On Saturday night I went to the pub for my friend Nick’s birthday, and happened to meet a group of football fans who supported Swindon Town FC, the team of the town where I grew up (but, to be clear, I WAS NOT BORN THERE). When asked why they supported the team, despite not being from there or having any connection to the place, they replied that they were all from the South, and that they just wanted a team to support that was a) near enough to London to allow them to go to home games cheaply and easily; and b) amusingly sh1t; they then asked me if I did in fact grow up there, and, when I replied in the affirmative, dropped into a genuinely serious register as one of them solemnly said to me, with a look of real pity in his eyes, ‘I am so, so sorry mate’.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that it’s thanks to those cnuts that I’ve had a horrible chest infection all week, so fcuk them and fcuk Swindon too, the place and the football team. They’re right, it *is* a sh1thole.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can rest assured that I wiped all the phlegm off this before hitting ‘publish’.

By Min Ding (most images this week from TIH, for which thanks!)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH MUSIC BY THE SINISTERLY-NAMED ‘MARK OF SATAN’ WHICH IS, I PROMISE, SIGNIFICANTLY LESS EVIL THAN THE NAME MIGHT MAKE YOU THINK AND IS IN FACT SOME RATHER GOOD BEATS WITH A SORT OF GRAND GUIGNOL HAMMER HORROR-STYLE VIBE, MADE BY A MAN I MET IN A PUB LAST WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH WAS THRILLED THAT ORBITAL WON THE BOOKER AND WOULD LIKE TO ADD ITS SMALL RECOMMENDATION TO THE CHORUS BECAUSE IT IS A GORGEOUS PIECE OF WRITING AND I SAY THAT AS SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS MOSTLY DEAD INSIDE, PT.1:  

By Moonassi

OUR NEXT MIX IS A SET BY SHARNIE AND HANNA ON RINSEFM AND IT IS AN HOUR OF PLEASINGLY-INTENSE BEATS AND BREAKS WHICH FEELS VERY LATE-2024! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS THRILLED THAT ORBITAL WON THE BOOKER AND WOULD LIKE TO ADD ITS SMALL RECOMMENDATION TO THE CHORUS BECAUSE IT IS A GORGEOUS PIECE OF WRITING AND I SAY THAT AS SOMEONE WHO REALLY IS MOSTLY DEAD INSIDE, PT.2:  

• The Manchester Digital Music Archive: On the one hand, it’s true that the tedious music-based BRAND IDENTITY that Manchester’s had wrapped around it by a couple of successive generations of entrepreneurs and grifters is…annoying, frankly (YES WE KNOW ABOUT BAGGY AND THE SALFORD BOYS CLUB CAN YOU FCUK OFF NOW PLEASE?); on the other, it’s also true that the city has a pretty incredible place in the UK’s musical pantheon and has been responsible for some genuinely influential genres and people and places over the past 50-odd years (longer, I know). The Manchester Digital Music Archive “is an online community archive established in 2003 to celebrate Greater Manchester music and its social history. We are a crowd-sourced archive, a place for people all over the world to share Manchester music ephemera and memories, be they fans, musicians or involved with the music industry itself.” What this means in practice is that you can browse an INSANE list of artists associated with the city and see whatever’s in the archive associated with them – from flyers from A Guy Called Gerald’s earliest club appearances to a whole bunch of zine reviews of the late, lamented Vibrant Thigh (no, me neither). This is SO INTERESTING.
• Save Wisdom: One of the things you learn as you age is that you will at some point or another really, really regret not asking the old people in your life more about said life while they are still in a position to respond with anything other than emphysemic wheezing or a whispered ‘switzerland…now…please’. Save Wisdom is a project designed to address this, offering 1000 questions which can be used as a guide or template for conversations with people whose memories you want to preserve or archive – all of these are intended to help draw out information about a person, their wants and desires and their memories, and, honestly, if I were a) the sort of person who was sentimental enough to start a memorialisation project for an elderly relative; or b) had any relatives left to memorialise, I would be all over this.
• VeloPlanner: ARE YOU A LYCRA DAD? Not a sex thing, honest – I am talking about lycra in the cycling context. Should you be one of the baffling number of men (sorry, this feels horribly sexist – I am of course aware that cycling is very much a gender-neutral pursuit, it’s just that I can’t help but associate it with ‘men in their 30s and 40s who have realised it’s a legitimate excuse to spend literally hours away from your family and maybe fit in two pints’)  who think ‘getting on a bike and pedalling in the cold and wet and rain’ is a fun way of spending time, you might find this website super-useful – VeloPlanner is basically an all-in-one repository of all of the world’s cycling routes, allowing you to do useful things like plot a route from London to Shenzen (I am speculating here, no idea if that is at all possible). Why not spend the rest of the day imagining the sort of road trip and real ale tour that you and the Bike Lads could go on if you hadn’t instead chosen to procreate?
• Animations: Geometric, maths-y (TECHNICAL!) animations by Etienne Jacob (whose work I featured here back in 2019 via Twitter – this links to his website, so I am allowing myself the revisit DO NOT JUDGE ME), sent to me by my friend Tom who wrote ‘these make my ganglia feel nice’ and, while that may make my friend Tom sound like some sort of intensely-weird brain pervert, you will also know EXACTLY what I mean when you look at these. It’s like some sort of weird, visual-only ASMR, seriously.
• Particle: Another week, another app seeking to DISRUPT NEWS CONSUMPTION – going to be honest, this doesn’t feel like a great time to be launching such a service given that the reaction of a not-insignificant portion of the world to last week’s news is likely to be ‘yeah, not really going to look at the news for a while thanks’, but, well, good luck nonetheless! Particle’s gimmick is that it aggregates different sources into topic-based feeds for a wide-ranging overview of opinions and perspectives on any issue, and that it offers varying degrees of AI summarisation/interpretation to give you quick overviews of a given question alongside AI-enabled interrogation of a concept, but, well, neither of those seem like enough of a hook to bother with this, if I’m honest (but I say that as someone who has realised this week that their relationship with information is, on some pretty deep level, utterly, utterly broken, and as such probably isn’t worth listening to). Still, if you’re on Apple and want another, differently-shaped window into the horror that is everything then, well, here!
• The St John Prints: APOLOGIES THIS LINK TAKES YOU TO THINGS THAT COST ACTUAL MONEY. Ahem. St John, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is a very famous restaurant in Farringdon, London – I’ve featured writing about it before lots of times in Curios, and it holds a special place in my heart because not only is it a fcuking amazing place to eat but also because I worked literally next door to it for a couple of years, and going down to the bakery every morning to buy doughnuts for me and the woman I was having an affair with at the time was a moment of genuine daily joy. Photographer Jason Lowe took the photographs that accompanied the restaurant’s 30th anniversary cookbooks, and is now making prints of those photos available for sale on his website and these are AMAZING. Seriously, whether or not you have personal history with the restaurant these are some top-quality photos of food, cookery, meat fish and viscera (quite a lot of viscera), and they would make SUPERB gifts for someone.
• The Best Inventions of 2024: As is now seemingly tradition, Time Magazine has once again published its rundown of what it considers to be the best inventions or innovations of the past 12 months –  I confess to feeling a bit ‘meh’ about quite a few of these this year, perhaps because, in contrast to previous selections, these seem a bit more ‘product’-y rather than ‘general innovation-y’, but, as in previous years, it’s worth having a look through the list as there will be at least a couple of entries which are new to you and which might elicit a spark of inspiration as to how you might take them in different directions, or which might make you think of the stories they create. This, for example, is sort-of brilliant and heartbreaking at the same time.
• Transit: I know, I know, you *have* a travel app, you like your travel app, you don’t want to change your travel app – and to be honest I haven’t tried this and so I’m only recommending it on spec, but it *sounds* interesting. Transit is basically a ‘wherever you are we will tell you how to navigate the urban transit environment’ service, but it’s ad-free and seems, as far as I can tell, to have a pleasing community layer to it allowing realtime user feedback about how the service is performing to be integrated into the information fed to others. Oh, and there’s something REALLY clever that it launched the other week which uses your phone’s vibration-sensing tech to determine how many stops on the underground you’ve travelled so that you can track your relative map position even without signal which, honestly, is SO CLEVER that I am slightly in awe.
• Stretch Timer: A little timer app for Macs only, but which is, I promise, one of the most innately-satisfying bits of design work you will have seen in ages. I promise you, if you’re the sort of person who regularly wears those annoying little too-small fisherman’s caps and the sort of square-legged, slightly-too-short ‘artist’s trousers’ at work because you have ‘creative’ in your job title (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) then you might have some sort of involuntary pleasure reaction to this. It really is that simple and beautiful and amazing.
• Towns: Do you need or want another community or messaging app? No? What if I told you this one was ON THE BLOCKCHAIN????? Yes, I know, that changes EVERYTHING! This is a new app developed by one of the people who created HouseParty (don’t worry, I didn’t remember that either and had to look it up) and who has received what I presume is an unconscionable amount of money from investors to create another digital product which, I confidently predict, will have exactly the same degree of lasting impact as his previous one. Here’s some explicatory blurb from a recent profile of the product: “Group chats on Towns can be configured in such a way that only people who fulfill certain criteria—who have specific expertise, say—are allowed to post messages, while everyone else watches from the sidelines. In this scenario, Rubin hopes, large group conversations will no longer be polluted with ill-informed takes and scam posts. He believes the ability for someone to prove that they are a real person using blockchain-based credentials, meanwhile, could help to minimize the opportunity for malicious actors to manipulate public discourse with bots.” So, basically, the ‘blockchain secret sauce’ here is ‘everyone participating this has their credentials encoded on the blockchain which then act as a passkey to certain communities depending on said credentials and the community’s own entry/participation requirements’ – which, you know, in theory doesn’t sound too bad, until you start thinking hard about how the fcuk that would work (how these creds get verified, and who by), and you quickly realise that, as with a lot of other blockchain stuff, this only really makes sense if EVERYTHING ELSE IS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN TOO, and, well, lol, no.
• Nudols: Have you ever wondered how one might go about marketing Pot Noodle to an Italian market? WONDER NO MORE! This is a quite astonishing new brand of instant cup noodle, apparently launching now-ish in Italy – there is SO much to ‘love’ here! Let’s start with the name, a BEAUTIFUL phonetic-Italian rendering of the word ‘noodles’ (let’s…let’s gloss over the fact that the rest of the brandname is ‘Banzai’, shall we)! The website homepage features a lovely voxel rendering of a noodle stand, in a design and style SUSPICIOUSLY REMINISCENT of something I featured in Curios about three years ago (I am not suggesting that these people read Curios so much as someone on the design team here has, I think, taken some QUITE HEAVY INSPIRATION from someone else’s work)! The…questionable approach to ‘pan-asian culture’ that sees the product referred to as ‘gnam gnam style’ (‘gnam gnam’ being phonetic Italian vocalisation for ‘the act of happy eating’)! Honestly, there is a LOT going on here – if nothing else, let’s notch this up as another datapoint to prop up my personal ‘maximalist webdesign is back!’ thesis.
• Antique Microscopes: Would you like an online museum collecting examples of antique microscopes throughout history for your enlightenment and delectation? I DON’T KNOW I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE INTERESTED IN I AM NOT FCUKING PSYCHIC. On the offchance, though, that is exactly what this link will take you to. I am charmed by this line from the homepage, mind: “An antique microscope is a work of art as well as science.” EXACTLY.
• Strangers On A Bench: This is such a good idea and it feels a bit like it might take off and become very famous indeed – not sure why, just has a certain VIBE about it (so, remember, WE FOUND THE CONCH). Strangers on a Bench is a podcast project which started a few months ago in which Tom Rosenthal strikes up a conversation with someone he doesn’t know who he finds sitting alone on a park bench- he asks them about them, and their life, and they just have a chat. The listener doesn’t know the person’s name, so these are entirely-anonymous little slices of life, vignettes describing the odd mundanity of everyone’s existence and the ways in which everyone contains multitudes and universes and, honestly, this is the sort of thing that normally makes me want to set fire to a teashop by way of anti-twee rebellion and yet it is SO LOVELY (and I say this as someone who really, really hates podcasts). Honestly, I think this is quite special and I think lots of you will really really like it a lot.
• Videogame Weather ASMR: I confess to not being wholly clear as to what the audience is for this YouTube channel, which features nothing but videos of videogames being played slowly, gently and with a real focus on in-game weather systems. Then again, though, who wouldn’t appreciate, say, an 8-hour-long drive around Los Santos with no shooting, no violence, just the sound of the storm raging outside? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Geography Help: I am slightly astonished by this. You know that game Geoguessr, right, where you get shown a random streetview pic and are tasked with working out where in the world it is? This is a site that’s seemingly been created for the sole purpose of making you better at that game – it includes information about local identifiers for seemingly every country in the world, from ‘what are the road markings like?’ to ‘what colour are the road signs?’ to ‘what special characters might I spot on signage which could give me a clue to the country I am in?’, and this is amazing to me because it’s INSANELY comprehensive and weirdly incredibly sort-of useful for all sorts of different purposes, and it’s all born out of a desire to help people get marginally better at a very silly, very online game, and fcuking hell people are amazing.
• Amstrad: There’s a whole generation of people for whom Alan Sugar is just an irascible TV caricature with some absolute all-time Tweets to his name, but, for those of us with a few more miles on the clock, he’s ALSO the man responsible for some of the worst home computing products of a generation in the shape of Amstrad, briefly (risibly) touted in some corners of the UK (probably corners of Sugar’s house tbh) as ‘Britain’s answer to Microsoft’. Anyway, for reasons we can only speculate at, a new website has appeared celebrating the history and legacy of the Amstrad brand – look, this is only really of interest if you’re old enough to remember this stuff, or if you’re a peculiarly-rigorous scholar of ‘now-defunct electronics brands from decades past’, but I personally got some quite strong nostalgiapangs from these cream plastic monoliths (and some PTSD responses to the fcuking Amstrad mouse, a genuinely evil piece of design with some of the worst driver software ever committed).
• Games To Play While The NYT’s Games People Are On Strike: As I mentioned the other week, the New York Times’ games people are on strike – to keep you occupied while you’re boycotting Wordle (OBVS), they’ve posted up a bunch of other games they’ve made which won’t direct traffic to the NYT and which are also LIGHTLY-SATIRICAL COMMENTS ON LABOUR RELATIONS, lol! In fairness a couple of these are very good and worth your time.
• Nightfall: An EXCELLENT browserpuzzlegame which, you will discover, is actually surprisingly deep and quite massive and which contains many, many hours worth of gameplay should you be willing to lend it the time. This is basically a full, in-browser remake of an old 2002 game called ‘Spybotics’, which, per the era, is all about HACKING NETWORKS and that sort of jazz, and which, if you can look past the slightly-of-its-time cyberpunk styling and writing, is actually a surprisingly-involved series of little puzzles which get knotty reasonably fast. This is a GREAT afternoon-killer, should you desire one.
• Asterogue: A cute little roguelike which gives you three levels for free and which then asks you to pay $5 to get the rest and, honestly, this was so good I paid the price of a cup of coffee to pay more. Good, clean, simple roguelike fun, and 100% worth the price of a London half.
• Shogun Showdown: Our final game this week is this BRILLIANT little (also) roguelike puzzler – kill all the enemies, reach the end of the gauntlet, picking up powerups and bonuses along the way; die, repeatedly, and try again and again. Four different unlockable characters, each of which plays slightly differently, a varied moveset which makes different runs feel genuinely distinct…this is free browsergame GOLD and you will thank me for pointing you at it, I promise (except you won’t, will you? You’ll just click the link and forget me you FCUKING INGRATES).

By Rochelle Voyles

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS DESCRIBED AS ‘A PANAMERICANA TRIP WITH MESCALEROS’ AND, HONESTLY, I CAN’T DO BETTER THAN THAN AND SO WON’T TRY (IT IS ACE)!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Neil Staines: Via Kottke, this is the Insta feed of one Niall Staines who does a variety of different styles of visual art but whose pixel-extension images – basically where you take a point in a picture and extend all the pixels from that point in a line to the edge of the canvas – are really rather wonderful and the main reason why I’m featuring the work.
• Gully Tattoo: One the one hand, this guy works out of Brighton and so if you’re in the UK then there’s the theoretical possibility that you could get his stuff inked on yourself; on the other, his work is INSANELY good and I imagine has a waiting list of YEARS, so good luck. Still, if you want to see some pretty astonishing trompe l’oeil work – the shadowing and depth in this is jaw-dropping, seriously – then click away.
• Amon Silex: Yes, ok, fine, this is another ‘odd AI images’ account, but this person is mining a bit of latent space that feels unfamiliar, far more furry and feathery and Babadoook-horror-style-adjacent to what I’m more used to seeing, and I very much enjoy how basically unsettling everything on this page is. TOO MANY EYES AND KNEES!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Emily Thompson

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

WELL.

I know I say this after every big event, but you really don’t need or want my opinion on the US election and so I will spare you (see, don’t you wish other newsletters were this considerate?).

Oh, ok, fine, apart from two specific, semi-related things.

One, we really, really need to hope that a lot of very successful, very decorated, very well-educated scientists operating at some of the world’s most august institutions and dealing with the very freshest realtime data about the state of our planet are very, very wrong about a lot of things, because it does rather feel like in the next four years we are about to sail gaily right past every single (already risibly lax) climate target we have set ourselves over the past couple of decades.

Two, per the above, we really, really need to hope that the accelerationists are in fact right and we can just sort of tech our way out of this, because it’s clear as fcuking daylight that we’re simply not going to take any of the other steps available to us.

So, er, fingers crossed then!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you may as well take comfort in the links while they last.

By Wes Lang

LET’S START THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH NEARLY THREE HOURS OF TRACKS WHICH SAMPLE THE LATE QUINCY JONES AND WHICH ALSO HAPPEN TO BE SOME EXCELLENT HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO LIVES IN THE UK AND WORKS IN ADVERMARKETINGPR AND WHO HAS FELT THE NEED TO WRITE LONG SCREEDS ABOUT US POLITICS ON LINKEDIN THIS WEEK IN A DESPERATE AND FAILED ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK INTELLIGENT TO FCUK THEMSELVES INTO THE SUN PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.1:  

By Frank Kunert

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS SPECTACULAR SELECTION OF TUNEFUL OBSCURITIES COMPILED FROM THE CRACKLING ARCHIVES OF SADEAGLE’S INCREDIBLE RECORD COLLECTION! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO LIVES IN THE UK AND WORKS IN ADVERMARKETINGPR AND WHO HAS FELT THE NEED TO WRITE LONG SCREEDS ABOUT POLITICS ON LINKEDIN THIS WEEK IN A DESPERATE AND FAILED ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK INTELLIGENT TO FCUK THEMSELVES INTO THE SUN PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.2:  

• Suffrago: Look, let’s get this straight – this is not some ‘let’s organise! The work starts here!!!!!111eleventy’-type resistance sh1t I’m espousing here (lol that I would ever be so motivated or hopeful), but, equally, it’s not inconceivable that some of you in the UK might this week have thought ‘hm, maybe it’s worth engaging with politics beyond the standard electoral cycle this time around’ – to that end, you might find Suffrage interesting, a new platform which is, ambitiously, attempting to basically ‘do digital democracy better’. It’s not intended solely for politics, long-term – the idea, I think (in common with lots of these projects, FCUK ME are they bad at explaining it – seriously guys, if you happen to see this, it is NOT EASY to work out what the everliving fcuk any of this is for!) is that this eventually becomes an issue-agnostic platform for the sharing of views and the agglomeration of complex information around an issue so as to enable better decisionmaking by the polis. In theory there is a LOT in here – the ability to follow policy at a constituency level and discuss/debate your representative’s voting record; simplified explanations of the legislative process and the passage of bills through parliament; condensed information about debates and discussions at national, regional and local level…look, I’m personally…unconvinced that this is ever going to get enough views and traction to be meaningfully useful, but, equally, if everyone had my cynical, negative and defeatist attitude then nothing would ever get done and we’d all be well on our way towards hell in the proverbial handca…what’s that? Eh? Oh. Anyway, still, here’s a website about democracy.
• Noomo Beat: This is interesting – not necessarily in terms of what it does (which, to be clear, is very little – albeit in VERY shiny fashion) but more in terms of what it means about agencies, digital and AI. Noomo Beat is a webproject by digital agency Noomo, which is designed to show off what it can do with AI and fancy graphics and indicate the sort of thing that potential clients might commission – the site shows off an interface for an imagined clothing brand which basically asks a few simple questions of the users and then uses that answers to said questions and a soupcon of generative AI to create a BESPOKE EXPERIENCE for each user – what this in practice means is that you then get shown a (really VERY SHINY, I must stress) selection of clothes (the clothes are seemingly always the same) with a slightly different soundtrack and colourway based on your answers. That’s it! BUT LOOK IT IS INTERACTIVE AND IT HAS AI IN IT! I would posit that, more than two years on from The Great Initial Wave of GenAI Excitement, if this is what agencies think is ‘useful’ about it then agencies deserve everything they’re going to get in the next few years.
• 1 Dataset, 100 Visualisations: Oh this is such a lovely project, and such a useful and interesting look at all the many different ways one might present a single set of datapoints and how the difference in said presentation affects the manner in which the information communicated is interpreted and received. Per the blurb, “this project is not made to show off, but rather show how interpretation can create better results. Take a close look at your dataset, and figure out what the main story in your data is. Different approaches and focuses demand different visualizations. We decided to keep every visualization the same style and colors and let the interpretation and story angle dictate the visualization. This resulted in 100 vastly different visualizations.” This is a bit of a calling card by Danish design studio Ferdio, and a smart one – it neatly demonstrates that they are quite good at this sort of thing, that they can do it in lots of different styles, and that they understand how style impacts substance, as well as showing that they are nice enough and confident enough to disseminate their expertise for free. This is both textbook CONTENT MARKETING and a really excellent resource for anyone interested in dataviz and all the different ways in which you can use smart visual design to bring numbers to life.
• Buttons: I have to be honest with you – this is not, in general, a hugely-interesting website (as far as I can tell it’s the storefront for a Czech studio that designs typefaces) but it IS the first one which basically offers potential customers a discount on prices in exchange for, basically, d1cking around. Basically the link here takes you to a page which, with a click, will generate a new website button at random, which will plonk down from the top of the page; more clicks will see more buttons deposited onto the page. If you, the user, click enough times to fill the whole screen with RANDOM BUTTONS then you will unlock a discount you can redeem when you buy fonts from the shop. Why? I have no idea, but I am very much a fan of this and STRONGLY suggest that any and all of you working with online retailers lobby hard to include similar mechanics on their websites.
• Gravitational Lens Simulation: Look, I could pretend to understand what this is showing, but I’d be lying – in large part my reasons for including this amount to little more than ‘ooh, cool visual FX that look a tiny little bit like what happens to the edges of your field of vision at the start of a trip’. Let me instead delegate the explanation to the site itself, which says the following in explanation of what the everliving fcuk Gravitational Lensing in fact is: “Imagine a heavy ball on a trampoline – it creates a dip that makes marbles roll towards it in a curved path. That’s similar to how massive objects in space (like black holes) bend light. When light from distant stars passes near these heavy objects, it bends around them, creating multiple images or making the stars appear in different positions than where they really are. This bending of light by gravity is called gravitational lensing, and it helps astronomers study things in space they can’t see directly. The pulsing star in the center helps demonstrate this effect by making it easier to track how the light bends around the black hole.” There, clear? No, me neither. Still, you probably don’t need to know too much about the INCREDIBLE, MIND, BODY AND UNIVERSE-BENDING PHYSICS being modeled here – instead, click the link, let your jaw go slack and marvel at the pretty lights as you move the black hole around the twinkly cosmos.
• Documentary Storm: I appreciate that you may not necessarily be in the market for ‘deep-dives into this fcuking world we live in’ right now, but, on the offchance, you might find this website a pleasing resource – Documentary Storm is, basically, a place that collects a fcuktonne of documentaries on a wide range of topics and makes them searchable by theme, title, etc. Nothing’s hosted here – these are all YouTube embeds – but it’s a convenient portal to find non-fiction filmmaking should you be interested. It’s also worth pointing out that the term ‘documentary’ has been largely rendered meaningless in the past few years, as the streaming platforms seemingly-snakebelly-low quality control bar for this stuff has seen some…questionable-quality investigations and VERY propagandistic material being peddled as ‘objectively-researched fact’; put it this way, I wouldn’t expect everything on here to have Attenborough-level rigour, and I would perhaps take significant portions of the films on here with a skipful of salt (I am thinking specifically of a lot of the UFO-type things, but I reckon there is probably quite a lot of…iffy medical stuff lurking here if you lift enough rocks).
• Photo Exhibits: Ooh, this is nice – an oooooooold website featuring the photography of one Stephen Edelbroich, who snapped a load of photos of New York, Paris, Venice, Vietnam (and other places too) and uploaded them here for the world to see – these are OLD, either analogue or early-digital depending on exactly when they were taken, and it’s honestly quite a thrill to go through them and go back a quarter-century.  I’m not sure how GOOD the photos are, if I’m totally honest, but it’s so nice to find them here.
• Daze: So this has been getting frothy writeups left right and centre over the past few weeks, despite the fact that the app itself is only out of waitlist this week (and even then iOS-only because of FCUKING course grumble grumble) – anyway, it LOOKS very cool even if, as a result of the aforementioned iPhoneonlyness, I am yet to try it. Basically Daze is a new messaging platform whose gimmick is (basically) that it combines the simplicity of messaging (ie you are literally just messaging someone, or a group of people) with the creative multimedia possibilities of Stories or Reels; so you can effectively create chats that look more like the collage-type-canvas you might expect from a c.2015 Insta/Snap aesthetic. Slap down gifs and videos and audio and animations and CHANGING FONTS and colours and it’s all CHAOTIC and MESSY and this looks like it might be ALL THE RAGE (for 10m until Meta rips off all its features wholesale across the ecosystem and kills this stone dead).
• Practical Betterments: I am pretty sure I have never in my life practised any form of self-improvement –  certainly not in the decade and a half that I’ve been making myself a worse person via the medium of internet obsession – but, should you be a more aspirational sort of person than me, the sort who believes in the possibility of things and people and circumstances getting better rather than constantly decaying towards entropy, then you might enjoy this website collecting a list of simple things that we can all do to improve our lives in small ways. Things like ‘lubricate your keyholes’ (no sniggering), or, er, ‘organise your toiletries chronologically’ (I have no idea what this means and am slightly too scared to click through and find out), and, look, this all strikes me as utterly insane, microoptimisation in search of tiny, imperceptible marginal gains, but, equally, I cry most days and so as such perhaps the person behind this, one ‘Nathanial’, is a better person to listen to than I am.
• An Incredibly Satisfying Swedish-Accented Rap: This is a bit of an unusual one – it’s literally just a link to a video which would ordinarily go in, well, the videos section where it belongs, but this is on Insta and as such I can’t embed it down there, but it doesn’t fit in the Instagram section either because it’s just a single video and the rest of the account isn’t (so far at least) delightfully-accented rap/poetry, and so you’re just going to have to put up with me queering the Curios running order slightly by putting it here. What’s that? You don’t give a fcuk? Oh. Anyway, this is a video posted by one Cecilia Elise Wallin and I am slightly obsessed with it – the delivery, the diction, the movement, the fact that when I first saw it I was half-convinced it was CG…this is just wonderful, and I really hope Ms. Wallin makes more of them.
• Perverse: Speaking of (sort-of) poetry (SEAMLESS!), Perverse is a new online (and offline, but mostly online I think) journal of verse, “a magazine for “deliberate, obstinate, unreasonable or unacceptable poems, contrary to the expected practice”, which might appeal to those of you who enjoy slightly-unconventional forms of poetry – it’s a newsletter too, so you can sign up for occasional deliveries of crafted words to your inbox.
• PacCam: We begin the BUMPER GAMES portion of Curios (I think we can all agree a bit of low-stakes ludic distraction will make it all better, right?) with this excellent, silly little game which basically lets you play a slightly-shonky, rudimentary version of Pacman using your face as a controller – enable your webcam and you can direct your small yellow pillmuncher around the screen by turning your head to the left or right or looking up or down. This is silly and a bit shonky but VERY fun (in a slightly broken way) – be aware though that a) it will give you a lot of shots of you looking VERY unattractive as you contort your neck to direct the sprite onscreen; and b) in fact, if any of you ever watched Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, those are basically exactly the faces you’ll be pulling.
• Letroso: Another week, another daily word game – this one’s like Wordle but you have a 10 letter word to guess each day; the basic ‘if you get the right letter in the right place it changes colour’ thing is the same, but there are a few tweaks in acknowledgement of the fact that, well, longer words make for a harder game. I like this a lot, and it’s a nice alternative to Wordle if you’re deciding to boycott it while the NYT fights with the unions (yes, even your daily word puzzle can become a complex labour rights issue! EVERYTHING IS POLITICS THERE IS NO ESCAPE).
• Moida Mansion: This is SO good – not least because of the meticulous attention to detail applied to the design and style and look and feel of the whole thing. Moida Mansion is a browsergame that’s designed to look and play like one of the old ‘Game And Watch’-style LCD games that those of a certain age will remember from long car journeys – an LCD screen, simple movement, no animations – updated with some really clever wrinkles that transform it into an actually fun game (none of the original titles of the era were, to be clear, ‘fun’ in any accepted way). Everything about this is just perfect, down to the manual and the way it’s written and presented, and the game itself is a solid 15 minutes’ enjoyment – a really exceptional bit of work by renowned game designer Lucas Pope.
• All Of The Ludum Dare 56 Entries: Via Lynn Cherny’s superb newsletter comes this link, to all the entries to the recent Ludum Dare game design jam, which challenged designers to create a small game from scratch in 72h or less, under the loose theme of ‘Tiny Creatures’ – there are DOZENS here, many of which you can play in your browser but the rest of which are free to download, and there are puzzlers and platformers and silly narrative fiction experiments and, honestly, there are HOURS of entertainment here if you just fancy turning your brain off and playing for a while.
• Tenebra: I know that you don’t THINK that what you need and want in 2024 is a browsergame built on emulating the graphics and OS of the long-forgotten BBC Micro from the 1980s – and, look, you might be right, maybe you DON’T need or want this, but, well, I’m giving it to you anyway because it’s honestly great and SO much better than you think it’s going to be. Tenebra is a puzzlegame with 31 levels – the gimmick is that you have to get the protagonist to the end of each, but he is afraid of the dark – how do you get him through the dark areas to safety? This starts simple but becomes fiendish enough to be interesting and fun after a few levels, and I imagine there are some of you for whom this is a genuine, brainscratching pleasure.
• Wigmaker: Our final miscellaneous offering this week is another infinite clicker (it’s not infinite, don’t worry). Would you like to play a game about making wigs? Are you pleased by liberal use of terms like ‘peruke’ to connote a hairpiece? Oh man are you going to enjoy this, in that case. A particularly nice example of the clicker genre, with a pleasant interface and some nice writing, this is a gentle, soothing and satisfying way of passing some time, ideally while on payroll so you can get remunerated for watching Wig Number Go Up.

By Devin Lunsford

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED ‘LEGALIZE LAMBADA’ AND MAKES ME WANT TO USE THE WORD ‘FUNKY’ DESPITE THE FULL-BODY-PRETZEL-CRINGE THAT DEPLOYING THAT TERM MAKES ME FEEL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Hamid Naderi Yeganeh: As far as I can tell from their bio, Hamid is studying maths in some capacity at UCL; he uses his maths skills to create frankly amazing pictures from equations (ok, fine, he might well be doing loads of other stuff with them but the likelihood is I wouldn’t understand ANYTHING about that, whereas ‘making pictures with equations’ is something I can broadly get my head around). This is…quite astonishing, although to be honest this could all be absolute lies and I would have no idea whatsoever.
• Geometry Club: Per the bio, “Celebrating the beauty of architecture with precisely aligned photographs from around the world.” You want photos of the top corner portion of a lot of buildings? GREAT!
• Artisan Embroidery: Via Jana over at Zuckerbakerei (honestly, SUCH a lovely newsletter/website which is also home to some glorious baking recipes), this is the Insta feed of Jordan Cunliffe in Lancashire who embroiders data. EMBROIDERS DATA. There are some of you who I know will be ABSOLUTELY TUMESCENT at those words – know that I write for YOU.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Raija Jokinen, via blort

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

The world’s either going to get maybe, possibly, a tiny bit better next week, or it’s going to get LOADS worse – EXCITING, ISN’T IT? I don’t know about you, but part of me quite wants to be put into a medically-induced coma until America gets its sh1t together.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re sick of their fcuking politics too, admit it.

By Zhiyong Jin (all pics this week via TIH, for which thanks as ever)

WHY NOT ENJOY THE OPENING SECTION OF CURIOS ACCOMPANIED BY A SELECTION OF UK GRIME TRACKS MIXED BY MANGA? THERE IS NOT GOOD REASON NOT TO, CLICK THIS LINK! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY ANGRY AT THE FACT THAT IT KNOWS WHO AND WHAT ‘THE RIZZLER’ IS, BUT IS EVEN MORE ANNOYED THAT THIS WEEK IT GOT HIM MIXED UP WITH BABY GRONK, PT.1:  

By Takashi Nakamura

NEXT UP WE RETURN TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL WHOSE BLOOPS AND BEATS ARE IN PARTICULARLY FINE FORM THIS WEEK! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY ANGRY AT THE FACT THAT IT KNOWS WHO AND WHAT ‘THE RIZZLER’ IS, BUT IS EVEN MORE ANNOYED THAT THIS WEEK IT GOT HIM MIXED UP WITH BABY GRONK, PT.2:

• I Can’t Believe Other People Don’t Do This: We have all experienced the very particular feeling of watching someone else undertake a task in a manner which, to us at least, looks so utterly preposterous, so wrong-headed, so STUPID, that it makes us question whether or not the person in question is in some way, I don’t know, intellectually subnormal (professionally-speaking I have found this most often when watching how people use search engines; by contrast, others tend to get this feeling watching me dress) – this is a Reddit thread collecting a VAST crowdsourced list of the ways in which various people perform certain tasks in hyperoptimised ways and, honestly, some of these are fcuking GAMECHANGERS. Seriously, there will be at least one thing in here which utterly changes your life (as well as a lot of others which, yes, fine, make you slightly question the sanity or life-choices of some of the posters in the thread – I appreciate you like tidy drawers, mate, but plastic ziploc bags in said drawers in which you organise all your individual gubbins feels a touch…excessive) – I experienced a moment of genuine revelatory clarity at ‘open bags of crisps upside down because all the seasoning sits at the bottom’, for example, akin to when the image of the duck suddenly resolves itself into a bunny rabbit.
• Extract All The Links: I feel quite strongly that I am cutting my own throat by serving you up this link, but such is my dedication to bringing you the very best of the web that I can’t hold back even when a link is basically designed to render Curios (or at least the bit of it which involves me) entirely redundant. Simon Willison got an LLM to code this up for him as part of some tinkering he was doing (you can read the notes of how here, should you be interested) – it’s a very simple tool which lets you paste in any copy you like from any webpage you fancy, and which will quickly and neatly extract any embedded urls from said text and dump them out for you without any of the annoying accompanying prose. Which means that should you decide that while the links are good the words are, frankly, dogsh1t, you need never again suffer through my prose – just copy the entire text of Curios, dump it in here and then surf to your heart’s content without my godawful words ruining your webspelunking. Know, though, that if you choose to do that I will do everything in my power to come back from the dead and haunt you to the point of insanity (not joking).
• AI For Culture: Do any of you work in the cultural sector? I have a vague feeling a couple of you might – anyway, if so, this might be of use/interest. Basically this is a set of tools and resources compiled by what looks like a range of pan-European cultural institutions designed to help people within the sector work out how best to deploy generative AI as part of their work – per the blurb, “We are on a mission to empower the culture heritage sector through Artificial Intelligence. Our aim is to enable professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts within the sector with the resources they need to integrate AI into their daily workflow, find creative ways to use them and solve their current problems. The platform hosts a pool of readily deployed AI software tools, along with training and testing datasets that have been curated for use within the sector. To describe what is possible and showcase existing successful deployments, various types of upskilling material are also hosted by the platform.” The fact that none of the tech companies have their logos on this makes me think it’s probably a genuine attempt to assist culture workers rather than a naked attempt to inject The Machine into every possible corner of the world for pecuniary gain. There are over 100 tools in the database here, so if you’re interested in AI for general purpose, practical use it’s probably worth a quick look.
• Napkin: This is, I concede, quite dull, but it might also be quite useful. Are you the sort of person who makes slides with diagrams on them? Do you have to get someone else to make the diagrams for you because, fundamentally, you’re a useless design refusenik? Enter Napkin, which will use THE MAGIC OF AI to spin up appropriate, diagrammatic illustrations for your slides based on the copy you feed it – basically you just plug in the on-slide text and it will spit out what it concludes are suitable graphical/diagrammatic representations of said text for you to select, tweak and ultimately use – if you’re the type of, I don’t know, SYSTEMS THINKER who likes to describe complex processes and feedback loops and stuff then this will probably be far too noddy for you; on the other hand, if you’re someone who works in advermarketingpr and whose slides contain concepts which should probably be written in crayon so RIGOROUS are they then this is probably EXACTLY the degree of sophistication you need. As an aside, I have been in many, many meetings over the course of my career with consultants from places like Accenture, and I am entirely convinced that 70% of all monies paid to the people in those companies goes on creating slide templates featuring triangles and arrows in important-looking configurations which mean the square root of fcuk all but very much LOOK businesslike.
• Hummingbirds: A new(ish) twist on the influencer model! This time with an emphasis on HYPERLOCALITY, though, which is obviously ENTIRELY novel (not in fact really that novel at all), which I suppose makes sense in, say, the US, given the size of the country, but possibly marginally less so somewhere like the UK, where it’s questionable whether the market exists for finding influencers in, say, Maidstone. Still, the premise feels solid – local businesses sign up, set up campaigns that they want influencers to participate in; said influencers sign up, select the brand campaign then want to work on, make their content, get paid, everyone wins! Well, in theory at least – as ever with these things I have…questions about the economics of the whole thing and whether the incentives available are attractive enough to tempt a sufficient volume of creators, or whether the impact of said ‘influence’ is enough at a micro level to make the brand campaigns worthwhile, but should you be less sceptical about all this than I am then you might find the model of interest. BONUS INFLUENCER PLATFORM: this is by possibly the UK’s least-favourite entrepreneur James Watt, the man who singlehandedly managed to render the word ‘punk’ utterly meaningless thanks to his work with Brewdog and who’s now branching out into the influence space himself with his new venture called ‘Social Tip’, where (basically) if you buy something from a brand, said brand can then pay you to talk about how happy you are to have bought said something all over the internet. This doesn’t, apparently, require any form of disclosure whatsoever from the person being paid, as given that they have already made the purchase it’s considered that they are not being induced to promote the product – which strikes me as…something of a grey area which may not remain grey for that much longer should the ASA be paying proper attention. In fact, the whole terms section of the site strikes me as being full of the sort of stuff that feels very much ‘we’re fcuking around! Let’s find out!’, so it will be interesting to see how long this lasts for.
• Cafeteria: Seeing as we’re doing ‘links vaguely related to advermarketingpr’, here’s Cafeteria, an interesting idea from the US which is designed to let brands get REAL INSIGHTS from REAL TEENS about what they REALLY THINK. They do this by paying them to complete short surveys – the company behind the app has a cohort of teens signed up, presumably with a reasonable demographic split (this is North America only, I think) and paying them to answer questions about what they’re into, the brands they like, etc etc. Kids get asked to participate at most a couple of times a month, to prevent burnout or, presumably, them gaming the system to earn lots of pocket cash; participants get paid upto $20 to participate, which seems like an awful lot of money for this to be in anyway practically scaleable, but, then again, American budgets are American budgets. Worth being aware of if your job has anything to do with ‘knowing what the kids are into’ (if that’s the case you really are reading the wrong newsletter).
• Walkcast: This is a really lovely idea which is sadly ruined by the appalling LLM-generated copy – Walkcast is basically an AI-generated podcast which spins up a story based on where you are in the world. As far as I can tell what happens here is that there’s a combination of geolocation (which tells the programme where you are), light prompting (which generates the story based on the aforementioned location data), and text-to-voice (which streams it into your ears), resulting in a new, location-specific story delivered to you whenever you want it. Which is in theory SO COOL, but is totally undermined by the fact that the tone is so utterly grating, full of the sort of horrendous, vaguely-millennial-inflected slop that is an LLMs default output. As previously discussed here, it is HARD to make The Machine write anything non-businessish that isn’t awful to read, but they could at least have attempted to mitigate the baseline mediocrity here a bit. Feels like there is an idea in here with a bit of tweaking, though – oh, this came via the excellent Sentiers, by the way, which continues to be a great newsletter for futures-type writing and thinking.
• The UFO Timeline: This is a great little project by amateur UFOlogist (is that the term? Apologies if I’ve just used the community equivalent of hatespeech here) by one Sam Lingle (HI SAM LINGLE!) who decided that it was quite annoying to keep track of the history of UFO investigations and discoveries and that what was needed was a website which presented a timeline of what was learned when – A UFO TIMELINE, IF YOU WILL! Ahem. This is GREAT, even if, like me, you are…unconvinced as to the existence of extraterrestrial life (or, perhaps more accurately, are unconvinced of the extent to which extraterrestrial life is interested in hanging out with us), and it taught me that the earliest recorded instance of alleged alien abduction occurred in the 1770s in Sweden, when one Jacob Jacobsson ‘came face to face with short, humanoid beings and a chubby man wearing a red cap’ and was somehow disappeared by them for four days (I don’t mean to be sceptical here, but I’m guessing it was easier to spin yarns like this in the late-18th Century). Anyway, this is a really nice personal project which is far better-coded than it probably needs to be, and is a pleasant way of spending 10 minutes learning about all the different parts of the world that have seen citizens claiming to have been ‘probed by the greys’.
• Jordan Stone:I don’t do TikTok, I am not interested in it, and I don’t find it, as a rule, particularly interesting as a medium (I know, I know) – that said, I think Jordan Stone  might be a genius and that their videos are ART. I don’t, honestly, know quite how to explain these to you – they’re a sort of evolution of brainrot content, stitching together and overlaying multiple different videos and music with fx to create something oddly-meditative and poignant and beautiful (I am not joking, seriously, I think this really is quite moving at times), despite being composed from clips that are, objectively, often very, very silly. I can’t quite explain the power of this, but trust me when I tell you that it may be the best thing I’ve seen on the platform all year and I would 100% watch an hour-long supercut of these, ideally very stoned in a comfortable gallery setting.
• Stop Project 25 – The Comic: To all the North Americans reading this – you poor, poor fcuks, seriously, this election has been going on for approximately three decades and it increasingly looks like it might in fact NEVER STOP HAPPENING; it’s exhausting and very boring for the rest of us, but for you it’s exhausting, boring and TERRIFYING, which must be even worse. I am not going to suggest what you do with your vote because a) it’s none of my business, who the fcuk am I to tell you what to do?; and b) I am 99% certain that everyone reading this is a Democrat (the only person I know who actually supports Trump and who might in fact read this is not a US citizen and lives in Mexico, so give a fcuk), but I found this website, which details some of the Project 25 stuff that has so many on the ‘left’ (lol at the idea that the current democratic party could be described in any such way in any rational world) so scared, nicely done – detailing the alleged plans for the post-election Trump supremacy in comicbook format to neatly explain via sequential art exactly how bad it could get for, basically, anyone who isn’t a straight white man. As I’ve said before, part of me does slightly think this is ‘QAnon for liberals’, but, even taking a lot of this with some grains of salt, it’s…a bit troubling. Anyway, hopefully That Fcuking Man will do an Elvis between now and Tuesday so this will all end up being moot (if we all hope hard enough it COULD HAPPEN).
• Use YouTube As An Instrument: Ooh, this is a FUN little hacked-together toy – plug in any YouTube url and this website lets you assign timestamped portions of the video to individual keys on your laptop, meaning you can basically turn any vid into a customised soundboard; this could be quite a lot of fun for mixing and recording (or if you just want to be able to quickly and easily use the ‘AW YEAH!’ bit from Timmy Mallett’s ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ as an on-demand audio sting for the rest of the day).
• Battleships: The game of Battleships – you know, the one where you have to guess where your opponents ships are placed on a grid – reimagined as a single-player daily puzzler. This is clever and neat, but I was really bad at it and so it has made me unaccountably grumpy and I don’t feel like praising it anymore than the bare minimum as a result. Sorry.
• Color Gum: A tiny little puzzler which you will get through in about 5 minutes, and as such a perfect ‘tea and biscuit’ companion – you just need to manoeuver the blob to the goal, ensuring that it’s the right colour when it arrives; simple, but you can see how the mechanic could get quite chewy and complex if you extended it a bit.
• The ThinkyGames Games Archive: ThinkyGames is a website all about, er, games that require some thought – they recently updated their website, and it now includes this GREAT archive of games, many of which are browser-based and entirely free-to-play, and which will require you to use your brain in some small way but which also include titles for all the major consoles and PC; if you’re after something to play right now then there are dozens of options here, but, equally, if you’d like a resource to help you decide what to play in the future then this is worth bookmarking. SO MANY GREAT GAMES, SO LITTLE TIME.

By Joshua Amirthasingh

THE LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS FABULOUS AND SOMEHOW-MELLIFLUOUS COLLECTION OF TUNES FROM ALL OVER THE PLACE, SUPERBLY MARSHALLED BY JOI N’JUNO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Kelani Fatai: Fatai is a Nigerian painter who does portraits of figures from Black culture in a sort-of-faux-Renaissance style – I *really* like the look and feel of the work here, and Fatai is set to become VERY FAMOUS quite soon as I think they have been picked to do the cover art for the forthcoming Mama Knowles memoir ‘Matriarch’. YOU SAW HIM HERE FIRST.
• Devil’s Blush: An account that posts videogame screenshots – honestly, though, that doesn’t come close to expressing the BEAUTY of this. Seriously, the shots are ART – they’re photos of screens, so there’s a very particular quality to the images, and the way the pixels show up, that is SO powerfully of-an-era that it feels like being transported back to your memories of playing Mario on a CRT round your mate’s house (you can read an interview with the person behind it here, should you be so inclined).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Gerard DuBois

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH WANTED TO INCLUDE THIS ONE TOO BUT COULDN’T WORK OUT A WAY TO EMBED IT, SO HAVE THIS EXCELLENT TRACK AND NSFW VID FROM AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS AS A BONUS)!:

It’s still, technically, Summer here in the UK, until Sunday morning at least – WHY AM I SO FCUKING COLD THEN?

Yes, that’s right, we’ve reached that phase of the year when all I can seem to think about is how fcuking cold my fingers are when I am typing this fcuking thing, and whether I should finally bite the bullet and lean into my general ‘ageing vagrant’ vibe by purchasing a pair of fingerless gloves (and yes, I am aware that ‘heating’ exists, but I am also aware of exactly what the ‘matt’s employability mapped over time’ graph looks like and as such am holding off for the moment); you, though, don’t care about that (or at least I presume you don’t; in the unlikely event that you find yourself somehow moved by my frigid plight, feel free to, I don’t know, set fire to me next time you see me), you’re only here for the links.

FINE WELL HERE ARE YOUR FCUKING LINKS THEN SEE IF I CARE.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you almost certainly didn’t come here to be abused, but, well, here we are.

By Joyce Lee

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH THE NEW UNDERWORLD ALBUM WHICH IS OUT TODAY AND WHICH REALLY IS EXCELLENT! 

THE SECTION WHICH SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE PUB LAST NIGHT DISCUSSING HOW, BASICALLY, EVERYTHING THAT’S SH1T IN THE WORLD CAN BE BLAMED ON THE 1990s AND WHICH IS NOW PRETTY FIRMLY CONVINCED OF THAT THESIS, PT.1:  

By Owen Gent

WE NOW TURN TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL, WHO ONCE AGAIN BRINGS US A SELECTION OF BLEEPS AND BEATS AND SQUELCHES WITH A MIX OF TECHNO AND TRANCE WHICH IS LIKE BEING AT A RAVE BUT WITHOUT HAVING TO DEAL WITH THAT ANNOYING FCUKER WITH THE FLAMING POI!

THE SECTION WHICH SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE PUB LAST NIGHT DISCUSSING HOW, BASICALLY, EVERYTHING THAT’S SH1T IN THE WORLD CAN BE BLAMED ON THE 1990s AND WHICH IS NOW PRETTY FIRMLY CONVINCED OF THAT THESIS, PT.2:  

• Bluesky Follower Bridge: It does rather feel that Twitter’s long, drawn-out decline entered a new phase recently, what with That Fcuking Man’s decision to further-ensh1tten the platform by nerfing the Block function, and one does wonder what will happen should That Other Fcuking Man lose the US election in 10 days and the whole ‘turn Twitter into a hypodermic for the injection of right-wing filth into the mind of the populace!’ plan turns out to have been a bust – I’m not convinced he won’t just shut it all down in a fit of pique should Trump lose, basically. Anyway, this has also resulted in another swathe of users decamping to Bluesky, which still feels a but ghostly but which is slowly filling up – having had something go small-v-viral on there this week, I can confirm that it’s JUST as annoying! – which means you might find this Chrome extension useful – basically it lets you really easily find people you follow, and who follow you, on Twitter over on the other platform, and then follow them all (there’s no batch-follow, you have to do it manually, but it’s not that onerous). Worth a go, given everything (and the fact that by all accounts Threads continues to be a horrible, empty parody of a place and there’s really nowhere else to go anymore).
• The Art of Spongebob: Spongebob’s another modern cultural touchstone that I never really connected with – partly age, I think, partly a lack of cable/satellite telly – but I am aware that for a significant swathe of people it’s seemingly of almost-Biblical significance; this, then, is for YOU, a Twitter account which exists to share art from the series, sketches and concept drawings and early animations, and basically anything from the archives that highlights the inventiveness and humour of the art style, which, objectively, is undeniable. There’s a really nice piece on the account here, including an interview with the person who runs it, who’s only 19 and who had it handed to them by a previous mod/owner…I think there’s something quietly wonderful about accounts like these being passed down from one generation to another, like a digital version of old recipes or the keys to the Satanic lodge or whatever.
• Cheers: Another week, another attempt to pull the general idea of ‘dating’ out of the seemingly-terminal nosedive it finds itself in, via…another app! Except, no, wait, this one’s different, promise! Only available in New York at the time of writing, the gimmick with Cheers is that it leverages your friends to help you find love; you reach out to your friends to get them to fill in your profile and recommend you, matches are suggested based on profiling but also the degree to which your friend network (in-app, obvs) overlaps, and you can get your friends to do introductions to mutuals for you…look, I am sure that there are parts of this that feel SAFE and HELPFUL, but, equally, it also sounds like an awful lot of faff and hard work, and that it depends a LOT on you getting all your friends to sign up just so that YOU can have a better chance of MEETING THE ONE, which, honestly, feels perhaps a *touch* solipsistic (and like it could result in SO much messiness, depending on what your friendship group is like). Anyway, coud one of you in NYC try this out and let me know what it’s like? Thanks!
• Plaid Patterns: Would you like a website which contains a seemingly-infinite quantity of plaids, along with the ability to create your own ENTIRELY UNIQUE version? No, I can’t imagine that any of you have been searching for such a thing, nor indeed that you will have the faintest idea of what to do with it, but I just give you the urls, it’s up to you to work out what they’re for ffs.
• Tron1: Despite what the Muskian misdirection machine wants us to think, I do not personally believe that we are all going to have humanoid robotic assistants anytime in the near future – that said, it’s obvious that domestic robotics of some sort are very much a coming thing (or if not ‘domestic’ then at the very least ‘everyday’), as evidenced by this latest off-the-shelf product being sold by Chinese manufacturer LimX Dynamics. The Tron1 is, basically, one of those odd bipedal walker type things that they had in Star Wars, except (at least per the promo materials) without the front-mounted murder cannons, which can either walk or wheel itself around, and can be remote controlled or programmed and, as far as I can tell, is intended to let people get to grips with robotics and AI rather than being something intended to be any sort of home helper. It’s $15k’s worth of kit, so probably not for the average hobbyist, but I can imagine a certain type of person becoming almost painfully aroused at the thought of all the uses they could put this to.
• Animal Futures: A pleasingly shiny bit of digital by the RSPCA here, designed to help educate children about the climate emergency and what it might mean for the world’s animal life and biodiversity in general – via a really nice graphical interface, users can click around and explore different environments, investigating how different potential future scenarios will impact them, and the animals that inhabit them. On the one hand this is really nicely made – on the other, I can’t help but feel…well, it’s all a bit depressing, isn’t it? All the scenarios are named things like ‘climate carnage’, or indicate a future in which we’ve gone hell-for-leather on tech at the expense of the poor critters…except for one specific scenario, presented as utopian, which sees everyone suddenly deciding that animals are just as important as we are, actually, and all going vegan simultaneously overnight, thanks to AI technology enabling us to talk to all of the creatures…and, look, I am just not 100% convinced telling kids that whichever way you look at it the environment seems pretty much utterly fcuked, EXCEPT if we can learn to talk to the animals and empathise with them, because, well, I’m not totally convinced that one’s ever going to happen. Still, really nice graphics here so well done on that front.
• Text Behind Image: Would you like to be able to manipulate an image with text in it so that the text appears BEHIND the primary element in the image rather than in front of it? Do you inexplicably not have access to any photoshop-type software? Bookmark this website, then.
• Are Socks Hard To Knit?: My kneejerk reaction to this would be “only the middle bit”, but should you wish to explore the question in (much, much) more detail then you might enjoy this webpage by one Luisa Vasquez, in which she interrogates the issue to discover whether, actually, socks are indeed tricky or whether YOU are just sh1t at knitting. I shan’t spoil the answer for you, but Luisa goes LONG on this – here’s her methodology, should you be curious: “I turned to Ravelry, a knitting and crochet site, to help answer my questions. Ravelry is a pattern database and community site. Pattern creators can upload patterns to the site for makers to find, and then makers can document their projects on the site as well. There are over 54,000 sock patterns and more than two million completed sock projects documented on the site. I was curious whether socks were more or less difficult than other knitting patterns often attempted by beginners. After completing a pattern on Ravelry, knitters can rate the project’s difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a “piece of cake” and 10 being “very difficult”. I compared the difficulty of some of these common patterns to see how they compared to socks.” The anticipation is killing you, right? I KNOW!
• The 30 Day Map Challenge: Via Giuseppe, one for the cartographers amongst you (are there any cartographers amongs you?) – basically a challenge to create a different sort of map every day, with different themes for each, running from one using hexagons to one describing a journey to one made using only AI…this strikes me as the sort of thing that will be very fun for a VERY SPECIFIC type of person. Are YOU that type of person? I don’t fcuking know, do I, who the fcuk are you anyway?
• The Rest: While I like to imagine that you are all faithful to me and that Web Curios is the only newsletter you allow ingress to your inbox, I am not so naive to think that you don’t occasionally have dalliances with other providers – and, let me be clear, I am fine with that! I am not jealous! I don’t look at other newsletters, with their professionally-produced logos and consistent formatting and ‘communities of readers’ with envy, oh no! Which is why I have no qualms pointing you in the direction of a new (to me at least) variant – The Rest is about music, and very specifically about providing a small antidote to algorithmically-driven listening – here’s the pitch: “In our newsletter, we feature a song and an insightful story about it. You can enjoy the song on your preferred streaming platform while the story will give you something to ponder and discuss with your family, friends, and colleagues.” There’s something really nice about the tight focus here which makes it more appealing to me than a lot of other music-focused newsletters – I also like that there’s an only-partial paywall, and that your $4 monthly sub, should you choose to pay it, gets you access to the full archive, but that not paying it doesn’t preclude you getting the daily updates. This looks really interesting, and, while I’m only a couple of emails in, I have enjoyed the music and the accompanying writing on each occasion so far – recommended.
• A Media Literacy Curriculum: Can we all agree that one of the biggest missteps of the past couple of decades, from an educational / instructional point of view at least,has been the lack of focus on teaching, training and reinforcing critical thinking and media literacy skills? No? We can’t even agree on THAT? FFS! Anyway, I am personally convinced of this, and as such was interested to stumble across this site this week which offers a selection of courses and training modules designed to help teens get a better idea of where information is from, how to parse it, and how to determine its likely truth value: “This curriculum, developed by Poynter’s MediaWise with support from YouTube, breaks big media literacy topics and ideas into bite-sized pieces to help teens actively and knowledgeably use the internet, specifically by giving them the skills to discern fact from fiction and the confidence to share information responsibly. There are 11 lessons in this series, linked in the folders on this page, with a slide presentation, handouts (when needed) and a link to a YouTube Hit Pause or MediaWise video that corresponds with the lesson. Lessons can be used sequentially, as stand-alones or in the order that best suits instructional purposes. Each lesson is designed to last 30-45 minutes, with additional extension activities included. You can also find abbreviated versions of the curriculum, designed as a five hour workshop or a 90 minute lesson. Through implementation of the entire curriculum sequence, students are equipped with the knowledge to recognize misinformation, the skills and resources to fact-check it and the confidence to make decisions on responsible sharing.” Which, to be clear, sounds GREAT – except all the materials strike me as exceptionally fcuking dull, and dry, and it’s all apallingly-presented, and, look, I’m not trying to suggest they get all buscemi.jpeg about it, but maybe not presenting everything as a series of worksheets might have been a start? Anyway, there is a LOT in here, and, leaving aside my quibbles about the presentation, there’s almost certainly some really useful material if you’re a parent or guardian or educator or similar.
• AI Safety Dance: By contrast to the last link, this is an educational resource that’s also designed in a way that makes it FUN (well, ok, as fun as it’s possible for something that is literally about AI safety to be, which, it turns out, can be ‘quite’ if you try hard enough) – this is VERY LONG, and is basically a series of hyperlinked long essay modules about the current AI safety debate, doomers vs accelerationists, etc etc, all framed in intensely-readable (to me, at least – I admit that the less-online might find the style…grating in parts) prose and with some light comic elements and a general Tumblr-ish vibe that I find particularly appealing. Look, this is very much within my wheelhouse and so I appreciate I might be biased, but as an introduction to some of the questions around ‘why should we be worried about this stuff, or why should we not be?’ this is imho very well-made indeed.
• General Collaboration: Another attempt to create the ONE APP that will somehow wrangle the ungodly multiplatform mess of modern administrative life into a single, tameable feed – this one promises to put all your different annoying little alerts and notifications from Slack and GDocs and Sheets and Teams and Figma and Git and and and FCUK’S SAKE MAKE IT STOP…ahem, sorry, all THOSE alerts into one place. I might suggest that if you need this app you perhaps need to look at your tech stack and how…efficient it is before you look at adding to it, but, well, you do you!
• USA Facts: While the url does very much sound like that of a joke website – “USA FACTS! ALL FACTS, ALL USA, ALL THE TIME! REAL AMERICAN FACTS, MADE IN THE US! PATRIOTIC TRUTHS!” etc etc etc – it appears that it is in fact real; this is Steve ‘Dad Dancing At A Microsoft Keynote’ Ballmer attempting to unsh1ttify the North American informational water table via the creation of this website, designed to present verified statistics and information about life in the US free of partisan framing. “Researchers. Analysts. Statisticians. Designers. No politicians. No one at USAFacts is trying to convince you of anything. The only opinion we have is that government data should be easier to access. Our entire mission is to provide you with facts about the United States that are rooted in data. We believe once you have the solid, unbiased numbers behind the issues you can make up your own mind.” Which sounds great in theory, until the part where you realise that they are still using data from Federal institutions which feels like the sort of thing that will make a lot of…redder Americans immediately nope out, and there are EXPERTS involved who will doubtless have PERSONAL OPINIONS…and, well, basically I am unconvinced that the quality of discourse is salvageable, even with OBJECTIVE MATERIALS presented by an avuncular white guy who has to be be trustworthy because he got very, very rich through capitalism! Still, I think it’s probably on balance A Good Thing, however little of a difference it’s likely to make to anything.
• Minimal Market: A site which collects various different little webapps designed to help you ‘decrease distractions and increase productivity’ – which, honestly, if you’re reading this newsletter strikes me as the last fcuking thing you’d be interested in, but, equally, I know that at least one person who occasionally reads this also has their phone set to lock them out of whatsapp after 5 mins of usage so, well, who the fcuk knows.
• Lo-Fone: Ok, this is both a product that is for sale (boo) and isn’t actually on sale yet anyway (double boo), but I am including it because I get the feeling it might appeal to quote few of you. Lo-Fone is a…yes, that’s right, a PHONE! Clever you! Except this is designed to be SUPER-minimal – you can get messaging apps on it, you can get a map app, you can put music on it, but there’s no browser, no social apps, and no news apps, and the whole thing is designed to be as functional as possible – other features are described as follows: “LoFone has a unique colour E Ink display that is gentle on the eyes, promotes better sleep and has incredible battery life. The case and battery are replacable. It has a point and shoot camera with no live preview, to make photo taking impulsive and fleeting. It also has a torch, a headphone socket and a user-assignable action button, making it just as useful as a smart phone.” I mean, look, it’s just a fcuking phone, and it might be sh1t, but it *sounds* quite good and you can sign up for updates on the site should you be so inclined.
• Difftext: OOH this is useful – lets you compare two texts aside by side and highlights what’s changed from one version to another. BRILLIANT for seeing if your changes have in fact been implemented, but terrible news for people like me, who for literally years has responded to at least 60% of all feedback on my writing with a promise to, yes, implement the edits, and then not in fact done so because most people NEVER FCUKING CHECK.
• Snail Racing: A very slow, very low-stakes racing game in which you guide a snail – far better rendered, in 3d, than it needs to be – around a small patch of garden, attempting to beat all the other snails to the crown of FASTEST SNAIL OF THEM ALL. This is really nicely-made, but, to be clear, it is VERY SLOW.
• Star Word: Via my friend Ed, this is a clever little game where you basically have to play scrabble to connect up various bits of the screen (it will all make sense when you play, I promise you). It’s all wrapped up in a light narrative about astronauts getting stranded on an asteroid and needing your help to escape – if I were to be a d1ck, and when am I not?, I’d argue that this would benefit from the writing being quite a lot tighter, but, well, that would demonstrate a quite staggering lack of self-awareness on my part and that would never do.
• Jelly Gang: Finally this week, an absolutely charming little physics-y puzzle game which features the most adorable cast of…squidgy little guys, basically. “Jelly Gang is a puzzle platformer where you control a group of 30 squishy characters. While you can move left, right, and jump like in a traditional platformer, only the characters within a focus region around your mouse cursor respond to your controls. The rest remain physically active but out of your direct control. The camera follows a larger main character, adding a unique layer of strategy to the gameplay.” Honestly, this is LOVELY and I would very much enjoy seeing the central idea expanded into a larger game.

By Toni Hamel:

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX COMES FROM FELIX DICKINSON AND I SUPPOSE YOU MIGHT VAGUELY DESCRIBE IT AS ‘BALEARIC’ BUT TBH I NEVER LIKED THAT AS A LABEL AND SO WE’LL JUST SAY THAT IT’S A COLLECTION OF EXCELLENT VAGUELY-HOUSEY MATERIAL AND LEAVE IT THERE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Arthur Chance: Thanks to BBC Tom for this – the feed of Omar Karim, who’s an artist playing with AI in a variety of different and interesting ways which seem to explore a little beyond the standard ‘I MADE A PICTURE WITH THE MACHINE’ – I particularly like the vague idea he has about equipping an agent with the ability to interact with the drug dealers who blow up your phone every weekend with those infuriatingly-emoji-heavy lists of product (I am 45 years old and I do not speak emoji, all I want is something to relieve me from the burden of consciousness for a few hours, WHY MUST YOU MAKE THIS SO HARD FFS???).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Takaya Katsuragawa

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO I AM BACK HELLO!

What have YOU done with the past few weeks of your life? I have singularly failed to take a holiday of any sort (how does one take a holiday from oneself? No, not ‘acid’, tried that), or indeed to really stop looking at the internet, but I have caught up on some sleep and, I think, just about managed to muster the enthusiasm to get to the end of the year without risk of (additional, ulterior) breakdown, so WELL DONE ME!

Anyway, as I type it’s vaguely-sunny out, and in a desperate attempt to expose my bone-white epidermis to a few rays before the sun disappears for six months, I am not even going to bother pretending with the intro this week and will instead crack right on with the links, not least because I imagine you’re having some pretty chronic url withdrawal symptoms right now (do not tell me you found another dealer, do not tell me you found another dealer, I will CUT YOU).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are glad to see me, I can tell (LOOK AT ME).

By Paul Ranson (pics via TIH)

WE BEGIN THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH WHAT TOM SPOONER CALLS ‘SAD CRACKLY JAZZ’, AND FRANKLY WHO AM I TO ARGUE (THIS IS LOVELY AND ALMOST-PERFECTLY AUTUMNAL)!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST TO ANY OF YOU WHO ARE IN LONDON AND WHO HAVE A BIT OF SPARE TIME OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AND WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH SOMETHING GENUINELY INTERESTING AND COOL AND FUN AND CREATIVE TO CLICK THIS LINK AND SIGN UP AND LEARN MORE, PT.1:  

By Alma Haser

NEXT, A PLAYLIST FEATURING 100 TRACKS BY BLACK BRITISH ARTISTS RECORDED SINCE 2020 AND WHICH IS A BRILLIANT AND INSANELY-VARIED SELECTION OF MODERN UK EXCELLENCE!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST TO ANY OF YOU WHO ARE IN LONDON AND WHO HAVE A BIT OF SPARE TIME OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AND WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH SOMETHING GENUINELY INTERESTING AND COOL AND FUN AND CREATIVE TO CLICK THIS LINK AND SIGN UP AND LEARN MORE, PT.2:

• IOGraphica: Oh this is WONDERFUL! Have you ever thought ‘God I wish I could turn the pointless movements made by my mouse cursor as I once again waste my life through screen-based interaction into BEAUTIFUL MONOCHROMATIC SEMI-ABSTRACT ART!’? No, it strikes me as unlikely, but that is EXACTLY what you can do with IOGraphica, which is a bit of software which tracks your mouse movements and turns them into gorgeous visualisations. So so so beautiful.
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024: Critters!  Yes, ok, fine, and some landscapes, but it’s mostly about the critters! As ever, important to note that not all the aforementioned critters on display here are, er, alive, but as long as that doesn’t put you off then you can rest assured that these are all astonishing in various ways – I personally was charmed by the one featuring toad-on-toad violence (you’ll know it when you see it), but every single one of these pictures is glorious. BONUS PHOTO CONTEST: seeing as you’re here, you might want to check out the winners of this year’s ‘Panoramic Photographer of the Year’ contest which are also lovely (but, well, WIDE).
• Wes Cook: This came out of one of the talks at this year’s XOXO Festival, and having read about the project and watched the associated video (which, honestly, I can’t recommend enough) I was UTTERLY CHARMED and you will be too. Wes Cook was an artist operating in the US in the 20th Century, working across a frankly insane range of projects from theme parks to film studios to theatre design. On a roadtrip, Cabel Sasser encountered his work, and became obsessed. Per Cabel, “Wes Cook died in 2004. He had no heirs, no family. His life’s work was left in a storage locker that went unpaid, eventually being sold at auction. I purchased all I could from the person who bought his storage locker, until I basically ran out of money. Oops. He deserves to be world famous. Maybe it’s not too late.” This website hosts the archive of Wes’s oeuvre, the video of Cabel’s talk, and I promise you that after you’ve watched the talk (WATCH THE TALK) you will fall slightly in love with this.
• Letterboxd Besties:So apparently if you’re a Film Person (it feels the capitalisation is important here) and you use film rating site Lettrboxed it lets you pick your TOP FOUR FILMS EVER by which to define yourself to the rest of the cinephile community – this website lets you put in your username and see if anyone else in the big wide world has the same UNIQUELY-RAREFIED TASTES as you do. Honestly, this feels like a near-perfect extension for a dating app, no? Also, based on this, I wonder what the most ‘basic’ top 4 is? Shawshank, It’s A Wonderful Life, Elf, Back To The Future? A Fiat500 selection for the ages!
• Laid Off Overlays: Look, I appreciate that there is nothing funny about being out of work and being worried as to where money’s going to come from, and the modern charade of having to digitally caper in the shop window in the desperate hope that some passing suit chooses YOU to bestow the temporary gift of employment on is particularly miserable and horrid, but, also, I found this website – which lets you create your very own ‘Twibbon’ (remember them!?)-style graphical overlay to add to your profile on LinkedIn in the style of the ‘Looking For Work!’ badges popping up all over the place over there. Want to create a badge that says “I Need The Money But I Promise I Will Never Care”? How about “No Major HR Grievances”? “Look Into My Eyes Before You Scroll Past Me And Condemn My Kids To A Present-Free Christmas”? The choice is yours. This is…this isn’t actually funny, is it?
• Crayon Town: Another ‘infinite canvas on which the entire web can draw simultaneously’ project, with the unique gimmick that the graphics are done to make the whole thing look (convincingly, I must say) as though it’s been drawn in crayon. Which might lessen the horror when you stumble into the inevitable ‘swastika corner’ (to be clear, I have not found ‘swastika corner’ and there’s no suggestion that it does in fact exist – I did though just scroll around for a minute and saw someone had written the simple phrase ‘gay wand’, which has really made me laugh for some reason).
• Pictures Of People Taking Pictures: I feel that this ought to be a bigger thing than it is. You can contribute your own, should you so desire (you should).
• Cartographist: Ooh, this is interesting – it’s a Github repo so you will need to be able to wrangle the code, but this is SUCH a cool twist on the standard browser/tab design – created by Szymon Kaliski, who describes it thusly: “Cartographist is an experimental web browser optimized for rabbit-holing. Instead of opening new windows (with cmd-click), Cartographist spawns horizontally scrollable panes.Instead of forcing you to find things in a linear history, Cartographist shows a tree-structured outline of your browsing. Instead of always starting fresh, Cartographist can save, and load “trails” – the exact state of the session you’ve left – supporting researching topics over long periods of time.” If you click the link you can get a better idea from screenshots (or you can see some video of it in action here), but this strikes me as SUCH a clever way of rethinking the way in which we move through webspace.
• Watch Frame By Frame: Would you like to be able to quickly and easily scrub through a video frame-by-frame? Er, why? Nevertheless, this webpage will let you do just that with any YouTube or Vimeo url, presumably for the purposes of spotting, I don’t know, scene anomalies, or for investigating whether something’s been a edited in certain ways, or, if you’re a pervert from 1983, for catching snatched glimpses of fleeting nipples and pubes from old films. You do you!
• Films In Airplane Toilets: A reader writes! Peter Brooke Turner, to be precise, who emailed me with the following “I’m a touring musician who has started my own theatre company @attcthe which makes films in airplane toilets and which might be of interest to you?” To which my immediate answer was ‘YES PETER THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF MAD SH1T I AM INTO WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?” (I was more polite than this). Honestly, these are…very weird, but also really inventive and fun and creative, and as a way of spending time when you’re bored on a poky Airbus this feels like something more people should possibly get into (also, this feels like a GREAT music video concept waiting to happen, no?). There’s one in which someone’s filming in a tux, which strikes me as quite a strong commitment to the bit – WELL DONE PETER THIS IS VERY WEIRD.
• Jars: A whole bunch of AI-generated TV channels – AI presenters, AI voices, AI scripts, all utter gibberish, obviously, but sort-of entertaining, a bit like watching Furbys talk to each other. These are all vaguely themed around ‘formats’ – so there’s AI Dragon’s Den (sorry, ‘Shark Tank’), AI cooking…actually I have become slightly captivated by the cooking one, it’s like some sort of weird fever dream where there are near-edible recipes being described by someone who’s being hand-operated by a trainee at the Henson workshops, and where every single sentence ends ‘YES CHEF!’ regardless of whether that makes any sense or not. This might actually be brilliant, not quite sure.
• Hots & Cots: This is basically ‘Tripadvisor for the US Military establishment’, a website where serving members of the US Forces can post photos and reviews of the food and accommodation they’re given by Uncle Sam in exchange for acting as IED fodder a few years down the line. Obviously the quality of bed and board varies drastically from place to place, but a few observations: 1) based on the diets these people seem to be eating, WHERE IS THE FIBRE???; 2) portion sizes are…variable; 3) I’m sorry, if this is your writeup of the food then you have no reason to complain about anything: “This brunch smash burger was amazing. Hash brown, fried egg, caramelized onions, and maple ketchup. So delicious. They also had a section that was doing fresh pasta dishes too.” MAPLE KETCHUP? A FRESH PASTA STATION? You didn’t get this sh1t in Full Metal Jacket.
• Bookloop: Vinted, for books. Yes, I know, lazy, but a) I am running SO LATE; and b) that is literally what it is, deal with it. Scan your books’ barcodes or enter the ISBN and the site will give you a valuation for them – you can then trade them in for credit on Bookshop.org, thereby supporting indie booksellers when you spend said credits. All in all this just seems like a great setup and something that’s worth signing up for if you possibly ought to get rid of one or two tomes but can’t quite bring yourself to conduct the ceremonial burning this year.
• Design Playlists: Do you DO DESIGN? Do you like to listen to music while you do so? Would you like to listen to music selected by OTHER DESIGNERS that they think helps them DO DESIGN BETTER? Great, you’ll like this site then, as it collects, er, playlists compiled by designers to listen to while they design, to be listened to by other designers while they, in turn, design. DESIGN MORE AND FASTER, YOU FCUKS. What do you imagine all the music in these playlists sounds like? Go on, just have a guess. YOU’RE RIGHT!
• Chess Grid: Make a downloadable black and white artwork based on the chess grid – the nice gimmick here is that you can enter the specific moveset from a single match, or passage of play, and that will be reflected in the resulting piece that’s generated. Even those of you who don’t revere Magnus Carlsen might find something to love here – the aesthetic of the generated works is very strong indeed to my mind, these would make glorious prints in the right environment.
• Frankenstein: SUCH an interesting way of exploring a text, this, specifically of seeing the ways in which the text was altered between different editions of the same work. This is the Frankenstein Varorium, an online tool which allows the user to explore the text through its various incarnations, allowing you to select individual passages and see how they have evolved through different revisions of the work. ““In the case of Frankenstein, the substantive changes that MWS made in her revised edition are so extensive that many teachers and students of Frankenstein consider 1818 and 1831 as two different novels.” Scholars do not agree on a single authoritative text, though the 1818 edition became more available from the 1990s onward in teaching editions, reflecting increasing interest in the earlier versions of the text. With this project, we offer a way to explore not just two but five distinct moments in the novel’s writing and re-writing, and they do not proceed in orderly stages. The following diagram summarizes the relationships among the manuscript and published versions of Frankenstein composed between 1816 and 1831 that we worked with for this variorum project.” Obviously this is mainly of use and interest to people who, er, really want to get deep into Frankenstein, but if you’ve even a passing interest in information design then this is worth exploring because the interface is really, really nicely done.
• Weather Landscapes: Another link to something you actually need to be able to code to do anything with – SORRY SORRY SORRY – but I think the fact that this is yet ANOTHER eminently-thievable idea should be enough for you to forgive me (all I ask is absolution, and only for some of the sins). This, basically, outlines how you might go about knocking up a realtime weather data display that, rather than showing you the temperature and precipitation probabilities in boring textual fashion instead does so by rendering it as a kids’ drawing. Honestly, this is SO CHARMING and I would 100% applaud anyone pitching this sort of thing as some sort of public installation or similar – please please please can one of you do something with this?
• Street Nuns: The only thing not to love about this site is that, in the specific context in which it is here being used, ‘street’ connotes ‘walking around on the pavement’ rather than ‘incredibly streetwise and not a little threatening’. Otherwise, though, this is a perfect website – photos of nuns, out and about. As someone who had literally the most miserable 18 months of his life in Rome, I can honestly confirm that there is no set of personal circumstances so bleak that your life won’t be instantly improved by just seeing a nun, on a bus.
• Doubles: Can you multiply a number by two? Can you do it again? And again? Can you do it AGAINST THE CLOCK? This game has made me feel more stupid than almost anything else I have done this year, which is no small feat.
• A Selection Of Excellent Tiny Browser Games: The link takes you to the webpage for a recent weekend game jam – scroll to the bottom and there’s a selection of a dozen or so browsergames which I can highly recommend as an afternoon pastime, the stuntbike game in particular being INCREDIBLY ‘one more go’-ish. ENJOY!

By Percy Fortin-Wright

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS THIS SELECTION OF ‘SONGS THAT HAVE DEFINED THE DECADE SO FAR’, WHICH HAS BEEN COMPILED BY A BUNCH OF EX-PITCHFORK STAFFERS WHO THIS WEEK LAUNCHED A NEW MUSIC MAGAZINE CALLED HEARING THINGS! (WHICH YOU CAN CHECK OUT HERE)

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Servilletas: Images of paper napkins from bars, cafes, bakeries and restaurants in Spain (I think). Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT YOU INGRATES.
• Ethos, Austin: A restaurant in Austin, Texas, sharing images of its food. Except the food is all AI, the images aren’t real, the restaurant doesn’t exist…but it does have a website! And, perhaps more understandably, a merch shop! I am confused about this – not about the fact that someone’s spinning up AI images of food, more about…why? Why the website? Is this a teaser for something else? See, this is the problem with AI stuff – IT MAKES EVERYTHING CONFUSING AND UNKNOWABLE.
• DJ Ag: I love this – turns out I have actually seen DJ Ag out and about in South London before, and but this is his Insta which showcases his habit of just setting up some decks, an amp and a mic on the street and letting people come and MC with him. Some of the resulting performances here are ACE, and in general this is just one of those ‘see, this is why living in a big city is awesome and why people are at heart sort of brilliant’ things that we can all get behind (until some brand decides to make Ag the cornerstone of their next ‘activation’ and the whole thing dies a miserable death).
• The Savalavada: This is interesting – India has its own version of The Onion! Ok, fine, I’m sure India’s had a fcuktonne of satirical, humorous outlets mocking its politics and culture, but this one’s new and feels more…Onion-y. It only exists on Insta, and I confess that a lot of the humour went right over my head, but I did very much enjoy a recent headline celebrating “International Day for Really Close Female Roommates” and so I am recommending it on that basis alone.
• Insta Repeat: Thanks to Kev Lloyd for sending this to me – an insta account highlighting the inherent aesthetic sameness of shots on the platform via the medium of collages which neatly point out exactly how fcuking banal everything in your ‘September’ dump was.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Charlie Tallott

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It’s been astonishing this week to see exactly how badly a political party’s comms team can handle something – FOR FCUK’S SAKE, LABOUR PARTY COMMS PEOPLE, IT SHOULDN’T BE THIS DIFFICULT. Also, the past seven days’ succession of embarrassing revelations and gift-related gaffes have somehow managed to achieve the unthinkable and made me feel genuine pity for the PM’s kid (I’m not a monster, it’s just that, well, after seeing what Euan Blair became I’m not exactly minded to give them the benefit of the doubt), who has been roundly embarrassed to the nation which now collectively thinks of him as a fragile milquetoast who needs some sort of anechoic chamber in which to practice quadratics.

Still, it’s been fun watching people attempt to minimise all this because ‘it’s not as bad as the Tories’ – while that’s obviously true, running that line does rather make you look as though you don’t understand the first thing about the practical realities of how lobbying works and what it is that businesspeople with vested interests expect when they give generous gifts to people in positions of actual, practical power. GYAC THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE BOX AT THE EMIRATES.

Anyway, enough of this – it’s late-September, everything looks like it’s going to be exceptionally damp for approximately the next seven months, and so I am going to take a short break to vaguely-recharge what pass for my ‘batteries’ – Web Curios will return in a few weeks, probably mid-October, at which point it’s PRACTICALLY FCUKING CHRISTMAS, dear God.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can all tell me how much you’re going to miss me if you like.

By Michael McMillan, who really doesn’t seem to have any sort of online presence at all that I can find.

YOUR FIRST MUSICAL PICK THIS WEEK IS A SELECTION OF TRACKS FRONTED BY SOME SUPERB FEMALE VOCALISTS, FROM ARETHA FRANKLIN TO JOCELYN BROWN AND ALL SORTS OF OTHERS INBETWEEN, ABLY MIXED BY TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY LISTENING TO BBC RADIO4 AND THEY HAVE JUST STARTED TALKING ABOUT FURRIES AND HONESTLY I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FCUK IS HAPPENING ANYMORE, PT.1:  

By Stuart Pearson Wright

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE BEAUTIFUL NEW ALBUM BY ERLAND COOPER WHICH IS A GORGEOUS BIT OF MODERN CLASSICAL COMPOSITION AND WHICH I REALLY DO RECOMMEND VERY HIGHLY INDEED!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY LISTENING TO BBC RADIO4 AND THEY HAVE JUST STARTED TALKING ABOUT FURRIES AND HONESTLY I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FCUK IS HAPPENING ANYMORE, PT.2:  

• The Social Web Foundation: Ok, this is a bit roughage-y, but if you’re interested in the concept of the Fediverse and all that jazz then you should probably be at least aware of this newly-launched organisation. It’s self-defined mission is “growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”, and it’s going to work on a bunch of initiatives designed to help educate people as to what the Fediverse is and how to get involved with it, as well as a bunch of more technical/operational stuff around making the ecosystem better; if you’re That Sort Of Person, then they would probably appreciate you getting in touch and offering to help out.
• TinkerCad: “Tinkercad is a free web app for 3D design, electronics, and coding” says the site blurb – which is entirely true, that’s exactly what it is. It also, though, features a ‘physics’ mode which lets you build things in the designer and then apply the laws of nature to them, meaning you can actually use this as a weird little kinetic sandbox toy and which is how I found myself wasting a good 15 minutes yesterday when I was meant to be writing about AI and jobs (lol, we are SO FCUKED!) and instead spent the time making an elaborate domino rally-type experience in virtual space and repeatedly knocking the dominos over and laughing like some sort of vaguely-troubled, massive child.
• Social Communication: This is really interesting – a resource produced by Truman State University in the US and designed as a series of resources for people who perhaps have difficulty with ‘normal’ social interactions and communication and may therefore need some assistance in parsing the cues and mores of what passes for ‘polite society’. Per the ‘about’ section, “This site is written directly for you, the person with social communication challenges. We hope you find it useful. (If you are someone else, please see the notes intended for different audiences below.) It’s not just people with autism or nonverbal learning disorder or social anxiety disorder who have social communication problems, but lots of intelligent people who have spent their lives with their noses in books or faces fixed firmly on the computer screen or doing other solitary activities.  Most of the people who get labeled “nerd” or “geek” have social communication challenges. So we’re not really interested in whether you have any sort of diagnosis, or if, like Sheldon, your mammas had you tested.The only assumption we tried to make about you is that you’re a competent speaker of English, reasonably intelligent, not a young child, probably somewhat frustrated by persistent miscommunications and therefore interested in learning more about how most Americans interpret social signals. (A lot of what is written here will be relevant for other English-speaking countries, but there will be some cultural differences.)” Now, I am not for a SECOND assuming anything about the potential likely readership of a massively-overlong weekly newsletter about ‘quite geeky stuff on the internet’, I’m just leaving this here for ENTIRELY-UNRELATED reasons.
• Bird Photographer of the Year 2024: I feel I ought to open with a slight warning here, because while you might expect the winning image in a contest entitled ‘bird photographer of the year’ would be one celebrating, I don’t know, the beauty of avian flight, say, or the glorious plumage and colours of a tropical species, this year the judges have decided to award the big gong to what is a photo of several thousand very dead birds, and as such the first thing you’re confronted with on clicking is, well, DEAD THINGS. Ngl, bit jarring (although it is a very striking image – on reflection, an infelicitous choice of word on my part as you will realise when you click through and see exactly what the image is depicting). Anyway, scroll past the corpses and you’ll see LOADS of nice pictures of birds in happier, significantly less dead, times – there’s one shot of a penguin inside a wave which is particularly impressive.
• Jamstart: This is a nice idea; Jumpstart hooks up to your Spotify account and presents you with guitar tabs for whatever you’re listening to, the idea being that you can play along as you listen – there’s a subscription layer to this, but there’s also a free tier meaning you can play around with it a bit and see what you think; I am, per previous Curios, completely musically talentless and as such have no idea if this works or is any good but, well, what the fcuk do you want from me? I just bring you the links ffs, you want me to chew your food for you as well? Jesus.
• The Bellingcat OSINT Toolkit: This is quite the resource – pioneers of the whole ‘anyone can investigate anything thanks to the web’ thing, Bellingcat, this week launched the latest version of their online investigation toolkit designed to offer anyone the tools they need to…well, investigate stuff. You want tools to help you find information on individuals and businesses? You want stuff to help you identify location data from images? You want a frankly slightly-terrifying selection of tools to help you track people down across every single platform you can possibly conceive of? GREAT! Per their writeup, “Have you ever struggled to find a tool that does exactly what you need? Do you know the feeling of spending hours trying to figure out how to use a tool just to realise that the key features you are interested in are not working anymore, or that the previously free product has turned into a paid one that is more expensive than you can afford? You are not alone. More than 80 percent of open source researchers that participated in two Bellingcat surveys indicated that finding the right tools can be challenging. This is where our new Online Investigations Toolkit comes in: it not only helps you discover tools in categories like satellite imagery and maps, social media, transportation or archiving, but is also designed to help researchers learn how to use each tool by providing in-depth descriptions, common use cases and information on requirements and limitations for each toolkit entry.” This is, broadly, A Good Thing, though I couldn’t help but think as I was writing the description that many of these tools could equally be used for…potentially quite creepy purposes. Still, let’s not think about that, it will make us sad.
• Francesco D’Isa: I’ve used one of this artist’s images in Curios this week, but wanted to include a specific link to their website and work because this is one of the more interesting examples of AI art I’ve seen in recent years; while the images are generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, they’re then manipulated in such a way that they don’t *quite* have that by-now-typical ‘AI image’ sheen/vibe to them, and as such these work as artworks in a way in which I don’t typically feel that the machine ‘originals’ do; your mileage will of course vary, but I do rather like these.
• Panels: You may have seen this week that the world’s most famous ‘tech influencer’, YouTuber Marques Brownlee, has this week LAUNCHED AN APP! You might also have seen people clowning on it because, well, it’s fcuking dogsh1t! This is the app – Panels is a very odd throwback to c.2011, offering you the opportunity to, er, subscribe and receive WALLPAPER IMAGES FOR YOUR PHONE! Yes, that’s right, you can pay an already-rich man a monthly stipend in order to access a selection of bland-looking vaguely-abstract digital images which are seemingly indistinguishable from every single other tasteful, HD image that comes up when you just put ‘hi res phone wallpaper’ into Google. WHO IS THIS FOR? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT IT? And yet, as Garbage Ryan pointed out this week, people are downloading this quite a lot, which suggests that a) there are a lot of people who really don’t understand how ‘searching for stuff’ online works, which I find baffling; b) who don’t realise that this is one of the usecases where AI image generators are actually pretty good; c) really, really love Marques Brownlee and want to keep him in boxfresh kicks. I did for a moment this week try and imagine what sort of app I might make for YOU, loyal reader of Curios, but the resulting ideas got VERY dark very quickly and I think it’s probably best if I don’t share them with you for all our collective sanities.
• Tripmates: This is a PR/promo/linkbait thing by money saving portal HotDealsUK – which has evidently worked as I am linking to it here! Well done, HotDealsUK! Still, this does look legitimately useful and is the sort of thing that if I were in my 20s and of an age where I still went on holiday with friends (rather than in my 40s and of an age where all my friends have selfishly had fcuking children and for some reason seem less keen on me tagging along and smoking at their darling progeny) I would probably find really useful. This basically lets you send an anonymous survey to everyone who might go on a group holiday, letting them specify what they want from the experience (amenities, facilities, pricepoint, etc) in a SAFE SPACE, without getting into a p1ssy argument with Tracey about whether or not ‘300 inflatable flamingos’ is a non-negotiable; it also helps with tricky conversations around budgets without anyone having to feel like the embarrassing povvo in the room, which feels like A Good Thing.
• Gobi: This week’s “Oh, an AI product that made a small part of my soul wither and die when I first saw it!” link is Gobi, which bills itself as “your lifelong well-being partner”, a phrase so utterly miserable that I just had to take myself to the bathroom and give myself a pep talk in the mirror before being able to come back and continue typing. This is exactly the sort of service that is going to be steamrollered by a big LLM model in the next year or so – why the fcuk do you need a separate app when you can do exactly the same thing by voicechatting with ChatGPT (or Claude, or Nazi Nick your personally-trained on-phone instance of LLama!) – but I am more interested in what it’s promising and what the offer is. Per the blurb, “Gobi works as your AI companion, continuously learning from your daily interactions to support your overall well-being. It checks in with you regularly, engaging in conversations to understand your current state, track your moods, activities, and challenges. Using this information, Gobi provides 24/7 personalized support by offering wellness tips, and real-time insights. Over time, Gobi evolves with you, adjusting its recommendations and insights to better fit your needs, ensuring you always have the right tools to enhance your well-being.” On the homepage there are a series of ‘real world usecase examples’, one of which shows the app asking ‘how is your date going? Need any help?’ which is SO FCUKING RIDICULOUS – I mean, what’s the app going to do if you tell it your date is a cnut and you hate the sound when he chews? – but I can’t help but be slightly discomfited by how obviously this tech is being sold to us as ‘the friend we never knew we needed’ (more of which in the longreads, should you be interested in this particularly miserable line of enquiry).
• Spotlist: This is an interesting adjunct to the boom in CURATION which I have read a frankly tedious amount about in the past year – you’re doubtless aware that people giving their recommendations for EVERYTHING is the new hotness in newsletterland; well Spotlist is an web version of that, which encourages you to make your own personally-curated lists of ‘stuff I think is good’ across any number of categories, share them with your network and, possibly, monetise them! There’s something quite horrible about this, to my mind – not the ‘recommendations’ thing but the fact that this is very clearly coming at it from the point of view not of ‘share things you like’ but of ‘monetise your interests! Become an influencer!’ which, honestly, is miserable. Also, this wants you to pay a fee to make your recommendations public, which suggests to me it’s doomed to failure and irrelevance, and I have to say I’m not exactly sad about that.
• Meco: This is interesting – not wholly novel, but I can imagine some of you might find it of use/interest. Meco is an app (web and iOS, Android coming soon) which basically acts as a separate home for all your newsletters, sparing your inbox from clutter and creating a digital space for ‘ignoring web curios every seven days’ – all your newsletters sit in one place, you can make notes and clip bits from them in a dedicated ‘notes’ bit of the app, it will do audio summaries of that day’s missives should you so desire, and there’s a bit of recommendation engine stuff in there too; personally I don’t need another fcuking platform to look at, but for those of you who don’t mind having to open 37 different apps to manage your life then this might be of interest.
• 15 Minute Cities: Presuming you’re not some sort of chemtrail-bothering, Soros-hating microchip conspiracist (and if you are, how the fcuk did you end up here?), you will probably appreciate the broad concept of the 15-minute city as a sensible approach to urban living; this site is a really useful resource which offers information about cities worldwide and how closely they cleave to the 15 minute ideal. You can search for a specific city or instead navigate using the map view; the data’s surprisingly granular, so if you’re looking at (for example) moving to a new place, this is a really useful way of gauging how convenient or otherwise access to essential amenities will be (or how much you’re going to be controlled by the NEFARIOUS, CONTROLLING SUPERSTATE, either/or).
• What Came First?: A little game from Google which basically slightly rips off a bunch of other, slightly more fun, timeline-based games from years past, but which I’m going to give a pass to because, well, I sort of love Google Arts and Culture a bit. You’re presented with two things, and you just have to pick WHICH CAME FIRST in history – you get three lives, and you have to try and get as many points as possible. Some of the juxtapositions are quite nice – was Hugh Jackman born before or after All About Eve was released in cinemas? – and generally this is a nice, gentle way to spend five minutes while you wait for the kettle to boil or contemplate your own inevitable senescence.
• Guess The Game: This is, to my mind, fcuking IMPOSSIBLE, but you may have a better and deeper knowledge of videogames than me. You’re presented with six details from a game screenshot in turn, and with each one you’re invited to guess the title – each wrong guess sees you given a new screenshot and a new nugget of info (metacritic score, release year, genre, etc) to theoretically help you along, but, honestly, the details you get shown are so zoomed-in that this is far too hard for my simple, non-visual brain.
• Alphaguess: Guess the word each day by narrowing down its position in the dictionary – each guess sees you get told whether the actual word you’re looking for comes before or after your guess in the dictionary, and you use this to slowly narrow down your options. This is surprisingly fun, although today’s is proving irritatingly hard and so I am in something of a sulk with the site at present.
• Echo Chess: The final game this week is this excellent little daily puzzler loosely based on chess – thankfully for me, though, the world’s least-competent chess player, you don’t actually need to be any good at the game to be able to play this. I can’t be bothered to try and explain it – yes, ok, in part this is laziness on my part, but it’s just easier to play and pick up, honest – but I promise you it’s fun and you might want to add it to your daily rotation.

By Francesco D’Isa

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS GENUINELY ODD BUT SURPRISINGLY ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD SELECTION OF TRACKS MIXED FROM THE AUDIO THAT USED TO ACCOMPANY THE PROCESSION OF CEEFAX PAGES THAT WERE SHOWN ON TELLY IN THE DEAD HOURS WHEN THERE WAS NO PROGRAMMING ON AND WHICH ENDS UP BEING A REALLY GOOD SORT OF VAPOURWAVE ALBUM WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Riders NYC: A newish Insta feed, via Kottke, where photographer Adam DiCarlo snaps bike riders as they emerge from one end of the Williamsburg bridge in NY. So far only one of the photos depicts someone who looks EXACTLY what you’d imagine someone cycling over the Williamsburg bridge to look like, but give it time.
• Aurore: Smut! Actual smut, on Insta! Aurore is, I think, an ‘erotic magazine’ or journal or something – I have just checked, it is! You have to pay $70 a year but there seems to be loads of filth on there if ‘literary erotica’ is your thing, and it seems very femme-focused – and this is its Insta feed, which I am including mainly because I didn’t realise you could get away with this sort of stuff on a Meta-owned platform. Not QUITE full nudity, but definitely a bit closer to it than most of what you see there. TASTEFUL PROTOBONGO!
• Synthetic Pink: Via former editor Paul comes this Insta feed of genuinely unpleasant – no, really, I am not joking, this stuff is really quite viscerally horrible – AI-generated images, which you will OBVIOUSLY recognise from last week’s longread from Sean Monaghan about the new AI aesthetic. I can’t stress enough, these are REALLY REALLY NOT NICE TO LOOK AT (obviously I love them).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Kasia Mrożewska

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I ought to be in Slovenia right now, hanging out with nice internet people and thinking about nice internet things, but instead I am in my kitchen in London, in my pants, a bit tired and hungover and generally feeling quite resentful at the fact that things like ‘needing to earn money to eat’ have prevented me from travelling to Naive Yearly. To all those of you who are there today, I hope you have fun – but not too much, so as to assuage my feelings of bitter jealousy and mild resentment.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you could at least pretend to be grateful that I’ve spaffed out yet another one of these for your delectation (what do you mean ‘I didn’t ask for this, why must you continue to foist this sh1t on me?).

By Alejandro Peters

START THIS WEEK’S WEB CURIOS EXPERIENCE WITH THE BLEEPS, BLOOPS AND BEATS OF FORMER EDITOR PAUL’S LATEST TECH-TRANCE MIX! 

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS YOU ALL USE THE FACECAM LINK BELOW TO MESS WITH THE HEADS OF ANY ELDERLY RELATIVES YOU MAY HAVE LEFT UNDER THE GUISE OF ‘TRAINING THEM TO SPOT SCAMS’, PT.1:  

By Randy Ortiz

NEXT, PLEASE ENJOY ANOTHER SUPERB SELECTION OF OBSCURE, TUNEFUL, WONDERFULLY-MIXED TRACKS FROM GENUINE MASTER OF VINYL SADEAGLE! 

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS YOU ALL USE THE FACECAM LINK BELOW TO MESS WITH THE HEADS OF ANY ELDERLY RELATIVES YOU MAY HAVE LEFT UNDER THE GUISE OF ‘TRAINING THEM TO SPOT SCAMS’, PT.2:  

• Non-User Events: I LOVE THIS IT IS PROPER INTERNET ART. “(non-)user events is a collaged interface that navigates personal internet experiences by quoting and close-knitting HTML elements from Polina’s browsing history. These elements, gathered from sites she visited in June 2024, are entangled in a grid-like structure, searching for areas of friction and excess, inviting viewers to move beyond seamless user experiences into poetic space where new meanings are possible. Polina views HTML elements as events that unfold through time, knitting the practices of our daily lives. What world does each element create when we return to it day after day? (non-)user events is part of Polina Lobanova’s computer is a feeling journey, where she asks herself and friends what “computer-feeling” is and what it could possibly be, focusing on intimate experiences with computing devices.”” Honestly, there’s something weird and poetic and strangely…lonely? about this, the rendering of semi-familiar webcopy in this disassociated format, and it made me think that it’s weird and, frankly, disappointing, that so few artists working in the space around our relationship with the web, and html, get the attention and recognition they I am personally convinced they deserve.
• Small World In Video: I’ve regularly featured Nikon’s Small World photo contest – awarding prizes to images capturing REALLY SMALL ORGANISMS – in Curios over the years, but in recent years they’ve expanded the contest to include videos of said REALLY SMALL ORGANISMS, and I am personally FASCINATED by this stuff – the second-placed film shows individual water droplets evaporating off a butterfly’s wings, and I am personally incapable of believing that it is real and not CG footage. SO INCREDIBLY SMALL!
• Little Planets: Look, I’m not going to ask questions about why you might want to create a private, non-logged, entirely-ephemeral web-based chat space which will vanish forever, leaving no trace, after 7 days or when you decide to kill it (whichever comes first); I am not suggesting that the only reasonable need you might have for this sort of thing is if you’re doing something very, very illegal or likely to very much upset someone; I am not for a SECOND implying that only some sort of adulterer or crimmo might be the only viable target market for a service like this. That said, be aware that if you bookmark this I will judge you (I mean, I’ll never know, but you get the idea).
• Courts: I don’t quite understand WHY the lovely dataviz wizards at The Pudding have created this, but it pleases me immoderately that they have. Courts is their latest webproject which, for reasons that remain unclear, collects aerial images of every single basketball court in the US; you can search by specific location, or sort by the colour of the court, or just scroll around and look at the 50,000+ courts here listed…having said I didn’t understand why this exists, it turns out I just didn’t pay attention when I found this earlier in the week; the idea is that the project will collect stories, anecdotes and memories about each of the courts, in theory building up a picture of the communities that exist around public spaces like these and how each court is its own social space with its own history and mythology and heroes and villains, and that feels like a wonderful and generally laudable idea, and something which, honestly, the FA could do worse than look at and copy for football pitches in the UK because, seriously, I think that could do rather well.
• Take A Selfie With Your Herbs: A website collecting images of people that they have snapped with herbs. Want to look at a bunch of (presumably) total strangers, posing happily with, say, basil? OH GOOD! The photos suggest it’s mainly a small group of friends participating in this, but there’s an email to submit your own herb-related selfie at the bottom of the page so I look forward to checking in in a month or so’s time and seeing a bunch of YOU on there, brandishing some tarragon and grinning wildly (should you decide to participate in this, please do try and squeeze in some small reference to Curios in your photo, maybe by, I don’t know, inking ‘Web Curios’ onto your forehead in permanent marker).
• Selleb: This is very much ‘not really my sort of thing’, but I am intrigued by its existence and how it speaks to the very much growing trend of ‘shopping curators’ as a newsletter niche – Selleb is literally a newsletter which exists to show you what ‘cool’ people have bought recently. That’s it – it’s like digging through the bin receipts of a niche subset of internet hipsters, and, if I’m honest, the naked, shallow consumerism here makes me feel…quite queasy, but then I am very much NOT the target audience for this and I am sure that the creators would find Curios a baffling and pointless endeavour were they ever to stumble across it, so. Here’s the blurb, should you want a better idea of the sort of vibe you’re getting here: “Selleb is a discovery app (currently in beta) where you can snoop on what the coolest people on the internet are ACTUALLY (!) buying/loving/consuming — with receipts to prove it. Call it (rear) window shopping on steroids. If you’re subscribed to our newsletter, you’re also automatically on the waitlist for app access. We hit your inbox twice a week. The Sunday edition serves up anything from travel to fashion to skincare to restaurants. The Wednesday edition features 5 tastemakers sharing receipts of things they’ve recently bought and the juicy stories behind them. Past guests have included Serena Kerrigan, Willa Bennett of Highsnobiety, Throwing Fits, Junia Lin, tinyjewishgirl, sssssoupsssss, Susan Alexandra, Jason Diamond, ellapottersays, Gia Kuan, Jeremy Cohen, hellotefi, dadaeats, the creators of Industry, the founders of MSCHF, StockX, Vine, Siberia Hills, etc…” – ngl, I have no fcuking clue who any of those people are other than Vine and MSCHF, but, well, maybe you’re younger and ‘cooler’ than I am and this speaks to you on a deep, spiritual level.
• Cat Bounce: This feels like a weird throwback to c.2003, but is seemingly not actually that old – anyway, this is a webpage where a bunch of cats drop from the top of the screen; they bounce. You can grab them, and throw them, and, well, that’s it, but who doesn’t want the opportunity to hurl digital felines around a browser window? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Love Me Or Not: Another link from Kris, Love Me Or Not is a sort of digital poem by Alicia Guo – taking the ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ petal-picking game as a conceptual starting point, the user is invited to answer a series of questions and prompts, which over time resolve themselves into a kind of verse; each question you’re asked and choice you make leaves its vague memory on the page, like discarded petals, and there’s something gorgeous about the way each person to experience this will create their own unique poem as they move through the site.
• Nothing: A website to encourage you to do, well, nothing. I’m going to reproduce the blurb here in full, because, well, it explains everything far better than my mangled prose would: “Nothing—a timer that tracks your intentional choice to do… nothing. No goals to chase, no notifications clamoring for your attention, no pressure to fill the silence with productivity. It simply exists, quietly counting each second you allow to pass. This is a space where inactivity is the point—a digital oasis amidst the chaos of endless tasks and to-dos. Yet the essence of Nothing isn’t about fixating on your screen, though you’re welcome to if you wish. It’s about setting aside your phone or computer, taking a step back from the relentless grind, and reconnecting with the world around you. Nothing is more a concept than an app—a quiet reflection rather than a tool to be used. It stands as a gentle rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action. Stay as long as you like, watch the seconds tick away, or let your gaze wander elsewhere. There’s no reward for lingering, just the peculiar pleasure of simply being. Sometimes, the most profound act is to pause, breathe, and do nothing at all—a reminder that it’s perfectly acceptable to embrace stillness and just… be.” Ngl, I just lost 72 seconds to this and it was quite a struggle to drag myself back to the GDoc and continue spaffing out the words (it is 0913am and I am FCUKING TIRED).
• Alien Project: Another in the long list of ‘links I have featured in Curios that I genuinely don’t really understand but which I am including in the vague hope that maybe one of you will be able to make sense of’, Alien Project is software which will apparently let you ‘simulate’ digital organisms. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA! Still, I very much enjoy the feature list, which I will reproduce here for your enjoyment: “Interactive physics simulation of damageable and glueable soft bodies and fluids! Genetic system and neural networks for simulating digital organisms and evolution! Built-in graph and genome editor for designing own agents and environments!” GLUEABLE SOFT BODIES AND FLUIDS! I mean, I have literally no clue what that practically means (or what a ‘gluable body’ might in fact be) but now I really want to find out. As far as I can tell from watching a few of the (rather beautiful) videos, this basically lets you simulate microorganisms, but, honestly, your guess is as good as mine – that said, the video I just watched contains a subtitle reading ‘some of them have developed extremities to capture fast-moving competitors’, which has now put me in mind of bioengineering some sort of mad bacteria and sounds VERY cool indeed.
• My Outdoor Archive: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but that of one Daniel Ding, who is using this page to record every hike he does; details of where, a few photos, a link to the specific trail taked on Alltrails…I really like this, just a small, simple record of Stuff Daniel Has Done, not through Strava or some sort of mediated dataharvesting portal but as a personal webproject showing a small sliver of his life. More of this sort of thing, please – actually, as an aside, it does feel rather like the past year or so has seen a small uptick in the number of projects like this,  people just recording ostensibly-mundane elements of their life, or their hobbies or passions, on non-standard platforms; the sort of thing which maybe a decade ago people would have put on Insta, but which doesn’t necessarily feels like it has a some on the socials anymore.
• Scrambled Maps: This is a VERY simple, stripped-back experience but it’s quite a fun addition to your daily puzzle routine – Scrambled Maps asks you to rearrange a selection of 18 tiles so as to recompose a section of map somewhere in the world. This is…quite annoyingly hard, actually, but surprisingly satisfying.
• Eightile: ANOTHER daily puzzle, this one based on anagrams – the game is very simple, described on the homepage as “Make words using all the letters. Each right answer adds a letter. Find the 8-letter word to win.” There’s a time limit, and while it starts (obviously) very easy, I found myself struggling a bit during the later rounds which proves exactly why my ex used to beat me at Scrabble every fcuking time we played.
• Limbo Today: This is GREAT – utterly pointless in the best way. Limbo requires you to do ONE THING each day – to guess the lowest number that NOONE ELSE will guess. That is literally it, and I love it (although I would like them to implement a feature that will ping you with that day’s result, please, thankyou).
• Croquet Conundrum: A puzzle game which requires you to get the ball through the croquet hoops in a certain, limited number of hits, and which starts easy and (far too quickly for my liking if I’m honest) quickly becomes incredibly fcuking frustrating to the point where I had to click away before I did some sort of frustration-related damage to my laptop.
• 50/50: Do you remember the early days of the iPhone, when things like this app were literally the most exciting thing EVER, and people were tapping away at Cut The Rope and Fruit Ninja as though their very lives depended on it? Wouldn’t it have been nice if we’d just sort of stopped the smartphone thing there and then? Anyway, 50/50 reminds me of that era of games – it has one simple premise, to whit ‘divide the object in half as exactly as possible’ and, well, that’s it, but it’s strangely-compelling and has a very ‘one more go’ feel to it (or at least it definitely does when, as I did, you have some incredibly fcuking tedious work to do and literally anything is more appealing than ‘messing around with Mailchimp’).
• Cosmobeat: OH GOD THIS IS BRILLIANT. Seriously, this is VERY fun and clever and also a complete fcuking nightmare to control, which is part of the charm. Do you remember QWOP? Of course you do! This is basically like that, but for dancing – your job in this browser-based demo for a forthcoming full game is to DANCE YOUR FCUKING SOCKS OFF, scoring points for your moves and being on-beat and all that jazz, with the gimmick that you control your dancer using six separate keys, each corresponding to a limb, their torso or their head, which leads you a brilliant, weird, mess of fingers as you attempt to make your avatar move in vaguely-rhythmic fashion and score points. Honestly, this is SO MUCH FUN and really quite addictive, and the dancing looks and feels WONDERFUL (I am possibly enthusing about this so much because in real life I dance like someone who’s in the early stages of Guillain-Barré syndrome). This is very hard – another game that feels weirdly like rubbing your belly and patting your head simultaneously – but SO nicely-designed and generally just a really enjoyable way to waste 20m.
• Play DOS Games: Finally this week, ANOTHER website offering you a ridiculous selection of old PC games from the 80s, 90s and 00s in your browser – this one, though, is distinguished by how fcuking obscure a lot of the titles here are, things I have never previously heard of, a bunch of old shareware titles from Apogee and the like alongside some old boomer-shooters and VERY shonky sports titles and, honestly, this really is a strange little corner of games from THE PAST and will trigger some really quite forgotten memories if you’re of a certain vintage (ie if you are me).

By Yoon A Mi

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS SO INTENSELY-80s-INFLECTED THAT IT WILL MAGICALLY TRANSPORT YOU TO MIAMI VICE-ERA FLORIDA AND YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ALMOST SMELL THE BRUT, AND IT IS BY LEXX! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Dummy Creation: A feed of AI images – yes, I know, I know, but whoever’s doing this has quite a nice eye and a degree of control over the corners of latent space they’re spelunking in, and while, yes, these all have the familiar patina of Midjourney/Flux, there’s something pleasingly-malevolent about the overall vibe here.
• Andy Thomas: Andy Thomas is a digital artist who makes all sorts of different types of work which he then posts on his Insta feed – he’s currently doing something involving creating digital visualisations of birdsong and the resulting videos are GORGEOUS and I can’t stress enough how much these just WORK and how beautiful they are, and how once you’ve seen one you will sort of have this in your head as the default way in which all birdsong should be visualised for evermore.
• Afffirmations: Motivational images and phrases to make you feel better about the slow, ceaseless trudge towards death!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jess Allen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Sincere thanks to all of you who emailed me last week to, er, check that I wasn’t about to do some sort of internet-induced harm to myself – don’t worry! If I do *that* I’ll put the livestream link in that week’s Curios so that ‘MY COMMUNITY’ can join in the fun!

(seriously though, it’s all authorial pose! I love the web! It’s not like some sort of appalling addiction or dependency or something, or a gaping void in my life that I’m filling with information in the absence of anything else that works!)

I hope you’ve all had good weeks, in any case, and that you have fun things planned for the weekend – I had to spend more of it than I would ordinarily have liked staring into the abyss of AI-generated bongo (no, really, I did! For an actual job!) and so I am going to go out now and gaze at the waters of the Thames in the potentially-vain hope that they will somehow cause me to forget all the terrible, dead-eyed ‘sexy’ pictures.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you will almost certainly want to thank me for the Now! playlist.

By Amie Dicke

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH THE  WELCOME RETURN OF SADEAGLE, WITH A MIX OF JAZZ AND RELATED STUFF FROM HIS CORNISH CAVE OF RECORDS!

THE SECTION WHICH CONCEDES THAT OP HAS A POINT HERE BUT WHICH ALSO CAN’T HELP BUT REALLY, REALLY LOVE ALL THE REPLIES THAT ARE BASICALLY ‘YEAH FCUK OFF WE DON’T LIKE YOUR SORT’, PT.1:

By Pale Flare

THIS NEXT SELECTION OF MUSIC IS VERY MUCH NOT MY SORT OF THING, BUT I IMAGINE THAT THERE WILL BE SOME OF YOU FOR WHOM A COLLECTION OF EVERY SINGLE SONG THAT HAS EVER APPEARED ON A ‘NOW’ COMPILATION, A COLLECTION SPANNING MORE THAN 24H OF SONGS, WILL BE SOME SORT OF INCREDIBLY-EARLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT! 

THE SECTION WHICH CONCEDES THAT OP HAS A POINT HERE BUT WHICH ALSO CAN’T HELP BUT REALLY, REALLY LOVE ALL THE REPLIES THAT ARE BASICALLY ‘YEAH FCUK OFF WE DON’T LIKE YOUR SORT’, PT.2:

• Cada: Ok, the second of this week’s ‘links which are basically just taking you to a shop, for which apologies again but, well, it’s practically Christmas (SORRY) and you will probably need to think about presents soon, so actually I am doing you a favour what the FCUK are you complaining about?’, this is something which may well be OLD NEWS to people who are either parents or modelmaking enthusiasts but which to me was an exciting new world of modular bricks. Cada appears to be a Chinese(?)  model-making system, almost-but-not-totally-unlike LEGO – it seems a *bit* more complex, but the real draw (for me, at least) was the odd licensing deals they appear to have made with real-world companies like, er, Shell. Want to have a complicated, multi-part assembly model of, er, an actual Shell forecourt? GREAT! There are also OFFICIALLY LICENSED models of all sorts of car brands and the like, should that be more your thing, but I personally couldn’t get over the image of diminutive plutocrat Wael Sawan having the licensed Shell motorway services shop on his desk and playing with it contemplatively while his extractive minions set the world on fire.
• Things In…: Ordinarily I don’t believe AI travel planning services are in any way a valuable thing – all they seem to do is point you towards either the most obvious and popular destinations in any given city, or alternatively ones that don’t in fact exist – but this seems to work…marginally better. No idea how it’s working under the hood, but it feels reasonable to assume that there’s some vague LLM-related plumbing under the hood. Anyway, tell it where you are going and it will think a bit and then spit out a bunch of recommendations around visitor attractions, food, places to stay and general tips. If you try it for a big city it will be very generic (although I thought the restaurant recommendations for London were better than you usually get with these things), but if you try it on somewhere more obscure it’s surprisingly not-terrible.  I *think* it’s pulling stuff based on a combination of LLM suggestions and Google reviews(?), but I would be genuinely fascinated to know quite how it’s all put together.
• Great Ball Contraptions: It is a source of no little shame to me as a man of 44 years that I started sniggering to myself as I typed those words, but, well, I also think it’s important to be honest about one’s failings. Have you ever wanted to “participate in the fun of Great Ball Contraptions”? Would, er, you like some more detail as to exactly what ‘great ball contraptions’ are? Here: “A great ball contraption (GBC) is a machine which receives soccer balls or basketballs from one module and passes them to another module, rather like a bucket brigade. Modules built according to the GBC standard can be assembled into a collaborative display without pre-planning or modification. The GBC standard is minimal, permitting the builder great flexibility in designing the mechanism by which balls are moved from the input to the output. The otherwise pointless handling of balls, and the myriad ways this is accomplished, gives great ball contraptions the impression of a Rube Goldberg machine.” So basically a GBC (if I only type the initials I don’t start giggling, turns out) is a machine designed to move stuff, pointlessly, often made of LEGO or similar building system. This is sadly light on videos, but there are LOTS of instructions should you want to spend this weekend monopolising your kids’ LEGO sets for a project that will not interest them in the slightest while you ignore them and their lonely tears.
• 50Watts: I am pretty sure that I featured this YEARS ago when it was on a different url, but I was sent it this week by reader Hyunsuh Kim (thankyou Hyunsuh!) and it’s lovely. It’s “a growing archive of weird and wonderful visual ephemera from around the world”, and there is SO MUCH rich visual inspiration in here, with hundreds of posts themed around a particular artist or illustrator or theme or style, and if you’re someone who works in publishing or design (or, er, design for publishing!) then I think this will be hugely up your street.
• TuneShine: Our final (promise) nakedly-commercial link of the week is this – an honestly very, very cool piece of product design which I can imagine having a certain number of middle-aged dads amongst you reaching for their wallets (do YOU live in Walthamstow? Do YOU call it ‘the Village’? Yes, YOU!). TuneShine is basically an LED art display – handmade (they know their audience, these people) in LOVELY WOOD with an LED-enabled front panel, this basically displays a lo-fi, lo-res version of the album art for whatever’s playing on your streaming service of choice (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) – effectively a sort of domestic artwork/what’s on display, a bit like a digital version of those stands on which you put the cover of whatever vinyl you’re currently playing. Very much the sort of thing that you might have found in a dot com office in Shoreditch c.2010-13 (RIP TECH CITY) which would inevitably been ruined when some bright spark decided to do mephedrone off it after coming back to the office for afters following Silicon Drinkabout. Anyway, one for your Christmas lists – it’s not cheap at 200 dollars, but it’s *very* pretty.
• The Railway Movie Database: Ok, so I had this on the list this week but I confess to not having properly dug into it just now (yes, this is a glimpse behind the authorial curtain – you SEE the sort of preparation that goes into every edition of Web Curios? This is why I could never ask for money for this sh1t), and I just checked the ‘About’ section and got unexpectedly incredibly emo about it (it’s 9:04am, this is normally when the fatiguetears start to come in waves). It is clear that this person REALLY CARES about trains and railways, and as a result of that intense passion has decided to create, and maintain, this website which contains an absolutely INCREDIBLE amount of information about the train stations of the UK and Ireland and which, if any, films and television series they have featured in. If I were to quibble I would like the ability to be able to browse by station rather than by film – THIS IS NOT A COMPLAINT, just a statement of preference! – but, honestly, I am slightly in awe of the amount of effort that has obviously gone into this, and the fact that it’s still being maintained in 2024. The person behind this is one Jonathan Horswell, who I think is doing God’s work in some small way.
• Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: Do you remember the days before every fcuker in the world had a fcuking podcast? God, they were good days, weren’t they? Anyway, in that strange, halcyon period, rather than recording baggy, poorly-edited and unfunny conversations between friends that noone else never, ever needed to hear, people instead committed their not-particularly-funny musings to…er…baggy, poorly-edited webpages instead! I have a strange feeling that this website might have been VERY FAMOUS in the early days of the mass internet – one of the original viral sensations – but I have only a fleeting recollection and, honestly, I am not going to Google this because there’s every likelihood that I would fall into a terrible researchhole and never emerge. Still, this website from…what, the late-90s/early-00s? Anyway, it collects things that the author (apparently English) and his girlfriend (German) have argued about – I appreciate that what I am about to type here is a bit glass houses, for which apologies, but the writing isn’t very funny and the observations are kind-of banal…I find it interesting, though, because a) it’s an archive of a DIFFERENT TIME (I do not think the author would have enjoyed going viral with a lot of these observations in 2024, put it that way); b) it’s an interesting artefact of THE PAST WEB; and c) it’s literally EXACTLY the contents of a significant number of podcasts, many of them hosted by couples, which proves that there is nothing new under the sun and that this sh1t has honestly never been that funny so can we please stop now? Thanks.
• A Single Div: An OLD design project by Lynn Fisher, demonstrating a bunch of pretty things you can do with a well-crafted bit of CSS. There’s some lovely webdesign stuff in here which might prove pleasingly-inspirational; alternatively you can just scroll and stare, slack-jawed, at PRETTY THINGS ON YOUR SCREEN, which is very much my approach to it.
• Nights On Earth: Ooh, I like this rather a lot. As the nights are drawing in – I woke up this morning to write Curios and it was PRACTICALLY DARK, which, honestly, I wasn’t wholly psychologically ready for – it seems appropriate to share something you can do with the night skies (although in England in winter those night skies tend to be accompanied by heavy cloud cover so, er, perhaps this is a pointless endeavour). Click the link, tell the site where you are, and it will present you with a *really* nicely-designed monthly calendar view, where on each day you’ll see a small graphical guide to what you might expect to see in the nigh sky that night (presuming, you know, there are no clouds, and you live in the middle of nowhere rather than in central London where it never actually gets dark properly) – so for example I can tell you that there’s an increased chance of aurora events tonight (not that we’ll see them, but), or that there’s a full moon AND supermoon next Wednesday, that sort of thing. Aside from anything else, the design/webwork on this is really very pleasing indeed – also, though, it makes me quite upset that I haven’t seen any shooting stars this year, might have to rectify that.
• Sunlitt: Seeing as we’re doing ‘celestial stuff’ (SEAMLESS, I tell you), here’s an app which will show you the position of the sun (and the relative shadows cast by buildings anywhere in the world) at any point in the day – this is SO PRETTY and so nicely-designed (or at least it *looks* pretty and nicely-designed, it’s another iOS-only app, the fcukers), and while I can’t immediately think why you would need this information with you wherever you go I like to imagine that at least one of you will be able to find some sort of use for it (planning photoshoots? Beach trips? Walks when on holiday? Yeah, ok, that sort of thing).
• Presidential Ham: As we wait with bated breath for the fcuking Americans to finally do their fcuking democracy and stop sucking up all of the rest of the world’s news oxygen, why not pass the time with this gallery featuring paintings of every single US President, each accessorised with, er, a ham. George Washington, holding a ham! Grover Cleveland, holding a ham! Barack Obama, holding a ham! WHO WILL HOLD THE HAM NEXT? There’s a ‘Joe Biden holding a ham…coming soon!’ placeholder at the bottom of the page, suggesting both the site owner’s political leanings and that they probably need to update this – but, honestly, here’s hoping that come December there’s a new portrait of a ham-laden Harris gracing the site.
• Cleanerbot Rescue: A reader (Andres Varela) writes!: “I built a thing. It’s an old school text adventure, only it’s voice controlled. I built it to learn some stuff and be a proof-of-life to folks in my network. Turns out they like the writing, and keep playing, so I thought I’d get cocky and see if you’d like it too…it applies AI to divine user intent rather than force them to use overly specific command phrases from the late 1900’s. “Have a look around and tell me what you can see.”  vs “search”. There’s a game save function that not enough people cotton on to, which I think is nifty because it doesn’t require players to register.” THANKYOU ANDRES! I initially struggled a bit with this because I was focused on using old-school text adventure commands, but once you lean into the LLMiness (IT IS A WORD) of it then you will get the hang quite quickly – it’s fun, especially if you’re old enough to remember this stuff the first time around, and while, if I’m honest, the voice commands are just a gimmick and it would be quicker to play by typing, there’s still something slightly magical about the fact I can speak to my computer and play (admittedly rudimentary) games by shouting at it.
• Ducky Fog: This week’s final frivolity is this tiny game in which you have to move the duck and rotate the screen to reach each level’s goal. Don’t worry, it will all make PERFECT SENSE as soon as you click the link, I promise (oh, and if you want you can mess with the code too, but, er, I don’t really understand code and so I can’t comment on that bit).

By Ludwig Favre

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS ANOTHER TRIP THROUGH THE BLEEPS AND BEATS OF TECH-TRANCE MIXED WITH CARE AND LOVE BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Jack Davison: Photos by someone called Jack Davison. GOOD photos, should you need an additional reason to click – nice range of subjects and styles, and in general more interesting than your standard insta ‘landscapes and portraits’ feed.
• The Daily Splice: A feed featuring a load of really quite excellent collage-y images and animations – this is some really impressive work, and stylistically very coherent to boot.
• Minimus: This is the Insta account of Minimus, according to the bio ‘The Mouse that made Latin cool!’. Erm, did it? I confess to not having noticed the now-incredibly-hip status of the dead language, but perhaps it’s because I’m not cool and in fact what all The Kids are doing rather than going and getting fcuked-up on meths is, I don’t know, declining verbs and engaging in hot conjugation sessions with their friends. I doubt it, though. Still, there is a LOT to love about this, not least how adorably shonky the little mouse doll that features in all of the images is, like something from a particularly low-budget BBC kids show from the 70s. Minime, rex es inter mures et te saluto!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Pon Arsher

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I went to the seaside last weekend, to visit an old friend of mine who lives there with his partner and child, and who has an allotment, and who is pretty much the least-online person I know, and I looked at his life and thought ‘yeah, ok, fine, leaving aside the kid, I am…jealous?’

For the first time in what feels like years, I am feeling the weight of the web a bit. Not just the web, but the fact that, unfortunately, the only ways I can find to earn a living seem to involve me having to stick my face into the sewage outlet that is ‘everything happening in the world’ and emerge clutching interesting nuggets between my teeth. I found myself this week wondering about what I might do were I to suddenly decide that, actually, I don’t want to spend approximately 35h of my life a week online (conservatively). It was, frankly, a bit unsettling.

Thankfully, though, I quickly realised that removing ‘not terrible at the internet and on it all the time’ from my personal brand quickly lowers my employment prospects to ‘basically nil’, and so if I want to keep doing things like ‘eating nice lunches’ and ‘working my way towards the cirrhosis that will eventually end me’ I probably don’t have any choice but to put my face right back in that sewage outlet where it belongs. Much like an unfortunate participant in one of those appalling human centipede films, I am stitched-in unto death.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should thank your lucky stars that you spend less time online than I do.

By Melody Tuttle (all images this week via TIH)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A TRULY WONDERFUL 45 MINUTE MIX OF JAPANESE SOUL MUSIC FROM THE 70s, SHARED WITH ME BY READER CHRIS JONES, WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ADORE (ALSO IT IS ON YOUTUBE AND THE VISUALS ARE BOTH VERY SOOTHING AND WILL LIKELY MAKE YOU SOMEWHAT JEALOUS OF THE DJ’S LIVING SPACE)! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY NEW READERS THIS WEEK FOR, WELL, THE FACT THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS LIKE THIS, BASICALLY, PT.1:  

By Laura Krifka

NEXT UP WE HAVE THE RETURN OF TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER AND HIS SOUNDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD, THIS TIME TAKING IN WHAT HE ASSURES ME IS ‘JAMAICAN DOO-WOP, FIDDLE FROM POCAHONTAS COUNTY, VIOLIN FROM ARMENIA, A SHEHNAI VIRTUOSO AND PLENTY OF PERCUSSIVE RHYTHMS FROM AFRICA TO SOUTH AMERICA’!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY NEW READERS THIS WEEK FOR, WELL, THE FACT THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS LIKE THIS, BASICALLY, PT.2:  

• Chocolate Milk: ANOTHER reader submission (thankyou, by the way, I really do appreciate it when you send me stuff), this one by Jack Bewley, who writes (with a pleasing degree of consideration, I must say): “This guy has singlehandedly traveled the US and reviewed thousands of chocolate milk drinks. Looks like he’s at 1,791 tried, ranked and reviewed. Most seriously I’ve ever seen chocolate milk treated. As a fan of the drink, his reviews seem to be right on too.” I am personally not a huge fan of chocolate milk – look, it’s an Italian thing I think, in Italy chocolate milk IS Nesquik, and it’s for kids to have at breakfast or teatime and dunk biscuits into, and NOTHING ELSE – but I respect Jack’s specific knowledge and feel inclined to trust his judgement. Bookmark this page for all your chocolate milk knowledge needs. NB – he also reviews UK drinks, and awarded Frijj a pretty harsh score of 1.0, should that help you decide whether you trust this man with your lactic hydration.
• 25 and Me: The post-Harris wave of cautious optimism continues, although tempered by the slight worry that, well, it’s still VERY close, and she is yet to actually SAY anything, and it could all still go horribly wrong (please God no). One of the main vectors of fear amongst liberals of a certain stripe is PROJECT 25, the think tank vision of what ‘a robust conservative future’ looks like and which is either ‘a terrifying vision of a post-Democratic future in which Trump basically becomes God emperor’ or ‘QAnon for the libs’ depending on your perspective. Anyway, if you would like to explore some of the concepts apparently espoused in the doctrine but don’t fancy wading through several million words of tortuous wonk-prose to work out what the fcuk they might be, then someone has built this site which basically uses an LLM (Gemini, in case you’re curious) to interrogate the documentation behind the project. Don’t get too scared, it might not happen.
• Become a Judge at the Tiramisu World Cup: Brought to my attention by Former Editor Paul, there is apparently a world cup of Tiramisu’ happening in Italy in October, and they are currently accepting applications for judges. Would YOU like to go to Treviso and eat your own bodyweight in coffee, egg, mascarpone and biscuit-based dessert?GREAT! All you need to do is answer some…actually incredibly obtuse and confusing questions about the granular detail of the judging process, and keep your fingers crossed! Should any Curios readers happen to be successful in their application, may I take this opportunity to apply for the role of translator/factotum for the trip? Thanks1
• Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024: Fish, cephalopods, corals and crustacea (and a bunch of other stuff too) – these are gorgeous, and it’s worth taking the time to click through the various categories as there are more nominated images that are immediately apparent from the UX here (small gripe: why are so many of the sites accompanying these photo contests so fcuking bad at displaying the actual photos they are rewarding?). My personal favourite is the big walrus in the first set of shots, magnificent b4stard that he is, but I have a big soft spot for this one too.
• Uses This: Occasionally I think ‘wow, I’ve been doing this for a long time’ (and usually at that point do a small cry for my lost youth and wasted years and WHAT HAS THE WEB EVER GIVEN BACK TO ME, EH, WHY IS MY LOVE SO UNREQUITED) and then I come across projects like this which has been going since 2009 and I feel like a dilettante. “Uses This is a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done” – and, yes, that’s exactly what this is. There’s a pleasing variety of people and professions, as you’d expect over the course of over 1200 interviews(!), and even though a lot of this stuff doesn’t mean much to me I can concede that there’s something rather lovely about reading about people who are very DEEP into doing something, and doing it well. If you’re a particular sort of LIFE OPTIMISING person there’s probably some useful stuff you can glean from here, if you’re willing to do a bit of spelunking.
• The RollerCoaster Database: I have definitely featured something like this before, but not, I think, this one – ALL OF THE ROLLERCOASTERS IN ALL OF THE WORLD! China has the greatest number, unsurprisingly – I have to say I think a grand tour of China’s theme parks would be a VERY good time, should anyone want to take me on one – but this really is international, covering (seemingly) every single theme park in the world outside of (I assume) North Korea. Details on each coaster vary wildly, but you can usually see at least a few pics – there’s also a page listing record-holding coasters, ranking them by drop size, top speed, etc, and I confess that it makes Alton Towers look a bit provincial by comparison. I mean, look, I have no desire to ever visit Riyadh, but LOOK AT THIS TERRIFYING BEAUTY.
• Ambiguous Words: A list of words with ambiguous meanings – “Here’s a bunch of words that, free of any other context, have a LOT of meanings. Because of this flexibility, they can be instrumental in titles for your songs, poems, stories, and jokes. Click on each word to delve deeper into these words’ meanings. The most flexible words are at the top of the list.” Potentially useful for poets, copywriters and the like, it’s also a pleasing 5 minutes for anyone who loves language. I remember having a moment of proper revelation as a kid when I read Lolita and realised that Humbert’s…ambiguous description of his honeymoon (‘I had the idiot in hysterics’) was sort of the key to much of the reading of the rest of the novel, and I adore this site.
• 10,000 Pixels: ANOTHER collaborative/multiplayer website (I told you it was a trend ffs), this is basically /r/Place but on a single URL. 10,000 pixels, each of which can be colour edited in realtime by any visitor to the page, allowing for REALTIME COLLABORATIVE PIXELART COMPOSITIONS. At the time of writing it’s all very benign and there’s no nazis or even anyone writing ‘poop’ (rare, I promise), and there’s something quite nice about just having the webpage open and seeing it change and evolve in realtime (zoom out for a proper view, it’s…slightly magical to watch, to my mind, as a bunch of strangers patiently collaborate to make things appear and disappear over time).
• Oh My Goodness: Oh wow, this is a quite incredible site. I don’t THINK it is riddled with Malware, but I appreciate that the aesthetic very much screams ‘WE ARE GOING TO INFECT YOUR PC WITH SO MUCH INCREDIBLY DODGY SPYWARE AS SOON AS YOU SO MUCH AS CLICK’ and, in general, it has almost unparalleled ‘old person who doesn’t understand the internet’ energy. What is it? It is a free greetings card site! Have you ever had an older relative who sends you ecards (RIP mother mine, you inexplicable Jacquie Lawson obsessive, you)? In which case you will get the idea – except, well, a lot of the designs here are what a certain type of online person might describe as ‘very cursed’, and there’s a weird bawdiness to the tone, and then you get to the ‘about’ copy which details the site’s history and you realise this is ANOTHER 25 year old web domain which is somehow still going (they even added ‘AI cards’ last year, astonishingly), and, well, I sort-of love this. The cards, mind, really are fcuking awful – I promise you that there is a LOT of mileage in picking one person you know (ideally not all that well) and communicating with them solely via the medium of Oh My Goodness cards for a solid week.
• Weird Little Ripple Generator Thingy: Yes, I know, but YOU click the link and then tell me what you’d have called it. See? EXACTLY. Anyway, this is a bit trippy and a bit soothing and I rather liked the fx (I suspect it’s also quite nicely coded, though I am too much of a luddite to be able to actually tell).
• Reflect Orbital: I can’t quite work out how I feel about this. As far as I can tell, this company is putting a bunch of massive mirrors in space which it is then going to use to reflect sunlight down to the surface of the Earth, directing it very precisely so as to enable the continued production of solar energy via panels even at times when it ought to be night – which, tentatively, sounds like an incredible idea, extending the potential productivity of solar energy by a huge amount. Except, also, I have seen and read enough vaguely-dystopian scifi to be able to ALSO imagine the ways in which this could be used to effectively torture entire populations with FOREVERDAYLIGHT, or (and, ok, I appreciate my grasp of physics here is perhaps not exactly ‘robust’, but still) maybe BURN A CITY LIKE ANTS IN A MAGNIFYING GLASS, and now I don’t quite know what to think. It is quite frankly a remarkable idea, but I would quite like someone who understands this stuff to explain to me whether it is indeed A Good Thing or whether it’s in fact A Bad Thing (or, perhaps more likely, whether attempting to define everything as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a fundamentally fcuking stupid approach to life that I really ought to grow out of).
• Citroen 2CV Brochures from the 1970s: I mean, what more do you need to know? The brochures are actually fascinating from a design/style point of view, even if you’re not a Citroen obsessive like the owner of this website (I don’t think they would mind me describing them as such). If you are, though, then this is basically REALLY filthy bongo.
• Fantasy Name Generators: ‘Fantasy’ in the ‘swords and sorcery’ sense rather than the ‘erotic reverie’ sense, although perhaps for some of you the two overlap to a degree. Anyway, if you’re a D&D player and need to quickly spin up a bunch of convincing-sounding names for, say, a bunch of half-orcs or a dwarven encampment, then you might find this interesting – if nothing else, the insane granularity you can apply here suggests someone somewhere has REALLY studied all the class guides closely. This is VERY niche, but might please some of you – and if not, it’s worth a click through and a quick play, because if nothing else a lot of the names it seems to throw up are pleasingly multisyllabic and ‘chewy’, if you have the same sort of vague word-synesthesia as I do.
• The Lesbian Bar Project: Remarkably this is the second bit of BRANDED CONTENT to feature in consecutive weeks, and the second which I looked at and thought ‘you know what, this is…quite good!’ – although I’m not sure that it will do much to shift the brand position of Jaegermeister from ‘the medicinal stuff wot REAL LADS do shots of’’. Still, it’s a really interesting project which has been going for 4 years now, and which started as a Jaeger-sponsored PSA airing in the US to raise awareness of the fact that lesbian bars across the country were dying out, and which has pivoted into being what the homepage tells me is “an EMMY and GLAAD Award-winning documentary series, which tells the stories of lesbian queer bars from around the world.” Without watching any of the docs I can’t vouch for their quality, but the awards *seem* like a positive endorsement and in general I am very much in favour of the idea of something like this, where a brand effectively helps document a culture and preserve it rather than instead attempting to brand its fcuking logo all over said culture’s face.
• Wall Town Wonders: I’m personally not really a VR person – I find the helmets cumbersome, and I will need better and more immersion before I’m ready to eschew the comfort of my chair and my gamepad. That said, this forthcoming title for the Meta Quest looks ABSOLUTELY AMAZING – it’s basically a small steampunk townbuilder thing, where you construct a city of buildings which…sort of get built into the actual walls of wherever you’re playing, and which contain ACTUAL TINY PEOPLE living ACTUAL TINY LIVES, and, honestly, if you’re the sort of person who’s ever thought ‘actually having the Borrowers as pets would be pretty cool’ then you will fall slightly in love with this.
• Black Screens: From the FAQ: “Just a black screen display that fills your entire screen, creating a dark surface that you can control. This tool also can create and download any size black screen wallpaper image.” I genuinely have no idea AT ALL why this exists, or indeed why anyone would need the parallel service on the site of a 15 minute video that is nothing but…a blank screen, but, well, I have no idea who you are and so perhaps YOU will be the person who can explain it to me. Anyone?
• The USC SFX Archive: Sound effects! So many of them! Some from the 30s and 40s, some more recent, but this is a HUGE trove of samples and clips – in particular there are a bunch from old cartoons which would be PERFECT as hiphop samples, but, honestly, this is a staggeringly rich collection on the Internet Archive.
• Dogelon Mars: I think – and there’s been some pretty stiff competition over the past few years – that this MIGHT be the single lamest crypto/NFT/web3 thing I have ever seen. It contains the usual word salad complete with vague promises of ‘massive gameplay’ and ‘fungible digital goods’, and even goes so far as to make the following genuinely risible claim: “Dogelon Mars is creating a metaverse set on Mars, by integrating AI to create an immersive and interactive virtual experience. Our goal is to redefine how communities interact, build, and engage in digital spaces.” YES MATE OF COURSE YOU ARE NOW EXPLAIN WHAT THE FCUK THOSE WORDS MEAN! But, of course, the lamest thing of all is the name – I’m slightly of the opinion that anyone who gets suckered into this deserves everything they get. I mean, honestly, who can read this sentence and claim to understand what it is meant to be saying? “Scheduled to launch in Q3 2024, “Dogelon: Land on Mars” aims to provide users with new opportunities to explore, create, and interact within a Martian-themed environment. By leveraging AI and the efficiency of Rufus L2, Dogelon Mars is set to offer a unique experience that aligns with our mission of exploring new digital frontiers.” NO FCUKER, etc.
• Family Fortunes Generator: You just got the ‘NEH-NERRH’ sound in your head, didn’t you? ADMIT IT. Anyway, this website lets you generate your very own Family Fortunes answer card, so you can set the category of thing (‘types of firearm’, say, or ‘ways to kill yourself’, and the answers you want to appear,  and LO! Welcome to an exciting new world of low-stakes memetic fun. I think, with a bit of work and a well-honed central bit, you could over time bully someone to the point of tears with these.
• SceneWise: This is a theoretically fun game which I found a touch too easy to be really compelling – you have to rearrange the six images, each of which is an individual frame from a film, into chronological order, which sounds tricky but given you get six goes and the tiles lock into place as soon as you get them right is actually pretty easy to get right simply by guessing at random (which is what happens to me, as obviously I have no fcuking idea what any of these films are). Still, cinephiles might enjoy this.
• Crucig: As a wordcel, though, this one I really do like. A small daily word puzzle where you have to solve both horizontal and vertical clues – it’s not hard, but it does that weird thing where it made me feel vaguely like I was using different bits of my brain simultaneously, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach.
• One-Page RPG Jam 2024: An absolute motherlode of one-page RPGs for you to play, should you be into that sort of thing. Some of these are games, some are what feel more like personal acts of meditation or reflection, some are designed to be played in company while others are entirely solo experiences…there is a LOT in here if you’re willing to explore.
• Graphs: The website shows you a graph tracking two variables over time – your job is to pick which of the four options said graph is depiction. Very much from the school of ‘correlation is not causation’ and quite interesting in a gentle, very geeky sort of way.
• A Castle Built From Random Rooms: Finally this week, a charming little CYOA-style adventure which combines a light degree of surreality and self-reflexiveness with surprisingly deep mechanics (I particularly enjoyed the persistence of certain choices across the narrative) and a huge degree of replayability – this is basically a text-adventure roguelike, where each time the rooms you’re trying to traverse change in terms of layout, contents and the like, and where no two playthroughs will ever be the same, and there are a bunch of different endings, and, honestly, this is just a really good way of passing 30m while you wait for something more interesting to happen to you.

By Daisuke Ichiba

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY MAGNETIC SOUL AND IS MAKING ME FEEL LIKE I AM ON A BEACH SOMEWHERE LOVELY AT SUNSET RATHER THAN STARING AT A STEEL-GREY SKY IN AN UNPREPOSESSING PART OF SOUTH LONDON AT 0959AM AND WHICH MIGHT DO THE SAME FOR YOU IF YOU CONCENTRATE REALLY HARD! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS IS, ODDLY, EMPTY!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Guy Vording

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE!

That’s right – it’s basically all over, it’s all mist and mellow fruitfulness from hereon in (apart from those of you reading this in the antipodes – thanks Rosie! Does this satisfy your hubris?), but thankfully this edition of Curios is PACKED FULL OF SUNSHINE and will possibly extend the summer for another week or so if you click every single link and wish REALLY HARD.

(this is not true, sorry – Curios is the same old litany of phoned-in prose and bitter cynicism it always is, and the cold and the rain are inevitable).

BUT, before we crack on with the links this week, we have our Tiny Awards winners!  Congratulations to Elliott Cost, who made One Minute Park (winner of the main award, £500 and a HANDMADE TROPHY!), and (the truly wonderfully-named) Nolen Royalty, whose One Million Checkboxes won the multiplayer award and £300! The Tiny Awards will be back next year, presuming neither Kris or I die in the intervening 9-10 months or are so deep in penury that we can no longer afford to do it.

A brief moment of sincerity – thanks SO MUCH to everyone who shared the links, who voted, who submitted sites, who said nice things about the project, who wrote about it and who generally made it feel like it was A Good and Worthwhile thing to do – as someone who’s basically got a pathological aversion to, well, ‘trying’, it was honestly wonderful to be reminded of the fact that it is actually worth putting effort into things every now and again because you can occasionally make Nice And Good Things Happen. Seriously, thankyou so much to everyone who engaged even a tiny (lol!) bit with the project, it’s honestly making me get a bit emo so I am going to have to stop typing about it now.

I am still Matt, this is still Curios, and you will never have to read me being ‘sincere’ at you ever again, I promise (well, until next year).

By Slawomir Elsner (images via TIH, as per)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A TRULY SUPERB PLAYLIST, 20 HOURS OF ECLECTIC, VARIED BUT CONSISTENTLY-AWESOME TRACKS SELECTED AND COMPILED BY COLECTIVO FUTURO! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST REALISED IT REALLY NEEDS A HOLIDAY, PT.1:  

By a seemingly-uncredit artist for Harper’s in 1910

INCREASE THE TEMPO AND YOUR HEARTRATE NOW WITH THIS MIX OF TECH/TRANCE TRACKS BY EVERYONE’S FAVOURITE GERMANOPHILE FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST REALISED IT REALLY NEEDS A HOLIDAY, PT.2:  

• No Borders: What does a map look like when you remove countries, seas, borders, coastlines…well, it looks like this. Effectively just a selection of place names arrayed on a grey background, this starts to become interesting when you zoom in – there’s something genuinely strange about the dissociation engendered by the familiarity of the places and the complete absence of any of the familiar cartographic reference points you associate with them, and the way in which your brain starts to insinuate the shapes of nations based on the spaces between placenames…This is ostensibly a very simple and not-hugely-interesting project, but I found it weirdly compelling and spent longer staring at this week than I expected to, for reasons I can’t adequately explain.
• Departure Mono: Per the description on the site, “departure mono is a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe” – that is, basically, it, but it’s a really rather lovely font that is significantly more aesthetically-pleasing than a lot of similar ones I’ve seen that plough the ‘retro, 8-bit’ furrow. Plus the website is really, really nicely designed, and even includes a proper playable game of Arkanoid at the bottom which is the sort of friendly Easter Egg that I am very much a fan of.
• Tolans: Since the early days of the GREAT GENERATIVE AI HYPECYCLE BOOM I’ve been waiting for someone to spin up a ‘friendly interactive Tamagotchi on steroids’-type application, a little digital cartoon companion to live in your phone and provide succour and companionship (ahem, not for ME, you understand, I DEFINITELY have enough friends, on the subject of which WHY WON’T YOU CALL ME?) – and lo, a mere two years or so hence, we have Tolans! “Meet your Tolan: a friendly little alien you can talk to about whatever, and who can even help picture your ideas! Want to be a fashion designer? Your Tolan is here to help you visualize a cool new shirt or pair of sneakers. Writing a book? They can help brainstorm your hero’s amazing journey. With Tolans in your life, there are no limits to your creativity. Your Tolan is highly personalized to you. They love to chat about any topic you choose and remember important details from past conversations.” So basically this is like Replika (in theory, at least), except with a hefty additional layer of character design on top, so rather than speaking to a disembodied entity you’re instead chatting with a vaguely-friendly-looking pastel coloured character with what looks like a rubber glove on its head, presented to you as a sort of combination pet-cum-digital-assistant. It’s iOS-only so I’ve not personally tried this out – and it’s a subscription service, obvs – but it might be interesting to take a look at. If nothing else you can have fun attempting to jailbreak it and get your ‘friendly alien companion’ to instruct you on how to make ersatz napalm with some petrol, some instant coffee and some orange juice.
• ‍Wigglypaint: Ooh, this is a pleasing little digital art toy. “Wigglypaint is a juicy, jiggly drawing program built with Decker, with notable similarities to Shake Art and KidPix. Pick a tool, make a doodle, crop it as desired, and save a GIF.” Obviously for this to have any value for you you’ll need a modicum of artistic talent – when I tried using it the results were…unimpressive, but as I have perhaps previously alluded to I have what can only be described as anti-talent when it comes to drawing (everything basically ends up looking like an exit wound).
• RIP Crowdtangle: I appreciate that this is possibly a *bit* niche, but this month has seen the shuttering of one of the few tools that made Meta’s social platforms even a tiny bit transparent – Crowdtangle was used by journalists, researchers and academics to track the best-performing content, Pages, etc, across the Facebook/Insta ecosystem, offering what was pretty much the only way of getting an overview of the sorts of things that were trending across the platforms at any given moment. As of August 14th, though, it’s dead – Meta killed it, and replaced it with an alternative system which – and here’s something which I am sure will leave you SHOCKED – doesn’t give anywhere near the same level of insight. Anyway, this site is a bit of an impotent scream into the void, commemorating the service and offering a selection of information about why it was so important and why Meta’s alternative solution is in fact nothing of the sort. There’s apparently going to be some sort of ‘memorial service’ for Crowdtangle on 30 September which is…well, it’s a bit weird, frankly, but then again I’ve been writing 10,000 words about ‘stuff on the internet’ to an audience of approximately seven people for over a decade, so on balance I probably shouldn’t throw stones lest my glass house cut me to ribbons.
• Interview Warmup: An interesting little tool/toy from Google, which purports to offer you the opportunity to practise for job interviews in a variety of disciplines by TALKING TO THE MACHINE – the site asks you questions, you respond by talking, as you would in a normal job interview, and at the end your answers are assessed and ‘graded’ and you get feedback. It’s more proof-of-concept than anything truly helpful – mind you, I say that as someone who almost certainly couldn’t pass a job interview if they tried, so perhaps I should reassess this – but it’s an interesting use-case for the tech and the sort of thing that I could imagine being potentially useful for people who’ve literally never experienced an interview before, or who don’t quite feel confident with the format. Equally, though, there’s nothing quite like ‘saying this stuff to your laptop in an empty room’ to hammer home exactly how soul-destroyingly vapid the ‘tell me why you’re excited about the possibility of working for us!’ charade is – GYAC mate it is called ‘work’ for a reason, noone is excited by it.
• Character Webs: This is actually more of a blogpost than it is a single-site type thing, but the draw here is the design work described so I think it fits up here rather than down there. Erin Davis is a dataviz artist at Axios, and this is their personal blog – here they explore mapping the relationships between characters in novels and presenting those as discrete pieces of visual design, and, honestly, this is SUCH a lovely way of communication the relationship structures within a story. Seriously, 100% convinced that these would sell by the shedload were they to set up a shop – Erin, should you ever happen to see this I would commission you to make one of these for me in a heartbeat, so should you be interested then do get in touch.
• Population: Not an entirely novel idea, but presented rather well – Population is a site which asks you to tell it your gender at birth, your date of birth and your nationality, and which will then tell you a whole bunch of stuff about your likely life expectancy, how it tracks against other countries, that sort of thing. Thanks to this I have been reliably informed that “You are the 5,566,904,165 person alive on the planet. This means that you are older than 68% of the world’s population and older than 55% of all people in United Kingdom” – which, I’m going to be honest, isn’t the most cheering of statistical analyses. Excuse me, I am just off to weep at my senescence.
• Consumed Today: Simply described as ‘a daily digest of the food and media that make up my diet’, this site does just that (or did – it appears that whoever made this either got bored of tracking their food/media consumption in early August, or they’re dead. Er, let’s hope it’s the former!) – clicking each day lets you look at small photos of their meals, a set of things they read (including hyperlinks where appropriate), and a list of all the songs they listened to (this person listens to a LOT of music), and I genuinely adore the tedious, quotidian minutiae of it all (and the sound effects when you hover over various bits of the site are a genuine pleasure, particularly the crunch/munch audio that accompanies the food pics).
• Regen Earth: Online since 2016, ”this is an ongoing mapping of documentaries about regenerative projects…We wanted to know the stories of the field of practitioners bringing their world(s) to life. It’s a labor of love, mostly to express gratitude to this remarkable community. We curate the map for projects that: a) are inspiring in their ambition and scope; and b) have had a short or long-form documentary made about them.” The link takes you to a Google Map covered in pins, each of which corresponds to a regeneration project at that location – clicking the pin gets you links, additional info and usually a YouTube video which explains more about the project in question, its impact, etc – so in the UK, for example, there are links to projects about rewilding the River Avon, while in Portugal there’s a link to a project around sustainable building techniques…niche, but if you’re an environmentalist or conservationist, or simply interested in the preservation of the natural world (and why wouldn’t you be? What are you, some sort of MONSTER??) then this will contain loads of interesting stuff for you.
• The Pessimists’ Archive: I know, I know, you don’t need or want any more newsletters in your life! Curios is enough! More than enough! TOO FCUKING MUCH! Still, should you somehow have additional space in your life for inbox content you might find this of interest – the Pessimists’ Archive is a newsletter which, per the description, is “a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas and trends.” So you have things like ‘letters protesting the construction of the Eiffel Tower’, say, or pieces about how robots have ALWAYS been coming for our jobs…I have a vague sense that this is used by a bunch of dreadful people to assuage our fears about how tech is making things worse – there’s an endorsement from ubercnut Marc Andreessen on the page, which did rather give me the fantods – but in general it’s interesting stuff and I figure some of you might find it worth a sub. For what it’s worth, though, SOMETIMES IT IS RIGHT TO BE SCARED AND HYSTERICAL.
• Could Care: There are many things which are infuriating about North American English – the inability to spell ‘aluminium’, say – but perhaps the most baffling and infuriating in equal measure is the insistence that the correct way of communicating one’s singular lack of engagement with or interest in an issue is to say ‘I could care less’. THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY FCUKING SENSE, HOWEVER YOU ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY IT! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL??? Anyway, this site exists for the sole purpose of explaining why this construction is stupid and wrong and should be stopped, with an elegant little bit of slider design. Can we all agree that you will stop saying this forthwith? It’s our language and we can take it back whenever we like, you know.
• Wandawhirl: Completely and utterly pointless, but not unpleasing. “Wanda Whirl displays calming and playful streamers that dance and whirl in the breeze” – choose from different patterns and shapes, click and drag your mouse to make them move in the imaginary digital wind, and recreate almost-exactly that very specific feeling of being so bored as a small child that you can lose yourself in ‘moving your hand through a beaded curtain’ for hours at a time. There’s quite a pleasing aesthetic to this, and the physics are very satisfying indeed.
• 100,000 Emoji: Basically the same kind of idea as the ‘One Million Characters’ site earlier on, except featuring emoji and smaller by a factor of 10 (did they not get the memo about how EVERYTHING has to be a million in 2024?) – you can click any of the spaces and select which emoji you’d like represented there, and it feels like there’s some team-based attempts to ‘own’ certain bits of the canvas with particular emoji, and someone VERY dedicated and possibly a little unwell has seemingly made a pattern in emoji crabs which extends for most of the length of the page, and, look, there is literally no point to this at all that I can discern but I am broadly-speaking pleased that it exists.
• Moviely: Every day you’re given the option of guessing a film or TV show – in each case, you get 10 guesses, and with each one you’re given information about the film or show you’ve selected and which characteristics it shares with the correct answer. So, for example, if your first guess is ‘The Princess Bride’, you’ll be told various bits of info about it – it’s IMDB score, the year it was made, the genres it’s tagged with in IMDB, etc – with any that match the target film in green. The idea is that over the course of 10 guesses you can narrow it down enough to arrive at that day’s correct guess, but, honestly, you’d have to know a fcuktonne more about films than I do (admittedly not hard) to stand even a passing chance of getting any of these, Cinefiles will possibly find this pleasingly-tricky, but personally speaking my main reaction was ‘Jesus, this is fcuking impossible’.
• Shutterbug: OOH, this is very nicely done indeed and very clever – you’ll need to open it in its own window for it to work properly, though, as the game basically involves resizing your browser to create the right-sized ‘framing’ for a photo. The gimmick is that you’re tasked with taking photos of various insects – each picture requires you to include a set number of components, meaning you’ll need to resize your browser and move the window around to find the right combination of insects and to get them all in shot at the same time. This is *such* a neat mechanic, beautifully-executed, and it feels like something that you’re going to see repurposed in a MUCH shinier advergame by L’Oreal or something in ~6m.
• Smells Like Chlorine: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this deceptively-funny little game in which you play as a cleaner in a game developer’s office, navigating the space in 3d and attempting to do your job against increasingly-strange constraints. “A menial job. Unfriendly co-workers. What does it take to get some respect as a janitor around here? Things take an interesting turn, however, after your boss tells you some devastating news. Those detergent fumes aren’t helping either…” I very much enjoyed this, and I think you will too.

By Robin F Williams

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS COMPILED BY POP CULTURE EXPERT NICK WALKER AND IS POSSIBLY THE MOST CHAOTIC SELECTION OF MUSIC I HAVE HEARD ALL YEAR – A COLLECTION OF SONGS THAT NICK HAS DESCRIBED AS ‘BANGERS’ ON TWITTER, A DESIGNATION WHICH, AS BECOMES IMMEDIATELY APPARENT FROM LOOKING AT THE TRACK LISTING, VERY MUCH DOES NOT HAVE A FIXED MEANING!  

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Official Stick Reviews: This is a slightly larger Insta feed than I usually tend to link to – over 2million followers, so mainstream! – but, look, it’s photos of people with really excellent sticks, how could I not? There are few pleasures in life quite like finding, and subsequently wielding, a really good stick.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Diane Dal-pra

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: