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HELLO! HELLO EVERYONE!

This week we’re doing things slightly differently (or at least I am – I presume that the vast majority of you will just ignore this newsletterblogtypething as you ordinarily do) – HOW EXCITING!

I mean, look, it’s probably not VERY exciting, but I’ve been forced into a slight change of format this week due to Circumstances Beyond My Control which meant that I had to spend all of yesterday in hospital (not for me) and had to ask for a copy deadline extension for Actual Paying Work, which meant that I spent three hours this morning writing that instead of Curios, which meant that, honestly, I simply haven’t got the energy to sit here and spaff out 10,000 words of HIGH-QUALITY (ahem) links’n’prose.

BUT! I feel a completely-unwarranted sense of responsibility towards YOU, my unknown-and-in-all-likelihood-vanishingly-small readership, to provide LINKS and DISTRACTION, and as such this week we are doing an EXPERIMENT!

Below you will find Curios in its RAW, UNFILTERED STATE – this is what lives in my GDoc and what every Friday morning at 6am I sit and stare at and then attempt to turn into a newsletter. ALL OF THE LINKS, NONE OF THE DREADFUL PROSE!

*ahem*

Obviously there’s a bit more of a ‘lucky dip’ vibe doing it this way – my notes aren’t exactly fulsome, it’s fair to say – but, on the plus side, you don’t have the unasked for side-order of MattWords ruining all the interesting stuff.

SO! Without further ado, here are A LOAD OF LINKS with literally FCUK ALL CONTEXT! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? ARE YOU?

Normal service will be resumed next week – thanks for your patience, and sincere apologies to any of you who are wrong-headed enough to be somehow disappointed by the lack of overwrought prose in this week’s edition.

I am still Matt, this is (sort of) still Web Curios, and if you prefer it this way I’d really prefer it if you kept that to yourself if that’s ok.

By Shardcore

THIS WEEK I WILL LIMIT MYSELF TO SUGGESTING THE NEW SOLO ALBUM BY KEVIN ABSTRACT WHICH I AM VERY MUCH ENJOYING AT THE MOMENT!

MISCELLANEOUS LINKS

• RealtimeGaza https://map.snapchat.com/@31.446727,34.312580,10.15z 
• BlackGPT https://www.latimer.ai/ 
• Grok https://x.ai/ ANDhttps://grok.x.ai/ 
• Molly Soda https://mollysoda.hotglue.me/ 
• AIsongs https://www.aisongcontest.com/ 
• Sound designsite https://unmt.dev/ 
• Saigon boy LOVE THIS SO MUCH https://saigonboy.me/ 
• Origamis https://origami-archive.com/wod/ 
• Dogs https://www.dogphotographyawards.com/awards-2023/ 
• Nature https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/photo-contest/2023-winners/ 
• Paperfid https://www.pulpatronics.com/ 
• Videoedtimachine https://twitter.com/c_valenzuelab/status/1720487169997824163 
• Libraries https://www.allthelibraries.com/ 
• Tree equity https://www.treeequityscore.org/ 
• London (featured four years ago when beta) https://colouring.london/ 
• Whimsyweb https://whimsical.club/ 
• Quilt https://www.quilt-bot.com/about 
• NASA https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/ 
• Fonstapaceviz https://font.fish/ 
• Vidlink community https://www.poetv.com/ 
• Newgames https://aftermath.site/ AND https://www.patreon.com/posts/welcome-to-wind-92467346 
• Pills or hobbits  https://antidepressantsortolkien.vercel.app/ 
• Clingfilm https://quantumstretch.com/ 
• More Bay https://needsmoreboom.com/ 
• Train fares uk https://github.com/FedericoBotta/railfares/tree/main 
• Offgridhols giuseppe https://darkhotels.co/ 
• Multimodalshopsearch https://shopdeft.com/hello 
• Future house https://www.futurehouse.org/ 
• C64glitches rene https://www.pictorial64.com/ GOOD INTERNET SUBSTACK
• Comicsinfo https://comicsdevices.com/ 
• Portugal also rene https://www.portugaltheman.com/ 
• Posters https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/ 
• Rank stuff https://chorus.fm/rank 
• Villains https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkpvfd3IhdOccc8ybisPqLW-Phi68HqN1 
• SFMusic https://baybeats.sfpl.org/  
• Wordfind b3ta https://cortextual.net/

LONGREADS

• Refugees https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/leila-farsakh/the-refugee-problem 
• Free will? Fcuk off https://archive.ph/20231103152328/https://nautil.us/yes-we-have-free-will-no-we-absolutely-do-not-431904/ 
• Computational thinking ruliad https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/10/how-to-think-computationally-about-ai-the-universe-and-everything/ 
• Social media writing setups http://textcasting.org/  
• AI warmodel https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fculturepulse-ai-israeli-palestinian-crisis%2F 
• Executive order https://hai.stanford.edu/news/decoding-white-house-ai-executive-orders-achievements 
• GPTbots https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23948957/openai-chatgpt-gpt-custom-developer-platform AND https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts AND https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/almost-an-agent-what-gpts-can-do 
• Style tuning https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/style-tuner AND https://cookbook.openai.com/articles/what_is_new_with_dalle_3 
• Pebblessons https://medium.com/gabor/from-t2-to-pebble-the-rise-challenges-and-lessons-of-building-a-twitter-alternative-553652f1d1e7 
• AIbombs https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/us/politics/ai-startups-pentagon-weapons.html 
• Kidprivacy https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/personal/2023/11/what-gen-z-really-cares-about-when-it-comes-to-privacy 
• Looksmax https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/style/looksmaxxing-tik-tok-dillon-latham.html 
• Beastville Bourneville https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/03/mr-beast-money-hometown-greenville-creator-economy 
• Rats https://www.janelia.org/news/rats-have-an-imagination-new-research-suggests 
• Fans https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/onlyfans-bryce-adams-top-earners-creator-economy/ 
• Non-Western future https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/28/world/africa/africa-youth-population.html 
• Domains https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/02/1082798/tiny-pacific-island-global-capital-cybercrime/ AND https://joinreboot.org/p/domains 
• Disney https://www.reuters.com/graphics/DISNEY-100/HISTORY/znvnzmzgjvl/ 
• Louis armstrong https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/louis-armstrong-archive 
• FC2 https://www.theringer.com/video-games/2023/10/20/23924419/far-cry-2-15th-anniversary-clint-hocking-ubisoft-open-world-fps

VIDEOS

• Heroine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSE0d1F_1NU 
• Moth wings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otPBQuxQHOo  
• Gorgonn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0jlxP7whhg 
• Gecs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcGO8HGStqc 
• Tamaotchi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fDR-P__9To 
• Electtroface https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLJs4e9sBSY 
• Trapstar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vk1W-heSIE 

THANKS EVERYONE I LOVE YOU BYE!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

HELLO!

Finally, after 30 months of successful evasion, covid finally got me – whilst I don’t think it’s likely to prove fatal, it turns out that it really does fcuk with my ability to concentrate for 6 hours whilst writing several thousand words about stuff on the internet (also, I physically couldn’t get out of bed at 6am today to write the fcuking thing – hear that? the sound of literally NO VIOLINS, right there).

So there’s no Curios this week – SORRY! – but I imagine that, what with the new Taylor Swift album, and all the news and stuff, you’ve probably got quite enough to keep you occupied.

On the offchance, though, that you’re DESPERATE for links, here are a few from what would have been this week’s selection. See? Even when I am AT DEATH’S DOOR I still care.

• This is Doom, but made using the little Pico-8 in-browser games system and it is really, really impressive
• This is an ‘Escape The Room’ game; I can’t tell whether it’s really hard or whether it’s the illness making me particularly thick, but this took me fcuking AGES
• I don’t normally feature stuff like this, but I was captivated by this state-by-state list of the oddest roadside attractions across America and it almost made me want to learn to drive so I could do a roadtrip and see them all
• This is a longread about the increasing obsession with the ‘craft’ of literature, and whether it’s having a deleterious effect on things like ‘plot’ – I featured another essay on a similar topic at the beginning of the year, I think, but this is a nice addition to it (and some of the writing is excellent)
• You’ve probably seen this being lauded, but if you’ve yet to read it then Imogen West-Knight’s article about her experience of going on a cruise for fan’s of the novel Gone Girl is as fun as everyone says it is (although, no shade, all of these cruise pieces are so obviously written in the shadow of DFW that they all ought to carry some sort of disclaimer and probably use extensive footnotes)
• In the week of the BBC’s first centenary, this is an extract from a never-published book by Adam Macqueen dealing with the Corporation’s history. It’s images of pages rather than HTML, so might be unwieldy on mobile, but I promise you it is SO GOOD and contains SO MANY great stories about what it’s like starting a national broadcaster. Also, the detail that Lord Reith (as he became) was 34 years old and ‘knew nothing of broadcasting’ when he was appointed Head of the BBC in 1922 is just wonderful. Can we start choosing Prime Ministers on that basis? It seems unlikely to be less successful than the current system

There you go. Links. EVEN WHEN I AM SICK. I’m like the Stakhanov of pointless webmongery.

Anyway, I hope that normal service will be resumed next Friday – til then, thanks for your patience and apologies for the reduced service (and please, if you preferred this shortened format to the standard logorrhoea, PLEASE KEEP IT TO YOURSELF).

BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!