I went on a hen party last weekend. I appreciate given Everything Going On this is not exactly seismic or thrilling news, but, given the aforementioned Paucity Of Nice Things To Talk About this week, I thought I would open with some HEARTWARMING LEARNINGS from my experience.
WOMEN ARE SO NICE! I am obviously not surprised by this per se – some of my best friends, etc etc! – but it’s more that before this experience I had never been in an all-woman groupchat; I was added, I lurked, and I marveled at just how generally friendly and supportive and loving and kind and NICE all these women were to each other despite mostly never having met. Lads, listen, NOONE called anyone a cnut! NOONE made any appalling jokes that bordered on the not-ok! Everyone was basically cheerleading everyone else! Contrast this with a friend of mine who recently lost a brother to suicide, and cheerfully told me that it only took two days between his telling one groupchat that he’s a member of and someone in that groupchat calling him a cnut – GUYS GUYS GUYS MAYBE WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS YEAH?
Anyway, I was not only tolerated by actively welcomed by the assorted womenfolk, and generally had an excellent time, so my takeaway from this is that women are great, hens are better than stags (admittedly there was an absence of penis straws on this one, perhaps that might have affected my assessment) and, sometimes, being a man is actually a bit sh1t. Although I did enjoy NEVER having to queue for a p1ss all evening, so perhaps the patriarchy still has a couple of things in its favour.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can invite me to anything you like.
By Matteo Ribet
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE GENERAL SENSE OF CREEPING THERMONUCLEAR DREAD TO STOP CREEPING NOW PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.1:
- Browser Dating: Perhaps the WORST thing about the concept of dating apps for someone who, like me, has a somewhat-conflicted relationship with their own appearance (LOOK IT IS ENTIRELY NORMAL NOT TO EVER LOOK IN THE MIRROR WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT), is the need to find photographs of yourself to use as bait (my only abortive attempt at engaging with the infernal things involved me getting so distressed at the prospect of finding five actual photographs of myself to use on the profile that I ended up taking a screencap of some text reading “I HATE MY FACE AND SO HAVE NO PHOTOS OF MYSELF AT ALL” and using that; it may not surprise you to learn that I did not Find Love) – oh, and the fact that profiles give only a very partial impression of Who Someone Is and What They Are Into and What Their Inner Life Is Like beyond the often-crushingly-banal details they choose to share about themselves (what’s that? You like…coffee in the mornings? You…you enjoy PETTING DOGS? YOU DO YOGA????). Which is why I was absolutely fcuking ADORE the concept of Browser Dating, a project by Belgian artist Drees Depoorter, which offers to match users based on THE WEIRD SH1T THEY LOOK AT ONLINE. You sign up, you fill in a few basic details about who you are and the sort of human you might like to exchange fluids with, and then you install a Chrome extension which tracks what you’re browsing, what you’re searching, when you’re online…based on these details, the site will match you with people whose own personal online sickness feels like a good fit with your own. No specific details of what you like to look at in the privacy of your own browser are communicated – your fetish bongo habits are safe! – and Depoorter is keen to assure everyone that they are taking privacy seriously, and while you might struggle to find the love of your life on this right away given a) it launched last week; and b) I can’t imagine it has more than a few thousand users right now, at best, I think that this is conceptually PERFECT and I really really want it to take off – I also would like to encourage ALL of you single Curios readers to sign up to this so that maybe, just maybe, you can connect with another weird internet goblin JUST LIKE YOU and find someone who’ll stroke your mucous membranes in just the way you like best. Honestly, now I come to think of it, I now want two of you to fall in love more than almost anything else in the world, so please all sign up and get on with it thanks. BONUS VAGUELY-SIMILAR DATING THING!: this is Rithm Love,which promises to do something very similar except using analysis of your Insta ‘Explore’ feed to GET YOUR VIBE and match you with someone with similar interests. Honestly, I can’t tell you enough how interesting I think the basic idea here is.
- The Fracture: CAVEAT: I do not know what this is, exactly, because it has utterly baffled me from the outset and, er, I can’t get past the first puzzle gate – as such, I would like to clearly state that if at some point this website turns horrid, I DIDN’T KNOW. Anyway, The Fracture is a deliberately-mysterious, deliberately-obtuse online mystery puzzle thing – the homepage offers you some GNOMIC PHRASES about what ‘The Fracture’ is which very much don’t tell you anything at all, stuff like “Fracture is not a tool, a game, or an experience. It’s far too dangerous — and far too powerful — for that. Fracture is a threshold. A designed collapse. It wasn’t created to help you. It was built to undo you, irreversibly — and then reconstruct you, not as a servant of circumstance, but as a manipulator of realities.” I mean, do ANY of you have the slightest idea what the fcuk that portentous wnk is saying? If your tolerance for this sort of prose is low then you are…not going to get on with this, but, if you persevere, you get the sense that this is setting itself up as some sort of SPIRITUAL ENGAGEMENT WITH THE MACHINE-type portal thing, a feeling exacerbated by the .ai in the url and a lot of the coming text alluding to some sort of TERRIFYING JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY that you are about to embark upon. You answer a few questions…and then you get hit with a riddle that requires you to answer it correctly to proceed to the next part of the puzzle and, dear reader, I have to confess that this has utterly fcuking banjaxed me. You can ask for one hint which you can access every 24h (and interestingly it looks like the ‘game’ will let you earn tokens with which to skip future puzzles should you wish), but even after three or four additional ‘helpful clues’ I am none the wiser (and I feel so, so thick). I am not a puzzles person, fine, I very much do not have the sort of brain that lends itself to cryptics and the like, but also I feel that this is VERY much at the obscure end of the scale – I don’t want to reproduce it in full as that feels like spoiling things, but should any of you want to try this out and, er, EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING AND WHAT THE ANSWERS ARE then I will be eternally grateful. No, seriously, please.
- On The Rag: This has been floating around for a few months now; I was put off writing about it previously because, well, it felt annoyingly hipster to me, to be honest, in a specifically US way which slightly annoyed me, but I think it might be interesting enough to warrant a link, fine. On The Rag is an anonymous messageboard-type thing that exists alongside a new HORRIBLY COOL magazine-cum-zine-type thing of the same name, like some sort of weird bicoastal art kids 4chan; the content being posted feels…niche, but I quite like the idea of an anonymous online community around a publication and think there’s half an idea here for digital extensions of physical media (lol physical media what do I think it is 1998).
- Turn Off All The Google AI: A Chrome extension which will, apparently remove all of the extraneous AI cruft from your Google searches – assuming, of course, you haven’t abandoned Google entirely due to the fact that it’s increasingly a genuinely-terrible search engine. Details as follows: “Filter Google search results to hide AI overviews, ads, discussions or videos. You choose. Don’t like the new Google AI overviews appearing in your search results? Perhaps you don’t like the discussions section or the shopping blocks or even the sponsored links? This extension lets you hide them. It simply uses CSS to set those areas of the page to be hidden (display=”none”). AI overviews are hidden by default but the options menu lets you choose what else you might want to hide: Videos, Discussion blocks, shopping blocks, “readers also ask” and sponsored blocks are also available to hide.”
- Seventh Sight: Yes, you read that right – we’ve leapt straight from the concept of ‘second sight’, that vague, nebulously-defined ability to in some way scry the unknowable and feel the warp and weft of THE FATES, to SEVENTH SIGHT which is, I presume, 3.5 times MORE POWERFUL than the standard variant. This is one of the most wonderfully-bullsh1t AI things I have seen in a while, promising as it does to use THE POWER OF MACHINE LEARNING TO ANALYSE YOUR DREAMS. Except, obviously, it can’t see your dreams, which means what it’s actually doing is, er, analysing your vague and confused writeups of your half-remembered sleepwanderings based on a less-than-premium-tier LLM! What can you get from asking The Machine to explain your subconscious to you? I’m glad you asked! “There are many benefits to understanding your subconscious. It is a guide to many aspects of your life always nudging you towards what’s really important.Better Relationships! Make Big Decisions! Find your Life Purpose! Repair Past Trauma! Improve your Career! Creative insights! Improve your intuition! Heal from Disease!” A LOT TO UNPACK, but I do feel that the final claim is…perhaps somewhat irresponsible, and might not in fact stand up to scrutiny (also, I very much enjoy ‘make big decisions’ – yes, fine, but will they be good decisions? Because ‘jumping off a very tall building’ would be a ‘big decision’ for me, but not necessarily one that in the fullness of time I would be happy to have made). Anyway, this is OBVIOUSLY a paid-for offering starting at $40 a year, which I really hope noone in their right mind would be dumb enough to take up…and yet, obviously, you know that someone somewhere will be. Perhaps my favourite thing about this is that despite there being AI all over this, and all the site’s images being AI, whoever wrote the copy has managed to leave an uncorrected ‘write’/’wright’ homophone, suggesting that it was crafted by an actual human, which, honestly, strikes me as weirdly poignant for reasons I don’t quite understand.
- Steve Albini’s Closet: One for fans of late music producer Steve Albini, specifically for fans of Steve Albini with disposable income to burn on buying some of his old tat. SO MUCH OLD TAT! Records and pictures and old tshirts, released on a week-by-week basis as the executors of the Albini estate go through the several thousand bits of old memorabilia he accrued over the course of his life and career. You can sign up to email alerts to get notified when new merch gets added to the site – even if you’re not an Albini superfan, the man was polymathic enough that there’s likely to be something in here for almost everyone eventually.
- No Kings: Only of use to any of you currently unfortunate enough to be living in North America, but tomorrow (14 June) is slated to be a day of peaceful protests across the US against the administration and its various current iniquities. “On June 14—Flag Day—President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else. No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like.” The onsite map of planned demonstrations is impressively packed with events, so it shouldn’t be hard for anyone to find one near enough to attend, and if you’re in London then there’s a demo outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms from 10am tomorrow.
- Technology Reader: Bloomberg tech reporter Dave Lee played around with getting The Machine to code him up a website, and ended up producing this genuinely-useful site which aggregates a bunch of tech news outlets and newsletters and collects stories in one place; it’s simple but it works, and if you need to keep across this stuff then it’s worth bookmarking alongside
- The Delorean Marketplace: Did you know that, apparently, they are going to start making DeLoreans again? That’s right! A car that was even in its heyday a byword for a certain type of vaguely-gakky grift is BACK and, er, its return is tied to NFTs, suggesting that there are certain BRAND TRUTHS which really are embedded in the DNA! This is WONDERFULLY silly and so very, very 2019/20, even down to the intensely-confusing and slightly-aggressive website design which seems engineered to drive you into some sort of confused submission with its combination of black and red and FUTURE CARS and the sort of general vibe of a 14 year old boy’s bedroom c.1992 married to the vague sense that you NEED TO BUY IN NOW. So, can you buy a car here? NO YOU CANNOT! Instead you can buy a tradeable NFT, which will at some indeterminate point in the future let you have the OPPORTUNITY to buy a car! What’s that you say? This magic bean will one day turn into a beanstalk? SIGN ME UP! If you ever wonder, awake and alone at 4am (so alone), why it was that NFT-backed stuff never took off even in the vanishingly-few usecases where it vaguely felt like it could have been useful (luxe memberships, etc), I advise you to take a quick look at the FAQs here; this feels…too complicated given the basic user need here is ‘I just want to be able to maybe buy a car’. Anyway, this made me vaguely-nostalgic for 2020, which, considering what was going on five years ago, should give you a vague sense of the degree of joy with which I am currently facing down now and tomorrow.
- 12 Seasons NYC: Via Kris, a site which explains the 12 seasons experienced in New York and helpfully tells you which you are currently experiencing RIGHT NOW (it is ACTUAL SPRING, so I am told).
- GifCities: I have, I believe, technically featured this before, but the Geocities gif search thing from Internet Archive has been given a lick of paint and, I think, a new url, so it merits reinclusion, not least because it’s the source of so many joyous visuals and it’s simply a good, innocent time to just type in whatever you fancy into the search bar and see what you get given. The banners! The gifs! The SPARKLES! Go on, click the link and type in whatever pleases you the most – NO NOT THAT FFS – and enjoy the wonderful procession of GRAPHICS FROM THE PAST.
- Hear To There: Ooh, ART! Hear To There is a lovely idea – you basically input two locations which you are going to walk between, and the site will try and spit out a selection of audio recordings which are linked to physical locations between the two destinations, effectively giving you a fragmented auditory companion to your journey and OH GOD IT HAS BEEN GOING 11 YEARS HOW IS THIS NEW TO ME?? Fcuk, I am a FAILURE. Anyway, this doesn’t *quite* work because it requires people to have uploaded audio corresponding to specific places, but I very much enjoy the idea behind it even if the execution isn’t quite as perfect as I might wish (also, I should stop fcuking whinging and be grateful that people still bother to keep stuff like this up really – sorry).
- Library Spy: There’s something lovely about the idea that you can take the sort of psychic temperature of a place through the books that people are reading – whilst obviously that’s broadly-unknowable (except if you’re fcuking Amazon. FCUKING AMAZON FFS!), Library Spy offers a smart way of getting at least a partial view of that sort of information via data from a particular library in Manhattan. “This is a live, unfiltered look at what books are being checked out of the Seward Park library, a branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. Every disappearing book reveals a moment of curiosity, interest, or intrigue happening right now in the neighborhood. I am continuously scraping book availability from the library’s website. Each time the number of available copies decreases — from 3 copies to 2, or 1 to none — we know someone has just checked it out. The quiet pulse of readers making their next pick.” Honest, I can’t tell you how much this pleases me – aside from anything else this shows that people are still reading and still using libraries, which in a weird way is the nicest thing of all. Can we think about a way of doing something similar for a wider selection of institutions? It feels like this is useful and insightful in ways that could be…good?
- AirLab: One the one hand, I really like the design of this and think it’s just a clever and cool looking THING; on the other, there’s something undeniably-dystopian about a gadget being flogged for $230 which is designed to tell you exactly how much the air quality wherever you are sucks, and in what specific ways, all via a slightly-cutesy 8-bit-style display interface featuring a CUTE TAMAGOTCHI PROFESSOR-type character. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of being told “No Matt, today is an INDOORS WITH A MASK day!” by a pixellated avatar of a scientist on my homebrew air safety monitor doesn’t strike me as an example of a GREAT future.
- Multiplayer Mondrian: A giant canvas, divided up by vertical and horizontal lines, on which you, and anyone else who happens to be browsing the site at the same time as you, can click various bits and cycle through various colours and effectively create a sort of gigantic, collaborative, ever-shifting knock-off Mondrian. My main takeaway from this is that it turns out Piet really knew what he was doing because attempting to make anything like this that looks halfway coherent via ‘the wisdom of crowds’ is seemingly fcuking impossible – /r/ThePlace this is not (yet).
- War Games Title Fonts: Do you remember the film War Games? LOL YOU ARE OLD AND WILL DIE SOON! But also, here! Have a fontpack (nine, in fact!) created from the in-game title fonts used in the movie! And while we’re here, have these ones based on the terminal text! I hope that makes up for me reminding you of your relatively-imminent demise, sorry.
- Adrian Chills: OH GOD I LOVE THIS. I don’t, I have to confess, in any way ‘get’ the praise and adoration lavished on admittedly-lovable Brummie Adrian Chiles for his Guardian columns, which, if you are not familiar, plough a weary furrow of ‘relatable, confused banality’ and whose headlines are admittedly masterful examples of the sub’s art (I mean, just look at the latest – “Who could deny a hot, tired delivery driver the fruit from their cherry tree?” is literally DESIGNED to get a certain type of poster all frothy) – it strikes me as being of an ilk with ‘No, Greggs and Wetherspoons are GOOD, actually, and my believing so is actually an act of class solidarity’ (this may be unfair, but it is MY TRUTH). That said, I fcuking ADORE this running gag by Steven Sheil which sees him pen regular horror stories in the style of said columns and post them to this Bluesky account. Honestly, these are WONDERFUL, some of them properly chilling, and it’s generally just a masterclass in shortform storytelling and How To Be Scary In <150 Words.
NEXT UP, ENJOY 2.5H OF BEATS AND BASS MIXED BY THE SLIGHTLY-SINISTER-SOUNDING MARTYN!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE GENERAL SENSE OF CREEPING THERMONUCLEAR DREAD TO STOP CREEPING NOW PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.2:
- BBC Shows for Reform Voters: In case you missed it, a story did the rounds earlier this week suggesting that the BBC was set to seek to amend or alter its programming in an attempt to ‘woo Reform voters’ to the channel – absolutely no idea as to the veracity (but it sounds, broadly, exactly like the sort of idiotic thing the BBC might do as a kneejerk reaction to the wider media’s current obsession with MAKING REFORM A SERIOUS THING), but Chris Barker decided to take that idea and run with it, bringing his photoshop skills and wit to bear in a Bluesky thread featuring a VERY good selection of classic BBC shows reimagined for a more right-wing audience. Ok, so your mileage here will depend on a) your ability to remember a decent number of BBC shows; and b) in all likelihood your age; funny as the gag is, I’m not imagining many under-50s are going to raise a smile at ‘FuhrerMouse’ (even I am too young for that one ffs), but in general this is Good, Gentle Internet Humour at its finest.
- Founder vs Funder Games: I’m linking to this in part because it felt VERY strongly like timetravelling back about 15 years, to a time when Silicon Roundabout (IT WAS CALLED TECH CITY FFS WHY DID THAT NAME NEVER CATCH ON) was still maybe going to be a thing, and everyone and their fcuking cousin was STARTING AN APP BUSINESS, and seemingly all you had to do in order for some enterprising VC or other investor to throw money at you was to walk down Curtain Road with a beard and a vague air of confidence, and in part because I have the vague feeling that quite a few of those of you reading this would quite like the opportunity to punch a private equity person (god knows I would, were said punch almost certainly more likely to injure me than them). Founder vs Funder Games is…God, it is SO FCUKING OF A TIME! Basically they are looking for applicants to get involved in a one-day COMPETITIVE EXTRAVAGANZA in which founders will face off against funders in games of chess, football and boxing, with…oh, fcuk knows what the outcome will be, details are sketchy and frankly it might not happen depending on whether enough people show interest, but if you’re ever thought ‘God, yes, I would like to bop someone from A16Z VERY HARD on the nose’ then perhaps this is your chance (otherwise their offices are very Googleable – NB WEB CURIOS IS NOT SUGGESTING ANYONE COMMIT COMMON ASSAULT ON ANY VENTURE CAPITALISTS AND DOES NOT WANT TO ENDORSE SUCH BEHAVIOUR).
- Riffo: Slightly disappointed that the very fun-sounding company name – Riffo! So hard not to say it without feeling vaguely-upbeat! – is in fact masking something…quite dull, but depending on your line of work-slash-degree of personal OCD, you migh find this useful. Basically Riffo LEVERAGES AI (sorry) to automatically rename and tidy all your files in smart, logical fashion. Which, you know, is boring but probably A Good Thing.
- The Values Bridge: Have you exhausted your horoscopes? Have you analysed your rising houses and waxing moons and leading planets? Have you come to the end of Myers-Briggs, with your four-letter personality code inked onto your wrist and all your personal interactions mandated by a relational framework to help facilitate ENTJ to ISFP communication (I hate you)? Do you need SOME NEW B0LLOCK to cling on to in a desperate attempt to feel like a deeper, more significant and more consequential being? Know, then, that I wish you some pretty deep-seated ill – but, also, you might like The Values Bridge, which apparently exists to TELL YOU WHAT YOUR VALUES ARE? You know what? I don’t even know what the fcuking word ‘values’ is meant to fcuking mean in this context, but perhaps this speaks to you in some way – amazingly not only does it want you to analyse YOUR values but it wants you to then get your friends and family to analyse THEIR values and then SEE WHERE THE GAPS ARE and, honestly, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? My favourite bit, though, is the promise that it will also give you an ‘authenticity score’ which “reveals how closely – or not – your life aligns with your values. By measuring the gap between what you value and how much you’re currently expressing it, the Authenticity Score helps you understand how near or far you are from living the life that most genuinely reflects who you are.” HOW DOES IT KNOW HOW I AM LIVING MY LIFE? Honestly, everything about this makes me want to scream slightly – also, just to give you an idea, I did actually try and complete the initial survey just to see what the user journey was like but was physically unable to answer the questions because, honestly, I simply do not really understand them. Erm. Am I…an empty shell? Having briefly reread this entry, I fear there’s a small possibility I might be.
- Pet Names: I’ve featured Amy Baio’s small boardgames in Curios before – this is her latest which she put up on Kickstarter this week and which hit its funding target in just a few days, and which you’re therefore guaranteed to get if you pledge the cash. This is a VERY cute, very fun little idea that I think would be perfect for young families (or particular groups of admittedly-slightly-twee friends – it’s ok, twee people, you are safe here) – it’s basically a card game that asks players to make up pet names for other players, and it comes with a vaguely-furry-coded little bag/satchel-type-thing to keep the cards in, which I can imagine Certain Types Of People squeeing over to an almost-uncomfortable degree.
- Mapping the X-Minute City: I love this mapping project, brought to my attention by Giuseppe, which in its prototypical version offers users a map of Athens which lets them explore individual neighbourhoods to see the extent to which each conforms to the ‘15 Minute City’ ideal (WEB CURIOS IS SPONSORED BY WEF, GEORGE SOROS AND THE WOKE DEEP STATE, etc etc) – it takes a bunch of different datasources and layers them over the map to let you get a quick and easy view of access to amenities, public transport, green spaces and the like, giving you the opportunity to see exactly what is and isn’t accessible at a very specific, very local, very granular level. Per the blurb, “Is your city an X-minute city?? Unveiling Access inequities within the X-minute city paradigm. What places can you access within a short walk? Are parks just around the corner but grocery stores out of reach? And are the everyday essentials equitably accessible across your city? This is what the interactive CThood seeks to highlight. Utilizes detailed location and pedestrian network data from open sources to estimate which destinations—and how many—are reachable within a short walk across the city. Provides a clear, intuitive view of how 5- and 15-minute walking environments are shaped by the street network and the spatial distribution of essential services. Reveals local access inequities under the X-minute framework by showing (a) the number of accessible destinations by type and (b) the areas that meet selected accessibility criteria.” WONDERFUL, and should be something that local government looks at and thinks ‘yes, we can and should do something like this’ (but won’t, out of fear that some swivel-eyed lunatic will think it has something to do with chemtrails, because that is apparently the world we now live in chiz chiz).
- PLOP: A READER (or at least someone who found Curios and thought ‘this pr1ck writes about any old sh1t, let’s give him a go’) WRITES! Says Daniel Foster, “PLOP is an idea I have for a tiny, internationally-published print poetry leaflet. I dunno if it’ll work, but I’m trying!” Well Daniel, I am happy to tell people it exists – Daniel’s currently seeking both poetry submissions and people to possibly distribute said magazine by hosting it in their shops, cafes, etc, and you can learn more about both aspects on the website. I will say though, Dan (can I call you Dan? I should probably stick with ‘Daniel’, shouldn’t I? Sorry Daniel), that I might rethink the name, because whilst I am sure it has deep, personal resonance for you, there is at its heart something fundamentally very, very fecal-sounding about ‘Plop’ which I am going to gently suggest might act as some small hindrance to its garnering widespread attention. Then again, I am a fcuking moron who is mostly wrong about everything and so you might want to ignore me entirely. Anyway, PLOP!
- The Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers Archive: Per the blurb, “The Cornell Hip Hop Collection features more than 500 party and event flyers ca. 1977-1984. This is the largest known institutional collection of these scarce flyers, which have become increasingly valued for the details they provide about early Hip Hop culture. Created entirely by hand, well before widespread use of design software, these flyers preserve raw data from the days when Hip Hop was primarily a live, performance-based culture in the Bronx. They contain information about early Hip Hop groups, individual MCs and DJs, promoters, venues, dress codes, admission prices, shout outs and more. Celebrated designers, such as Buddy Esquire (The Flyer King) and Phase 2, made these flyers using magazine cutouts, original photographs, drawings, and dry-transfer letters.” THIS IS WONDERFUL, and is SUCH a great font of inspiration for anyone who really wants to nail ‘handmade flyers from the 80s’ as an aesthetic (what? That might be EXACTLY what one of you wants to do, how the fcuk am I meant to know?).
- IceSpy: On the one hand, Web Curios is generally of the opinion that the modern surveillance panopticon is A Bad Thing, and that, in general, attempting to use photos of strangers to find out personal information about them is also A Bad Thing; on the other, this service which lets you upload a photo of anyone you like and tries to match it to a database of known ICE employees in the US feels like a suitable fcuk you to the cnuts currently colluding with a programme of mass deportation of immigrants, so…well, you can be your own moral guide here. For the curious, it works as follows: “First we downloaded hundreds of ICE employee photos from LinkedIn. Then we processed them using local face recognition technology to create face descriptors. When you take a photo we analyze it locally in your browser and find the most similar-looking employee. This app is designed to highlight and embarrass the organization committing atrocities against refugees and immigrants to the United States.” Oddly enough I just tried it on a photo of myself and it matched me with an ICE officer in DC, also called Matthew – PLEASE NOTE I AM NOT IN FACT AN AGENT OF THE US STATE APPARATUS AND AM NOT INVOLVED IN ANY DEPORTATIONS OR SIMILAR, PLEASE DO NOT DO A RIOT AT ME.
- The Hello Archive: A webpage featuring a small selection of videclips demonstrating two Korean (I think) people saying ‘hello’ in various different non-verbal ways. You may, after watching this, want to adopt one or two of these for your own personal use; may I personally recommend the ‘lunge hello’ as a pleasingly-alpha-seeming way of greeting a peer? If nothing else this feels like something nicely-baffling you could introduce to the workplace with a favourite colleague, just to ‘surprise and delight’ (lol) everyone else in the office.
- Let’s Hold Hands: OH I LOVE THIS! Creating small moments of connection with someone somewhere in the world, Let’s Hold Hands is a small website which lets you do just that – clicking the link will take you to the site, which will either match you with another user currently online, or invite you to share the link to either social media or via another medium of your choosing; when someone else is on the webpage with you, you can press a button to reach across the digital divide and HOLD THEIR (virtual) HAND! Both participants have to be pressing the button, creating a tiny shared experience in that moment which, honestly, is SUCH a beautiful little idea. Click the link, and know that it is possible that you are holding hands with another member of the WEB CURIOS FAN COMMUNITY (lol there is no such community, you are all lonely islands in my digital stream), possibly one which, should you both sign up to Browser Dating, you may one day end up in love with! Come on you fcuks, I WANT YOU TO FIND LOVE.
- Slidecheck: When I have to do presentations now I always make sure that the ‘who the fcuk is this cnut?’ section uptop includes a line about how fcuking terrible I am at PowerPoint, which I like to think obviates me of the need to make any effort whatsoever to make the slides look nice. Should you be less lax about the quality of your work, though (but…why?), you might enjoy this service – which, yes, fine, is AI-enabled, but which could also be GENUINELY USEFUL. Feed it a PPT and it will CORRECT THE ERRORS – make all the fonts consistent, catches typos and grammatical errors and duplications, and basically does all the stuff that your “In-House Pitch Timeline” says you should have already completed at T-3 days but which we all know ALWAYS gets done by a harried team member on the laptop on the way to the pitch.
- 31 Unmarked Games: Ok, so you need to pay $5 for this but it is SO WORTH IT, I promise. I don’t want to give you details of the games in question, but the description is both lovely and a perfect evocation of the feel of the bundle: “When I was young, my dad had this huge plastic case full of music on cassette tapes. Our neighbour gave us what felt like a hundred videogames, copied and burned onto plain white disks with names written on them in marker. In 31 unmarked games, you’ll receive 31 unmarked cassette tapes in a little digital mailbox. Some contain short experiences: playable practical jokes, maybe. Some are little finishable arcade games or platformers. A few of the thirty-one are confounding puzzle-boxes that might even last you an hour or two each. It’s my hope that these games capture a little bit of the feeling of getting a bunch of unmarked games from a stranger.” I really, really like this, not least because of the ‘box full of random tapes’ conceit which I think is a really nice wrapper for the collection.
- Silly Little Codes: ANOTHER EMAIL FROM SOMEONE OUT THERE OFFERING ME A SMALL MOMENT OF HUMAN CONNECTION AMIDST ALL THE LONELY CLICKING! “We made a silly little thing that you might like – it’s a daily rebus puzzle game called Silly Little Codes. A rebus puzzle, though it might sound niche and mysterious, is one of those picture puzzle word representation things. We’ve made hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of original puzzles – there’s no AI up in here. We’re great for the people that are too dumb for Minute Cryptic (us), and easily bored with Wordle/any any of the hundreds of ___le variations (also us).Take a look, poke around, make yourself comfortable. There’s a new puzzle daily at midnight so if you hate the puzzle today just try again tomorrow, or email us and we’ll send you a bunch. We’re American so occasionally we use American English answers – sorry about that. We’re good Americans not bad Americans, though – sorry about all that too.” I really like this – the whole site is full of cute games, actually – even if my brain doesn’t quite work in the optimal way for me to always (ok, mostly-if-ever) get the solutions to the day’s puzzle. Still, a nice potential addition to the morning rotation of ‘things to procrastinate with before I push my face back into the horror once again.”
- Sheepgate: ANOTHER reader submission! Truly, I am blessed (seriously, thankyou so much for emailing me, it briefly gives me the illusion that someone out there cares) – Raoul Duke sent this across, and it’s basically ‘Defender, except you’re piloting a flying cow’, and it is FUN, in a pleasingly-retro, vaguely-Jeff-Minter-coded kind of way.
- Grubtown Cafe: Our final game of the week is this quite spectacularly-good effort in which you basically have to match breakfast items on a plate while listening to a pleasing set of lofi beats. Honestly, I can’t tell you how satisfying this is, and how so many bits of it just WORK – from the satisfaction of reaching The Mug Phase (this will make sense eventually, I promise), to the physics, to the really good soundtrack, this is phenomenally addictive and might well dominate the end of the working day.
By Izzy Paige
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- City Milk: Not, in fact, a Tumblr! Still, though, this is a great collection of, er, Japanese milk bottle designs, via the world’s most personable stationery shop Present & Correct.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The House Appreciation Society: This is slightly-odd, but, I think, broadly-benign – this Insta feed exists to celebrate houses that people have walked past and thought, “wow, what a nice house!” – if you see a nice house, snap it and share the photo with this account and it will post it as part of its seeming mission to er, highlight nice houses. I don’t *think* there’s any secret attempt to use this to eventually rob the properties in question or anything like that, so I feel like I can recommend this almost-unreservedly.
- Ads of San Francisco: This account shares images of, er, ads seen in San Francisco – you may not think you care (and, in fairness, you may be right!), but I think there’s a vague sort of ‘leading edge of the future’ quality to this; it seems not-unreasonable to assume that, given the fact that we seemingly continue to exist entirely downstream of technology, stuff you see in these ads is likely to act as a reasonable indicator of certain directions of travel. Will those directions be ones we will approve of? Will we enjoy the journey? Do you even need to ask these questions any more? In particular there’s one on there with the strapline “We teach AI to think, reason and code – so you don’t have to!” which, well, seemed a BIT on the nose.
- Samantha Rayne Stories: Who is Samantha Rayne? Well, it’s important to stress from the outset that ‘she’ isn’t real – she is instead an AI-generated ‘travel influencer’ whose feed consists of photos of ‘her’, dressed in Lara Croft-adjacent outfits in a variety of different locations, always on some sort of INTREPID JOURNEY. What’s notable about Samantha that might make someone want to follow the totally made-up non-travels of a totally made-up non-person? Two clues: 1) the account used to be called ‘Samantha Teen AI’; and b) Samantha is going to have some SIGNIFICANT lower-back issues in later life if ‘her’ bust size and distinct lack of seeming supportive underwear is anything to go by. Yes, that’s right, it’s another Insta account attempting to make bank from the seemingly-inexhaustible well of HORNY-BUT-VERY-DUMB guys who can’t seem to tell that ‘she’ is not, in fact, a real girl and flock to wish her good morning and compliment her ‘photos’ and, look, I don’t mean to catastrophise about this stuff but sh1t like this gives me BAD VIBES about the general future health of the species.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Keir Starmer Profile: Tom McTague in the New Statesman gets good access to the PM in what is probably the best profile of the man I’ve yet read – it’s a *bit* self-indulgent in places and I might have wanted less McTague (yes, I know, but this is MY newsletter and no fcuker is paying me, so you can live with the editorial self-indulgence in my case), but this does a good job of painting Starmer as a ‘decent-but-dull’ man unable to deal with the fact that there is indeed a gaping ideological hole at the heart of the current Labour project – one which, if you ask me (I know you don’t ask me, but, per the previous parenthetical intervention, tough) is born of the fact that the party is completely unwilling to countenance the possibility that maybe, just maybe, part of the problem might just have been the utter dominance enjoyed by capital and private equity over so much of life and that it’s only by maybe doing something to address that that it might be possible to also shift the broader conversation in a way that is meaningful, and that the Labour government’s seeming inability to detach itself from the teat of BUSINESS AND MONEY is possibly one of the signal reasons why nothing seems to be getting materially better and why everyone seems miserable – because WE KNOW NOW THAT THESE COMPANIES AND THESE FINANCIAL STRUCTURES DO NOT IN FACT WORK IN SERVICE OF THE SORTS OF GOODS WHICH THE STATE IS MANDATED TO PROVIDE, AND IN FACT OFTEN WORK IN WAYS WHICH ARE DIRECTLY ANTITHETICAL TO SAID GOODS. Ahem. Anyway, this is interesting and worth reading if you’ve any interest in who’s running the UK right now (the PE cnuts and Farage and some shadowy money, obvs!).
- What Is Centrism?: This is a US piece and as such is US-centric, but the general points it makes about ‘centrism’ as a concept feel applicable on both sides of the Atlantic, and this piece feels in some way like a decent companion to some of the issues (not) raised by the Starmer interview. “Unlike most political philosophies, centrism defines itself in relation to other political philosophies. The right stands for something, and the left stands for something, but the centrists stand for “in between those things.” This fact alone accounts for the centrists’ messaging problems, and their solution. The problem is: How do you get people to support a philosophy that doesn’t inherently stand for anything? Their solution is: Attack the other political philosophies as too extreme, leaving centrism by process of elimination. And because this is a contest for control of the Democratic Party, that means, in practice, “attack the left.”…The right wants to change the existing power structure to give more power to its chosen groups. The left wants to change the existing power structure to give more power to everyone, including the marginalized, who are by definition unpopular. The centrists? In the most generous reading, their project asks, “How much good can we do without changing the existing power structure at all?” Turns out the answer is, “Not much.” But there’s plenty of money to be had in pretending to try.”
- Being A Paid-For Troll On X: A New York Times piece about Dominick McGee whose job is ‘being a cnut on Twitter in the hope of some CREATOR PENNIES’ – this is a genuinely dispiriting profile, both in terms of the general vacuity and amorality of its subject and the systems that we have built (sorry, ALLOWED to be built by corporations) which actively incentivise and reward the propagation of messages, views and falsehoods deliberately designed to inflame and enrage. The big GOTCHA here, as far as the piece seems to be concerned, is that the guy isn’t even making big money – but, well, that doesn’t strike me as the point here so much as that he is being tempted to put this stuff online in the HOPE of making big money, and that incentive is enough to add another tap to the millions already adding to the sewerage bemerding our informational water table every single fcuking day, and for every McGee there will be hundreds, thousands of people similarly tempted by the promise of PENNIES FOR POSTS, all spewing out varying strains of moronic, offensive, untrue rubbish in the hope of tweaking the algo and making bank. Because, as we are increasingly seeing, stuff like this has real-world consequences.
- Ballymena: In an ugly echo of last Summer’s riots in England, Northern Ireland this week saw several nights of violence in response to the arrest of two young Romanian men on sexual assault charges; anyone paying any attention to social media about NI over the past few years will know that, in common with pretty much any area where there’s a degree of poverty and deprivation, one of the prevailing narratives promoted by Certain Actors Online has been to suggest that the poor quality of life for residents is directly correlated to immigration, and that the immigrants in question are guilty of a selection of crimes including ‘not wanting to assimilate’. Who’s been peddling this stuff? Why, it’s a selection of accounts on X with blue ticks, which EARN MONEY FOR GETTING ENGAGEMENT. You don’t know where they’re posting from, you don’t know who’s behind them, but you DO know that someone somewhere is getting a monthly cheque for literally fomenting racial hatred. Does that feel…does that feel good? Oh, and semi-related – you know how last year Facebook was instrumental in the organisation of the riots and associated violence against immigrants and asylum seekers? Good to see they’ve fixed all that and it’s not currently being used in exactly the same w…oh.
- The Class of 2025: Apologies, more US stuff – but, again, I think that this probably tracks pretty well across the wider world, even if not exactly 1:1. This is a post about the results of an ‘informal survey’ of over 50 college and high school graduates – obviously the tiny sample size makes this very much anecdata, but in general I think you can treat this as broadly-representative of a certain mental direction of travel if nothing else. You can imagine the general tone – fear of the future, the economy, The Machine and the like – tracks widely beyond the US, and I would be amazed if a variant on this para didn’t feel applicable to wherever you may be, with one or two regionally-appropriate tweaks: “There are several contradictions among this cohort that reveal deeper truths. The most digitally native generation craves in-person community. The first class to study alongside AI worries about their career prospects as a result. The group that witnessed historic campus unrest largely chose personal security over activism. Their housing decisions are particularly telling. They’re not following dreams to expensive coastal cities, they’re following affordable rent and existing support networks. Moving home represents strategy, not failure: build savings, maintain family connections, plan the next move carefully. This generation isn’t abandoning the American Dream, but they’re definitely redefining it from previous generations. A consistent paycheck and meaningful work trumps corner offices and titles. Mental health takes priority over grinding toward burnout.”
- Sam Altman on AI: I know this man is clever. I know he must be. And yet, every time I read something he has (ostensibly) written I am STAGGERED by the sheer banality of the thinking and the complete lack of any sort of serious engagement with the impact of what he is foisting on the world. Honestly, it’s worth reading this just to see how EMPTY it is – I mean, honestly, THIS is the thinker on whose shoulders we are being carried towards the burning horror of the next 2-3 decades? “Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other. People have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don’t care very much about machines.” Jesus fcuking wept.
- The LLM Cul-De-Sac Question: You may have seen a bunch of headlines this week about LLM reasoning collapse – this is Gary Marcus talking about what that practically means, and his explanation of the Apple paper in question is interesting and helpfully-clear. Fwiw I am generally aligned with this broad viewpoint – that LLMs have necessary inherent limits and that we are going to need a different approach to get anywhere near Proper Intelligence, but, equally, what the fcuk do I know (rhetorical)?
- The Gap Through Which We Praise The Machine: I really enjoyed this essay, although it deals specifically with AI as it relates to coding rather than anything else; still, the principles it describes maintain regardless of usecase, I think. This is basically all about the amount of uncredited human labour and expertise that goes into Making The Machine Do What You Need It To, specifically “[the] gap between “what we are told the AI can do” and “what it actually does out of the box” is significant…what is imagined is powerful agents who replace engineers (at least junior ones), make everyone more productive, and that will be a total game changer. LLMs are artifacts. The scaffolding we put in place to control them are how we try to transform the artifacts into tools; the learning we do to get better at prompting and interacting with the LLMs is part of how they transform us. If what we have to do to be productive with LLMs is to add a lot of scaffolding and invest effort to gain important but poorly defined skills, we should be able to assume that what we’re sold and what we get are rather different things.” SEMI-RELATED BONUS PIECE: AI Is Stone Soup, which I also very much enjoyed as an analogy but also as an essay in its own right, even if I think it’s unnecessarily mean about Ethan Mollick.
- Writing With The Machine: This is an EXCELLENT essay about the current state of Writing With The Machine – what LLMs can do, what they can’t do, and how that feels as someone who still tries to exchange words for actual monies. Madeleine Brettingham writes about her experiences of trying to get AI to RITE GUD, her (mostly) failures, and the occasional flashes of near-success that are causing her pause. I agree with basically everything she says here, particularly the stuff about it being unable to replicate flashes of brilliance…yet.
- Why Using AI In The Welfare State Is Maybe Not Good: This is long, but REALLY interesting, particularly if you’re wonkily interested in the application of AI in the public sector, or if you’re maybe a *tiny* bit concerned about what some of the potential side-effects of said application might end up being. This is the story of how the introduction of AI-assisted welfare assessments by the city of Amsterdam was abandoned, and why (discriminatory, basically, though the whole thing is a bit more complicated than that), and what things like this mean both for local government but also for the wider conversation about the desirability of more autonomy and IT in decisions that materially affect the living conditions and day-to-day lives of ordinary people, as well as the way in which they are ‘seen’ by the state.
- Anti-ICE Tech in LA: Rest of World takes a look at some of the apps being used by people on the ground in LA and elsewhere in the US to stay one step ahead of the ICE deportation machine, and how grassroots community assistance is being augmented by modern means: “Hack Latino is an artificial intelligence-powered app for Latinos in the U.S., made by the Georgia-based entrepreneur Adrian Lozano Jr. It offers restaurant suggestions and consular information to more than 30,000 users, along with a key feature to keep them safe: a map of ICE sightings, launched in April. It is one of a slew of mobile platforms created by nonprofit organizations, independent developers, and foreign governments, which have cropped up amid a surge in immigration raids in the U.S. The Donald Trump administration has vowed to enact mass deportations from the U.S., home to some 13.7 million undocumented individuals. The digital tools provide services such as “Know Your Rights” guides, legal information, and emergency resources to help the community prepare for potential encounters with immigration authorities. Apps such as Hack Latino or digital tools like Stop ICE Alerts function much like the community patrols of the 1990s, when neighbors and activists in neighborhoods with a large Hispanic presence would warn others about the arrival of authorities — except these apps have the added benefit of real-time technology.”
- The Value of Proportionate Fines: There is a very specific type of person I can imagine enjoying this article – in my head they also have strong opinions about transport networks and possibly one very specific area of fiscal policy, and they DEFINITELY have a Substack (and they call it ‘a Substack’), and, well, if that describes you then you will LOVE this slightly-wonky but surprisingly-interesting look at which it would make LOADS more sense if fines scaled according to the fine-ee’s ability to pay said fine.
- Immersive Quarries: SUCH an interesting piece by Marie Foulston about why all these ‘Immersive Exhibitions’ look and feel the same, and why they all take place in very specific places with a very specific sort of design, and look, and feel – and discovers that it’s all because of the fact that the first one of these was fitted out in an old quarry, and as such the form function of this sort of thing was determined by the physical space in which it was originally conceived, and that physicality has in turn informed the way in which these things are now imagined and presented worldwide. Honestly, I love stuff like this, a properly-interesting look at questions of chicken and egg when it comes to any sort of design work, and the relationship between necessity and invention.
- A Review of the Switch 2 Welcome Tour: Weirdly I don’t think I have ever played a Switch – none of my mate’s kids are particularly videogamey, and I was never a Nintendo person growing up and so have no nostalgic tie to the fcuking plumber and the rest of the canon – but I adored this writeup of the Switch 2’s ‘Welcome Tour’ pseudo-game, which isn’t so much a ‘review’ as it is a discursive look at Nintendo’s approach to design and creativity, and a really smart way of discerning the company’s worldview from a single piece of tech/software.
- The 1,000 Year History of the Strap-On: I did not, before this week, know that the first recorded reference to a strap-on came in the early 11thC and was written by a bishop – lo! “Have you done what certain women are accustomed to do, that is, to make some sort of device or implement in the shape of the male member, of the size to match your desire, and you have fastened it to the area of your genitals or those of another with some form of fastenings and you have fornicated with other women or others have done with a similar instrument or another sort with you?” – but now I do; thanks to Web Curios, you too can now share this EXCITING KNOWLEDGE, and much more strap-on-related lore besides, with family, friends, colleagues or lovers! You’re welcome!
- How I Accidentally Inspired A Major Chinese Film: A great story, this – years ago, journalist Christopher Beam wrote a piece about ‘a ragtag group of Chinese men who’d started an American football team in the southwestern city of Chongqing’ – that piece was optioned for film in America but, after several years of stalled development, that seemed to have gone dark. And then another film appeared, telling seemingly the EXACT same story but produced by a Chinese film company – so Beam decided to find out how the story had unfolded. This is super-interesting, both from the point of view of the byzantine process of attempting to make a film and from its insights into both the Chinese film industry, its relationship with Hollywood (and vice-versa), and the film itself – according to my friend Alex who Knows China, it also does a very good job of describing what Chinese films are like to watch, so kudos all round basically.
- Sushi in Pakistan: I absolutely adored this piece on the history of sushi in Pakistan in Vittles – it might be paywalled, though, so in case you can’t access it and don’t want to stump up for a sub there’s an edited version in the Guardian which you can read for free (but the original is better, honestly).
- Football for the KSI Generation: Perennial Curios favourite Clive Martin writes in the New Statesman about his visit to watch a round of the Ballers League, one of the swathe of attempts to reinvent football for the YouTube kids – coincidentally I tried to watch some of this the other week and FCUKING HELL it was Not Good Entertainment, but then again I am OLD. This is, per all Martin’s stuff, very funny whilst also making you feel slightly like you’ve been shaken up in a portaloo full of Prime.
- An Evening With Roy Chubby Brown: I have to say, in the 2-3 months that I’ve become aware of the existence of The Dispatch it has published some cracking pieces of writing – this one, in which editor Jacob Furedi ventures to Blackpool to witness a performance by famously ‘blue’ (also massively fcuking racist) comedian Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, to meet the people still turning out to hear him make jokes about the…no, actually, can’t bring myself to type that, you can just read the piece yourself and find out, and to generally just take the temperature at the end of the pier in 2025. If you’re a connoisseur of a particular type of British ‘culture’ then you will absolutely adore this.
- Wake, Scroll, Obey: This is written by someone who calls themselves ‘Noisy Ghost’ – I can’t recall how I found their newsletter, but I very much enjoyed this freewheeling account of their relationship with tech, the surveillance economy and the way in which this is all locked in now in a way which we possibly haven’t quite realised yet.
- W4nking: Not, technically, the title, but I’m running late and, well, it’s descriptive! This is an excerpt from a book whose author I have seen EVERYWHERE in the past few weeks, doubtless because they are hot and have written a book all about sex (even if, ostensibly, it’s about…not having sex). This is an extract from The Dry Season” by Melissa Febos, in which the former sex worker talks about taking time off from fcuking and WHAT SHE LEARNED ABOUT HERSELF – honestly, I have less-than-zero interest in reading this memoir, but I very much enjoyed this extract and the tone it strikes, halfway between ‘bored lover on day three of a bedroom binge’ and ‘curious professor’. Can I just say, though, that I think sharing a dildo with your flatmate is WEIRD?
- If/Them: This is the opening couple of paragraphs. It tells you the two stories that this piece is about – you decide if you want to read the rest (but I think you ought to): “Eleven months after my father chose to kill himself, I sat with another man who, in some ways, had also chosen to die. “I don’t want to get off death row,” the man said, the number on his prison uniform graying down his pant leg. The man was not named Alan, but that is what I will call him. Alan was one of my clients in my job as an investigator helping people who had been sentenced to death with their legal appeals. He wore heavy boots and a clean white t-shirt and a watch with a broken face. He was angry with me.”
- Jeremy Spoke In Class Today: Finally this week, a meditation on the 90s and gun violence and hope and hopelessness and that one Pearl Jam song, this is absolutely beautiful and made me cry a little bit, which may not recommend it to you but.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
