AND SO, WE CAME TO THE END.
44 editions of Web Curios, roughly 3,500 links, 400k-odd words (fcuking HELL though) and here we find ourselves, on the cusp of entering the second quarter of the first century of the third millennium of recorded time, with supposedly-educated residents of one of the world’s richest and most powerful nations shooting into the sky because they are scared of planes and no longer seem to understand technology.
Truly, the future is panning out gloriously.
So for the next few weeks, why not take a break from the future? Ignore it. Fcuk it. It will happen without you, whether you like it or not (and you probably won’t, let’s be realistic).
Briefly, before we crack on with the links and the words and all the usual Web Curios gubbins, I just want to say a small thankyou to all of you for reading this (or, more realistically, just opening it and clicking a few links and mostly ignoring the prose), for sending me interesting links and emails, for telling me each week which links I’ve managed to fcuk up (no really, I am grateful!) and for occasionally sharing it with people – I really do appreciate it.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you will be FINE without me, I promise (but what will I do without you?).
By Tye Martinez (most images this week from TIH, to whom, again, thanks)
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PETERS MANDELSON AND THIEL HAVE EVER HUNG OUT, PT.1:
- The Shopify Winter Editions: No, I didn’t expect the prestigious ‘first link in the final Curios of the year’ slot (it IS prestigious! Shut up!) to go to the annual list of product updates shipped by an ecommerce company, but for the second time in recent months Shopify’s marketing people have done something genuinely fun and, well, credit where it’s due. Click the link and you’ll be taken to a dry-looking (and, frankly, dry-reading) list of product updates that have shipped this year – but, if you click on the top left of the Page, where you can toggle between the ‘boring’ and ‘not boring’ view, you can flip the experience to become…BORING TV! This is SO fun – basically they have taken the 150+ different updates and turned each into a tiny, silly TV commercial, made with AI, which you can watch on a little pop-up in-browser telly, complete with remote control to let you flip between them at will. I have no idea whether they fully committed to the bit and did all 150 (it’s a cute idea but, well, it’s still fundamentally about software updates to an ecommerce platform and I am not quite invested enough to do the full deep-dive), but everyone else, take note – THIS IS WHAT AI IS FOR. Well, not just this – you’d sort of hope for all the money spent and energy consumed we’d get a bit more out of it than ‘moderately-imaginative marketing for a massive corporate’, but let’s take what we can get shall we?
- Rijksmuseum AI Art Explorer: One of the nice things about Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum – other than it’s superb collection and regularly-excellent digital work – is the way in which they facilitate others working with their archive; this is an excellent example, a hobby project cobbled together by one Sors Lockhorst which scrapes the museum’s API, uses OpenAI’s CLIP to map them in vector space and gives YOU, the end-user who frankly probably didn’t care about the preceding 20 words of semi-technical exposition, the opportunity to search the collection based on (their words) ‘vibes’. Want to ask the engine to show you works which demonstrate ‘the general sense of not knowing quite what you’re doing’? Or paintings which, more than any others, embody the very essence of ‘suspicious lust’? NOW YOU CAN! Your mileage will vary – not everything results in a satisfying selection of images but, broadly, there’s been something interesting in the way in which my (admittedly…somewhat oblique) queries have been interpreted each time – and because it’s not an official website you need to open the pictures in a new tab to get the full, hi-res view, but it’s another example of the interesting ways in which this sort of search can open up and recontextualise an archive.
- The Taylor Swift Eras Website: I am sure that there are some of you who are already well aware of the launch of this website, whether as a result of your own personal Swiftian obsession or that of someone else in your household – I had no idea, though, that there was some NEW DIGITAL THING dropping from one of the world’s most famous people and was quite interested to see what one might make with all that money and all those resources and a reputation for engaging one’s fandom in deep, lore-driven explorations of MEANING and HIDDEN MESSAGES and LYRICAL COMPLEXITIES and…God, this is so fcuking miserable. Honestly, click the link – it feels HORRIBLY phoned-in (even the design is lacklustre and…cheap-feeling?) – fans get to choose which of the ERAS of the ERAS tour they want to vibe with, and clicking on the variously-coloured header images will take you to an embedded Spotify playlist of that specific album, and some shots of that bit of the stage show from various stages of the megatour, but there’s something really rather hollow about the fact that the sections on the homepage go ‘top nav / album embed / album shop / merch store’ – like, TayTay, you are VERY RICH and frankly haven’t you squeezed these kids (and their parents) enough now? Where’s the imagination and the sense of COMMUNITY and the opportunity to fans to come together and share their memories of the tour, and where are the additional easter eggs for all the devotees, and where, honestly, is the fun? Because this is not in any way a fun website. Once again it feels a little bit like being a fan of one of these people is a bit like enjoying a talented performer’s work, but also quite a lot like a strange findom relationship.
- Connyct: I am including this not because I care about it in the slightest but because there’s a vanishingly-small likelihood that this is going to be TikTok2.0 – or at least it could be in the US, should the ban actually go through next year. Connyct is, as far as I can tell, ‘TikTok but doing rollout like Facebook in the mid-00s’, and so only opening up to college students at present so as to, I presume, allow them to scale at a reasonable pace and also build the sort of necessary young userbase that all social networks need to gain critical mass. Is this going to become the latest North American digital dopamine sink? I don’t know! I don’t, in all honesty, give a fcuk? And, come on, neither do you, let’s all stop pretending. Although, briefly removing the mask of weary cynicism, it does feel like, generationally-speaking, this might be a time for a platform reset for the young, and ‘social media as though it were invented for students today rather than 20 years ago’ isn’t a terrible pitch (even if that does, coincidentally, look pretty much exactly like TikTok).
- Music Time Travel: Ok, full disclosure- I haven’t *actually* tried this, but the idea looks interesting and I am going to make a huge assumption that it’s not malware and it won’t brick your phone or anything. Rewind (that’s the app’s name, but ‘Music Time Travel’ is more helpfully-descriptive) basically lets you pick any year you like and pretend you’re listening to a sort of ‘greatest hits radio’ from said year – it links to your existing subscription music service so all the tracks are licensed, but adds a layer of curated ‘by year’ magic, meaning that if you want to spend the festive season harking back to a time in which your life was simpler and you didn’t yet know what a crushing fcuking *mess* you were going to make of everything then, well, you can! This feels like it might be fun for any of you whose children are going through a musical retrofetishism phase.
- Cloudspotting: Pictures of clouds, which you can draw on so that you can share the shapes you see with the world. I love this – there are a load of images on there already, which you can either draw on yourself to find your own shapes, or hover over to see the shapes others have found in them; or, should you wish, you can upload your own photograph of some cumulonimbus (other cloud formations are available) so the wider cloud enthusiast community (nebulophiles?) can also enjoy seeing what they can scry in the wispy dampness. Why? WHY NOT, WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE A REASON FOR EVERYTHING FFS?
- The Best Science Images of 2024: Nature picks their best shots of the year – honestly, these are great but to my mind there is nothing that can surpass the quite incredible close-up picture of a sand weevil which looks (I promise you am I right about this) like the best boss that FromSoft have ever designed, like something from an as-yet unexplored corner of Elden Ring’s map (seriously, if these references mean something to you then you have NO IDEA how right I am about this comparison). On the flipside, though, the swimming cheetahs felt a little like harbingers of some not-wholly-glad tidings. Still, overall these are all amazing pictures which will elicit some actual, proper ‘wow, isn’t the natural world a consistent incredible and beautiful place, regardless of our incessant attempts to fcuk it into the sun?’ feelings from all of you, so, well, enjoy those while you’re still capable of doing so. BONUS CRITTER PICTURE CONTENT: the annual comedy wildlife photography awards which, I’ll be honest, I’ve slightly fallen out of love with in recent years (it’s very much me, not them), but which this year redeem themselves with at least three top-quality images (the two separate penguin images – always great value, those lads – and the one of the seals, which I am AMAZED wasn’t titled ‘The Slap’ for reasons that should become immediately apparent when you see it).
- The AI Art Critic: Upload an image and get a little video critique delivered to you by The Machine, in the guise of Danny Devito in a Warhol wig – the workflow here is presumably something like ‘image analysed by GPT, analysis fed as a script to a preset Runway text-to-video pipeline, for those interested; this is a classic example of what the limitations are of the text part of the pipeline, because the ‘opinions’ here are simply…nowhere near interesting enough to be worthwhile. The Machine won’t slag off the work, it will just spit some artw4nk-adjacent guff which, while corresponding to whatever it is you’ve uploaded, is neither interesting nor cruel nor funny, and therefore there’s no real incentive (to my mind) to try this more than once. Which is a shame, because I still maintain that there’s something magical and surprising about the tech here – the fact that The Machine can ‘see’ is fcuking insane!! – but it’s stymied by the off-the-shelf language model in use. Can someone make this again but with a jailbroken local copy of LLAMA or something? A little project for one of you to work on while I’m away!
- Soot: Very much not my sort of thing, this, but I can imagine it being interesting and useful to people with significantly different brains than mine – Soot is, basically, a visual moodboard-type thing; you arrange images on a Page or series of Pages which you own and curate, images can be annotated and tagged and themselves link through to OTHER image boards, and you can make anything you post on there public so that other users can explore your aesthetic. I personally don’t *quite* see how this is different from the million-and-one similar type of platforms for this sort of thing that already exist, but I’m equally conscious that I am a bit like a dog staring at a car with this sort of stuff in that it is pretty much totally alien to my conception of the world and information and How Thinking Works, and your mileage might therefore vary a bit.
- Google ImageFX: I have stopped bothering with AI update stuff in the main, partly because I was getting increasingly-irate emails from people complaining about it (on which, actually – if your default position is that ‘it is AI and therefore it is sh1t and you shouldn’t write about it or feature it or even look at or think about it lest you accelerate the badness!’ then, well, you haven’t really understood what Curios is about) and partly because there’s just SO FCUKING MUCH OF IT – I’ll make a brief exception for this, though, the latest iteration of Google’s text-to-image builder because it’s quite good (better than OpenAI’s, to my mind) and the interface is nice, and because, if you’re in the States or if you can be bothered to VPN your way there, then you can also experiment with this fun little style transfer-type toy called Whisk which lets you combine a bunch of elements into a scene which you can then remix using text prompts, giving a neat example of how this stuff is going to start working in the next year or so.
- AI CEO: Satire! Except, well, it’s not so funny when it’s not the CEOs who are going to be replaced, it’s the rest of us!
- The Old Robots: Via Pietro Minto, an OLD website featuring, er, a LOT of images of old robot toys from pretty much every point from the mid-20th-Century onwards. Do you have some sort of half-formed memories of a childhood toy in comforting beige, some sort of red-eyed lumbering hulk of 80s-imagined future, your very own plastic pal who was so much fun to be with? You will almost certainly find details of it in here, but fcuk me will you have to look hard because there are SO MANY OLD ROBOTS on here.
- Spacefiller: I do like me some generative art, and I very much enjoy the idea here: “Each poster in the Living Prints series is algorithmically generated when you order it. The prints are sampled from an ecosystem of simulated organisms and no two posters are the same. You won’t know exactly what your poster looks like until it shows up at your door, but we think that is the fun part. The simulated organisms are grown from randomly placed seeds. A variety of predetermined species can appear in your poster, each with its own look and behavior.” OK, so the resulting outputs here aren’t to my personal taste, but I can very much get behind the idea at play – can, er, someone make one of these things that DOES conform exactly to my personal tastes, please? THANKS!
- AImail: I think email gets too much of a hard time, personally. Email is discrete. It’s asynchronous. You can deal with it in your own time, at your own convenience, or indeed never. Noone has EVER sent you an email simply saying ‘hi’ with no further detail or information. I LIKE RECEIVING EMAILS. AND YET! It appears to have been saddled with the blame for a significant proportion of our modern ills, the corporate ones at least, and we’ve had a decade or more of people promising to KILL email or SAVE US from email or TRANSFORM email, and still it persists, unkillable. The latest attempt to free us all from the, er, not-particularly-tyrannical grip of email comes in the shape of Cora, an AI-enabled system which promises, as far as I can tell, to triage all of your mail and deliver you summaries twice a day of the things you need to know, responding automatically to the things you don’t need to be aware of, and deleting the things it deems to be spam. ARE WE ALL FCUKING MAD?!?!?! There is literally no way in hell that ANY AI software anywhere in the world can execute this sort of stuff autonomously, accurately, all the time, and putting your email life in the hands of this sort of system in 2024 is almost-certainly going to lead to some genuinely awkward – but, admittedly, potentially-very-funny mishaps as Cora decides that, actually, you didn’t need to see that reminder email from HMRC after all. Currently available via a waiting list, for any of you brave (stupid) enough to entrust your inbox to an LLM.
- Cask Exchange: As we canter into the second quarter of the third millennium, it does rather feel like the ambient mood is ‘casino on the titanic about an hour before the iceberg hits’ – everyone feels a bit reckless, a bit emboldened, and a bit ‘fcukit, put it all on black, what’s the worst that could happen?’. In this spirit, and given you might want to divest some of the $Hawk you picked up on the crypto exchanges the other week, you may well be interested in Cask Exchange, a website which lets you invest in, er, whisky barrels? Is this a thing? Is this legit? Perhaps it is – per the blurb, “Cask Exchange is an online trading platform where qualified distilleries, wholesalers, and brands can buy and sell barreled spirits for bottling. It connects sellers looking to monetize their barrels with buyers seeking liquid for bottling.” – and, of course, there’s a market for everything, but, also, CAN MAYBE EVERYTHING NOT BE A FCUKING MARKET PLEASE? Apparently this has been going in some form or another since 1998, so once again it is I who am the rube and the idiot – Christ alive, I despise (and, mostly, completely fail to have any real understanding of,) money.
- Snowflake Maker: You know those snowflakes you make with small children using folded paper and scissors? Well this is that, minus the paper and scissors (and hence minus finding bits of said paper all over your house for the following decade or so) – this is…fun! Genuine, simple, uncomplicated fun! Also, if you’re that way inclined, there’s an interesting minor patternmaking challenge involved in trying to create a snowflake with a pleasingly-phallic cutout pattern – give it a go!
- The LAN Party House: I’ve never really been a proper geek – I appreciate that writing this as someone who writes, for free, a weekly newsletter about ‘stuff that I find interesting on the internet’ might possibly result in some muffled laughter at my expense from the seven of you reading this but, honestly, it’s true! I have never done D&D, I am not into boardgames or scifi or fantasy, or any of the standard tropes, and I have generally tended towards ‘drink and drugs’ as pastimes rather than ‘fandoms and communities’, and I am capable of doing my own washing without it smelling of mildew (sorry, but)! Which is why stuff like this absolutely fascinates me – just…imagine being so into something that you go to these insane lengths to facilitate it! For those of you too young or too…’normal’, frankly, to be aware of what a LAN party is/was, in the days before online gaming the only way to play serious multiplayer network games (FPS or strategy sims, mainly) would be to connect them to a Local Area Network – or LAN – which required the machines to all be cabled together, which required them to be in the same place, which meant people taking their computers to a central place and connecting them and then basically spending 24h+ doing nothing but eating fast food and playing games…you can see, can’t you, where some of the stereotypes about this community started? Anyway, this is what a house designed from the ground up to accommodate that sort of event might look like, if it were envisioned by someone VERY wealthy who had some pretty serious design chops – honestly, this is AMAZING (although what’s possibly more amazing is that the person in question is also married and has children) and will make one or two of you very, very covetous indeed.
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PETERS MANDELSON AND THIEL HAVE EVER HUNG OUT, PT.2:
- WikiLocal: This isn’t a wholly-new idea – I have definitely featured something along similar lines before, possibly during Lockdown One – but I have a particular soft spot for projects which both leverage Wikipedia and which encourage local exploration and learning. This is a really simple website, mixing up maps with Wikipedia entires to let you quickly and easily find places that are notable enough to have a Wikipedia entry devoted to them in the immediate vicinity of any location you choose – so, for example, I can see the place where Van Gogh briefly lived round the corner from me, say, and I have literally JUST learned that I am located just by the site of the oldest adventure playground in London still to stand at its original site. I KNOW I AM SO PRIVILEGED! Honestly, this is SO interesting and I figured it might be particularly cool to give it a go over the holidays as an opportunity to get to know your neighbourhood a bit better. NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility should this tool reveal that you live in an area with no interesting or notable history/landmarks whatsoever.
- Meta Motivo: Ok, this is QUITE technical, but it’s really interesting from the point of view of attempting to create virtual agents which can move, act and to an extent even ‘learn’ autonomously in virtual space- this is a new experimental model/toy thing from Meta which explores how it’s getting along making models which can effectively perform “whole-body control tasks, including motion tracking, goal pose reaching, and reward optimization, without any additional training or planning.” There’s an explanatory blogpost here – which is, honestly, VERY TECHNICAL – but click the main link and enjoy playing with the AI stick figure man who, if you play around with it a bit, can be made to dance and caper in ways which give you a brief, tantalising glimpse as to how interesting and odd and fun it will be in a few years time when you have semi-autonomous in-world virtual actors who can act independently and who can display emergent physical behaviours. If, though, that doesn’t really grab you, then can I please encourage you to at the very least take a moment to right click on the figure and lob a beach ball at it? The ragdoll physics at play are VERY funny.
- Disney Prime Video: A comedy Bluesky account! It’s not just people just humourlessly shrieking about platform etiquette, you know! These are imagined films – some funny, some not, but I did enjoy the recasting of a film about the nativity myth as one entitled ‘Cucked By God’.
- Surf Social: This, theoretically, looks like it might be interesting and useful – Surf Social is effectively a wrapper service for a bunch of different feeds from different places, including the fediverse (Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads) and YouTube and Flipboard, and which will basically let you spin up a selection of interest-based feeds pulling in content from across each of these platforms into single, consolidated streams, Which, actually, sounds…potentially good? While the theoretically idea of ‘pulling all your feeds into one’ doesn’t tend to work in practice – different platforms are for different things! Context collapse is a problem! – keeping the main ones where they are but pulling shared results for interest-based searches seems…smart and not likely to mess with the way in which you use the platforms already. This could be worth a look, although the standard ‘it’s in Beta and so is likely to fall over’ caveats of course apply.
- Keikku: To be honest, I am including this almost solely because I had no idea that stethoscopes had gotten so incredibly hi-tech or required such shiny and fundamentally-overengineered websites. LOOK AT THESE FCUKERS IT’S LIKE SCIFI MEDICINE OUT OF STAR TREK OR SOMETHING!!! Also…whilst obviously progress is good and stuff, and I can’t imagine anyone dying because of a stethoscope running out of batteries, I do wonder whether perhaps there are some things that possibly don’t need a wifi connection. Oh, and it taught me a new favourite word – auscultation! – which means that basically I love this website now.
- Not My Name: This is quite dizzying, and does little to dispel my long-held internal belief that anyone learning Chinese as an adult is basically some sort of genius or magician. This is a website all about Chinese names and how they have been basically ‘flattened’ by the simplified version of the language – from the explanation, “You may come across Chinese names in various contexts, such as Cixin Liu, the author of the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, and Ai Weiwei, a contemporary Chinese artist. However, these names have been transliterated to Hanyu Pinyin, which represents Mandarin pronunciation, rather than their original characters. This can lead to name ambiguity, as even native Chinese speakers may find it challenging to decode the original names behind the Pinyin.” Scroll down the page, click on ‘explorer’, and you’re presented with a dizzying array of names (navigate using the arrow keys), each with an accompanying visualisation showing how many people share it, and the traditional characters it derives from, and the different tones that can be used when pronouncing it…the key to understanding it isn’t explained HUGELY clearly (which I’m going to attribute to difficulties in translation), but it’s worth clicking around and exploring – if nothing else the vocal samples illustrating pronunciation demonstrate the insane range of the language and the sounds and stresses and dear God it is SO HARD.
- Social Justice Kittens 2025: Another year, another calendar full of kittens accompanied by some of the best Tumblr-esque sentiments expressed across the web in the past 12 months. Some absolute gems in this year’s selection – I think, on reflection, my personal favourite is May’s pair of Sphynx’s worriedly discussing the need to dismantle capitalism within a generation, but please do feel free to pick your own.
- The World War II Film Supercut: OK, there is a certain section of the Curios readership here who on clicking this link are liable to become so powerfully tumescent with excited arousal that it might cause some sort of medical event – BE WARNED. Are you someone who would say they are ‘into history’? Did you contemplate buying a ticket to The Rest Is History live podcast recordings? Do you ACTUALLY think about the Roman Empire every day? Do you REALLY like old war films? OH MY GOD THIS IS ALL YOUR CHRISTMASES COME AT ONCE! I can’t stress enough what a fcuking BATSHIT project this is – per this explanatory blogpost, “For more than a year I’ve been working on the World War II Supercut, a video project that combines 143 World War II movies into one 12 hour series, with historically significant clips pulled from the movies and ordered chronologically.” The main link takes you to a Google Drive folder where you can find the entire 12-hour epic, arranged into a dozen hour-long episodes, taking you from the pre-war to the post-war in an astounding collage of clips from every war film you’ve ever heard of and a bunch more that you probably haven’t. To be clear, I could give not one iota of a fcuk about WWII or war films or history and so this is of less than no interest to me, but for those of you who are going to make a day of this then, well, MERRY FCUKING WARMAS!
- Pop The Confetti: Click the button, pop the confetti cannon, watch the sprinkles, feel your laptop become worryingly hot as it tries to render the physics of thousands of bits of paper! Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT IT IS CHRISTMAS!
- Midjourney Patchwork: This is an interesting idea – Midjourney have launched (in beta, I think) a tool which effectively works as a storyboarding/concepting workspace with integrated AI, so you can start to flesh out the look and feel of characters and scenes using the Midjourney image generation tool within your digital whiteboard, sort of like…I don’t know, like Miro but with the ability to spin up really very good AI images as part of the embedded functionality. You can read a guide to it here, which might give you an idea of whether or not it might be of use to you – generally though this looks like it could be superuseful from the point of view of initial storyboarding or concepting, particularly as a team-based tool.
- Puppets: Via Lynn comes this lovely little puppet toy – it detects your hands, you select the puppets you want to embody and VWALLAH! In mere seconds you’ve got a passable Statler and Waldorf on your screen, moving along with your hands as you make them quip and caper. I actually found myself doing the voices while I played with this, which suggests both that this is pretty fun and that I am a very, very lonely man who probably needs to take steps to address this. BONUS HAND-TRACKING BROWSER TOYS! This lets you make rudimentary paintings using your handprints on a virtual cave wall, which when I used it resulted in what I can only describe as a scene looking a bit like a neanderthal dirty protest had taken place but which I am sure in your capable and artistic hands will help you create some truly stellar artworks (or, at the very least, a crudely-drawn c0ck, in the best tradition of wall-based art since time immemorial).
- AI Mix Check: Are you a musician or a sound engineer? Would you like to have your sound mixing skills critiqued by an AI? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you would – and yet the future has seen fit to afford you the opportunity! I am not a musician and so have no demos to upload for assessment, but I would love it if one of you who is more musically-inclined can give me some sort of indication of quite how awful the advice it gives you is – although actually, on reflection, it’s not like it will be bad advice so much as ‘advice that will ensure that your record is mixed so it could be played in a supermarket at 917pm without anyone noticing’.
- Short Trip: Oh WOW, this is a blast from the past. The main link is to the Steam download page for a short, small PC game called ‘Short Trip’, where all you do is drive a tram through some mountain villages, picking up and dropping off passengers – it’s designed as basically a small, soothing distraction, a 15m mind-cleanser, if you will. It came out earlier this month, and is the final evolution of THIS, which I featured possibly a decade ago and which I was delighted to rediscover all these many years later. Honestly, this is SUCH a lovely 5-10 minute distraction, beautifully drawn and made – there’s a *weight* to the controls that makes it feel…I don’t know, HOMEMADE in a way, and fits with the art style perfectly; I am really happy to see that the original is still online and that the creator, Alex Perrin, has persevered to make a fuller version available for download. Honestly, this is a classic of the small, interactive web and should be celebrated as such.
- Scroll: Via B3ta comes this game, which challenges to see how far you can scroll, either in 30s or until you get bored or die or your finger develops some sort of intolerable RSI-type condition. If you can do more than 2.5 in 30s then either you have a far better mouse than I do or your fingers are AMAZING (or I am in some way digitally subnormal, which I concede is also a possibility).
- Play Codex: Another daily puzzle to add to your now-probably-hours-long routine! This one’s a codebreaker – each day there’s a different quote which you have to work out; each day, the code changes. The codes are always simple letter substitution games – you know, today all ‘ys’ are ‘ls’, that sort of thing – but they’re always a decent, chewy five minutes of mental work which might be the sort of thing you enjoy (or will be the sort of thing that you hate-wrangle for a while before fcuking off back to Sudoku).
- Travle: God, I am SO embarrassingly-bad at this. Travle is a simple game (which Gdocs seems REALLY disinclined to let me type – I KNOW HOW TO SPELL ‘TRAVEL’ YOU D1CKS I AM DOING THIS DELIBERATELY) which asks to to get from country A to country F simply by mapping out a country-to-country route to get from one to the other. This, honestly, has served as a humiliating reminder of how utterly appalling my geography is, but you may find it less shaming than I have.
- Isle of Tune: Last up this week, something for you to play with over Christmas – come back to me in 2025 with your compositions, please (or, er, don’t! You owe me nothing! Spend Christmas however you choose!)! Isle of Tune’s a fun little music toy – make your composition by plotting a route for a train, placing various objects by the track, and seeing what sound they make; the various different elements are different sounds, you can change the pitch and tempo, and generally this is actually a far more in-depth and complex tool than in initially appears (but, also, it’s cute and whimsical and basically a tiny digital train set, and who doesn’t love that? NO FCUKER, etc etc!). ENJOY!
By Cody Bratt
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Old Web Rulez: Just some incredibly powerful aesthetics really.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Trendy AI Videos: AI videos! Odd, slightly-unpleasant AI videos! The latest one, of the writhing mushrooms (no, really, writhing is 100% the right adjective) is spectacularly unsettling. This is slop, but…odd slop – and there are some of these, a few imagining a sort of ‘America’s Got Talent’ but with AI, which feel legitimately, horrifically near-real.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Gisele Pelicot, Again: We kick off this week with another piece about the Pelicot trial and the woman who has, rightly, become a cause celebre over the latter half of the year and who I really, really hope gets to just sort of be left alone for a while now. You all, I presume, know the details of the case by now, but this account by Sophie Smith in the LRB is excellent in particular because it doesn’t attempt to make this a ‘French’ case or a ‘French’ issue, taking it back to a scene in a beloved book by a beloved (female, fwiw) author which sheds some not-particularly-pleasant light on our general, cultural attitudes to sex and marriage and consent and ‘ownership’ – honestly, this whole article made me feel extremely, deeply uncomfortable, which is exactly as it should be I think – I’ve been particularly struck this week by the oddity of the two parallel cultures which exist in the UK, one where this is a significant and groundbreaking and horrific and illuminating case that should hold significant lessons for us all, and another which is cheerfully debating the whys and wherefores of a woman’s attempt to sleep with 1000 men in a day as part of her bongo career, and how we probably ought to maybe have more of a conversation about how and where these two worlds intersect.
- The Pulitzer Year in Review: A link to the Pulitzer Centre’s picks of its journalism over the past year – “As we wrap up 2024, we are proud and excited to share a hand-picked selection of Pulitzer Center-supported stories that shaped our year. Every December, our team takes a moment to reflect on the journalism that moved us, surprised us, challenged us, or made an impact. These stories—reporting from more than 20 countries—include the big breakthroughs and the quieter moments that require sustained attention as public discourse shifts.” As you might expect, this is all SERIOUS REPORTAGE, but as a broad selection of stories about The State Of The World this is pretty hard-to-beat.
- AI At The End of 2024: It’s slightly astonishing to think that it’s only been a couple of years since the introduction of the latest wave of generative AI – the past month or so has seen a flurry of different announcement and launches (and spats and disputes) which means it’s not always easy to get a sense for what the current state of the art is, but thankfully the ever-helpful Ethan Mollick has done a convenient roundup of ‘what is currently possible with the mainstream models from the main players’ and if you want a guide to ‘what can this stuff ACTUALLY do at the fag-end of 2024?’ then this is a decent overview. FWIW, my thoughts on this are, broadly: a) most people are still in the main thinking about this in very limited fashion when it comes to potential use-cases, and tend to be WAY too focused on the ‘creative’ outputs (pictures and video) which are the least-interesting (currently) expressions of the tech; b) 2025 should see people doing some interesting, creative and hugely-useful things with multimodality which will be very impressive; c) agents are going to be make a lot of things VERY messy in the next 12-18 months; d) the ‘oh fcuk, this stuff is…eating jobs!’ realisation is finally going to start to bite in the coming year.
- To Whom Does The World Belong: In a week in which the UK government basically said to the creative industries ‘we don’t think you’re going to win in a fight with the AI companies’ lawyers, so why don’t we play nice with them instead?’ (seriously, it’s worth reading the consultation paper because LOL did all the lobbying by the big boys work!), this is a really interesting piece of writing in the Boston Review, about AI and copyrighted material and ‘fair use’ and why it’s actually really quite hard to argue that The Machine shouldn’t actually be allowed to ingest everything, actually, and why perhaps the more interesting question around copyright is to do with outputs rather than inputs…if you’re interested in this question or have skin in this game, this is very much worth reading through in full.
- Crypto is for Crime: Paul Krugman explains neatly why, in the main, yes, actually, crypto IS largely a nefarious thing! This neatly covers why it’s seemingly very likely that a significant portion of the world’s crypto stocks are being actively used for money laundering, and touches on the debanking thing which is getting lots of conservatives and cryptoenthusiasts frothy over in the US, and is generally a good overview of why one might want to use crypto for these purposes (and why, if you dig into it, there aren’t actually that many real, non-dodgy uses for the stuff anyway). Oh, and if you for some reason want to listen to me and some smarter, funnier people talk about this on a podcast you can do so here.
- GoatseCoin: Ok, I know I have linked to this story before, but if you haven’t clicked on it in the past can I PLEASE exhort you to give it a try now – it basically links the ‘where are we in AI at the end of ‘24?’ stuff to the crypto stuff, and, even if I only take about 15% of it at face value (I am always skeptical of ‘autonomous machines’ and am inclined to presume Mechanical Turk-ing until proven otherwise), this is honestly batsh1t. To recap – there’s an AI agent that has been spun up, which exists on Twitter; people interact with it, those interactions get fed into the model, and so it ‘learns’ and grows…anyway, this ‘agent’ has in the past few months invented a memecoin based on Goatse (you don’t, I assume, need me to explain this to you by now – you’ve been here a while, you’ve received the horrible, fleshy induction), which now has a seven figure market cap…oh God, this is all so mad and deeply silly but also TERRIFYINGLY FUTURE and pretty much my favourite news story of the year.
- That Massive Ed Zitron Essay: It’s been a good year for US-based UK PR man-turned-tech-industry-scourge Ed Zitron, who’s very much become A PERSONALITY off the back of his sustained critiques of the AI and wider tech industries – part of me wants to say something about preaching to the converted and audience capture here, but that same part of me realises quite how bitter that would sound and so, well, I won’t. This is Zitron’s last of the year, which is doing NUMBERS and lauded pretty much everywhere as an ESSENTIAL, EXCORIATING RANT – it’s neither of those things, though, it’s overlong (I know!) and overwrought (I know!) and slightly-too-hyperbolic (I KNOW!!!!), and could reasonably be summarised as ‘modern capitalism tends to make products and experiences worse over time, and the technology industry has effectively become our most ubiquitous and ever-present example of that, and it is bad and it is terrible for consumers and, more widely, society!’. Which, you know, is true! But probably didn’t require 10k words to say. God I am such a cnut – thank God Zitron doesn’t read this shit and won’t ever know that some fcuker who writes 10k words a week themselves has had the temerity to call them ‘verbose’.
- What It’s Like Getting Your News From Rumble: Stuart Thompson in the NYT spends some time getting all of their news from Rumble, the right-wing social media platform that’s basically ‘YouTube, but for people who worry that Fox News is possibly leaning a bit woke these days’ – as you’d expect, it’s aimed at people who are angry, and scared, and want to be rendered more angry and scared by muscular men shouting at them from their computers. This is less interesting, to my mind at least, about Rumble than it is about this very, very hyperspecific media diet and what it does to you – because, honestly, it’s not hard to look at this and then look closer to home and the GBNewssphere and the TommySphere and the TRUTH TELLING ‘news’ accounts on X and YouTube and TikTok and realise that OH FCUK WE NO LONGER HAVE ANY SORT OF SHARED CENTRAL CONCEPT OF WHAT IS TRUE AND REAL AND ACTUALLY HAPPENING ANY MORE. I can’t stress enough how much it weirds me out that seemingly NOONE is talking about this, even after a year in which it because eminently clear that there are approximately 73 different versions of ‘reality’ which people might believe in at any given moment and that maybe 20% of those 73 versions intersect in any meaningful way with what is actually happening, and that this…might prove to be problematic from a civic point of view, maybe.
- Fantasy: Ok, this is a link to an actual book to buy – BUT! I promise you, if you’re a ‘creative’ then you will absolutely fcuking adore this. Fantasy is a book by Bruno Munari, an Italian writer who in 1977 wrote this as a guide to his concepts of imagination, creativity and ideas – it has only just been translated into English, and is available from a small press in the US and, seriously, if you’re the sort of person whose job involves design or making or even if you’re just the sort of person who really does believe that Eno’s Oblique Strategies are TRANSFORMATIVE INTELLECTUAL TOOLS then, honestly, you will ADORE this – when I found it this week I dug out a public domain copy of the Italian version to remind myself of how good it is and, honestly, this really is superb (here’s the full Italian text – Italiani, godete, the rest of you take a look and get a feel for the sort of work it is).
- The Harper’s Spotify Story: You might not have heard about this one yet what with it being quite new, but thanks to this piece dropping in the past day or so the PR team at Spotify is going to have a significantly-less-relaxed Christmas than they might have hoped. The main thrust of the piece – extensively-researched by Liz Pelly – is that Spotify has basically been commissioning huge quantities of faceless, semi-nameless, inoffensive music which it owns the rights to and then quietly working to ensure that said music displaces other tracks to which Spotify doesn’t own the rights across popular playlists, so as to ensure that Daniel Ek, his fellow partners, and the battery of shareholders he now has to deliver VALUE to on a quarterly basis can continue being richer than any human being ever needs to be, ever. Here’s the framing, just to set the scene – oh, and just in case you were wondering, this is 100% going to get worse with AI music which really is pretty-much good enough now to produce infinite ‘ambient chill’ and ‘lofi beats’ playlists to carry us through to the heat death of the universe. REJOICE! “Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.”
- Moon: I think that Bartosz Ciechanowski might be one of my favourite internet people in the world – he is SO GOOD at what he does, and there’s something so insanely generous about the work he puts into these explainers; honestly, his making these feels almost like a species-wide public service (ACTUALLY, there’s an idea – is there an award for the best use of the web for purposes that benefit humanity in small ways? There should be, I think). I’ve featured his explainer articles on here before, and this new one is another beautiful addition to the collection – here, Ciechanowski explains (in LONGFORM – this is detailed and involved, but justifiably so) everything you wanted to know about the moon, how it relates to the Earth, where it came from (perhaps disappointingly, here Ciechanowski sticks to the ‘official’ line rather than the true version which involves the moon actually being a fake version placed there by Archons c.1500 – I know this is true because David Icke once told me (this itself is true)), all accompanied by his brilliant interactive diagrams which help bring all the tricky concepts of mass and orbit and, well, PHYSICS, to life. SO GOOD.
- The Eternal Bossman: I always find the fetishisation of bodegas by people from New York somewhat tiresome – yes, yes, you have SMALL INDEPENDENT LOCAL SHOPS, they are OPEN LATE, they sell IDIOSYNCRATIC THINGS, they are often run by COLOURFUL PERSONALITIES…GYAC mate this does not make your city in any way special ffs! Particularly when the london cornershop (not, to be clear, necessarily found on a street corner) is its very own perfectly-rendered urban curio with its very own vibe and personality – central to this is the proprietor, the bossman, written up here with genuine affection by the Economist; this is a lovely piece of writing both as a picture of modern London but also as a little vignette about the state of the country, socially and economically.
- The Polski Sklep: I’m sure there are many parts of the UK in which the rise of Polish immigrant communities feels like a relatively-recent phenomenon, but 80s Swindon was weirdly dominated by Polish families which meant that I thought everyone in the UK was called things like ‘Niewiadomski’ and ‘Wolosczinski’, and that I learned Polish swear words in parallel with English ones (there are, honestly, few things more satisfying to snarl under one’s breath than ‘curwa’), and that loads of the local shops were owned by Polish shopkeepers, and which in turn meant that I felt weirdly nostalgic reading this piece in Vittles about how the Polish shop (polski sklep) has formed a key part of diasporic life, and the odd cultural collisions you find in the aisles of shops like these. Honestly, fcuk bodegas.
- The Sam Smiths Pubs: This has been EVERYWHERE in the past 24h – a sign both of how much the English love reading about a proper eccentric and of how the Sam Smiths chain has a particular place in the hearts of many (specifically, I think, people who realised that they allowed you access to a magical world of sub-£3 pints – as recently as about 2010ish) – but for those of you who’ve yet to read it this is a BRILLIANT piece about the pub chain, why it’s so odd, and the very, very peculiar individual who runs the business. Americans in particular will I think practically soil themselves at the layers of Englishness on display here, but everyone will enjoy it – although I was slightly disappointed that the article at no point managed to explain why Sam Smith’s beer gives significantly worse hangovers than ANY other brewer (is it because it was cheap and therefore I drank more of it? Impossible to say).
- How Netflix Fcuked Everything: On Netflix, its model, and the rise of ‘slop content’ and the disengaged viewer, and how, as with so much, DATA HAS FCUKED EVERYTHING. Honestly, I really wish that someone would take away from Q1 of the 2000s that our obsession with quantification IS NOT MAKING THINGS BETTER. Anyway, this is very much ‘inside the TV industry’ but it’s a fascinating, well-written and well-researched piece that will help explain to you why there’s nothing worth watching anywhere despite there being basically infinite telly. Given the majority of material on streaming platforms appears to be designed to meet the needs of a theoretical, middle-of-the-bell-curve average consumer who’s probably ‘watching’ whilst also completing at least one other task, and given than on that basis quality simply doesn’t matter like it used to, what do we think that means when AI can churn out rubbish that is basically ‘film-shaped’ if you squint? HMMMMMMMM.
- The Mad Wargame: Ok, this is…very odd, and I am still not entirely certain why I am recommending it, but for some reason this really stuck with me after reading and so I will chuck it in here on the offchance that it appeals to one of you. Some caveats: 1) this really is VERY long; 2) it’s about the narrator and his friend undertaking a mission to play an INCREDIBLY complicated and dry-sounding WWII strategy tabletop game; 3) the narrator is (and I am not trying to be mean here – it really is true, I promise) basically Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (he is also not unaware of this fact), almost certainly owns a fedora and/or a collection of samurai swords and/or some of those velvet-effect paintings and is…not exactly sympathetic. And his friend is, honestly, a more extreme version of this persona. These are not heroes we’re dealing with here, let’s be clear. You can imagine this guy literally saying ‘milady’; 4) this is a post on a board game website, and therefore entirely unedited. AND YET. There is something…sort-of brilliant about this, a sort of morbid-self-awareness, as well as a sense of superiority, that reminded me INCREDIBLY of the narrator in A Confederacy of Dunces (a book which I never really understood the adulation for, if I’m honest) and which made the whole thing weirdly compelling to me in ways in which I appreciate that I am now really struggling to communicate. Look, this is WEIRD and VERY uncool, but also sort of cool because of it, if that makes sense. No? No, ok, fine.
- Danny Dyer: Everyone loves Danny Dyer, it is the law. This profile of him by Hayley Cambell in GQ is brilliant, and will make you love him more. NB – non-Anglos, here is a brief Dyer primer to get you up to speed.
- The Best Links Of The Year: In case you’re interested, by the way, Caitlin over at links asked me to pick my favourites – so here they are. I’m putting them in the longreads section because 4-5 of them are basically longform writing and so it sort-of fits here, and if you missed them the first time around I really do recommend giving them another go.
- Planet Puppet: I honestly wasn’t expecting a late contender for ‘best essay of the year’ to appear in December, but this is an all-time classic imho and you MUST read it. Mina Tavakoli visits the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion, the annual convention for the ventriloquists of the world to come together, play puppets and generally hang out, and I am not exaggerating when I say that in terms of subject matter and style this really is one of the best things I have read all year. Honestly, this should win SO MANY PRIZES, it really is utterly superb and funny and poignant and sad and and and oh God, seriously, it is so good that I want to stop writing about how good it is so that I can go and read it again.
- The Point of Whales: Our final essay of 2024 is this, by Richard Smyth, published in September but which I only found this week. This is short and human and rather beautiful, I thought, and the final paragraph seems like a fitting one to leave you with.
By Zhiyong Jing
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
