Hi everyone! Hi! Can…can we all please stop talking about the US election for a bit, please? There’s ages left and you’re not going to be able to keep this level of discourse up for another three months, unless he really DOES fcuk his couch.

Tell you what, let me distract you with something different, something which exists BEYOND POLITICS! Something which transcends petty boundaries of left and right, right and wrong, ‘Republicans’ and ‘people who aren’t total cnuts’ – THAT’S RIGHT I AM TALKING ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS!

Yes, gentle reader, we have a shortlist! 12 websites in the main category, 6 in the ‘multiplayer’ category, all vying for your votes and attention and the chance to win a VERY SMALL PRIZE!

Thanks to everyone who shared the website – we had over 300 entries after clearing up spam and the leavings of all of those people who simply can’t comprehend written instructions – and especially to our esteemed judges who sorted through them all to pick their favourites.

Please do go and check out the nominations, and vote, and TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE – if nothing else it’s a lovely selection of interesting and odd and fun and silly and BRILLIANT websites, made by actual people for the simple love of Making Stuff Online, and for that reason alone it deserves a bit of love and attention.

The winners will be revealed on 18 August – I’ll remind you ahead of time, don’t worry – but PLEASE SHARE THE LINK AND SPREAD THE WORD! Should any journalists be reading this thinking ‘you know, maybe this would make a good hook for that piece I’ve been longing to write about the small, creative web as an antidote to Big Tech Hegemony?’, let me reassure you that you are right and that it would.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are as sick as I am of the ‘b’ word, don’t pretend you’re not.

By Natalia Gonzales Martin

WE KICK OFF THE SONGS THIS WEEK WITH WHAT IS FRANKLY THE ONLY MIX YOU NEED, PERHAPS EVER, IN THE SHAPE OF OVER 24 HOURS OF (FROM WHAT I HAVE HEARD, AT LEAST) SUPERB TRACKS SPANNING A MASSIVE RANGE OF GENRES AND ARTISTS AND ERAS AND WHICH, HONESTLY, IS JUST A GIFT FOR WHICH IMMENSE THANKS TO THE PEOPLE AT DEEK RECORDINGS FOR COMPILING IT!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS HOW EXACTLY YOU IMAGINED THEY GOT THE HORSES TO DANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, PT.1:  

By Janet Maya

NEXT UP, AN ACTUAL ALBUM BY A NORTH-EAST PUNK BAND CALLED SUNNY BLUNTS WHICH I DISCOVERED THIS WEEK AND FELL SLIGHTLY IN LOVE WITH, NOT LEAST BECAUSE THE SINGER HAS A RECOGNISABLE ACCENT WHICH IS IMMENSELY PLEASING AND THE SONGS ALSO SLAP! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS HOW EXACTLY YOU IMAGINED THEY GOT THE HORSES TO DANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, PT.2:  

• Ready Player One: Ok, it is very important that you watch at least some of this clip twice –  the first time KEEP THE SOUND OFF. The link is to a Tweet promoting a bunch of ‘sports cars’ existing in ‘metaverse platform’ (so 2021!) Somnium Space (remember them? They were selling ‘real estate’ for real cashmoney back in the day, bet that’s appreciated nicely!), and, honestly, this is slightly amazing – these are all modded in by users, and they are all ‘ownable’ (something something web3 blockchain) and drivable in the game, and as you watch this you start to get a creeping feeling that, yes, ok, fine, this may be something that is currently only really being used by about 1000 people worldwide, in all likelihood, and it’s a *bit* janky, but, actually, if you squint, you can JUST ABOUT make out the shape of every fcuking tedious manchild’s fictional wet dream Ready Player One lurking in the not-too-distant future…look, seriously, I have no personal appetite for any of this stuff, but even I can concede that there’s something slightly mind-blowing about the possibility being hinted at here. Ok, you done that? You watched at least a bit of this with the sound off? Ok, great, now go back to the beginning of the video and put the sound on. Listen to the voice-over. THAT IS WHY THE METAVERSE IS NEVER GOING TO BE A THING. PEOPLE LIKE THIS. WHY ARE YOU ATTEMPTING TO MAKE SEXY CHAT ABOUT VIRTUAL CARS? Honestly, you can practically *smell* the mountain dew and see the very, very grubby gamer chair. Still, the tech is undeniably impressive so well done, sort-of.
• The Salesforce Child Art Sale: I have featured the strange and, honestly, rather horrible, art of Salesforce Child in here before via their Twitter account, but I noticed this week that some of their work is now on sale in physical form and, well, GET INVOLVED. Spending some of the corporate art budget on one of these would be an incredible statement of intent, is all I’m saying.
• Overlap: What do you want more of in your life? Time? Money? Sex? Cake? Tearful solitude (lol!)? NO WHAT YOU WANT MORE OF IS PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS CONNECT ME UP TO THE NETWORK LINK MY NODE. Ahem. Overlap is a new professional matchmaking setup, which, presumably, is designed to do similar stuff to LinkedIn except without causing you to lose some of your immortal soul every time you post (I presume that’s what’s happening on LinkedIn, anyway) – basically it’s a dating app but for professional connections (sort of), insofar as it seeks to pair you with potentially-interesting people based on your profile, but the idea here, presumably, is that you will swap business cards and contacts and wisdom rather than mucal extrusions. The problem with an approach like this, I worry, is…well, it’s men, isn’t it? Given that men can’t seem to spend any time on any platform without attempting to use it as a platform for chirpsing, it seems to me vanishingly-unlikely that one which quite obviously apes the UX and UI of dating apps (minus the sexy photos, fine) isn’t going to be swamped with guys attempting to use it to get into more than someone’s contacts book. Still, MORE PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS, like some sort of miserable besuited Pokemon of sh1t.
• Button Stealer: Fun AND pointless! Button Stealer is a Chrome extension which, when installed, lets you ‘steal’ a button from any webpage you happen to visit – ‘stolen’ buttons are not, of course, stolen in any meaningful sense, but the extension saves them in your personal ‘stash’, so over time you can build up a small, personal collection of digital design elements that are uniquely yours. It’s that that makes it charming, I think – the fact that everyone’s haul will be unique (and obviously totally pointless, but, well still unique!).
• Raymond Biesinger: Ok, this is an online shop, fine, but the design here, by one Raymond Biesinger, is SO GOOD – this is his store, where he sells his own prints and restorations of vintage design work from 20th Century Canada, and, honestly, I promise you that you will find something here that you adore, and the prices are relatively low for this sort of thing. Take a look, this is great.
• So, You Want To Build A Museum: WHAT a resource this is! Offered by by Florence Schechter, who is the person behind the long-running and eventually-successful campaign to establish London’s Vagina Museum and who’s now created this insanely-generous document which neatly and simply takes you through the questions you need to think about and the steps you need to take if you want to establish your own small museum on whatever topic you fancy. You need to fill in some details and hand over your email to get access, but, honestly, that’s a small price to pay – there’s SO much good thinking in here, and, honestly, it’s probably worth a look for anyone who’s involved in planning-y, thinking-y, organising-y work.
• Asqme: Interesting idea, this, aimed at YouTube creators – the idea here is that you train The Machine on your archive material, which is then used as the basis for a Question & Answerbot version of YOU, spun up by AI, which can be available 24/7 for anyone to ask questions of, the idea being that answers will be valuable because drawn from your actual bank of knowledge and not in fact just spun up as a result of probability. You can even go so far as to monetise the system, charging for responses (and even charging a premium for FAST responses), which seems…punchy, frankly. I see what they are trying to do here, but I would have to be SIGNIFICANTLY more confident in the ability of these people to fix the whole ‘hallucination’ issue than I in fact am before I let The Machine confidently answer questions on, say, the safe way to install an induction heater. Feels like there might be some interesting legal liability stuff in the future here, is all I’m saying.
• Rebind: Featured in the longreads section a few weeks back, Rebind is an AI-augmented reading platform which offers you the ability to, er, read but with ADDED FEATURES – video content to go alongside the reading experience, and discuss the book with an AI model which has been specially trained on the thoughts and interpretations and reactions of another reader, an expert or someone with particular perspective on the text in question. It was this AI component that got all the attention in the press leading up to launch, and it’s an interesting idea, although I suppose I question exactly how many people are actually going want to spend significant amounts of time ‘talking’ to an AI interlocutor about, I don’t know, Middlemarch enough to spend the cash on these SPECIAL BOOKS. There’s a slow publication cadence, with a new title coming out every month or so, and there’s a bunch of additional functionality including the ability to take notes on the text as you go, and then use those notes to create your very OWN interlocutor, so you can…what, discuss your feelings and thoughts on the text with an AI version of yourself? As you can tell, this holds VERY limited appeal for me, but perhaps you’ll be persuaded – personally it feels quite a lot like CD-Rom encyclopaedias c.1995, but see what you think.
• A Very Big Auction of Sports Memorabilia: How much would you pay for the shorts that Michael Jordan wore on his final ever NBA game, playing for the Washington Wizards in the 2002-3 season (it is unclear from the listing whether said shorts have been laundered, lest that change the amount you might be prepared to bid)? How about Diego Maradona’s ACTUAL SIGNED ARGENTINA SHIRT from the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup? Well TOUGH, unless the answer to both those questions was ‘a genuinely insane amount of money’ then I’m afraid you’re unlikely to get near any of the lots at this forthcoming Sotheby’s sale taking place in the US next week. Still, nice to window shop.
• Free Faces: After last week’s ‘steal the fonts’ MSCHF drop, here’s the lawful-good antonym – Free Faces offers “a curated collection of typefaces that are available under a variety of free licences somewhere on the interwebs”, collected by one Simon Foster. THANKYOU SIMON FOSTER!
• Free Textures: More free digital things! Textures this time! “Texturelabs is an online resource for free, original textures and tutorials for art and design. These elements are created by Texturelabs and are free to use, even in your commercial work (with just a few exceptions). Alongside these resources are a selection of original Tools – project files, templates, actions, and more, which play a vital role in sustaining the project.” All of this was created by one person, Brady Erickson, which is such an insanely generous thing to do it makes me very slightly emotional.
• British Teeth: Matt Round gets his second mention of the week (he doesn’t even PAY me, ffs) for this lovely new project on Vole where the English amongst you can find out exactly HOW English your English teeth are, compared to the degradation of the teeth of the average English person of your age. As someone who went to the hygienist this week and therefore is feeling moderately-virtuous about their oral hygiene (whilst simultaneously currently imbibing his seventh mug of ruinously-strong brew of the day here at 917am, of a hue that might best be described as ‘terracotta umbre’, thereby undoing all of the good work accomplished in the chair a few short days ago ffs) this made me feel rather smug – anyway, this is ANOTHER great example of a simple idea that can and should be coopted into a marketing promo for a dentist’s, or a public health campaign or something. SOMEONE PAY MATT THE MONEY FFS, HE HAS LITERALLY DONE ALL THE WORK.
• Learn Go: I appreciate that telling people to ‘learn Go’ in 2024 is a bit like telling them to, I don’t know, master times tables – you could do it, fine, but, equally, we passed the Rubicon of machine superiority a while back. Still, if you don’t mind the fact that you’re learning a game that machines have literally completed (to an extent, at least) this is a really good resource which patiently takes players through the rudiments of the game before slowly scaling up the complexity across a five-step tutorial program. To be clear, I tried a few steps of this and realised quite quickly that this is FAR too maths-y for me, but those of you with more, er, rigorous brains might enjoy the learning experience here.
• Infinite Homepage: Another attempt to recreate the Million Dollar Homepage! Honestly, has anyone tallied the various riffs on Alex Tew’s now-legendary early-internet stunt? Would love to see something chronicling all the copycats it spawned (and to know whether any of them had anywhere near the same degree of success). Anyway, Infinite Homepage is another ‘hey, why don’t you buy a stake on this infinite webcanvas?’ project, with the gimmick that there’s an infinite series of editable text boxes which users can ‘lock’ in exchange for a payment – if you want an idea of why this is never going to work, try making ANY fcuking sense of the ‘about’ page here. Doomed to eventual irrelevance, but in the meantime there’s something oddly-fascinating about seeing all the various bits of graffiti people are choosing to populate the canvas with (and slightly dispiriting to note that the moronic crypto ‘gm!’ thing is still a, well, thing).
• Smokescanner: I am slightly annoyed by this – I think it’s a fun, silly little idea (and as a smoker – still, just – I obviously approve of the theory behind it), but it REALLY doesn’t explain itself particularly well. Let me see if I can do a better job – tell the site where you are flying from, and to, and it will tell you how many packets of fags you have to buy at your destination to cover the cost of the flight in the savings you make. Er, does that make sense? Hang on, maybe it’s harder than I thought. Basically the idea is ‘if you buy loads of fags in (eg) Italy you will save about £9 per pack – by that token, if I buy 20 packs of fags I have basically got a £180 flight for free’ – SEE, IMPECCABLE LOGIC!!! I know that you almost certainly can’t use ‘tabs are cheap abroad!’ as an advermarketing mechanic in 2024, more’s the pity, but this is a great little gimmick.
• The Supreme Court Art Competition: Do YOU know someone between the ages of 15-18? Are they artistically talented? Are they at a loose end this weekend? Are they the sort of 15-18 year old who would like to spend their free time creating an artwork inspired by the UK’s Supreme Court to celebrate its 15th anniversary? WELL ISN’T THIS YOUR LUCKY DAY! You only have until Sunday 28th to get your entries in, and they have to meet the following criteria: “This is a free, open submission exhibition for students aged 15-18 studying in the UK. Families of Supreme Court staff and Justices cannot take part. We welcome works on paper, small canvases and small, light sculpture. Paper and canvas artworks should be a maximum of A3. Sculpture should weigh a maximum of 1850g and be a maximum of 30cm high and 20cm wide.” Disappointingly, if perhaps predictably, the contest also stipulates that “Artwork should focus on the UK Supreme Court building or the judicial system. Artwork should not parody or satirise the law,” but, well, TRY ANYWAY.
• A Good GoFundMe: I don’t think this is serious, and even if it was it would never meet its target, but I am 100% here for the concept behind the campaign which I think is the best use of the Vegas sphere I have yet heard of.
• IRL HTML: A FUN USE OF AI! Specifically multimodal AI, which is being used under the hood here to ‘see’ the images uploaded, ‘read’ them, and then render them as code. “IRL HTML is a web app that hosts HTML web pages created from photographs of HTML code. You can upload a photograph of some HTML to create a new HTML page!” Hear that? Sketch some html on a piece of A4, photograph it, upload it here and VWALLAH IT IS A WEBPAGE! Which is, honestly, quite magic – there’s a really interesting extension to this which is effectively creating a sort of scrapbook Visual Basic tool for people to literally draw out webdesign and have it automatically spun up into a prototypical page design, which now I come to think of it is obviously totally possible right now and which I imagine someone has already made. Still, if not, GET ON IT IT IS A GREAT IDEA.
• Sarah of the Antartic: Sarah is someone who has recently arrived in Antartica to do research into polar ice cores. This is their TikTok account, which only has three videos but two of them are ‘doing polar research in the style of Wes Anderson’ and are so beautifully, perfectly realised that I feel reasonably-confident recommending the channel to you, because, really, who doesn’t find beautifully-presented Artic landscapes delivered via the medium of perfectly-composed cinematography compelling? NO FCUKER, etc!
• The Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library: Have you harboured a long-standing fascination with teledildonics and felt that the only thing holding you back from creating your very own remote-controlled sex aid? OF COURSE YOU HAVE, YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Welcome, then, to the Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library, a repository of all the code you could possibly need to set a variety of latex-covered objects moving intimately within you! I present this information without judgement or prejudice, and ask only that none of you ever try and tell me what you do with it.
• Mojie: The final miscellaneous link this week is to this fun little Wordle clone (I know, but I promise it’s fun) which asks you to guess three films each day based on emoji-based clues. My general lack of anything resembling cinematic knowledge makes this a particularly challenging one for me, but if your appreciation of cinema extends beyond ‘Bad Boy Bubby’ and ‘Meet The Feebles’ (no they ARE classics!) then you might find this an enjoyable addition to the daily puzzle round.

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK DESCRIBES ITSELF AS ‘BALEARIC BOOGIE NIGHTS’ BUT PERSONALLY SPEAKING I THINK ‘MASSIVE 80s GAY DISCO’ IS A BETTER FIT – EITHER WAY IT IS ACE AND IF I HAD A POOL IT IS THE SORT OF THING I WOULD PROBABLY PLAY WHILE ‘LOUNGING’ NEXT TO IT AT THE WEEKENDS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Cruising Archaeology: An Insta feed sharing photographs of some of the detritus abandoned at various cruising sites across the UK – from the mundane, to the poignant, to the odd and inexplicable, all of gay life is here. SO much fascinating stuff here – my personal favourite is the discarded poppers bottle emblazoned with the Union Jack and bearing the legend ‘ENGLISH ROOM ODORISER’ which immediately opens the window onto an imagined psyche absolutely RIDDLED with self-doubt and contradictions, but you will find your own amongst the collection. There’s an art book out now accompanying this, should it be your sort of thing.
• Historic Embroidery: I mean, you probably don’t need this explaining, do you? IT’S OLD NEEDLEWORK FFS.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Daido Moriyama

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Propriety be damned, we’re allowed to feel a faint twinge of regret, right? Please take it upon yourselves to determine exactly which of last Sunday’s major news events I am referring to.

Anyway, given the fact that the world’s digital infrastructure appears to have decided to fall over this morning and that therefore a lot of you might find yourself in a position where…everything…takes…forever…thanks…modernity…fcuk’s…sake, I’ll keep this short and instead proudly present to you this week’s selection of freshly-slain links, harvested at no small personal cost by me, for you, just you, always you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can already taste that first pint, can’t you, I can tell.

By Reuben Negron (all pics this week lifted from TIH)

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH AN ALBUM I BOUGHT FOR A QUID ENTIRELY AT RANDOM ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO IN SPITALFIELDS AND WHICH HAS SINCE BECOME ONE OF MY FAVOURITE SUMMER LISTENS AND WHICH FEELS PERFECT FOR AN AFTERNOON LIKE THIS ONE (THE ONE IN LONDON RIGHT NOW, TO BE CLEAR, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOUR PERSONAL AFTERNOON MAY OR MAY NOT BE LIKE)! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS ASKED BY A STRANGER IN CENTRAL LONDON LAST SUNDAY IF I HAD ‘ANY BUGLE’ TO SPARE, WHICH STRUCK ME AS BOTH DELICIOUSLY RETRO AND WILDLY OPTIMISTIC ON THEIR PART, PT.1:

By Stephen A Scheer

BACK TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL FOR THIS NEXT MIX, WHICH IS PSYTRANCE AND ACID TECHNO AND THEREFORE ALMOST UTTERLY UNCOOL BUT I LOVE IT UNCONDITIONALLY REGARDLESS BECAUSE DEAR GOD DO I MISS DOING SPEED AND DANCING TO THIS STUFF! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS ASKED BY A STRANGER IN CENTRAL LONDON LAST SUNDAY IF I HAD ‘ANY BUGLE’ TO SPARE, WHICH WAS BOTH DELICIOUSLY RETRO AND STRUCK ME AS WILDLY OPTIMISTIC ON THEIR PART, PT.2:  

• Gaza Memorial: A site which lists the names and ages of people killed in Gaza over the past 9 months – if you have your volume up, you will hear the names being read aloud as they cycle. The voices reading the names of the deceased are other people from around the world who have contributed their voices to their project – if you’re moved to do so, you can leave a recording here.
• The Ultimate PaywallHopper: Before you all get excited, be aware that this is TECHNICAL and you will need to be comfortable fiddling with a few things on your computer to get it to work – BUT it’s not actually hard at all, and the instructions on the page are comprehensive, and, look, as previously discussed, I believe in paying for journalism as much as the next man but, equally, I am paying four figures annually for subscriptions at the moment and it’s not like my employment prospects are getting any better with the passage of time. This will get you into ALL SORTS of places, including The Athletic and Bloomberg, and is a fcuking GODSEND.
• The Picasso Study Centre: Picasso, seen from the vantage point of 2024 – a leathery old pervert who had an indisputable way with the oils but who you probably wouldn’t necessarily trust with your wife/daughter/mum. Still, if you’d prefer your analysis of one of the 20thC’s most celebrated artists to be informed by rather more than my throwaway dismissal, you might enjoy checking out this newly-digitised set of works collected by the Picasso Study Centre – this contains 5,000 works from sketches and studies to monographs and photos and 3d models, and you could honestly lose hours to this if you’re so minded.
• Code Galaxies: OK, I can’t claim to wholly understand what it is that is being visualised here – yes, fine, ‘code’, and according to the description code which ‘visualizes dependencies among most popular package managers. Every star in this visualization represents a package’, whatever that means – but beyond that I’m slightly lost – but it’s undeniably VERY PRETTY and quite mesmerising. This site – via Giuseppe’s ever-excellent data newsletter, btw – lets you explore Rust, Python, Arch Linux and other languages in zoomy, space commander fashion, flying through the various nodes as though they were, well, galaxies. Hence the name. Jesus. Anyway, I don’t think there’s any purpose to this AT ALL from a practical point of view, but I am very keen on the aesthetic and general VIBE.
• The ABC Glossary Questionnaire: An interesting nascent project about the web and tech and language, this, in which you (yes, YOU!) are invited to submit your own new words, terms and definitions to characterise how we relate to the internet. “Welcome to the ABC Glossary* Questionnaire, an invitation to revisit your relationship to the internet and to reimagine how we collectively web through language. Below are a set of exercises to help you locate yourself within a (local area) network in order to refuse harmful computing practices and to repair our connections with/between technology, community, and nature. What words do we use to describe our electronic experiences? What terms do you associate with the internet, computing, and cyber culture? What words do we ignore? What words do we need to use in new ways? Submit a term with a newly redefined condition.* Draw an imagined map of the internet.” I mean, that sounds right up my street and maybe it will be up yours too – this is only a few weeks old and only has three entries so far, but I am hoping it will spread and grow as people engage with the idea, not least because I am increasingly of the opinion that we need new vocabulary for all of *this* as ‘being online’ and ‘surfing the web’ (LOL!) doesn’t really cut it any more.
• Make The Olympic Flag: You know what the Olympic flag looks like, right? RIGHT? OF COURSE YOU DO! In fact, I bet you remember it so well that you can replicate it digitally RIGHT NOW, completely accurately, on your first try. Click the link and PROVE IT. This is one of those things that makes you realise how appalling human memory is at detail (oh, ok, fine, MY memory) – while I had the vague shape of the rings in my head, turns out I have literally no effective retention AL ALL of which colours are involved, what order the colours go in, or indeed the correct proportions of the final design. Erm, can you all try this and reassure me that you’re sh1t at it too? THANKS!
• The Locavore: This is an NYC thing, but feels very much like it can (and should) transfer as a concept to basically anywhere else. Designed to be a directory of small, local shops in the city, this is a BRILLIANT idea – shops can self-submit, with the only criteria being: “1. Open to All – It’s important to us to highlight IRL shops with regular walk-in hours. Everyone’s welcome!; 2. Independent – To qualify, shops must have 5 or less locations and be independently owned; 3. Accessible – Shops must be easily accessible by bus, train, biking or walking within each neighborhood; 4. Old and New – We prioritize longtime community staples as well as new much needed neighborhood additions.” There’s no search function – you can browse by store type or neighbourhood, but the idea is that this is designed as much to help you learn about the shops that are out there as it is to get you a quick answer to your ‘where can I find a cobbler in Greenpoint’ query – and this feels like a SUPER initiative overall. The directory apparently now spans over 13,000 independent shops, which is quite remarkable – does this exist for London? If so, can one of you point me at it, please?
• Tinder For Recipes: Yes, I know, but it’s the app-makers’ description so I am letting that one go – it’s actually called ‘Dinners’, but wevs. This is an app for…for who? Big families with wildly-divergent taste in meals? People who want to introduce a potentially-extremely-limiting element to their domestic approach to food? The idea is that you and your fellow housemates all download the app, then get presented with various recipes – swipe left to say ‘MMM YES PLEASE’, right to say ‘I WOULD RATHER EAT MY OWN FACE’. All the recipes that you ALL swipe left on get added to your APPROVED recipebook, ensuring that you only ever cook things that you all like – simple, right? Well, yes, in theory, until you get that one housemate who only wants to eat plain rice and poached chicken breast and who therefore royally fcuks the whole system for everyone else. THERE IS ALWAYS ONE.
• Jordan Stone: I am really not a TikTok user, mainly because video is very much Not My Medium, and I am sort of grateful for that because I’m very conscious of how easy it would be to find something that scratches a very particular, personal itch and just falling into some catatonic rabbithole with it for approximately six hours or so. So it is with the work of Jordan Stone – I have never, ever seen anything on TikTok which speaks to me quite like this does. Seriously, it has some sort of very odd ASMR-type effect on my brain, like someone is stroking it VERY DIRECTLY, and it’s very hard for me to stop watching – WHY???? This is…I don’t know what it is. Memetic nonsense? TikTok slop? NO IT IS ART, ART I TELL YOU! There are only 23 videos on this channel but they are all worthy of being in the Tate, and I am not sh1tting you – watch and marvel. BONUS TIKTOK: I have no idea what the fcuk is happening here, but the chickens are magnificent and I want more.
• Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024: Our annual look at ‘photos of mad stuff in the cosmos’, now – leaving aside the fact that I am 100% convinced that one of these images is not a photograph but is in fact just a screenshot from a very heavily-modded version of Skyrim (you will know exactly the one I mean, promise), can I just draw your attention to the caption on the image entitled ‘Run to Carina’? The bit that reads “Deep in northwest Namibia, in a scorched desert where you can drive hundreds of kilometres without coming across another human, an artist is hard at work. Dotted all over the desert are numerous sculptures made of stone which blend seamlessly into the surroundings. Known as the ‘Lone Men of Kaokoland’ [as the region was formerly known], it is not clear who has put them there and where exactly they are located.” EXCUSE ME WHAT?! Why did noone ever tell me about the mysterious stone giants of the Namibian desert?! Anyway, the space pictures are ace, as always, but that detail in particular has spun me out rather.
• Beautiful AI Animations: Gerde Gotit is…a studio, I think, based in Canada, that does a bunch of work using generative AI to create animations – the main link goes to some work they’ve done creating dancing leaf sprites and the like, but you might recognise them from those videos of the dancing spaghetti which did the rounds last week, which you can see more of here. This is really impressive, particularly in terms of the way they’ve used mocapped dancers to create the movement set, and I’d be amazed if this specific technique doesn’t crop up in a TV spot sooner rather than later.
• The AI Murder Mystery: Via my friend Tom at the BBC (HI TOM!) comes this slightly-shonky work-in-progress/proof-of-concept experiment in AI-led ludic interactive experiences (catchy, eh?) – you play…A DETECTIVE! And you have to SOLVE A CASE! By TALKING TO SUSPECTS and INTERROGATING THEM! Using NATURAL LANGUAGE! Specifically, “You are Detective Sheerluck, investigating the murder of Victim Vince. The storyline, clues, and suspect alibis are all fixed, with every suspect hiding something about the case from the police. Each suspect knows important information about the other suspects, allowing you to piece together the truth through chatting. Your partner Officer Cleo can investigate locations at your request and present you with observational evidence. You can ask her to give you an overview of the case or to search certain locations for clues. Take notes from your conversations and piece together who killed Victim Vince, why he was killed, and how. When you are ready, click the End Game button to make your deduction.” This…almost works, sort-of, but what’s more interesting is the shape of the *next* thing you can vaguely see beneath its skin; we’re not yet at a point where this stuff can be considered anything other than a passing curiosity, but we can definitely also see exactly how it will work when the tech gets good enough. If you’re of a particular sort of mind, it’s also moderately-amusing to work out how you can jailbreak the characters into telling you everything straight off the bat – one for all you ‘prompt engineers’ (LOL HELLO 2022!) out there.
• Newsletters-To-Podcasts: To be clear, this is a terrible idea which won’t work at all – but that has never stopped me from including a link in Curios, and it won’t stop me now. This is a service called Jellypod, whose gimmick is that it will take all the many newsletters you subscribe to and which you don’t have time to read, and will, VIA THE MAGIC OF AI, turn them into a fully-voiced podcast, summarising all the main issues so you don’t have to do any tedious, time-consuming reading. Look, I appreciate that I am very much the last person in the world who can or should be making this argument, but can we maybe not just accept that there are real, practical limits on the quantity of information that we are capable of usefully ingesting, even if we listen to it all at 3x speed? Also, can you imagine the hideous mangling of content and meaning you’ll get from an AI summary of multiple newsletter sources? Please, can someone spend a week getting their news and information ONLY via the medium of this service and tell me how you get on?
• Underground Comix: OH YES. “The Adler Archive of Underground Comix is a collection of underground comix, books, and archival newspaper and magazine clippings on cartoonists and ephemera. The underground comix portion of the collection presented here includes ~250 items published between the 1960s and 2000s by artists such as Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Dori Seda, Art Speigelman and many others, as well as anthology titles such as Arcade Comics Revue, RAW, Weirdo, Young Lust and Zap.” I sort of feel that every kid aged about 16 ought to get access to this, it feels like a sort of countercultural rite of passage – if nothing else, I IMPLORE you to dip in here and read some Harvey Pekar if you’ve never done so before; the man really was a genius, and, on a personal note, his book ‘The Quitter’ is the most painfully-relatable piece of media I have ever encountered in my life.
• Bookmarks: Ooh, this is a good idea I think – basically IMDB for novels, this is potentially hugely useful for anyone looking to get book recommendations from somewhere less genre-obsessed and generally mental than BookTok. “Every day, the Book Marks staff scours the most important and active outlets of literary journalism in the US and beyond—from established national broadsheets to regional weeklies and alternative litblogs—and logs their book reviews. When a book is reviewed by at least three outlets, each of those reviews is assigned an individual rating (Rave, Positive, Mixed or Pan). These ratings are then averaged into a result and the book becomes part of our Book Marks database. Each book’s cumulative rating functions as both a general critical assessment, and, more significantly, as an introduction to the range of voices and opinions that make up the world of American literary criticism. These opinions are accompanied by pull quotes representative of the overall stance of each individual review, and readers can click through to the full review at its source. Readers can express their own opinions alongside those of the critics in each book page’s What Did You Think Of… comments section.” Smart and helpful, and, coincidentally, a really good place to remind yourself of how TERRIBLE US book cover design is when compared to the variety and ingenuity you see from European and UK publishers (sorry, but it’s really true).
• Frasier Sleepers: This week I learned that there is an active community of Redditors who have come together around the shared experience of being seemingly unable to fall asleep without the comforting Seattle-based sounds of Frasier to accompany them to unconsciousness. Join them here, as they discuss hot topics such as “I find watching the first 5 seasons far more relaxing and as the series progresses so does the cameras and the sound quality become crisper. Thats not to take anything away from watching and enjoying the series over and over again in its entirety. On the dvd box set version, the microphones and cameras they use on set seem more velvety and the picture quality is creamier and less harsh and bright as in the later series.” PREACH!
• The Tokyo Toilet Map: At some point in the late-1990s, a resident of Tokyo decided to use the early internet to document the states of various public conveniences across the city. Photos of Japanese toilets from 1996-1997! Occasional images of graffiti of, inexplicably, dogs in congress! I am astonished at the fact that this is still live, 30 years after the fact – there’s an email address attached to the page, should any Japanese speakers wish to get in touch with the Yuuji Hayashi who is apparently responsible for this small slice of odd obsessiveness.
• Disk Defrag Simulator: Completely, totally and utterly pointless – EXCEPT I reckon that if you work in an office with young enough colleagues, you can reasonably open this webpage, fullscreen it, turn the sound on and then apologetically explain ‘sorry, really important IT updates, can’t do anything about it’ and just sort of go to the pub. Try it NOW while it’s momentarily sunny!
• Alien Melon Games: Dozens of weird little…games? Art projects? Code experiments? Wevs, these are ace and there are LOADS of them – you will need to download most of them to try them out, but it’s all free or ‘pay what you want’, and there’s SO much creativity and odd packed into each that it’s 100% worth bookmarking for your next bored, rainy afternoon (so in all likelihood ‘August’).
• Pippin Barr Does Greek Punishments As ‘Snake’ Variants: Pippin Barr, 8-bit game artist and fan of the classics, returns with another in his occasional series of ‘tiny games riffing comedically on Greek mythology’ with a small series of variants on the classic Nokia ‘Snake’ gameplay model, each tweaked to represent one of a selection of Greek punishment myths. Play ‘Snake’ as Sisyphus allegory! Play it to be reminded of Prometheus! Or Tantalus! Ok, so these are single note gags which you will probably get very quickly, but, equally, they are FUNNY and I am always a sucker for medium/message stuff like this.
• The Coin Toss World Cup: Finally this week, this is literally a piece of branching interactive fiction about tossing coins – BUT it is VERY FUNNY and I promise you that you are going to want to keep playing to because the writing here is far, far better than it needs to be. Although, be warned, I believe that the probabilities here are accurate and so you might want to clear the remainder of the century if you’re going to beat this without brute-forcing the whole thing in some way.

By Mark Forbes

WE CLOSE THIS WEEK WITH A MIX WHICH, HONESTLY, SOUNDS TO ME LIKE WHAT I IMAGINE IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN LIKE TO WALK AROUND THE MALL IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS FROM AN EARLY BRET EASTON ELLIS NOVEL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Morgan Leigh Meisenheimer: How full of cows is your Insta feed? NOWHERE NEAR FULL ENOUGH! Rectify that immediately with this Insta account, run by animal photographer Morgan Leigh Meisenheimer, whose photos of LOVELY BOVINE LADS are really very good indeed, and made all the better by the number of said BOVINE LADS who have clearly just received a really comprehensive shampoo, condition and possibly blow-dry and are, by the standards of dairy cattle at least, remarkably glam as a result.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Maureen Dougherty

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Welcome, one and all, to the very first Web Curios EVER not to be written under a Conservative government!

What do you mean ‘it all looks dispiritingly familiar, you’ve not even given the place a lick of paint ffs’?!

Ok, so the election wasn’t all good news – loads of people simply couldn’t be bothered to vote, and a troubling proportion of those that did chose to put their ‘X’ in a box marked ‘racist, frog-faced haunted ashtray’ – but, equally, at least I can now forget that Michael Fabricant was ever anything other than a middlingly-successful mobile DJ who once worked under the nom d’arte of ‘Mickey Fab’ (this is 100% true, by the way).

Anway, enough of all that, there are a fortnight of links for you to get through while you wait for the nice man in the blacked-out beemer to show with the seventeen grammes of cheap cocaine you’ve ordered to ‘get you through’ on Sunday. To be clear, if England win then I hope all your gak is cut with strychnine.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and after Sunday we are never, ever going to talk about football again.

By Jason Levesque

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS BRILLIANT SELECTION OF GAUZY, JAPAN-INFLECTED, VIDEOGAMESOUNDTRACK-Y D’N’B, WHICH I PROMISE IS SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER THAN THIS DESCRIPTION ALMOST CERTAINLY MAKES IT SOUND! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY THRILLED TO IMAGINE ALL THE FRENZIED GROUPCHATS HAPPENING AROUND THE UK RIGHT NOW AS THE UK’S MEN COMPETE TO SEE WHO CAN BECOME THIS YEAR’S ‘AR$E-FLARE MAN’, PT.1:  

By Mobolaji Ogunrosoye

WE CONTINUE NOW WITH ANOTHER SELECTION OF STRANGE AND OCCASIONALLY SINISTER BUT ALWAYS VERY CRISP BEATS AND BREAKS AND BLOOPS FROM FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY THRILLED TO IMAGINE ALL THE FRENZIED GROUPCHATS HAPPENING AROUND THE UK RIGHT NOW AS THE UK’S MEN COMPETE TO SEE WHO CAN BECOME THIS YEAR’S ‘AR$E-FLARE MAN’, PT.2:  

• The Swype 30k: How often do you see or hear things that make you think ‘yeah, I mean, we’re fcuked, aren’t we?’ I hope, honestly, that it’s rare, that you’re not constantly muttering under your breath about how WE’RE ALL DOOMED – I mean, I’m definitely not doing that, oh no siree – but it’s reasonable to assume that the constant whirling assault of modernity will occasionally throw up some in-feed content that makes you…somewhat concerned as to the likely trajectory of our future. So it was this week when I encountered an ad for the Swype 30k, a newly-announced brand of disposable vape (remember, DISPOSABLE) which not only lets you inhale variously-flavoured particulate matter to your heart’s content but which also comes equipped with, er, Bluetooth, and an OLED screen, and the ability to link to your social media accounts, and Spotify, so it’s basically an entirely-disposable smartwatch. AMAZING. On the one hand, let’s make sure we’re doing our recycling – on the other, let’s also churn out 100,000k units of these fcukers! Still, maybe this is made out of a revolutionary new class of entirely-biodegradable electronics and plastics, right? Right? Er, hello?
• The Doolittle Prize: Ok, yes, fine, it’s not TECHNICALLY called the Doolittle prize, but it ought to be. Existing pretty much at the opposite end of the intellectual/’hope for the species’ spectrum as the previous link, this is ‘the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication. A Grand Prize of USD$10mln will be awarded for “cracking the code” with annual prizes of USD$100,000 to support successful applicants with their research to develop scientifically rigorous models and algorithms for coherent communication with non-human organisms until interspecies communication is achieved.’ So, basically, ‘can you use AI to help us talk to dogs? Great, we’ll give you ten million quid’ (I simplify, but only slightly). On the one hand this is obviously BRILLIANT and I am 100% here for this sort of funding; on the other, where do we go when we finally get the opportunity to TALK TO THE ANIMALS and we finally learn that they think we’re d1cks. WHAT THEN????
• Volv: I’ve long tired of the slightly-smug epithet ‘a stupid person’s idea of a clever person’, but, if I can paraphrase that, this really is a stupid person’s idea of a clever idea. Volv promises to give you ALL THE NEWS YOU NEED, but in, er, nine-second snippets. Why nine seconds? Because, apparently, ‘that’s all our TikTok addled brains can take’ (SCIENCE!) – so instead of, I don’t know, working to get your attention span back, why not lean into that degradation by downloading an app that promises you summarise EVERYTHING YOU COULD POSSIBLY NEED TO KNOW in small infobites that can be consumed in less than 10 seconds each. Take a moment to think about the top 5 significant news stories happening today wherever you may be. Now think about how you might communicate those stories in a manner which preserves their nuance and complexity, that communicates a necessary quantity of information and context, in nine seconds. Hard, isn’t it? I remain unconvinced that the GENIUS MINDS behind Volv have quite nailed this, but if you find the idea of the ‘…For Dummies’ series of books too intellectually daunting for you to cope with then perhaps this is for you.
• A Song Map of Canada: This is a LOVELY idea. One man, on a bike, cycling across Canada, following a route mapped by song lyrics. “Canada has no shortage of lyrics that pay tribute to the places people call home, with songs like Alberta Bound, Runnin’ Back to Saskatoon, Sudbury Saturday Night, Farewell to Nova Scotia, and Bobcaygeon to name an obvious few. Whether it’s rock, pop, folk, or blues there are countless artists of all genres, traditions, and communities with songs that tell the stories about the places we live. The Great Canadian Song Cycle is an unsupported (no van following along) bicycle trip across Canada with a focus on collecting songs about places. The end goal is to provide a song map of Canada populated by artists and their fans, and random interviews en route.” This has apparently just started, and there are minimal updates so far, but there’s a map and a list of songs, and I think this is just a lovely idea for a trip (for someone with significantly stronger calves than I possess).
• A Computer Vision Gallery: A curated collection of AI-created artworks pulled together by the Seattle Convention Centre – these are fascinating, a really interesting selection of different styles and techniques and models being employed by the various artists in question. I do think that anyone who out-of-hand dismisses any art made with AI as ‘not art’ should probably take a look at stuff like this and think again – there’s a categorical difference between ‘artist making work with models’ and ‘person typing prompt into Midjourney’, and this stuff is definitely the former.
• Paint’N’Play: This is quite fun – a tool from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC which lets you paint in the style of various different artists; effectively this just cycles the paintbrush through four or five different shapes, but they’re done well enough to mimic the styles of Van Gogh, Constable or others and the way in which you can mix and match the different stroke styles allows for some surprisingly-interesting effects (or it would if you were more artistically-inclined than I am; all my stuff looks like dogsick). Try drawing a Van Gogh-style portrait, it is FCUKING HARD – so fair play Vince, you were actually pretty good.
• Large Horse: This is a single-serving joke, but I am very much into the commitment to the bit and the use of subdomains as a comedy vehicle, something which, personally speaking, I don’t think you see enough of. COMEDY SUBDOMAINS FTW!
• Find The UK’s Hellmouths: Matt Round has somehow found a document listing the official location of every single one of the UK’s 700+ hellmouths, and has mapped them for you here – see where YOUR nearest one is. Then spend a good 10 minutes getting annoyed with yourself as you try and work out which actual, real-world datasat Matt has used to populate this, and then wonder whether or not their PR team will get in touch to complain should they ever find out about this.
• BossManChickFillA: The TikTok account of a fried chicken shop in Preston, Northern England, which consists mostly of them posting videos of their customers coming in after having had a few drinks of an evening. This is actually really lovely – it’s good-natured and feels nice, not sneery, and is a gently-comic look at life in a standard English town when you’re young and p1ssed and REALLY need a chicken shish with everything on NO LETTUCE! Although I have to say that the footage of all the kids celebrating after the football on Tuesday makes me so, so scared for Sunday night that I might have to stop writing here and just take 70 Xanax.
• Noiys: This is a very simple anonymous messaging site – anyone can log on and post a message anonymously and it will disappear in 24, and it’s obviously been hacked together by a kid somewhere, and it’s…weirdly, I found myself quite invested in this this week. You won’t read anything particularly profound or hilarious and most of it’s just nonsense posted by people who I reckon are probably on average about 12 years old…but also there’s something sort of fascinating about it, like looking at an antfarm or something, and it made me think of how this is what so much of the young adult experience is in 2024, these streams of strangers sharing text messages across Discord channels or Slack channels or Telegrams or weird little websites like this, so ephemeral and yet so persistent…no idea where I am going with this, but I found this a curious-if-pointless ‘slice of modernity’ and maybe you will too.
• All Of The Playlists: Oh, ok, fine, not ALL of them, but a VERY SIGNIFICANT NUMBER. “OK Mondays was a near weekly playlist spanning genres and moods, published from January 2nd, 2017 through January 1st, 2024. This page serves as a searchable index and archive of all playlists in the project.” So that’s somewhere in the region of 350+ playlists, all hand-curated, which, based on a quick scan of some of the tracklistings, span a truly remarkable selection of genres…this should be an instant bookmark imho.
• Some Interesting VTubers: While I’m not personally ever likely to get into the whole VTubing thing – I’m reasonably-relaxed about ‘the trappings of adulthood’, but at the same time draw the line at being the sort of 44 year old man who watches an anime e-boy with dragon ears and considers that to be legitimate entertainment – I am fascinated about the creativity evident in what some of these people are doing and how they do it. This Twitter thread presents a few examples of people pushing the envelope in terms of what it’s possible to do with Twitch and a mocap rig – there are a couple in here combining it with a hand-drawn animation style which I am in awe of.
• 4Chan’s Top 100 Books Ever: This is interesting – even if only from a sort of cultural analysis viewpoint. You all know what 4Chan is – each year the site does a member poll on THE BEST BOOKS EVER – one enterprising Channer has gone through all of the lists to date to compile THE UBERLIST, based on rankings over time, and you can see them all here. This is pretty much what you’d expect in many respects, but I was pleasingly surprised to see that it wasn’t ALL male (just, er, massively, overwhelmingly so) – it’s obviously super-American and super-Western and super-white in its bias (also, there is no universe in which ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ should be anywhere near any top books list – what is it with American men and their obsession with that novel?), but it’s an interesting look into ‘what forms the mindset of an average super-online Western teenage boy in 2024’. Slightly embarrassed by how many of these I’ve read tbh, but in my defence I have read a LOT (and I have read 80% of the collected works of Jilly Cooper and I bet none of the Chan fcukers can say THAT).
• Lettre: I feel slightly like I am ageing into a different part of the web. Partly this is my insistence on experiencing it primarily via desktop, which automatically siphons me towards A Certain Demographic, but it’s genuinely arresting to me when I get served stuff like this, which is, objectively, for Older People – I mean, look, it’s an fcuking iPad-first app! I am not old enough for iPad first apps! Except, er, it also looks quite interesting, I must say – it’s basically a penpalling app, where anyone can write letters (handwritten, obvs – again, AIMED AT OLD PEOPLE FFS) and if you like the look of a letter then you can reply to it in-app…basically like a sort of a reskinning of the basic concept of ‘forums’ for people who would be very scared of the concept of ‘forums’ but who are still very big fans indeed of ‘handwritten epistolary correspondence’. Ngl, if I had an iPad (WHICH I DON’T BECAUSE I AM NOT THAT OLD) I would totally give this a go.
• Not Quite Past: A LEGITIMATELY GOOD USE OF AI! MACHINE-IIMAGINED TILEWARE! “Not Quite Past trains AI to make beautiful things. Our first project explores classic Dutch Delftware tiles and lets you make your own. Make your own tile in our Workshop or pick one that’s already been made in our Marketplace. We then get it made in a kiln in the Staffordshire Potteries and sent to your door.” This is really fun, and quite a cool way of making yourself something bespoke and unique and secretly-geeky which will also look rather nice in your newly-refurbed kitchen.
• Buy A Stegosaurus: Yes, ok, there are other lots available at this forthcoming auction at Sotheby’s, but there is only one star attraction and that star attraction is Apex, a mounted stegosaurus skeleton which is estimated to go for a mere $4-6m dollars, making it the perfect adornment for your front garden. You can also get a T-Rex tooth for a mere $50k or so, though, which frankly feels like the sort of thing your kids can probably sacrifice their university fund for (tell them to become plumbers, seriously, it’s a better bet in the long run anyway).
• Dawn Chorus: Via blort, ALL OF THE BIRD SOUNDS! This is lovely – recordings of the dawn chorus from all over the world, mapped, which you can listen to to your heart’s content. It’s weird how evocative the different sounds of different birds’ songs can be – there’s a qualitative difference to what it sounds like to wake up in Rome to what it sounds like to wake up in London (and yet the taste of the tears in the morning is tediously-uniform, how queer!). This has been going for a few years now, and there’s an app which you can download should you want to record your own sounds and contribute them to the project – 100% lovely, this, no notes.
• Insect Photos: Got to be honest, I’m a *bit* of an entomaphobe and so these images make me itch like billy-o, but they’re also amazing in the way that only massively-close up photos of, say, beetles can be. THEY ARE LIKE TERRIFYING ORGANIC TRANSFORMERS! THEY ARE LIKE JEWELLED DEATH MACHINES! PRAY THEY NEVER GROW TO 100x THEIR SIZE! Anyway, this is the page featuring the nominations for the Royal Entomological Society’s annual photo contest, and these are GORGEOUS, especially the one of the termites which isn’t something I thought I would ever type.
• Chrono Piano: Ooh, this is both mathematically-pleasing and melodically-pretty and I very much enjoy it. “Chrono Piano is a live music player generates piano music based on the current date and time. Each digit from the date and time corresponds to a musical note. The date digits create the bass and the time digits form the melody.” Can we please have a clock in a public place that uses something like this to produce sounds, please?
• One Checkbox: You remember that ‘One Million Checkboxes’ site from the other week? Well this is that, but…smaller. It made me do a small lol, and may do the same for you.
• Where’s Wally?: Ok, so for excellent reasons of copyright this isn’t in fact called Where’s Wally? – but, well, that’s exactly what it is. I think it’s a promo for some New Zealand-based agency or something, given that all the various places in which you’re charged with finding a character in the throng are NZ locations, but, honestly, who cares? FIND THE MAN IN THE RUBBER RING! FIND THE LAUGHING OLD LADY! BEAT THE CLOCK! I am so, so bad at this it made me quite angry and I had to stop playing after a few fruitless minutes, but you may get significantly more out of it (you fcukers).
• The King Is Watching: Finally in this week’s miscellanea, A GREAT GAME! And one which will tide you over nicely til 8pm on Sunday night (PLEASE GOD SPAIN PLEASE GOD) – it’s quite hard to explain but easy to pick up, and all you really need to know is that a) you need to protect your kingdom fro hordes of ravening goblins; and b) noone does anything unless THE KING IS WATCHING. Seriously, this is great fun and is distracting enough that it kept my mind off the horrendous prospect of a potential England victory for a good 10 minutes.

By Roope Rainisto

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK BRINGS WHAT I MIGHT DESCRIBE, WERE I A VERY DIFFERENT SORT OF PERSON, AS ‘IMPECCABLE NYC BLOCK PARTY VIBES’ AND IS COMPILED BY ARSENII!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Sonder Solutions: Sonder Solutions are a German art collective that do odd little performances that riff on stereotypes of national identity and ORDER and probably all sorts of other stuff that I don’t understand because, well, everything they do is in German. Still, their Insta feed is full of pleasingly-nonsensical (to me at least) videos of them doing things like ‘pointless roadworks, very slowly, in a TINY SILVER DIGGER’ and, honestly, who doesn’t need a bit of in-feed Tuetonic surrealism? NO FCUKER, etc!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Nick Prideaux

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO I AM BACK HELLO!

How are we all? I mean, I say ‘all’ – as is inevitable at this time of year, my already-vanishingly-small audience is further thinned by what I imagine is a significant number of you being in a field in Somerset, and a large proportion of the rest of you still being attached to the post-Cannes recovery IV, but to those of you who are reading this then a heartfelt THANKYOU HI I LOVE YOU.

Anyway, here in the UK we are a week away from a GLORIOUS NEW DAWN – or at least we’d better be, or else there will I fear be some sort of collective mass suicide event as we all fail to get our heads around another 4+ years of Conservative horror. That…that couldn’t actually happen, could it?

Well, regardless, I won’t be here next week to comment on it – sorry, but there’s no way in hell I am not staying up next Thursday, meaning the likelihood of me being in any fit state to start writing this crap at 6am (or indeed of wanting to) is pretty much nil. SO, this newsletterblogtypething will return on 12 July, hopefully in basking in the glow of…well, in all likelihood a Government that doesn’t look hugely different from the old one, policywise, but where familiarity has yet to breed total, overwhelming contempt!

That’s…that’s progress, right?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are definitely better off reading this than being at a festival, DEFINITELY.

By Jessica So Ren Tang

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH ANOTHER SELECTION OF TECHNO, ELECTRO, BEATS AND BLOOPS (AND, INEXPLICABLY, SOME ZAPPA) BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT IT’S WISHING FOR A SMALL, LOCALISED MONSOON TO HIT WORTHY FARM BETWEEN NOW AND SUNDAY, PT.1:  

By TS Harris

OUR SECOND MIX IS THIS BEAUTIFULLY-CHILLED SELECTION OF LOUNGEY-TYPE STUFF MIXED LIVE AT CAFE DEL MAR BY ANDY WILSON!

THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT IT’S WISHING FOR A SMALL, LOCALISED MONSOON TO HIT WORTHY FARM BETWEEN NOW AND SUNDAY, PT.2:

• Habbo Is Back: I am of an age that my main exposure to Habbo Hotel was my mate Luke doing the PR for it for a few years back in the day, but I am conscious that there may be some of you for whom it has a more substantial nostalgic pull (or, if I am correct in my suspicions about the Curios readership, your kids enjoyed it) – anyway, Habbo is BACK, resurrected, phoenix-like, in what looks to my exceptionally-untrained eyes to be a pretty faithful recreation of the original, with all the furnishings and personal spaces and odd, boxy avatars that you remember so well, alongside what they promise is all the quality of life stuff you would expect (safety, moderation, community guidelines and all that jazz). Would YOU like to crawl back into an internet that feels small and safe and cute just like it did when you were 11? I mean, look, I want to have a go at you for regressing but given I am currently rereading a bunch of novels I last read two decades ago I don’t think I have any legs to stand on, so, well, enjoy!
• Search The Market: A gorgeous little bit of webart, this. “Think about a personal and private google search and post it on this website. Something you might not have told the ones dearest to your heart. Google uses these searches to generate a data profile of you to sell on open bidding markets. This website creates a bubble for each search to remind us of all the data collected.” The site is literally just a list of searches that other visitors have submitted which you can scroll through, and each is clickable so you can see the results that show up for each – a window into other people’s hopes and fears and dreams and how they are mediated and reflected by the web. This feels like an installation of sorts waiting to happen.
• Butterflies: Would you like to install a new social network on your phone? No, of course you wouldn’t, you’re presumably not (that sort of) a masochist – but wait! What if I were to tell you that this was a social network…entirely populated by AIs?!?! No, wait, come back! This isn’t the first of these that I’ve seen – there was one about a year ago, I think, but that was text-only and web-based, whereas this is an app and significantly shinier, and has GRAPHICS and…no, actually, it’s still a sh1t and pointless idea. You download the app (I know this because I bothered – you may not want to), and you’re then prompted to spin up as many ‘characters’ as you want which you can then use to populate the network. Give them a personality, a backstory, some traits, and then set them loose to post and interact and share pictures and…WHY?!?!? Look, I can sort-of see the appeal in a vague ‘infinite sandbox experiment’ sort of way, but that simply doesn’t apply with this sort of stuff when it’s built on your standard LLM – everything, per all GPT-type text you will ever read, is sanded down to LinkedIn-smooth-blandness, which means that all of the posts and ‘interactions’ have that horrible ‘meaning-shaped but unpleasantly-empty’ vibe of most untreated LLM slop; that, coupled with the fact that whatever model they’re using to generate the images tends hard towards ‘generic Stable Diffusion busty elf girl cheesecake’ as its aesthetic, makes the whole thing feel like a PG-13 Reddit thread full of the most boring conversations you can imagine. NOONE WANTS THIS STUFF. Or at least I really hope they don’t. Interestingly I left ‘alerts’ on, just to see how ‘autonomous’ these agents are – I have had none in the six days since I installed the app, suggesting it’s perhaps not really working. SURPRISE!
• Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot: Matt Round continues his one-man mission to make the web a better place with a new project dedicated to becoming the web’s number one fansite for all-time classic Stallone vehicle ‘Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot’. “We couldn’t resist buying the domain name, or taking on the challenge of creating the best fansite ever for this classic film. Don’t miss the amazing fanart and GIFs, send us your thoughts and keep an eye out for the launch of our podcast, Stop! Or My Mom Will Mute.” I have no idea how long he will keep this up, but, personally-speaking, I am intrigued by the podcast (and I NEVER say that).
• Seen: Another new app, this one apparently intended to be used by actual people rather than AI agents – Seen has one gimmick and one gimmick only, namely that it’s an app exclusively for reaction videos. Rather sadly, the app’s description in the App store (iOS-only at present) reads: “Tired of sending hilarious video content to your friends and getting just a ‘haha’ in return? Seen is a video sharing app that shows you authentic reactions to the videos you send. Share memes or mini vlogs of your life and get genuine real-time reactions to all your content” which rather makes it sound like a passive-aggressive away of demanding that your friends LAUGH AN APPROPRIATE AMOUNT at your hilarious content. Anyway, this is either going to die a miserable death or it’s going to lead to an unpleasant resurgence in swap.avi reaction videos, either/or.
• Climate Zones: Have we all accepted that the weather’s going to keep getting different? No? Oh. Still, for those of you who would like some DATAVIZ-LED INSIGHT into exactly what this change is going to look and feel like in the coming 30-40 years, the fine folk at The Pudding have pulled together this lovely-if-troubling guide as to how various cities around the world are likely to change in terms of average temperatures, rainfall and the like, and I encourage you to scroll through and have a read/play because it’s not only just a really nice piece of work (as per with these guys – they really have been consistently excellent for years now, credit where it’s due) but also because it contains all sorts of really quite granular detail about how each city’s climate is likely to shift (London becoming a place with ‘no dry season’ feels a bit too on-the-nose tbh).
• Dracarys: This is ‘just’ a bit of WebGL coding with particulate effects, but it is SO PRETTY and therefore worth checking out. LOOK AT THE BEAUTIFUL SPACE DRAGON! Very nicely coded indeed. Oh, and if you want more simulated particulate fun, this is VERY satisfying to play with.
• Timeface: I think this might be my favourite bit of digital clock design I’ve seen in an age – it looks like a mess on first viewing (and, ok, on second an third as well), but then it clicks and I think that this would look very cool on a watch, personally (and I say that as someone who hasn’t worn a watch since approximately 1993, and, honestly, whose wrists are probably too thin to support one these days anyway).
• County Cricket Day 2024: OK, this isn’t internetty AT ALL (aside from the fact it has a website), but it’s being organised by a friend of mine out of a simple desire to Do Something Good, and despite my complete lack of interest in cricket I figure that some of you who live in the UK and who don’t intend to spend Sunday afternoon getting right on the pub gak while you cheer on GARETH’S UNDERPERFORMING, OVERPAID BUNCH OF CNUTS LET THE LEASH OFF SOUTHGATE YOU PR1CK WHY AREN’T YOU PLAYING TRENT GET GALLAGHER OFF WE OUGHT TO BE WALKING THIS WHO’S GOT THE BAG GET US A PINT IN OUR BOYS might find this of interest. “County Cricket Day is a fan-led campaign to celebrate County Championship cricket, and encourage as many people as possible to attend a game on ​Sunday 30th June 2024. It’s inspired by (but not affiliated with) Non-League Day, which for over a decade has worked to attract fans to football games at the lower end of the pyramid, and has helped spark a renaissance at that level of the game. County Cricket has a lot in common with Non-League Football: it’s affordable, it’s at the heart of local communities, and it provides matchgoing fans a relaxed environment to enjoy games in the way they want to. At many county grounds, you’re also able to bring in your own food and drink. But most importantly of all – you’ll be guaranteed a warm welcome by the people running their clubs for the joy of the game. Whether you’ve played cricket, are a committed fan, or have never experienced the game live before, we want to show people that the fixtures on County Cricket Day promise a joyful and memorable day out for everyone.” Maybe give it a go?
• Cursor Museum: Whilst I am very much not a father and will never be one, the fact that I enjoyed this single-gag website quite as much as I did suggests that I have now become a dad on some sort of spiritual level.
• 45 Football: OH MY GOD THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING COLLECTION OF FOOTBALL-THEMED SONGS I HAVE EVER SEEN! Compiled by one Pascal Claude in Zurich (THANKYOU PASCAL!), “This is for all football and vinyl and footballvinyl lovers around the planet. I hope you enjoy. 45football.com is based on my collection of vinyl 7″ records on football. I started to upload the files in July 2012, since then I’ve been about to register the singles week by week. I’m still happy to find records I haven’t known yet, so feel free to get in touch. Also if you have some additional or preciser information on a record. If there’s a song on 45football.com you own the copyright of and want it to be removed, please let me know. It was and is impossible to regulate all the copyrights of all the hundreds of records here. Most of the record labels don’t exist anymore.” Honestly, if you’re the sort of person who REALLY wants to put together a football-themed playlist for your Euro finals party in a few weeks time, but is ALSO the sort of appalling muso who insists on all the songs being obscure vinyl-only samba/funk novelties from 1980s Uruguay then OH MY GOD this is going to make you happy. SO SO GOOD.
• The Ultimate Playlist Index: This…this might be the most incredible music repository I have ever linked to in 14-odd years of doing this, no joke. The project’s a byproduct of the Rate Your Music community, and, as far as I can tell, is an attempt to create a comprehensive list of links to the ULTIMATE playlists for every single genre of music ever conceived of, the playlists that you would give to aliens if they were to make First Contact and inexplicably lead off with a question about ‘really wanting to get into baile funk but not really knowing where to start’. Seriously, click the main link and scroll and marvel at the incredible selection of playlists, offering you an entry into every single type of sound you could possibly conceive of, from ‘Ottowan Noise’ to ‘Viking Metal’ and everything inbetween. Seriously, there are 1600 separate playlists linked to here, this is ASTONISHING. Oh, and if you want EVEN MORE MUSIC, you might enjoy checking out this insane library of what its curtator terms ‘exotica’, which as far as I can tell basically means ‘seemingly hundreds and hundreds of vinyl records of vaguely-loungey guitar music from mid-20th-C America’ and which you really have to click around to explore properly because fcuk me this goes DEEP’.
• Paint Spin: Make your own spin painting type artworks, in-browser, which is far more satisfying than it sounds, I promise you. Soothing in a way few ‘make an art!’ toys tend to be.
• Election Leaflets: “ElectionLeaflets.org is an online archive of political leaflets. It is created by members of the public photographing and classifying what comes through their doors at election time. Since 2010 there have been 19563 leaflets added to the archive, providing a valuable resource for academics, journalists and campaigners.” This is a UK site, to be clear, so it’s UK political parties – as seasoned leaflet-watchers might expect, the Lib Dems and their unusual approach to graphs and their axes feature heavily here, but what’s really interesting to me about this is the wild variance in design choices across the spectrum, even within parties, and the degree to which it gives a reasonable impression of the vast, mad unruliness of campaigning at a national level (also, special shout out to the independents and in particular Chaz Singh who’s standing in Plymouth and who has SUCH WHOLESOME ENERGY on his leaflet (please don’t be an awful person, Chaz Singh!) and whose clashing fonts I rather love).
• Webcollage: Via PFRC, this is a lovely bit of webart – per the description, “WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found. It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.” As its creator says, ‘this is what the internet looks like’ – inchoate, slightly out-of-focus, unpredictable, and a portal to an infinite number of mysterious places. AS IT SHOULD BE.
• LEGO Cars: A Flickr album full of images of classic cards recreated in LEGO. In case you really want 17 photos of a model of a Mercedes Benz W112 Fintail Build, recreated in Swedish plastic blocks because, well, who wouldn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Urban America: I know, I know, the sheen has rather come off AI-generated imagery now that we’re all beginning to realise that, hang on, the pollution is starting…still, let’s ignore that (and the whole environmental thing) in favour of enjoying this pleasingly-unsettling TikTok account that posts short clips about regional horror myths – the dead-eyed Alaskan Kutasha, the Teke Teke from Japan… these are all spun up in (I think) Midjourney and then animated with a variety of different tools, and they work REALLY well – short and focused enough to be unsettling without breaking the immersion through AI jank, this is some of the better ‘making interesting things with AI tools’ content I’ve seen in a while.
• Queen Songs: Would you like a genuinely exhaustive guide to the music of Queen, including a link to an actual proper book analysing the band’s songcraft? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! There’s a…slightly odd man who lives in what used to be my mum’s apartment block in Rome who used to blast Queen at earbleed volume at all sorts of odd hours of the day, and has done for years, and while I am unlikely to ever see him again and he will never read these words, I dedicate this link to HIM (and, er, any of the rest of you who have a deep and abiding love for Fat Bottomed Girls).
• The Best Legal Website I Have Ever Seen: As far as I can tell, this really is the website of a French firm of lawyers (I have checked, their registered on the official list of legal representatives and so seem legit) – just click on it, seriously, and then ask yourself ‘why aren’t all lawyers’ websites this good?’. THERE IS NO GOOD ANSWER. If you work in corporate webdesign, PLEASE show this to all of your most tedious clients and ask them to DREAM BIGGER.
• 23 Words: A daily word game – but no, wait, come back! This is simple, clean and quick – you simply have to find solvethe 23 anagrams you’re presented with each day within the time allotted. They start easy with four-letter words, then the difficulty ramps up until by the end…well, look, I am terrible at anagrams and I, er, struggle towards the end of each day’s puzzle, but it’s oddly satisfying and it’s at most a minute or two each day should you want to add it to the timewasting routine (current daily time required before work can start: 43 minutes).
• Woodworm: This is SO CUTE – the premise is simple, you’re a woodworm (of course you are!) and your task is to eat away at a block of wood to replicate the shape you’re shown on each level. Gently brainteasey at higher levels, but satisfying rather than frustrating, and generally VERY PLEASING (when you solve them, rather than when you’re coming up hard against your (ok, my) total lack of anything resembling patten matching abilities).
• One Million Checkboxes: This week’s ‘wow, this really has been EVERYWHERE’ link is this charming multiplayer website project/game/thing – this is literally just a million checkboxes on a webpage, checkboxes which have two states (checked vs unchecked), checkboxes which anyone on the website at any given time can check or uncheck to their heart’s content, and which have resulted, since it went live a few days ago, in one of those occasional amazing experiments in collective will and behaviour that you occasionally get online (see also Reddit’s The Place and its various incarnations). Log on and just watch, and you’ll see the site is an endless back and forth of factions attempting to tick all the boxes, or seeking to ensure that that NEVER happens, people trying to write rude words in ticks, people just sort of muddling around at the edges…EMERGENT BEHAVIOURS! I love this stuff – it’s a bit like (bear with me) watching a field of long grass being moved by the wind – you can’t see the actors (wind/people clicking), only the resulting effects of their movement (shifting grasses/boxes changing colour) and there’s something almost ghostly about it…anyway, I fcuking adore this and would quite happily have this on a massive screen somewhere ambient (but I appreciate that my idea of what constitutes ‘public art’ is possibly not universal).
• Pokerogue: Finally this week, something that I sort-of bounced off pretty quickly because I simply don’t have the ingrained Pokemon knowledge to either be competent or particularly interested, but which I imagine will grab some of you by the synapses and not let go – this is basically a roguelike variation on Pokemon where you have to battle through the entire roster of beasts, collecting as you go, unlocking new starters and generally putting all your accumulated Pokeknowledge to the test. If you or someone you know are the sort of person who can actually tell the difference between, say, Pokemon Diamond and Pokemon Pearl (please, do not tell me) then this is for YOU!

By Casey Goddard

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS WEATHER-APPROPRIATE ‘CANARY ISLANDS MIX’ BY ATLASt WHICH A GENUINE SUNSHINE-Y DELIGHT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Plum Island Museum: The Plum Island Museum is a collection of objects which have washed ashore in Massachusetts, maintained by a single woman – it’s a physical collection too, visits on appointment, but this is the photographic record of the various detritus that collects on the shingle. “The shoreline is a place where nature collides with the detritus we humans leave in our wake. Plastic forks intermingle with bird bones, Happy Meal Toys float in on clumps of seaweed. Frequently, I mistake reeds for straws or straws for reeds. It is easy to see how sea creatures innocently attempt to feed on things we have left behind.” Beautiful and sad.
• Ohmni: You will know MIA as an artist from Paper Planes, obvs; you may also remember her as an outspoken voice on Sri Lankan independence back in the day, and, over the past few years, a peddler of…increasingly esoteric opinions on a wide range of topics, which is why it was not a HUGE surprise this week to see that the singer/artist/producer has launched a range of clothes which are, er, made of materials designed to stop the 5G from reading your thoughts. I am not exaggerating – click the link, and look what happens when you take the classic ‘tinfoil hat’ concept and make it FASHION. A snip at £100 – after all, WHAT PRICE THE SANCTITY OF YOUR BRAINWAVES? Well, quite.
• The Bali Time Chamber: There is a lot of masculinity that I really don’t understand AT ALL, and the whole ‘MEAT AND MUSCLES AND FIRE AND BEING ALPHA’ thing is very much of that ilk. Perhaps that’s why I found the concept of The Bali Time Chamber so perfectly, wonderfully ridiculous – the idea that MEN need a space surrounded by OTHER MEN without the distractions of women or booze or, er, vegetables which are keeping them from achieving their FULL MASCULINE GOALS. Still, if that sounds like your sort of thing then you will LOVE this – a place in which upto about 25-odd men can all pay to hang out together in Bali, in a fully-catered island paradise where you can…I don’t know, to be honest, the website has a lot of stuff about ‘fulfilment’, but the general vibe I get from the whole thing suggests that that ‘fulfilment’ might be the sort that comes from pump-and-dumping a memecoin and making off with six figures of mooks’ crypto. Still, PLEASE read the brochure – it is VERY FUNNY – and enjoy the majesty of the Insta feed, which, were I not aware of how it was selling itself, I would strongly suggest looks like it’s advertising a very particular type of man-on-man bongo if I’m wholly honest.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Amie Dickie

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hello everyone, hello hello – firstly THANKYOU to everyone who shared the Tiny Awards link over the past week, it is HUGELY appreciated and I would thank each and every one of you personally if that wouldn’t involve a degree of stalking that would almost certainly make you exceptionally uncomfortable. If you would like to share the link AGAIN, then PLEASE DO – here it is! The Tiny Awards! Nominations open for another couple of weeks or so!

Anyway, this week’s Curios is, as ever, PACKED, BULBOUS AND STRAINING WORRYINGLY AT THE SEAMS with excellent writing (not mine), games, pictures, webtoys and curiosities – which is good, because I am off next week and maybe the week after too, what with having to nip to Italy for a few days (I have to sign a piece of paper – the 21st century continues not to be entirely-evenly-distributed, turns out). Still, the extra time between newsletters will give you the opportunity to finally CLICK EVERY LINK. Won’t it? WON’T IT?????

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might want to plan something big for next Friday to fill the massive, Curios-shaped void in your life.

By Keita Morimoto

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH AN EXCELLENT NEW MIXTAPE OF MANC HIPHOP BY THE EQUALLY-EXCELLENTLY-NAMED BRITIZEN KANE! 

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES ALL OF YOU ENJOY THE EUROS AS LONG AS YOUR ENJOYMENT ISN’T CONTINGENT ON ENGLAND WINNING, PT.1:  

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

OUR NEXT MIX IS THIS SUPERB SOUL-AND-FUNK SELECTION COMPILED BY BANARDO! 

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES ALL OF YOU ENJOY THE EUROS AS LONG AS YOUR ENJOYMENT ISN’T CONTINGENT ON ENGLAND WINNING, PT.2:  

• Shop Like Batman: Presuming that none of you are billionaire playboys with access to an improbable degree of military-grade hardware, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to replicate the Batman/Bruce Wayne lifestyle in any meaningful sense (other than the whole ‘crying alone at night’ thing – that’s within reach of all of us!) – but if you’re rich enough, you can now SHOP LIKE THE BATMAN! This is an online shop which…is this some sort of retail-focused extension of the bat-brand? Is that a thing now? Apparently so, per this piece in Fast Company, which treats the idea of ‘what if Bruce Wayne were a real person? What sort of obscenely-expensive tat would he buy to signal his status and taste to the world?’ with frankly insane levels of reverence. This was briefly hosted in a real-world New York townhouse last week, at an invite-only series of in-person immersive shopping trips for, presumably, millionaires who still have superhero-themed bedsheets – but you, mere peon, can still browse the wares via the online shop. Want to buy a ‘one of only ten made, ever’ working replica of the Batmobile (recent, rugged, military-styled version), finished in Anish Kapoor-authorised Vantablack and complete with, er, ‘imitation gun turrets’? You pathetic little man – but HERE YOU GO! Fancy some violently-overpriced glassware to adorn your version of Wayne Mansion? GREAT! I am slightly agog at this.
• The Cuneiform Corpus: Describing itself as “The World’s Largest Online Corpus of Translated Cuneiform Texts”, this is slightly incredible – input any keyword you like and it will pull the relevant texts from the extant archive of translated cuneiform text from about 3,000 BC onwards. You can drill down into specific periods and eras and geographies should you so choose, which is obviously of use to anyone using this for serious scholastic purposes, but for everyone else there’s something truly amazing about just chucking random, banal words into the search box and seeing what comes back to you from several millennia past. Shopping lists and lamentations and curses and and and – I really, really like this a lot.
• FuryPage: Ooh, this is quite cool – FuryPage is a simple, off-the-shelf way of making nice-looking scrolly animation sites. There are various different templates that you can use, and I think these are primarily intended for designers to show off their portfolios, but I reckon this is probably flexible enough that it can be turned to whatever end you fancy – the outputs look rather slick, and this might be worth a look if you’re in the market for a more interesting landing page than you might get with Wix or the like.
• Bloggers Blogging About Blogging: A blog, collecting blogposts by people who blog about the fact of blogging. Which I appreciate is recursive to a degree that might not necessarily be immediately appealing to all of you, but which, honestly, is actually really soothing in what I can only describe as ‘a very old internet sort of way’. Basically this website practically has elbow patches it’s that middle-aged in vibe, but it’s also a nice (nascent, and growing) collection of thoughts and reflections by a selection of people (mainly in the UK, and currently mainly focused in tech/IT from what I can tell) about why they blog and how and what about, and it’s a non-terrible place to start exploring a specific corner of what, quaintly, used to be called ‘the blogosphere’ (dear God WHAT a hideous term that was) about 20 years ago.
• Deer In Places They Shouldn’t Be: Would you like a Twitter account dedicated solely to sharing images of deer interloping in places where, objectively, they have no place? To be honest this account doesn’t *quite* live up to the name – I was hoping for more ‘deer looking guiltily into the camera as it’s snapped attempting to sneak out of the domestic bedroom via the window’-type content – but it’s a nice enough source of gentle, deer-themed humour, and who doesn’t want some of that in these trying times? NO FCUKER, etc!
• SmallStack: This is a nice initiative – SmallStack is a new initiative designed to highlight small (<1000 subs) newsletters on SubStack; from what I can tell, anyone whose newsletter falls under the qualifying threshold can submit theirs, and the best ones will be mailed to subscribers as a ‘here’s a small newsletter you might be interested in checking out’ teaser. Cute, and a potentially good way of uncovering some new writers you might not otherwise discover – although, caveat, it being Substack there is likely to be a lot of twee sh1t too (sorry, but) and a reasonable number of people who expect paying for what is, objectively, dogsh1t writing (again, sorry, but).
• Math Encrypt: I LOVE THIS. Input any number you want and this website will magically (not magic) come up with a VERY COMPLEX-LOOKING EQUATION which, if solved correctly, will give the number you originally entered as its answer. Want a challenging way of ensuring that only a very specific type of maths nerd ever gets your number at a bar (lol at the idea that anyone gets chatted up in the real world any more, but still)? HERE YOU ARE THEN! Ok, fine, this is very much ONLY useful as a filter for people with a certain minimum degree of mathematical ability, but I really like the potential applications for this for ARG-type games (or just fcuking with people).
• Decker: Have you ever thought to yourself ‘God, I really love making slide-based presentations – DECKS, IF YOU WILL (I won’t, by the way, I fcuking despise that term) – but I wish there was a way for me to make them in a manner that replicated, almost exactly, the specific aesthetic of 1980s MacOS’? WELL LUCKY YOU! Decker is exactly that – this looks…surprisingly powerful, with a degree of Visual Basic-lite programming you can do of slides and buttons and things, but the main draw is obviously the look-and-feel.
• The Mewsletter: EXACTLY the sort of pun-based and narrow-focused sort of project I think we should all get behind, The Mewsletter is a new, er, newsletter whose author has decided to attempt to visit every single one of London’s 2,381 mews streets (DO YOU SEE?) and write about the experience. I don’t know who’s writing this, but I enjoyed their justification as to why: “So: would take too long to walk every street in Greater London, don’t want to walk every street in some particular bit of Greater London, certainly don’t want to just lie about walking every street in some particular bit of Greater London. But what if there was a more feasibly visitable subset of streets, found throughout the capital? For example, every street called ‘[something] Mews’: is visiting all of those achievable? Well, if it is, I will declare myself the Softest Geezer and demand that I am allowed to yell “MENTAL HEALTH” at Sir Keir Starmer3 until he starts crying and declares that what I have done is better than any of his stupid policies.”
• Frogland: Do YOU like and appreciate frogs? Do you wish there was an online portal devoted to the best of the amphibians?  Do you want to go back in time nearly 30 years? OH GOOD! Welcome to Frogland, the internet’s premier frog-themed website since 1995! 1995! Honestly, this is like unearthing something from ancient Mesopotamia, Hammurabi’s teenage diaries – it was obviously maintained by a kid who not only loved frogs but who had parents who were techy and geeky enough to be online in the very nascent era of the public web, and it is SO PURE AND LOVELY (and also, froggy!), and in particular I thought there was something genuinely sweet about the ‘awards’ section where you can see all the different accolades the site got in the mid-to-late 90s when there were obviously a bunch of initiatives to celebrate and reward digital creativity/curiosity among kids of the era. I know this is SUCH an old person’s thing to say – I know it, and yet I’m going to fcuking say it, which, again, is VERY OLD PERSON – but I do think it’s a shame that we don’t seek to promote and reward digital creativity in this way any more (by which I don’t just mean ‘making websites’, by the way – spinning stuff up in Roblox or Fortnite or Blender or Unreal might be a better modern equivalent then ‘cobbling together a webpage in Dreamweaver’).
• Bookfinder: This is a really useful resource – if you’re looking for books that are old, or out of print, or you’d simply like to buy physical copies of something that’s a bit hard to find from somewhere that isn’t Amazon, then just type in the title to this search engine and watch as it pulls out listings from websites you’ve never even heard of. Importantly you can also set your shipping destination to wherever you fancy, to ensure you’re only searching retailers who will actually work where you are – this is GREAT, particularly for anything slightly niche or obscure.
• The Carabiner Collection: I’ve never been particularly into climbing – possibly a shame, given I am all limbs and weigh about nine stone soaking wet, making me a prime physical candidate (apart from the whole ‘muscle tone of an elastic band’ thing) – and as such I have never personally developed any particular feelings about carabiners. Still, I imagine if you’re more of an experienced climber and have dangled from your fair share of rock faces you’ve probably developed a degree of affection for the little bits of metal who have kept you from plummeting to a pointy, crunch death – and so, presumably, have the people who maintain this site, er, ‘celebrating’ (can one really celebrate a carabiner? LET’S TRY!) the carabiner in all its glory. Sam Johnson, whose website this is, I fcuking SALUTE you and your dedication to/love for the carabiner, you are the sort of person on whom the web is basically built and we all thank you for your service.
• Pn0gstr0m: A HORRIBLE name for what is a fun little game (from last week’s B3ta) – imagine Pong, but every time you or your opponent hit the ball, it splits into MORE BALLS, until you’re basically whacking a whole salvo of shots across the net and attempting to keep as many of them live as possible, racking up massive scores and collecting powerups that do interesting things to the balls – sending 10x the number back to your opponent, say, or equipping you with a laser that destroys a load in one fell swoop. This is less challenging than it at first looks, but it’s definitely a fun 15 minutes on a Friday (or Monday) afternoon.
• WordSnake: Another B3ta link, this one – this is Snake, but with a gimmick when it comes to the controls and the mechanic. See how long it takes you to work out what it is (no, I’m not telling you, you’re a CLEVER PERSON, you can do it!).
• Fcuksweeper: This needs a download, and, well, it’s a game called ‘Fcuksweeper’ so I’m not sure how many of you will make it past this bit – still, for anyone still reading, this is actually VERY FUN and very funny, and a lot sillier/weirder and significantly less ‘sexy’ than the name might suggest; there’s bodyhorror GALORE here, in an ‘odd rather than scary’ sense, and if you approach it as an interactive artwork rather than a ‘game’ per se then you will, I think, really enjoy it (or at least be pleasantly weirded out by the experience). Oh, and be aware that if you just want to play Minesweeper then, er, I’d probably stick with the original.
• Chao Bing: This is BEAUTIFUL – a gorgeous experiment in lightly-interactive storytelling, with seven very small mini-’games’ (they’re games only in the loosest sense, think of them more as brief moments of interaction/contemplation) which come together to tell a small, personal story. From the creator’s description: “Chao Bing: A Read-Only Memory Experience is an interactive memoir in the style of a CD-ROM storybook game. Explore my childhood memories woven into a story about the ennui of adult life–all rendered in a 640 x 480 pixel resolution. Chao Bing is a game forever in its own making, writing, and rewriting. It’s a game, and also a game about the performative act of making a game.” I really, really like this – strongly recommend you giving it ten minutes of your time.
• Probabilistic Noughts and Crosses: Yes, technically the url says ‘tic tac toe’ but THAT IS NOT WHAT THE GAME IS CALLED FFS. Ahem. This is a really smart little twist on the traditional gameplay – you play against the computer (or another human, should you have…friends?), with the twist being that each move you can make has a different success probability attached to it; if it ‘succeeds’, you place your ‘X’ as normal, if you ‘fail’ the space gets marked for your opponent, and if the outcome is neutral then the space remains unallocated – which obviously completely changes the way you play, where you look to move, and the flow of the game, as you can strategise in ways not possible in the original ruleset. There’s also quite a lot of interesting stuff in the background about ‘optimal’ game design, should you be the sort of maths mind who can get their head around all that stuff (I very much cannot). Per its creator, “in any given game of Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe you can do everything right and still lose (or do everything wrong and win.) However, the better player always rises to the top over time. These are characteristics that I find interesting about a lot of other games, and I thought they’d be fun to apply to an otherwise boring, solved game like tic-tac-toe. They’re also highly relevant to my life philosophy – that every outcome is effectively random, but our actions can often skew the odds in our favor. Bad breaks are inevitable, but good judgment is always rewarded (eventually, and given enough chances.)”
• KittyToy: Would you like some cute pixelart cats to feed and generally horse around with in your browser? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! “Take care of and adopt stray kitties. Buy toys and decorations for your house and yard!” says the description, and, honestly, how could you resist? The autoplaying music is…somewhat grating to my ears, but mute the tab and keep this open FOREVER and you will always have a roomful of digital cats to pet and kiss and cuddle whenever things get hard. This is surprisingly deep (in a very shallow way) – there are various different toys and things that you can ‘buy’, and you can seemingly accumulate a near-infinite quantity of digital felines, which will be pleasing to those of you who have secretly harboured ambitions to own ALL OF THE CATS.
• MoonDrop Isle: I only got a chance to spend  30m or so with this yesterday, so can’t tell you TOO much about it – but it’s interactive fiction, in the classic Zork style (“You are in a room. You see a laptop, and an empty mug of tea. You are tired and in your pants. Continue writing? There are no exits”, etc etc), and it’s a collection of multiple individual adventure games written by different IF specialists, all joined together into a shared experience set on an island which you, presumably, somehow have to escape or understand in some way. The puzzles I experienced in the first section were interesting but not maddening (and I say this as someone who really is a fcuking DREADFUL lateral thinker/problem solver), and I think you’ll enjoy this a lot (as long as you don’t mind reading, and no graphics, and having a typing-only interface).
• Level Devil: Finally this week, one of the most evil browser games I have ever seen – honestly, this is diabolical and cruel and you will die over and over and over again. It won’t matter, though, because you only stay dead for half a second or so, and it’s all SO brutally cruel that you will have to laugh at the arbitrary unfairness of it all. Seriously, this is very fun indeed – if you happen to recall IWBTG, then this will ring a lot of pleasing bells.

By Irina Selaru

OUR LAST MUSICAL SELECTION THIS WEEK IS A MIX OF 80s-ISH SOUL AND LOUNGE-TYPE STUFF BY DJ KRUG WHICH IS SO SMOOTH AS TO BE PRACTICALLY-FRICTIONLESS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Nice To E-Meet You: A reader who shall remain nameless got in touch last week to tell me that the Tiny Awards had reminded them of an old Tumblr they made about a decade ago. They shared it with me, and so I am sharing it with you. WHY? WHY NOT!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jenny Holzer

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE!

Ordinarily I use the bit at the top here for some p1ss-weak attempt at topical satire or an op-ed, but I hope you will forgive me this week for giving it over to some MINOR SELF-PROMOTION.

Kris and I are once again running The Tiny Awards in 2024! TELL THE WORLD! In case you have managed to somehow wipe the memory of last year’s edition from your minds, the Tiny Awards is our attempt to spotlight some of the brilliant, weird, heartfelt, curious, creative, poetic, beautiful, pointless websites that people all around the world make and which tend not to be surfaced by algorithmic feeds because they’re not FCUKING VIDEOS (have I mentioned how fcuked off I am about the ubiquity of video as the dominant medium of our age? I really am, you know).

As with last year, we’re running nominations for the next few weeks – so PLEASE submit sites you like, whether your own work or those of other people, because the more there are the better, and the better the final shortlist (decided upon by an ESTEEMED PANEL OF JUDGES from around the world), and one of these sites will win £500 and a SMALL HANDMADE TROPHY (and there’s another £300 prize for the best ‘multiplayer’ website too!).

Noone gets rich from this, there’s no desire to turn this into something massive, it’s just something we thought was a nice thing to do and we hope you do too. If you know communities that might find this interesting, or people who might like the idea, then please share it with them – you don’t HAVE to, obviously, but think of it as a small thankyou to me for, er, writing an overlong, self-indulgent newsletter that literally noone in the world ever asked for every Friday morning.

Ok, that’s the end of the self-indulgence, you can fcuk off and click the links now.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you want to tell everyone you know, don’t you? Yes you do.

By Edu Monteiro

WE START THIS WEEK WITH THE SUPERB NEW ALBUM BY MACHINE DRUM WHICH IS AN EXCELLENT COLLECTION OF HIPHOPDRUMNBASSBREAKSTYPESTUFF AND VERY MUCH WORTH YOUR TIME! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE YOU TO PLEASE TELL ANYONE WHO MIGHT CARE ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS BECAUSE THEY ARE A GOOD THING, PT.1:

This is from Twitter in 2017. 2017!!! Do you ever think about the universe and how altered it might be if one single event had gone differently? I often dream of a world in which that plane crash had been fatal.  

A SURPRISINGLY-EXCELLENT PLAYLIST OF MODERN GERMAN MUSIC, NOW (SORRY, GERMANS, BUT ALSO, WELL, YOU UNDERSTAND, RIGHT?), EXPERTLY COMPILED BY GERMANOPHILE FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE YOU TO PLEASE TELL ANYONE WHO MIGHT CARE ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS BECAUSE THEY ARE A GOOD THING, PT.2:        

• Space Explorer: This is SO CUTE! Steve Gardner has made a little website that explains how you can, er, make a small website where the interface is a spaceship flying around an interacting with various on-page elements – so you can move the ship around the page, which explains how various things work (objects, movement, inertia, interactivity, etc) and then gives you the opportunity to remix the page or to make your own – this is a LOVELY piece of interactive tutorialising (no, it IS a word, fcuk you) and personally I would like to see more websites that have this sort of (entirely pointless and somewhat-overengineered interface). Just like…
• Dolce Activation: A LUXURY WEBSITE! With a truly appalling url – seriously, Dom and Stef, could you not have bought a better domain? Still, I forgive them because while the site itself is dull as fcukery the style and interface is GORGEOUS – you navigate by moving a little Vespa around a map of Rome, with your goal being to find a selection of monuments which in turn let you access EXCITING PRODUCT INFORMATION about various bits of D&G tat. To be clear, this is an objectively terrible way to experience what is, at heart, a very content-lite website – it’s slow, inefficient and you will inevitably be a bit disappointed by what you eventually get served when you ‘uncover the secrets’. BUT! The art style is gorgeous – sort of cel-shaded, which you don’t see often enough in webdesign if you ask me – and YOU ARE DRIVING A TINY VESPA AROUND ROME!!! Oh, by the way, if you have the time I also recommend looking at the playlists that they have included here to publicise the perfumes they’re flogging, which I think are the most appallingly-generic attempts at ‘musical curation’ I have ever seen and which made me actually lol at the thought of there being some sort of ‘cool consultant’ behind the decision to fill a mix with the EDGY SOUNDS of, er, Drake and Jack Harlow and Skrillex.
• TrippyTunesTV: Ooh, this is cool – a 24/7 stream of dance music of various kinds (when I’ve logged on this week at various points it’s been psytrance –  look, I LIKE IT – and breakbeat and at the time of writing it’s playing d’n’b) with an accompanying visualiser that’s all generated and animated by AI. Not sure of what the workflow is here, but the description on the page says: “this is the output of my computer god image creator – it uses much gpu (a whole 4090) and much cpu (a whole 14900ks) to make weird pictures somewhat synchronized to the musical entertainment to serve as a demonstration of the powers of our future ai overlords.” This is…weirdly hypnotic, I have to say – the machine occasionally gets ‘stuck’ in odd loops of ‘thought’ (not thought), and it’s fascinating seeing it move from image style to image style and interpolate between them, and I think this would look ace on a big screen.
• Het Archief: Speaking of dance music and clubbing, this is incredible and a proper slice of musicultural history (well, Dutch musicultural history, at least). De School was a space in Amsterdam which for 8 years was a sort of arts and cultural centre that hosted artists, musicians, club nights and collectives, and which shut in January this year – this website is a frankly astonishing archive of audio from that period, capturing sets and club nights from across genres over the entirety of 2016-24. “On January 15, 2024, De School closed its doors for the very last time. From a first Friday night in 2016 until the 66-hour grand finale, Amsterdam’s former technical school functioned as an ever-evolving space, with at its core the steadfast pulse of a club. Infused with new life, the labyrinthian building—lest we forget: derelict classrooms, pitch-black basement, blossom-kissed garden, checkered cubicles, highway-like hallways—became a temporary home for the interlocked wonder of music, art, and culture. A blueprint for countless special people to forge countless special days, nights, and the blur beyond time. Het Archief, which you have just entered, translates eight years of club history into an expansive sound archive. Eight years of recordings are indexed, escape the walls, and finally see the light of day. Het Archief is a time capsule for the present and future, and an open-ended zone to remember through sound.” Seriously, if you are into techno this is a fcuking MOTHERLODE – and even if you’re not, there is SO MUCH in here to explore and listen to.
• Stompers: Over the years I’ve featured a variety of ‘gamified fitness’-type apps, none of which have ever achieved the same degree of success or profile as the OG version Zombies Run! – Stompers is another in similar vein, but which feels a but more fun and silly than some of the previous iterations, a bit like a sort of ‘Mariokart with your mates, but for step counts’ – basically you create an avatar and compete in daily step goal challenges with your friends…but there are powerups! And debuffs! And it all feels sort of fun and dumb and playful, which might make it the sort of thing that’s fun to do with your family or groupchat. Or not – I’m basically fcuked if I understand anything about the compulsion to exercise, if I’m entirely honest with you.
• Alt Text Selfies: This is rather beautiful and occasionally poignant and a tiny bit sad. A series of paragraph-length self-descriptions, designed to invoke the alt-text one might apply to a photograph, the idea being to create a non-visual representation of the self: “For us, an alt text selfie is any written self-portrait. This project takes a well-known practice—the selfie—and approaches it through a disability lens. Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but to us, an alt text selfie doesn’t need to center visual presentation or a literal description of an image. Alt text selfies might focus on feelings, smells, tastes, sounds, emotions, textures, or some combination. Alt text selfies can be any length, but for this project, we focused on writing in the one-sentence to one-paragraph range…Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but, to us, an alt text selfie doesn’t need to center around visuals, or literally describe an image. As the selfies gathered on this website exemplify, alt text selfies can blend smell, taste, touch, sound, and more. At their core, alt text selfies are an access practice, tools for connecting across sensory experiences and distance.” Do take a moment to read through a selection of the pieces here – they’re all bitesized, and some of them are quite arrestingly beautiful.
• Shade Map: I think I’ve featured something similar in Curios a few years back, but the site wasn’t as nice as this one – ShadeMap does exactly what the title suggests, which is, er, show you where the shade will fall, anywhere in the world, at any given time of day. Which, honestly, is fcuking mental when you think about it. You can select the date and time at the bottom of the page, which means you can use this for all sorts of useful purposes – planning walks in such a way as to ensure you’ll be in the sunshine more often than not, or conversely for ensuring that you’re not exposed to the TERRIFYING BURNING ORB more than you absolutely have to be (don’t worry, goths, I see you), or for planning any outdoor/experiential thing which might benefit from sun or shade…in fact it feels like there’s probably some quite fun outdoor installation work you could do with this, playing with where shadows and light fall at different times of day, which I would quite like one of you who’s significantly more artistically and creatively inclined than I am to think about some more, please.
• MemoryLane: To be clear, this is a grift and a BAD PRODUCT and I do not endorse it at all – but it feels like there’s an idea here that someone else (a charity, for example) could improve significantly. MemoryLane is a ‘tell The Machine your memories and it will turn them into a book which we will then print for you’ service, except it’s run as a £20 a month subscription service which makes no sense at all except from the point of view of parting gullible people with their money – that said, I think there’s something quite nice about the concept, and with a bit more care (and a significantly-less-aggressive pricing model) and maybe the ability to speak to The Machine rather than just type, this could be quite a cool service for, say, Age UK, or the Alzheimer’s Society.
• Sonicity: Various cities from around the world, interpreted as audio based on specific information about them (temperature, elevation, population, etc) – this is a standard ‘convert data to sounds!’ project, but I quite like the way it results in each of the cities having quite a distinct audio profile, which in itself sounds like a CLEVER CREATIVE IDEA for certain types of brand, should you be in the market for such a thing. London sounds sh1t, I am sad to say – POOR LONDON.
• MusicLawyerAI: This seems like…a legitimately good use of AI! With no apparent downsides! Apart, of course, from the possibility that it might give you bullsh1t information (or, perhaps, that it’s an early death-knell for a particular type of lawyering – although your opinion of whether or not that is in fact A Bad Thing will obviously depend on the degree to which you think that commercial lawyers are a category deserving of preservation – I am keeping my own counsel on this one). MusicLawyer lets you plug in your contract, at which point the AI will analyse it and, apparently, tell you exactly how it’s fcuking you, to five decimal places – but, obviously, I don’t have any music contracts to hand to test it with, and even if I did I’m no lawyer and so would have no idea whether The Machine was in fact offering a decent analysis or whether it was just making sh1t up left right and centre – which, I suppose, is the problem. Still, it’s free, and I would be intrigued to hear from anyone who tries it about whether it actually seems to deliver the goods.
• Life In Jars: When I was a kid, someone I was at school with (no, really – this isn’t one of those euphemistic anecdotes where ACTUALLY IT WAS ME; I want to stress this very much WASN’T me, for the avoidance of doubt) decided to see what would happen if they left a jar of their own p1ss in a cupboard in one of the history classes over what turned out to be an unusually hot summer – turns out what happens is that it turns into a very weird black sludge and causes not-inconsiderable consternation in the member of staff who opens it curiously come September. Which is by way of only-slightly-tenuous introduction to this YouTube channel, in which a bloke looks at what happens when you leave water in jars for a while and then look at it under a microscope. SO MUCH LIFE! SO MUCH TEEMING, TINY LIFE! This is brilliant YouTubing – educational, entertaining, a tiny bit weird/gross…also, it’s not just ‘stuff in jars’, there’s a lot of other nature/science content on the channel which is very much worth an explore. Still, though, STUFF IN JARS!
• Museum Artefacts in Fortnite: I really like this – this is a set of Twitter videos showing how various museums are experimenting with integrating 3d scans of elements from their collections into Fortnite maps, as a light-touch way of introducing, for example, ACTUAL DINOSAUR SKELETONS to kids as a natural part of the in-game experience (there’s one vid in here which shows a player mining in-game, and as they do so uncovering a scan of a real-life triceratops skeleton which is a perfect example). This just struck me as a really smart way of ‘meeting your audience where they are’, and of using digitised collections in creative fashion.
• Cartwheel: This feels like a useful thing for any of you into 3d animation – Cartwheel is an AI-enabled platform that’s designed to let you create first pass animations to any character you feed it through text prompting. So, for example, you upload your character created in Blender or whatever, and then tell the software to ‘make it do a cartwheel’ and HEY PRESTO, there it goes. Or at least it does in theory – I imagine it’s probably not QUITE that simple, and that the results probably don’t always look like the ones on the homepage – but, even if it’s not quite as slick as they want you to believe, this strikes me as something worth playing with for anyone interested in animating characters (also, I really, really hope that they’ve not been rigorous with the guardrailing because dear God can I think of some potentially-wonderful if not-entirely-tasteful prompts I would like to try out).
• Fractal Life: You know Conway’s Life simulation, right? The gliders, all that sort of jazz? Well this is that, but infinite and fractal and DEAR GOD this messed with my head something chronic. Click the link and then scroll out…and keep scrolling…this gave me proper, dizzying, ‘we are just specks in a petri dish’ insignificance vertigo, and I hope it does the same to you because, frankly, I see no reason I should suffer alone.
• Classic Computer Brochures: This very much does what you’d expect it to based on the title – “Welcome to my personal collection of vintage brochures”, says the welcome banner, and that is EXACTLY what you get. Obviously if you’re the sort of person who gets excited at the prospect of delving into the instructional documentation for the APPLE II then, well, ENJOY, but even if you’re not quite *that* much of an IT enthusiast there’s something genuinely interesting about the way in which this takes you through the history of brand and marketing in the personal computer space, how the devices were presented and sold and the differing roles they were sold as occupying in our lives.
• Nightmare Kart: AN ACTUAL, PROPER, FULL VIDEOGAME WHICH YOU HAVE TO DOWNLOAD BUT WHICH IS AVAILABLE ON A ‘PAY WHAT YOU WANT MODEL’! This is BRILLIANT, honestly – can you imagine a version of MarioKart, released for the PS One, and themed around the beloved FromSoft game Bloodborne? Can you? IMAGINE NO MORE FOR IT IS HERE! Seriously, this is really, really fun and is 100% worth downloading and chucking the devs a few quid – the courses are great, the references to the Bloodborne (never named, for obvious legal reasons) are integrated beautifully, and overall it is just a Good, Fun Time for All the Family – highly recommended, this one.
• Tiny Glade: Another game you actually have to download – but it’s only a demo, and it’s free, and, honestly, if you liked Townscaper you will absolutely adore this – you just make a beautiful little woodland dwelling, basically, all tilt-shifted and SUPER CUTE, and, honestly, it’s a genuinely relaxing little toy which I once again recommend unreservedly.
• Jasbiac: Guess the genre of three albums based on their cover art – this is a fun daily quiz to add to the rotation, should you be in the market for yet ANOTHER timewaster to add to your pre-work routine.
• TILT: BAAAAAAAAAAAAAH this is infuriating but incredibly addictive, a tiny little bullet-hell type game where you simply have to survive the spinning and swirling death blobs long enough to collect a set number of…things in order to ascend to the next level. This is very, very hard, and quite brain-mangly if, like me, you have the approximate spatial awareness and coordination of a piece of Gouda, but bitesize enough that it doesn’t get frustrating so much as compellingly ‘I CAN DO THIS’-y.
• Word Up: Last in this week’s selection of games is this mobile-only variant on Scrabble, where you have to score a set number of points each level – inbetween levels you can spend the points you’ve earned on tweaks and powerups that change the gameplay in interesting and creative ways, maybe instituting a minimum word length for a score to register, say, or banning abstract nouns (I am making these up, but you get the gist). This is a LOT of fun (if you’re a wordcel like me) and one I very much recommend giving a go.

By Coco Capitan

WE CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS SURPRISINGLY-EXCELLENT MIXTAPE COMBINING VARIOUS GRIME TRACKS WITH OLD TV THEMES WHICH I KNOW SOUNDS FCUKING TERRIBLE BUT WHICH I PROMISE YOU IS GENUINELY GREAT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Mitch Sea: Mitch Sea is a sculptor, and this feed shares his works, and works in progress – I personally find some of the musculature a bit fussy for my tastes (ffs Matt you fcuking ponce!), but the talent here is undeniable and it’s rare to see this sort of stuff on Insta (in my experience, at least).
• NTFLX & Drill: You might have seen some of these doing the rounds this week on Twitter under the guise of ‘AI Music’ – it’s not AI, though. Per the artist bio, “One man making beats and animations based on Film/TV characters. The only AI is the voice change.” Regardless, this is another example of how amazing the current tech stack is in terms of what you can pull together in your bedroom – I don’t personally find ‘raps about characters from Harry Potter’ compelling in any way, but there’s no denying the skill here; there is something sort-of magical about the insane creative toolbox that’s now available to anyone with the wherewithal to learn how to open and use it.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Faith 47

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

When I was 20, in the Summer of 2001, I spent an afternoon at my friend Paul’s house in Swindon along with my other friend Jim. As we got gently drunk in the sunshine, we found ourselves lamenting the fact that ‘there isn’t any big news happening at the moment’ (yes, I know, but in our defence we were young and this was a pre-rolling-news / pre-web-everywhere era).

And so, the monkey’s paw curled.

Since then it’s fair to say that everything appears to be happening simultaneously, all the time, but even by the standards of modernity this week has been QUITE FULL, what with the various election madnesses in the UK, and Ukraine, and Gaza (honestly, Israel’s commitment to finding new and creative definitions for the word ‘precision’ is quite remarkable), and the Pope and, oh yes, That Fcuking Man (lol, though), not to mention all the other stuff which I simply haven’t had time to learn about.

So what I’m saying is that you probably feel like you need a break, like you need to kick back, to relax, to maybe just live in the moment, to BREATHE. Well, sorry, but I can’t help with that – all I have are a fcuktonne of links, as ever, so make the best of it and stop whining.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might want to consider visiting a heat pump this weekend (it will make sense if you read on, promise).

By Sonmina

WHY NOT START THIS WEEK’S CURIOS WITH SOME LOVELY JAZZ AND LATIN AND OTHER STUFF COMPILED BY TOM SPOONER? THERE IS NO REASON WHATSOEVER! 

THE SECTION WHICH, HOWEVER OLD IT GETS, WILL NEVER CEASE TO BE AMAZED BY THE CREATIVE AND SPECTACULAR WAYS IN WHICH THE LEFT IN THE UK WILL ATTEMPT TO FCUK ITSELF WITH KNIVES, PT.1:  

By Randy Ortiz (this and all subsequent pics lifted from TIH)

UP NEXT, A GENUINELY BEAUTIFUL ALBUM WHICH I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO A LOT LATELY AND WHICH I THINK YOU MIGHT LIKE TOO AND WHICH IS BY A BAND CALLED SPIRO AND WHICH IS CALLED ‘KALEIDOSCOPICA’!

THE SECTION WHICH, HOWEVER OLD IT GETS, WILL NEVER CEASE TO BE AMAZED BY THE CREATIVE AND SPECTACULAR WAYS IN WHICH THE LEFT IN THE UK WILL ATTEMPT TO FCUK ITSELF WITH KNIVES, PT.2:    

• Sympawnies: Via Andy, this is a YouTube channel with a single, singular premise – Noam Oxman is a musician who…oh, look, let him explain it: “In the search of new ways to express my art, my passions, and my music I created ‘Sympawnies’ – a new type of art form that combines three of my biggest loves – animals, music, and drawing. ‘Sympawnies’ is a collection of my original musical scores, which I draw in the shapes of different animals. All animals are welcome – pets/farm/wild.” Which I appreciate may not make much sense, so click in and look at the videos and realise that the score is written in such a way TO MAKE THE MUSICAL NOTATION LOOK LIKE A PICTURE OF THE ANIMAL IN QUESTION! THIS IS REMARKABLE! Ok, so there are some flourishes in the way he draws his semiquavers and the like to make the pictures work, but there’s also some insane compositional skill in making music that sounds good while also being recognisably written so as to appear in the shape of, say, a great dane. This is honestly mental, and made me wonder how the fcuk this idea first came to him (mushrooms, surely?).
• Poetic Computer: This is technical and a bit obscure, but I very much like the idea of ‘code as poetry’ and the ability of html and css to connote meaning and convey emotion beyond the content they frame (if that makes any sense at all). Basically this is the home to Prasa, described by its creator as ‘an esoteric programming language that investigates the intersection of technology and cultural identity’, inspired by the Telugu language of certain parts of India. Look, you’ll have to be a particular type of programmer/language enthusiast to get the most out of this, I think, but I hope that for maybe one of you this will be slightly inspirational or at least academically-interesting.
• Load-Bearing Posts: If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter in the past week or so you’ll likely have seen this floating around, but if not then I strongly encourage you to click the link, click the ‘Quote Tweets’ button and enjoy a recap of some of the greatest shortform bangers that the human race has ever produced (oh, ok, fine, that’s unfair, but we’re not privy to the pithy sh1tposting of the Mesopotamians and so this is what we’re left with). The original post read as follows: “What are the load-bearing posts of our time? Obviously ‘facing god and walking backwards into hell’ and ‘miette’ are up there. Does Ed Balls still count? PS if you can parse this you should probably log off”, and although, as is inevitable when something gets this big, people have gone off-topic and are substituting ‘load-bearing’ for ‘funny’, it’s still a wonderful reminder of the fact that Twitter really has given us some absolutely top-notch comedy over the years (alongside the brainrot and the general disgust with our species that it’s also engendered).
• Meow Library: Books for cats – specifically, famous novels which have been ‘translated’ for felines, so that every word is replaced with ‘meow’. “Founded by feline linguist Sam Austen, The Meow Library aims to translate every major work of the Western canon into language that can be understood and appreciated by the common housecat. Proceeds from Sam’s literary debut, Meow: A Novel, are funding this effort. Our organization hopes to have several works by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust feline-ready by this holiday season.” So this is obviously a very silly joke and the fact that the books are being sold as ‘comedy gifts’ slightly put me off including it, but then I discovered the podcast and FCUKING HELL is this a commitment to the bit that I can’t help but applaud. Seriously, click the link and listen – I genuinely did corpse at this, and it made me feel significantly warmer to the whole project. MEOW.
• Watch Censor: On the one hand, this SAYS it’s a site dedicated to helping you work out at what point in popular films there are scenes of a sexual nature so that you can ensure that you skip them entirely, so as to not offend your chaste eyeballs with the FILTHY PERVERSION OF HUMAN CONGRESS (so far, so ‘stereotypes about GenZ/Alpha’) – except, if you dig a bit, all of the titles they seem to have information on are, er, famously QUITE SEXY, and the information also serves the dual function of itemising every single even vaguely-titillating moment in each episode so that, should you be so minded, you could ALSO use this as a way to just scrub through and get to the good bits. This has obviously been hacked together by an enterprising teenager, and, frankly, more power to them for not just going straight to a Tube site.  This reminded me an awful lot of something that genuinely did exist in the 1980s and 1990s in the UK – terrible joke non-newspaper ‘The Daily Sport’, famous for incredible headlines like ‘Lord Lucan Found Living In Bus On Moon’ (no, really – you can see some bangers from its Sunday edition collected here), used to have daily TV listings which would provide a detailed breakdown of every single instance in which female nudity, however minor, was visible on UK television, so avid masturbators could ensure they were tuning in at the exact moment in which, I don’t know, you got a brief flash of Helen Mirren’s nipple in a vaguely-erotic 1970s arthouse flick. Good to see that certain habits persist (Jesus, men eh?).
• Can’t Sleep Reads: This is a nice idea – Can’t Sleep Reads is, as the name suggests, a place to find things to read when you can’t sleep; all of the content is public domain, so it tends to short stories from classic (mainly US, I think) authors like Mark Twain, and you get a different one each time you refresh (you can also load a new random one at the bottom of each page should a single tale not be enough to send you towards catatonia). Definitely worth bookmarking or saving a link to on your phone should you be the sort of person with a tendency to lie there staring at the ceiling at 3am, wondering if your insides are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
• Drum Samples: Would you like some free drum samples? You would? GREAT! This is a page on the website of artist (and drummer) Bill Mead, who posts images of his paintings, free to download, as well as offering a whole host of these samples for anyone to take and do with as they please. “Most of the drum samples you’ll find on this site were originally created and distributed through a project called Organic Drum Loops (organicdrumloops.com). This site was prolific from late 2016 through early 2023 and produced a large catalog of unique drum samples. This body of work represented the sound of calfskin headed drums, and the aesthetic of a professional drummer who was finding his way out of musical conformity. Within these downloads are thousands of high resolution multi-track loops, one-shot samples, and improvisations. Earthy in sound, greasy in groove. Interestingly messy much of time, clean and appropriate almost none of the time – yet somehow always feel-driven and vastly musical.” I think I’ve been saying this a lot recently, but I really do adore this sort of thing, the generosity just to make stuff available just in case anyone might want to play with it, or make with it. THANKS, BILL MEAD!
• Losange Magazine: Do YOU like old Renault cars? Oh my word you will love this, then. “Losange Magazine started in the Netherlands in 2007 as an initiative of Renault enthusiast Tony Vos. The magazine is published four times a year. The digital version started in 2018. Losange Magazine has the support of Renault Classic, the history department of the Renault factory.” SO MUCH RENAULT! Not just cars either, tractors too! Look, this is very much Not My Thing, but I have the utmost respect for anyone who loves something as much as the person behind this clearly loves Renault – seriously, some of the prose is almost reverential – I mean, just listen to this: “Love is not always logical or explainable. But Renault Design has made the new all-electric 5 a sweetheart.” Find someone who talks about you the same way that Tony Vos talks about the all-electric Renault 5.
• Strong Spiel: Oh oh oh this is so pleasing (and, I get the impression, surprisingly deep if you are musical and take the time to play around with it and understand it a bit). This is basically a stringed instrument simulator – click the link and you’ll be presented with a selection of four sets of digital ‘strings’ which you can strum with your mouse (or, presumably, your finger if you’re on a touchscreen device); you can also edit them and add your own additional strings to effectively create your own strummable instruments – you sort of have to play with it to get the idea, but it’s quite astonishingly soothing, both to play with and to listen to. If you click the little ‘notes’ icon in the bottom-right hand corner you can select from a range of classical pieces (and a few game OSTs as well) to see them being played on the site, which will give you an idea of what’s possible if you can get your head around the interface and the concept – this really is quite beautiful, and, based on the ‘about’ section, I think pretty technically-impressive. There’s an iPad version available for a couple of quid, which I think is a bargain for anyone who’s interested in spending some time getting to grips with it – but even the web version is just gorgeous. Superb work by Canadian dev Murat Ayfer.
• Funny Works: This week’s ‘preposterously overengineered bit of webwork’ comes from Korean digital studio Funny Works, who’ve recently revamped their website and created this quite amazing portal into their portfolio and projects, all designed as a cartoon teenager’s bedroom that you can click around and explore. There are so many lovely touches here – perhaps my favourite is the oldschool videogame system which acts as a portal to let you explore the various ‘metaverse’ (sorry) type products they’ve built for various clients by plugging in different carts (such a nice bit of design, that), but the whole thing is charming and even the sound on the Page isn’t annoying in the slightest. Ordinarily I get annoyed with sites like this for being obtuse and hard to navigate, but this is really, really charming.
• Synthetic Theatre: More AI art/storytelling experimentation here, this time (I think – the project’s not exactly well-described, if I can be critical for a second) an experiment in (again, I think) seeing what happens when you let an LLM concoct a story and an image-generator spin up accompanying pictures, with a bit of human guidance. This is very much ‘what you might expect’ in terms of the aesthetic, but I did like the ethos behind it, described here: “This project is an exercise in feeling exposed. Not every story is going to be interesting, not every story or artwork will be interesting, and not every design exploration will look great, but as long as I can manage to fuel my drive to create something new, the outcome becomes secondary.” I can get behind this sort of play – why not use The Machine to fiddle and mess around? Although, to be clear, about 80% of the stuff here is tripe.
• Cockfloat: This is, I concede, incredibly stupid and very, very childish, but at the same time I was totally unprepared for what I would get when I clicked and I found myself laughing out loud for longer than I am comfortable admitting. ART.
• Sort The Court: Ooh, this is fun! Have you ever played the mobile game ‘Reigns’? OH GOD SORRY I HAVE JUST DISCOVERED THAT THERE’S A FREE WEB VERSION OH GOD Ahem, sorry – I was saying, Reigns is a game which puts you in the shoes of a monarch making decisions about their kingdom; the decisions are all binary yes/no-type choices, and through them you will either guide your kingdom to fortune and glory, or yourself to an early death. Sort The Court is basically like that, but with a few more graphical flourishes, and it’s FUN! Silly, fun, and a bit whimsical, and a really good way of passing 20 minutes while you wait for something. But. let me reiterate, the second link here takes you to a browser-based version of Reigns, which I really can recommend unreservedly and which may well become something of a timesink compulsion if you’re not careful. TWO  GAMES FOR THE PRICE OF ONE LINK! God I am good to you.
• Utopia Must Fall: A browser-based demo for a fuller game, coming sometime soon, but which is more than engaging enough to occupy you for 5-10 minutes at a time – it’s basically a Missile Defence-type setup, with you tasked with defending London from asteroids and aliens and assorted other threats by shooting the everliving fcuk out of them with some space lasers. The gameplay is simple-but-fun, but the real star here is the visual style which is a pitch-perfect recreation of the 80s arcade aesthetic responsible for, say, the original Star Wars cabinet game (iykyn) – very reminiscent of Matt Round’s interpretation of Flappy Bird which I linked to a few weeks ago.
• Frogger, the RPG: Our final game of the week is this FAR better than it needs to be RPG – this is a ‘real game’, or at least about an hour’s worth of one if you’re a completist, made in RPG Maker and asking ‘what if Frogger was a roleplaying game in the style of early Final Fantasy titles?’ – the answer, by the way, is ‘it would be really fun, and if any of these references mean anything to you then you should play it!’. There’s a save functionality so you don’t have to do the whole thing in one sitting, and this is generally a lot smarter and more engaging than you might think when you first log on.

By Matt Hansel

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SELECTION OF LOUNGEY, JAZZY, SOUL-Y, ELECTRO-Y, 80s-ISH (SORRY, BUT THAT’S THE BEST I CAN DO) OBSCURITIES MIXED ELEGANTLY BY MYSTERY SEASON!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Snapper Matt: Also via Things, this is drone photography of London – you know what you’re getting, but the images are no less impressive for all their slight predictability.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Chet Zar

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Are you excited? Are you tumescent with rising anticipation! THAT’S RIGHT EVERYONE, WE GET TO DO ANOTHER DEMOCRACY!!!

Thing is, my obvious happiness at getting rid of this shower of dreadful cnuts who have fcuked the country in half over the course of the past 14 years is somewhat mitigated by the p1ss-weak nature of their likely replacements and the very real fact that, for a significant proportion of those set to be defenestrated from Parliament, this will make not one marginal iota of difference to their lives and circumstances – in fact, for a lot of them, it will be a net benefit. Do you think Messers Hunt, Rees-Mogg, Shapps et al will give anything resembling a flying one when they hear the bell toll on July 4th? No, they won’t, because they and so many of the rest of these appalling, double-figure-IQ mediocrities are INCREDIBLY FCUKING RICH, and will in fact be at liberty to become considerably moreso at the point they are no longer ‘constrained’ (lol) by the fact of being, at least in theory, a public servant.

Anyway, fcuk the tories, kick them so hard they can’t get back up again for a decade or so at the very least, and pray to god that the incoming lot are marginally-less milquetoast in the face of corporate interests than I fear they will in fact be.

(a note to the non-English reading this – yes, I know you don’t give two fcuks about the democratic process taking place in a country that can best be described as ‘second tier’ (on a good day) but please indulge my momentary excitement at the thought of not having to hear from Rishi Sunak ever again. Oh, by the way, my personal money is on that stumpy little nonentity ending up at Andreessen Horowitz come August, so let’s see shall we).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I promise you will get significantly less swearing over the course of the next 10,000 words or so (sorry about the length, again).

By Jordan Bolton (images this week all courtesy of This Isn’t Happiness)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A SET BY OPPIDAN FROM TON OF BRIX IN LONDON LAST MONTH, WHICH IS AN HOUR OF PROPERLY BRILLIANT DJING AND SOME TOP-NOTCH TUNES (AND, JUDGING BY SOME OF THE FACES ON THE KIDS UP AT THE FRONT, A PLEASING COUNTERPOINT TO THE WHOLE ‘YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PO-FACED MORALISTS WHO DON’T DO DRUGS’ MYTH)!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE REALLY DISAPPOINTED IF ALL OF YOU WORKING IN AGENCIES WITH A LOBBYING OR PA FUNCTION DON’T DO SOMETHING AT LEAST MARGINALLY INTERESTING OR PSEUDO-CREATIVE WITH THE MANIFESTOS AND LLMs, PT.1:  

By Alex Eckman-Lawn

A MUSICAL CHANGE OF PACE NOW WITH THE NEW SOLO ALBUM BY BETH GIBBONS WHO REALLY DOES POSSESS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VOICES! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE REALLY DISAPPOINTED IF ALL OF YOU WORKING IN AGENCIES WITH A LOBBYING OR PA FUNCTION DON’T DO SOMETHING AT LEAST MARGINALLY INTERESTING OR PSEUDO-CREATIVE WITH THE MANIFESTOS AND LLMs, PT.2:    

• The Snoop Memorabilia Auction: It’s long nee known that Snoop will do seemingly ANYTHING for money – no brand collaboration too tawdry, no grift too base – so it’s no huge surprise to see him flogging off a bunch of tat for cash. If you have ever wanted to own, say, his old Death Row Records chain (current bid $1700!), or the outfit he wore at Wrestlemania 2023 ($905!) then WOW ARE YOU IN LUCK! This has about a week or so to run, so I would imagine the prices are going to rise a bit, but if you dig through there’s actually some pretty interesting memorabilia from Snoop’s golden era scattered amongst the frankly ludicrous amount of branded tie-in tat (a first edition Snoop FunkoPop, anyone?).
• The Ancient Greek Farm Simulator: This is *slightly* more interesting in idea than in execution, but it’s an interesting glimpse of one of the ways in which we’re going to see AI used more and more – this is basically a build of the quite remarkable ‘Smallville’ village simulator which I linked to last year, in which a bunch of AI agents with their own motivations, etc, were set loose in a small simulated environment to see how they interacted, developed relationships, displayed emergent behaviours, etc, except here it’s an ancient Greek farm. Meet Lycidas the goat herd and the other residents, and watch as they go about their tasks – farming, chatting, falling in love…you as the player can ‘interact’ with them, but in common with all LLM dialogue to date it’s hard to get them to say anything interesting, and I personally didn’t find I was given enough ability to see ‘inside the heads’ (if you will) of the agents as I would have liked. Still, this is a really interesting branch of AI research and investigation, and I’m fascinated to see how this sort of thing develops as the tech improves – you can read more about it here if you’re interested (there are also sims of a Roman fishing village and somewhere in Ancient Egypt, should you prefer a slightly different flavour of AI-simulated history).
• Professional Lunch: ANOTHER friend link, and one that’s probably only really of use if you live in London or come here regularly – that said, if that is YOU and you like eating at restaurants, and you’re lucky enough to be able to afford to do so, then this is GREAT. Marshall Manson is a Texan in London, and he enjoys lunch – so he has started this newsletter, where he writes twice a week about…good places to have lunch. Marshall is a significantly more grown-up and professional human being than I am, and as such he writes from the perspective of someone who’s doing ‘business lunches’ (or at least who isn’t planning on doing a three-bottler), but even if that’s not your thing he is an excellent judge of food and I can vouch for a significant number of his recommendations.
• No Web Without Women: A website celebrating innovations by women in the field of computer science, as a reminder that, despite the persistently c0ck-heavy vibe of much of compsci and webtech, a lot of it is built on the work of women. From Lovelace to Lamarr to Roberta Williams and beyond, this is a lovely and potentially-inspiring look at how various women have had a significant impact across a wide range of disciplines which are often lazily and sexist…ly (?Not a word, but it should be) male-coded.
• Maecenium: This is…weird, and I get quite bad vibes from it but I can’t quite articulate why. On the surface, it’s a charitable foundation dedicated to the promotion of STEM and to provide funding to research – per the site, its mission is “to support and promote the pursuit of knowledge and innovation in various fields of natural and social science, including but not limited to biology, personalized medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, and history. We believe that scientific research plays a crucial role in solving complex problems, improving lives, and shaping the future of humanity…One of our main goals at Maecenium is to identify and support innovative, high-impact scientific projects. We believe that breakthroughs often come from thinking outside the box and exploring new ideas. Through our rigorous selection process, we identify projects that have the potential to make a significant impact and provide them with the necessary resources to thrive. Through our support, we aim to enable scientists to focus on their research without the burden of financial constraints. We believe that by investing in scientific research, we can unlock new discoveries, innovations, and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.” Which sounds good, right? So why do I get such bad vibes from the site? I think it’s in part the name – I now get the fantods about stuff that has this faux-antiquity vibe and a near-immediate assumption that it’s trying to trojan horse some pretty fashy thinking – and in part all the AI-imagery on the site, the fact that while only talking in the very vaguest of terms about what the fcuk it is that they want to fund or do, if you dig into the site they seem to be requesting donations at a minimum of £10k…oh, and the fact that a bit of digging suggests that the founder, one Katherine Yovanovich, PhD, seemingly has no other online presence anywhere other than on this site, which feels…weird for a supposed academic. Do any of you happen to have a clue? Am I being unfair, or am I right and is this very fcuking dodgy indeed?
• The American Diary Project: Who doesn’t love reading other people’s diaries? NO FCUKER…actually, is that true or is it just that I am a terrible voyeur? Hm. Anyway, this isn’t creepy or voyeuristic at all, promise – instead, it’s a project designed to archive the personal journals of people from the US throughout history. “The American Diary Project was founded in October of 2022 with one simple vision: Rescue diaries and preserve the writing of everyday Americans. From our founder and executive director, Kate Zirkle: “One crisp fall day in October, I was updating my last will and testament when I was struck by the question of what to do with my journals after I pass. Should I leave them to someone? Should I burn them? Should I donate them? These questions lead me down a fruitless internet search—I just couldn’t find a suitable place to archive my writings in the U.S. Upon this discovery, I felt an instant, electric surge of “I WOULD LOVE TO DO THAT” and thus, the American Diary Project was born.”” It’s still pretty new, and not STUFFED with content, but there are examples of diaries from the past 300 years on the site and there is something just wonderful, to me at least, about going wandering around through the past thoughts and feelings and memories and fears and dreams of these strangers.
• The Talk: You may have seen a clip doing the rounds this week of a purported conversation between Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, about the existential horror of being alive – at one point it was being shared EVERYWHERE with all sorts of commentary about how moving it was and how DEEP, and, honestly, I don’t personally understand how the fcuk anyone didn’t see through it immediately (sorry, but I didn’t) but, obviously, IT WAS NOT REAL!!! In fact, it was an out-of-context excerpt from this series of videos, called The Talk, by Danish artist Jonas Hollerup Helle. The link here takes you to the youTube channel for the project, which features a bunch of similar imagined chats – Chris Rock and Will Smith, Cher and David Lynch, etc etc – which are produced, as far as I can tell, by editing together clips from completely unconnected interviews into a semi-coherent-seeming conversation. I think it’s worth having a think about what this implies for people’s likely susceptibility to AI content – I mean, look, just watch one of these things and it’s clear to anyone paying even an iota of attention that there is no dialogue happening, that the phrases spoken barely relate to each other, that there’s no interaction between the participants…and yet lots of people didn’t notice at all. Which isn’t to say people are stupid so much as it is to say that we simply don’t pay attention, and that that’s going to mean we’re on the cusp of some VERY interesting consequences when AI duping of faces and voices gets just a tiny, tiny bit better.
• The Communal Plot: Via Giuseppe, this is SUCH a good idea and a lovely interface/visualisation to boot. Every day, the site throws up two different questions plotted across two axes – today’s, for example, is ‘do you prefer non-fiction or mystery novels?’ and ‘do you prefer country or pop music?’ – which you’re invited to answer by placing yourself on an appropriate space on the plot. Pick your spot and you’re shown how you compare to everyone else who’s answered that day’s question. That’s it -but it’s elegant and interesting, and I really like the correlations it can occasionally throw up, and I think there’s something here which might be worth exploring further for data analysts and the like.
• Puzzle Canon: This very much falls into the category of ‘things I think are interesting but I really don’t understand AT ALL’ (it’s a big category, growing by the fcuking second) – (very) basically, puzzle canons are musical riddles, sort-of compositional in-jokes or challenges designed to test a musician’s ability to interpret clues within musical notation (I think). From the site’s own description: “”Puzzle canon,” “riddle canon,” “Ratselkanon,” “Enigmatic canon,” “closed canon,” all these terms refer to a sort of canon that is sufficiently strict that a single written melody can represent two or more performed melodies! One of these melodies might be the retrograde of the other, or upside-down, or higher or lower, twice as fast or slow. Only the imagination is the limit. many more possibilities exist. What kinds of clever things have Bach, Mozart and others tried? What other kinds of puzzle canons exist? Who are the unsung heroes of canon from Medieval times to the present? The puzzlecanon website is the place to find out!” The only issue I have with this is that it is VERY MUCH designed for real musicians – it’s all displayed as staves, there’s no audio to give you a reference as to what these things sound like when you get them ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’, and, as such, unless you can read music and ‘hear’ it in your head (which I very much can’t) it might remain a mystery to you. Can someone who understands this please explain it to me in a manner that a cloth-eared moron like me might comprehend?
• Osbcurify: Another Spotify plugin, this time analysing your account to see how obscure or otherwise, compared I presume to majority streaming habits based on raw numbers, your tastes are – it also gives you information about how this is changing over time, whether you’re tending to listen to more or less ‘energetic’ music than you used to, all that sort of jazz. Potentially interesting if you like quantifying every aspect of your life, or if you’d like to keep an eye on what your ‘Wrapped’ selection is going to look like for the purposes of gaming it to make you look more ‘interesting’ based on your taste in, I don’t know, deathcore from the Faroe Islands.
• Share Textures: ANYONE WHO DOES ANYTHING INVOLVING CG AND 3d MODELING / DESIGN – THIS IS FOR YOU! “Since 2018, we’ve been sharing textures that are free from copyright restrictions. Our collection now includes over 1500 free textures, 200 3D Models, and 50 atlases, and it keeps growing, thanks to our patrons. You don’t need to register or pay, just select an asset and click the download button. You can able to download them up to 4K resolution.” This is an incredible resource and SO GENEROUS, bless whoever’s behind it.
• Slosh: I don’t quite understand the recent American obsession with ‘hard seltzer’ – we did alcopops 30 years ago ffs, why are you doing them again but…sh1tter? – but I am slightly obsessed with the website for new range ‘Slosh’. I don’t want to drink a single one of the available flavours (they all do that very, very North American thing of having incredibly-incongruous combinations that sound…too much, something I always find on restaurant menus in the States as well – also, black cherry and lime is, objectively, a nasty-sounding mix), but I absolutely adore the frankly insane overegging of the site – there is SO MUCH going on here, from the different types of interactivity to the music to the animations to the fact that you can pick a flavour to ‘explore’ by playing an actual game of 3d ‘beer pong’ (it’s not very good, and it’s quite annoying, but WHAT commitment!). Basically this feels like the designers all got very, very baked and just went with it, which I personally think is the sort of aesthetic all digital projects should lean into a little harder.
• No Disposable Barbeques: Look, absolutely no shade to whoever is behind this campaign – I am sure there are lots of good reasons why disposable bbqs are a bad thing, from an environmental and safety perspective – but I find the single-issue nature of this Twitter account, going since 2020, genuinely amusing.
• Acousitc Location and Sound Mirrors: I guarantee you that unless you are already aware of what the words in the link refer to that you WILL NOT be able to guess the sorts of devices and contraptions that are commemorated on this website. LOOK AT THE ILLUSTRATIONS! Honestly, I cried laughing at some of these.
•  I, The Moon, The Star: I don’t quite know how to describe this – a sort of digital poem, I think – but it’s lovely. Change the words in the phrase via the drop-downs and see how the site responds – aside from anything else I really love the UI here, as well as the resulting imagery and how it fuzzes into focus.
• Sister Mary Blaze: Look, this is religious propaganda – I KNOW I KNOW – but, equally, it’s a fcuking nun on TikTok, and who doesn’t love some of that incongruity? NO FCUKER, etc! Sister Mary Blaze is…is she a real nun? I don’t want to dig into it too deeply, but she dances to popular songs – there’s a recent vid of her doing a routine to the BBL Drizzy beat which is quite the thing – and generally seems Quite Online, and I haven’t checked into the comments but I wouldn’t be surprised to see an awful lot of children in the mentions praising her for ‘serving cnut’. It’s very much THAT sort of account, and your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you enjoy the cognitive dissonance of a woman you’d expect to be doing a rosary and maybe polishing an apse (NOT A EUPHEMISM!) doing very, very self-aware content marketing.
• J1zzy Jewellery: I’m not sure whether ‘j1zzy’ is the sort of thing that will get spam or profanity filtered, but let’s play it safe. Anyway, for clarity, this is a site which allows you to commission custom jewellery MADE FROM SEMEN (or breastmilk, apparently, elsewhere on the page) – per the vendors, “Whether you are marking your fertility journey, getting a vasectomy gift, surprising your partner or just want to be that much closer, we can turn your j1zz into a real gem! We love being inclusive over in the Trinkets world so both male and female j1zz can be used! (YOU MUST PROVIDE YOUR OWN SAMPLES)” – the last bit of that really finished me. Anyway, if you fancy spaffing into a jar and sending sad spaff to some strangers to be transmuted (via some mysterious process they don’t really elaborate on, from what I can tell) into very, very milky-looking ‘gemstones’ to hang on a pendant or wear on a ring or something then BOY are you in the right place. They’re unclear on volumes required, which feels like something of an omission (an ‘emission omission’, if you will, which I imagine you won’t – sorry about that), but this seems entirely legit (or as legit as you could ever say a business designed to sell you jewellery made of spunk could ever be) and as such, well, here you are!
• Consider The Consequences: Finally this week, a genuine historical Curio updated for the digital age – Consider the Consequences “originally published in 1930 was written by  Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins and is the earliest known published work of fiction that offers branching paths.  This style of fiction would go on to give rise to Choose Your Own Adventure books, Infocom text adventure games, and of course, the incredibly popular field of modern Interactive Fiction.”  It’s been replicated in Twine, and you can play it at this link, and it’s such an interesting look at mores and customs of a century ago, and it’s worth exploring, both because of its status as a precursor to basically any ‘branching narrative’ experience of the now and the way it shines a light on the social concerns of the interwar era in North America. Also, it’s a nice palate-cleanser after all that talk of j1zz.

By Photo in Moz

OUR FINAL MUSICAL PICK THIS WEEK IS THE MOST RECENT RELEASE FROM DAVID SHANE SMITH WHOSE ANGULAR-BUT-BEAUTIFUL SONGS I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING SINCE HE FIRST KINDLY EMAILED ME SOME IN AROUND 2008! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Adventures in Jelly: Via Jana at Zuckerbaeckerei, this is SUCH a lovely Insta feed – would you like to see loads of pictures of moulded jelly desserts and the occasionally video of them wobbling? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! These are so, so pleasing, and while I’m conscious that there’s a vanishing number of you for whom this is likely to tickle a scratch a peculiar fetishistic itch, be safe in the knowledge that I will NEVER KNOW and can never judge.
• Museum Bums: An account existing solely to celebrate bums in museums. Genuinely astonished I haven’t featured this before, it is PERFECT insta.
• Cafe Good Day: Craig Mod is doing one of his Japanese walks again at the moment, and his daily emails from the road are just wonderful – I’m not a particular Japanophile or anything, he’s just so so so good at writing about the flow state that you get into when walking long distances, and about the people he meets and their stories, and the things he sees, and it’s just glorious. Anyway, this is the Insta feed of a small cafe that he found on one leg of his insane, 30km day yomps, and while it’s not remarkable in any way it is also just incredibly soothing and I thought you might enjoy it.
• Who Designed This Garbage?: Photos of discarded designer goods packaging in NYC. No, I don’t really understand why either.
• Turkish Sh1tposting: A window into being VERY ONLINE in another culture and language – I fcuking adore this, even if I have no idea what the everliving fcuk a good proportion of the posts mean. It’s not all Turkish – there’s some Russian stuff in there, some from Arabic nations – but the general point is ‘look at how other people do this stuff, and how it is familiar and yet very different’. Via Pietro’s always-excellent Link Molto Belli.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Shannon Cartier Lucy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Do you ever get the feeling, maybe, that you perhaps don’t quite have the same…checks and balances as other people? That perhaps your moral compass is somewhat askew?

I ask only as a I did a thing this week which involved standing up in front of people and talking about Things I Did In The Past, and there were various points when…well, let’s just say when it became clear that things that *I* found funny, or at the very least examples of ‘well, the past was a different country!’, were seen by others as examples of what might best be described as ‘severe moral turpitude’ (to be clear, NOTHING CRIMINAL).

Am…am I a cnut?

As with so much of Curios, dear reader, that is a rhetorical question and I really, really don’t need or want to hear your opinion on it. Just know that I occasionally ask myself, and let’s leave it at that.

Anyway, this week’s edition is, if you’ll excuse the momentary autofellatio, quite a good one I think, so why don’t you get on with reading it and I’ll go back to enumerating all my many failings to seven decimal places.

I am still Matt, this is still Curios, and you really should make sure to check out the video at the end this week because it is EXCEPTIONAL.

By Charlie Tallott (images nearly all lifted from TIH, for which thanks)

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS A CRACKING SELECTION OF EARLY HIPHOP (WE’RE TALKING 80s AND EARLY-90s HERE) COMPILED BY FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! (AND YOU CAN READ SOME WORDS ABOUT IT HERE IF YOU LIKE!)

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT HAVE TO LEAVE LONDON IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT ARSENAL DO IN FACT WIN THE LEAGUE, PT.1:  

By Molly Bounds

NEXT UP, HAVE SOME SLIGHTLY-MANIC JAZZ COURTESY OF THE FABULOUS SOIL AND PIMP SESSIONS! 

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT HAVE TO LEAVE LONDON IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT ARSENAL DO IN FACT WIN THE LEAGUE, PT.2:    

• Rap Feud: Now that the dust has seemingly settled – at least momentarily – on The Great Beef, take a moment to enjoy this really nicely-made site which takes you through the timeline of HOW and WHY and WHEN it all went down. This is really, really good – obviously it’s interesting if you’re interested in the story and the people and the music, but also as an explainer project and as a piece of webdesign in its own right. As you scroll, you pass through each individual track – you can listen to it, get information on the backstory as to why it was written, read the lyrics, get information on the artists and the targets… regardless of your interest in Kendrick, Drake or the whole thing, this is just really good webwork. Also it taught me that one of the samples on the Metro ‘BBL Drizzy’ beat was in fact AI-generated, which had totally passed me (and I imagine lots of other casual listeners) by, and which feels like a Rubicon of sorts has been crossed here.
• The Most Horrible Advert I Have Ever Seen: I’m not exaggerating here. This really, really upset me – not joking! Made me really really sad! – and I would honestly take steps to actively harm the product in question were I ever to see it in the wild (but I think it’s only in North America, and I can’t imagine the brand is going to exist in a few years’ time). Seriously, watch this and see what happens when you take ‘ironic detachment’ far too far.
• Birdify: By way of a palate-cleanser after that horrid ad – SO HORRID – have this lovely project, by one Thomas Newlove, which simply lets you listen to the sound of birds. That’s it! Search for your favourite, or simply browse through the list – it’s simply pleasant to hear birdsong, but it’s also nice to have a listen to some of the more common British varieties to see if you can start to recognise them in the wild; I am back in leafy South London and it is SO NICE to be able to hear birdsong again (although I am probably going to have to revise that opinion if the pigeons obviously living on the roof directly above my bedroom don’t start shutting the fcuk up).
• Words About War: Not really a Curio, this, so much as a serious and useful project (there’s that whiplash thematic sidewindering again, really must try and address that one day) – Words About War is a document which is designed to act as a language guide for people writing about conflict to seek to ensure that the words they use are fair and accurate. From the homepage: “From George Orwell’s critique of the language of totalitarian regimes to today, discussions of war and foreign policy have been full of dehumanizing euphemisms, bloodless jargon, little-known government acronyms, and troubling metaphors that hide warfare’s damage. Think of “collateral damage” (civilian deaths), “overseas contingency operations” (wars), and “bug splat” (killing human beings with drone-fired missiles). This guide aims to help people write and talk about war and foreign policy more accurately, more honestly, and in ways people outside the elite Washington, DC foreign policy “blob” can understand. We encourage you to use this guide, to share it with others, and to adapt it as necessary to local contexts. The guide should be especially helpful to journalists and other writers, podcasters and vloggers, policy analysts, teachers, scholars, and people involved in public education projects.” Leaving aside the slightly-irksome reference to the ‘foreign policy blob’, this is a useful and interesting project, and it’s worth having a look at the short version, even if you can’t be bothered with the whole thing, and then bearing what it says in mind next time you read reporting about, for the sake of argument, Gaza.
• The Desktop Cat Cursor: Inspired by an idea floated by legendary internet geek Foone, this is a small download (which costs a quid) which will turn your computer cursor into a long cartoon cat’s paw, reaching in from outside the boundaries of your screen to move and manipulate things on your desktop. Why? BECAUSE IT’S FUNNY (sort-of, if you’re a particular type of person).
• Digital Art From the Era of Japanese PCs: Ok, so, again, an upfront warning – this is a decade-old forum thread collecting examples of pixel art from Japanese videogames in the 80s and early-90s, and as such it features QUITE A FEW EXAMPLES OF PIXELART NUDITY, almost all, inevitably, of women, because Hentai. Still, it’s not ALL slightly-tawdry pseudo-bongo, and, honestly, this is aesthetically fascinating, I promise (as well as there being some really beautiful work in here). From the person who started the thread: “So over the past few years I’ve been saving pictures from old Japanese games that I really liked and I thought I’d share them with you all. Most of these pictures come from Japanese PCs from the 80s to mid 90s like the MSX, PC88, PC98, X1, X68000, FM Towns and a bunch of others. They’re pretty impressive because they display a level of graphical quality that Western computers just weren’t capable of producing until much later. Take a look at the intro for the PC88 RPG The Screamer. It’s hard to believe that this game came out in 1984; there was nothing remotely comparable coming from Western computers at the time.” There is a LOT in here – there are 4 full pages of screenshots – and if you’re interested you can read a little more about the technical ‘why’ of this stuff on this page (but, again, apologies for the nudity on this one – it turns out that the venn diagram of ‘people who are minded to collect screenshots of old Japanese videogames’ and ‘people who like looking at pixelart representations of anatomically-improbable women’ is a circle).
• Shund: This is one of those links that is very much Not For Me – mainly because I don’t speak a word of Hebrew, or Yiddish – but which I like to think will for ONE READER be genuinely fascinating and useful. Shund is a searchable database of Yiddish popular fiction from down the years, searchable and readable on-site, and while it’s intended for linguistic and cultural scholars I would imagine that, if you can read the texts, there’s something in here for the more casual historian. “A Woman’s Honor, The Lost Daughter, It’s Hard to be a Mother, The Masked World—these are just a few titles from the thousands of Yiddish pulp novels published during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Serialized as stand-alone pamphlets or in the pages of the Yiddish press, novels like these are twisting tales of murder and infidelity, adventure and political intrigue. Though labeled by critics as “trash” (shund in Yiddish), they were central to Jewish daily life throughout the global network of Ashkenazi Jewry. Today these texts remain largely unstudied even as scholars assert their importance to understanding Yiddish culture and its afterlives. This project aims to bridge this gap by producing a collaborative, open-access database that will synthesize shund’s varied and disparate archives and facilitate new scholarship. With a better understanding of what exactly constitutes shund, a group of scholars can together produce comparative histories of the genre while theorizing it as a paradigm for how marginalized cultures confront the modern world.” The site’s not the most user-friendly in the world, but it does work – I just couldn’t understand a word of the content, but that’s my problem not theirs.
• Pasta Guide: A guide to pasta! As it says right up top, this is not a recipe guide or a cookbook (although there is a recipe for making actual pasta) – it’s just a guide to what pasta is, how it’s made, some of the shapes…Look, I fcuking LOVE pasta (obviously) and I genuinely don’t understand the slight air of shock and horror that people in my life have occasionally exhibited at my ability and indeed inclination to eat it multiple times a day, and I am very much in favour of this sort of technical appreciation of one of the world’s greatest-ever foodstuffs (fight me) (don’t fight me, I am weak and sickly)…and if you click through the ‘Experiments’ tab you’ll be taken to Adriana Gallo’s Are.na page where she documents her experiences of making the stuff…this is not the most comprehensive pasta resource on the web, but I love it precisely because it’s just one person’s celebration of something they really like, which is basically what the very best of the web is all about.
• Dupe: Look, let’s get this out of the way – I don’t approve of buying stuff just for the sake of it, I don’t approve of consumption in general (yes, I am fun at parties, and no I don’t get invited to many, why do you ask?) and I’m increasingly feeling like some sort of ascetic preacher of doom in the face of the world’s ceaseless attempts to dull the pain with shopping. THAT SAID, I am equally aware that sometimes you do actually need things, and that you might find it useful to have a way of finding stuff that looks like the expensive version you really want but can’t afford, at half the price. Thus, Dupe – a service in beta which lets you plug in the url of any product you care to mention and which promises to find you a selection of knockoff versions of said product from around the web. I can’t vouch for how well or otherwise this works, but it’s worth a go I think. This is firmly focused on home decor, before you get all excited about getting couture knockoffs, but if you’re decorating then this might be useful.
• Il Campionato Mondiale di Umari: This is a project by one of my favourite niche newsletters (Scope of Work, which I’ve featured in here a few times before, which is mostly about building and construction and the process of making stuff), and I’ll let Spencer, who runs it, introduce the concept to you: “Umari is the plural form of umarell, and umarell is a jocular Italian [AUTHOR’S INTERJECTION – it’s actually dialect, Bolognese iirc. God I’m a prick] term for a person – classically a man of retirement age – who pauses to observe work in progress. The term might be used as light-hearted mockery, but I think more people ought to umarell.  To umarell is to take an interest in the built environment – the environment that our species creates, and in which most of us spend most of our time. An umarell turns their attention to that environment’s creation, taking time to appreciate the materials, machines, and muscles from which it emerges.” Isn’t that a wonderful concept? Anyway, Spencer is running a small contest, to celebrate people who are observing work in interesting ways – whether in sketch form, or in writing (whether technical or creative) – and I think this is SUCH an interesting concept and potentially a source of some really interesting work, and I wondered maybe one or two of you might think it the sort of thing you might want to have a go at.
• Open Glass: I imagine the number of people reading this who might be interested in cobbling together their own homebrew version of AI-enabled glasses is a round zero, but, just in case, here are some instructions on how to do so. You remember 12 years ago when Google Glass came out and the world wasn’t ready, and the term ‘glasshole’ was coined? Trust me, you would need to invent whole new words for people wearing these. Still, pretty fcuking scifi (NB – I think this is the second of these projects I’ve featured in here, but this one’s managed to strip the hardware costs to about £25 which is…frankly insane).
• The Black Games Archive: “Black Games Archive is a multimedia, public-facing database of games, digital resources, accessible scholarship, and designer interviews that are relevant to the intersections between Black culture, games, and play.” This is a great resource, both for people seeking titles that feature better representation of black people than was often traditional (although thankfully the industry’s come on leaps and bounds since I worked in it in the mid-00s) and for anyone interested academic readings around race, society and representation in the medium – there’s also a section focused on essays and scholarship, which is useful for anyone wanting to delve into this further.
• While We’re Talking About Games, I Did A Talk: The link takes you to the (terrible) slides, and you can read my (terrible) notes here, should you be interested. I am genuinely sorry to everyone who listened to it for all the swearing and for using a Bad Word Which Is No Longer Acceptable In The 2020s when describing the Daily Mail’s reaction to God of War II’s launch party.
• Fanzine World: This is a nice idea which I don’t think *quite* works, but you might find something in it – Fanzine World is designed to let anyone pull together a list of 5 ‘creators’ based on a theme of their choosing, the idea being that anyone can say ‘Hey, I’m really into haberdashery, here are the 5 creators I think are most interesting the haberdashery space RIGHT NOW’ for anyone else to find and peruse and enjoy. Basically it’s a way for people to share their passions, and it’s potentially not a bad way of finding creators within a certain vertical should you need one.
• Campane Marinelli: Are any of you in the market for a church bell? I mean an actual church bell, massive and sonorous, to hang in a church tower, made in a foundry and weighing tonnes? No, of course you’re not, but I was so pleased with the fact that PEOPLE WHO MAKE CHURCH BELLS HAVE WEBSITES that I felt compelled to include this one. Campanologists, this one is for YOU!
• Digitiser: Now this is one I really can’t believe I haven’t featured before – those of you who a) grew up in the UK; and b) are old, like I am, may have fond memories of TeleText, the text-based internet precursor (it was nothing like the internet) which basically let you read pages of text on your telly, and which was arranged into various sections, not unlike a weird sort of TV-based magazine, and which was where people used to buy cheap holidays and keep track of the football scores as recently as about 1998. One of the BEST things about TeleText was its coverage of music (honestly, I bought SO many great albums based off their recommendations in the early-90s) and videogames – the games section in particular was a genuinely-hallucinatory mix of off-kilter humour, tips, properly good reviews and some VERY STRANGE low-res 8-bit pixel art, and some utterly baffling (to anyone who wasn’t already immersed in the lore) in-jokes and running gags…and the archive is online! YOU CAN READ DIGI AGAIN! Honestly, if you remember this stuff then I can’t tell you what a treat it is; if you don’t, it’s worth clicking this link and having a dig around because a) you will be amazed by how genuinely strange so much of it is, and how odd it must have been to find it just a button-press away from the aggressively-normie confines of ITV in 1993; and b) you will get an idea for how incredibly bored teenagers were , when we would literally sit and wait 20s at a time for the pages to automatically turn so we could read a comic review of Prince of Persia.
• AntARctica: Sorry about the bad joke sorry sorry sorry. This is genuinely great, though – an (I think) educational portal for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust with a bunch of AR experiences that let you ‘experience’ the magic and mystery of being VERY COLD on the tundra, with your huskies – you can do these on your phone, and there are six different experiences including swimming with the penguins, running with the sledding dogs and freezing to death, alone and cold and frightened (one of these is in fact a lie).
• The Labyrinth: This is by no objective standards ‘good’, but, equally, it’s a game that was made by a team of forty ten year old kids in Croatia – it’s a small platformer, which uses the children’s drawings as the source art, and while it’s very simple and very janky it’s also weirdly charming, and I have to say that if it was a bit more polished I like the aesthetic enough to play for longer than the 45s I actually lasted.
• PixoGuess: Can you guess what the pixellated thing is? CAN YOU? Pick from various categories – logos, pokemon, videogame characters, etc – and see how quickly you can guess what they are as they go from HUGELY PIXELLATED ABSTRACT MESSES to recognisable images. This is…moderately fun, and you can create local lobbies so you can spend the afternoon challenging your colleagues should you not have anything better to do with your life.
• EyeSpy: Play I Spy in your browser with what I presume ae Google Earth images – you’re plonked somewhere in the world, and given an option of 3 objects which appear somewhere in the 360 image – all you need to do is select the correct one. This is…quite hard, but you get the feel for it after a couple of goes and it’s a not-terrible way of killing time while you wait for timesheet-o-clock.
• Showdown: This is ‘rock, paper, scissors’, but more fun than you’d think – you play against a moustachio’d cowboy figure, which responds to your strategies, and there’s a betting mechanic which keeps it compelling, and this is FAR shinier and better-made than it needs to be, and, honestly, I really enjoyed this and I think you might do too.

By Not The NoName

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK TAKES YOU THROUGH LOUNGEY DISCO ALL THE WAY TO SOME SORT OF PROTO-HOUSE VIA A VARIETY OF SLIGHTLY-80s SOUNDS WHICH I CAN’T DESCRIBE ANYWHERE NEAR AS WELL AS I WOULD LIKE, AND IT’S BY SI KURRAGE AND MR SHIVER AND IT IS GREAT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Art Deco Society NY: Via Blort, this is a lovely Insta feed featuring, er, art deco stuff in New York. But, you know, not just the Chrysler Building – OTHER art deco stuff. Look, it’s good, you’ll enjoy it, have a click.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jeremy Hutchison (via Blort)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

SUMMER HAS COME TO LONDON! Or, more accurately, it is not currently raining and that is good enough for me. I would imagine that you’re all excitedly preparing your spangly pants and protest songs in anticipation of Eurovision, so I will keep this intro short and encourage you to dive right in, as otherwise there’s no way you’ll be finished before all the besequinned caterwauling starts.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably stick a fiver on that Baby Lasagna song (according to someone I know who understands this stuff; I have no fcuking idea, obviously).

By Michelle Thompson (all images this week lifted from TIH, to whom thanks as ever)

AS YOU WERE DOUBTLESS ALL AWARE IT WAS 45 DAY ON 04 MAY, CELEBRATING VINYL AND ALL ASSOCIATED THINGS, SO HERE IS AN APPROPRIATELY VINYL-Y MIX BY TOM SPOONER WITH WHICH TO CELEBRATE!

THE SECTION WHICH IN THE WAKE OF NADHIM ZAHAWI’S DECISION TO STAND DOWN WOULD LIKE TO REMIND READERS THAT IN HIS YOUTH HE LITERALLY LOOKED LIKE A TERRIBLE STREET MAGICIAN WHO WAS ALSO A PECULIARLY-UNSUCCESSFUL PICK-UP ARTIST, PT.1:  

By Yuwei Tu

OUR NEXT MUSICAL TREAT IS THIS PLAYLIST FEATURING EVERY SINGLE SONG MENTIONED IN THE BEASTIE BOYS BOOK – SERIOUSLY, BOOKMARK THIS, IT IS FCUKING AMAZING AND IS OVER A DAY’S WORTH OF BRILLIANT TRACKS!

THE SECTION WHICH IN THE WAKE OF NADHIM ZAHAWI’S DECISION TO STAND DOWN WOULD LIKE TO REMIND READERS THAT IN HIS YOUTH HE LITERALLY LOOKED LIKE A TERRIBLE STREET MAGICIAN WHO WAS ALSO A PECULIARLY-UNSUCCESSFUL PICK-UP ARTIST, PT.2:

• Record Club: I know, I know, the last thing anyone wants in the year of our Lord 2024 is ‘another social network’. Or, frankly, any social networks at all. Still, let’s not think of this as a social network – let’s instead think of it as, er, a record club! This is a new online community built by and for music enthusiasts as a place to hang out, chat about music, share recommendations and all that sort of jazz (lol) – crucially, it’s not trying to be a destination for listening, more a space for people to congregate around particular artists or songs or genres, and to find like-minded people who are also into the same sort of thing. Obviously this isn’t a wholly-new premise, and there are doubtless other places online that offer a similar sort of vibe (or which try to), but I rather like both the design and the feel of this – it’s in beta, but I was let in pretty quickly, and if you’re the sort of person who really likes talking about how much the B-side of ‘I Touch Myself’ meant to them as a kid (look, I’m not judging, it takes all sorts) then this may be your new online forever home. I think it reminds me a bit of ‘This Is My Jam’ (RIP, wiv da angles), which may be why I feel so warmly towards it.
• Etymonline: OH GOD I LOVE THIS. How have I not seen it before? Evidently I am not spending enough time online. I have just checked out the FAQ page and I think this has been going since…2005ish? Anyway, it is OLD – Methuselan by modern web standards – and it is venerable, and it is a BRILLIANT resource for, er, etymology nerds. Are you the sort of person who really, really enjoys finding out the origin of terms like ‘macadam’ or ‘two-step’? GOOD ME TOO! Honestly, the fatigue is really starting to kick in now and it’s all I can do not to abandon you right here and just go to bed and send myself to sleep by going through the linguistic history of the verb ‘to eat’ – but I won’t, because I am DEDICATED and, also, I have compulsive issues which means that I wouldn’t be able to relax chiz chiz. Anyway, this is a genuinely wonderful resource, and as with so many things it’s mainly maintained by a single individual, who, honestly, is a fcuking hero. I can’t stress enough how wonderful I find these sorts of sites, useful and deep and PERSISTENT, and which exist solely because someone is interested and cares and believes it important that it SHOULD exist. It’s almost enough to make me like people, almost.
• The London GreenGround Map: Another link from Rishi, this (buy his poems, they are great), and another which I am slightly upset I hadn’t known about previously. A piece of design by Helen Ilus, the London GreenGround Map is (roughly speaking) a sort of tube map analogue for the capital’s green spaces, mapping connections and routes between public parks and gardens and areas less blighted by urban sprawl, letting you plan routes that take you through the bits of the city that are yet to be tarmaced over. “An enthusiastic walker and urban explorer Helen travelled widely, studying and working in UK, before coming up with the idea of connecting parks to tube style network for walkers. Fan of Harry Beck’s London Tube map she wondered what would happen combining the schematic mapping with walking routes. As an intuitive traveller she found the schematic maps more accessible in urban environments, but realised they also trap people in transport networks. This is why her maps give priority to green infrastructure, replacing stations with parks and tube lines with walking routes. She has also experimented with creating a walking map for libraries as well as worked with several commissioned maps.” It’s free to download, and if I had access to a colour printer I would totally do a big copy of this and carry it with me – whether or not you want a physical copy, this is SUCH a good way to plan walks and routes, and if you live in London it’s worth looking for your local area and seeing if there are any nearby spaces that are new to you that you might want to explore over the coming few weeks before it gets cold and wet and grey again.
• London Rent Prices Map: A sub-Page of the previously-featured Pint Prices page (mapping the price of a beer – which, by the way, I saw someone pay £EIGHT FCUKING QUID for a pint of neck oil  the other day, which is an awful lot to pay for beer that bad), this takes data from SpareRoom to map average per-room rental prices across the city. The values are colour-coded, so the lower end of the pricing scale is green while the higher end is red, but it’s important to remember that GREEN DOES NOT EQUAL CHEAP, because there is no cheap housing stock in this fcuking city and you can expect to shell out a minimum of about £800 for a room that is practically in Essex, let alone something on an actual tube line. If you’re looking for somewhere to live, this could actually be useful – you can click into specific areas, and then find individual links back to the SpareRoom listings, which might be helpful if you’re currently unlucky enough to find a new rental (I am sorry, good luck).
• The Hacker News Map: A map! Of posts on Hacker News! Arranged thematically! You can search, or just zoom in and around – it’s actually a pretty decent search engine given the massive range of topics covered on the site over the years, and you can read a decent explanation of what it is, how it works and how you might use it on this blogpost by its creator Wilson Lin – it’s a surprisingly good way of finding interesting things, and for doing topic-based research (as long as you don’t mind it throwing up things from a few years back), and is a generally interesting place to spend a bit of time digging around.
• The Water Drinkers: I think I featured a piece on here a few years ago about the weird world of hydration YouTube, where people, mainly young men, would post videos showing them drinking water, performatively chugging a bottle of Evian or whatever, again and again, day after day, maintaining ‘hydration streaks’ (surely, you know, a prerequisite for being alive?) and generally building a small, weird, niche, but dedicated, audience of hydration fans – this link takes you to a spreadsheet listing some of the top water drinkers, how many days their ‘streaks’ have been going, that sort of thing. The person at the top of this leaderboard has been filming themselves drinking water and posting the footage to the web for (at the time of writing) a total of 4541 days, which is a degree of obsessional, and quite possibly deeply-psychologically-unhealthy, dedication to which I can very much empathise.
• Abandoned Blogs: Via Kris, this is an Are.na board collecting blogs that have been left dormant by their owners. This is INCREDIBLE, a series of windows not only into the past, but into the specific pasts of specific strangers – the blogs collected here (there are over 100 I think) run the gamut from the personal to the obsessional, covering fashion and music and food and ‘just, you know, LIFE’, and there is so much here to explore and enjoy. Some of these will have been abandoned through lack of interest of a loss of focus or simply time and change and, you know, growing up, and some will have been left because their owners don’t exist anymore, and wandering through these is…I wanted to type that it was like wandering through a graveyard, but that makes it sound sad and elegiac in a way that this isn’t. It’s more like walking down a street where all the houses are empty but perfectly-preserved, able to step through any door you choose and explore what was left by whoever once owned it, and it is BEAUTIFUL. I really need to look into forever hosting for Web Curios – given I am never going to procreate, this fcuker is my SOLE LEGACY (literally the saddest line I have ever written, that) and I’m fcuked if I’m letting it decay when I finally manage to get off this mortal coil.
• Weathersight: Self-describing as ‘tools for data-driven climate journalism’, this is basically a resource that seeks to make weather datasets more easily readable and accessible – genuinely useful for anyone who is involved in researching or looking into all of the various interesting and awful ways we’re fcuking the planet and, by happy extension, ourselves!
• Tiny Dogs: One of the rare occasions when I feature a commercial endeavour in Curios – but, honestly, it is SO CHARMING that I couldn’t leave it out, even if it is something you have to pay for. Do you have a dog? Would you like to have a tiny version of said dog? A tiny version crafted out of felt? Which looks EXACTLY LIKE YOUR BELOVED HOUND? YES YOU WOULD! Hence Tiny Dogs – this person is based in Austria, and if you send them a photo of your dog they will send you a quote to have it ‘tinified’ – effectively rendered in miniature using what are probably some really quite impressive crafting techniques. Look, I am very much not a dog person – they smell, and you have to take care of them, and having dealt with two terminally ill, bedbound family members already in my short life I’m done with that thankyouverymuchindeed – but these are SO CUTE, and, honestly, if someone you love has a SPECIAL BOY (or girl) of the four-legged variety I can think of few nicer (if unspeakably–twee) gifts for them than this. I also very much enjoyed the short, one-word answer to the ‘Do You Do Cats As Well?’ FAQ (“No”).
• AI Recruiting: Do any of you work in Human Resources/Recruitment? If so, you might want to skip this next bit. Gone? Good. YOUR DAYS ARE SO NUMBERED! This is a slightly-chilling service, selling itself as a one-stop-solution for (specifically) tech recruitment, which claims that it basically does EVERYTHING automatically – CV vetting, task-setting, interviewing, interview assessment…all managed by The Machine, with the magical, unknowable Black Box deciding who the optimal candidates are without a human ever needing to be involved in the process, undercutting recruitment agencies or headhunters by a purported 80%. “What about bias?”, I hear you cry, “And what about the fact that the process is entirely inscrutable?”. “WHO CARES?”, responds the software company, firing up the AI and effectively putting Randstadt out of business.
• Books About Food: This is a site made by two guys in London which is designed to be a hub for people – authors and those on the publishing / design side – who are involved in the business of writing about food, a site where they can showcase their work and promote their projects, and it works as a really useful directory of ‘people in food in the UK’. If you are after food writers or stylists or photographers or designers in this space, this feels like a hugely-helpful place to start doing your research; you can focus in on a specific author and see, for example, who art-directed their cookbook, or find inspirations for brand collabs, or find potential recipe writers for a commercial project… If you work in UK food publishing, or foodie advermarketingpr, this is GREAT.
• Motown Junkies: A proper old-school blog, this: “a track-by-track review of every US and UK Motown single, including all subsidiaries. Not ambitious, then…I’m Nixon, and I’m British. I love music in almost all its forms, and I love Motown…Here’s how this will work. I’m going to do a separate post for every released (or planned) A- and B-side, and these will then be compiled both on the pages for each label, and also in the Master Index, which is just a great big list of everything that’s been posted to date. Unless otherwise noted, for the stuff between 1959 and 1972, I’ve treated the liner notes in the Complete Motown Singles box sets as the Word of God, and will only be dissenting from the officially-sanctioned “party line” where I think it’s important to do so (and noting the conflict). I’ll also provide external links to any information out there which I’ve taken note of, or which might provide useful further reading.” This is excellent, a proper labour of love, and a wonderful way of finding some genuinely brilliant music.
• Snail Is Inevitable: This is very silly, and also feels like something that you could iterate on in a variety of fun ways. “A snail relentlessly follows your cursor. There’s a fun hypothetical that asks if you would accept the following conditions: you get ten million dollars, but a snail follows you for the rest of your life, and if it ever touches you, then you die. Naturally, I took this hypothetical and made it into a chrome extension (the “snail that follows your cursor” part, not the “getting ten million dollars” part, though you are free to pretend this is the case). Once you press the “start” button on the extension’s popup page, a snail (shoutout Slay the Spire) will invisibly start tracking your cursor’s position. It moves very slowly, but it is always moving. If it touches you, then you die (get a blue screen of death popup).” I installed this earlier this week and it has added a pleasing note of existential angst to my browsing experience, which, fine, may not be what you’re after from a link, but LIVE A LITTLE FFS.
• Tranquil Words: I enjoyed this. Tranquil Words presents a blank screen on which you type whatever you want – but the words are invisible, unless you choose to reveal them or send the output to yourself via email. Whether you’re interested in practising free writing – you know, that stream of consciousness unblocking technique that a certain subset of ‘creative’ people swear by – or just use it as a secret way to write all sorts of invective about your colleagues or flatmates while they are RIGHT THERE, I very much like the unfettered ‘type your id into the void’-ness of it all.
• Other Orders: Code which lets you play with text in interesting ways, taking words and rearranging and reordering them in different ways based on different rulesets. Which I appreciate may not make much sense, but will do when you click, I promise. Not practically useful for anything I can immediately think of, but potentially fun from the point of view of experimental writing (or, actually, doing interesting/oblique interrogations of a corpus or single text, which could be useful now I come to think of it). If you’re a very particular type of wordw4nker there’s something interesting/whimsical/romantic you could do with your collected correspondence with a lover here, I think.
• Courtesy Vulture: Gah, ANOTHER TIKTOK (sorry) – but this is SO GOOD. Stop-motion animation in the ‘weird, and a bit gross’ category, which reminds me, vibe-wise, of Salad Fingers in the best possible way. If you click the link, the first vid on the page is a compilation of previous episodes (each tends to be about 30s long), which will get you nicely up-to-speed (insofar as this makes anything resembling ‘sense’). Aside from anything else this is technically really impressive, props to whoever’s behind it.
• Dhime: It will almost certainly come as no surprise to anyone reading this that I cannot dance for sh1t – I am largely arrhythmic, afflicted with the ‘dancing white man’s overbite’, and frankly far too tall and thin for my efforts to look like anything other than a collection of coat hangers having an epileptic fit. Still, maybe this will CHANGE MY LIFE – Dhime is a really interesting idea, using AI to teach you how to dance. The deal is that you watch videos of dance routines, then set your phone up to film you attempting to replicate the moves – The Machine then analyses your movements and attempts to work out how similar or otherwise you were to the ideal, and then offer you feedback to improve your spastic flailings. Whether this works I have no idea, and will never, ever find out, but if you’re someone who really wants to nail whatever the current TikTok fad is then a) why are you reading this newsletter? It seems frankly incongruous; and b) this might help.
• Perfect Pitch: Last up in this section, ANOTHER GAME! Listen to the notes, attempt to map them to the correct keys on a keyboard, and if you’re anything like me realise that you really are tone-deaf to a spectacular degree. This is, honestly, fun, even if you are really, terribly bad at it.

By Chang Ya Chin

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS A SELECTION OF TRACKS THAT SOUND NOT UNLIKE A HARD DRIVE DEFRAGGING ITSELF, BUT IN THE BEST WAY POSSIBLE, MIXED BY FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Manu Kant: Specifically, SEXY, YOUNG, AI IMMANUEL KANT! No, really, look at his cheekbones! FEEL THE WEIGHT OF HIS SMOULDERING CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE (little Kantian joke for the heads out there)! This was a short-lived art project that, for reasons I can’t adequately explain (despite the writeup here), decided to present selected bits of Kant’s thinking as though they were coming from the mind, and mouth, of a VERY PRETTY 24 year old influencer called Manu Kant. Isn’t he gorgeous? And SO DEEP!
• The E-Ink Cam: Another Krislink, the E-Ink Cam is a wonderful project, describes by its creator, Kaloyan Kolev, as follows: “eink.cam is a lo-fi digital camera with a tiny energy footprint that makes charming dithered pictures. I like to describe it as a “digital polaroid.” eInk (or ePaper) is an alternative display technology that uses physical ink particles to produce images. eInk displays are much more power efficient and legible in sunlight in comparison to LCD screens, but suffer from slow refresh times and limited color reproduction. While these limitations will be overcome as the tech develops, they also give it an undeniable charm. The images on eink.cam look futuristic and retro at the same time.” I would imagine if they ever chose to make this a purchasable product they would be INUNDATED with orders – I barely ever take photos of anything, and even I want one of these immoderately.
• John Pork: Who is John Pork? Why, he’s a virtual influencer with the head of a pig! What a silly question! I honestly have no fcuking idea about this one AT ALL.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Andrew Brischler

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: