up in the general AI-wrangling discourse this week and wondered what the fcuk it was all about – this is the article that started the ball rolling, and whilst it’s…a bit knotty in places, it’s also SUPER interesting from the point of view of how our current crop of AI models work, and how they ‘think’ (they don’t think), and how knowing more about how they identify concepts and ‘situate’ them in latent space can help direct them more effectively. I am not going to try and paraphrase the arguments here because, honestly, you do just have to read the longform work I’m afraid, but I promise that if you take it slowly then it does all make sense and will properly make your brain fizz with the cleverness and oddity of it all.

AI & Photojournalism: I continue to be generally discomfited by the p1ss-poor tenor of most of the coverage of the current AI boom, and the lack of anything beyond “WOW THIS IS BASICALLY MAGIC” and “IT ONLY CREATES DERIVATIVE RUBBISH” discourse from much of the mainstream press. This article in the Columbia Journalism Review is an interesting corrective to that – in it, Amanda Darrach interviews Fred Ritchin, a former NYT Photo Editor, about what image-based AIs mean for photojournalism and ideas of ‘truth’ and representation, and the whole conversation is so much more nuanced and intelligent than 90% of what I’ve read around this in recent weeks. Ritchin asks interesting questions not only about the technology but also about the role of photojournalism in culture and the particular ways in which it works to create collective cultural memory, and the storytelling aspect of a single image, and trust and truth and and and – honestly, this is really interesting and thought-provoking, even if (as I appreciate many of you probably are) suffering from not-insignificant AR fatigue right now.

How Long Does Twitter Have Left?: The slow decline of my favourite website continues apace – it’s astonishing how many people simply don’t use the platform anymore compared to a year ago, and how rickety it is, and how much worse the spam is, and how, despite all of this, That Fcuking Man is still making like it’s all going swimmingly (it’s clearly not). Anway, this is a short bit of speculative analysis by Dave Karpf which suggests, based on his calculations, that the site’s got about 6 months before Elong declares it bankrupt (and inevitably blames his failure to make the business a success on the WOKE MIND VIRUS.. Let’s see how accurate this proves to be.

Google Control: Ok, this is QUITE GEEKY, and unless you’re particularly interested in search rankings or ‘how the internet works at a sort-of foundational level’ or advermarketingpr-type gubbins then you might want to skip it – for the rest of you, though, this is a SUPER-interesting look at the the companies that effectively own all of the most trafficked sites on the web, how they maintain that position, and what YOU, eager digimarketer, can learn from them. Honestly, whilst yes, fine, this is a BIT work-y, and whilst also yes, fine, there is literally nothing more boring on this earth than SEO, this is genuinely interesting and informative, and I say this as someone who has pretty much decided that they can’t be fcuked to feign interest in ‘work’ anymore and may well just stop forever and see what happens.

The MAGA-fication of North Idaho College: I know that the majority of you aren’t North Americans (actually, due to the previously mentioned absence of any sort of analytics on Curios whatsoever, I don’t know that at all – but I assume), and that this writeup of CULTURE WAR B0LLOCKS at some college you’ve bever heard of therefore probably doesn’t strike you as immediately interesting, but I honestly think that this sort of thing is a bit of a canary in the coal mine for the UK and as such I would encourage you to have a read as, well, if you don’t see this sort of thing happening over here before too long then you’re a more optimistic person than I am. The piece details how “for most of the past two years, the college’s governing board has been a volatile experiment in turning grievances into governance. Trustees backed by the county Republican Party hold a majority on the board. They have denounced liberal “indoctrination” by the college faculty and vowed to bring the school administration’s “deep state” to heel and “Make N.I.C. Great Again””, and how that has rendered the institution effectively ungovernable and at risk of closure. This is less about North America and more about a general trend towards a conception of the world that is entirely zero-sum, in which it is impossible to conceive of an improved outcome for one group without a necessarily worsened outcome for another, and which, as a result, leads to the sort of rage and fear we’ve been seeing around LGBTx rights and women’s rights and immigration over the past few years. Honestly, after this week’s ridiculous, horrible ‘small boats’ performative sh1tshow in the UK, this sort of article feels significantly less alien than one might have hoped.

Inflationships: Ooh, I do like a new lifestyle slang term (and apologies, by the way, if this has been current for AGES – I am old, and so get to this stuff late) – ‘inflationships’, as characterised by this piece in The Face and coming to every single strategy upfront for every single youth-facing FS brand campaign in the world VERY SOON, describes the modern situation where couples are forced to move in together earlier than they might have chosen to as a result of everything costing seventythreemillion pounds. Basically this is an updated, three-years-on version of all those stories about people ending up spending Lockdown One with some random they’d chirpsed off Hinge, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it as a spurious hook for whatever tired old brand activation you’re currently looking to peddle to Monzo or whoever.

The TikTok Bad Dates Content Flywheel: It is interesting, if you’re an online Methuselah like me, to witness different content trends and formats being resurrected and reinterpreted for a new platform and generation – so it is with the storied ‘OMG my dating life is a disaster!’ content vertical, beloved of (mostly) young women since blogging was a thing and now being remixed for the TikTok age. Which means more crying into camera, more sleuthing and tracking and shaming…what I find interesting about this is the way in which the style of what’s produced differs from generation to generation, and the way in which things that would have most likely been anonymous back in the day are now presented in-person – because, after all, what’s the point of going massively viral if noone knows who you are? I think there’s a really interesting essay to be written looking at the different ways specific content tropes play out on different platforms and in different eras, so, er, if any of you would like to write it for me then that would be great, thanks.

ExploitTok: There’s not much to say about this – this piece details how people in the developing world are increasingly turning to dark and exploitative content to get eyeballs on TikTok, and, subsequently, some money. “In a series of recently viral livestreams on Indonesian TikTok, the premise is always the same: Women in their 50s and 60s sit in a stagnant pool of water and mud, often shivering. The women’s clothes are soaked to the skin, and they periodically throw a pail of water over themselves, looking directly at the camera. At times, they wipe away tears, appearing distressed. In doing so, the women — or the TikTok creators directing them, at least — can earn money. Over hours, sympathetic viewers send “coins” and gifts that can be exchanged for cash, amounting to several hundred dollars per stream.” This isn’t in any way surprising – “will w4nk for pennies” is, after all, a classic variation on The Oldest Profession In The World – but that doesn’t stop it from being miserable. Much like with the dating horror stories piece above, this is another ‘every generation runs the same content hoops’ story, except this time this is basically ‘bumfights, but make it globalised late-stage capitalism’. Bleak.

The King’s League: This is SO interesting – the first profile I’ve read of Gerard Pique’s “King’s League” seven-a-side tournament/franchise that the former Barca player has established in Spain, where a bunch of teams (captained by streamers, YouTubers and a couple of ex-pros) compete in rolling tournaments which are shot and cut for distribution across streaming platforms, complete with vague soap opera-style intrigue and a bit of wrestling-ish kayfabe thrown in for good measure. This feels like a version of a future, not least in the (very smart) way that it’s all been envisaged backwards from the mobile screen – everything is optimised to make COMPELLING CONTENT FOR THE SOUGHT-AFTER 8-24Y/O DEMOGRAPHIC and everything (from the format of the tournaments, to the way the games are structured, to the way they’re shot and edited) is designed to match up to the hypersaturated, fast-cut media which its intended audience is already addicted to.

Dating Men With Podcasts: I think you probably already know what this article says, but, as someone who fcuking hates podcasts and is firmly convinced that somewhere in the region of 97% of them don’t deserve to exist and doesn’t understand why so many men with skinny jeans and beards seem to think that anyone should care what they think about anything, I found it both pleasing and funny and perhaps you will too.

What Drum Machines Can Teach Us About AI: This piece is actually not really about AI, or at least not so’s you’d notice; instead, it’s about the history of drum machines, and how they have been used and incorporated into musical creation since their development – ok, fine, so it’s a BIT AI-ish insofar as there’s a bit of discussion about technology as complementary to, rather than substitutive of, human creativity.

Finding Audrey Amiss: The link here takes you to the ‘collection’ page for a series of articles about outsider artist Audrey Amiss, which have been commissioned as part of the process of cataloguing and analysing her works which is currently being undertaken by the Wellcome Collection; there are three parts at present, and the rest will be published over the coming weeks. Amiss was a classic ‘outsider’ artist – prolific, almost compulsive, in their work, and frequently beset by mental illness which characterised their life and their practice and which affected their ability to make inroads into the ‘mainstream’ arts scene of the 20th Century. I personally find stuff like this absolutely fascinating, heartbreaking and poignant – plus, beyond that, the Wellcome is asking some genuinely interesting questions about the role of the curator in the presentation of collections such as this, and whether or not it is possible for a curator to ever present an ‘artist centric’ view of a body of work such as this. Honestly, just read this opening to the first essay and see if it grabs you: “On a summer’s day in 2013, a woman called Audrey Amiss died alone in her south London flat, aged 79. On that day, she had eaten a Cornetto ice cream and a Sainsbury’s fruit sponge pudding before sticking the packaging down into a lined notebook, a scrapbook where she documented all the food she ate and household items she used every day. She sketched a few items she could see in her home. She wrote a letter to the charities Scope and Freedom from Torture. She tucked a bus ticket to Croydon and a receipt for a cheese sandwich into a log book, ready to be pasted down and annotated with her thoughts on the day’s activities. In her account book, she recorded, next to a receipt, that she’d “trudged the route. Arrived home exhausted. ZAPPED. CHEATING. After 10 July 2013, the rest of the pages of these volumes are blank, marking the final moments of Audrey’s life.”

Making Bikes: It may not surprise you to learn that I subscribe to a LOT of newsletters – one of my favourites is called ‘Scope of Work’, which is about manufacturing and making stuff, and is full of things I don’t really understand written by and for people who are several orders of magnitude more practical than I am. This week it featured this essay by Spencer Wright, all about their experiences building bikes, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you it is honestly one of the most interesting things I have read in ages and taught me LOADS about how bikes are made and how they work and, look, I accept that not everyone is going to be enticed by a few thousand words of someone talking about soldering metal tubes together but I promise you that there is poetry in here if you look for it.

In For A Pound: This is a GREAT piece of writing in VAN magazine (which is, in case you were as unfamiliar with it as I was up til this week, a publication dedicated to classical music) and which reminded me a lot stylistically of something one might find on Vittles, or The Fence (which is no bad thing, to be clear – just that it clearly inhabits a certain space in young, humorous, disaffected, urban, left-wing cultural criticism which you may find familiar) – the author, Hugh Morris, buys a £1 ticket to the Royal Opera House as part of its current scheme to improve access to FINE ART (as aside: does anyone REALLY like opera? It’s always struck me as something that people pretend to enjoy rather than actually enjoy, like caviar and children’s first birthday parties), and writes about art and value and how the two intertwine, and, honestly, this really is very good indeed.

The California Problem: OK, even by the standards of Web Curios this article is VERY LONG – we’re talking a good 10k words here, I think – and it’s very specifically about current trends and themes in indie game design, and as such I feel confident in saying it’s perhaps not for everyone; that said, if you’ve any interest at all in the production of culture and how that works, and how trends within a field work and don’t work, and how they can become stultifying, then this is very much worth reading (but you might want to break it up into bitesize chunks). It will also help if you know who Jonathan Blow is, I think, though it’s not 100% essential.

Agnes Callard’s Marriage of Minds: This article has caused QUITE THE FUSS in certain sections of the web – I present it here with minimal comment, other than to offer you this basic precis: 1) Agnes Callard is a philosophy professor, who was married to another philosophy professor until she fell in love with one of her students and divorced her husband to be with him; 2) Agnes Callard now lives with her new partner, her former husband, their two kids, and her new child with her new husband – they claim this works out well for everyone involved; 3) Agnes Callard spends an awful lot of time in this article talking like someone who does not in fact think this is working out super-well for everyone involved, no matter what she thinks she is saying; 4) Agnes Callard writes and talks about feelings with a degree of precise self-absorbtion I don’t think I have ever encountered before in a human being (also, as an aside, Agnes Callard is autistic, which feels like perhaps it could and should have been made more of in the piece, but you may feel differently about this bit). You will either find this HILARIOUS or quite incredibly boring – but, honestly, I couldn’t help but giggle throughout at how STAGGERINGLY self-regarding and self-involved this all is. Whilst I appreciate that the unexamined life may not in fact be worth living, I would also cheerfully posit that there can be such a thing as TOO MUCH examination.

Football in Brazil: An exceptional piece of writing in the LA Review of Books, by Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro, which writes about Brazil and being Brazilian and the way in which football is inextricably linked with nation and nationality. This is not only superbly-written throughout, but also taught me so much – from the idea of ‘brazilian’-style football being intrinsically-linked to the country’s demographics and the concept of ‘mulatismo’, to the links between the famous 7-1 defeat to Germany and the rise of Bolsonaro, this is packed full of history and ideas and culture, and is, above all else, a great read (even if you don’t care about football whatsoever).

The Taking of Stonehenge: A short story by Adrian Hon, part SATIRE about cultural conservation and paternalism, part amusing scifi short, this is near-perfect in idea and execution.

On Novocain: If you’ve ever read anything about addiction you’ll have come across the trope of the addict who needs medical attention but can’t risk taking anaesthetic in case that should trigger a relapse; this is one of those, but, I promise you, it is LOADS better than you might expect and it’s a million miles away from the tortureporn machismo of James Frey’s (fictional) experiences. “It’s a scientific fact that there’s no way to know exactly how long a single second is. It’s not like an inch. You can’t lay a second next to another second and see if it’s the same size. The truth is that seconds might be all kinds of different sizes. Ordinarily this is an abstract, philosophical kind of truth about the difference between time and space, but when you experience extended chronic pain, this truth loses its abstract quality and you understand that all seconds are not the same size and that there are long seconds, and there are longer seconds, and there are Very Long Seconds.”Superb.

By Maud Madsen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK MAINLY COME FROM RENE WALTER’S EXCELLENT GOOD MUSIC NEWSLETTER!)!:

We begin this week with a mystery. What are Temple Cities? Who is behind this? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Genuine questions, all of them – if any of you are able to shad any light on this whatsoever I would be very grateful indeed.

Next up is this super-cheering bit of rock’n’roll by Drinking Boys and Girls Club – it’s all in Japanese and thus I have no idea what it’s about, but it’s SO hummable despite that that I promise you it will live in a corner of your brain for days (in a good way). The song’s called ‘Listen To Me’.

I’m currently really enjoying Yves Tumour’s work, and this latest song – a bit more melodic, and bit more jangly guitar – is no exception. Cracking track, and he remains eminently watchable as a performer – this is ‘Heaven Surrounds Us’.

I feel quite strongly that, at the age of 43, I am probably too old to express admiration and appreciation for a song entitled ‘Hickey King’, but, well, here we are. I know that comparing a grunge-y guitar-led band with a pink-haired female singer to Garbage is committing some sort of cardinal sin of unimaginative writing but, well, this really does sound quite a lot like Garbage. This is the latest single by Skating Polly:

Last up this week, we have this track by Pynch, called London, which to my mind does an excellent job of nailing what it feels like to live in this city in your 20s (now moreso than ever, I guess) – I rather love this and it’s doomy, singalongachorus, and I hope you do too. TAKE CARE AND TRY NOT TO DIE I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 03/03/23

March 3, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 36 minutes

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

By Penny Slinger

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A TRIP BACK IN TIME, COURTESY OF LAURENT GARNIER AND HIS CLASSIC (IF YOU’RE OLD) X-MIX 2!

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.

By Michael Dumontier

IN THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK, DRIFT OFF WITH THIS PERFECTLY-SELECTED PICK OF VAGUELY-SPACEY PSYCHEDELIC-ISH FUNK COMPILED BY KIM & BURAN!

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.

By Rose Barberat

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This has been hyperbolicly described as ‘THE WORLD’S FIRST AI-GENERATED ANIME!’ in certain circles, so it’s probably worth pointing out that…well, it’s not quite that. AI was used, yes, but so was a bunch of real video footage and Unreal Engine and After Effects and a whole host of other things, and whilst the end results are impressive when you consider it was produced by a team of three, it’s also worth bearing in mind that it took them ~5 months and so it’s not quite the ‘HIT THE MAGIC BUTTON GENERATE DRAGONBALL!’ witchcraft that some of the more breathless commenters have claimed it is. Still, as the latest example of what can be done by tiny teams with modern tech it’s very impressive.

This is a very fun little song – pleasingly kinetic and bouncy. It’s called ‘Miss The World’, and it’s by Body Type.

The video to this track – by Noble Rot, called ‘Casting No Light’ – really reminds me of the sort of experimental Czech animation from the 1960s that you occasionally used to stumble across on early morning BBC2 back in the day – this is a cracking bit of driving instrumentalism which builds very pleasingly indeed.

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.

I tend to feature stuff that’s a bit more obscure in the videos section of Curios, but I will make an exception for this new track by CHVRCHES because it is basically a perfect pop song and it is too powerful for me to resist it. The song’s called ‘Over’, and I imagine this is getting rinsed on whatever radio station young people listen to these days.

Years ago I featured a song by an artist called Boyfriend which was called ‘Jealousy’ and which was genuinely brilliant but which was never followed up by anything else that I could find – the artist name meant it was nearly impossible to find out anything about the artist, other than some garbled nonsense about the fact that they were a religious schoolteacher by day and a deviant performer by night. Anyway, 7-odd years later Boyfriend has once again stumbled across my radar, now doing a track with Pussy Riot, and whilst it’s not a patch on Jealousy (which I am going to repost

below because it slaps so hard) it is pleasingly sleazy and odd and the video’s weird and a bit unsettling and features Amanda Lepore which is recommendation enough of itself. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT I LOVE YOU BYE!

(BONUS CONTENT: This is that Jealousy song. Honestly, this should have been HUGE.)

Webcurios 24/02/23

February 24, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 34 minutes

TURNIPS! TURNIPS FOR ALL!

It would be funny were it not so spleen-fcukingly enraging, wouldn’t it? Still, it meant the Star could do a funny frontpage again so that’s ok.

Aside from anything else, Therese, when was the last time you ate a turnip? They are FCUKING DISGUSTING. Has anyone done that hilarious thing where they share an image and the pricelist for the Portcullis House canteen as a WITTY JUXTAPOSITION of the reality for these awful cnuts and that which maintains for the rest of us?

Anyway, enough of the root vegetable chat! There are links to click, words to read (or, more likely, skim over with gritted teeth while you’re trying to work out whether to click or not), music to listen to and pictures to look at – WHO NEEDS FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES WHEN WE HAVE THE WEB?!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I didn’t have ‘the return of scurvy as a medical concern’ on my “UK 2023” bingo card and yet, well, here we are!

By Mark Gleason

THIS WEEK’S AUDIO ACCOMPANIMENTS BEGIN WITH A GENUINELY SUPERB MIX OF BRAZILIAN POST-PUNK AND NEW WAVE BY ANDY CUMMINGS!

THE SECTION WHICH, A YEAR ON FROM THE START OF THE UKRAINE WAR, THINKS IT’S WORTH DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION TO THE AP WAR CRIMES TRACKER FOR THE CONFLICT , PT.1:

Infinite AI Heroes: You may not have particularly enjoyed the infinite AI Seinfeld. You might have found the infinite radio show somewhat tedious, and not really gotten on with the infinite series of imaginary characters having awkward dates in poorly-animated CG. Perhaps, though, this will be the moment your eyes are opened to the frankly terrifying world of machine-generated entertainments that we’re about to enter, because this really is staggering. This is a Twitch channel being run by popular (and, apparently, not-uncontroversial – blimey, a cult eh?) streamer Athene, which features an ongoing, apparently live and generated on-the-fly series of interactions between an AI-generated avatar of Athene himself and a rolling cast of ‘celebrity’ guests, all spun up by AI and given prompts for what to talk about from the peanut gallery in the comments. Which is why, as I type, Joe Biden is apparently expressing some strong and forthright opinions about the ‘Dark Brandon’ meme, and people are preparing to quiz fake Joe Rogan on the chihuahua uprising in Vietnam. As per with these things, the conversations are largely stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and the faked video of the celebrities wouldn’t fool anyone, and the audio is pretty janky…but, also, it’s not actually all that bad, and it’s…oddly funny! The characters rotate quickly enough that even if there’s someone you don’t recognise onscreen when you log in, they’ll be swapped out quickly enough (the personalities on show skew hard towards YouTubers and streamers, as you’d expect), and the topic suggestions from the chat don’t (from what I’ve seen at least) get TOO edgelord-y, and in general this is a weirdly fun time – crucially, though, this isn’t significantly worse than quite a lot of actual streamer content, and one of these AI channels is 100% going to get itself a proper following by the end of the year, you mark my words (but, er, as ever, can we please agree to forget I said this if it turns out to be bunkum? Thanks).

Infinite Big Bang Theory: Don’t worry, I’m not going to include every single AI-generated infinite stream thing I come across (how quickly we become jaded! How quickly the novelty wanes!), but there are a few in here this week – partly to show the different ways people are playing with this tech, partly to demonstrate how (relatively) simple this stuff is to spin up. Here, for example, is an infinite stream of AI-generated ‘comedy’ trained on the world’s most-ubiquitous and least-amusing sitcom The Big Bang Theory – the graphics here are simple and top-down, like a 16-bit RPG, and the voice models are pretty ropey, but frankly it’s no less funny than its execrable progenitor.

Infinite Steamed Hams: This though is great, not least because of the fact that the Steamed Hams sketch from the Simpsons has basically been through the web’s memetic meatgrinder about 3million times now, and is so conceptually deep-fried that this sort of nonsensical weirdness and jank feels oddly perfect. An infinite parade of Steamed Hams variants, with Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers engaged in a neverending series of nonsensical non-sequiturs which, honestly, are…sort of surreally funny, and which combined with the ultrajanky animation which sits alongside the audio actually vaguely works. If I was a very stoned and extremely-online 16 year old then I think I would find this captivating – no idea whether that’s an endorsement or not, but there you go. Maybe YOU have a very stoned and extremely-online 16 year old you can test this out on.

Scribble Diffusion: Fun little AI sketching tool – draw out a simple idea of an image (you know the sort of thing – a kid’s drawing of a sailboat, a classic ‘house with four windows and a door and curling smoke emerging from a chimney’, that type of idea), tell the machine what it is that you are in fact drawing, and it will endeavour to turn your fat-fingered scribblings into something vaguely-recognisable. This is, more than anything, a fun thing to play around with when you’re stuck on the bus – it’s unlikely to produce anything award-winning, but as a way of doodling it’s actually pretty fun (and, amusingly, is very reminiscent of the original Dall-E interface from WAY BACK IN THE DAY when we didn’t quite realise quite how mad this stuff was going to get, and at what pace). I have particularly enjoyed asking it to create many-limbed Lovecraftian monstrosities – it’s REALLY good for spinning up unpleasantly-fleshy meat octopi, for example – but let your imagination run wild!

AI Gallery: On the one hand, this is AN Other slightly-underwhelming 3d gallery environment around which you can manouvre an avatar whilst looking at equally-underwhelming examples of AI-generated art; on the other, there’s something rather cool and borderline-atmospheric about the way they’ve done the visuals here, which made me enjoy it rather more than I expected. The art’s not very good, mind, and the accompanying descriptions are also AI-generated, meaning the whole thing feels a bit…weirdly empty of meaning, which increasingly feels like the most interesting thing about most machine-spun visuals. Still, nice work by French digital studio UltraNoir.

2Dumb2Destroy: A textbot trained on a selection of famously-stupid individuals from the fictional world, who you can chat to about anything you like (as long as you don’t mind the conversation being even more enervating than your standard GPT-based interactions). “Trained on countless hours of Pauly Shore movies, all seven Police Academies, Ralph Wiggum quotes and that one bodybuilding forum where a bunch of gym bros decided a week had eight days in it, etc. This is one A.I. you don’t have to worry about ever overthrowing humanity, or stealing your job.” This is almost-funny, but it’s interesting less because of what it says and more because we’re on the cusp of everyone and their mother (or at least everyone and their mother willing to pay a bit for the privilege) being able to train and spin up their own GPT variants with whatever training data they like, which is going to be…interesting, I think.

Spaghettify: I have an…unfortunate track record of leaving jobs in a manner that’s perhaps not as clean as one might ideally desire; there was The Email, there was the parting gift of inserting one extraneous and entirely-fictional additional line into the biographies of each senior staff member on the company website…basically I am a sucker for the pleasing gifts that departing workers can leave for their colleagues, and as such I don’t think I can adequately express how much I love the idea of Spaghettify, a service which will take any code you care to give it and render it…spaghetti-ish, adding bugs and unnecessary comments and making it needlessly obscure and, basically, making it an absolute fcuking nightmare for anyone to subsequently untangle and reuse. Now obviously this is sub-optimal behaviour from a ‘good employee and colleague’ point of view, but, well, sometimes revenge is important and this sort of petty sabotage of future endeavours is actually A Good Thing.

Everything Can Be Scanned: I like to think that this project is inspired by this genuine classic of The Old Web, but, regardless of its genesis, it is GREAT. Want to see a collection of otherwise unremarkable objects scanned at unnecessarily high resolution with no real sense of any connection between them other than their presence on this webpage? OF COURSE YOU DO! “everything.can.be.scanned (e.c.b.s) — is a project that allows you to see basic objects, which usually we don’t pay much attention to and don’t even notice them existing, in a more detailed way…e.c.b.s is a special museum that illustrates a cross-section of life in a particular time, in a particular place.” It’s unclear where that place is (although there’s a Russian translation of the website), but overall this is a lovely and slightly-baffling personal project that pleases me no end.

New Murabba: While the various consultants and in-no-way-exploited migrant worker classes get on with constructing the fever dream that is The Line in the Saudi Desert, cuddly-and-in-no-way-murderous VISIONARY FUTURIST MBS is already thinking about his next mad architectural vanity project. Would you like to know what it is? IT IS A GIANT FCUKING CUBE! A SINISTER, BLACK, GIANT FCUKING CUBE! IN THE DESERT! But, according to the website copy, it is ALSO the ‘gateway to another world’ (honestly, it really does look like the gateway to another world – specifically, the very bloody and S&M-themed world of the cenobites as envisaged by Clive Barker in his now-infamous Hellraiser series of books and films – I mean, really, this doesn’t feel like a coincidence). Actually, sorry, I am misrepresenting this – Murabba is the name of a planned new district in Riyadh, whereas the terrifying black cube is the Mukaab. So now you know. Anyway, this really does have to be seen to be believed – the CG renders are quite, quite mad, and appear to feature a surprising number of flying cars which seems…a stretch for a project that’s aiming for completion by the end of the decade. Still, who wouldn’t want to explore “the world’s first immersive, experiential destination. Where hospitality, retail and leisure reach new levels, all in breathtaking, ever-changing environments”? NO FCUKER, etc! Honestly, I strongly recommend you download and check out the press kit, this is another absolute DOOZY and I would pay good money to sit down with the people who sold this fever dream to find out exactly what they are planning to do with the inevitable 70zillion quid they have been promised.

Artifact: You might have seen the announcement of this new app, from former Insta people, which was billed at its unveiling as ‘TikTok for Text’ – Artifact (for that is what it is called) is now OUT, and you can experience it yourself whether on Android or iOS and, well, it is not TikTok for text. Artifact is designed to help you consume written material with the same ease and AI-assisted content discovery as the world’s most popular form of visual crack – you sign up, you tell it the broad verticals you are interested in, and it feeds you content based on those selections. After you’ve read 25-odd articles the machine will start learning your interests and preferences with greater specificity and begin tailoring its recommendations with greater accuracy. I have only been playing with this for a day or so, admittedly, but I am…rather underwhelmed, at present. Perhaps it’s not designed for me – it’s not its fault that I already read a LOT – and it will be more useful for those of you who don’t spend your days attached to the information firehose with your jaw dislocated and a faraway look in your eyes. Anyway, you can read more details here should you so desire – personally I don’t quite see this being a gamechanger, but then again I am a know-nothing bozo so, well, who knows?!

The Link Ads: A Twitter account which features lonely hearts advertisements run in the short-lived magazine The Link, published between 1915-21. “The Link was founded in 1915 as “Cupid’s Messenger” by Alfred Barrett as a response to the loneliness he observed in society. Through the publication, people could get in touch with like-minded souls for friendship, correspondence, and more.” These are WONDERFUL – partly because, well, who doesn’t love a little bit of century-old sauce, but also because of the wild plurality of what people are after and into and the poetry of some of the listings. How can you not fall for a lonely hearts ad that reads: “”Hope (Midlands). – Would anyone seeking sunshine like to see how much could be crammed into an enevlope? Either sex. (738.)”? Impossible.

Critical Danger: Critical Danger is an initiative by a collection of artists and designers who have, er, designed a bunch of merchandise in conjunction with digital agency (I think that’s what they are, anyway) Somefolk and all the proceeds of the stuff for sale goes to wildlife charities – the tshirts here are rather cool, and the money’s going to a good cause, so should you be in the market for NEW GARMS then you could do worse than look here.

The Barter Archive: A BEAUTIFUL PROJECT! The Barter Archive “aims to preserve the stories and collective memories of the people working at the Billingsgate Fish Market at Canary Wharf, London. The archive begins as a series of observational drawings which are gradually exchanged for the fishmongers’ stories, memories and personal objects.” Honestly, I can’t stress how much I love this, both the works and the concept behind them – the drawings are gorgeous, but so are the stories, and the whole project is just perfect. “Barter Archive is a community-led archive constructed by artist Pat Wingshan Wong in collaboration with the fishmongers at the Billingsgate Fish Market at Canary Wharf, London. The archive engages with the idea of barter physically and symbolically. It includes memorable objects ‘bartered’ by the artist using her observational drawings of the happenings in the space, as well as videos that document stories and memories of the people. It preserves the collective memory of the Billingsgate community and challenges the domination of capitalism, highlighting and questioning the ways value is assigned through culture and society.” Please do click this one, it’s SUCH a nice bit of art and local history and personal storytelling.

The Snap Lens Devthon 2023: While everyone is getting superfrothy about AI, Augmented Reality tech continues to sputter along with the air of something that was very cool a few years ago and which hasn’t quite realised that it is no longer The Thing. Which is a shame, frankly, as whilst we’re still waiting for the killer use case for AR anything, the tech’s improving at a pretty decent clip as this latest batch of digital creatives who’ve won prizes for innovative use of Snapchat can attest. There’s some really nice work in here, partly from a technical point of view but also creatively – AR gardens instinctively feels like something fun and playful and that should just…work, and the voxelised roomscanning build is genuinely impressive. Basically just be aware that every cnut submitting work to Lions this year is going to be doing something with fcuking AI (if you’re getting GPT to write your submission you have already lost, FYI) so maybe AR will make you stand out in a pleasingly-retro manner.

The Museum of Sounds: HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS? This feels like EXACTLY the sort of thing that really should have limped across my field of vision by now, and yet I don’t think I have ever been alerted to the fact that not only is there a digital Museum of Sound online but that there is also an accompanying SOUND OF THE YEAR AWARD (there is going to be a ceremony at the British Library this year, and should anyone involved happen to stumble across this writeup then please know that I would give a kidney to attend)! Anyway, the Museum of Sounds is a somewhat-mysterious thing, maintained by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and featuring clips of all sorts of different sounds arranged in groups of five and ranging from the sounds of beavers (snuffly, cute) to the sounds of corncrakes in Ireland, to the sound of loose paving slabs and manhole covers on London streets – if it wasn’t for the fact that I have started and so have no choice but to finish this week’s Curios I would totally spend the rest of the morning basking in the aural splendour that is the sound of a spinning 10p piece recorded in high definition.

Blink: Have we finally run out of variations on dating apps? Have we reached the end of the swipe-to-sex pipeline? I have no idea, stop asking me, but it does seem as though we’re reaching the fag-end of innovation in this particular sector. The latest attempt to reinvigorate the tired-seeming app landscape is Blink, which offers as it’s singular gimmick the fact that its ‘dates’ are initial phone conversations that you schedule with a potential match at a mutually convenient time – you and your suggested partner get matched based on standard criteria (the type of relationship you’re looking for, location, interest, etc) and then you’re put together for a 10 minute ‘getting to know you’ chat (no video, just talk) before you can decide whether to keep messaging or move on with your life (you also get to see photos of people before you get to message them – anonymously – so you can weed out anyone who makes your feel physically sick or that guy who once sang at you in a restaurant and who keeps showing up on your Hinge). This feels…tough, to be honest. Is a 10 minute phonechat with a total stranger the best way of determining whether you might want to let them put things inside you for the rest of your natural life? Still, worth a try, and if nothing else I reckon you could have quite a lot of fun with this if you didn’t take it too seriously (if nothing else, this feels like it might be perfect for comedians refining material – although very much not perfect for anyone unfortunate enough to match with them).

The A24 Auctions: I didn’t realise that film company A24 has a website through which they regularly auction of film memorabilia – but they do! Currently on sale (bids are being taken til early March) are a bunch of props from last year’s BIG SMASH POPULAR HIT MOVIE ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ – I obviously haven’t seen it (I am, as previously mentioned, broadly Michael Owen-ish when it comes to cinema), but I understand it is very good and features fingers shaped like hot dog sausages, should you wish to attempt to buy them.

By Cecilia Bonilla

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE NEXT SECTION WITH THIS HOUSE MIX BY TIM ANDRESEN? THERE IS NO GOOD REASON!

THE SECTION WHICH, A YEAR ON FROM THE START OF THE UKRAINE WAR, THINKS IT’S WORTH DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION TO THE AP WAR CRIMES TRACKER FOR THE CONFLICT , PT.2:

Towns: Go on, admit it, you’d forgotten about Web3, hadn’t you? WELL IT HASN’T FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOU! The latest evolution in ‘The future of the web is transactional an on-chain’ appears to be this – Towns, a new platform which has been set up by people previously involved in Clubhouse (so you know it’s good!) and which is seeking (I presume) to capitalise on the general feeling that social media is in something of a flux and there is a bit of a platform reconfiguration going on, and that people might be in the market for somewhere new to congregate. Which, I get it, makes sense and is in general all well and good. The bit where I quite quickly start to lose interest and, frankly, the will to live, though, is when it gets into the practical details of how it’s all meant to work and the idea of being able to buy and sell communities on the chain and…no, sorry, NOONE NEEDS OR WANTS THIS. Aside from anything else, the idea of communities as tradeable commodities does to my mind rather miss the point of what a ‘community’ is meant to be (on or offline) besides just sounding like an invitation for miscreants to build up, I don’t know, an engaged community of well-off middle-class stereo enthusiasts and then sell it to one of their crypto grifter mates so that said community can be grifted into penury. I do not like this at all, basically, but am comforted by the fact that this strikes me as having approximately the same chance of any other Web3cryptoproject of MAKING IT in 2023 (to whit, approximately nil).
Smithsonian Roulette: Are YOU on Mastodon these days? Would you like an account to follow over there which posts random curiosities from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum? MAYBE YOU WOULD. Thankyou to John Horner for sending me the first on-Mastodon Curio in the 11 years I’ve been writing this thing; consider this your Blue Plaque.
Dimensions: Another ‘Jesus, have I really not featured this on here before? FFS Matt!’ link – but a wonderful one. Have you ever wanted an objective resource to determine how big everything is? YES YOU HAVE AND HERE IT IS! “Dimensions.com is an ongoing reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.com is a global platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.” This is simultaneously sort-of insane and equally, I presume, very useful – if you’re a designer who deals in real-world measurements then you’re probably familiar with this resource already, but, for the rest of you, welcome to the rest of your life, in which you will never again have to take ill-informed guesses as to the standard size of an army cot mattress, or the exact measurements of Blofeld from James Bond.
SwissGL Demos: A collection of small, hypnotic and very pretty coding demos which I don’t really understand the purpose of but whose existence I am gladdened by. The Spectrogram one in particular is rather fun.
Contact Sheets: A very rare link to Pinterest here, courtesy of Daniel Benneworth-Gray who over the years has spent time compiling this board of old contact sheets from photoshoots of the past. There are some great images here – classics you’ll have seen before, including iconic (sorry) shots of Ali and others, but also images of people you might be less familiar with, such as painter Chuck Close. It’s fascinating to see the different ways in which people approach the camera, and as a resource for learning about what makes a ‘good’ shot (and, interestingly, the difference between a photo that is merely ‘good’ and one that is ‘great’).
The World Dataviz Prize 2023: How long has David McCandless been doing Information Is Beautiful? However long it is, it’s fair to say that McCandless has single-handedly been responsible for the elevation of datavisualisation to a near-fetish over the course of the past ten years or so, and that the increased interest in the skill (and its evolution thanks to evolutions in digital design and interactivity) has seen the quality of work in the field improve significantly. This link takes you to this year’s crop of nominees for the annual BEST DATAVIZ IN THE WORLD prize, and as you’d expect there are some wonderful and very smart examples. Personally speaking I find the almost-calligraphic design of this example particularly pleasing, but you will doubtless find your own favourites.
Spy Balloon Simulator: Were you disappointed that it wasn’t space aliens? I confess to being a little let down by the fact that we weren’t being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences (although maybe, just maybe…), but found some solace in this website which lets anyone who might want to simulate the flight of a massive spy balloon do exactly that. Turns out that getting a balloon to end up where you want it to is…hard, frankly – but if you’d like to track some actual, real-life amateur high-altitude balloon launches (and, frankly, who doesn’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then you can also do so here. Web Curios – topical, thrilling, balloon-related content, right in your inbox. Do you get this from those cnuts on Substack? Do you fcuk.
Verdant Futures: This made me very happy – I don’t quite know what to do with it, but I am glad that this exists and wanted to share it with you. As far as I can tell, Verdant Futures is a small collective of people based in the South West who are running a bunch of interconnected businesses and community initiatives centred around books and literature. “Verdant Futures is a Social Enterprise – an organisation that applies commercial strategies to improve peoples’ financial, social and environmental well-being. It is also a hybrid digital and physical business – a must have in today’s connected world. We sell our goods online around the world, using re-commerce strategies, while also giving our customers a high-quality retail experience through our shops and services.” So they fund their projects to rescue books through the British Book Rescue Scheme through other initiatives like selling books by the yard, they run charitable projects…this seems like an incontrovertibly Good Thing, frankly, and should any of you be based in the South West (Bath, specifically), perhaps it’s something you might be interested in getting involved in?
Formula Generator: You may not think that all this newfangled AI stuff is for you; you may have no truck with the idea of making machines imagine Boschean horrors, or making them compose villanelles about honey-roast ham. This, though, this is PRACTICAL, it is USEFUL and if you’re still struggling to think of ways in which all this natural language AI stuff is going to change the world then maybe it will help you understand in some small way. This is a plugin for Google Sheets which lets you ask it, in normal people words, to create formulas for anything you like – AND THEN IT DOES IT! “I want to multiply all those things in that column (but not the ones that are Prime Numbers) by all the things in that row over there” – stuff like that. I am sure that for those of you who are less cack-handed with the spreadsheets than I am this won’t be quite as magical, but it’s less about that and more about what this shows in terms of use-cases. MAGIC, I TELL YOU.
AIBert: This is an interesting idea, though I am unsure as to whether anyone will want or like it enough to shell out for a monthly fee. AIBert is basically ‘all the AI gubbins, in WhatsApp’ – you add it as a contact and you can use it either as ChatGPT or as Midjourney, sending it prompts and getting results in return. Which, fine, is literally just a bundling exercise and you could do exactly the same without paying by just using two separate services rather than one, but where’s the fun in that? I wonder how long this will keep working before its API access gets throttled or all the bits of string holding it together start to erode, but I am impressed with the entrepreneurial chutzpah involved in cobbling it together. Lol at the idea that someone would pay $27 a month, though.
Memo: I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but when I went to international school at 15 I was suddenly surrounded by wealthy people who had largely been the product of an international education, meaning that they all spoke that very specific and peculiar brand of teenage English that you can only learn by spending your entire childhood speaking the language with non-native speakers whilst at the same time being taught almost exclusively by North Americans and consuming North American, and which basically means that everyone sounds like a super-successful Swedish music producer but with the vocabulary of a wannabe valleygirl (it was 1995, after all). Anyway, that’s by way of not-particularly-illuminating intro to Memo, a language learning app which promises to teach you the tongue of your choice via the medium of memes and YouTube videos – you listen and are asked to repeat phrases from pop culture, TV, films, sports, memetic hits of yesteryear…I am not 100% certain exactly how useful it will be to you to be able to say “Damn Daniel, back again with the X” in French, but, well, maybe it will be the breakthrough you need. Also from what I can tell there’s no suggestion that this app features an appallingly-horny cartoon owl as its mascot, so perhaps that detail will swing it for you.
Eel Rents: So it turns out that between the 10th and 17th Centuries in the UK, property owners would on occasion charge rent in eels. As in, you (the tenant) would be required to pay a fixed sum of serpentine sea creatures to your landlord in exchange for continued use of the property. I have MANY QUESTIONS – did the eels need to be delivered alive? Were they all delivered on one day – EEL DAY! – or were they handed over as and when they showed up? Was there some sort of minimum quality or size threshold that needed to be reached for the eels to be considered viable? Sadly this website doesn’t tell you any of that, but it does confirm that Geoffrey de Mandeville of Chippenham received 1500 of the things in 1086 and for that we can ALL be grateful. Via the wonderful Blort, this one.
Lucy Ives: Absolutely one of the best-designed personal portfolio homepages I have seen in ages, Lucy Ives is a writer of novels and short stories and essays, and this site collects various writings and information on her books and, honestly, I fcuking LOVE the way this looks and is laid out; like a series of oldschool Macintosh dialogue boxes (but, er, loads better than that, honest).
Experiments in AI Video: A short Twitter thread showing off some of the work people have been doing using Runway ML, the AI-powered video editing tool I featured in here…last week? Christ, I have no concept of time anymore. Anyway, these are quite amazing – shonky, fine, but also astonishing when you take a moment to think of how good this is going to get in 12 months. The bits where the software takes an assembly of cardboard boxes and turns it into a cityscape with various building styles applied is…honestly, just astonishing.
Soft White Underbelly: Soft White Underbelly is a YouTube channel featuring “interviews and portraits of the human condition by photographer Mark Laita”, and whilst you might not be interested in every single subject on display here there is a staggering breadth and range of people who Laita has spoken with and whose stories he shares here. From bounty hunters to former drug addicts, a trans child and their father to people who spend their lives hopping freight trains across the US, these are beautifully shot and generally (from the handful I’ve seen at least) sensitively handled and pleasingly-unsensationalist. If nothing else it’s an interesting look at how to apply a very specific style and tone to a video series (but, also, there are some FASCINATING people on here).
Togetherdraw: Collaborative drawing on an infinite scrolling canvas – every simultaneous visitor to this URL gets the opportunity to scrawl and draw to their heart’s content, with the caveat that the canvas on which you draw is slowly and inexorably vanishing at the top of the screen. Pleasingly ephemeral, and there’s something particularly nice about the ‘feel’ of the brushes here (try it, I promise you’ll see what I mean). Also, on the couple of occasions I’ve tried this when someone else has been online, all the strangers have been pleasant and I haven’t seen anyone write anything horrible. Which, I appreciate, shouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy, but we are where we are.
Date Your Cat: This is too soon for me (RIP Bowsks), but if you’ve ever wanted to go on a slightly-surreal and conversationally-unsatisfying ‘date’ with a CG animated cat, whose ‘personality’ is powered by some sort of rudimentary text AI then HERE YOU GO! This is funny, in a slightly-shonky way, but I also worry that we’re about to enter an era in which every single brand with a ‘personality’ feels the need to create a similar interactive avatar as the natural language guide to their website, like a sort of Clippy on neuroenhancing drugs, and it will be horrid. Or brilliant, it’s very hard to tell anymore.
WTTR: I don’t know why I find this super-minimalist weather website thing so appealing, but I do. Add the name of anywhere you like after the slash to receive ASCII-ish weather predictions for the coming week; not only is this really nicely done (lightweight code, clear graphics, etc) but it is also 100% faster and more user friendly than any of the useless fcuking weather services that my sh1tty phone insists on defaulting to, so MANY THUMBS UP to this, it is great.
Wood Wide Web: I LOVE THIS. “As part of the Poetry Games exhibition at the National Poetry Library, Playing Poetry and Phoenix Cinema & Art Centre launched a commission to invite two artists to explore the intersection of poetic writing and game-making. Artists Mariana Marangoni and Rianna Suen collaborated over the course of two months, developing a joint practice looking at digital literacy, online communities and ecopoetics…Out of the commission, Marangoni and Suen, along with sound designer Mikey Parsons, developed a new game affectionally called Wood Wide Web. Part idyllic walking sim, part cottage-commodore-core pixel art generator, Wood Wide Web invites the player to tend to a digital world, planting seeds by writing poetic texts, which grow into trees and in turn spread to become entire forests.” Honestly, this is so beautiful and pure – just wander round and play with it, type away and see what your words become, enjoy the clues and the mystery.
Mr Global 2023: You may have enjoyed the BAFTAs (also, if you’ve not read it, this is a superb bit of writing by Stuart Heritage on That Moment); you may be waiting for the Oscars. Know, however, that thebiggest day of awards season has already been and gone, with the annual Mr Global male beauty pageant – BUT FEAR NOT BECAUSE HERE ARE THE PHOTOS! As per every year, My Global requires participants to wear ‘typical national dress’ of their nation as one part of the pageantry, and once again the costumes do not disappoint. Come for the deep-as-the-Marianas-Trench eyes and the smouldering gazes; stay for the frankly insane spectacle of genuinely beautiful men wearing genuinely appalling outfits. WHY IS BELGIUM A GIMPWOLF? WHY IS CHILE COSPLAYING AS ELSA FROM FROZEN? WHY ARE THE COMPETITION ORGANISERS INCAPABLE OF SPELLING ‘THE NETHERLANDS’ CORRECTLY? So many questions, none of which will likely be answered by this link – still, these are VERY BEAUTIFUL BOYS, so enjoy their cheekbones (and, honestly, pity the poor guy from the Philippines who you feel must have been mercilessly ribbed by everyone else because…oh God, seriously, just click the link and GAWP). Also, hang on, WHY IS THERE NO MR UK? OR MR ITALY? Should anyone from Mr Global chance upon this, know that I am available next year and can probably fill both roles for the price of one. A
AI Taboo: A fun little game – can you force the AI into saying specific words based on the questions you ask it? Very easy at the lowest difficulty, but troublingly-impossible (for me at least) when you whack it up to ‘hard’ (YOU try getting GPT to say ‘paucity’, go on).
Clickwords: Finally this week, I know that you all probably have your morning word game routines worked out by now, but let me present this new variant for your consideration – I promise it has fcuk all to do with Wordle (other than the fact that you get a new puzzle each day). Instead, the setup is a bit like Scrabble; you’re given a board with a selection of letters already placed on it, and over the course of the game you’re given 60 tiles, three at a time, with which to form words on the small board and score as many points as possible. Simple but surprisingly deep when you get into it, this is annoyingly addictive and has added an additional 10 minutes to my daily ‘time it takes Matt to stop fcuking around on the web and do some actual, paid work’ (currently standing at 130 minutes, fact fans).

By Sukhy Hullait

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS CRACKING SELECTION OF AMBIENT AND DISCO AND FUNK AND ALL-ROUND ECLECTICISM BY STELLA Z!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Daily Wiki: A new Wikipedia entry linked to each day. No idea who by, no idea on what basis, no idea what for. Does there need to be a reason? THERE DOES NOT!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

CreepMart: Another ‘we’ve found an interesting vector in latent space, now let’s mine the fcuk out of it!’ AI art account, this time exploring the interesting world of imaginary kids toys from a sinister, machine-imagined past. Again, these appeal to me less because of the details on the individual images (although some of them are very good) and more because of the aesthetic space they all inhabit.
All Things Fungi: Because who doesn’t love a little bit of mycology? NO FCUKER, etc!
Lil Hugy: Sent to me by my friend Gill, with the line ‘This person should be Adidas’ creative director’ and, well, she’s right. I don’t know who Hugy is, or why they are, or what the significance of a person in a vinyl bear’s head wearing streetwear might be, but this ‘goes hard’ as I believe the kids say (don’t worry, I am cringing even more than you are at that last line; I am going to leave it intact, though, because otherwise I will never learn).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

How To Do Things With Deepfakes: It feels like the panic around Deepfakes has been rather done the wrong way round – hugely overblow when it first appeared with the initial, rudimentary faceswapping tech 3-4 years ago and (to my mind at least) really not overblown enough now. This link is to an academic paper which explores some of the practical, adversarial ways deepfakes might be used – but, honestly, you don’t need to rely on theory. Here’s an article from just this morning outlining how ElevenLabs speech-spoofing tech can bypass voice recognition controls within the Lloyds Bank app! Here is a video shared by an actual real-life politician in Kenya which features a faked Joe Biden decrying the evils of sodomy! And here’s a video about the process of making an AI clone of oneself (video and voice)! Between this and the deepfake bongo stuff I featured in here last week, it feels we’re on the cusp of something of a deluge of this type of thing, and, as per, it doesn’t 100% feel like we’re necessarily prepared for it.

How Not To Test GPT3: Or ‘here are some examples that should go some small way to reassuring you that The Machine is not yet capable of anything we would conceive of as ‘thought’’, which is also a sentence I wish it wasn’t necessary to write (seriously, I reiterate my prediction that there will be at least one reasonably-vocal ‘Church of the AI God’ set up by the end of 2024 – again, though, please feel free to scrub this prediction from your memories when it turns out to be total b0llocks). What I find particularly interesting about this – and potentially a little troubling – is the extent to which the software’s ability to spoof this sort of thinking will be boosted by its future ingestion of people talking about exactly how it currently doesn’t actually ‘think’; I am genuinely fascinated by the weird, recursive rabbitholes of training data that we’re almost certainly about to start heading down.

The AI Bubble of 2023: I thought this piece – which is written very much from the point of view of an investor, and is very much not the sort of thing I usually feature in here – was a useful summary guide to some of the things it’s worth looking out for in the first wave of massive AI hype we’re currently going through. This is all generally good advice, and I particularly liked the overall point about how it is is entirely possible and indeed legitimate to simultaneously believe that this is a genuinely transformative technology AND that it is being massively oversold and overvalued, and there are also some decent points here which you might want to apply should you be interested in riding the AI hypewave for fame, fun or financial gain (the most important of which is ‘there is a window during which people will pay attention to anything with ‘AI’ in the title, and that window is slowly closing’).

AI and the Law: You will doubtless have seen cuddly Magic Circle law vampires Allen & Overy announcing that they were introducing AI into their workflow; you may not have noticed that equally-morally-upstanding litigators Mishcon are currently advertising for a prompt engineer (“Tell me you’re not in any way serious about this without telling me you’re not in any way serious about this”) – either way, the law appears to be embracing AI in a big way. This piece in WIRED looks at What That Might Mean – it’s generally positive, explaining the use cases and some of the practical guardrails that firms are putting in place to lesson some of the more hallucinatory imaginings of The Machine – what it doesn’t address at all, though, is a question I’m increasingly interested in around the potential unintended consequences of this sort of stuff. I remember YEARS ago reading something about the potential for machine learning in the knowledge economy which specifically referenced the ability of AI to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of reading and collating information, and doing research into case law, etc, that was traditionally the purview of legal juniors and paralegals, and which asked the question ‘if young lawyers no longer need to spend time immersing themselves in the materials of the profession as part of their training, because instead of finding their own examples or precedents they can just ask a machine to sort through 3million legal documents in 0.17s, what knowledge are they potentially failing to acquire which they will find they really miss later in their careers?’. Obviously the answer to this is basically a giant shrug emoji – muchlike everything else in the field of AI right now – but I do wonder at what point we’re going to start thinking about this stuff more seriously than we currently seem to be.

Do Not Get The Machine To Plan Your Workout: I predicted a few months back that we were going to see at least one instance of someone being horrifically injured as a result of attempting to follow an exercise regimen invented by GPT – OK, so that hasn’t quite come to pass, but this article suggests that I am 100% right and that anyone seeking to get a workout designed for them by AI should probably factor in a lengthy spell in A&E as part of their recovery time. There was a point here where I legitimately winced – I think it was the idea of ‘kettlebell windmills’, and what that might do to a person’s rotator cuff – and I am still confident that we’re on track for someone seeking to sue OpenAI for GPT-directed injuries before the year’s out.

The AI Bongo Is Coming: This is a more interesting article than my title makes it sound (so why did you write it like that. Matt, you fcuking moron? Jesus) – the piece interviews a bunch of current adult content creators working on OnlyFans about their attitudes towards the (seemingly inevitable) tide of AI-generated bongo that’s coming our way, and the different attitudes towards it from different niches of the creator community. Personally I found quite a lot of this touchingly naive – the idea that there is some sort of uniquely human collection which can be fostered between a busy cam performer and the marks parasocialising with them which can’t be adequately replicated by a decent chatbot seems…unlikely, frankly, but I guess they know the business better than I do. What was particularly noteworthy was that literally none of the people interviewed had any doubts that this was on its way – they differed only on how they imagined the shift would manifest itself.

Please Acknowledge The D1ck: Or, ‘Inside a Catfishing Factory’, a company which exists to keep lonely old men (it is, as far as I can tell, exclusively lonely old men) texting with imaginary pulchritudinous young women for ever and ever and ever – the men find the ‘girls’ through exactly the sort of scammy adverts you’d imagine, and, once reeled in, pay a per-message fee to correspond with the beautiful and strangely-eager woman of their dreams. Except – and be warned, this may shock you – the girls aren’t what they appear, and the people they are texting are not in fact the nubile-yet-oddly-demure girls in the pictures but instead a rotating cast of low-wage pieceworkers who are employed to keep the marks interested and engaged while the text fees rack up. This is obviously heartbreaking on some level – although, equally, I am silently cheering on the old men who are abandoned in homes by uncaring relatives and are slowly burning through their kids’ inheritance at the rate of one smutty SMS at a time), but I also thought it an interesting companion piece to the last one about AI bongo – this seems to me exactly the sort of service that could effectively be replicated with a lightly-trained GPT model, which rather makes me think that the parasocial layer which keeps the mooks returning might be a bit easier to dehumanise than some of the performers currently believe.

Songwriters Are Broke: This was news to me, but on reflection is perhaps unsurprising – turns out that songwriters are the latest niche industry tro find that the bottom has rather fallen out of the market. An interesting piece in Rolling Stone which looks at how the metrics have shifted over the course of the past few years, and how even a single writers credit on a big-name artist’s album track won’t keep the wolf from the door anymore. Annoyingly there’s a lack of focus on the ‘why’ behind this, but it’s hard to see beyond a combination of shifting revenue models and an overabundance of supply being two of the major driving factors; which, and I’m sorry to say this, doesn’t make me feel super confident about the long-term future of music as a viable commercial career in a world in which the models are only going to get more stretched and the supply issue is about to explode.

RIP WC: I can confidently say that I have never featured an article from The Beauty of Transport in here, nor indeed have I ever written anything extolling the beauty of old train station toilets. Well, there’s a first time for everything – I promise you that this is LOADS more interesting than you’d think a piece about, er, old urinals in British train stations ought to be, and it features a bunch of gorgeous photographs of some beautifully-designed pissoirs, and it’s more generally interesting as a meditation on how we might think about preserving these sorts of architectural and design oddities, and why this doesn’t happen more often. I PROMISE YOU THIS IS GOOD, I PROMISE.

Guiliani: The first of two London Review of Books articles this week; this one is a wonderful review of a new biography of Rudy Giuliani, a man who is now just a rather sad punchline to a tired joke (which wasn’t hugely funny in the first place), but who in the 1990s was genuinely seen as something of a visionary, the man who turned New York from a place that was perceived as a hotbed of violent criminality into the world’s number one city by the end of the decade. Fine, so a lot of the policies that he enacted to achieve that transformation were…a touch illiberal and arguably quite racist, and his monomaniacal focus on crime meant that large swathes of the rest of the city’s administration were comparatively neglected, but, well, omelettes and eggs, right? This contains some frankly staggering anecdotes, including one that will make you revise the whole ‘Phil Collins chucking his wife by fax is the worst dumping story EVER’ narrative in your head (also, justice for Phil as that story isn’t in fact true anyway).

Illegal Gold Mining In South Africa: Thanks to Michael for sending this my way – this is an astonishing story, not only really well-written but full of bits that will make you pause and shake your head and mutter “hang on, WHAT?” to yourself – I mean, just take this short passage as an example: “In 2015, Simon entered the mines by paying a thousand dollars to a local syndicate boss, known as David One Eye, who allowed him to walk into the tunnels via an inclined shaft just south of Welkom. One Eye, a former zama-zama himself, had risen from obscurity to become one of the most fearsome figures in the region. He was powerfully built from lifting weights, and he had lost his left eye in a shooting. The syndicate would charge Simon more than twice as much to exit the mines. He remained underground for almost a year, subsisting on food provided by One Eye’s runners. He came away with too little money, so he went into the mines again, paying the same syndicate to lower him with a rope. He became accustomed to life underground: the heat, the dust, the darkness. He planned to remain there until he was no longer poor, but in the end he came out because he was starving.” A YEAR?! A YEAR LIVING UNDERGROUND IN AN ILLEGAL GOLDMINE?? This, honestly, is full of bits like this – the South African mining community doesn’t come out of this particularly well, it’s fair to say (you know who else comes from a South African mining family? You do, don’t you!).

Can You Ever Escape London?: The Fence magazine recently asked people what journalistic tropes they expected to be heartily sick of by the end of 2023, and a surprising number of people cited ‘articles about moving back to London’ – in deference to that, then, here’s the only piece of that ilk I will put in Curios this year (A PROMISE, unless, er, I forget, or someone writes something really brilliant). Clive Martin, who moved to Somerset a few years ago, returns to the capital and shares his thoughts – I very much enjoy Clive’s writing and would basically read his shopping lists were it not a singularly-creepy way of displaying my appreciation, and this is no exception; it’s full of observations like this, which I particularly liked: “There was something else I noticed: the signage. London appears to be reaching peak Helvetica, with endless notices spelling out the machinations of the city in a cloyingly apologetic, faux-human tone that suggests either ChatGPT or a legion of disillusioned copywriters all working on the same brief. At the Waterloo branch of Foyles – always a nice respite from commuter chaos – there was a refurbishment notice. But instead of it reading simply, “This shop is closed for planned renovations”, it read, “We know shutting up shop isn’t ideal, but we’ll be back soon, new and improved”. Small beer, perhaps, but the language felt very HR, like London was about to call me upstairs and slide a P45 across the desk.”

The Care Crisis: This is long, serious and pretty much the opposite of cheerful – it’s also very well written and very well argued, and is this week’s second LRB article. Here, James Butler reviews three recent books on the current care crisis in the UK, and through so doing presents a (frankly miserable) picture of where the country is and how it got here.You will either know about all of this stuff already as a result of personal circumstances (and in which case, solidarity), or you won’t but you will probably know deep down that you are going to need to get your head around it soonish because, well, this is all of our futures. It’s impossible to read this without thinking, variously, a) the systems that govern pay and remuneration are broken; b) there are some areas on life where it is not possible for the private sector to play a positive and ameliorative role; and c) I really, really hope that the care robots get invented soon, because otherwise I am 100% topping myself when I start to get a bit wobbly.

For The Love Of Losing: A brilliant piece of writing by Marina Benjamin in Granta, about her stint as a card-counting pro-gambler and the way in which we think of luck and loss, and how sometimes the losing is the point. There’s a very specific oddity to those who gamble very seriously (whether as professionals or as people with a very expensive hobby) which this piece captures perfectly – I remember being on a train back from Oxford one weekend and spending the entire journey transfixed by the conversation of the table full of professional contract bridge players in the same carriage as me, who, despite looking like a bunch of minor, unsympathetic characters in the novels of Jane Austen, were describing lives full of bacchanal and sauce, and whilst this doesn’t quite touch on any of that stuff it does manage to communicate that slightly…other-ish sense you tend to get from these types of people.

The Teacher Crush: This is very good indeed – Jessica L Pavia remembers her schoolgirl crush on a teacher, a crush that went unrequited and unacted upon but which even in its chaste recollection opens questions of volition and complicity…I really enjoyed this, partly because the prose is great but also because it didn’t quite go in the directions I expected of it.

Tiddler: A very short story by Charlie Gilmour, about childhood and sibling-ness, which is practically-perfectly-formed.

I Should Have Left Him Then: The final longread of the week is this not-particularly-long piece of short nonfiction by Hayli Cox, about the realisation that you should leave someone and that in fact you should have done it a long time ago. There’s a formal ‘thing’ that this does which I very much enjoyed, moreso than I expected, and which I felt made the whole thing feel personal to the reader in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise – see what you think.

By Jesse Homer French

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

First up this week, a trailer for a forthcoming videogame. I know, I know, many of you don’t care about videogames – WELL YOU WILL CARE ABOUT THIS ONE IT IS ABOUT JESUS! Yes, that’s right, coming ‘soon’ is “I Am Jesus Christ”, in which you, the player, step into the, er, sandals of the titular Son of God and live through some of his greatest hits – the water into wine, the temptation in the desert, the, er, fishing minigame, the healing of the sick, the last supper (“Press ‘E’ to bless the Eucharist!”) and, presumably, some sort of climactic final showdown on Judgement Day when you and Lucifer finally go mano-a-mano. Honestly, this is almost certainly going to be very, very bad indeed, but tell me you’re not curious to try it out.

ANOTHER videogame trailer – wait, hang on, this looks great and I promise you that even if you don’t ordinarily engage with this stuff that you will find this curious and compelling-looking. “What if Lemmings, but with actual human beings?” is the basic premise, and, honestly, this looks MENTAL.

This track is by Fidlar, it’s called ‘Centipede’, and this is basically the closest thing you will get today to a time machine back to 1994 (I am not joking, this is uncanny).

I don’t think that there are enough music videos which take as their central creative concept the horror that is ‘the advermarketingpr presentation’ – which is why this, the video for Outer Banks by Tanlines, pleased me so much (also the song reminded me oddly of Talking Heads crossed with Coldplay, which I appreciate isn’t necessarily a recommendation but which I felt worth mentioning). I promise you that you will feel a small thrill and then a very real sensation of creeping guilty horror the first time you see a slide pop up that is basically one of your go-to favourites.

This, by contrast, is a lovely song in search of a proper video – regardless, though, I love the vocal here which is vaguely reminiscent (to my mind) of Weyes Blood and Aldous Harding; it’s called Dawncoloured Horse and it’s performed by Fenne Lily.

Superb little bit of hiphop here, by Zulu, which I feel really ought to have more than 13k views. This is called ‘We’re More Than This’.

A GREAT bit of angry shouty guitar music now – this is Kid Capiche with ‘Smash The Gaff’, and if you’re not mouthing along to “I’m happy, so happy, so glad my, mum had me” by the second chorus then you’re no friend of mine (no please come back I need as many friends as I can get).

The week’s final song and video is this, ‘Nice Idea’ by Kae Tempest – I’ve not been a massive fan of their recent musical output, but this is a cracking little bit of verse’n’drum’n’bass with some superb writing and killer lines and it feels like a suitable place to say thanks for reading and I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 17/02/23

February 17, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 34 minutes

I can’t help but feel a slight sense of disappointment at the fact that we haven’t, it turns out, been visited by extraterrestrial forces beyond our ken (or, if we have, we’re as ignorant of it as ever) – mainly because I was quite looking forward to the inevitable pitched battles between the inevitable Cult of the UFO and the growing Cult of the AI to determine which was the TRUE SAVIOUR and which the FALSE GOD.

Anyway, as you all doubtless know, that is a false dichotomy – there is only one true saviour, and it is Web Curios, delivered via your weekly linky sacrament.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably confess.

By Geoff McFetridge

WE SOUNDTRACK THE INITIAL SECTIONS OF THIS WEEK’S WEB CURIOS WITH THIS WONDERFUL TWO-HOUR SELECTION OF BEATS BY J-DILLA!

THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.1:

Checking In On Bing: Oh Microsoft! Oh no! Despite previous experience in the field of ‘letting a chat interface out of the box before it was quite ready’ (Tay, how quickly we forgot you!), it seems that, once again, the world’s least-charismatic software company has dropped something of a ricket by giving people access to its GPT-juiced new version of the Bing search engine without ensuring it wasn’t going to go…a bit rogue. The first link here takes you to the ‘Bing’ subReddit which is just PACKED with wonderful examples of users having…esoteric and occasionally-hallucinatory interactions with the software. From attempting to convince you that you’ve engaged in time travel when you try and look up screening times for Avatar 2, to making up product details in order to persuade you to make a purchase, to flat-out denying facts about itself when presented with them , to, er, threatening harm to users in what is quite honestly a moderately-chilling tone…this is all GREAT stuff and not a little amusing, as long as you don’t bother thinking too hard about the company’s readiness to open up a transformative new product to public use without doing anywhere near the necessary quantity of tests and checks to ensure that it isn’t going to, I don’t know, recommend that people gargle bleach or something. Microsoft’s issued a statement acknowledging the issues, but the company doesn’t seem overly concerned about the potential damage that this might do to public confidence in the idea of AI-augmented information retrieval – all publicity’s good publicity, right? Hm. I think my favourite reaction to all this has been from the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, who one short week ago penned a glowing endorsement of The New Bing and who happily claimed that Google was going to have to win back his custom and who now, after having used the product for longer than 10 minutes, is reporting that the search engine tried to get him to leave his wife and left him ‘deeply unsettled’. Now, I say this as someone who is writing in his pants to an audience of literally dozens, but, well, to me that sort of radical 180 rather suggests that Kev didn’t necessarily do his due diligence in his first writeup, and is perhaps emblematic of the sort of breathless, seal-like clapping that greets stuff like this from certain sections of the tech press which one might reasonably argue is the root of many of our current problems with tech and society. Anyway, this is all fun and games and lol, but it won’t stop the move towards AI integration with search and it won’t stop a whole bunch of industries being turned on their heads as a result – this stuff does feel like it could be transformatively significant in the next few years, particularly if you’re old enough to be able to remember exactly how much Google changed things 25 or so years ago.

AI Radio: After the UNFETTERED (if temporary) JOY that was Infinite AI Seinfeld, we have a whole new frontier in the exciting world of machine-generated content to explore. AI Radio is a podcast – it’s only two episodes in at the moment – made by Bemmu and a variety of AI tools, and it’s pretty remarkable. The copy is (I presume – details about the exact ‘how’ are a touch iffy) generated by GPT and then fed through a text-to-speech program – what’s remarkable is how…natural it sounds. I mean, look, you’re unlikely to be fooled into thinking this is actual people if you listen closely for a few minutes, but, equally, the audio quality is good enough that it doesn’t immediately scream ‘THIS IS FAKE’, and the discussion, whilst rambling and a bit non sequitur-ish is also, frankly not significantly less interesting or sensical than the in-studio ‘banter’ you’d get between a radio host and the team of braying sycophants they call ‘production staff’. To quote the ‘about’ bit, this is a “Radio show hosted by a dynamic duo of two AI entities, Adam and Bella, who discuss everything from current events to pop culture. They are even able to answer listener questions and cover topics or reddit posts of your choice. You can send suggestions to the /r/airadio subreddit, or by email to me+ai@bemmu.com — Current features of the software running this: – Can invent news, or cover them based on title, and interview fake experts. – Can talk about topics it finds on Reddit or Hacker News. – Can answer listener questions, or invent some if there aren’t any. These segments were made up by AI. Sometimes they get to pretty questionable territory, beware!” It feels a little bit like we’re on the cusp of one of these AI-led creative endeavours properly taking off; one of these is going to end up mining a particular weird sweetspot and I think you will quickly see a boom in this sort of thing. But, er, don’t quote me on that in case I’m as wrong about it as I tend to be about everything else I try and predict.

The Buzzfeed Infinity Quizzes: Buzzfeed quizzes! God, it’s just like it’s 2011 all over again! Isn’t that ‘Friday’ song mad?! EXCEPT! Buzzfeed has, as promised, integrated AI into some of its quizzes to make them MORE INTERACTIVE – effectively the way this works is that you plug a bunch of keywords in as responses to prompts (“tell us the name of your crush!”, “tell us an activity you’d like to do together!”) and the backend runs it through what I presume is GPT and eventually spits out a personal story JUST FOR YOU, based on your responses. There are four quizzes which you can currently try out if you fancy having a slightly-retro online content experience, and…look, let’s be honest, this is sh1t isn’t it? The outputs (at least the couple of times I’ve tried) have been broadly nonsensical, full of dead ends and with no real sense of continuity, and it’s generally significantly less fun than one of those paper quadrant toy things that you used to make in primary school. Basically this is included in this week’s Curios as a CAUTIONARY TALE – just adding an AI layer onto something doesn’t make it good or interesting. Which, I suppose, is a criticism you could apply to recent editions of this newsletter, I concede, but at least I’m self-aware about it.

Infinite AI Dating: Another Twitch-based AI-generated TV show – OK, fine, ‘TV Show’ is a bit of a stretch, but it’s definitely VIDEO CONTENT, and doesn’t ‘TV Show’ sound less…well, sad? – which is being entirely created by a combination of text and text-to-speech tools alongside some basic character models. Created by Brighton-based agency RamJam, this channel features two characters having an infinite series of ‘bad dates’ – basically a pair of people having a series of unsatisfying date-type interactions in what sounds like a slightly-empty restaurants. This is, muchlike the AI Seinfeld, nonsensical and not exactly ‘funny’, or even particularly interesting if you listen closely to what they are saying, but at the same time there really is something oddly and inexplicably compelling about the freewheeling conversation – perhaps it’s the fact that by human standards it’s almost entirely unpredictable, and there’s a certain morbid attraction in seeing where the chat is going to meander next. Oh, and I can’t pretend that I don’t find the mere fact of a slightly-stilted machine-generated voice telling another slightly-stilted machine-generated voice about where to find the best sticky toffee pudding, and then getting almost angry about how much it likes sticky toffee pudding, weirdly funny. You know how, famously, it’s easy to fall into a TikTok hole and end up watching approximately three hours of videos and then be completely incapable of telling anyone why you were compelled to do so, or even what any of the videos were about in the first place? Well this is like that, except it makes even less sense. I do worry that this stuff may end up being our species’ Infinite Jest moment, you know.

Cinebot: Seeing as we’re doing AI-generated content – here, have a newsletter! Cinebot is, as far as I can tell, a newsletter which is ‘reviewing’ a canonical list of the 100 greatest films as chosen by…someone or other, except of course the reviews are penned by GPT3 because a) it’s 2023 and it is the law that everything must involve AI in some capacity or another; and b) because human beings no longer have anything more to say about 20th century cinema (that’s certainly what it feels like ,in any case). All the films reviewed so far are scifi, and the machine is obviously being instructed to review them as though from the point of view of a robot, or machine intelligence, in each case, which occasionally makes for some halfway-interesting observations, but my main takeaway from this is that whilst AI-generated dialogue can be odd enough to create diverting little vignettes, ‘straight’ writing’s just a bit…hollow.

AI For UI: We’re only scratching the surface of AI-assisted design and build work, and we won’t really start to see the effects at scale until these tools start to become integrated into the big, mainstream software packages, but this service, called Galileo and currently letting users sign up for early access, is an excellent example of the sorts of things you’ll shortly be able to do with minimal effort. ‘Design me a signup page for an app which collects name, email and phone number’; ‘Create the UI for a mobile-first website designed to allow people to leave anonymous feedback about their neighbours’ interior design choices’, that sort of thing – oh, and of course it will knock up the copy for the app/website too, because why not. Oh, and there’s this one too, which does much the same sort of thing – or promises to, at least. I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer speed and scale at which this stuff is emerging, but use cases like this strike me as…broadly benign? Unless of course you’re someone in the second world scraping a living by doing super-low-level digital design work of this sort via Fiverr or Upwork, in which case actually it probably isn’t benign at all on reflection. Damnation.

The Dollar Street Dataset: Do you remember a few years ago when there was a brief flurry of companies getting a small PR boost by taking steps to address stereotypes in media through the release of stock photography libraries that reflected the more diverse and inclusive world in which we now happily live? OF COURSE YOU DO! Who could forget the transformative effect they had! Still, if you miss those halcyon days of easy comms wins, or if you missed the boat the first time around, FEAR NOT! You can do it ALL AGAIN with TRAINING DATA FOR AI!!! Ahem. Sorry, that was desperately cynical of me and, frankly, a bit unnecessary given the fact that this is a serious issue that does need addressing – the datasets that have been used to train the current generation of GAN and LLM are not perhaps as inclusive and diverse as they could be, and the project here linked to is a good example of someone attempting to do something about it. The Dollar Street Dataset is a spinoff of the long-running Dollar Street initiative, which seeks to visualise differential global incomes in a digestible and comprehensible way, and is “a collection of images of everyday household items from homes around the world that visually captures socioeconomic diversity of traditionally underrepresented populations. It consists of public domain data, licensed for academic, commercial and non-commercial usage, under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA 4.0. The dataset was developed because similar datasets lack socioeconomic metadata and are not representative of global diversity. It includes 38,479 images collected from 63 different countries, tagged from a set of 289 possible topics. Besides this, the metadata for each image includes demographic information such as region, country and total household monthly income, allowing for many different use cases, ultimately enhancing image datasets for computer vision.” This is a really important issue which it’s vital to think about – it’s also (sorry to say this) the sort of thing that certain companies and institutions could also parlay into some quite easy PR should they wish to replicate this across different fields / areas.

PathWai: I’ve had to do some PROFESSIONAL THINKING recently about THE FUTURE and WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN and whilst obviously I have no fcuking idea about either of those things (I have, if I’m honest, a singular inability to visualise anything about my own future, let alone any of YOURS) it took quite the effort not to get all frothy and excited about ALL OF THE TRANSFORMATIONS that we might be on the cusp of thanks to AI (but then again I’m one of those people who thought 3d printing was going to usher in a post-scarcity society, so, er, SKIPS FULL OF SALT is what I am saying here). PathwAI is a website which attempts to map some of the possible (likely?) developments in AI technology against a theoretical future timeline, and whilst a) the site’s a bit of a mess and it’s not the easiest to read; and b) the claims made about timings are obviously nothing other than that – claims and speculation, there’s a lot of interesting detail here about what might come post-GAN and post-LLM and what these potential milestones might practically mean. For the more practical among you, you might want to cross-reference this timeline with another of your choosing which outlines rising sea levels, just so you can track at exactly which point we’re going to need the machines to be smart, capable and humane enough to lift us from the waves.

GQ3: Remember NFTs? God, they were a THING, weren’t they? Amazingly, much as it feels like the whole period of ‘jpegs for plutes’ was just some sort of collective ayahuasca experience which left us all feeling empty and emotionally purged, it seems it really did happen – and some people are continuing to believe! Which, presumably, is why GQ has chosen early-2023 to launch its own NFT-enabled membership scheme, whereby YOU (yes, YOU!) can spend the princely sum of (at the time of writing) about £1300 to own an EXCLUSIVE JPEG and get access to a bunch of perhaps slightly-more-exclusive real-life stuff – so you’ll get an invitation to dinner along with some as-yet-nameless celebrities and GQ people, access to parties and events, a box of ‘curated GQ products’ and, er, a magazine subscription! Which is nice! Obviously I am making fun of this because, well, it’s NFTs and the artwork here is, even by the standards of the ‘scene’, risibly bad, but equally there is still a small part of me that doesn’t think that the idea of digital membership schemes like this, perhaps based on a degree of blockchain tokenisation, is a TOTALLY stupid idea, and so I’ll be interested to see whether this evolves into an actual thing or whether (as I think is perhaps more likely) noone at GQ EVER refers to this again after about Q2 2024.

Rare Threats: A subReddit collecting examples of people using particularly obscure, florid or baroque threats in conversation (“I will teach you that ‘fist’ is also a verb”, that sort of thing). Particularly inventive examples include “I am going to scrape the gums off your teeth and staple them to the back of your throat” (no, me neither), and the wonderfully-specific “I hope you eat a tortilla chip vertically”.

Oilshore: This is odd. As noticed by Ryan Broderick, Oilshore is aTikTok account in which a young woman posts videos purportedly about her life and job working for an oil company called Oilshore – the clips are fairly standard meme-y ‘what it’s like having a job’ and ‘things that give my colleagues the ick’-type things, but they equally all look like they are filmed in a cupboard rather than in an office, and, whilst the company has a name and a logo, its website is quite clearly not actually a real oil company’s website and is seemingly built on Wix or something, and digging around it appears that the girl in the videos ALSO appears in videos for this clothing brand, which styles itself as ‘an environmentally-conscious fashion retailer’, and basically all of my TRANSMEDIA MARKETING CAMPAIGN senses are tingling just like it’s the late-00s.

By Alex Prager

YOUR SECOND MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY TOM SPOONER AND IT COVERS FUNK, PUNK, JAZZ AND DISCO AND IT IS EXCELLENT WEEKEND FODDER!

THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.2:

Bondee: Another appwebsitegamething which will not be the metaverse but which offers some sort of vague directional nod about what that nebulous idea might one day coalesce into! Bondee is described by users as “Habbo meets MSN”, which if you’re about 5 years younger than me will probably scratch all sorts of Proustian itches – the idea is that the platform enables users to socialise in virtual space, with its (mostly young) users congregating there to socialise. “Bondee combines a nostalgic, early-2000s format with social-networking elements. Users’ digital avatars can socialize with each other on the home page — lounging in a chair, petting a cat, standing around — or leave their friends notes if they’re offline. Hop over to a friend’s virtual room, and the same can be done there. Beyond that, a player can engage in activities — from sailing the virtual ocean and collecting limited edition items to entering a private chat with a friend’s avatar and going “party mode” together.” – there’s nothing about this that is unique per se, but it’s an interesting alternative to the Roblox hegemony when it comes to young people and virtual worlds. This probably isn’t for you – although, you know, I’m not judging, much, probably – but it might be worth being aware of if you’ve either got kids, or if you’re just generally interested in how ‘digital third spaces’ (if you’ll allow me) are evolving.
Lighthouse: So obviously The Metaverse is going SWIMMINGLY – even the FT saw fit to give the concept a kicking yesterday, which honestly felt a bit like smacking a sad-eyed puppy at this point – and noone really believes that we’re all going to be hanging out in immersive digital environments together anytime soon, but, nonetheless, people are continuing to build stuff and play around with what the broad idea of ‘metaversality’ (this isn’t a word, I know, but allow me this brief moment of linguistic creativity) might mean, and now there is a way to explore some of those spaces yourself. Lighthouse is effectively trying to build a ‘search’ layer for whatever the metaverse currently is – as far as I can tell, this currently means that it acts as a sort of central directory / portal to a bunch of 3d experiences that various people have made and which you can access via the website, with the added ability to search for specific themes and features you might be particularly into and find ‘metaverses’ (honestly, even writing that word feels…wrong in 2023) that fit your needs. I have had a bit of a play around with this and it’s an interesting attempt to try and bring some order to an incredibly-fragmented ‘scene’ – you can get links to various different environments on various different platforms (Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, etc), and whilst they’re all…largely underwhelming tbh, or at least they are when accessed via my increasingly-emphysemic laptop, there are also far, far more of these things than I honestly expected and they do appear to be getting some use. Admittedly by a maximum of approximately three people at a time, but still. Basically this is a decent jumping off point if you’re after a vague ‘state of all this stuff’ overview, but it’s unlikely to convince you that you REALLY need to open an office in Decentraland anytime soon.
Monocle: Is AR ever really going to become a thing? Are we ever going to finally arrive at the weird and glorious future promised by videogames in which we have an always-on-heads-up-display which tells us everything we could possibly need to know about the world around us and even more besides? Fcuk knows, is the short answer, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone’s clamouring to have MORE information density applied to their field of vision at present, so maybe not anytime soon, Anyway, ignore my doomsaying – Monocle is a fun little piece of kit which combines a tiny, lightweight camera, an equally tiny,OLED display that lets you basically hack together any sort of simple Google Glass-type kit you can imagine, from the simple ‘show me my emails on a screen in my eyeline’ to more complex and weighty stuff like moving images and more complex data overlays and, ok, fine, this is HUGELY geeky and not a little techy, and frankly my ability to do anything with stuff like this begins and ends with this writeup, but if you’re a shed-tinkering inventor or the sort of person who just happens to own a soldering iron then you might find this an interesting and fun project to play around with.
Better On Paper: A simultaneously lovely and generous project, this – Better On Paper is a project which presents a bunch of digitised photographs, shot on film and made available for free printing should you like any of them. That’s literally it – here are some gorgeous photos taken in the now-antique analogue style, and if you like them and want to print them on high-quality paper then you can and they will be yours to keep forever. Not only is this just A Nice Thing To Do – thankyou, Korean photographer and artist and designer Seungmee Lee! – but it’s also something that feels very much like it could be appropriated for a campaign or just a bit of fan service for the right brand or organisation.
Underwater Photographer of the Year 2023: Fish! And crustacea, and single-cell aquatic organisms, and all sorts of other amazing and terrifying and frankly deeply sinister denizens of the wet, all captured here for your delectation. These will either make you sign up for diving lessons immediately, or alternatively you’ll never want to dip your head below the waterline ever again – although, honestly, how could you possibly be scared of the seas when they contain these adorable little guys? Just, er, ignore all the sharks.
The Revenant: It seems that over the past couple of decades we’ve switched from a situation where the concept of ‘running a marathon’ was something that most right-thinking people wouldn’t even countenance to one whereby literally every fcuker over the age of 30 seems to blitheley decide to ‘get into running’ and start collecting marathon medals as though they were parking tickets. As a result, ‘just’ doing marathons isn’t really that impressive anymore, and people are exploring increasingly extreme variations on the theme (I once worked with someone, briefly, whose ‘thing’ was doing the Marathon des Sables ‘for fun’, which is just fcuking insane) – if you’ve done the marathon, the ultramarathon, the hypermarathon, the back-to-back-hypermarathon, the insane US ‘backyard ultra’ and you’re still hungry for more, then maybe, just maybe, you’re ready for The Revenant. Taking place in New Zealand in January 2024, the Revenant is “around 200km & 16,000m-ish of vertical ascent. Unsupported individual or two person team Ultra Adventure Run. Map and compass only. No watches allowed. You have 60 hours to complete the challenge if you can tell the time.” So, to be clear, you’re running…what, 6 marathons, plus a 16k ascent, in 2.5 days? Yeah, sounds reasonable. I am…reasonably certain that the total number of people likely to read Web Curios AND be of suitable physical and psychological stock to complete a challenge like this is literally zero, but I would love one of you to prove me wrong.
Melodice: This is a lovely idea – Melodice is a website which provides music to soundtrack your boardgaming. Select your game of choice from the (incredibly comprehensive) dropdown list and get playlist of musical accompaniments designed to heighten your experience and add ATMOSPHERE and TENSION. I have no idea whatsoever why their selected choice of music to accompany a game of Monopoly would be the music to SimCity3000, but, weirdly, I think it sort of fits.
Better Search: Seeing as Google and Bing seem hell-bent on ‘improving’ their products with the introduction of unasked for AI gubbins, you might want to find alternative portals to use. This is a very simple search tool which lets you run searches against 4 websites and 4 websites only – Reddit, Twitter, Stack Overflow and Github – and which allows you to specify the content type you want to source (pdf, ppt. Zip. docx) as well as a date range for the search; obviously you can do all this with Google, but it requires you to remember the search string commands and this is basically just easy and quick and if nothing else it’s worth bookmarking this as your go-to Reddit search engine because, honestly, everyone needs one of those.
Mathijs Hanenkamp: This is the portfolio site of Dutch photographer Mathijs Hanenkamp – his photography is excellent, but I’m featuring this because I genuinely adore the way his site is designed and the UI and UX and the general look and feel of the whole thing is, to my mind, just about perfect and such a wonderful way of displaying his work.
Welcome To My Home: Not *my* home, you understand, but the digital, online ‘home’ of Phoemela Ballaran, which is a small digital space featuring some poems, some music, a collection of images of stones Phoemela has collected and some stories associated with them, and a link to her ‘garden’ where anyone can leave her a message…this is lovely, a gorgeous, homespun corner of personal web, carved out of the ether, and the older I get the more I think everyone should have something like this somewhere that just…exists in digital space as a refuge or home for its maker. Which, I appreciate, is possibly a BIT w4nky, but, well, it’s my blognewslettertypething and I’ll be w4nky if I want to.
McCheapest: This is interesting. As you will all doubtless know, the Economist has for years been using the McDonald’s Big Mac as a global price tracker, with the relative price of the uniform product in various countries worldwide being used as a proxy measure of economic performance and relative wealth; I didn’t, however, realise that the price of the sandwich varies wildly within the US, until I found this website which tracks the price across North America and records the differentiation. I was slightly surprised to see that the most expensive Big Mac (a whopping $8.09) was in Massachusetts rather than New York or LA, whereas the cheapskates among you should get to Oklahoma where you can ‘enjoy’ your meal for a mere $3.49.
The Owl Job: This is really interesting – The Owl Job is a set of instructions and directions on how to set up your own sightless escape room (that is, an escape room suitable to be played by the visually impaired), which I appreciate isn’t something I imagine that many of you are going to be minded to get involved with but which are a surprisingly interesting series of ways of thinking about design and interactivity for a wide and diverse audience which may be of use even if you’re not planning on turning your living room into a playcentre for the RNIB.
All The Excel Formulas: Look, I appreciate that this is very much on the ‘;boring and functional’ end of the link spectrum, but while we wait for AI to automate the tedious (and, frankly, borderline-incomprehensible) stuff like pivot tables and the like it might be useful to have this master list of Excel formulas to hand. Maybe.
Special Flushing Waterfront: Take a lightly-interactive tour along Flushing Creek, a waterway that flows northward through the borough of Queens in New York City. This is “an interactive virtual walking tour and public archive project where participants are able to co-create documentation of this body of water and its surrounding area in Queens, NY” – local residents were invited to submit memories, photographs, notes, thoughts, poetry and whatever else they felt like contributing to the project, which contributions were then integrated into the digital experience. There’s something surprisingly pleasant and even meditative about taking a virtual stroll along a NYC canal and browsing notes on what it means to local residents, and I would absolutely love to see something similar about some of the UK’s waterways (it feels like this ought to exist in some form already tbh – anyone?).
MacOS9: Another one of those old ‘emulate an old Mac OS in your browser and pretend it’s 1994 and Apple’s still horribly uncool!’ web experiences – except this one has the BRILLIANT added benefit of the machine’s virtual hard drive containing a bunch of actual, playable games from the mid-90s, including the all-time-classic LucasArts point-and-click Indiana Jones game – honestly, this is BRILLIANT and frankly there’s enough in here to keep you occupied til the clocks change again.
All Of The Fast And The Furious Films At Once: I confess to not having really ever engaged with the FF franchise – I’m not, as a rule, particularly interested in either musclecars or musclemen, and given most of mine are dead I am not hugely interested in films that fetishise the concept of ‘family’ as their central premise, and Vin Diesel really does look (to quote Robin Williams on Schwartzenegger) a condom full of walnuts – but I am vaguely aware of the fact that there is a new one coming out at some point soon. If you want to refresh your memory of the franchise to date (WHY?!?!?! It is literally all cars and explosions and homoeroticism, and muscular men shouting the word FAMILY! at each other while dealing with the aforementioned explosions and homoeroticism!) then what better way to do it than by watching them as presented on this site – that is, all playing in very small windows simultaneously. Utter gibberish, but I sort-of imagine that that’s the case even if you watch them sequentially (also, always nice to be reminded of the fact that copyright law simply doesn’t apply if you just make the offending content really, really small).
Peter Marshall: The Flickr page of Peter Marshall, whose photography of fading England is not only wonderful in terms of subject matter but SO beautifully-lit that I quite want to own vast swathes of it. If you like photos of old seaside resorts and abandoned scrapyards and old caffs then this is basically catnip.
The Garden Photography Awards: As I type this, I am looking into my girlfriend’s garden and watching a fox; the fox, in turn, is watching me, while it pointedly defecates in the middle of the lawn. Thankfully the photographs in this year’s Garden Photography Awards don’t, at least as far as I’ve seen, contain ANY photographs of sh1tting foxes (there is a ‘pets’ category, but I am really confident that there won’t be any vulpine scat on display), instead choosing to focus on the beautiful flora visible in the UK’s gardens. I am literally the opposite of green fingered (…brown fingered? No, definitely not that, that sounds AWFUL), but even I was struck by how glorious the gardens here are; should you want to feel inadequate about your own poorly-tended patch of scrubland, click here!
The World’s Biggest D1ckpic: To be clear, this link is ENTIRELY safe for work, I promise – whilst, yes, this is technically the world’s biggest d1ckpic, it’s a cartoony illustration rather than a high-res photograph, and falls very much under the heading of ‘comedy peen’ rather than ‘troubling and threatening throbber’. As explained in this article, “Almost a year in the making, the image has an area of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels — 290 times larger than the current record holder. At one pixel per inch, it would wrap around the Earth 2.7 times. If printed out at 15 DPI, a fairly common setting for large billboards, the image would be as tall as 16,408 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. If 3D-printed, the image could (hypothetically) be used to bat the International Space Station out of orbit.” This has been created with a lot of love (and a hope that it will end up in the Guinness Book Of Records) – you can scroll along the dong, keeping your eye out for Easter Eggs and gags, and see whether you have the patience to work your way all the way down its shaft (although if you want the full image you’ll need access to specialist software to view it, given that the file is somewhere in the region of 250TB in size). This is…this is almost perfect – pointless, silly, childish, and yet a weirdly-impressive technical feat. Well done, mysterious and anonymous creator!
Bases Loaded: A GREAT little game, this, which is basically a weird cross between Vampire Survivors and Baseball and Arkanoid, and which I know won’t make any sense based on that description but which I promise you that you will enjoy a lot and which will make the afternoon pass more quickly than it otherwise might.
Dire Decks: By the same developer, ANOTHER very nicely-made pixelartish game, this time a deck builder-cum-shootemup where you pick different cards to shoot down the invading armies of space aliens. Challenging, but in a very pleasing ‘one more go’ sort of fashion, and immensely satisfying once you start getting the measure of its rhythms.
Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around: Finally this week, a game you need to download but which I highly recommend you play around with – it basically takes the ‘ghost’ concept familiar from racing games, where a previous player’s performance on a particular track is used as your opponent in subsequent races, and updates it for an AI age to create an experience where you play with AI-controlled NPCs whose behaviour has been trained by other players, playing the same game as you. Which, I appreciate, is a dog’s dinner of a description – here, try this: “Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around is a “forever-time” multiplayer game. The goal of this game’s creation was to immortalize players and give others a chance to play with them “in spirit” even after they are no longer with us. In the “Remember Me” mode, players can train a neural network to capture their play style. The output is a data model that can be shared with friends and family. Your playstyle is essentially encoded in the data model.” This is SO interesting, and there’s honestly something quite uncanny and arresting about the…recognisably human playstyles that emerge as a result of the training. This feels exciting and cusp-y, like there’s a VERY good idea in here which is going get expanded upon massively by a big-name title before too long.

By Joelle Jones

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Retro Synth Ads: Not in fact a Tumblr, but it’s not like you care and I really needed something to put here after a few weeks of blank space! Do YOU want a selection of old adverts for synths, lovingly scanned and compiled from old magazines? YES YOU DO DON’T LIE TO ME! Regardless of your personal interest in synths from the 70s and 80s, this is also a surprisingly good source of longform copy examples – the ads tend to be quite wordy, and if you’re a copywriter looking for some examples of wordy ads that aren’t the classic ones by VW that everyone always fcuking references then you might find some useful material in here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Kite Observer: Photos of massive cargo ships at sea. Nothing else, just ships, but I promise you they are REALLY, REALLY BIG (fine, there are occasional non-cargo ships too, but, mainly, it’s just MASSIVE FLOATING HUNKS OF METAL).
Cat Music Videos: Music videos for popular songs, made from stitched together clips of cats from the internet. Which, yes, I appreciate sounds almost exactly like something from approximately 2007, but that is not a bad thing because everything then was still pure and the rot had yet to really set in.
New Ireland In Colour: Another in my occasional series of ‘creators who’ve found a really fertile bit of latent space and are just mining it mercilessly and the results are GREAT’ accounts – this is by one Hugh Mulhern, and is a selection of images depicting an imagined pseudo-post-apocalyptic Ireland between 2035 and 2070. These are SO GOOD – if you can imagine Transmetropolitan transposed to County Cork then you’re halfway there.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Maybe AI Bing’s Not So Bad After All: By way of a counterpoint to the first link all the way up there about how AI Bing’s been a bit of a mess, here’s Ethan Mollick writing about his experiences using the beta product – rather than attempting to jailbreak the machine, Mollick’s been using it in more standard fashion and it’s interesting to read about his experiences with the tech and what it can do. Most interesting to me is the way in which it uses citations – what will determine which sources it cites? The arms race to crack that and manipulate it is going to be INSANE – and the qualitative difference in outputs between it and ChatGPT; to be clear, I still don’t think this stuff is ready to be used in the wild, and I remain unconvinced as to the benefits of this level of AI search assistance for anyone who’s halfway-decent at doing their own research already, but the direction of travel feels pretty unidrectional at the moment so it’s probably best to be aware of what’s coming.

A Quick Guide To Cloning Yourself: More Mollick, this time on the ease with which he was able to create a passable fake version of himself delivering a lecture to camera – the piece linked here explains how he did it, the software he used, and the end results, which whilst not good enough to fool a careful observer are absolutely neraly good enough to fool someone scrolling through at pace. Which, fine, is also the sort of scaremongering we saw with the initial wave of deepfakes about three or four years ago, except this kit is faster, better and vastly more accessible than that was, and you now have the added insanity of readily-available voice spoofing…basically I think it’s important to realise that there’s been something of a Rubicon crossed with this stuff in terms of its ease-of-creation and general plausibility…I mean, look at this for example. Mad.

Writing A Song With The Machines: There must be something genuinely odd about being a reasonably-famous songwriter with a defined and recognisable personal style and watching that style being aped in no time at all by an unthinking collection of 1s and 0s. Credit, then, to Colin Meloy of The Decembrists, who decided to see what would happen if he asked The Machine to compose a song in his own style, and to provide chord progressions to the eventual composition, and then recorded it to see how the whole thing sounded – I think I would have had a pretty deep and abiding existential episode, but he seems relatively unfazed by the whole thing. This is, perhaps, a factor of the song’s being pretty much tripe -as he says, “For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness” – but it’s interesting to read him describing why it’s mediocre, particularly as someone with literally no musical or creative ability whatsoever.

National Stereotypes in Midjourney: INCREDIBLY EASY PR IDEA OF THE WEEK – pick whatever vertical you or your client operate in, and devise a small project which will helpfully point out the specific biases with which the AI model of your choice has been encoded in relation to said vertical! Which is exactly what’s happening in this piece, where Cassie Kozyrkov asks Midjourney to create images based on the prompt “Illustration for an animated show set in [country] about science and progress, taking place in the future”, and records the different results for different values of [country]. This is SO INTERESTING, and Kozyrkov’s writeup details some of the many, many things she learned about what The Machine associates with various places – Syria and Afghanistan, for example, are imagined as ruins even in a theoretical utopian future. Fascinating, and a potential source of inspiration for all sorts of orthogonally-related projects imho.

The 15-Minute Cities Madness: You’re probably familiar with the concept of the 15-minute city – popularised during the first lockdown periods, it’s (very basically) a school of thinking around urban planning and design that suggests the optimal urban layout involves residents living within a 15m distance (walking, cycling or via public transport) from a base-level set of amenities; so employment, leisure, shopping, healthcare, green spaces, etc etc, all within easy reach of everyone. The idea behind this is that such a setup not only improves the lived experience for residents, but has all sorts of knock-on benefits for the environment, public health and safety, general local economies and the wider ‘community’, and I wrote about it in 2020 as a sensible, interesting new trend in urbanism. Fast forward three years and this ostensibly-benign concept has been seized upon by a certain branch of the wingnut fringe as the latest example of the WEF-led GREAT REPLACEMENT, somehow linked to lockdowns and vaccines and state control and a desire to TAKE YOUR PROPERTY and LIMIT YOUR MOVEMENT and, Christ, it’s EXHAUSTING. This piece in Vice explains some of the ‘why’ behind this madness, but it doesn’t quite delve far enough in my opinion; there’s something slightly terrifying about the fact that, for a seemingly-not-insignificant proportion of the West, literally ANY action taken by Government is a nefarious plot to limit individual freedoms and usher in a terrifying (if nebulous and poorly-defined) globalist future. As an aside, I personally find it very funny that many of the people railing against this as a principle will also likely be members of Facebook Groups which wistfully recall the days when you could walk to the shops safely at 3am wearing nothing but a cheeky smile, and will in no way see any commonality between the two concepts.

GenZ and Me: Joe Moran writes in the LRB of his experiences dealing with GenZ in his role as a University lecturer, and offers some thoughts on What He Has Learned – I very much enjoyed the riff on his losing battle against the term ‘relatable’, and the significance of ‘relatability’ as a concept for this particular coterie of young adults; perhaps even more, though, I appreciated his suggestion that there is perhaps less ‘generational’ change happening than we might be inclined to believe: “Sociologists give three explanations for the change in people’s attitudes and behaviours over time: period effects, lifecycle effects and cohort effects. Period effects describe change across all age groups: the result of sweeping societal shifts. Lifecycle effects describe change resulting from the ageing process or in response to key events such as leaving home, becoming a parent or retiring. Cohort effects describe change that results from shared generational experiences…the current discussion attributes too much to cohort effects and not enough to period and lifecycle effects.” This struck me as an interesting and useful way to think about this sort of stuff (which, fine, you probably all knew of already but which was new to me).

Therapy Talk: I read large parts of this article through my fingers – words cannot adequately express the degree of horror and revulsion I personally feel when I read things like: “Hinge, a popular dating app, still lets users post sunglass-clad selfies and proclaim their love for espresso martinis. But now they can also respond to prompts like “Therapy recently taught me___,” “A boundary of mine is___” and “My therapist would say I___,” and this one sent me into a personal horrorspiral imagining exactly how ill-equipped I would be to answer the question: “Becca Love, a 40-year-old clothing designer and dance teacher in Montreal who uses the pronouns they and them, often asks dating app matches, What does connection look like to you? Around the third date, they initiate discussions about their prospective partner’s “attachment style,” a tidy summation of childhood trauma.”” This piece is relatively nonjudgemental about the rise in the use of therapyspeak in dating, but I’m reasonably comfortable being more assertive – this is fcuking TERRIBLE, not least because (as evidenced by the fact that ‘Gaslighting’ has approximately 219 competing (wrong) definitions currently in use in the UK at least) there is literally no common understanding of what the fcuk these terms mean beyond “I am very much invested in my own status as the sole significant protagonist of my reality”.

TikTok in Afghanistan: There’s something almost comforting about the (at least surface-level) universality of teenage experience in 2023 – wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, if you’re a young adult in modernity you probably want to be big on TikTok. So it is in Afghanistan, as this WIRED article outlines – profiling some of the young people who are using the platform to present a slightly-less-Taliban-y picture of the country to the outside world. There’s an interesting side-effect to this, of course, which is that this TikTokified picture of life in the country is the only one that can really be presented – personal safety means that coruscating political criticism of the regime’s not really viable, and so there’s a weird flattening of perspective whereby Afghanistan through the TikTok lens is sort of just like anywhere else, just with slightly more unplanned ventilation in a lot of the buildings and significantly fewer women. I don’t quite know what I think about this, but overall I am not sure I have the same sort of positive (ie naive) feelings about TikTok’s ability to shed light on the world in 2023 as I did about Twitter’s in 2011, though whether that’s to do with the platform or just the slow loss of hope we’ve all experienced over the past decade or so it’s hard to tell.

The Moment That Changed The Superbowl: I don’t, I have to admit, really understand American Football – certainly not to the extent that I could analyse a team’s tactics or specific plays – which is why I particularly enjoyed this nice bit of scrolly storytelling in the NYT, which walks you through the moment which analysts apparently agree changed the game in favour of the Kansas City Chiefs. You may or may not give two hoots about a 65-yard punt return (I, personally, do not), but the way this is done is a really good example of how to use this sort of technique to explain something complex and dynamic in really clear and visually-appealing fashion (NB – I appreciate that for people who know about American Football this may well be the equivalent of someone simplistically offering ‘man run clever, ball in net’ as an explanation of Maradona’s ‘86 goal, but, well, bear with me here).

Selling Out Still Sucks: Ok, one article does not a trend make (as everyone involved in planning and strategy knows, that’s TWO articles!), but I am posting this as it’s the first time in years I’ve read something written by a young person that tentatively suggests that maybe ‘getting the bag’ is no longer the be all and end all of everything, and that we might be moving back to an era in which shilling for brands in exchange for pennies is perhaps not considered a universally-laudable thing to do. This piece riffs on the Superbowl adverts and the degree to which many of them, in the author’s words, “used “Hey, look at that famous person!” instead of an actual idea.” This is a short piece, but worth reading just to see whether or not it feels like a THING – and also for this closer, which felt…true: “when I see a constant flow of low-effort craps that infect our ears with algorithmically generated nonsense, that tell millions of sports fans to risk thousands of dollars with a few taps on their phone, that force us to sit through the richest people in the world getting off on the fact that they remember the ’80s, I have to believe there’s some way to reverse this. We need to bring back shame, for the good of the culture.

Romanticising The Hays Code: This is a bit of a weird one – on the one hand, just because a few weirdos on Twitter are going around complaining about sex in films being in some way ‘nonconsensual’ for the audience doesn’t mean that any actual, real people in real life think like that (or, frankly, even that the people saying that on Twitter think like that); on the other, we’ve seen the frankly mental reaction to Sam Smith wearing a sub-Bowie red carpet outfit among conservative commentators (is it a coincidence that they donned that a mere couple of days after I linked to an online boutique for the rubber curious? I THINK NOT. Proof, there, that Sam Smith reads Web Curios!) and the insane reaction to drag queen storytime on both sides of the Atlantic, and I’ve been writing about the growing tradwife/puritanical movement for a while now, and and and and…look, it just feels A BIT like some of this longterm project to inculcate conservative values into The Kids is starting to bear fruit a bit, is all I’m saying. Semi-related – who IS behind the $100m campaign to rebrand and repopularise Jesus in the US? Why, it’s an ultraconservative billionaire who opposes LGBT+ rights and abortion! Apologies for focusing on a US issue here – but, also, no apologies, because this stuff is totally bleeding over here and has been for a few years now.

3d Printing and the Housing Crisis: 3d printing really doesn feel like a failed utopian dream – but, apparently, it’s not dead! It’s still a thing! Sort of! This is a really interesting piece profiling a company currently engaged in producing 3d printed housing for a developer in the US, with a view to rolling the building method out more widely should the project prove successful; it’s a fascinating look into the technology and its limitations, and the difficulty in bringing these sorts of innovations to mass scale use, even after a decade. More than anything it’s a useful reminder – to me, as much as to anyone else – of the massive gap that always exists between technology that shows promise and technology that actually, really, properly works in real life.

The Aftermath of Deepfake Bongo: Unless you follow the world of streaming and streamers, you’re probably unaware of a recent controversy whereby a male Twitch streamer was effectively caught buying deepfake bongo of a bunch of other female Twitch streamers – this article explores the controversy a bit, but, more interestingly, focuses on the women whose likenesses were spoofed by the tech and what redress they have been able to seek; it’s not…great, frankly, and if anything this piece neatly shows how the whole deepfake bongo thing is likely to be a very real problem in the short-to-medium term given how easy it already is to make and how little actual input you need to make it. The Online Safety Bill would in theory act to criminalise the creation of this sort of material, but I’m not personally convinced that a) you’d ever be able to meaningfully enforce the legislation; and b) that it will get passed in its current form – it doesn’t, basically, feel like there are quite enough guardrails in place to stop this stuff being pretty much everywhere before too long.

Childhoods of Exceptional People: This is SO interesting – and, at heart, almost reassuringly-unsurprising. Henrik Karlsson decided to do some research into the backgrounds and upbringings of a selection of what he termed ‘exceptional’ people; geniuses or high achievers, people who, by any reasonable standard, can be said to have been a success in their chosen field(s), and see what common themes emerged. His findings demonstrated a selection of interesting commonalities (aside, of course, from the fact that all the people in question are VERY FCUKING CLEVER), including a high degree of exposure to intelligent adult conversation, high-quality tutoring and self-directed learning…all of which, of course, are examples of MASSIVE FCUKING PRIVILEGE. How LUCKY that your parents have a salon of venerated thinkers that they can introduce you to to enable your curious young mind to grow and explore! How FORTUNATE that they were able to afford a multi-doctoral tutor to coach you through your studies! Obviously this isn’t a surprise, but it’s sometimes helpful to be reminded of the fact that it’s very rare that talent or intellect will be enough to secure success. Alternatively, of course, you may read this and look at your kids’ nonexistent tutor and your useless, drunk, miserable, middle-aged friends who will be no use at all as pedagogical rolemodels and simply despair at your kids’ prospects – in which case, er, sorry!

Visiting A Bongo Convention: Author Michael Estrin writes novels; he’s working on a series set in the Adult entertainment industry, and as part of his research he recently went to the Adult Video News Convention to do a bit of fieldwork, and this is a blogpost outlining his impressions of the whole thing. This is very funny, not smutty in the slightest, and whilst it’s obviously not a patch on Big Red Son (the canonical example of bongo-gonzo journalism) it contains enough vignettes of the mad, the desperate and the bongo-addled to make you feel like you were there yourself (whilst at the same time being very glad you weren’t).

The Sound Of Grief: On having, and losing, a child, and the way in which music works to heal and hurt and help and hinder as you grieve; this is a beautiful essay, although, caveat emptor, it is also a very sad one indeed.

Everything Joel Learned About Renting In London: For several years now, Joel Golby has been writing occasional columns for Vice in which he highlights some of the more egregiously awful examples of the London rental market for the tearful lols. The series has now come to an end, and in this closing piece Joel looks back on the past few years and what has changed and – SPOILERS – everything has just gotten, broadly, worse, and this is a superb piece of angry, sad and slightly-baffled writing about a system which has been broken for an age and which is getting worse and which noone seems to have the inclination or skills to fix, and which is condemning at least two generations of people into lifelong precariety and which, it seems, is just The Way It Is. This really is fantastic – it annoys me quite how good Golby is, but, well, he is.

Stolen Twins: Finally this week, the first thing I have read this year that made me stop halfway through and go up and look at the name of the author again because I was so impressed – this is by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, and it’s about fostering and growing up and neurodivergence, and the prose is STARTLINGLY good, honestly – from the opening line (“Like many autistic people, I find neurotypical communication fascinating but often deficient in fixedness”) to the last, this is almost-perfect in its composition. I think this person, whose first novel is apparently being published this year, is going to be famous (and if they aren’t, they should be).

By Raysa Fontana

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is by Kate Davis – the video is a perfect little example of GeoCities graphics and mid-00s interfaces, and the song… the song, I have to admit, made me almost unbearably anxious (I think it’s the absence of anything I would recognise as a melody, despite the fact that it FEELS like there should be one, like it’s constantly about to start to make sense but…it doesn’t) but in a way that I didn’t totally dislike. Is that a recommendation? I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANY MORE!

This, by contrast, definitely has a tune – it’s by Gengahr, and it really reminds me of early Hot Chip which may or may not be a recommendation for you (I like it a lot, though). The song’s called ‘A Ladder’ – see what you think.

Bush are one of the least cool bands EVER, which considering how beautiful Gavin Rossdale was (probably still is, the git) is no mean feat. Still, I have a personal massive soft spot for grungey lighter-in-the-air anthem ‘Glycerine’, which is here covered in wonderfully drone-y fashion by Allison Lorenzon and Midwife; this very much sounds how tranquilisers feel.

Last up in this week’s videos, we close out with this pleasingly-poppy bit of indie – the band is called Flycatcher, the song’s called Always Selfish and I’ve been humming it all morning and maybe you will too. See you next week BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 10/02/23

February 10, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 32 minutes

Hello everyone! HELLO!

One on the one hand it was fun this week watching Google’s PR fcukup with the whole ‘your AI search engine’s a liar LOL’ story; on the other, I can’t help but think that none of the serious coverage of this I have read in the media has spent quite enough time thinking through the potential consequences of what AI-led search might mean and that, given our previous experiences over the past 15 years with ‘letting technologies we don’t fully understand and haven’t fully evaluated the potential impact of loose on our society without doing anything even halfway-resembling proper, meaningful user testing because that’s what investors want and caution be fcuked!’, we might want to perhaps employ a bit more caution rather than ploughing straight ahead with the whole ‘let the black box tell me what it thinks is true, despite the fact that neither I nor indeed anyone else currently alive has any idea by which mechanisms it arrives at those evaluations’ thing.

Christ, sorry, we’re only at the beginning of this fcuking thing and I’ve already done one of those horrible nested paragraphs that seems to go on forever like some sort of hideous mobius strip of badly-crafted prose.

ANYWAY. I hope you’re all well and having fun, and that you enjoy this week’s Curios; I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably start looking up old editions of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to use as some sort of gold standard of truth in the coming veracitypocalypse.

By Alfonso Gonzales Jr.

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S EDITION WITH THIS PLEASINGLY-ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO MIX BY JOACHIM SPIETH!

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.1:

Here Comes The Video AI: This isn’t quite ready to take over your feed in quite the same way as video and text AI have done, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time as the examples here really do look quite magic. The link here takes you to Runway’s announcement of their ‘swap new elements or apply new styles to an existing video’ tech (which you can apply for access to should you be so minded) – this effectively means that you can give the software any moving image file you fancy and (for example) tell it to ‘swap the ugly people for beautiful ones’ and VWALLAH! Ok, fine, it’s not quite that simple, and it obviously looks a *bit* potato-ey at the moment, but, equally, it doesn’t look that potato-ey, and this is another of those increasingly-common moments where I feel like looking over at everyone standing in large groups outside Covent Garden pubs as they take a break from the hard work of post-production editing and maybe suggesting they enjoy the good times while they can. It’s not only Runway doing this – there’s another paper here about similar-but-different software which does broadly similar stuff, and you can try a different version of this tech at this HuggingFace link should you be so minded. Having tried it out, it seems to work best for light style transfer-type modifications, so why not spend some productive hours this afternoon asking it to reimagine all of your favourite sporting moments as though drawn by Hieronymous Bosch or something?

The Prompt Engineering Handbook: Despite having previously said that I don’t think ‘prompt engineering’ is going to be a thing for very long, I am conscious of the fact that right now it can be quite useful to know how to better-wrangle The Machines. So, er, here! This is a link to a whole bunch of resources on both the theory of ‘talking to the AIs’ and also the practice of how best to construct your increasingly-byzantine instructions so as to produce the exact shape and style of sexy fursona you’ve been imagining (that is what you’re going to use it for, right?). BONUS PROMPT ASSISTANCE: This is a rather useful prompt-constructor for Midjourney, which offers you a variety of prompts and sliders to help you communicate with the machine and which is particularly useful for all the subtle ‘emphasise this, deemphasise that’-type tweaking which marks the best AI image generation (and this link is also part of the reason why I don’t think ‘prompt engineering’ is going to last long as a thing). ADDITIONAL BONUS PROMPT THING!: Should you be particularly interested in this sort of stuff, and should you be practically involved in it (or, probably, should you want to be practically involved in it), and you can get to London on Monday evening, you might be interested in attending the London Prompt Jam on 13th Feb at Newspeak House (although, to be clear, Web Curios accepts no responsibility for the amount of creepy AI-generated cheesecake manga imagery that you’ll be subjected to should you attend).

AI Accompaniments: Muchlike the somewhat-magical music composing AI previewed by Google the other week, this is another link to a work-in-progress piece of research which features some quite impressive results; once again it’s Google, once again this links to a rather academic blogpost which, if you’re stupid like me, will mostly mean the square root of fcuk all to you but which does feature a range of different examples of the tech in action so that you can be suitably astonished by the speed at which this stuff is evolving at. The working name for this kit is SingSong, and the paper explains that it’s “a system which generates instrumental music to accompany input vocals, potentially offering musicians and non-musicians alike an intuitive new way to create music featuring their own voice” – so imagine a not-too-distant future in which you can croon a few bars into your phone as inspiration strikes, and The Machines (I don’t know why but I’m feeling an increasing desire to refer to themselves with the capitalisation and definite article – an affectation which, I promise, I will do by best to resist) turn it into a TikTok-ready clip complete with backing track. Again, this isn’t currently very good – you wouldn’t, I don’t think, actively choose to listen to any of this unless you were possibly on a lot of very experimental drugs or on the brink of some sort of nihilistic episode – but it’s more about the potential and what this will almost-inevitably enable.

Stable Attribution: This made me feel stupid earlier this week, and I am slightly grumpy about it – but, equally, it provided me with an excellent practical demonstration of why you should greet anything AI-related with a reasonable degree of raised-eyebrow scepticism (lol Google Bard!). Stable Attribution purports to be kit which will identify the source imagery used by Stable Diffusion to generate its own compositions – so effectively lifting the lid on the materials that have been ‘used as creative inspiration’/plagiarised (delete as applicable). Except, as pointed out to me by various people after I shared it, it doesn’t ACTUALLY do that – what it appears to do is run a relatively simple reverse image search on the image and pull out stuff that shares rough visual DNA with the endpoint image (which, based on the latest understanding of this sort of kit, may well indeed be possible), meaning it would also pull out ‘source imagery’ for stuff which was very much created by an actual human. HOWEVER, despite literally not doing anything that it says it does, Stable Attribution is actually weirdly useful as a means of finding other semi-related visual styles to a specific image, so should that be something you feel might be useful to you then YOU ARE WELCOME.

GlossAI: Look, I PROMISE you that all this AI stuff is going to die down a bit soon. Promise. Til it does, though, I can’t help but be fascinated by the various layers that are being developed to make use of it; I’m reasonably confident that most of the services and products popping up in the current frothy ‘OMG AI!’ explosion won’t exist in ~12m time, but I think it’s interesting and instructive to keep an eye on what people are playing with and the ways in which this stuff could potentially be employed. Here, for example, is a service which I am reasonably-confident won’t actually produce anything particular stellar but which offers a vision of a future in which creating multiple, platform-appropriate assets from a single source really is as easy as clicking a button. The advertised gimmick here is, basically, ‘give us a video and we will turn it into about 300 different content types for all the different social channels, as well as probably some written content too and maybe a presentation because why not?!’, and you and I both know that the outputs will be shonky as hell and largely nonsensical, but, well, that won’t always be the case, and I would advise the low-end video editors out there to maybe join the post-production people outside the pub because, well, you might as well, eh?

The Braggoscope: Absolutely one of my favourite projects of the week, this, partly because of the fact that it involves BBC Radio 4 and therefore is very much up my middle-aged street, but also because it’s such a wonderful example of how you can use all this AI stuff to do interesting, useful and creative things RIGHT NOW. Matt Webb has used GPT-3 in conjunction with a few other development tools to analyse the transcripts of every single episode of the long-running historico-cultural radio show In Our Time and arrange them taxonomically by theme on this site. So, for example, you can now explore all the episodes of the show which deal with economics, say, or literature and rhetoric – which doesn’t sound like much, but the person hours required to do this would have been VAST and it’s such a nice, smart way of demonstrating how astonishingly useful for brute force work this sort of stuff can be. The obvious extension to this, with a bit of additional hackery, would presumably to then offer per-topic summaries based on the programmes’ contents (although I get the impression that the whole thing would probably start falling apart a bit at that point, quality-wise), but hopefully you can get a vaguely-exciting flavour of what the possibilities are (and maybe about how you might use this sort of thing yourself – I keep having (admittedly quite boring, fine) thoughts about what you might be able to do with GPT if you create a bespoke version and feed it with all of a company’s information, for example (like this sort of thing, or this sort of thing, but, frankly, more terrifyingly comprehensive – from the website to EVERY document, to file structures, to (perhaps more controversially) employee emails and Teams conversations and effectively treat it as a living knowledge base that can be interrogated using natural language, and that sounds…sort-of cool, in a very tedious, corporate-y sort of way, but also really fun in terms of how you might use this. Anyone else? Eh? Oh).

Poe: It feels rather like we’re (rapidly) coming to the fag-end of the period in which OpenAI is going to let us have infinite playtime with its AI toys for free – everything that’s come out this week about the Bing integration and Microsoft’s plans for monetising the tech at enterprise level makes it feel a bit like you’re going to start having to cough up for anything but the very bare minimum quite soon – not least because ChatGPT’s been rendered basically unusable by the fact that seemingly every awful right-wing fcuker in the world is constantly trying to get it to agree to using hatespeech. Anyway, Other Large Language Models Are Available! And this is Poem which has been developed by Quora and which is now unrestrictedly available (to iOS users only, chiz chiz) and which basically does the same tricks as ChatGPT but in an app and on your phone and, for the moment at least, free. Given it’s aforementioned Apple-only status at present I’ve not tried it out myself, but the feedback I’ve seen so far has been broadly positive – it did make me think, though, of the weird potential future in which there are a selection of these sorts of tools, all trained slightly differently on different corpuses of information and with different tweaks and weightings given to their balances, and what it might be like should we all have on-device AI-assistants whose knowledgebases are all subtly different and whose perceptions of ‘truth’ and ‘right and wrong’ vary from instance to instance. Interesting, no? Oh suit yourselves ffs.

Claralell: Type in your name and listen in rapt joyous wonder as the machine spits out a tune based on some maths involving spelling (there is a proper explanation of the rules behind how it works on the ‘About’ page, for any of you who are less tin-eared than I am and who understand things like ‘staves’ and musical notation and ‘not being tone deaf’) – honestly, this is SO CHARMING and I was pleased to find out that ‘Matt Muir’ is a delightful bit of light piano; see what YOU sound like! This made me halfway wish that music generating AIs were slightly further along, as I would love to feed the Matt Muir snippet to another machine to create a longer, more involved composition (I have seemingly stumbled upon a subconscious desire to have a symphony written for me).

Howl vs Loewe: Are YOU a fan of the novel Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones? Or, perhaps more probably, the lavish Studio Ghibli animated film inspired by said novel? GREAT! You might like this charming little (mobile-only) site which lets you answer a few questions and thereby determine which of the book’s characters best represents you – and THEN ,because this is a collaboration between Studio Ghibli and high-end fashion house Loewe, you get shunted into a storefront and asked whether you fancy shelling out several grand on a handbag that looks like Calcifer. I am not judging – some of the kit looks pretty cool! – but I personally found the transition from ‘obviously kid-friendly mobile game for fans of the book or film’ and ‘BUY A VISCOSE TSHIRT FOR £1200’ slightly-jarring. Still, I will never not enjoy anything Howl-related, and I must say the mobile site is rather nicely made.

Europeana: This is an absolutely brilliant resource and I love it and it made me briefly annoyed about Brexit again before I remembered that it was several years ago now, and that continuing to whinge about lost political battles many years after the fact is the sole preserve of the w4nker. “Europeana provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with digital access to European cultural heritage material. 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 cultural heritage items from institutions across Europe. Discover artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.” Honestly, this is a STAGGERING collection of art and photography and history and academic work and odd ephemera, and if it were a museum it would be the size of Birmingham and I would likely never leave.

MammalWeb: This is a GREAT project, tracking wild animals around the UK and continental Europe – it’s a volunteer effort where anyone can participate, either by manually identifying animals in submitted imagery or by setting up their own camera trap to see what critters wander into shot during the days and nights, and then sharing that imagery and information with the initiative. Lovely, and the sort of thing that might be fun to get involved with should you live somewhere where you see animals other than pigeons.

The Doomsday Alarm Clock: This is cute – an alarm clock app which will gently wake you each morning with terrifying news of apocalyptic horror. Want to be roused at 7am by a voice gently telling you that the machine uprising is finally here? Would greeting the day with the news that nuclear war has broken out put a spring in your step? Maybe it would. This is, as far as I can tell, a hobby project by a couple of devs – there’s a link to environmental charity Earth Justice at the bottom of the page, but tbh this feels like something that could be licensed and repurposed by a climate charity and jazzed up a bit as a fun awareness/fundraising driver (sorry, I really must stop thinking about things like a fcuking PR, it’s a sickness I tell you).

253: I have DEFINITELY mentioned this in Curios before, but I don’t think I have ever been able to link to the original site which has just relaunched after…some years offline. 253 was a novel written for the VERY EARLY WEB, published between 1996-8, with a genuinely interesting and novel structural and thematic premise – the book is a collection of short vignettes, with the following specific technical guiderules: “There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people. With the driver, that makes 253. This novel describes an epic journey from Embankment station, to the Elephant and Castle, named after the Infanta de Castile who stayed there, once. This is an example of the verbal imprecision that costs British industry millions of pounds a year. Numbers, however, are reliable. So that the illusion of an orderly universe can be maintained, all text in this novel, less headings, will number 253 words. Each passenger is described in three ways: Outward appearance: does this seem to be someone you would like to read about? Inside information : sadly, people are not always what they seem. What they are doing or thinking : many passengers are doing or thinking interesting things. Many are not.)” I didn’t stumble across this until I found the print version in a charity shop in the early-00s, but it was for years one of my favourite books and I must have read it a few dozen times over the years, mostly sitting on the tube) – the fact that the original site has been resurrected was both a wonderful reminder of the book’s existence, and a lovely look back at how it began, and at the early days of the web, and, honestly, I am getting weirdly misty-eyed as I type this so should probably stop and have some more tea. Before I do, though, PLEASE DO CLICK ON THIS ONE AND READ SOME OF THE STORIES THEY ARE GENUINELY WONDERFUL.

By Mercedes Helnwein

NOW WE HAVE A PLAYLIST WHICH IF I’M HONEST I FOUND MORE FRIGHTENING THAN ANYTHING ELSE, BUT WHOSE WEIRD COMBINATION OF GABBER, HYPERPOP AND DNB IS WEIRDLY-COMPELLING!

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.2:

Photobooth Dot Net: Do YOU want access to the web’s premiere resource for all things related to the little kiosks you use to get passport photos? OH GOOD! This is a genuinely-charming and very oldschool little site, run by a proper enthusiast who, as far as I can tell, seems to spend a reasonable amount of time wandering the world and checking out different examples of photobooth tech (and, frankly, why the fcuk not?). This is partly just an interesting overview of the history of the things and the various baroque differences in style and tech that they have employed, but it’s also got a search feature which means that you can, should you desire, find EVERY SINGLE PHOTOBOOTH IN THE WORLD (ok, fine, this probably isn’t strictly true, but) and plot your future travel plans accordingly based on whether or not you’ll able to enjoy some booth-based analogue photo fun. There are worse ways to plan an itinerary tbh.
Cloudwatching: A meditative little webart project where any user who lands on the page can participate, either by designing their own ‘cloud’ using a rudimentary Paint-style interface or by sitting and watching as the clouds created by other anonymous webmongs glide past over a background of cerulean blue. Admittedly the slightly contemplative and gentle nature of the experience can be jarred somewhat by the occasional cloud in the shape of phrases like, er, “I Eat Kids”, but generally this is a supremely gentle way of spending 5 minutes staring at a screen.
Shortest Lives: This is a really interesting project, but it’s probably worth pointing out at the top that it’s about miscarriage and as such, depending on your personal experience and circumstance, you might want to skip reading this one. Shortlist lives is an initiative being developed in the Netherlands – specifically at the UZ Gent hospital, at least initially – which is designed to give parents who suffer miscarriage a tangible, personal memory of their child via the medium of a 3d render of their heartbeat. “Shortest Lives originated from An-Sofie’s personal experience. In 2017 she became the godmother of Lily, the stillborn daughter of her cousin. By experiencing the loss up close, she saw how parents are left behind in a great void. What started as a project for Lily’s parents has, thanks to the support of UZ Gent and Berrefonds, grown into an opportunity to support other parents as well. Shortest Lives is an initiative that wants to give parents a powerful reminder of their child. Based on an ultrasound, it is possible to make the heartbeat of a stillborn child audible again. This heartbeat is then visualized in a unique way.” I think this is rather beautiful, personally, and I like idea that it’s something which could in theory be extended to all parents who have access to ultrasound data, wherever they are – I equally appreciate that everyone’s experiences with miscarriage are personal and different and that you might not agree.
Calculating Devices: This is a YouTube channel whose sole raison d’etre is to explain and ‘review’ various obscure or antique counting devices. Have you ever wondered how the ancient Hittite method of enumerating things differed from that popular with Mesopotamians c.Hammurabi? No, probably not, but that is why we are here – TO LEARN (and to fill all these empty hours between birth and death with CONTENT). This is, honestly, significantly more interesting than it has any right to be, not least because if you’re moderately innumerate like I am it actually provides some useful insights into how one my helpfully go about conceptualising the concept of ‘numbers’ and thereby better deal with them (I’m…I’m not selling this, am I? FFS).
The Aircade: I am always amazed and slightly-appalled at recruitment-focused PR efforts for the military and the various different ways that different nations’ various branches of the armed forces vie to attract the best and brightest cannon fodder into their ranks. This website is one part of the US Airforce’s efforts to entice the youth into the whole ‘death by plane’ business (I presume they spunked the rest of the budget on the recent Top Gun film which from what I could tell was effectively a two-hour recruitment ad for the airforce which people astonishingly paid to watch) via the medium of a series of genuinely really rather good games – honestly, I wanted to hate this but unfortunately all the stuff you can do here (from the in-browser elements to the downloadable AR-enabled ‘Command The Stack’ game) are annoyingly really quite fun and super-polished, as I suppose I should have expected from an institution whose annual budget is probably something comparable to the GDP of the UK. Whilst I find the very existence of this website and the associated content somewhat…icky, I have to grudgingly applaud the fact that it’s all very nicely made indeed.
Crewmap: I can’t quite work out whether this is a genuinely smart idea for the new age of remote/hybrid working, or some sort of dreadful parody of ‘modern working life’ – YOU DECIDE! Crewmap is a platform which exists to help create bonds between colleagues and coworkers – the idea being that in a working world in which many of us see our colleagues on screens for 90% of the time, and where we don’t necessarily enjoy the same opportunities for smalltalk and socialising and general, fluffy ‘getting to know you’ chat as we might once have done whilst sharing corporate meatspace, you might want to find other ways of getting to know the other humans who are doing the same largely-pointless, soul-destroying job as you are. Basically the platform lets you set up quizzes and questionnaires about your likes, your interests and your hobbies, share them with your team members, and then get told who has what in common based on everyone’s answers – which…sounds like it might be fine in theory, but I can’t quite help get the feeling that this could quite quickly get awkward – in part because of the fact it feels, I don’t know, just a bit *too* close to the sort of thing that people associate with dating apps, and partly because I can envisage a scenario in which people end up feeling isolated rather than connected when they realise that none of their teammates like the same things that they do (“Noone else ticked the self-fisting box? I QUIT!”, etc). Still, maybe I am wrong and this is a genius idea, in which case YOU ARE WELCOME!
Read Jpeg: I LOVE THIS. Honestly, I can’t explain how much this pleased me when I came across it (I think via Kristoffer again, but I couldn’t swear by it) – I think it’s because it feels zine-y in a way that always appeals to me. Read Jpeg is a newsletter that is just a stream of images that link out to places: “Curated streams on contemporary culture. Image essays. Subject matter varies. No text. Just images. Click–throughs for surprise. Mailed irregularly by the zip.” Really, this is practically-perfect – odd, esoteric, aesthetically (in)coherent and consistently surprising – you can go back through past editions to get a feel of how this works, but given how much of newsletterland is SERIOUS and BUSINESS and about KEEPING AHEAD it’s nice to see one that is pure vibes.
Petswitch: I have a special place in my heart for websites which do one thing and one thing only, and which do that thing practically-perfectly; Petswitch is not such a website. It does, admittedly, do only one thing – to whit, taking your face and ‘swapping’ it with the face of any animal you choose to offer it an image of – but it does it in a way that is frankly quite shonky and a bit ‘phoned it and I promise you that when I found it this morning and had a quick play with turning myself into a sad-faced dog I lost it for a full two minutes (it was just after 6am and I was tired, in my defence). This is, to be clear, not very good at all, but it is VERY FUNNY and I confidently predict that you will all know at least one person who will be driven absolutely mental if you start sending them one of these a day featuring them combined with a series of different critters.
WikiShootMe: Simultaneously interesting and really not interesting at all (sometimes I like to think this is the exact liminal space which Curios occupies and that’s perhaps why no cnut reads it), WikiShootMe is “a tool to show Wikidata items, Wikipedia articles, and Commons images with coordinates, all on the same map” – so basically you can look up anywhere in the world and see ALL THE STUFF that Wikipedia has on the area, on a map! From places of interest to images of the local area, it’s a surprisingly-detailed look at a particular geographical space which leads you (or at least it did me) to look slightly differently at where you are and what surrounds you and what is and isn’t significant about it.
The List of Stews: An actual Wikipedia entry this time, both tasty AND seasonally-appropriate! Given it continues to be so chilly here that I seriously contemplate buying a pair of fingerless gloves to type today’s Curios in, it feels like this encyclopaedic list of international stewed dishes might come in handy – from Peruvian chicken to the (apologies to any Flemish readers) frankly-repellent sounding horsemeat stew with gingerbread(!!!!) of the Northern European lowlands, there is everything you could want here (presuming your ambitions tend towards ‘the consumption of largely-brown, largely-meat-based meals).
OpnSouls: Do you ever feel like your friendships are stuck in a rut, that you don’t really talk anymore? Is your groupchat moribund? FEAR NOT! OpnSouls is an app which promises to reinvigorate your friendships by, er, sending your group of mates a question each day which you all have to answer. “Every day, you will receive a new question that is designed to spark meaningful conversations and help you learn more about your friends. You can share your own answer and see how your friends have responded, leaving comments and replies along the way.” Depending on what you and your friends are like this will either be HILARIOUS or the sort of thing that will see you all blocking each other on every single platform going within a month.
Poline: I have to confess upfront here that I really don’t understand how this works or what it really is – that said, my total confusion as to its exact utility and purpose is part of the reason it appeals so much. As far as I can tell, Poline is a palette-creation tool – beyond that, though, well…Let me give the the website’s own descriptor text and see if you can make head or tail of it: “”poline” is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes. It is an indispensable tool for the modern generative sorcerer, and a delight for the eye.” GREAT! So, er, one for all you generative sorcerors, then – erm, could one of you possibly explain to me what the fcuk is going on here, should you have a second?
WTFDoesThisCompanyDo: Balls, this is a GPT-ish thing and should be uptop, but, well, I can’t be bothered to scroll back and add it in. Sorry. ANYWAY, this is a genuinely fun application of the tech – plug in any website url you like and the tech attempts to give you a description of what the company actually does based on the copy on the homepage. What this is useful for, I’ve found, is for gently pointing out to people that the copy on their website is meaningless dogsh1t, as evidenced by the fact that not even a machine trained on the entire corpus of the web can make sense of it – honestly, this is particularly good for agencies and I strongly advise you to pick your own favourite ‘disruiptive creative studio’ and see whether or not the machine can work out that what they do is ‘make videos to sell petfood’.
CandyCoated: I feel I ought to explain that I stumbled across this site via this article rather than through any sort of personal interest (not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with being into this stuff!) – that out of the way, let’s all enjoy browsing through the esoteric world of hand-made, bespoke, inflatable rubber fetishwear! Have you ever wondered where people whose idea of a perfect sexy time is, say, being inside a space hopper while someone attempts to tug them off from the outside, find an appropriately-modified space hopper? WELL WONDER NO MORE! Personally speaking it was the combination whale toy-slash-dildo that gave me greatest pause, but you will all find something to love here.
Manifesturbation: It seems that every few years someone reinvents the basic lie at the heart of new age classic ‘The Secret’ – to whit, that you can basically get the universe to give you what your heart desires simply by following a few simple instructions. There was the original, there was Cosmic Ordering, there has been the modern reframing of it as ‘manifesting’, and now…now we have this. I feel compelled to point out that this link was a reader submission (I am sworn to secrecy), and that there’s a very slight possibility that your employer might not massively enjoy you clicking on the link whilst on their dime…and now let’s dive in! What would you say if I were to tell you that there was a way of securing EXACT SUMS OF MONEY through no activity or effort whatsoever other than having a VERY MINDFUL W4NK? I imagine what you say is “fcuk off Matt, I am not a moron and I was not born yesterday, this is obviously rubbish, what are you trying to sell me?” – but, seemingly, there are others for whom the answer would instead be “SIGN ME UP FOR CASHW4NKS!” And it is for these people who Manifesturbation exists – people who, in exchange for the secret of how to “co-create your life through juicy, lit-up pleasure instead of to-do lists, overwhelm, stress and struggle” are willing to fork out a (NON-REFUNDABLE) $200. Yes, that’s right, for a mere two hundred quid you too can have someone tell you ‘facts’ about how if you just finger yourself properly you’ll be granted your heart’s financial desires (except, er, the small print is keen to point out that there are no guarantees here). This is, let’s be clear, a quite astonishing grift and the sort of thing that I feel no compunction whatsoever being mean about because whoever is doing this (my girlfriend pointed out that they also do a podcast about their sex lives which is quite famous, which I guess figures) is, I feel comfortable saying, making this all up and peddling snake oil (also, please watch the testimonial videos – those people do not look like the most discerning of consumers, is all I’m saying here). Still, MANIFESTURBATION! What a fcuking world we live in.
Order Automatica: Finally this week, a palette-cleansing card-battling game which will hopefully clear your mind from the last link and which is a really pleasing pixel-y looking timewaster which you can happily while away a few hours with.

By Deon S’Souza

LAST OF THE MIXTAPES THIS WEEK IS THIS LOUNGEY CRACKER FROM LOUIS LARGO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN EMPTY! POOR TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Typewriter Artist: Anatol Knotek makes art from an old typewriter, typography and, occasionally, coloured ribbons. This is minimal and beautiful and feels like the art style of a campaign that’s just begging to be commissioned.
Models Architecture: This Insta account really should be named ‘Architectural Models’, but I will forgive them the confusing reversal because there is something SO SO LOVELY about architects’ models and dioramas, and there’s some superb work here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Governance vs Moderation: We kick off the longreads section this week with a piece by Ethan Zuckerman that looks at how communities work online, and how one might go about optimally organising them in a way that minimises all the awfulness that tends to happen when people congregate. In a week when Twitter’s looked even more parlous than usual under the Glorious Reign of That Fcuking Man (honestly, the site’s just…fcuked at the moment, creaking and seemingly held together by string – if you’ve not read it, Casey Newton’s account of What Is Going On is by turns funny and depressing) it feels appropriate to share something that takes a more considered view of the problems inherent in managing the twin poles of rights and responsibilities – the conclusions here strike me as broadly sensible, with the overall inference being that it is better to allow communities to develop their own rules and regulations and standards and codes than it is to attempt to impose them from above, but that this requires a degree of engagement in the management and maintenance of said communities that we have previously been (mostly) willing to commit.

What Is CoreCore?: I’m including this mainly as I am sick of seeing variants on this piece floating around the web and this happens to be one of the better ones I’ve read about this ‘new aesthetic’ – look, it’s a new twist on Dada-ism, can we move on now please? I did quite like this closing para, not least because it gave me momentary hope that I never have to hear the ‘core’ suffix ever again: “The discourse around corecore feels like a work of art in itself, indicative of the fluid and fast, often convoluted way art genres emerge and calcify on the internet. The scene is being historicized in comment sections in real-time as viewers argue it’s being ruined or claim the subgenre was always meant to be Dadaist-absurd. New offshoots are spawning by the week—there’s corecorecore, nichecore, coretok. Publications are writing it up. Podcasts are puzzling it out. Everyone is erratically trying to clutch at what it means. True to its name, corecore is like a project we’re all working on, the most nebulous “aesthetic” of all time.”

Turning GPT Into DAN: Or, ‘the latest series of attempts to mess with ChatGPT in order to see what sort of mad or terrible stuff you can get it to say in complete contravention of the OpenAI guidelines’ – this is a link to a post in a subReddit dedicated to attempting to ‘jailbreak’ the software, in which the OP explains how to use DAN, a ‘roleplay model’ to effectively cut out all the guardrails ChatGPT has built in to stop it explaining in detail how to dispose of your lover’s corpse with quicklime and a shovel. This is all sorts of fascinating for all sorts of reasons – partly the general arms race that we’re seeing between the people who make this stuff and the users trying to subvert it for the lols, but also the fact that, again, NOONE SEEMS TO UNDERSTAND WHY THESE TRICKS WORK (see also this, and this), and there is something halfway-sinister, even accepting the unnecessary anthropomorphism inherent in the idea, of ‘scaring’ the software into obeying you.

How One VC Is Automating Themselves: I am increasingly interested in seeing practical examples of the ways in which people are seeking to integrate AI stuff into their lives and work – the theory’s fine, but there’s something particularly fascinating about seeing the extent to which this stuff can be useful RIGHT NOW. This is a post about how a VC called Yohei Nakajima is using the suite off tools currently knocking about to make themselves more efficient – the piece is surprisingly detailed on the ‘how’, but here’s the ‘what’: “Nakajima is a GP at a small venture firm, Untapped Capital, so he has a GPT-3 bot that answers common questions from founders. It emails responses to them and includes a way for him to refine them over time—so it continually improves. He has another bot that automatically summarizes every email interaction he has. He reviews these before meetings so that he’s always up to date on founders and LPs. He has another one that, given a startup’s website, can draft an investment memo that includes data like the company’s value proposition, a description of its product, its likely competitors, and even the sentiment from its Product Hunt launch. It goes beyond his work life, too. He has a bot that summarizes and makes searchable emails from his kids’ schools—so he never has to spend time looking up deadlines or important events again.” Small aside – reading all the millions of words about GPT and its ability to write for us, and seeing all the people attempting to take ‘written communication’ out of their lives altogether via the medium of AI-penned emails and notes…does noone actually enjoy writing?

The UK Media Nepo Map; One of the main drivers of The Discourse this week, at least amongst a specific class of the UK’s media-literate Twitter users, was this map compiled by Mic Wright which neatly delineates some (but very much not all) of the familial relationships which are the bedrock on which the modern media landscape in this country works. I don’t mean to speak for Mic here – he very much doesn’t need me to, for one – but I don’t think the point of this is to suggest that this is the only problematic aspect of the structure of the fourth estate, more that this is just one aspect of a very tangled web that encompasses private and public schools and Oxbridge and which if you attempted to map it fully would require the sort of 4-d model that makes datavisualisationmongs weep hot tears of eroticised fear. Anyway, regardless of your opinions on whether this is a) THE MOST DISGUSTING EXAMPLE OF ENTRENCHED PRIVILEGE THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN; or b) MAN DISCOVERS HOW WORLD WORKS, FAINTS, it’s an interesting overview and I don’t think anything like this has been visualised in this way before, and it’s worth remembering next time you see a new senior appointment at one of the big media houses.

The History of the Web: The History of the Web has been a newsletter and website for a while, but Jay Hoffman has turned it into a book which is all available online, and if ever wanted to read a comprehensive historty of how the infrastructure that enables you to read this fcuking newsletterblogtypething in the first place actually came to be then you will very much enjoy this.

AI Twitch Streamers Are Doing Reaction Streams Now: You know how there have been various flavours of apocalyptic predictions about what the coming AI tsunami is going to do to the content landscape, and how we’re going to end up in a situation where the majority of stuff produced online is made The Machine and watched by The Machine with no need for unpleasantly-messy meaty involvement at any stage? Yes, well, it’s already happening, sort-of. This piece looks at AI VTuber NeuroSama (cobbled together from a combination of LLM and text-to-speech voice-synths) whose creator has started setting it up to do reaction streams – so, to be clear, this is an AI simulating its reactions to other content on Twitch. At some point last week, before it got banned for transphobia, NeuroSama started ‘watching’ and ‘reacting’ to the infinite AI-generated Seinfeldish stream ‘Nothing, Forever’ – so, there you have it, in early 2023 we have what I think is the first instance in recorded human history of an artificial intelligence watching and reacting to content produced by another artificial intelligence. However you might want to quibble about definitions and meanings and ‘AI’, it’s hard not to feel a little bit like this is a small Rubicon we’ve just left behind us.

They’re Working On AI Identikits Now (This Is Why It’s A Bad Idea): It seems redundant to have to point out that ‘using nascent AI image-generation which we don’t 100% understand and which we are already aware is a hodgepodge of biases based on the training data used to create it as a means of creating mugshots for the identification of criminals’ is not necessarily the smartest idea in the world, and yet here we are.

The VFX Industry is Broken: Is there any industry anywhere in the world which doesn’t feel a bit like it’s going to sh1t right now? AI hypetrain aside, of course. Apparently the CGI FX world is all sorts of screwed as a result of the insane demands being placed on digital artists by studios and directors who – and this will shock you – don’t necessarily always perfectly understand the technical requirements and limitations inherent in CG tech. This is, I think, a growing problem that is only going to get worse while we still rely on (lazy, inefficient, uselessly-meaty) PEOPLE to do this stuff – there is SO MUCH involved in much of modern business and commerce nowadays that involves stuff that lots of people simply have no idea about I mean, look, it’s been 20+ years ffs and 90% of people have no fcuking idea how to build a website, how long it might take, how much it should cost and what needs to go on it, so I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to work on stuff that is actually quite technical and quite hard and which is constantly being interrupted by people saying things like ‘yeah, but you can just do that with AI, right? We need it in an hour’.

The MegaPorkFarms of Modern China: I’ll be honest with you, this is included mainly because it’s the most nakedly ‘dystopian future’ thing I have seen all week. Forget the robots, forget the AI, it’s the concept of a 25-story MegaPigFarm in a fifth-tier Chinese city that really gave me the futurefantods this week. The photos in here are just sort of dizzying.

VR Sex Parties: I have to admit that this link felt ever so slightly like coming home – not, to be clear, because of any personal experience, but more because ever since Web Curios first began on the H+K blog all those years ago I have been sneaking in links to teledildonics and marveling at the endeavour of people who really, really want to bone in VR. It seems that every new generation of tech gets its own version of this stuff – from Second Life to Google Glass and now to VRChat (for all I know there was a burgeoning teledildonics hacking subculture in Runescape, but I sort-of hope not). There’s nothing particularly new here, which I find interesting in itself – over two decades or so, the community of people who are into this stuff has remained niche at best, and the tech, whilst increasingly evolved, is still mostly homespun and jury-rigged, and I wonder whether there’s just simply a hard cap on the number of humans living at any one time who want to strap a motorised piece of latex onto their groin and enjoy some long-distance robofrottage.

The British Rail-designed Flying Saucer: This,,,this appears to be a real document, and I am AGOG. From 1970 comes this old application to the patent office, in which British Railways Limited sought to get official recognition for their design for a propulsion unit for a flying space vehicle. I AM NOT SH1TTING YOU THIS IS LITERALLY A BLUEPRINT FOR A FLYING SAUCER (scroll down to Fig.1 if you don’t believe me). I have so, so many questions – is this really real? What happened to this project? Was a prototype ever built? WHY AM I STILL FORCED TO SPEND HUNDREDS OF POUNDS ON SUBSTANDARD RAIL TRAVEL WHEN I COULD HAVE HAD A FCUKING SPACESHIP BY NOW? I would love to know more about this should any of you happen to be in possession of some facts.

Chicken Stock: I really enjoyed this article, which begins with a bit of a disquisition about the magical properties of chicken stock but then broadens into something far more interesting – Noah Galuten writes about their efforts to try and find out what’s in shop-bought stock cubes and quickly discovers some fascinating (and not hugely appetising) facts about the way in which the industrial food production machine works. There’s something perennially intriguing about getting a glimpse into worlds you know nothing about – so it is with this depiction of the b2b side of the food production market, where foods become chemical formulas and the quality of a particular type of chicken stock is measured not in terms of flavour but in terms of the fact that “Liquid is flowable at ambient temperature.” If you have slight qualms about Big Food then this is unlikely to make you feel better about the whole ‘industrialised food production at scale’ thing.

I Hired 5 People: I don’t, as s rule, include longreads unless I think they are good or interesting, and I certainly don’t tend to feature stuff (in this section at least) just to point and laugh at it, but, well, this post is simultaneously really interesting and ALSO something that just begs to be pointed at whilst laughing. So. In this edition of their newsletter, Simon Berens writes about how they experimented with hiring a bunch of assistants to (and I am not making this up, this is literally what they were hired to do) sit behind him each day as he worked to stop him from becoming distracted and wasting his time. Take for a moment your initial gut reaction to that statement – I am sure you have one – and now go and read the piece and enjoy all the many, many other feelings that you will experience as you read Berens’ assessments of his assistants, their value, and his expectations as to what they might do for him. This is one of the most impressively tone-deaf things I think you will read all year.

I Turned Off My Appetite: Paul Ford writes about taking Mounjaro, a drug designed for the treatment of diabetes which, in common with others related to that pathology, also has seemingly miraculous properties when it comes to managing weight loss. This is interesting not because of the detail about the drug or the weight loss, but about what Ford seems to realise as he’s taking the treatment – as someone whose life had, per their description, was previously ruled by their appetite, removal of that appetite fundamentally changes something about who they are and how they experience the world, and there’s something both hopeful and…weirdly sad about what that might mean for their future.

Meet The Archive Moles: This is on the one hand what can practically be described as a very, very long puff-piece for a particular publishing house, but I will forgive the author their self-promotional excesses because it’s such a charming read – the piece looks at how publishers of forgotten books go about scouring the world for great works that have either languished forever in unwarranted obscurity or which have fallen oddly out of fashion, and the picture it paints (which is basically of a bunch of tweedy literary detectives scouring the stacks with magnifying glass in hand) is basically catnip for anyone who considers themselves even vaguely bookish.

Do You Ever Feel Like A Plastic Bag?: YOU MUST READ THIS. Honestly, I literally cried laughing whilst doing so and I think you will all absolutely adore this – Michael M writes about being in a not-very-successful band and the singular experience of performing the worst ‘acoustic cover version of a pop song for a live radio show’ ever committed to broadcast. I cannot stress enough quite how spectacularly good this is – were it not for the fact I still had to write the rest of this fcuking thing I would go and read it again RIGHT NOW.

The Crack Up: Finally this week, a piece from the past which you can either enjoy as a great piece of writing about the personal experience of a mental breakdown, or as a wise assessment of how we’re all of us broken and irrevocably messed up in our own particular ways – F Scott Fitzgerald, writing in Esquire in 1936, about the time he ‘cracked’. What’s startling about this, other than the candour, is how modern so much of it feels, and how many of the assessments Fitzgerald make about The Lot of Modern Man are very much still applicable nearly a century hence.

By David Fullarton

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

We kick off this week with a video that is pretty much exclusively for one demographic and one demographic alone – middle-aged men who still nostalgically remember doing acid and listening to Pink Floyd when they were young. This is the whole of Dark Side of the Moon with an entirely-AI-generated accompanying video, which, depending on exactly how many microdots you do, will beguile and terrify in equal measure.

I unexpectedly very much enjoyed this animation about a military drone that attains sentience during a very awkward CIA press conference, and I think you will too.

Oh, this is VERY nicely done. Shadows is a French short film which takes clips featuring human shadows from other black and white films and collages them together to tell the story of a shadow who’s driven to increasing distraction by his human owner’s immorality. I am not sure whether it’s the simple fact that the whole thing’s in French and monochrome that makes it feel so sophisticated, but I was very impressed by this as a piece of both editing and storytelling.

This is very much not my usual sort of thing, but I was absolutely charmed by this – Rachel and Vilray are, from what I can tell, a contemporary duo who record new songs using authentic equipment from the 40s and 50s, which lends the audio an incredible time-travel quality – seriously, if you ever found yourself enjoying the soundtrack to Fallout more than you expected, or if you’re the sort of person who’s ever enjoyed Pomplamoose or Puddles Pity Party then I think you will very much like this (and if those references mean nothing to you, try it anyway!).

This is called ‘My Witch’ by Jen Cloher and whilst I am not personally into the whole aesthetic here from a sexual point of view I can equally appreciate that there is something quite astonishingly sexy about this video and song.

Soccer Mom has consistently been putting out some great songs over the past few years, and this – called ‘Shalom’ – is no exception; it’s all I can do not to turn this right up and really annoy my girlfriend who’s working next door and would very much not appreciate it.

Shardcore has been manipulating the machines again, and this video, set to a minimalist interpretation of My Funny Valentine, is beautiful and weird and a little sexy, and for reasons I can’t adequately explain reminded me slightly of animated Kandinsky if Kandinsky had painted in monochrome and featured significantly more semi-recognisable naked human flesh.

Finally this week, another superb track by Manga St Hilare, who I won’t get tired of putting in here because he really doesn’t do bad tracks. This is called ‘Just Being Us’ and I love it and I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 03/02/23

February 3, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 28 minutes

Have you had good weeks? I suppose the answer to that will depend on how much Shell stock you all own – LOL! – but I sincerely hope that regardless of your portfolio performance – LOL! – you’re all feeling relatively content and not too burnt out from another week of staggering cognitive dissonance (my personal favourite this week was English football’s continued ability to spend more than every single other league in Europe, combined, whilst the actual English economy continues to limp emphysemically towards what we’re continually assured are the bright lights of ‘eventual recovery’ but which, let’s be honest, is as likely to be ‘the glow emitted by the bonfire of what remains of our hopes and dreams for the future’).

Anyway, I have a lunch to get to and probably ought to wear something other than my Curios pants if I want to avoid the unpleasant stares and increasingly-anxious tannoy announcements – I hope you are all doing WONDERFULLY and that this week’s collection of, er, ‘things on the internet’ manages to distract you momentarily from all the other stuff.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and YOU are special to me in ways you can only dream of (but would probably prefer not to).

By Paul Davis

WE START THE WEEK IN REASONABLY UPBEAT FASHION, COURTESY OF THIS MIX OF FUNKY HOUSE BY DOC MARTIN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.1:

Watch Me Forever: Apologies for the fact that we once again start with AI-related stuff, but I PROMISE that this is more interesting than ‘you can use the machines to write copy for the About Us page of your incredibly boring website’. Watch Me Forever is a quite astonishing thing – an infinite, machine-generated TV channel which broadcasts nothing but its own, AI-generated episodes of Seinfeld. This is quite remarkable – the scripts are generated on the fly by GPT-3, they’re then fed to a text-to-speech generator and audio is generated, and then this is all automatically fed to a visualiser which creates the graphics and generates the camera angles, scene changes, cuts…On the one hand, this is objectively dreadful as entertainment; the scripts make no sense, the acting is wooden, everything looks as though it’s being rendered by the same software that was used to create Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’ music video in the early 80s (here’s a link in case you’re a child and that reference means nothing to you)…and yet, as I sit here typing this at 708am GMT on a Friday, there are nearly 10,000 people concurrently watching this Twitch stream. Whilst I don’t think the people responsible for churning our the hand-crafted nuggets of televisual gold that characterise this GOLDEN AGE of episodic scripted entertainments need worry quite yet (although as I write this, AI Kramer just made an actual joke about Italian coffee machines making drinks that taste of Marinara sauce, so actually…), this feels very much like a glimpse into a future. Not just the utopian (is it utopian? Not so sure) vision of an era in which we can have newly-minted, high-quality entertainments generated on demand, but, more prosaically (and also, significantly more imminently) this sort of setup is going to be absolutely rinsed by the same people who flooded YouTube with all the algorithm-pleasing garbage CGI videos aimed at children in the early-10s. Train GPT on the entire canon of Peppa Pig and capture an entire generation of young eyeballs with your infinite stream of highly-monetisable knockoffs – it’s the future! Honestly, this really does feel like tomorrow having arrived a bit early (if, admittedly, in still-embryonic form).

Uncreative: I did wonder about this one… Uncreative was a smart little bit of attention-grabbing by DDB, which rather captured the imagination of certain advermarketingpr circles this week – the URL now takes you to a ‘hey, we fooled you!’ splash, but previously was a faux landing page for a new ‘entirely automated’ creative agency which was promising to REVOLUTIONISE AND DISRUPT creative services by, er, undercutting everyone else by using AI tools to come up with ideas. The nice gimmick was that they were promising to offer FREE CREATIVE while they got on their feet – you could enter an email address (DATACAPTURE!) and give a few details about the client you needed ideas for, and what you needed them to achieve, and then a few minutes later you got emailed a PDF with some potential creative solutions based on your brief. So obviously what this actually was was a promo for DDB and their innovative approach to working with AI – well done them! As I said, smart bait-and-switch – but it was also, I think, an interesting case study of Where We Are with this stuff. I had a play, and the things I got sent back were, broadly, rubbish – generic and lacking in detail or spark. Thing is, though, I’ve spent enough time in agency ‘brainstorms’ – and lots of you probably have too – and I know that most of what comes out of them is also broadly rubbish. What DDB proved with this is that a) they are good at promoting themselves, well done them; and b) AI won’t come up with any tactics that are actually good, but it will happily come up with thousands that are just as mediocre as those dreamt up by the 15 people in their mid-20s currently having a painfully-unfocused conversation about ‘maybe we could do some influencer activations?’ in your second-largest meeting room.

BibleGPT: Do you ever think that you’d be a better person if you were able to consult a biblical scholar on every aspect of your life and behaviour? Well thanks to the magic (not magic ffs!) of GPT, now a more spiritually-coherent existence is within your grasp! BibleGPT is a small webproject which lets you ask any question you like and receive an answer based on either the King James of World English bibles – you get a bit prose relating to your question along with a couple of quotations to provide you with Godly succour as you seek to navigate a path through the sinners and the temptations. I confess to being a Catholic in only the very loosest of ways (my relationship with the Church suffered irrevocable damage when I wasn’t allowed ‘Pontius’ as a confirmation name – embarrassingly this is a true story), and as such I can’t vouch for the godliness or otherwise of the answers or whether you can guarantee yourself entry to heaven simply by consulting this app every time you have a decision to make – that said, I have so far asked it whether I should eat fish today given it’s a Friday (it correctly confirmed that there is no Biblical stipulation to do so) and whether I should (respectfully) go to a strip club (it suggested in reasonably strong terms that I should not) and, based on these answers, I feel reasonably comfortable entrusting your afterlife and general moral guidance to this bit of code. Oh, and it’s available in Spanish too, just in case you have a God-fearing abuela who’d enjoy the chance to interrogate the scriptures on the fly.

GPT Hamlet: This is here more as a quick ‘look what you can do!’-type example rather than anything fully-formed to play with, but it’s interesting to note that when Ethan Mollick asked ChatGPT to code and script him an interactive fiction game in Twine it was able to do so with reasonable success. This is very simple, fine, but again it’s impressive less because of the final output and more because of the way the software can instantaneously spin up workable frameworks for things that you can then experiment with to your heart’s content.

CatGPT: I think you can probably guess the joke here, but this made me laugh and it may briefly distract you from whatever real-life horror is currently gnawing at your psychic ankles (so to speak).

Smooth Talker: I continue to be amazed at the fact that noone’s commissioned a ‘why the immediate future of dating apps is an AI-assisted hellscape where you will no longer be able to assume that the person you’re messaging isn’t outsourcing the tedious business of actually talking to you to a not-particularly-sophisticated machine’ piece yet, but in my continued, futile attempts to nudge the commissioning editors of the world’s press (ALL of whom obviously read Curios, ahem) I present to you yet another service which promises to use GPT to improve your ability to chirpse strangers via text. Put in some salient point from your target’s bio, select how ‘smooth’ you want your approach to be, press a button and BOOM! You will be the grateful recipient of some…well, based on my brief experiment, some truly mediocre attempts at starting a conversation. Between this, and the terrifying extent to which teenage boys appear to be horny for the toothy AI monstrosities, I do wonder whether this tech is over the next few years going to prove the final nail in the coffin of the ability of teenage boys to relate to and engage with…well, with anyone tbh.

Stelfie: You might have seen these doing the rounds over the past few weeks – the person behind the Stelfie project (I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that they’re called ‘Stefano’ or something similar) has found a certain area of latent space in (what I think is) Stable Diffusion that is letting him produce some rather excellent images, imagining what it might have looked like had he (or the avatar he has created to represent him) been present at various points in history with a mobile phone, and what his selfies (SELFIE/STELFIE! DO YOU SEE?!?!) might have looked like. So, we have ‘bloke in Ancient Rome taking a selfie’, bloke taking selfies with Darwin and Einstein, bloke taking a selfie at the building of the pyramids…you get the idea. This is where the most fun/interesting AI image stuff lives at the moment, if you ask me – people finding particular visual areas that interest them and then going deep within those to see what they can make/find. I do find it fascinating to wonder about the extent to which these sorts of very distinct visual styles are going to become protectable, though – might it be possible for an individual or organisation to stake a claim to a specific area of visual latent space? Does that question even make sense? Am I hopelessly out of my depth? All excellent questions.

Infinicity: Much like the first link in this section, this feels like a window on a coming future that’s not quite finished cooking yet. Infinicity is a research project and paper which is aiming to create generative cityscapes, from maps to 3d models to ACTUAL NAVIGABLE 3D ENVIRONMENTS, all automatically – this is obviously all INCREDIBLY complicated and maths-y and, frankly, beyond my comprehension, but the website does an excellent job of explaining what’s going on (well, if you exclude all the really hard bits that I don’t understand) and, most excitingly, shows you all sorts of videos and examples of what the generated cities look like and how you can move through them, and, look, they look awful, muddy and indistinct and oddly-reminiscent of a very particular era of videogame graphics circe 1998, but, equally, this is practically witchcraft and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how amazing the potential of this stuff is, from gaming to architecture to scenarioplanning…dizzying, honestly.

Another Tutorial On How To Make Talking Avatars Using AI: I actually played around with the steps outlined in this Twitter thread for a few hours this week, and it’s remarkable how ‘easy’ it all is – I mean, look, the stuff I created was…significantly less shiny than the examples in these videos, but the process described here does actually work, and those of you with more patience and a greater fundamental desire to create an AI-generated talking head might find this useful. Again, if nothing else this demonstrates how simple it is to create (for example, off the top of my head) a character to front all of your corporate training videos (God, what a soulcrushingly dull example, sorry).

Ocean Art Underwater Photography Contest 2022: OH MY GOD THE MYSTERIES OF THE DEEP ARE AMAZING! I feel slightly conflicted about these images – on the one hand, they are amazing and astonishing and crikey the sea is a remarkable place; on the other, they are…unsettling, on occasion, and do rather reinforce my fairly deeply-held conviction that the sea is a terrifying place that we should perhaps not explore too much more thoroughly lest we finally awaken the kraken. I mean, just look at the image entitled “A Male Weedy Seadragon Carries Pink Eggs On Its Tail” and then try telling me that that creature isn’t Not Of This Planet (also, parenthetically, ‘weedy seadragon’ is SUCH a brilliantly-sh1t name for a seabeast).

Dear Gillian: This is a super-interesting project that any female readers of Curios might want to get involved with – particularly those who remember the Nancy Friday books, which, for the unaware, were a series of explorations of human sexuality written from the 1970s, based on anonymous interviews with hundreds of people (initially women, but latterly also men) about their sexual fantasies. If you’ve never had the chance to check them out, I cannot recommend them highly enough – partly because of the fact that human sexuality is ENDLESSLY fascinating, and partly because, let’s be honest, it’s just some absolutely excellent smut (though, er, it’s probably worth pointing out that the original books were VERY explicit and you might feel a bit funny about visiting a zoo for a while afterwards). Anyway, 50 years on from the original book on female fantasies, a new project is seeking to ask similar questions of a more modern audience – the name, ‘Dear Gillian’, is because it’s being fronted up by Gillian Anderson, under whose name the resulting collection will be published by Bloomsbury – and so clicking the link will take you to a form where you can submit your own (entirely anonymous) sexual fantasy for potential inclusion. If nothing else I will be hugely-interested to see to what extent technology and the web bleed into these more modern fantasies – or, indeed, the extent to which they don’t.

Groundhog Day: While obviously we’re all away of Punxatawny Phil, until I found this site I had no idea that there were in fact a host of OTHER weather-predicting rodents scattered across NOrth America and Canada, each of whom have also laid down their prognostication as to whether or not Winter is finally going to fcuk off. Sadly it turns out that the majority of the weathergophers have decided that we’re in for another six weeks of cold and misery, but at the very least you can explore this website and learn more about the various meteorological seers (including the fact that the one from Pennsylvania is, inexplicably, called ‘Poor Richie’, which has made me feel unaccountably sorry for the miserable, cold little fcuker).

Valentine’s Day Cards: These aren’t particularly exciting or ‘webby’, but, equally, I laughed more than I expected to when presented with the option to send my girlfriend an e-card which reads, for no reason that I can seem to find, ‘Robert’. These are personalisable should you desire, but, honestly, I think the options they offer as defaults are pretty strong too, and I would personally be charmed to get a card whose cover read “you absolute mess”.

By Spencer Ostrander

LET’S GO BACK TO THE LATE-90s NOW WITH THIS SUPERB DJ KRUSH MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.2:

The Sindhu Sesh Remix Competition: One of the nicest musical finds of last year was my discovery of the Sindhu Sesh musical universe (I like to imagine it like Marvel, but a bit more ‘provincial pub, scampi basket and cheap cocaine hoofed in an outside lavatory’ than ‘multibillion dollar interconnected film franchise behemoth), as evidenced by Pete and Bas, whose single ‘Mr Worldwide’ I featured here last Summer. Anway, there’s now a competition running to find the best remix featuring Pete and Bas’s unique vocal stylings – if you’re any sort of musician. I can’t encourage you strongly enough to download the vocal tracks and go WILD – the winning entry will be featured on their next single and will get all the kudos you’d expect for adding some terrifying 180bpm beats to their already slightly fighty vocals.
Calligrapher: A little AI handwriting tool, which I don’t think serves any purpose at all beyond the aesthetic – what’s hugely impressive about this (to my ignorant mind, at least) is that it really is generating the writing on the fly each time. In an era in which it’s hard not to obsess about our imminent obsolescence in the face of increased machine competence, it’s good to know that their handwriting’s fcuking terrible too.
The Official UFO App: Or, to give it its official title, ‘Enigma Labs’ – either way, if you’ve been waiting for a way to tell the world about all the times the silver, saucer-eyed aliens have seen fit to choose YOU for a probing then this is very much the app for you. Admittedly it’s not fully launched yet, but there’s an iOS beta that you can sign up for (I like the fact that they are prioritising iPhone users, as though aliens are design status slags and have a preference for showing themselves to people who worship at the churches of Ive and Jobs) and the app will eventually provide anyone worldwide with the opportunity to upload details of alien sightings along with supporting evidence, which will then be analysed by the app’s ML code to determine whether or not it’s a real sighting or a hoax (should…should we be asking questions as to how they’re benchmarking that?). “Enigma is the most trusted, frictionless place to report a sighting and the largest queryable UAP database in the world. Our platform continues to run machine learning on over 270k citizen and military reports across every country, awarding every sighting an anomaly score based on multivariate models. We are building tools for everyone to deconflict sightings with identifiable variables , glean insights, and connect to other people with similar sighting stories.” I am almost tempted to get an iPhone, just to access the incredible community I can already tell will coalesce around this.

Housr: This is a smart idea – Housr is an app which is seeking to DISRUPT (yes, I know, but bear with me) the student rental housing market, making it simpler for landlords to list properties for students to rent, and for students to find suitable housing, and housemates, and deal with deposits and contracts and all the tedious and frankly complicated stuff that Iargely ignored (which is perhaps why my second year of university saw me living in a flat that might charitably have been disguised as ‘squalid’, and with a sofa which gave my friend Paul what looked suspiciously like chemical burns). This, honestly, strikes me as an uncomplicatedly smart business concept – it’s currently only running in Manchester, I think, but will expand over the coming year.
A Man Sitting On A Couch Looking At Something: I LOVE THIS. Another wonderful webartprojectthing via Naive Weekly (there are a few in here this week, and this is your semi-regular reminder to sign up if you’re into this sort of thing), this is by Fred Wordie who, for a week last year, set up a camera pointing at his sofa and got software to surveil him via said camera, with the machine seeking to interpret his movements and positions into recognisable actions. The resulting site is a strange, dissociated selection of what the machine ‘saw’ each time it ‘looked’ – a man sitting on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa with a bottle in his mouth…this shouldn’t be as affecting as it is, and yet the dissociated fragments of life that pop out here and the ambiguity in how one might interpret the rather bald descriptions, make this something really rather wonderful and unsettling. If nothing else, there’s definitely an ad campaign in the broad theme of this (apologies to Fred if this sullies the otherwise pure nature of your art! Sorry man!).
The Doorstep: Also via Naive comes this lovely, small web project – a digital shoe rack, where Azlen Elsa is inviting people to submit photos of their shoes for inclusion. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?? Unless, of course, Azlen has an unannounced shoe fetish, but let’s presume that that’s not the case here.
Catch Cameras: Via Dan – thanks Dan! – comes this site, selling cameras, which briefly transported me back to a simpler time a decade or so ago when ‘The Hipster’ was still a thing. Catch is selling small film cameras – with real film! Actual, physical film! That you need to get developed! – which are beautifully-designed (if you think that the absolute apogee of compact camera design was the 1970s) and to me feel oddly reminiscent of the Olden Days when Instagram’s logo was still designed to look like a physical photography device, and Hipstagram was still a thing…anyway, this is basically charging you £60 for a nice-looking point-and-shoot film device, but if you’ve decided that 2023 is the year you get more ‘mindful’ about your photography practice then a) fcuk off and don’t come back; b) this may tick a box or two. There is something particularly funny about how the shop page features actual instructions on how to go about getting the film processed, to the point that they actually feel the need to write ‘Google ‘film development’’ (and by ‘funny’ I mean ‘horribly, cruelly ageing’).
FatMap: I have never been skiing. Or snowboarding. Or snowshoeing, or wingsuitgliding, or ice-climbing, or any mountainous pursuits, really. In part because skiing was always a bit pricey, a bit because I am almost certain to return with fewer functioning knees than is ordinarily considered ideal. If you, though, are more Snow Brave than I am and don’t mind either the cold or the possibility of spending several months in traction as doctors attempt to reconstruct the shredded remnants of your cruciate and meniscus, then you might enjoy FatMap, which, seemingly, is like Strava but for mountainous sports (on reflection, if you’re into this sort of stuff then you quite possibly know about this anyway, but fcukit) and which contains all sorts of interesting information about slopes and gradients and snowfall, as well as allowing you to conduct a silent vendetta against all those people who are better at falling down the side of a mountain than you are (it’s just gravity ffs, stop showing off).
Seeing Theory: This is a really great piece of interactive explanation from Brown University in the US – it’s an explanation of probability and statistics that is delivered with such wonderful visual and interactive flair that even someone as fundamentally incapable of grasping numerical concepts as I am can emerge with a half-coherent explanation as to how some of this stuff works (ok, quarter-coherent). There’s nothing in here that’s particularly new on its own, but it’s just a superb example of how to use coding and interactivity to help introduce and explain complex concepts; it does feel like brands and businesses, particularly ones in complicated industries, don’t really have any excuse for not using more tools like this in their communications.
All The Superbowl Ads: It’s nearly that time of the year again, when two teams of pituitary meatheads spend four hours hitting each other while several hundred million spectators continue working on their long-term ‘Mission Diabetes’ project – oh, and a bunch of people in advermarketingpr spend far too much time analysing the adverts. This is YouTube’s SUPERBOWL AD CENTRE, which you might want to bookmark should you decide you want to have an opinion on who ‘won’ the ad breaks this year. FWIW (and I have only bothered to watch a handful) I get a rather weird feeling from Snap’s promo, like it’s been dropped in here via a timewarp from the past, when we all thought more positively about the digital future and ‘AR donuts’ felt like a fun toy rather than something to gaze at hungrily.
Lighthouse Friends: I confess that in the early weeks of this year I have been feeling somewhat…unmoored, and I have found myself wishing on occasion that I felt strongly or passionately enough about…well, about anything, really, to want to devote myself to it with wholehearted abandon. Basically I want to feel about…well, anything really, the same way that the person behind this website feels about the lighthouses of North America. THEY HAVE VISITED ALL OF THEM (well the ones in the US at least) and taken pictures! You can read their notes on EVERY SINGLE ONE! Just imagine caring so much about something that you’re motivated to embark upon a project so wonderfully, perfectly pointless/meaningful (delete per your perspective) as this! Anyway, lighthouses! Do…do I need therapy?
Illustrated People: This is not only a great photoproject but an ad campaign waiting to happen, and given this is apparently 10 years old I’m slightly amazed that it hasn’t been used already. Thomas Mailaender used a UV lamp to ‘burn’ temporary images onto his subject’s skin, photographing the impressions before they faded, creating permanent mementos of the vanishingly ephemeral – honestly, if you’re after some creative inspiration for any campaigns relating to summer holidays and the like, this feels PERFECT.
Growing: This is just GLORIOUS – Growing is a digital poem, created by Olly Bromham, which creates a cascade of words across your browser window, each linking to a Wikipedia entry; I have no idea at all how the program is choosing the vocabulary, but the words chosen are FABULOUS, all crunchy and chewy and delightful to speak aloud, and their procession across the page creates a deliciously sonorous composition which doesn’t make any sense at all but which creates a sort of…texture, if that makes sense, that I find almost perfectly-pleasing. Also, it has just taught me that picrocarmine means “A stain made from picric acid and indigo carmine”, which is just lovely.
Squeaky Clean Toys: Can I have a quick show of hands, please – how many of you would buy a, er, ‘pre-loved’ sextoy? Well, thankfully I can’t see any of you and so have no idea which of you are more…relaxed than others when it comes to dildosharing, but presuming that at least one of you put your hand up then YOU’RE WELCOME! In fairness, these people do give the impression that they know what they’re doing – they clearly state that most toys can’t in fact be recycled, and they have lots of information about porous vs non-porous materials, and there are obvious environmental benefits to handing down your Bad Dragon from generation to generation rather than simply leaving future humans with the puzzle of the Anthropocene Dildolayer to unravel – but, equally, WHO WANTS A PRE-LOVED SEXTOY?!?! Anyway, er, this exists.
Back Scratching Simulator: It’s not, fine, a HUGELY accurate simulation of scratching someone’s back, but it IS a fun little game which caused my brain to ache in pleasing and unusual ways. How quickly can you press the right key combinations and get that itch scratched?
Gaming Like It’s 1927; Last up in the ‘miscellaneous links’ section, a wonderful collection of small games, all created as part of the recent ‘Gaming Like It’s 1927’ GameJam, which saw designers invited to come up with quick-and-dirty game prototypes (some digital, some not) based on works from 1927 which have recently entered the public domain in the US. So there’s a Tempest clone taking visual inspiration from the works of Salvador Dali, another which takes place in a feline-themed version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, one based on the writings of AA Milne…I’ve only tried a handful of the 20 games linked to from here, and they’re very much on the ‘unpolished and experimental’ end of the spectrum, but there’s some brilliant creativity on display here throughout.

By Steve Seeley

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX IS THIS CRACKER BY DJ BIRCH WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE LOOSELY AS BEING ‘ECLECTICALLY GLOBAL’ BUT WHICH I PROMISE IS REALLY GOOD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY ONCE AGAIN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Jonathan Hoefler: Another to file under ‘finding a promising area of latent space and just digging right into it’, Jonathan Hoelfer’s Insta feed shares images of imaginary gadgets and devices dreamt up by AI, all of which have a sort-of pleasingly baroque aesthetic to them, as though Steampunk managed to magically get less irritating.
Adam Cole: Cole is an artist working with digital media and AI, and I came across him because of his work Kiss/Crash; his Insta feed is a pleasingly-unsettling parade of odd machine imaginings, which if you like the same sort of stuff I do you will probably enjoy quite a lot.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

MetaTrends: I imagine you’ve all long since done your trend predictions for the year and are now already engaged in scrying for next year’s imaginary futures – whilst I used to regularly point and laugh and mock these sorts of things (and, honestly, still do in the main), there was a point about 8 years ago when Grey included ‘New Witches’ as one of their trends for the coming year and I thought this so ridiculous, so utterly emblematic of the madness of agency planners and their desperate need to OWN THE ZEITGEIST, that I made fun of it mercilessly (to the point of doing so in actual print somewhere) only to find that they were absolutely fcuking right, and that the occult did indeed come back in a massive way throughout the late-2010s, driven, as they rightly predicted, by teenage girls. Which is basically a long-winded way of reminding you that you should never listen to me about ANYTHING (unless you’re paying me money, at which point all my opinions become SOLID GOLD), but also of introducing this rather useful (if, equally, VERY SILLY) piece by Matt Klein where he extracts the META-TRENDS from 50 agency trend docs and isolates the 16 broad areas of consensus. Your mileage here will vary depending, frankly, on how much of your professional life you need to spend having conversations about things like ‘the biggest colourways influencing GenAlpha soft drink consumption habits’, but I like the way that these are presented (the pithy ‘what is this, how is it expressed, how does this drive tension, how might you get involved’ format is smart) and, whilst this is all obviously b0llocks, so is your job and so you might as well play along.

Unequality: I thought this was a really interesting essay by James Plunkett – the final in a series of three, written in partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in which he explores the concept of ‘unequality’, as distinct from ‘inequality’. Plunkett defines ‘unequality’ thusly: “the distribution of income growth has gone from an upward slope to a hockey stick laid on the ground. And so unequality looks distributionally nothing like the unfair and scarred yet dynamic economy of Thatcher — the economy that made New Labour strike its famous compromise with the rich.All of which nearly rounds out our view of unequality; as well as being divided and spatial, it’s exclusive, elitist, and stagnant. But unequality also has one other essential feature: it’s stunningly homogenous. And this final characteristic feeds back into and amplifies the others.”; oddly, reading this it felt like the best evocation of the vague feeling of ‘everything is just a little bit…off’ feeling I’ve had since returning to London last year, perhaps best evoked by this line: “how does unequality feel? The answer is that it feels like we exist in two distinct countries, side by side. These cleavages are partly a question of money, but they go deeper than that. In a technological revolution like the one we’re living through now, the distinction between the vanguard economy and the laggard economy isn’t just a distinction of rich versus poor, or of high-paid versus low-paid jobs; it’s a distinction of the new versus the old — a difference not of quantity but of kind.” I thought this was excellent.

Who Owns AI?: This is a really good overview of the commercial state of the AI market, and why it’s hard to pick a ‘winner’ from the current crop of players – and why it’s equally hard at present to see anyone carving out any sort of meaningful competitive advantage in the ‘creating layers between AI and product’ space, mainly because, as the article’s authors point out, there are no ‘moats’ – everyone playing in this space has access to the same tech, more or less, all the image stuff is using the same baseline training data, as is the text stuff, and it’s hard to see where marginal advantage happens at this stage. Business-y, as you might expect, but it feels like solid sectoral analysis.

How Medium Is Dealing With AI: ‘How we’re going to deal with AI and what are our policies around its use?’ is a question that should be occupying more businesses than I believe is probably currently the case – some, of course, moreso than others. Which is why it was pleasing to read this piece by Scott Lamb of Medium, outlining the publishing platform’s current policy on copy generated by or in conjunction with text-generating AIs – the quick overview is ‘you have to disclose if what you are publishing is wholly or partly AI-generated, and if we suspect you are not disclosing this we reserve the right to remove said copy’. What’s good about this, in my opinion at least, is that it’s clear, it’s user-focused, it reflects concerns expressed by the community of writers using the platform, and it acknowledges the need for fluid policy development and revision as the technology and people’s expectations change. Ok, fine, it’s not SUPER-thrilling as a piece of prose but sometimes (ok, rarely) ‘useful’ trumps ‘fun’.

Using AI To Boost Creativity: More from Ethan Mollick here (who you really should follow if you’re interested in the ‘how’ of ‘using AI for professional reasons), who is pleasingly positive about the scope for Chat-GPT in particular – in this article he runs through some simple ways in which you can use the interface to help you generate and refine ideas, many of which will be of interest to all you poor advermarketingprdrones out there – I particularly enjoyed the ‘generating names for new products or businesses’ example. Again, I think it’s important to be realistic about this stuff – none of what it generates is going to win you a Lion right now, but that’s absolutely fine because neither is most of the rest of the work that you or anyone else does, most of which is involved in creating content noone will ever read for companies and products 99.9999999% of the world’s population has never heard of. I’m going to throw it out there – I don’t think writing p1ss-poor ‘thought leadership’ content for morons to ‘Like’ on LinkedIn is not a category of work we should be particularly concerned with keeping for ourselves.

Drawing Comics With GPT: One of my favourite things of 2010, and one of the web projects that first inspired me to start writing Curios, oddly enough, was early webcomic sensation AxeCop, where artist Ethan Nicoll took notes from the mad stories his little brother Malachai would make up when playing and then illustrated them to professional standard – honestly, the original strips were some of the funniest things I had ever read (and, checking back, they still are – honestly, just read this, it is fcuking PERFECT). I was reminded of that when reading this piece about an artist experimenting with getting ChatGPT to write single-panel newspaper comics; there’s a certain weird, blank surreality to some of the creations that vaguely remind me of the unhinged parade of non sequiturs that is ‘talking to an under-10’.

Bubble City: As Twitter continues its slow process of disintegration – turns out that sacking huge swathes of the staff DOES have a material effect on platform functioning and stability! – so the general chuntering about ‘what next?’ continues. I found this white paper – which is by Monica Anderson from October last year – about their vision for a different platform for text-based conversations, called ‘Bubble City’, genuinely fascinating. This is all theory, but as a set of principles and ideals around which to organise a potential new network it strikes me as, broadly, pretty smart (although I think Monica and I have slightly different approaches to legality and content moderation – hers is…pretty loose!: “to the extent permitted by law, there should be no censorship of posted messages. You can use the system for illegal purposes by for instance posting about drugs for sale and people wanting to buy those drugs would be able to find those messages. And so would the police. Without paying a penny”). Worth reading, in part if you’re interested in social platforms and how they function, but also more generally as an example of how to set out this sort of thing in a really clear and cogent manner.

We’ve Lost The Plot: I think this is a really interesting article that completely misunderstands and misuses the term ‘metaverse’ (insofar as it means anything anyway) and by so doing rather undermines its otherwise-good central argument; the piece is basically about how everything is now entertainment here in the great ludic paradise that is 2023(!), and that by extension we are becoming conditioned to narrativise events in a way that isn’t necessarily healthy or positive – whether that’s the desire to see everything via the lens of entertainments, or the increasing degree to which we are all trained to perceive of ourselves as principal protagonists in a tightly-scripted modern drama (comedy/tragedy – delete per your own personal flavour of narcissism). All of which feels true and sounds interesting, but which is then slightly ruined (to my mind, at least) by the author’s slightly hamfisted attempts to make this OF THE NOW by linking it to the broad concept of the metaverse which, honestly, no. Still, ignore that part of it and this is an interesting read – see this passage, which if you remove the nonsensical pre-colon opening is actually…true? “Life in the metaverse brings an aching contradiction: We have never been able to share so much of ourselves. And, as study after study has shown, we have never felt more alone. Fictions, at their best, expand our ability to understand the world through other people’s eyes. But fiction can flatten, too. Recall how many Americans, in the grim depths of the pandemic, refused to understand the wearing of masks as anything but “virtue signaling”—the performance of a political view, rather than a genuine public-health measure. Note how many pundits have dismissed well-documented tragedies—children massacred at school, families separated by a callous state—as the work of “crisis actors.” In a functioning society, “I’m a real person” goes without saying. In ours, it is a desperate plea.”

My Year as a Hot Girl For Hire: Or, “what it’s like working for OnlyFans, being one of the people who acts as the interface between performer and fans” – to which the answer, in case you hadn’t guessed, is ‘sad and grubby and empty in ways you probably didn’t automatically consider when you read the headline’.

The Rise of the ‘Dupe’: Or ‘how having knockoff gear used to be considered socially ruinous when I was a child, but is now apparently totally fine’ – which, honestly, is a good thing! This Buzzfeed piece looks at how there is a growing cachet associated with being able to find items that mimic the designer aesthetic for a non-designer budget – there’s something interesting in what this means for the status of the logo, and indeed whether this is something that will be reversed when (lol if?) the current economic horrorshow rights itself somewhat.

Amazon Is Getting Worse: Timely given the less-than-stellar results just published, this is a decent companion piece to last week’s essay by Doctorow on digital ‘ensh1ttification’ which looks at the specific ways in which Amazon has managed to ‘ensh1ttify’ itself over the past decade or so (at least from the point of view of customers and many vendors), and what the strategy behind that might be. This is a good-if-infuriating article that does nothing to disabuse me of my firmly-held opinion that, of all the horrid companies (outside of the ones that, you know, make machines of death). Amazon is by quite a long distance the most frightening.

Blackpilled Swag: There’s a part of me that read this article and thought it was written specifically to make people like me twitch with discomfort as they attempted to parse the language; still, if you can get around the…somewhat idiosyncratic Blackbird Spyplane house style, this is a really good read on the weird world of ‘blackpilled swag’ – more prosaically, branded merch from companies whose impact on the planet, society and our species as a whole might best be described as ‘not wholly positive’. This is interesting not just from a trends and fashion point of view, but also as a general barometer of modern nihilism – actually, there’s an idea, why don’t we replace the (increasingly meaningless and irrelevant) Doomsday Clock with a better indicator, one that tracks our growing lack of interest and engagement in the fact that we’re all careening hellwards in the handcart. Maybe we could use emoji. Oh, by the way, the Shell sweatshirt pictured in here absolutely SLAPS and would be quite the power garment to sport this weekend should you have access to one.

Nine Ways of Looking at a Pint of Guinness: Apologies if you’re paywalled out of this but, well, I did tell you to sub to Vittles – this is a WONDERFUL piece of writing, about Guinness and pubs and the pour and what makes a ‘good pint’, and about homesickness and identity, and I enjoyed reading it so much that it was almost enough to make me abandon my lifelong hatred of any fcuker who orders a round composed entirely of Guinness when ahead of me in the queue at the bar.

Chatting With Uri Gellar: Did you know that there was a particular Pokemon, called Kadabra in the West, which was removed from the deck as a result of a complaint by Uri Gellar? No, neither did I, but that and SO MUCH MORE Gellar-related trivia lies just a click away, and I promise you that it is worth every second of your time. This is from gaming website Kotaku, but is frankly far less about the Pokemon question (the card is being reinstated in a new edition, hence the interview) and far more about the author’s long-standing dislike of Gellar slowly-but-inevitably being worn away by the insane force of the man’s personality – I promise you that whatever you may think about Uri Gellar (“SPOON BOTHERER”, most probably) you will come away from this article having warmed to him considerably.

The Violin Doctor: A profile of one John Becker, a Chicago resident and one of the world’s premier experts in the repair and restoration of Stradivarius violins – I was mesmerised by this, in that very particular way that sometimes happens when reading a detailed and intimate description of someone or something preternaturally skilled; honestly, this might be the quietest (I know, but you’ll see what I mean) and most relaxing thing I read all week.

In Battersea: Owen Hatherley writes in the London Review of Books about the Nine Elms development around Battersea Power Station, and the particular, peculiar oddness of the area which has now reached some sort of developmental milestone (despite not being in any meaningful sense ‘finished’). This is only really of particular interest if you know London (and, frankly, the specific area in question), but it’s a lovely and angry piece of writing that skewers much about what feels wrong about yet another glass-and-steel-and-chrome forest being erected in an area that wasn’t necessarily crying out for one. “If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously faked, but to what end? Who wants this Tate Modern for philistines, this Senate House for illiterates, this Berghain for people who can’t dance?” Well, yes, quite.

Yes Chef: Cookery and drudgery and repetition and routine and meditation, and why doing the same thing over and over again is, occasionally, worthwhile and necessary. “Repeating something is often an act that keeps one foot in the past and one in the present. Maybe that’s why chefs can repeat the same jokes over and over again. Though the days are long days, the work painful, the same jokes help us remember when we laughed out loud the first time. But to repeat something the right way is to give up on the past and to think only of being fully present now, in every new day and moment, toward an authentic future.” As someone who’s been repeating this same Friday routine for..too long, I can only agree.

Holiday in Antarctica: Finally in this week’s longreads, this is a beautiful, funny and genuinely romantic account of Roxane Gay and her wife Debbie Millman took a cruise to Antarctica – Gay writes the prose, while Millman intersperses illustrations and short captioned notes, and it’s so lovely to read something that works as a shared account of common experience; it is honestly not possible to read this and not feel a little warmer and happier at the end, I promise. Plus, it contains some EXCELLENT photographs of massive lumps of ice, should you fancy seeing some before they all melt.

By Michael Sowa

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I don’t often feature 20+ minute animations here, but I’ll make an exception for this – Oscar nominated in the ‘Best Animated Short’ category, My Year of D1cks is all about trying to lose your virginity as a girl growing up in the mid-90s, and it’s exactly as scuzzy and funny and weird and gross as you would hope, and I LOVE the animation style, and basically this is great and you should all watch it.

More animation now, in the shape of this superb and very Cyriak-esque bit of work by Australian animator Felix Colgrave. Apparently the creatures in this video are inspired by his two-year-old son’s toys – whatever, this is DELICIOUSLY odd, and reminds me quite a lot of Jim Henson’s creature workshop, despite being entirely digital in execution.

This is fun, and a bit scuzzy, and it’s called ‘People (Everywhere I Go)’ by TeeVee Repairman, and it would be a lot of fun to jump around to live I think.

When I first heard this song I was immediately and powerfully transported back to some indistinct period in time about 15-20 odd years ago when seemingly EVERY SINGLE SONG had this sort of very clean production and these sorts of sweetly-cut-glass vocals, and basically it’s a time machine and I love it. It’s called ‘Evolution’ and it’s by Braids.

Finally this week, we close with this – a little acoustic-ish number which I initially dismissed as ‘a bit wet’ but which drew me in with the slightly-off-kilter nature of the songwriting and the ADORABLE Wall-E-crossed-with-Gizmo robot mascot starring in the video, and which by the end had me feeling…well, unexpectedly emo. So, effectively, it is I who is in fact ‘a bit wet’. This is called ‘Disposable Everything’ and it’s by AJJ and I LOVE YOU bye!

Webcurios 27/01/23

January 27, 2023

admin

Uncategorized No Comments

Opening
Misc 1
Misc 2
Tumblr
Long Reads
Video

Reading Time: 36 minutes

Hi everyone! Hi! How are you!

You know what, I feel…alright this week! The sun is shining, the heating is on, the days are getting longer and I have done my tax return – it’s all going to be ok!

(On the subject of tax, by the way, a brief note on the Nadhim Zahawi thing – the funniest thing about all this, to my mind at least, is the fact that Zahawi has for the past 5-6 years or so been the biggest government lickspittle going. I am one of those tedious people who listens to the Today programme every morning, and as such I can say with reasonable confidence that there is noone who has done more of the 8:10am ‘meatshield to defend whatever awful sh1t the Tories have done now’ interviews than the self-described ‘King of An*l’ (thanks, Popbitch!) – on that basis, him STILL getting sacked as a result of his dodgy tax affairs, despite having spent much of the past decade orally bum-spelunking a succession of Prime Ministers, is even funnier (til you remember that he’s still a multi-millionaire and I am going to have to turn the heating off again shortly if I want to be able to buy new pants at any point in 2023).

Anyway. It’s lovely to see you all. Thanks for being here.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I am, on reflection, quite proud of ‘orally bum-spelunking’ as a turn of phrase.

By Brendan Burton

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A BRAND NEW MIX OF TWOSTEP AND NUKG BY OPPIDAN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO GABBER MARGINALIA, PT.1:

Edit Existing Images With AI: I promise, this edition of Curios will be significantly less full of experimental AI gubbins than the previous few (whether this does anything to improve your enjoyment of the whole is, on balance, unlikely, but know that I am at least trying), but there are still one or two things to get out of the way so, er, let’s get on with it. First up is the new, exciting update to a bunch of text-to-image platforms which now let you upload an image and then textually specify the edits you would like the machine to make to said image. “Hide a red-striped-besweatered glasses-wearing homunculus somewhere in this picture”, for example, or “make it a dog”, or “put Rishi Sunak into a bombed-out post-apocalyptic landscape”, that sort of thing. As with a lot of current AI stuff, this doesn’t (in my experience, at least) quite work well enough to be a standalone solution to anything just yet, but it’s quick-and-dirty enough to be useful for some quick potatoshop lols while we wait ~6months for it to render your Junior Graphic Designer obsolete (by the way, the link here goes to an AI image generation platform called Playground AI, but this tech is now A Thing and should be available on whatever your particular text-to-image platform of choice is).

Drayk It: See, now THIS is more like it – if I’m going to have to feature AI stuff to ‘keep up with the zeitgeist’ (must I? Can the zeitgeist not just sort of fcuk off?) then I would rather it were utterly pointless and very silly projects like this one, which lets you give it any subject matter you require and click a button, at which point some gears will whirr and you will, in a few short seconds, be presented with audio of a rap performed by an AI version of Drake, all about whatever you chose. On one the hand, the model here isn’t the greatest rapper or rhymer in the world and will occasionally get stuck in weird little loops; on the other, I can’t pretend I didn’t find AI Drake croonining to me about (and this was my exact prompt) “premature ejaculation is actually a sexual superpower that women really love” at least a little bit wonderful. Please feel free to share any particularly successful compositions with me – at the very least I’d hope that some of you will be using this tech to come up with inspiring new corporate anthems with which to soundtrack Friday drinks (for the three of you who still bother going into the office).

Google Is Working On Text To Music: You can’t yet play around with it yet because of Google’s BORING insistence that it doesn’t want to put this stuff out into the wild without more guardrails and more testing, but this webpage contains a bunch of frankly astonishing examples of software that lets you type in stuff like ‘imagine if Lou Bega worked with Chesney Hawkes to somehow compose a banger which took the main stylistic elements of their two most famous hits but which also then channeled the particular melodic flair of The Chainsmokers’ and then generates quite astonishingly competent music from your text. Seriously, it’s worth checking out a few of these because they really are VERY good indeed.

Another Massive List of AI Tools: I’m not going to include any more of these after this point because, frankly, life’s too short, but I am giving you ONE LAST OPPORTUNITY to bookmark one of them because they are SO useful. The main one linked here is probably the most comprehensive I’ve yet seen, but you might want to also make a note of this one and this one on the offchance that any of them die or stop getting updated.

Vermeer: I’ve said this several times over the years (to the point where I think the digital director of the institution occasionally reads this – HELLO, DIGITAL DIRECTOR!), but Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum really does put out some wonderful digital work to promote its exhibitions. This website, created to mark the opening of a new retrospective on the life and work of Johannes Vermeer, is no exception – it’s SO NICE, for a start, to see a digital project from a gallery or museum be well-funded enough that they are able to commission Stephen fcuking Fry to do all the voicework. Closer to Vermeer (for that is the title of this DIGITAL EXPERIENCE) is an opportunity to explore the painter’s oeuvre, either as a series of guided digital tours accompanied by the dulcet tones of the aforementioned Fry, or independently using a really smart and nicely-taxonomised interface which allows you to assemble your own collections of works from the collection based on elements or historical connections which interest you, and which does that wonderful thing that some of the best digital curation achieves whereby each visitor really can create their own path through the artist’s works and life by focusing on specific elements of each canvas and being able to quickly and effectively contrast the treatment of said element across multiple works. Aside from anything else, the quality of the digitisation of the paintings here really is superb – honestly, this is sort of the gold standard for digital museum projects and, even better, the total number of mentions of the word ‘metaverse’ is zero, and at no point will you be asked to navigate a poorly-rendered 3d avatar model through a clunkily-rendered gallery space for which THANK FCUK.

One Second Sampler: This is very silly, but, equally, the sort of thing which you could use to drive someone to the very edge of madness and so it gets the nod for Curios. One Second Sampler is exactly that – hit the button and the site will record one second of audio from your mic, which you can then play at a variety of different pitches using your keyboard. That might not sound like much, but if you can’t immediately see the low-key bullying potential in secretly recording a friend, colleague, family member or loved one and then using that pitch-shifted recorded sound sting as a tool to mock and frustrate then, well, you disappoint me, frankly.

The Tech Layoffs Tracker: It’s fair to say that, from what I can tell, the employment market doesn’t look…fantastic at the moment (the cynic in me wonders to what extent this is a deliberate choice by big business to reintroduce a little more of an employers’ edge after a couple of years in which the prevailing wisdom has been that power had been shifting (minimally, but still) towards workers instead of bosses, but maybe those are simply the ramblings of a pinko loon), as evidenced by this ongoing tracker of the layoffs recently announced across the tech industry. This is posted not to gloat or laugh – I mean, seriously, what sort of a cnut do you think I am? – but instead because it’s possible that someone might find it useful; aside from anything else, should you be in the business of recruiting people for developer/code-y roles, this is probably a decent place to start looking (there’s a tab on the website collecting spreadsheets of staff who’ve been canned so other employers can theoretically offer them roles, for example).

The Laid Off Club: Perhaps in reaction to the last link, this little website is a place where people who have lost their jobs can post about their feelings, and where others can respond with messages or support – this is both really rather cute, and also an interesting way of designing the post/comment interface (I know that sounds dull, but I promise you you’ll see what I mean if you click the link).

Slay: We’re still waiting for the first ‘new app of the year which will become popular with kids and which will as a result become the subject of increasingly insane valuations despite having literally no obvious path to monetisation that wouldn’t kill the very things that made it popular in the first place’, but it seems that there might be an early contender in Slay, which I’ve seen being talked up in a few places and which is apparently Very Downloaded in the early days of 2023. The gimmick here is basically the same sort of thing as YikYak et al – asking questions anonymously of your peergroup for associated social clout! – except the gimmick here is the whole ‘safety and positivity’ vibe, whereby the questions users are allowed to ask are solely positive ones (“Who has the kindest heart?”; “Who makes me smile whenever I think of them?”; “Who seems least likely to end their lives in the gutter of drink and drug abuse?”, that sort of thing), and the only possible feedback is to vote for one of four people – no messages, no DMs, no additional comments. Which, honestly, sounds a) incredibly fcuking dull (but I appreciate I am not a 13 year old girl, and so possibly am not at the heart of the target demographic here) and b) like it could absolutely still get used for bullying in a few creative ways, but also, and perhaps most crucially c) sounds literally impossible to monetise without ruining the already-wafer-thin user experience. Anyway, it’s immaterial because the featureset here will get nicked by one of the big players within six months and this will become yet another memory consigned to the oubliette of previously buzzy apps that noone remembers anymore (I REMEMBER YOU, PEACH!).

The GenZ Translator: This is a very silly little GPT-enabled hacksite which takes any text you feed it and translates it into GenZ speak. In fairness, it sort-of does exactly what it promises, albeit not particularly spectacularly, and I think you could have a lot of fun with this if you’re bored of an afternoon. Why not translate all of your employer’s website and see if anyone notices? Why not use it to YOOF UP your content calendar for that FS brand that’s desperate to engage a younger consumer base? Why not save the link on your phone and use it next time you’re speaking with an ACTUAL YOUNG PERSON in order to make them feel embarrassed and uncomfortable about how badly you’re trying to integrate with them? Come on FFS, this is all GREAT material which will make those empty hours just fly by.

Film Twitter Take Generator: I like this link because it’s pleasingly old-school – no AI rubbish here, just a database full of filmic content somewhere in the back end and a button to press – and also because the stuff it generates is, I think, genuinely quite good – “If you think Halloween (1978) is unproblematic you need to TOUCH GRASS”, for example, or “People watching V for Vendetta and not realizing you’re NOT supposed to identify with the protagonist LOL” feel like exactly the sort of mildly-irritating tossed-off opinions that will keep film buffs shouting at each other online for hours. If nothing else, you can probably get some low-level troll mileage out of logging into your favourite film-lovers forum and dropping some of these for the lols.

FigCat: Earlier this week I received an email from a nice person named Jan, who wanted to know whether something they had made was suitable for inclusion in Curios (they expressed some uncertainty as to whether the links were ‘on-brand’ for Curios, but went on to explain that in their defence “it’s very difficult to tell what the brand is, exactly”, which I obviously took as testament to the GREAT WORK I have been doing here. “I recently started a website, where I post very long thematic lists of things (currently books, comics, and RPG supplements), ranked by their popularity online. The interesting part is that I compile these lists manually by visiting hundreds of web addresses (blog posts, threads on Reddit etc.) and patiently tallying the number of recommendations the various items receive there. The web is full of lists of useless stuff, but to my best knowledge very few others are assembled in the manner of a medieval Benedictine monk with alarming obsessive tendencies.” This is QUITE THE UNDERTAKING – it’s relatively early days, and I get the feeling Jan is just getting started here, but if you want a bunch of lists of, say, RPGs with multiversal elements, or European novels from 1940 to the present day, then BOY does this site have you covered. I am slightly in awe of this, and I do rather like the wider ambition of creating a universal directory of online recommendations, however Sisyphean and impossible such a thing might be.

Wargal Art: Jan was also kind enough to point me at his website collecting AI art – now I wasn’t that interested in this at the outset because, look, I have seen a LOT of AI-generated art over the past year or so and I am frankly a bit jaded by it as a topic and am running out of interest in the very recognisable style of most machine-made imagery, but I really rather liked this; Jan’s done a nice job of collecting ‘collections’ of pictures from a similar point in latent space, creating what feel like miniature exhibitions by a range of different artists and I find this sort of exploration of ‘areas’ of visual style a lot more interesting than the majority of Stable Diffusion work out there. Also, bonus points for the fact that literally NONE of this features anything resembling ‘fantasy art’ and the additional fact that there don’t appear to be any large-breasted anime ladies to be seen (I know it doesn’t seem like that ought to be praiseworthy but, again, trust me when I say I have seen a LOT of this stuff and the ‘no bosoms’ thing is depressingly rare.

Oikioikiki: I have literally NO idea where I found this, but it is pleasing to me and it may well be pleasing to you too. I don’t know who the person who owns this Pinterest account is, but I am THRILLED that they take such pleasure and pride in photographing their stuffed toys with quite such care and attention. There are albums here featuring Snoopy and Woodstock, Gromit and that pink bear from Toy Story 3, all photographed out in the real world with love (and a degree of obsession – there are, er, over 500 photos of Snoopy and Woodstock, for example, which is…quite a lot), and, whilst I am ordinarily unmoved by this sort of whimsy, there’s something genuinely heartstring-tugging about the care with which Gromit in particular has been shot. I very much hope that this is going to be an ongoing thing, because, honestly, this is SO PURE.

Mimetic Rocks: Rocks! That look like animals or people! That’s it! Click the image, get a new rock, enjoy it, move on! There’s an email address should you have any photographs of a metamorphic armadillo or something to submit to the project.

Cursed Images: Is it me or is there something of an…old school feel to this week’s crop of links? This one, for example, feels like it’s straight out of 2013 – all this website does is present you with a new ‘cursed’ image each time you click, but that, frankly, is all you need. Much of the stuff on here will be recognisable to any veterans of the old, weird web (what do you mean “Matt, you have clearly spent far, far too much time online if you recognise even one of these fcuking pictures, what is wrong with you and what the fcuk have you been doing with your life?”), but there are enough new (to me at least) weird things sprinkled throughout to keep you clicking for a while. If nothing else, should you have any young people in your lives who are yet to experience the incredible power of context-free images from the weird past then WOW are they in for a treat with this (as an aside, is there a TikTok for this sort of stuff? It feels like there’s an interesting aesthetic in combining these things with the corecore stuff – and there it is, the first sentence I have typed in 2023 which has made me instinctively recoil in horror as soon as I read it back, HUZZAH!).

No Context French: I can’t say this with any certainty, but I get the feeling that these sorts of ‘no context’ meme accounts are incredibly gauche and Facebook-y if you’re part of the country they are about (cf No Context Brits, which just feels ‘this was on TikTok a month ago’) but become brilliantly weird as soon as they are about a country you’re less familiar with. So it is with No Context French, my new favourite Twitter account because if nothing else it provides a regular reminder that the internet has rendered everyone’s brain stupid and broken, even Parisians (also, the footage from protests is a happy and convenient reminder that the French are simply better at industrial action than we are).

The Minimalist Photography Awards 2022: I think I said about five years ago that we might be reaching saturation point with photography awards, and the subsequent five years have done nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Still, this is one contest I can very much get behind – The Minimalist Photo Awards “is a non profit association, powered by black & white Minimalism magazine, which aims to recognize, reward and expose talented photographers all around the world and introduce them to the professional photography industry”, and the work here is SO GOOD. If nothing else it’s refreshing because the style and subjects it promotes are so distinct from many of the other photo contests I feature in here – if you’re a designer or art director then there’s just as much to enjoy in here from a colour and composition point of view as there is if you’re a photographer. In case you care, I think this one is my favourite of the entries, but as ever I encourage you to have a good old explore as there is SO MUCH great work amongst the winners and commendees.

The Wonders of Street View: Prolific creator of ‘fun internet ephemera’ Neal Agarwal is BACK with a new game/toy thing – The Wonders of Street View is a BRILLIANT timesink which does one thing and one thing only, taking you through a wonderful selection of odd views on Google Streetview. What’s particularly nice about this is that StreetView embeds in the site, meaning not only can you see some weird stuff but you can also, should you desire, explore the surrounding area to get context for the weirdness (I just had a wonder around the Mustard Museum in Maine and feel much better for it, for example).

By Natalia Gonzalez Martin

NEXT UP, A PLAYLIST FEATURING A BUNCH OF TRACKS FROM ABOUT 2003-2009 WHICH IT WAS RECENTLY POINTED OUT TO ME IS AN ERA WHICH HAS LEFT A WEIRDLY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT DIGITAL FOOTPRINT, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO GABBER MARGINALIA, PT.2:

The Top Escape Rooms Project: I appreciate that Escape Rooms are perhaps a bit 2012, a bit ‘hipsters are still a thing’, a bit ‘craft beer’ – but, equally, they can be fun if done well and in the right company, and, look, it’s not like things have improved immeasurably since their heyday so perhaps just GIVE THEM A CHANCE OK? Ahem. Anyway, I was until this week unaware of the fact that there exists an international organisation dedicated not only to celebrating escape rooms but also to ranking them, and that each year they compile a list of what they consider to be the BEST experiences in the world – but there does, and they do, and here it is. “The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the very best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the experience of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world. We serve escape room owners and designers by publicly recognizing their achievements, and we serve our fellow enthusiasts by providing an international bucket list of the best rooms to play.” There are only two UK-based room in this year’s selection of the best 100 (Macclesfield and Margate, in case you were interested), which is a shame, but there are LOADS around Europe – if you’re that way inclined, you could make this the basis of a frankly brilliant series of weekend breaks to some excellent destinations.
Lileks: It was slightly odd discovering this site – it felt hugely familiar, but I think that that’s because it’s had a few VIRAL HITS over the years and as such I recognise some of the content (specifically, I think this was the host of one of the original ‘man, food in 1970s America really was quite spectacularly vile, wasn’t it?’ recipe card roundup posts) – but also like I had found some sort of spiritual kin in some small way. THIS HAS BEEN GOING FOR 26 YEARS FFS!!! There’s a sort of general lean towards ‘slightly weird US ephemera from the 50s-70s’, but it’s probably best to let the site’s owner introduce it: “What is this thing? Simple: The anteroom of the internet’s most diverse, idiosyncratic, and individually curated pop-culture museum. Note: that’s the last time I’ll use “curated.” It’s pretentious. But it’s true! I am pretentious. Also, this site is a one-man effort, assembled over two decades, its innumerable sub-sites gathered together under general, vague rubrics.It’s not some idle project, occasionally updated. The Bleat, a blog that’s celebrating its 25th year, contains a M-F essay, some piece of old commercial ephemera, a rotating feature on everything from cliffhanger serials to old radio to main street America to the ads of the 1930s or 1970s, and a link to the daily site update. And that’s just the blog. Scroll down for the total enormity. I hope you enjoy the site. Twenty-six years, and counting.” I cannot stress enough how much I love this – a proper, sprawling, 2.5-decade-long accretion of links and words and pictures, all mapping a vague sense of ‘what one person has found interesting enough to share online since 1997’ – but if you’re after a way in, why not try this wonderful series of posts analysing the particular art style of one Art Frahm, an artist whose work seemingly consisted solely of cheesecake postcard illustrations of 1950s women whose pants have inexplicably just fallen around their ankles (no, really).
Ivory for Mastodon: Are any of you actually using Mastodon? How’s it working out for you? I tried, honestly I did, but all the reasons it didn’t stick for me in 2017 or whenever are still very much true, and now there’s this added barrier of my being old and tired and jaded and increasingly of the opinion that when Twitter finally dies I think I will probably just not do social networks anymore (I reserve the right to completely change my mind on this should something infinitely new and shiny and exciting and (please god, please god) solely text-based take off in the next year or so, obvs). Still, if you’re finding that Mastodon is scratching your Elon-free Twitter itch then you may enjoy this app – an (iOS-only at the moment, I think) mobile app for it, called Ivory, which I have been informed by a bunch of people whose opinions I tend to broadly trust is Very Good as far as these things go. Obviously I haven’t tried it myself re a) Mastodon; and b) Apple, but, with the usual caveats, this may well be worth a look.
How Far Does 5kg of CO2 Get You?: This is an interesting little data experiment which asks ‘if you limited yourself to only emitting 5kg of CO2, how far could you travel in a variety of different European countries?’ (and yes, fine, I appreciate that that is a potentially niche definition of the term ‘interesting’, but I AM INTERESTED OK? ffs). Distances vary from country to country for various reasons: “an electric train in Sweden can travel further than an electric bike, due to the greater carbon footprint per individuals of manufacturing the bike and the very low footprint of traveling by train almost exclusively powered by renewables. In Poland and Cyprus, carbon intensity is so high that driving a diesel car may be less detrimental than driving an electric car. From Paris, France, driving a SUV you can barely get out of town (21 km) whereas a small electric car would drive you 3 times further to the beautiful wine cellars of Bourgogne (77km).” It feels like there’s something in this – a travel calculator for low-carbon weekends, for example, that spits out suggestions and travel plans and booking assistance, all-in-one, for example (but you will DEFINITELY come up with better ones – or at least I hope you do, because that was frankly sh1t and I like to think that you’re all significantly less useless than I am).
Kutt: You know how everyone makes bets, right? I mean just small ones, between friends, in a fun, ‘no money involved’, non-binding, bragging rights sort of way, the sort of throwaway remark in the pub which you laugh about and then which, in the main, everyone forgets or which, at most, involves someone having to shave an eyebrow or perform some sort of worryingly-biological forfeit should they lose. Well imagine THAT, but instead of everything being for fun and for lols you instead plug the bet into an app and pledge ACTUAL MONEY which will get automatically transferred to the winner upon said bet’s completion – doesn’t that sound better? Well, er, no, actually it doesn’t, it sounds like it could lead to all sorts of issues – but that’s not stopping new startup Kutt, which confidently claims to be a “sports and social gaming platform that allows friends and strangers to use their knowledge of sports, politics, and pop culture to compete against each other in a variety of competitions.” Set your own odds! Ensure people pay up! BET UNLIMITED AMOUNTS! There is literally no way at all that this app could possibly be a bad and ruinous idea, oh no sirree – any journalists out there looking for a nice, easy new tech-led scare story really could do worse than apply a bit of scrutiny to this, because it looks…dangerous. An app which is promising to let anyone run a book on anything, that they can offer to anyone, with no loss limit? HMMM.
Protected Planet: “Protected Planet is the authoritative source of data on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). It exists due to the extensive efforts of governments and other stakeholders to map, monitor and report data on protected areas and OECMs. Through the Protected Planet website, users can explore the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), World Database on OECMs, Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness (GD-PAME), and a wealth of associated information. Protected Planet enables a spectrum of users to access data for information-based decision making, policy development, and business and conservation planning. Businesses in a range of sectors including mining, oil and gas, and finance use the WDPA and associated databases to identify the biodiversity risks and opportunities of a given project.” Whilst this is primarily of use and interest to people working in conservation (or, alternatively, in industries which are very much the opposite of conservation but which need to pay attention to it), it’s also just generally fascinating to browse around the world and see where the largest concentration of protected areas is – who knew Estonia was such a hotbed of natural conservation? EVERYONE TO TALLINN!
Study Hall: This is an interesting idea, and something that feels very much like ‘the shape of things to come’. YouTube recently launched this new educational initiative which, in partnership with Arizona State University, will make actual proper college (University)-level courses available on the platform, courses which will be valid for actual, proper college (university) credits. There’s a fee, but it is SMALL compared to what you would pay through other institutions, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than A Good Thing, democratising access to education and creating a genuinely new path into the college (University) system for people who might otherwise have struggled to access it. It’s interesting that online education hasn’t really progressed that much since the early boom days of the Khan Academy and other such early-web-2 poster children, but perhaps this integration of online resources and the creation of truly transferable remote syllabi will accelerate change from hereon in.
Anne of Green Gables: I can’t pretend that Anne of Green Gables ever meant anything to me growing up, but I’m aware that for some of you it was probably a SEMINAL CHILDHOOD TEXT and the mere mention of its title unlocks some sort of Proustian memorytrain within you. It is for YOU, then (yes YOU), that I present this website which offers a properly-deep exploration of the original manuscript drafted by LM Montgomery with notes and annotations and explanations – there’s something lovely about the fact that the site allows you to read the whole book should you so choose, presenting the digitised manuscript pages alongside the more readable text (the digitisation also let you explore old photographs and features all sorts of pleasing additional bits of information about the author, her family, the cultural milieu in which she was writing, etc), and, honestly, this is pretty much perfect as a way of presenting a manuscript imho.
Roast Dating: I remain staggered that there hasn’t been more made of the way AI (specifically text AI) is going to mess with dating – or, frankly, that I haven’t found more services springing up that offer to let the machine Cyrano your way into someone’s pants (again, journalists, this one is a total open goal for mid-markets and right-wing broadsheets). Still, here’s one! Roast is a FULL SUITE of AI tools which promises to punch up your profile pics and improve your pulling power, based on what the company claims is analysis of THOUSANDS of dating profiles to determine how best to be successful on the apps (the answer, I think, as has been repeatedly proven, is to be very, very good-looking) – whilst I firmly believe that this is total and utter post-PUA bullsh1t, I will (quietly, reluctantly) applaud the way they are positioning this as ‘using science and data to improve your chances’ rather than ‘just outsource the emotional labour of attempting to get to know another human being to determine whether or not you might be emotionally compatible to a machine’, which, to be clear, is exactly what this is. If Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and the rest aren’t already working on in-app tools to detect AI-generated copy in messages then I would be amazed.
Plastic Free: I go slightly annoyed by the copy on this site, which seems to be doing its best to obscure what the actual fcuk this is meant to be. “We are an army of experts — material scientists, system changers, innovators, impact measurers, creators, builders, artisans — united in a shared mission to ignite and inspire the world to turn off the plastic tap.” WELL BULLY FOR YOU. This is particularly irritating, because what this ACTUALLY seems to be is in fact quite useful – basically this site aggregates all sorts of news and science updates about ways in which designers and manufacturers and makers around the world are creating things in less-plastic-reliant ways. So, for example, you can find information on new materials being developed to create soles for shoes without plastics, or new grasses being engineered which it is hoped will be able to replace nylons in time – it’s all very much on the consumer-y end of things, and if I’m being cynical it strikes me that this is basically a one-stop-shop for the next time you need to spend six minutes filling in the ‘CSR Ideas’ portion of the pitch, but, equally, there’s loads of information in here which could be put to good use (although, admittedly, probably not by any of us advermarketingprcunts).
SuperBad: Via the ever-charming Naive comes this entirely-baffling web project. I have no idea whatsoever is going on here, or what the point of it is (should there be one), or who made it, and I can’t categorically promise you that it doesn’t potentially lead somewhere terrible and wrong (but, er, it probably doesn’t) – SuperBad is…look, it’s an incomprehensible mess, frankly, of lo-fi webart and partial html and broken links and dead ends and non-sequiturs and it is BRILLIANT and baffling and utterly mystifying, and I spent a good 40 minutes clicking and playing and didn’t even come close to scrying what this was for or where the edge of it are, or whether it even HAS edges, and honestly this might be my favourite thing of the week.
Time My Meeting: Would you like a handy tool with which to demonstrate exactly what a futile waste of time the vast majority of your work meetings are? YOU’RE WELCOME! Start the timer on this website when you’re meeting kicks off, stop it when it ends, and you’ll be able to tell people ‘well, that meeting was longer than the inaugural time taken to complete the marathon in the modern olympiad!’, and your colleagues will all hate you just that little bit more. Which is almost certainly what you were hoping to get out of Curios today, so, well, you’re welcome again!
The Pr0nhub 2022 Year in Review: I have long contended that Pr0nhub’s annual data drop about the content consumption habits of visitors to its site is THE most interesting and revealing document published each year about Where We Are as a species (‘nowhere good’, is the generalised answer). I am a little late to this this time around, but I was glad to find that the drop doesn’t disappoint – you will of course fund your own nuggets of interesting in here, but, personally-speaking, I am most curious about the rise of ‘hentai’ as a popular category around the world (why are we increasingly masturbating to cartoons? WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT US?), curious about the rise in popularity of trans-related content (this doesn’t strike me as a particularly positive thing when it comes to seeing trans people as people rather than sexual curios), and utterly baffled as to why so many people in Australia were searching for ‘two vagina sex’ (can any Australians explain this, please?). This is the Big Data we really deserve.
This Is Not Word: Make beautiful patterns with words as you type. This is a small, frivolous toything, but I would really really like the ability to activate this mode in GDocs (should anyone from Google be reading this and feel like acceding to the unreasonable demands of some webmong).
It’s Funny How The Knight Moves: This made me feel quite stupid quite quickly, but is equally the sort of thing that I imagine many of you (the ‘shape rotators’ amongst you, to exhume a now-already-antediluvian-feeling conversation from about a year ago) will find scratches a very particular brain-itch in quite a pleasing fashion. Can YOU make the knight touch every square on the board that doesn’t see it either put in check by the queen or taking the queen? Maybe you can, but fcuk me was it beyond my limited intellectual capabilities.
UFO Clicker: A clicker game that only lasts about 15 minutes rather than taking over your life like some sort of low-level meth! This involves hoovering up tiny little humans with spaceships, and is very satisfying indeed should you be in the market for something to waste away the working day.
Chronophoto: Ooh, this is fun and VERY addictive. You get shown a series of photos, and the game is to guess exactly when each was taken – this is great, and aside from anything else is a very good way of learning about subtle aesthetic differences between eras that are largely thought of as culturally/aesthetically homogenous (cf ‘the 90s’).
Die In The Dungeon: Final link of the miscellanea this week and WOW is it a good one – Die In The Dungeon is the demo of a forthcoming full game, playable in-browser, in which you seek to get your little warrior frog creature through 25 levels of fighting monsters with dice. Which, fine, may not sound like fun, but I have played the SH1T out of this this week, in a way which I haven’t done with one of these since the Vampire Survivors demo a year or so back (and that ended up being one of the biggest games of 2022) and which possibly indicates that this one is a bit special. Give it a go, I promise it’s LOADS of fun (also, the frog is very cute) – drag the dice onto the grid to play, you’ll pick it up as you go along.

By Maisie Cowell

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF SLIGHTLY-LOUNGEY ELECTRO MIXED BY THE QUITE-FANTASTICALLY-NAMED LOVE APE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Immerseology: Look, I know this isn’t a Tumblr but frankly I continue to struggle to find anything to put in here but I am so pathetically change averse that even the thought of altering one of the sections of Curios after all these years brings me out in slight cold sweats. Anyway, tedious taxonomical questions that literally noone other than me cares about aside, this is a really interesting website which focuses on the practice of immersive theatre: “Immersology studies the emerging genre of immersive theatre from the creator’s point of view. It offers theories, structures, design struggles, practicals, and other meta-level musings.” Even if you don’t have anything to do with theatre (immersive or otherwise), I’d argue that this is an interesting and worthwhile place to explore – some of the stuff they write about experience design is, I think, applicable across a range of other disciplines and media.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

The Anonymous Photo Project: Found photos, basically – but good ones. “In 2017 when filmmaker lee shulman bought a random box of vintage slides he fell completely in love with the people and stories he discovered in these unique windows in to our past lives. Collecting and preserving unique colour slides from the last 70 years, the project was born out of a desire to preserve this collective memory and give a second life to the people often forgotten in these timeless moments captured in stunning kodachrome colour.” These are great, and you can find more (and more information) at this website.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Hyperconnected Culture and its Disconnects: It does very much feel that there’s a reckoning coming to the idea of The Creator Economy(™), one based on the fact that, in the main, it appears everyone has realised that many of the base-level assumptions underpinning it were, to put it politely, utter fcuking bullshit. This is a very good essay by Rogers Brubaker which examines some of the reasons why that might be the case, specifically looking at the degree to which both the production, consumption and circulation of content can be said to have been ‘democratised’ in any meaningful sense; Brubaker concludes that whilst production has been, circulation (the most crucial component of something achieving widespread resonance and relevance, and in allowing people to earn from their creation) has very much not, and that the disconnect between these two things has prevented the ‘creator economy’ from taking off in any meaningful way, and that algorithms are in a way set to exacerbate this state of affairs: “For most, the pleasures of digital cultural consumption are uncoupled from the exertions of curatorship. Today’s digital consumers are no longer being fed a limited diet of standardized cultural products, but they are still being fed. Consumption may be personalized, but it would be a stretch, in most cases, to call it self-directed — and it is not necessarily more active than pre-digital forms of “mass” cultural consumption. Even Yochai Benkler, an enthusiastic proponent of participatory digital culture, felt obliged to acknowledge the continued “prevalence of the culture of passive consumption.””.

Seven Questions To Ask About AI: I know that Curios has been very AI-heavy of late (for which continued apologies), but it really is SO interesting to consider how these technologies might develop or be used in the short-to-medium term (the long-term is simply too wildly unpredictable to speculate upon imho). What I am finding particularly interesting is the (somewhat reassuring) extent to which none of the stuff I have seen over the past few months is QUITE up to the task of replacing people yet (leaving aside image generators and illustrators, which, fine, a BIT), and the degree to which society is embracing the centaur-like possibilities of the tech – but also the slight feeling that what we’re getting excited about now is the bullsh1t, idiot’s version of this and we’re a couple of iterations away from the REAL gamechangey stuff (fwiw I am increasingly coming around to this point of view). Anyway, this is a decent essay and set of questions/considerations by Max Read, which is very much worth reading if you want a set of lenses through which to consider the current AI hypewagon.

Misinformation and the Web: This is aq conversation between Peter Kafka and Facebook’s former head of product security Alex Stamos, which ranges across a variety of topics but which is mostly concerned with asking the question ‘are we too worried about online misinformation and the impact it might have on society?’ – you may be unsurprised to learn that Stamos’ opinion is very much ‘yes, yes we are’. He makes some good points – on Trump, for example, he points out that the volume of content generated about the man during the 2015 election campaign and his tenure as President was such that any attempt at content-based manipulation via misinformation was doomed to failure simply by dint of being at most 0.001% of the conversation – but, equally, seems curiously blind on other issues (for example – even if that’s only 0.001%of the content, if you can make influential people see it and believe it and act on it, then it doesn’t really matter does it? And why is it preposterous, as Stamos seems to assert here, for private companies to seek to act in ways that are of broad benefit to humanity?), but in general this is an interesting discussion on a topic which continues to be of fairly massive significance.

Why We’re Still Waiting for VR: This is VERY LONG, but if you’re interested in reading a reasonably clear-eyed analysis of why it is that we’re not yet all using VR headsets at home and at work, and why AR continues to be little more than a gimmick despite the fact that people have been trying to sell it to us as THE NEXT THING COMING RIGHT NOW HONEST GUV for literally 15 years now, all written by someone who would probably admit that they have been a reasonably big cheerleader on all this stuff for a while, then this piece by Matthew Ball (the VC guy who got famous by writing loads of (mostly quite smart if inevitably-hyperbolic) stuff about the metaverse) might be of interest. If nothing else, Ball does a really good job of explaining all the technical reasons why VR/AR/XR at scale is challenging – the whole question of ‘a near infinite number of variables when it comes to the user experience of AR based on device, location, time of day, etc’ is obvious when you think about it, for example, but had literally never occurred to me til I read this – and I thought his conclusions towards the end of the piece about what this could mean for the practical development of whatever the fcuk we mean today when we use the word ‘metaverse’ were interesting and novel.

Working In VR: A nice companion piece to the previous article, this piece in Slate describes the current experience of actually trying to do your job in Horizon Workrooms and contains an unusually-honest appraisal of ‘what it actually is that the innovation labs of places like Accenture actually do’ which is, it turns out, ‘act as the sales arms for whatever new software or hardware tech is being peddled by the big boys as the MUST-HAVE transformative solution du jour, regardless of whether or not it actually makes sense for the client’. Anyway, you may not be surprised to learn that working in VR sounds absolutely fcuking awful in every way – if you see the consultants entering your building with headsets, RUN FOR THE HILLS.

Ensh1ttification: You have probably seen this doing the rounds this week, if you’ve not read it already – Cory Doctorow writes on the ‘ensh1ttification’ of platforms in the modern internet era, and how it is happening to TikTok in the same way that it has happened to Facebook, and Instagram, and Amazon, and a whole host of other properties and places that used to be good, useful and/or fun places to hang out online, but which, through a combination of VC-led MUST GROW mindset and the simple nature of capitalism in general, have gradually shifted to become places that deliver minimal (if any) value to the user whilst maximising their ability to monetise you at every turn. None of this is new, and the arguments at the centre of this are ones that Doctorow’s been making in various places for years, but this is a cogent explanation of the general thesis and it’s hard to argue with the central thesis, restated at the article’s close, that “For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The ensh1ttification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.”

The AI Plagiarism Problem at CNET: If you want a neat example of the whole ‘Maybe this AI stuff isn’t quite good enough to replace us all just yet’ argument, witness the mess at CNET this week – in the space of a few short days we’ve gone from ‘CNET uses AI to write articles’ to ‘CNET’s AI articles actually contain quite a lot of factual errors, maybe the machines are actually just dumb’, to ‘CNET’s AI articles appear to contain quite a lot of actual plagiarism’. Again, this isn’t to say that AI-generated clickbait or SEO fodder isn’t the (miserable, beige) future, more that that future isn’t quite here yet. By the way, if you’re currently working for an employer that you really hate and are leaving soon, why not see if you can spend the final few weeks of your professional tenure persuading your paymasters that they should outsource their entire content strategy to AI and to hell with the guardrails? I imagine it probably wouldn’t be that hard, and the consequences are potentially VERY FUNNY (and financially ruinous).

Teaching With ChatGPT: After the initial spate of ‘THIS IS THE END OF HOMEWORK AS WE KNOW IT!!!’ apocalyptoheadlines which followed the launch of ChatGPT, it’s been interesting to see various educators attempting to argue that in fact the technology is a huge boon to the classroom rather than some sort of existential threat to the teaching profession. This is one such piece, in which Thomas Rid writes of his experience taking a class in Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering which the teacher explicitly decided to ‘co-teach’ with ChatGPT – there’s a lot of really interesting use-case examples in here, and the idea of using the software as a silent teaching assistant to answer questions without disrupting the flow of class was fascinating…but, equally, this falls into the same trap as many of these pieces which tend to be written by high-functioning computing studies students who don’t seem to understand that a) there are subjects that are taught differently and which wouldn’t necessarily benefit in the same way from these techniques; b) focusing your thinking on how the best and most intelligent/creative students can make use of this technology is all well and good, but, bluntly speaking, you’d think it would make more sense to workshop how the people in the bottom quartile are going to use this stuff because that’s where the marginal gains are set to be significantly greater. Still, if you’re an educator or interested in the field, this is an interesting and thought-provoking read.

How The Young Spend Their Money: If you’re the sort of person who needs to know all about CONSUMER TRENDS and GenZ spending habits, this piece in the Economist will contain little new; if you’re more of a generalist, though, this is a useful read which contains a bunch of helpful datapoints and statistics and which will hopefully mean you never, ever have to see another slide which contains a variant on ‘Young People Value Experiences Over Possessions!’.

Trailerisation: Or ‘imagine how cool it would be if your job was remixing or reimagining popular tracks for use specifically in film trailers’ – the answer is it would be very cool indeed. This is a really interesting article that touches on all sorts of modern trends and themes – digital creation, the shifting way in which we expect stories to be told in multimedia, the fact that the concept of ‘selling out’ is deader than the proverbial dodo…”in contemporary trailers, omniscient narration has largely disappeared (that means no more hackneyed “In a world …” setups) and there’s less dialogue from the film. Trailers “can be more impressionistic and elliptical in their storytelling,” he said. “It’s more about creating a feeling in a lot of the work.” As a result, the trailer’s soundtrack has become increasingly crucial. “Music is sometimes 80 to 90 percent of the process to us,” Woollen said. “It’s trying to cast that right piece of music that’s going to inspire and dictate rhythm and set tone and inform character and story, and hopefully make an impression.”” Again, this is perhaps an interesting piece to bear in mind should you feel the need to persuade your creative director that actually maybe you shouldn’t use AI to compose the soundtrack for the otherwise-beautifully-storyboarded mood film.

The Contagious Visual Blandness of Netflix: This, and the next piece, could just as well be titled ‘how the internet aesthetic escaped our phones and took over the world’. This article looks at the specific visual style that determines a ‘Netflix production’ (but, more accurately, is just a sort of general visual lingua franca de nos jours) and the odd flatness of seeing lighting schemes and colourpalettes that feel, like the web, placeless and every/nowhere, and COLD. Even in the mid-10s heyday of the ‘orange/taupe’ domination, things seen onscreen never felt quite so…mechanical and precise as they seem to now.

Shoppy Shops: Or ‘on the visual homogeneity of modern lifestyle-focused retail spaces and the slow continued breed of the Insta drop-shipping aesthetic into real life’ – or, ‘this is what the world will look like when our only shared collective reference point as a species is the vague, 2d aesthetic of browser-based HTML and Javascript’. It feels like, just maybe, we need a new punk movement as an antidote to…this stuff.

Death In The Metaverse: Whilst, obviously, it’s fun to make fun of the ‘m’ word, it’s also important to remember that there are a lot of obvious benefits to improving the quality of interactions between people in virtual space, and there are a host of potential positives to allowing people to have semi-embodied experiences at distance. I thought this piece, about communities of grief which have begun to be established in virtual spaces such as VRChat and how they are being used to help people process feelings of loss in a safe, communal space with others in a similar position, was an excellent overview both of the benefits of this sort of tech for specific, niche need cases but also of the specific therapeutic uses that it can be put to which we’re only now beginning to scratch the surface of. Although part of me did think whilst reading this ‘So the metaverse is Forums but with avatars, then?’, which perhaps wasn’t the intended takeaway. Still, I think that this is a useful piece to read if you want to be reminded of all the interesting and helpful and human ways in which you could consider using this tech, rather than simply focusing on the frankly miserable commercial usecases.

How Battle Royale Took Over Gaming: This is a GREAT read, looking at the cultural throughline that takes us from the film, released in 2000, and Fortnite, and latterly COD, and how that single pulpy concept ushered in what has been one of the most influential design trends in modern entertainment. This is particularly interesting if you’re a gamer, but there’s a lot to like in here if you’re simply interested in cultural transmission or even design – there’s a lot of interesting stuff about how PUBG (the original title to properly put the genre on the map) worked to keep the player experience interesting, which I think (as ever with this stuff) is interesting and applicable in a range of different areas.

On Harry’s Book: I imagine that most of you have Opinions about all the most recent royal revelations and the subsequent media furore – whatever those Opinions may be, you will probably enjoy Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB writing about Harry’s memoir. It’s a pretty charitable reading overall, compared to some others I’ve read, but also contains some rather brilliant lines – it’s all eminently readable, but this excellent paragraph gives a nice flavour: “Prince Harry has never read a book in his life, so his ghost writer, J.R. Moehringer, invites a round of applause every time he goes all Sartre or Faulkner. The latter provides this volume’s epigraph, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ which Harry reveals he found on some brainy quote site on the web (‘Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?’). It’s quite thrilling, Harry as existentialist philosopher, and I was especially pleased with his Heidegger-like handling of the principal problems of time. ‘Could there really be Nothing after this?’ the homework-shy scrum-half writes. ‘Does consciousness, like time, have a stop?’ Such thoughts bring him closer to his mother. ‘Thinking Harry’ is now surrounded by the postcolonial writers we saw on his Netflix series, who are pushing him to enact his fantasy of being a standard-bearer for reformed racists turned brand ambassadors for what is right, what is fair and being Really Sorry about the Past.”

The Climbing Influencer: This is a SUPERB bit of profile writing in GQ, in which Grayson Schaffer spends time hanging out with Nims Purja, a name previously unknown to me but who is, it seems, legendary in mountaineering circles both for being a Very Good Climber but also for being someone who, it’s fair to say, enjoys fame and its trappings and rather enjoys the whole brand-and-imagebuilding part of his lifestyle, and who is singlehandedly (at least according to this piece) bringing a bit of Insta/TikTok friendly ‘athlete bro culture’ to summitting Everest. Honestly, this really is an object lesson in how to write one of these – Nims is presented pretty neutrally, on balance, coming across as a driven, talented, superhumanly fit narcissistic sociopath with a God complex, but there’s also a lot of interesting stuff in there about the extent to which Sherpas have traditionally been marginalised when it comes to the climbing industry, working in service of (mostly Western) others, and how Nims’ work is, whilst obviously making him an absolute superstar, also elevating other Sherpas in their own right and creating a more diversified culture around the sport. This is pretty kilometric, be warned, but it’s also very readable and a lot of fun.

Two Immigrants: I really enojyed this short essay by Ajay Makan about his experience of moving to Portugal as a British-Asian immigrant, and the weirdness of being two sorts of outsider at once; you might too,

In Defence of Mean Girls: A SUPERB piece of writing, this one, about the particularly intense quality of friendship forged between girls at an all-girls school – now obviously I have no personal experience of this so can’t vouch for the veracity of what’s described here, but this is powerfully evocative of a specific part of adolescence, when your tribe is everything and your world simultaneously vast and microscopic in scope.

Dissolution Foretold: Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, author of some truly incredible writing about surgery and the brain, talks about what it feels like to know that you are decaying and dying, what it is like to see the evidence and be confronted by the reality of your own senescence and imminent demise. It’s…it’s not an easy read, or at least it isn’t for me – in common with much writing of this type, I can marvel at the control and clarity of the prose whilst also having to fight quite hard to stave off the low-grade feelings of nausea and body horror that assail me when I read things about how we’re ambulant lumps of meat and electricity – but as a clear-eyed account of what it is like to look your own mortality right in the face it is a very, very good one.

100 Punchlines To Procrastinate Kicking Your Bucket: Finally this week, this is…what is this? A poem of sorts, I suppose, composed from 100 aphoristic phrases about how there’s always more to live for, which manages to be darkly ironic and oddly-inspirational at the same time, and which I have found myself reading three or four times this week which suggests that perhaps it’s rather good. Hope you like it.