HELLO EVERYONE HELLO HAPPY FRIDAY!

I, er, went out for LUNCH yesterday, which, it turned out, was quite long, and quite liquid, and which almost certainly didn’t require the additional afterbooze, and which possibly was the reason as to why I woke up at 4am this morning…which is by way of small explanation as to why what follows is, even by my standards, a poorly-written and frankly barely-sensical mess of branespeek.  The links, though? The links are, as per, fcuking GREAT.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably just click the links and ignore the words this week, sorry.

By Bobbi Essers

IT MAY NOT SURPRISE YOU TO LEARN THAT MY INTEREST IN CHRISTMAS IS PRETTY MUCH ZERO AND THAT I HAVE WHAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS A VISCERAL HATRED OF ‘FESTIVE’ MUSIC, BUT, BECAUSE I APPRECIATE THAT YOU MAY BE LESS FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN THAN I AM, I NONETHELESS PRESENT TO YOU THIS 3.5H SELECTION OF (NOT WHOLLY TRADITIONAL) CHRISTMAS TRACKS COMPILED BY MY FRIEND ED!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY CURIOUS TO WATCH THE ‘GREGG WALLACE MAKES FRIENDS WITH LAURENCE FOX’ THING THAT NOW SEEMS GRIMLY INEVITABLE, PT.1:  

By Katrien de Blauwer (this and all remaining images via TIH)

NEXT UP, OPPIDAN DOING A SET FOR DJ MAG FROM A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO WHICH IS A PRETTYMUCH PERFECT COLLECTION OF PARTY BANGERS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY CURIOUS TO WATCH THE ‘GREGG WALLACE MAKES FRIENDS WITH LAURENCE FOX’ THING THAT NOW SEEMS GRIMLY INEVITABLE, PT.2:  

• The Desert Island Discs Spreadsheet: An *incredibly* middle-aged, middle-class, anglocentric link, this one, but, well, I have a vague idea about the makeup of at least a proportion of my readership and I SEE YOU, Radio4 people. I have no idea who has compiled this but this spreadsheet contains not only links to every single episode of the show EVER – oh, hang on, ought I explain? Ok, fine – to the non-anglos amongst you, Desert Island Discs is a long-running BBC radio show on which notable people are interviewed about their lives, with the general conceit that they are being asked which records they would take with them if they were to be stranded alone on a desert island. So, this spreadsheet not only links to every single episode of the show, which is just interesting and useful in and of itself (there really are some incredible names on there) but also, for reasons known only to the person who compiled it, records every single artist whose music has been selected by someone, keeping a running tally of the most-popular (Mozart, in case you were wondering), books that people have chosen to take (you’re allowed to bring one – Shakespeare takes the top spot, but a surprising number of masochists would apparently choose the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which feels…joyless, frankly) and the sole luxury item that they would wish to bring with them (it’s worth scrolling down that particular tab because there are some truly esoteric picks in there – my personal favourite is whoever it was who chose ‘the law of the land’ as their luxury, for the sole stated purpose of then being able to break it). This is oddly-fascinating (or at least it is if you’re a middle-class, Radio4-listening brit of a certain age – I concede that for everyone else then, well, it’s a fcuking spreadsheet).
• The Bluesky Roast Thing: So this was this week’s self-referential viral Bluesky thing – plug in your handle (or indeed anyone else’s), and this will do the whole ‘roast my profile’ thing (much the same as did the rounds for Twitter and Insta a month or so back), with an LLM offering an ‘hilarious’ analysis of your posts and posting style. I can’t stress enough how horrible I find this – the copy it comes out with hits a very specific register of perky-LLM-positivity that I find especially grating, and, overall, the tone of voice here is pretty much my least-favourite style of writing in the whole world; blandly-cheerful, ‘sassy’ and toe-curlingly insincere. Still, LOADS of people really enjoyed this, or at least enough to share The Machine’s ‘hilarious’ insights into their personality and ‘unique’ posting style, which I found interesting – turns out people can put up with horrible LLM-writing when it’s all about them!  BONUS BLUESKY THINGS!: for the techy amongst you, this is a decent primer on how to extract analytics from the platform so you can, should you so desire, cobble together information on post performance, etc etc.
• The Neighbourhoods: This is a lovely project by one Rob Stephenson, exploring and documenting New York City – per the description, “This weekly newsletter is a not-so-deep dive into every neighborhood in NYC in an effort to create some sort of photographic document of modern-day New York, or at least a record of what I find interesting* on any particular day. I know I will be leaving out a ton of things that could be considered crucial to the understanding of a particular neighborhood and including stuff that will leave some scratching their heads, but this isn’t meant to be a complete or even accurate representation of a place, just my reaction to it. With a mix of old and new pictures and field recordings, I hope this project will add something to the substantial body of work that has already been made about the city.” This is SO interesting – I say this as someone who’s only ever visited New York and doesn’t have anything resembling DEEP KNOWLEDGE of the city, but who is fascinated by writing about hyperlocal urbanity, and for whom this sort of writing, discursive and personal and curious and interested and interesting, is basically personal catnip. If you like reading people like Jon Elledge writing about London then you might also enjoy this – and, obviously, if you’re a New Yorker, this feels like something of a must-read.
• Y2K: There’s some new film coming out from ubiquitous indie-presenting collective A24 – I have literally fcuk all idea what it’s about, and nor do I care, but it does have a rather nice retropromosite accompanying it which I rather enjoyed; the gimmick is that it looks and feels like a desktop c.1999 (I may not know the first thing about the film, but I have a reasonable degree of certainty that it is set IN THE PAST), complete with Winamp-esque media player with a playlist of era-appropriate tracks, a bunch of files on the desktop for you to explore and an AOL-style chat window just waiting for you to talk to your friend through…except are they your friend? What’s going on? WHO ARE YOU REALLY SPEAKING TO? This is rather fun.
• Billy Bass Cameo: Fine, it’s not *quite* Cameo, but, well, almost. Have YOU ever wanted the opportunity to have your own, bespoke video of a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing along to whatever song you fancy? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you have EVER wished for such a thing, and yet the universe has provided nonetheless. It’s all very homebrew, but all the better for it – you have to upload your own MP3, you can select specific movements for Billy to perform while it plays, and you can even select different lighting setups to best-frame your piscine performance (the best thing about the site, though, is that it includes a button which is simply labeled as ‘send to fish’. More websites need such a button). I am THRILLED that this exists, and I imagine there is at least one person in your life who would be equally thrilled to receive a video of a mechanical fish flailing arrhythmically to ‘Silent Night’.
• YourSign LM: You may not think that the TikTok feed of a wholesale signmaker somewhere in China would be worth following, but you would be WRONG. I promise you, the guys fronting these – ‘Tony’ and ‘Leon’ and a couple of others – are some sort of hydrogen bomb of onscreen charisma, and while it’s increasingly apparent that there’s nothing remotely funny about what’s likely to happen to US politics over the next four years, there is something VERY funny about a young Chinese man doing an absolutely nailed-on Trump impersonation while attempting to convince you of the absolute importance of shipping a LOT of neon signage products from Shenzhen.
• The Open Source Challenge: The OSINT enthusiasts at Bellingcat have put together this series of challenges to test your online sleuthing skills – they are unlocking at various points over the coming month, or you can unlock them early by completing previous puzzles in the sequence – the two that are currently open to view are both of the ‘where was this picture taken?’ variety, and as such not HUGELY complex, but it will be interesting to see what shape the rest of the selection takes.
• Songs of Insects: What sort of lunatic wouldn’t want the opportunity to listen to the glorious sounds of cicadas, recorded and catalogued online alongside grasshoppers, crickets and 90-odd other species of noise-making insects? NO FCUKER, etc! This is a North American site and these are North American insects, just to stave off any disappointment in those of you who are exclusively interested in the sounds made by European or Asian insects instead.
• Craftball: Pointless, shiny luxe brand browsergame corner! This time it’s the turn of Loewe, who, for reasons that I doubt even their head of brand could adequately explain, have chosen to spunk a bunch of money on a game which, even by the standards of these things, really is p1ss-poor. What exactly does ‘manouvering an orange (no, really, it’s a fcuking orange – WHY?) left and right along one of three straight courses in an attempt to avoid obstacles’ have to do with ‘flogging expensive bags and shoes and perfumes’? NO IDEA! Still, who cares? You can win PRIZES (I imagine the ‘prizes’ amount to ‘a tenner off a keyring’, but, still, PRIZES!)! This really is bafflingly-sh1t, but does at least have the requisite degree of shine and polish you expect from this sort of thing – seriously though, can anyone explain the orange to me?
• Pipe Dreams: Oh this is great, PURE CURIO. Did you know that “Pipedreams, which recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of continuous broadcasts, began in 1982 and remains the only nationally distributed weekly radio program exploring the art of the pipe organ”? No you didn’t, fcuk off, stop lying. Anyway, this is the website accompanying the (presumably North American) show which features a quite astonishing array of pipe organ music – there are nearly 2,500(!!!!) recordings on here as far as I can tell, meaning if you ever wanted to get REALLY into, er, the sound of the pipe organ, you now have the perfect place to start. I can imagine that for some of you that this will feel pleasingly-festive (and quite possibly that for a few others it will cause potentially-traumatic flashbacks to being forced to spend a lot of time in church as a kid).
• NPR’s Books We Love: Oh this is a great resource, well done NPR – this website is basically a pleasingly-explorable selection of books published this year which have been recommended by various NPR contributors, across a range of genres and categories, which is easy to browse and which contains over 350 titles, meaning that there’s something in there for pretty much every taste. Be aware that this is obviously a North American selection, meaning not everything on here will necessarily have been published yet where you are – but you can also browse previous selections going back to 2013, so if you’re in the market for a bunch of book recs for the holiday season this is an excellent place to start.
• Infinite Baseball: Via Lynn Cherny’s reliably-fascinating newsletter (seriously, if you’re interested in AI and digital creativity in general you really ought to subscribe) comes this silly-but-also-interesting project, which basically produces AI-generated imaginary baseball games, delivered via ‘live’ commentary on the site – this is…sort-of incredible, partly because I don’t understand baseball in the slightest and as such I have no idea whether what it’s saying makes any sense at all. It *sounds* like it does, though, and there’s something oddly-soothing about having the commentary running in the background, wittering away about line-drives and batting averages. This is an art project by Dan Moore, who writes: “The Great American Pastime reimagines one of America’s most cherished rituals through the lens of artificial intelligence. This piece employs the Infinite Baseball Radio Network to broadcast an unending stream of AI-generated baseball games that captures the rhythm, tone, and drama of a live sports broadcast. By inviting listeners into a familiar yet subtly artificial version of America’s favorite pastime, the work provokes reflection on humanity’s increasingly tangled relationship with technology, nostalgia, and the narratives that shape the American cultural identity.” So, er, there!
• Continue and Persist: This is a lovely idea, and I think you should all pick someone you know in the US to send one of these to. Per the blurb, “Every day, thousands of Cease and Desist letters are issued, telling people to stop what they’re doing (Looking at you, David Chang). What a bummer! That’s why we created: The Continue and Persist Letter. A official-looking legal letter that encourages and uplifts people, one that tells people to keep doing what they’re doing! Surprise someone you appreciate by sending them a Continue and Persist Letter.” WHAT A LOVELY THING! Also, they will post it for you for free, which seems like a good enough reason for you to bother – I can’t tell you how pleasing it would be to receive an official-looking bit of documentation telling me that, actually, I’m not wasting my life doing this and I should crack right on (but, perhaps, the opposite would be healthier).
• Comball: Have you ever wondered to yourself ‘what would it be like if someone were to combine the twin ludic  pursuits of pool and popular mobile game 2048?’? No, I can’t imagine for a second that you have (you incurious fcuk, you), but thankfully Eray Zesen has which is why this fun little browsergame exists.
• The Complete BBC Micro Games Archive: Growing up in the UK in the 80s, exposure to computing was in the main limited to occasional opportunities to use one of the school’s collection of yellowing, grubby BBC Micros, a system characterised by amazing, blocky graphics and some truly batsh1t games which for some reason were occasionally considered to be ‘educational’ enough to let us spend an hour or so messing around with them – I genuinely have no idea what exactly playing a text adventure game called ‘Granny’s Garden’ was meant to contribute to my intellectual formation, but GOD did I love those occasional moments when I got to play it rather than memorising times tables. Anyway, this site seemingly collects EVERY SINGLE GAME EVER MADE FOR THE BBC EVER, including the aforementioned Granny’s Garden, so if you want to experience exactly how poor electronic entertainments were in 1984 then this is basically all your Christmases come at once.
• TicTactic: Noughts and crosses reimagined as a sort of roguelike card battler. This is a demo of the full thing, but it’s pretty full and the game is surprisingly deep and complex when you get into it a bit (ok, complex compared to actual noughts and crosses).
• Fliphaus: Via the excellent Nag, this is a TERRIFYINGLY addictive game which someone really needs to rip off for the UK asap. The premise is simple – you’re shown two houses side by side, pulled from Zillow listings, and all you have to do is guess which one is priced higher. Given how insane Brits are about housing and property in general, and how insane we also area about money, a UK version of this would break traffic records for whichever estate agent or property-adjacent company nicks this idea first – GO!
• The Confounding Calendar: This week’s last ludic link is this (growing) selection of puzzle games – a new one’s being released every day for advent, and, honestly, each of the ones so far is SO SO GOOD (in particular the fiendish and brilliant ‘Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters’, which had me grinding my teeth at it for longer than I care to admit). These are fun, imaginative, quirky and interesting, and I think it’s very much worth checking back over the next couple of weeks to play them all.

By Kumi Oguro

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A SUPERB SELECTION OF TRACKS CHOSEN BY NICK STROPKO WHICH IS REALLY MAKING ME WANT A COCKTAIL AS IT PLAYS IN THE BACKGROUND, UNFORTUNATE GIVEN IT IS CURRENTLY 10:01AM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Arch Budzar: Art. Not normally my sort of thing, visually, but I find there’s something interesting about the juxtaposition of the sort of ‘naive’ style and the messaging and maybe you will too.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Neko Sawatzki

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I got to go to a GALLERY OPENING this week, like an IMPORTANT PERSON (I am not an important person, I simply still have friends who work in arts PR), and as such I would like to use the limited real estate available to me at the top of Curios to strongly recommend the Electric Dreams show at the Tate Modern – if you’ve any interest in the history of how art and electronics have intersected from the mid-20thC onwards then it really is superb, and, even if you don’t, IT WILL FCUKING EDUCATE YOU.

Otherwise, this week has largely been characterised by my having to turn off the radio every time they decide to talk about the assisted dying bill – look, you’re all entitled to your opinions, but when you’ve watched someone die slowly, painfully, cruelly and helplessly over the course of a couple of years I’m going to suggest that it rather changes your perspective on the whole question, and if you all think I haven’t already banked my Switzerland cash in preparation then, well, you’re wrong.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t get this sort of mix of light artistic recommendation and vaguely-nihilistic thanatophilia ANYWHERE else!

By Keita Morimoto (links this week once again via TIH, for which thanks)

BASK IN THE GLORY OF A BRAND NEW MIX OF EXCELLENT (MOSTLY) HIPHOP FROM SADEAGLE, WHO HAS BRIEFLY EMERGED FROM CORNISH OBSCURITY TO BLESS YOUR EARS!

THE SECTION WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO SEEING ALL THE EXCITING, INNOVATIVE AND FAR-WORSE-MODERATED PLATFORMS AUSTRALIA’S KIDS WILL FLOCK TO NOW, PT.1:  

By Clayton Schiff

NEXT UP, SOME PLEASINGLY-HARD TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY JENTEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO SEEING ALL THE EXCITING, INNOVATIVE AND FAR-WORSE-MODERATED PLATFORMS AUSTRALIA’S KIDS WILL FLOCK TO NOW, PT.2:  

• Fugatto: While a lot of focus this year has been on the leaps and bounds made by AI video, I’ve personally been most impressed with the advances made in audio generation – the latest versions of stuff like Suno really are astonishing, and while the programs aren’t quite composing chart toppers yet they are definitely good enough that stock audio libraries ought soon to be entirely-redundant. Potentially more interesting, though, is stuff going on at the weird edges of sound generation – which brings us neatly to Fugatto, which is actually ‘a framework for audio synthesis and transformation’ and which is only really a proof-of-concept idea thing, and which is here presented as…quite a dense paper, but which I am sharing with you because some of the examples of what they’re trying to do here are genuinely interesting. Rather than getting the machine to imagine sounds that we could make ourselves, wouldn’t it be more interesting to get it to imagine sounds that have never previously existed? Sounds that we can’t even begin to conceptualise? Sounds so odd that even language doesn’t seem to be able to adequately describe them? YES IT WOULD! So click the link, scroll down, and hear the first rudimentary attempts to get a machine to generate the sound of ‘a cello barking’ or ‘a saxophone screaming’ or ‘an oral delivery of a violin playing a beautiful solo in English saying the words “I need to know; Who let the dogs out?”, sounding like a violin playing a beautiful solo.’ Seriously, this is VERY ODD, but also super-interesting in terms of pushing the boundaries of what we can imagine and conceive of. We’re going to start needing new words, aren’t we?
• Woznim: Via my friend Ged comes this potentially-helpful little app – do YOU struggle to remember who the fcuk people are and what they are called? In that case it’s entirely possible that this app will save your life (or, more accurately, from momentary, low-level embarrassment). Basically this lets you make notes of people’s names based on where you met them, thereby associating person with place – which, apparently, helps one remember someone else’s name. Per the blurb, “Easily save the names of people you meet and the exact locations where you met them. Whether it’s a coffee shop, a conference, or a random encounter on the street, Woznim helps you keep track. Add personalized notes to each entry. Keep track of important details, like the conversation you had, mutual interests, or future plans.” One the one hand, I can imagine this being useful for a particular type of person; on the other, it probably doesn’t help if the main reason you can’t remember anyone’s name is that, at heart, you simply don’t give a fcuk if they live or die, so possibly worth bearing that in mind.
• Pearls: WELCOME BACK TO THE WORLD OF LUXE BRAND BROWSERGAMES! This is designed to promote the overpriced gewgaws of Van Cleef & Arpel – you’ll need to open it on your phone, but when you do you’ll get access to a pleasingly-gentle little game in which your sole task is to bounce a pearl from one pillar to another by tapping your phone’s screen (it’s…low-octane entertainment, fair to say). Depending on the score you achieve, you can attain REWARDS – admittedly my performance was so poor that all I was offered by way of recompense was, er, some branded wallpaper for my phone, but I like to imagine that if you really rack up the points you get the chance to win a cubic zirconia the size of your face.
• Leonardo’s Inventions: On the one hand, Da Vinci was doubtless one of the world’s great polymaths with a near-genius level grasp of a range of disciplines; on the other, he gets an awful lot of credit for being an inventor when, to be honest, most of his ‘inventions’ were bullsh1t. Yeah, ok Leo, you ‘invented the helicopter’ – except you didn’t really, you did a (very impressive, admittedly) sketch of a prototype which, thanks to MODERN KNOWLEDGE, we now know wouldn’t have worked at all. Your flying machine? Wouldn’t have gotten off the ground mate. That tank? Ever see active service, did it? I am merely trying to point out that calling Da Vinci (fuck, for some reason my brain has just remembered those two viral twins from Covid-times and is now insisting on pronouncing this ‘Da Vinky’ – thanks brain, you cnut) a great inventor based on his sketches is like calling me a great inventor based on that period I went through aged c.4 when I was obsessed with building multi-part transformer cars out of LEGO. Anyway, that extended and wildly-unfair rant about one of history’s great minds out of the way, this is a nice selection of 3d models of said inventions which you can peruse at your leisure.
• Kortex: I realised many years ago that I simply have no interest at all in OPTIMISING MY LIFE, or developing EFFICIENT WAYS OF BEING AND THINKING – I simply don’t care, turns out. That said, if YOU are the sort of person who’s always liked the idea of having some sort of digitally-assisted filing system to help you arrange your thoughts and your work and your ideas in some sort of cogent, coherent and useful way then you might find Kortex useful – I think it’s still in beta, but it looks like a reasonably-useful set of tools, particularly for people whose practice involves lots of research and note-taking across different fields and areas of interest.
• Routeshuffle: Not an entirely original concept – I think I saw something like this during Lockdown 1 – but I am generally a fan of things that encourage you to explore your local area in different or unusual ways. Routeshuffle basically lets you choose your starting point, whether you’re walking, running or cycling, asks how long you want to go for, and then plots you a random route – helpfully these are circular so you’ll end up back where you started. Nice, simple and useful – there’s a premium version for some reason, but I will forgive the poor student who built this for attempting to scrub together a few pennies because, well, times are hard and we all need to eat.
• Treasure Inside: FINALLY! After predicting for YEARS that treasure hunt/puzzle books – a la Masquerade – are going to make a comeback, FINALLY THEY HAVE (turns out if you keep repeating something at regular intervals for long enough you will eventually be proved right). Treasure Inside follows a spate of more homegrown treasurehunt projects with a rather more large-scale and shiny variant – Jon Collins-Black has hidden five treasure boxes across North America, packed with goodies, and has written a book packed with clues to help eager hunters work out where they are and track them down. Per the blurb, “There’s Treasure Inside is the culmination of close to five years of work. The author worked with experts in several fields to put together a treasure both unique and valuable. Worth millions of dollars and growing more valuable each day, the pieces in the treasure are as varied as they are unique. Chosen to appeal to as many different tastes and interests as possible, items include Bitcoin, antiquities, shipwreck bounty, rare Pokémon cards, sports memorabilia, gold, precious metals and rare gems. Other objects have historical significance, including ones made or owned by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andrew Carnegie, George Washington, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Onassis, Henry David Thoreau, and Louis Comfort Tiffany.” I can’t help it, I fcuking LOVE stuff like this – I still remember with genuine pleasure working on Perplex City back in the day, and I really would love someone to do something large-scale like this in the UK please thankyou.
• Productivity Blocker: A reader writes! I have no idea who this person is, but they emailed me with this project, described thusly: “While there are plenty of Chrome extensions for helping you focus, this is the first one that blocks productive websites so you can relax. It currently blocks over 80 productive websites including: Slack, Fiverr, Duolingo, Linkedin and Dropbox.  All blocked sites are redirected to this block page https://www.productivityblocker.com/blocked, with fun (and stupid) recreational links people can enjoy. The extension is free and exists mostly as a joke/parody of our glamorization of always working, hustle culture. But as an added plus, it does promote wellness and not burning out.” I rather like this, and should any of you currently be working for Nestle, then a) your employer’s a cnut; and b) you can totally rip this off as a simple brand activation for KitKat, that will be one million pounds in consultancy fees please.
• Salaryman Synthfun: Ok, I don’t usually link to single Insta posts without context but, well, I can’t find any additional context and this is simply too much fun to exclude. Just click the link and enjoy the video of a Japanese man absolutely wigging out as he plays a cacophonous mess on synths using a videogame controller as input. The accompanying caption just reads: “Many Japanese salarymen spend their Friday nights playing synthesizers like crazy using game controllers”, which makes me think that perhaps the word ‘many’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Do any of you live in Japan? Can any of you confirm or deny that this is in fact a thing that people do rather than something that one bloke does?
• Saapato: Via Kris at Naive, this is a beautiful little site built by sound artist Brendan Principato – I don’t really quite know how to describe it, but it’s…a sort of patchwork mosaic of works and photos and fragments of music, and if you click around on the various patchwork squares each generates a sound, meaning you can create a light audio tapestry as you navigate which will be different for each of you. Beautifully, whatever I seem to press manages to combine to create something vaguely-beautiful, which is no mean feat of programming – this really is rather gorgeous.
• Intro: This was introduced to me this week by James Whatley, who described it as ‘LinkedIn meets Cameo’, a combination of words so singularly-unappealing that I nearly voided myself in immediate protest upon hearing them. Still, if you’re the sort of dreadful, dead-behind-the-eyes fcuk who likes to think of themselves as a ‘thought leader’ then you can rent yourself out for meetings using this platform/app – it’s basically like an escort service but for cnuts on LinkedIn, so you have various startup/tech people offering the benefits of their hard-earned wisdom for a mere $2k a session, or various multiply-jointed yoga influencers or clean eating gurus and DEAR GOD everyone here is a vision of alphaness in taupe. Still, if you’d like to pay four figures to have some sort of Stephen Bartlettalike spaff out some rubbish about the vital importance of HUSTLE AND GRIND MENTALITY then, well, you’re a fcuking idiot, frankly. Although now I come to think of it I am not so proud that I’m not partly tempted to put myself up on there for ‘demotivational chats’ just to see if there are any takers.
• Net Elevation: Want to know what the net elevation of someone’s life was – that is, what the net difference in the height above sea level of their place of birth and place of death was? WELL LUCKY YOU!
• Travel In Times: Would you like to be able to quickly and easily find out how long it would have taken you to travel from, say, Sevenoaks to Bury in the 17th Century? GREAT NOW YOU CAN! This is really interesting, promise – it estimates travel times based on the road network that was in place across Europe at the time (and, presumably, making generous assumptions about the likelihood of your drowning in any sea crossings you might need to make), and as such you can learn that it would have taken a day and a half to get to Cambridge from London 500 years ago, but that that time was slashed to 4h just a hundred or so years later. Insert your own gags here about how unfavourably your travel times back home this christmas compare to those from an era before electricity.
• Surveillance Self-Defence: Are YOU an incredibly paranoid person who is increasingly convinced that THEY are watching your every move online? Well you’re probably right tbh, they almost certainly are – and why wouldn’t they be, you PERVERT? Anyway, should you feel the beady eyes of surveillance upon you – or at least *think* that you do – you might find this collection of tips and tools and remaining unmonitored online of use. They’re…they’re a TOUCH on the paranoid side, but I suppose that’s kind of the point. My snark aside, it’s obviously true that for a variety of people, for a variety of reasons, this sort of thing is hugely important – per the blurb, “Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) is a guide to protecting yourself from electronic surveillance for people all over the world. Some aspects of this guide will be useful to people with very little technical knowledge, while others are aimed at an audience with considerable technical expertise and privacy/security trainers. We believe that everyone’s threat model  is unique—from activists in China to journalists in Europe to the LGBTQ community in Uganda. We believe that everyone has something to protect, whether it’s from the government or parents or prying employers, stalkers, data-mining corporations, or an abusive partner.”
• Smoke and Fire: A page of gifs of smoke and fire from cartoons. No more, no less. There’s something sort of wonderful about the way these are collected, and it’s really worth scrolling all the way through to get the full effect.
• Let’s Party: On the one hand, part of me thinks that this is a really great idea; on the other, part of me also thinks that this is the sort of thing that cause some quite INCREDIBLE ruptures in the more complicated and messy types of friendship group. Let’s Party is a an app for your phone that attempts to bring back the UNFETTERED FUN of the pre-digital age – the idea is that you take photos through the app, which doesn’t then ‘unlock’ them until the morning afterwards – so you only get the full dump in the morning when you’ve forgotten all about what you may or may not have snapped. Which, yes, I can totally see as being fun! But the wrinkle here is that you can let multiple phones have a shared account – which means you’ll also get everyone ELSE’S photos at the same time too, which is obviously fine if you’ve all been good but is potentially…less fine depending on how the night panned out and exactly what your relationship is with these people and, look, I’m not suggesting you’re all messy b1tches who love drama but, equally, this feels…dangerous.
• Pierret’s Dream House: I LOVE THIS! Pierret is, apparently, a French business that sells glazing (doors and windows) – they’re currently running a promo where you are in with the chance of winning 20 grand’s worth of, er, doors and windows (is that a lot of doors and windows? I’m not really up on how much stuff costs beyond weed and casillero del diablo these days), based on your ability to DESIGN YOUR OWN DREAM HOUSE! Yes, that’s right, presumably riffing on the recent popularity of similarly ‘cosy’ (sorry, HATEFUL word) villagebuilding games, this is a surprisingly-full-featured little browsergame where you can spin up your own maison or chateau, personalise the…yes, DOORS AND WINDOWS to your heart’s content, and then presumably have your creation judged by Monsieur Pierret at the end of it. Honestly, I adore this, mainly for the fact that it’s a lot deeper and more fully-featured than it probably needed to be – for one or two of you (the one or two of you who still hanker after a doll’s house, probably) this will possibly prove mesmerising.
• Solitomb: A fun fantasy-roguelike cardgame based (loosely) on Solitaire – this is FUN, simple to learn but surprisingly-complex, and can comfortably eat away a few of those hours standing between you and a date with the muscle-relaxant of your choice.
• Known Mysteries: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is, honestly, one of my favourite things of the year. Known Mysteries is, per the blurb, “about the desire to escape Earth. Using a mix of video and text, Sorrow’s story unfolds with the help of the player to solve the mysteries in her town.” But honestly, that doesn’t even begin to describe all the reasons why I adore this. It’s the first game to be built and hosted on the Solar Server, which is, as the name suggests, a solar-powered server in Alberta, Canada, maintained by Kara Stone who also wrote the game – per the blurb on the site, “Solar Server is an autonomous solar powered web server run from my apartment balcony in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It will host a series of videogames designed to be low-carbon and have environmental themes in the games. My goal with this project is to not only represent environmentalist themes and have people think about the future of the planet and what needs to change, but also put principles of sustainability into actual practice. Because I am an artist, I want people to see and interact with my work, yet my previous work demands you interact with fossil fuels in order to engage with it—on Steam’s servers, Apple’s, Androids, and itch.io’s. With Solar Server, consuming fossil fuels is no longer a necessity when playing my work.” So, to start with, that’s just really cool – but also, the game is GREAT. Seriously, it’s brilliant – it’s more a visual novel, fine, but it’s brilliantly-written and well-paced and the treatment of photos and imagery and video to make it all work as a lightweight website on a small server actually works in service of the narrative, and the music is GORGEOUS and I promise you this is worth every single one of the 60 minutes or so it will take you to play through all three parts of the story (and if for whatever reason parts two or three aren’t working, try again later – the sun might have gone behind a cloud). I can’t tell you how much I love this, honestly, it is very special imho.

By Richard Diebenkorn

FINALLY THIS WEEK, A MIX OF SLIGHTLY-DREAMY SYNTHY SOUNDS THAT IMHO ARE PERFECT FOR COLD SUNNY DAYS, COMPILED BY TECHWAA! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Pretty Little Patriot: Ok, this is quite far from my normal wheelhouse and not normally my sort of thing, but some of the images on this Insta feed really are quite something. Via Caitlin’s excellent ‘Links’, Pretty Little Patriot is a MAGA-friendly line of clothes for women and…fcuk, just so much of this is baffling to me – the aesthetic, the general ENERGY of the whole thing, the continued insanity of the apparently-entirely-contradictory loves of Jesus, The Donald and high-ordnance firearms managing to coexist in the minds of these people with no apparent cognitive dissonance…there’s a lot to take in here, but I am 100% serious when, were it not for their politics, I would buy the FCUK out of the first sweatshirt in this carousel (and, frankly, quite a few of the others too).
• Susan Collins:I was lucky enough to be introduced to this artist earlier this week, and not only is she lovely but her work is ACE. Susan Collins does multi-camera, multi-installation videowork (or at least that’s what her recent practice has focused on) and there’s something both conceptually-fascinating but also visually compelling about the results. See what you think – you can read a bit more about the work and her practice here.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Laurence Von Thomas

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I had something of a new professional nadir this week which I feel it might be cathartic to share.

So I was booked to appear on some panel thing by a very corporate company, to talk about AI (I was asked as a result of one of my ‘actual jobs’ – rest assured I wasn’t introduced as ‘Matt Muir, author of a miserably-unpopular newsletter no cnut has ever heard of’). I would like to, in order, apologise to: a) the person who booked me, the brother in law of some good friends of mine, whose career I feel I may have irrevocably fcuked; b) everyone in the audience who perhaps wasn’t expecting one of the panellists to attempt to break some sort of record for uses of the word ‘fcuk’ in an ostensibly-businesslike 45-minute panel discussion; c) everyone in the audience who I managed to inadvertently imply had never done anything in their careers that could be considered better than ‘average’ (and that even that, frankly, was perhaps being generous to them). I am sorry to all of you. There is possibly a lesson to be taken from this, but I have spent the past three days attempting to drink the memory away and so it’s probably lost to me by now.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably wondering whether I am available to speak at your event and the answer is a resounding ‘yes’!

By André Palais

THE MUSIC THIS WEEK KICKS OFF WITH THIS PROPERLY JOYFUL HOUR-LONG CELEBRATION OF MF DOOM AND HIS MUSIC WITH A LIVE BAND AND ALL SORTS OF GUESTS!

THE SECTION WHICH MET JOHN PRESCOTT (RIP) ONCE, MANY YEARS AGO, AND WHICH WAS SUBJECTED BY HIM TO ONE OF THOSE WEIRD CHEEK PINCH THINGS THAT GRANDPARENTS DO, WHICH WAS FRANKLY QUITE WEIRD AS I WAS 22 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME AND WE WERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT, PT.1:  

By Nigel Van Wieck

DO YOU REMEMBER A FEW MONTHS AGO WHEN THAT GUY POSTED ONLINE ABOUT A GENRE OF MUSIC THAT WAS DESCRIBED TO HIM, VERY SPECIFICALLY, IN A DREAM? WELL NOW THERE IS A WHOLE ALBUM OF THAT GENRE OF MUSIC AND FCUKING HELL IS IT A SOMEWHAT INTENSE SONIC JOURNEY THAT I FEEL YOU SORT OF NEED TO HEAR TO REALLY COMPREHEND!

THE SECTION WHICH MET JOHN PRESCOTT (RIP) ONCE, MANY YEARS AGO, AND WHICH WAS SUBJECTED BY HIM TO ONE OF THOSE WEIRD CHEEK PINCH THINGS THAT GRANDPARENTS DO, WHICH WAS FRANKLY QUITE WEIRD AS I WAS 22 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME AND WE WERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT, PT.2:  

•  The Sounds of Disneyland: Web Curios, famously, does not judge its readers, does not look upon your proclivities and perversions with disgust or censorious eyes – wherever you get your jollies is, broadly, fine by me.That is except for those of you who despite being grown adults still fetishise the entertainment products of the Disney machine – you I do judge, plentifully. Still, in the spirit of end-of-year rapprochement I present to you this collection of what I presume is the ambient music that gets piped around the parks, should you want to recreate the vibe in the privacy of your own home/sanatorium – know, though, that I think you are WEIRD.
• Exoroad: An interesting data-led map of the US, which lets you adjust a bunch of sliders and settings to identify which parts of the country meet specific criteria you’ve specified – so house price ranges, say, or crime rates, or population density or…oh, or ‘ethnicity’, which all of a sudden feels…less good, frankly, and makes me think this is just designed to be used by people who want to live in places where they know they can exclude both the poor and those they find ethnically distasteful. So, actually, on further reflection I sort-of feel bad about linking this, but on the flipside it’s a really interesting combination of different datasets which, if you squint, probably aren’t *definitely* going to be used to perpetuate regional segregation. Probably.
• Memento Movi: Want to have the inevitable fact of your own mortality communicated to you via the reassuring medium of your favourite films? GREAT! Memento Movie asks you to tell it your age, to pick a movie (from an annoyingly uncomprehensive list), and to guess at your likely lifespan (ngl, this question spun me out slightly – are we talking what I *think* I’m going to get to? Or what I get to given the choice? Because let me tell you there are some VERY different numbers at play there), and it will then, with nary a second’s thought, present you with the EXACT frame from said film which corresponds to where you are in the Great Journey of Life. Apparently I am currently at a relatively nondescript scene about ⅔ of the way through The Princess Bride, which feels about right tbh.
• Terms of Service: A USEFUL AND POSITIVE USE OF AI THAT FEELS LIKE A NET BENEFIT TO PEOPLE! I know! Amazing! This is actually a really, really good idea and feels like something that might usefully be lifted by a ‘consumer champion’ brand anywhere in the world because, well, it’s just a good and useful idea. The website’s actually called TOSAbout (but that’s a horrible name, so let’s not mention it again), and exists to offer an easy-to-parse overview of the terms of service of a selection of major tech platforms, from Adobe to Zoom and everything inbetween – said terms are given a topline rating from 1-7 (7 being ‘amazingly not totally cnuty’ and 1 being ‘by ticking the checkbox you have surrendered your rights in this and three subsequent lifetimes, and your offspring will be used for glue’) and for those who want more detail as to the specific iniquities being foisted upon the user there are also AI-generated summaries giving an overview of the (rarely) good, the (far more prevalent) bad and the (inevitable) ugly. Smart, useful, helpful, and a near-perfect use of LLMs which I am slightly disappointed with all of you for not having come up with already tbqhwy.
• Jamcorder: Ooh, this is an interesting idea – I am negatively-talented, musically-speaking, so have no idea whether this is actually something useful or not, but I am intrigued by the concept. The Jamcorder (can we maybe rethink the name though lads? It’s…well, it’s sh1t isn’t it?) is a small device that’s designed to attach to your keyboard via the MIDI socket and which basically transcribes EVERYTHING you play in hypercompressed format, meaning you can record, they say, 25,000 hours of music on one device. That is…a lot of keyboard noodling. While it’s fair to say that not EVERY one of those 25k hours will be packed with Beethoven-level output, for anyone whose musical working practice is basically ‘sit at the piano and fcuk around’ I can imagine this being an invaluable way of mapping and tracking the creative process and ensuring that your ‘notes’, so to speak, are never lost.
• Words Like This: Another poetry-related Curios, this is a lovely little site put together by…two people in Australia (hello, mysterious pair of Australians, should you ever see this!) which is designed solely to present poetry they think is good, simply and appealingly, in a manner intended to let the words and the work speak for themselves, The presentation is simple – nicely-arranged text on block-colour backgrounds, a different background colour for each poem – and for reasons that escape me it really works presentationally and contextually; I think this is a lovely way to read verse, and I enjoyed the ‘about’ section, where they talk about the project and why they do it, very much indeed: “Words Like This presents beautiful passages of poetry in a beautiful, contemporary way. There will be no use of technical terms like ‘personification’ or ‘quatrains’ here. No lengthy analysis or historical perspective of the poetry or the poets who wrote them. Sure, context can be important in helping to understand a poem, but that removes from the visceral or primal (two other good words) response that we have to hearing our language spoken out loud or in our minds. Poetry is really just about words like this.” LOVELY, and I mean that is a nice rather than ‘damning with faint praise’ sort of way.
• The COlour Literacy Project: Do you want to know more about colour as a concept, and to get better at exploring what it signifies, communicates and connotes? OF COURSE YOU DO YOU ARE NOT MADE OF WOOD FFS! “The Colour Literacy Project is a 21st century initiative that recognizes colour as a meta-discipline. Our mission is to provide state-of-the-art educational resources that strengthen the bridges between the sciences, arts, design and humanities in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. Fluency with the language of colour sharpens our visual intelligence, expands our perceptions, and enhances our ability to communicate.” This feels very much aimed at the artistic educational establishment, or at practitioners looking to deepen their appreciation of colour and how to work with it – there are a LOT of exercises and resources on here.
• Dear Photograph: HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE??!?! This is an artefact of the pre-social web (or, more accurately, the very early social web, where we all used our Facebook pages to share interesting links about things we cared about rather than it instead being yet another incessant hose of low-quality moving picture pabulum fired into our eyeballs at the rate of violence), dating back to…Jesus, some time in the mid/late-00s I think, and…God, there’s something about this that just *feels* of the past, even though there’s nothing necessarily retro about the project or its scope. Dear Photograph is a website which collects photos of people holding photos of the place they are photographing – a description which I appreciate makes NO SENSE, but which you will hopefully forgive me for when you see the recursive nature of the project. Each picture is accompanied by a short text recounting the memory that’s being recovered in each case, and the whole thing is a small, poignant series of vignettes which touch on place, recollection and the general inevitable truth that all things must eventually pass.
• The AI Soul Imprint Generator: Via Jan in the Czech Republic (HI JAN!) comes this project by Charles University in Prague, which invites you to answer a series of questions and which will then, based on your answers to said questions, SHOW YOU WHAT YOUR SOUL LOOKS LIKE! What your soul will probably look like – SPOILERS! – is an artlessly-composed bit of AI slop, but I quite like the disconnect between the slightly-portentous vibe of the questionnaire and site and the outputs, which inevitably look quite a lot like the sort of poorly-photoshopped tribute pages of the 2012-era web. Interestingly this is part of a wider body of work investigating some..,not-insignificant questions around technology and theology being investigated by the Theology and Contemporary Culture Research Group of the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in cooperation with Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, Multidisciplinary working group AI in context and Monastery of the Infant Jesus of Prague. So expect someone to come up with an answer to the vexatious question of ‘does The Machine have a soul’ sometime next week.
• Daisy The AI Anti-Scammer Granny: This has annoyed me quite a lot over the past week or so, so I will keep this short – briefly, this is a (very nice, very smart, very well-done and very successful) bit of PR by O2, in which they have claimed to have ‘invented’ an AI system that will thwart phone scammers by keeping them tied up on the line; this has been covered EVERYWHERE thanks to its (again, smart) mix of zeitgeisty elements (old people being scammed! AI!), but two things in particular have rather boiled my p1ss about it that I want to get off my chest. 1) IT IS A FCUKING PR STUNT THIS IS NEVER, EVER GOING TO BE AN ACTUAL THING THAT O2 DEPLOY; IT WILL HAVE EXISTED AND BEEN LIVE FOR EXACTLY AS LONG AS IT TOOK TO JUSTIFY THE EXISTENCE OF THE PRESS RELEASE WHY THE FCUK IS IT BEING WRITTEN UP UNCRITICALLY AS THOUGH IT IS A REAL THING FFS YOU ARE SH1T AT YOUR JOBS TECH JOURNALISTS!; 2) this is basically a riff on something that was in Curios about ~6m ago which I distinctly remember flagging as ‘something worth ripping off’, so basically I am just salty that I am not getting any (completely undeserved, to be clear) credit here.
• Hip Hop English School: Ok, unless you speak Japanese you’re probably unlikely to get a vast amount out of this, but it really makes me happy that it exists – HipHop English School is a Japanese podcast in which the hosts use a different hiphop track or artist each week to help teach its listeners English – some of the episodes are just breakdowns of specific songs, line-by-line, while others are interviews with artists who happen to be touring Japan…honestly, this feels like SUCH an easy, replicable format for (say) K-Pop, or Reggaeton, or any other genre of music where lyrics tend not to be in English, so, well, go and steal.
• Roots: I am pretty sure that if you’re the sort of person who feels the need to put usage limits on your phone you’re already well-versed in all the different apps and tricks and tools you can deploy to bolster your nonexistent willpower – should you be in the market for another, though, Roots looks like it has a comprehensive featureset and (and this is the bit I think is a bit gross if I’m honest) a huge fat layer of GAMIFICATION atop said featureset. Earn badges! Compete in challenges! Badges and challenges which only really exist…in your phone! Do you see the…slight disconnect?
• 100s of Beavers: Thanks to Lisa Schmeiser’s excellent newsletter I was introduced to this film, which I had never heard of before but now I feel I really must see. I don’t want to explain or describe it – just click the link and watch the trailer, and know that you will never, ever have seen anything quite like this before.
• Pi Test: How many digits of Pi can you recall from memory? PROVE IT THEN YOU BRAGGART!
• Handyfotos: Via Kris comes another decade-old web project which is SUCH a perfect slice-of-life website that I have fallen slightly in love with it. Photos and videos presented in a grid, filterable by various tags (location, what’s in the photo, etc) but otherwise presented entirely without context. There’s some minimal explanation, but, honestly, I quite like not really knowing more than this: “The Marco Land Handyfoto Foundation (est. 2014) is a sustained media archive of moments. A Handyfoto — or mobile photo — captures mundane objects or situations as a photo or video. It is the unexpected synergy between two unharmonious elements. The MLHF defines Handyfoto also as a way-of-seeing, a sacred practice: unplanned, observant, and attuned to life’s subtle humor and charm.” Beautiful, mundane digital life shards.
• The Arts Grant Guru: THIS IS A FCUKING SCAM. You, clever Web Curios readers that you are, would obviously arrive at that conclusion without my guidance, but I think it’s worth sharing because I get the impression there are at least a couple of people who work in the arts who read this and I feel the community as a whole should be on the lookout for nakedly-grifty sh1t like this. In an environment in which arts funding is more contested – and harder to come by – than ever, a service which purports to use THE MAGIC OF AI to help you craft better grant applications could be seen as a helpful service; this, though, is a naked fcuking scam, charging users a fee to perform tasks that could reasonably be achieved with the free versions of most of the large LLMs (and, if not, can DEFINITELY be achieved with the £20 a month pro versions, which is still less money than these cnuts are trying to charge for what is literally just a layer on top of (I presume) GPT. Honestly, this is gross and makes me really quite annoyed, so please do tell anyone you know who works in the sector to please not fall for sh1t like this? Thanks.
• Source Plus: Ooh, this is interesting – for artists working with AI who would like to be able to train their own local models on datasets that have been cleared for that express purpose, Source Plus offers a series of downloadable imagesets which have the full approval of their creators and copyright owners to be used for model tweaking. Useful for anyone working in this space who’d prefer not to feel like they were thieving from the mouths of the STARVING ARTISTS.
• Friend: Oooooooooooooh this is an odd one. Friend is a forthcoming AI companion service whose BIG THING is the idea that your companion, your ‘friend’, will live in a physica pendant-style device and effectively become a forevercompanion, remembering you and your life and what you do and what you say and being, basically, your always-there-pal who’s fun to be with! Or at least that’s the theory. In practice, now that the web version of Friend is live, it feels…quite different to that. Load up the website and you’re thrust straight into conversation with one of these ‘friends’ – you don’t get to choose which ‘companion’ you’re paired with, although you can refresh the page to get a new one – who starts your chat with a prompt and…the prompts are all FCUKED. My first one opened with “i’m texting you from my friend’s couch lol, him and his wife are fighting I’m just here in the corner”; the next one with “my kid’s in the hospital after a car crash and i’m a mess, pretending to be strong is exhausting” – hang on, what? WHY THE FCUK WOULD I WANT TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH THE IMAGINARY MOTHER OF A CARCRASH VICTIM? There doesn’t seem to be any version of these that *doesn’t* have one of these fcuked-up, ‘provocative’ openings, which does rather lend one to wonder…what’s going on here, why is this designed like this, and is there a bigger, more interesting story being alluded to (which, to be clear, would be sort of cool and interesting)? Katherine Dee at Default Friend thinks not, but I am VERY INTRIGUED by this and will keep an eye out for subsequent developments.
• Free Billionaire Sperm: Are YOU a woman who might want to bear a child? Are YOU struggling to conceive? Do YOU need access to some high-quality sperm? Would YOU like said sperm to be ABSOLUTELY FREE? Well lucky you, today’s your lucky day – presuming, of course, you’re able to get yourself to Moscow, because that’s where Telegram founder Pavel Durov has decided to make his seed freely available to whoever wants some (I presume there’s a finite supply of DurovJuice rather than him spending half his life strapped into some sort of unholy prostate milking machine but, honestly, who knows?). Durov’s previously boasted of already having fathered ‘100s’ of children via similar means, but it’s good to know that he’s not stopping there. I don’t know about you, but I am not entirely convinced that the reasons behind this are *wholly* benign, got to say (have any of you read ‘Rant’ by Chuck Palahniuk? Just saying, is all).
• Nomido: Find ALL THE WORDS that can be made from each day’s fragments – this is, annoyingly, far harder than I thought it was going to be (or I am losing IQ points by the day, either/or).
• Procjam: Another great set of tiny games via Lynn Cherny – these are the entries to the recent Procjam game development festival, and features dozens of small, cute, fun exercises in procedural generation, from a bonsai growing simulator to some rather fun sandboxes, many playable in-browser.
• OpenRA: Finally this week, the sort of thing that may make middle-aged Curios readers’ weekends – want to play Command and Conquer: Red Alert in a version that’s all updated and compatible with modern computers and stuff? OH GOOD HERE YOU ARE.

By  Julie van der Vaart

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BASICALLY THE SOUND OF BEING IN A MARINA C.1987, OR AT LEAST IT IS IN MY HEAD (I WAS NOT HANGING AROUND MANY MARINAS IN 1997, TURNS OUT), AND IT IS BY DREAM CHIMNEY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY! 

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Fersetid: Oh this is BRILLIANT. Films (and occasional other media) reimagined as PS1-era videogames. The American Psycho clip in particular is just supremely chilling.
• Ben G Tibbert: Exceptionally-unsettling AI art and animation; this is very, very good indeed, and reminds me quite a lot of Cool 3d World in terms of overall aesthetic.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Michael Kirkham

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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!: