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Webcurios 17/02/23

Reading Time: 34 minutes

I can’t help but feel a slight sense of disappointment at the fact that we haven’t, it turns out, been visited by extraterrestrial forces beyond our ken (or, if we have, we’re as ignorant of it as ever) – mainly because I was quite looking forward to the inevitable pitched battles between the inevitable Cult of the UFO and the growing Cult of the AI to determine which was the TRUE SAVIOUR and which the FALSE GOD.

Anyway, as you all doubtless know, that is a false dichotomy – there is only one true saviour, and it is Web Curios, delivered via your weekly linky sacrament.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably confess.

By Geoff McFetridge

WE SOUNDTRACK THE INITIAL SECTIONS OF THIS WEEK’S WEB CURIOS WITH THIS WONDERFUL TWO-HOUR SELECTION OF BEATS BY J-DILLA!

THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.1:  

  • Checking In On Bing: Oh Microsoft! Oh no! Despite previous experience in the field of ‘letting a chat interface out of the box before it was quite ready’ (Tay, how quickly we forgot you!), it seems that, once again, the world’s least-charismatic software company has dropped something of a ricket by giving people access to its GPT-juiced new version of the Bing search engine without ensuring it wasn’t going to go…a bit rogue. The first link here takes you to the ‘Bing’ subReddit which is just PACKED with wonderful examples of users having…esoteric and occasionally-hallucinatory interactions with the software. From attempting to convince you that you’ve engaged in time travel when you try and look up screening times for Avatar 2, to making up product details in order to persuade you to make a purchase, to flat-out denying facts about itself when presented with them , to, er, threatening harm to users in what is quite honestly a moderately-chilling tone…this is all GREAT stuff and not a little amusing, as long as you don’t bother thinking too hard about the company’s readiness to open up a transformative new product to public use without doing anywhere near the necessary quantity of tests and checks to ensure that it isn’t going to, I don’t know, recommend that people gargle bleach or something. Microsoft’s issued a statement acknowledging the issues, but the company doesn’t seem overly concerned about the potential damage that this might do to public confidence in the idea of AI-augmented information retrieval – all publicity’s good publicity, right? Hm. I think my favourite reaction to all this has been from the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, who one short week ago penned a glowing endorsement of The New Bing and who happily claimed that Google was going to have to win back his custom and who now, after having used the product for longer than 10 minutes, is reporting that the search engine tried to get him to leave his wife and left him ‘deeply unsettled’. Now, I say this as someone who is writing in his pants to an audience of literally dozens, but, well, to me that sort of radical 180 rather suggests that Kev didn’t necessarily do his due diligence in his first writeup, and is perhaps emblematic of the sort of breathless, seal-like clapping that greets stuff like this from certain sections of the tech press which one might reasonably argue is the root of many of our current problems with tech and society. Anyway, this is all fun and games and lol, but it won’t stop the move towards AI integration with search and it won’t stop a whole bunch of industries being turned on their heads as a result – this stuff does feel like it could be transformatively significant in the next few years, particularly if you’re old enough to be able to remember exactly how much Google changed things 25 or so years ago.
  • AI Radio: After the UNFETTERED (if temporary) JOY that was Infinite AI Seinfeld, we have a whole new frontier in the exciting world of machine-generated content to explore. AI Radio is a podcast – it’s only two episodes in at the moment – made by Bemmu and a variety of AI tools, and it’s pretty remarkable. The copy is (I presume – details about the exact ‘how’ are a touch iffy) generated by GPT and then fed through a text-to-speech program – what’s remarkable is how…natural it sounds. I mean, look, you’re unlikely to be fooled into thinking this is actual people if you listen closely for a few minutes, but, equally, the audio quality is good enough that it doesn’t immediately scream ‘THIS IS FAKE’, and the discussion, whilst rambling and a bit non sequitur-ish is also, frankly not significantly less interesting or sensical than the in-studio ‘banter’ you’d get between a radio host and the team of braying sycophants they call ‘production staff’. To quote the ‘about’ bit, this is a “Radio show hosted by a dynamic duo of two AI entities, Adam and Bella, who discuss everything from current events to pop culture. They are even able to answer listener questions and cover topics or reddit posts of your choice. You can send suggestions to the /r/airadio subreddit, or by email to me+ai@bemmu.com — Current features of the software running this: – Can invent news, or cover them based on title, and interview fake experts. – Can talk about topics it finds on Reddit or Hacker News. – Can answer listener questions, or invent some if there aren’t any. These segments were made up by AI. Sometimes they get to pretty questionable territory, beware!” It feels a little bit like we’re on the cusp of one of these AI-led creative endeavours properly taking off; one of these is going to end up mining a particular weird sweetspot and I think you will quickly see a boom in this sort of thing. But, er, don’t quote me on that in case I’m as wrong about it as I tend to be about everything else I try and predict.
  • The Buzzfeed Infinity Quizzes: Buzzfeed quizzes! God, it’s just like it’s 2011 all over again! Isn’t that ‘Friday’ song mad?! EXCEPT! Buzzfeed has, as promised, integrated AI into some of its quizzes to make them MORE INTERACTIVE – effectively the way this works is that you plug a bunch of keywords in as responses to prompts (“tell us the name of your crush!”, “tell us an activity you’d like to do together!”) and the backend runs it through what I presume is GPT and eventually spits out a personal story JUST FOR YOU, based on your responses. There are four quizzes which you can currently try out if you fancy having a slightly-retro online content experience, and…look, let’s be honest, this is sh1t isn’t it? The outputs (at least the couple of times I’ve tried) have been broadly nonsensical, full of dead ends and with no real sense of continuity, and it’s generally significantly less fun than one of those paper quadrant toy things that you used to make in primary school. Basically this is included in this week’s Curios as a CAUTIONARY TALE – just adding an AI layer onto something doesn’t make it good or interesting. Which, I suppose, is a criticism you could apply to recent editions of this newsletter, I concede, but at least I’m self-aware about it.
  • Infinite AI Dating: Another Twitch-based AI-generated TV show – OK, fine, ‘TV Show’ is a bit of a stretch, but it’s definitely VIDEO CONTENT, and doesn’t ‘TV Show’ sound less…well, sad? – which is being entirely created by a combination of text and text-to-speech tools alongside some basic character models. Created by Brighton-based agency RamJam, this channel features two characters having an infinite series of ‘bad dates’ – basically a pair of people having a series of unsatisfying date-type interactions in what sounds like a slightly-empty restaurants. This is, muchlike the AI Seinfeld, nonsensical and not exactly ‘funny’, or even particularly interesting if you listen closely to what they are saying, but at the same time there really is something oddly and inexplicably compelling about the freewheeling conversation – perhaps it’s the fact that by human standards it’s almost entirely unpredictable, and there’s a certain morbid attraction in seeing where the chat is going to meander next. Oh, and I can’t pretend that I don’t find the mere fact of a slightly-stilted machine-generated voice telling another slightly-stilted machine-generated voice about where to find the best sticky toffee pudding, and then getting almost angry about how much it likes sticky toffee pudding, weirdly funny. You know how, famously, it’s easy to fall into a TikTok hole and end up watching approximately three hours of videos and then be completely incapable of telling anyone why you were compelled to do so, or even what any of the videos were about in the first place? Well this is like that, except it makes even less sense. I do worry that this stuff may end up being our species’ Infinite Jest moment, you know.
  • Cinebot: Seeing as we’re doing AI-generated content – here, have a newsletter! Cinebot is, as far as I can tell, a newsletter which is ‘reviewing’ a canonical list of the 100 greatest films as chosen by…someone or other, except of course the reviews are penned by GPT3 because a) it’s 2023 and it is the law that everything must involve AI in some capacity or another; and b) because human beings no longer have anything more to say about 20th century cinema (that’s certainly what it feels like ,in any case). All the films reviewed so far are scifi, and the machine is obviously being instructed to review them as though from the point of view of a robot, or machine intelligence, in each case, which occasionally makes for some halfway-interesting observations, but my main takeaway from this is that whilst AI-generated dialogue can be odd enough to create diverting little vignettes, ‘straight’ writing’s just a bit…hollow.
  • AI For UI: We’re only scratching the surface of AI-assisted design and build work, and we won’t really start to see the effects at scale until these tools start to become integrated into the big, mainstream software packages, but this service, called Galileo and currently letting users sign up for early access, is an excellent example of the sorts of things you’ll shortly be able to do with minimal effort. ‘Design me a signup page for an app which collects name, email and phone number’; ‘Create the UI for a mobile-first website designed to allow people to leave anonymous feedback about their neighbours’ interior design choices’, that sort of thing – oh, and of course it will knock up the copy for the app/website too, because why not. Oh, and there’s this one too, which does much the same sort of thing – or promises to, at least. I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer speed and scale at which this stuff is emerging, but use cases like this strike me as…broadly benign? Unless of course you’re someone in the second world scraping a living by doing super-low-level digital design work of this sort via Fiverr or Upwork, in which case actually it probably isn’t benign at all on reflection. Damnation.
  • The Dollar Street Dataset: Do you remember a few years ago when there was a brief flurry of companies getting a small PR boost by taking steps to address stereotypes in media through the release of stock photography libraries that reflected the more diverse and inclusive world in which we now happily live? OF COURSE YOU DO! Who could forget the transformative effect they had! Still, if you miss those halcyon days of easy comms wins, or if you missed the boat the first time around, FEAR NOT! You can do it ALL AGAIN with TRAINING DATA FOR AI!!! Ahem. Sorry, that was desperately cynical of me and, frankly, a bit unnecessary given the fact that this is a serious issue that does need addressing – the datasets that have been used to train the current generation of GAN and LLM are not perhaps as inclusive and diverse as they could be, and the project here linked to is a good example of someone attempting to do something about it. The Dollar Street Dataset is a spinoff of the long-running Dollar Street initiative, which seeks to visualise differential global incomes in a digestible and comprehensible way, and is “a collection of images of everyday household items from homes around the world that visually captures socioeconomic diversity of traditionally underrepresented populations. It consists of public domain data, licensed for academic, commercial and non-commercial usage, under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA 4.0. The dataset was developed because similar datasets lack socioeconomic metadata and are not representative of global diversity. It includes 38,479 images collected from 63 different countries, tagged from a set of 289 possible topics. Besides this, the metadata for each image includes demographic information such as region, country and total household monthly income, allowing for many different use cases, ultimately enhancing image datasets for computer vision.” This is a really important issue which it’s vital to think about – it’s also (sorry to say this) the sort of thing that certain companies and institutions could also parlay into some quite easy PR should they wish to replicate this across different fields / areas.
  • PathWai: I’ve had to do some PROFESSIONAL THINKING recently about THE FUTURE and WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN and whilst obviously I have no fcuking idea about either of those things (I have, if I’m honest, a singular inability to visualise anything about my own future, let alone any of YOURS) it took quite the effort not to get all frothy and excited about ALL OF THE TRANSFORMATIONS that we might be on the cusp of thanks to AI (but then again I’m one of those people who thought 3d printing was going to usher in a post-scarcity society, so, er, SKIPS FULL OF SALT is what I am saying here). PathwAI is a website which attempts to map some of the possible (likely?) developments in AI technology against a theoretical future timeline, and whilst a) the site’s a bit of a mess and it’s not the easiest to read; and b) the claims made about timings are obviously nothing other than that – claims and speculation, there’s a lot of interesting detail here about what might come post-GAN and post-LLM and what these potential milestones might practically mean. For the more practical among you, you might want to cross-reference this timeline with another of your choosing which outlines rising sea levels, just so you can track at exactly which point we’re going to need the machines to be smart, capable and humane enough to lift us from the waves.
  • GQ3: Remember NFTs? God, they were a THING, weren’t they? Amazingly, much as it feels like the whole period of ‘jpegs for plutes’ was just some sort of collective ayahuasca experience which left us all feeling empty and emotionally purged, it seems it really did happen – and some people are continuing to believe! Which, presumably, is why GQ has chosen early-2023 to launch its own NFT-enabled membership scheme, whereby YOU (yes, YOU!) can spend the princely sum of (at the time of writing) about £1300 to own an EXCLUSIVE JPEG and get access to a bunch of perhaps slightly-more-exclusive real-life stuff – so you’ll get an invitation to dinner along with some as-yet-nameless celebrities and GQ people, access to parties and events, a box of ‘curated GQ products’ and, er, a magazine subscription! Which is nice! Obviously I am making fun of this because, well, it’s NFTs and the artwork here is, even by the standards of the ‘scene’, risibly bad, but equally there is still a small part of me that doesn’t think that the idea of digital membership schemes like this, perhaps based on a degree of blockchain tokenisation, is a TOTALLY stupid idea, and so I’ll be interested to see whether this evolves into an actual thing or whether (as I think is perhaps more likely) noone at GQ EVER refers to this again after about Q2 2024.
  • Rare Threats: A subReddit collecting examples of people using particularly obscure, florid or baroque threats in conversation (“I will teach you that ‘fist’ is also a verb”, that sort of thing). Particularly inventive examples include “I am going to scrape the gums off your teeth and staple them to the back of your throat” (no, me neither), and the wonderfully-specific “I hope you eat a tortilla chip vertically”.

By Alex Prager

YOUR SECOND MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY TOM SPOONER AND IT COVERS FUNK, PUNK, JAZZ AND DISCO AND IT IS EXCELLENT WEEKEND FODDER!

THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.2:  

  • Bondee: Another appwebsitegamething which will not be the metaverse but which offers some sort of vague directional nod about what that nebulous idea might one day coalesce into! Bondee is described by users as “Habbo meets MSN”, which if you’re about 5 years younger than me will probably scratch all sorts of Proustian itches – the idea is that the platform enables users to socialise in virtual space, with its (mostly young) users congregating there to socialise. “Bondee combines a nostalgic, early-2000s format with social-networking elements. Users’ digital avatars can socialize with each other on the home page — lounging in a chair, petting a cat, standing around — or leave their friends notes if they’re offline. Hop over to a friend’s virtual room, and the same can be done there. Beyond that, a player can engage in activities —  from sailing the virtual ocean and collecting limited edition items to entering a private chat with a friend’s avatar and going “party mode” together.”  – there’s nothing about this that is unique per se, but it’s an interesting alternative to the Roblox hegemony when it comes to young people and virtual worlds. This probably isn’t for you – although, you know, I’m not judging, much, probably – but it might be worth being aware of if you’ve either got kids, or if you’re just generally interested in how ‘digital third spaces’ (if you’ll allow me) are evolving.
  • Lighthouse: So obviously The Metaverse is going SWIMMINGLY – even the FT saw fit to give the concept a kicking yesterday, which honestly felt a bit like smacking a sad-eyed puppy at this point – and noone really believes that we’re all going to be hanging out in immersive digital environments together anytime soon, but, nonetheless, people are continuing to build stuff and play around with what the broad idea of ‘metaversality’ (this isn’t a word, I know, but allow me this brief moment of linguistic creativity) might mean, and now there is a way to explore some of those spaces yourself. Lighthouse is effectively trying to build a ‘search’ layer for whatever the metaverse currently is – as far as I can tell, this currently means that it acts as a sort of central directory / portal to a bunch of 3d experiences that various people have made and which you can access via the website, with the added ability to search for specific themes and features you might be particularly into and find ‘metaverses’ (honestly, even writing that word feels…wrong in 2023) that fit your needs. I have had a bit of a play around with this and it’s an interesting attempt to try and bring some order to an incredibly-fragmented ‘scene’ – you can get links to various different environments on various different platforms (Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, etc), and whilst they’re all…largely underwhelming tbh, or at least they are when accessed via my increasingly-emphysemic laptop, there are also far, far more of these things than I honestly expected and they do appear to be getting some use. Admittedly by a maximum of approximately three people at a time, but still. Basically this is a decent jumping off point if you’re after a vague ‘state of all this stuff’ overview, but it’s unlikely to convince you that you REALLY need to open an office in Decentraland anytime soon.
  • Monocle: Is AR ever really going to become a thing? Are we ever going to finally arrive at the weird and glorious future promised by videogames in which we have an always-on-heads-up-display which tells us everything we could possibly need to know about the world around us and even more besides? Fcuk knows, is the short answer, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone’s clamouring to have MORE information density applied to their field of vision at present, so maybe not anytime soon, Anyway, ignore my doomsaying – Monocle is a fun little piece of kit which combines a tiny, lightweight camera, an equally tiny,OLED display that lets you basically hack together any sort of simple Google Glass-type kit you can imagine, from the simple ‘show me my emails on a screen in my eyeline’ to more complex and weighty stuff like moving images and more complex data overlays and, ok, fine, this is HUGELY geeky and not a little techy, and frankly my ability to do anything with stuff like this begins and ends with this writeup, but if you’re a shed-tinkering inventor or the sort of person who just happens to own a soldering iron then you might find this an interesting and fun project to play around with.
  • Better On Paper: A simultaneously lovely and generous project, this – Better On Paper is a project which presents a bunch of digitised photographs, shot on film and made available for free printing should you like any of them. That’s literally it – here are some gorgeous photos taken in the now-antique analogue style, and if you like them and want to print them on high-quality paper then you can and they will be yours to keep forever. Not only is this just A Nice Thing To Do – thankyou, Korean photographer and artist and designer Seungmee Lee! – but it’s also something that feels very much like it could be appropriated for a campaign or just a bit of fan service for the right brand or organisation.
  • Underwater Photographer of the Year 2023: Fish! And crustacea, and single-cell aquatic organisms, and all sorts of other amazing and terrifying and frankly deeply sinister denizens of the wet, all captured here for your delectation. These will either make you sign up for diving lessons immediately, or alternatively you’ll never want to dip your head below the waterline ever again – although, honestly, how could you possibly be scared of the seas when they contain these adorable little guys? Just, er, ignore all the sharks.
  • The Revenant: It seems that over the past couple of decades we’ve switched from a situation where the concept of ‘running a marathon’ was something that most right-thinking people wouldn’t even countenance to one whereby literally every fcuker over the age of 30 seems to blitheley decide to ‘get into running’ and start collecting marathon medals as though they were parking tickets. As a result, ‘just’ doing marathons isn’t really that impressive anymore, and people are exploring increasingly extreme variations on the theme (I once worked with someone, briefly, whose ‘thing’ was doing the Marathon des Sables ‘for fun’, which is just fcuking insane)  – if you’ve done the marathon, the ultramarathon, the hypermarathon, the back-to-back-hypermarathon, the insane US ‘backyard ultra’ and you’re still hungry for more, then maybe, just maybe, you’re ready for The Revenant. Taking place in New Zealand in January 2024, the Revenant is “around 200km & 16,000m-ish of vertical ascent. Unsupported individual or two person team Ultra Adventure Run. Map and compass only. No watches allowed. You have 60 hours to complete the challenge if you can tell the time.” So, to be clear, you’re running…what, 6 marathons, plus a 16k ascent, in 2.5 days? Yeah, sounds reasonable. I am…reasonably certain that the total number of people likely to read Web Curios AND be of suitable physical and psychological stock to complete a challenge like this is literally zero, but I would love one of you to prove me wrong.
  • Melodice: This is a lovely idea – Melodice is a website which provides music to soundtrack your boardgaming. Select your game of choice from the (incredibly comprehensive) dropdown list and get playlist of musical accompaniments designed to heighten your experience and add ATMOSPHERE and TENSION. I have no idea whatsoever why their selected choice of music to accompany a game of Monopoly would be the music to SimCity3000, but, weirdly, I think it sort of fits.
  • Better Search: Seeing as Google and Bing seem hell-bent on ‘improving’ their products with the introduction of unasked for AI gubbins, you might want to find alternative portals to use. This is a very simple search tool which lets you run searches against 4 websites and 4 websites only – Reddit, Twitter, Stack Overflow and Github – and which allows you to specify the content type you want to source (pdf, ppt. Zip. docx) as well as a date range for the search; obviously you can do all this with Google, but it requires you to remember the search string commands and this is basically just easy and quick and if nothing else it’s worth bookmarking this as your go-to Reddit search engine because, honestly, everyone needs one of those.
  • Mathijs Hanenkamp: This is the portfolio site of Dutch photographer Mathijs Hanenkamp – his photography is excellent, but I’m featuring this because I genuinely adore the way his site is designed and the UI and UX and the general look and feel of the whole thing is, to my mind, just about perfect and such a wonderful way of displaying his work.
  • Welcome To My Home: Not *my* home, you understand, but the digital, online ‘home’ of Phoemela Ballaran, which is a small digital space featuring some poems, some music, a collection of images of stones Phoemela has collected and some stories associated with them, and a link to her ‘garden’ where anyone can leave her a message…this is lovely, a gorgeous, homespun corner of personal web, carved out of the ether, and the older I get the more I think everyone should have something like this somewhere that just…exists in digital space as a refuge or home for its maker. Which, I appreciate, is possibly a BIT w4nky, but, well, it’s my blognewslettertypething and I’ll be w4nky if I want to.
  • McCheapest: This is interesting. As you will all doubtless know, the Economist has for years been using the McDonald’s Big Mac as a global price tracker, with the relative price of the uniform product in various countries worldwide being used as a proxy measure of economic performance and relative wealth; I didn’t, however, realise that the price of the sandwich varies wildly within the US, until I found this website which tracks the price across North America and records the differentiation. I was slightly surprised to see that the most expensive Big Mac (a whopping $8.09) was in Massachusetts rather than New York or LA, whereas the cheapskates among you should get to Oklahoma where you can ‘enjoy’ your meal for a mere $3.49.
  • The Owl Job: This is really interesting – The Owl Job is a set of instructions and directions on how to set up your own sightless escape room (that is, an escape room suitable to be played by the visually impaired), which I appreciate isn’t something I imagine that many of you are going to be minded to get involved with but which are a surprisingly interesting series of ways of thinking about design and interactivity for a wide and diverse audience which may be of use even if you’re not planning on turning your living room into a playcentre for the RNIB.
  • All The Excel Formulas: Look, I appreciate that this is very much on the ‘;boring and functional’ end of the link spectrum, but while we wait for AI to automate the tedious (and, frankly, borderline-incomprehensible) stuff like pivot tables and the like it might be useful to have this master list of Excel formulas to hand. Maybe.
  • Special Flushing Waterfront: Take a lightly-interactive tour along Flushing Creek, a waterway that flows northward through the borough of Queens in New York City. This is “an interactive virtual walking tour and public archive project where participants are able to co-create documentation of this body of water and its surrounding area in Queens, NY” – local residents were invited to submit memories, photographs, notes, thoughts, poetry and whatever else they felt like contributing to the project, which contributions were then integrated into the digital experience. There’s something surprisingly pleasant and even meditative about taking a virtual stroll along a NYC canal and browsing notes on what it means to local residents, and I would absolutely love to see something similar about some of the UK’s waterways (it feels like this ought to exist in some form already tbh – anyone?).
  • MacOS9: Another one of those old ‘emulate an old Mac OS in your browser and pretend it’s 1994 and Apple’s still horribly uncool!’ web experiences – except this one has the BRILLIANT added benefit of the machine’s virtual hard drive containing a bunch of actual, playable games from the mid-90s, including the all-time-classic LucasArts point-and-click Indiana Jones game – honestly, this is BRILLIANT and frankly there’s enough in here to keep you occupied til the clocks change again.
  • All Of The Fast And The Furious Films At Once: I confess to not having really ever engaged with the FF franchise – I’m not, as a rule, particularly interested in either musclecars or musclemen, and given most of mine are dead I am not hugely interested in films that fetishise the concept of ‘family’ as their central premise, and Vin Diesel really does look (to quote Robin Williams on Schwartzenegger) a condom full of walnuts – but I am vaguely aware of the fact that there is a new one coming out at some point soon. If you want to refresh your memory of the franchise to date (WHY?!?!?! It is literally all cars and explosions and homoeroticism, and muscular men shouting the word FAMILY! at each other while dealing with the aforementioned explosions and homoeroticism!) then what better way to do it than by watching them as presented on this site – that is, all playing in very small windows simultaneously. Utter gibberish, but I sort-of imagine that that’s the case even if you watch them sequentially (also, always nice to be reminded of the fact that copyright law simply doesn’t apply if you just make the offending content really, really small).
  • Peter Marshall: The Flickr page of Peter Marshall, whose photography of fading England is not only wonderful in terms of subject matter but SO beautifully-lit that I quite want to own vast swathes of it. If you like photos of old seaside resorts and abandoned scrapyards and old caffs then this is basically catnip.
  • The Garden Photography Awards: As I type this, I am looking into my girlfriend’s garden and watching a fox; the fox, in turn, is watching me, while it pointedly defecates in the middle of the lawn. Thankfully the photographs in this year’s Garden Photography Awards don’t, at least as far as I’ve seen, contain ANY photographs of sh1tting foxes (there is a ‘pets’ category, but I am really confident that there won’t be any vulpine scat on display), instead choosing to focus on the beautiful flora visible in the UK’s gardens. I am literally the opposite of green fingered (…brown fingered? No, definitely not that, that sounds AWFUL), but even I was struck by how glorious the gardens here are; should you want to feel inadequate about your own poorly-tended patch of scrubland, click here!
  • The World’s Biggest D1ckpic: To be clear, this link is ENTIRELY safe for work, I promise – whilst, yes, this is technically the world’s biggest d1ckpic, it’s a cartoony illustration rather than a high-res photograph, and falls very much under the heading of ‘comedy peen’ rather than ‘troubling and threatening throbber’. As explained in this article, “Almost a year in the making, the image has an area of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels — 290 times larger than the current record holder. At one pixel per inch, it would wrap around the Earth 2.7 times. If printed out at 15 DPI, a fairly common setting for large billboards, the image would be as tall as 16,408 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. If 3D-printed, the image could (hypothetically) be used to bat the International Space Station out of orbit.” This has been created with a lot of love (and a hope that it will end up in the Guinness Book Of Records) – you can scroll along the dong, keeping your eye out for Easter Eggs and gags, and see whether you have the patience to work your way all the way down its shaft (although if you want the full image you’ll need access to specialist software to view it, given that the file is somewhere in the region of 250TB in size). This is…this is almost perfect – pointless, silly, childish, and yet a weirdly-impressive technical feat. Well done, mysterious and anonymous creator!
  • Bases Loaded: A GREAT little game, this, which is basically a weird cross between Vampire Survivors and Baseball and Arkanoid, and which I know won’t make any sense based on that description but which I promise you that you will enjoy a lot and which will make the afternoon pass more quickly than it otherwise might.
  • Dire Decks: By the same developer, ANOTHER very nicely-made pixelartish game, this time a deck builder-cum-shootemup where you pick different cards to shoot down the invading armies of space aliens. Challenging, but in a very pleasing ‘one more go’ sort of fashion, and immensely satisfying once you start getting the measure of its rhythms.
  • Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around: Finally this week, a game you need to download but which I highly recommend you play around with – it basically takes the ‘ghost’ concept familiar from racing games, where a previous player’s performance on a particular track is used as your opponent in subsequent races, and updates it for an AI age to create an experience where you play with AI-controlled NPCs whose behaviour has been trained by other players, playing the same game as you. Which, I appreciate, is a dog’s dinner of a description – here, try this: “Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around is a “forever-time” multiplayer game. The goal of this game’s creation was to immortalize players and give others a chance to play with them “in spirit” even after they are no longer with us. In the “Remember Me” mode, players can train a neural network to capture their play style. The output is a data model that can be shared with friends and family. Your playstyle is essentially encoded in the data model.” This is SO interesting, and there’s honestly something quite uncanny and arresting about the…recognisably human playstyles that emerge as a result of the training. This feels exciting and cusp-y, like there’s a VERY good idea in here which is going get expanded upon massively by a big-name title before too long.

By Joelle Jones

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Retro Synth Ads: Not in fact a Tumblr, but it’s not like you care and I really needed something to put here after a few weeks of blank space! Do YOU want a selection of old adverts for synths, lovingly scanned and compiled from old magazines? YES YOU DO DON’T LIE TO ME! Regardless of your personal interest in synths from the 70s and 80s, this is also a surprisingly good source of longform copy examples – the ads tend to be quite wordy, and if you’re a copywriter looking for some examples of wordy ads that aren’t the classic ones by VW that everyone always fcuking references then you might find some useful material in here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Kite Observer: Photos of massive cargo ships at sea. Nothing else, just ships, but I promise you they are REALLY, REALLY BIG (fine, there are occasional non-cargo ships too, but, mainly, it’s just MASSIVE FLOATING HUNKS OF METAL).
  • Cat Music Videos: Music videos for popular songs, made from stitched together clips of cats from the internet. Which, yes, I appreciate sounds almost exactly like something from approximately 2007, but that is not a bad thing because everything then was still pure and the rot had yet to really set in.
  • New Ireland In Colour: Another in my occasional series of ‘creators who’ve found a really fertile bit of latent space and are just mining it mercilessly and the results are GREAT’ accounts – this is by one Hugh Mulhern, and is a selection of images depicting an imagined pseudo-post-apocalyptic Ireland between 2035 and 2070. These are SO GOOD – if you can imagine Transmetropolitan transposed to County Cork then you’re halfway there.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Maybe AI Bing’s Not So Bad After All: By way of a counterpoint to the first link all the way up there about how AI Bing’s been a bit of a mess, here’s Ethan Mollick writing about his experiences using the beta product – rather than attempting to jailbreak the machine, Mollick’s been using it in more standard fashion and it’s interesting to read about his experiences with the tech and what it can do. Most interesting to me is the way in which it uses citations – what will determine which sources it cites? The arms race to crack that and manipulate it is going to be INSANE – and the qualitative difference in outputs between it and ChatGPT; to be clear, I still don’t think this stuff is ready to be used in the wild, and I remain unconvinced as to the benefits of this level of AI search assistance for anyone who’s halfway-decent at doing their own research already, but the direction of travel feels pretty unidrectional at the moment so it’s probably best to be aware of what’s coming.
  • A Quick Guide To Cloning Yourself: More Mollick, this time on the ease with which he was able to create a passable fake version of himself delivering a lecture to camera – the piece linked here explains how he did it, the software he used, and the end results, which whilst not good enough to fool a careful observer are absolutely neraly good enough to fool someone scrolling through at pace. Which, fine, is also the sort of scaremongering we saw with the initial wave of deepfakes about three or four years ago, except this kit is faster, better and vastly more accessible than that was, and you now have the added insanity of readily-available voice spoofing…basically I think it’s important to realise that there’s been something of a Rubicon crossed with this stuff in terms of its ease-of-creation and general plausibility…I mean, look at this for example. Mad.
  • Writing A Song With The Machines: There must be something genuinely odd about being a reasonably-famous songwriter with a defined and recognisable personal style and watching that style being aped in no time at all by an unthinking collection of 1s and 0s. Credit, then, to Colin Meloy of The Decembrists, who decided to see what would happen if he asked The Machine to compose a song in his own style, and to provide chord progressions to the eventual composition, and then recorded it to see how the whole thing sounded – I think I would have had a pretty deep and abiding existential episode, but he seems relatively unfazed by the whole thing. This is, perhaps, a factor of the song’s being pretty much tripe -as he says, “For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness” – but it’s interesting to read him describing why it’s mediocre, particularly as someone with literally no musical or creative ability whatsoever.
  • National Stereotypes in Midjourney: INCREDIBLY EASY PR IDEA OF THE WEEK – pick whatever vertical you or your client operate in, and devise a small project which will helpfully point out the specific biases with which the AI model of your choice has been encoded in relation to said vertical! Which is exactly what’s happening in this piece, where Cassie Kozyrkov asks Midjourney to create images based on the prompt “Illustration for an animated show set in [country] about science and progress, taking place in the future”, and records the different results for different values of [country]. This is SO INTERESTING, and Kozyrkov’s writeup details some of the many, many things she learned about what The Machine associates with various places – Syria and Afghanistan, for example, are imagined as ruins even in a theoretical utopian future. Fascinating, and a potential source of inspiration for all sorts of orthogonally-related projects imho.
  • The 15-Minute Cities Madness: You’re probably familiar with the concept of the 15-minute city – popularised during the first lockdown periods, it’s (very basically) a school of thinking around urban planning and design that suggests the optimal urban layout involves residents living within a 15m distance (walking, cycling or via public transport) from a base-level set of amenities; so employment, leisure, shopping, healthcare, green spaces, etc etc, all within easy reach of everyone. The idea behind this is that such a setup not only improves the lived experience for residents, but has all sorts of knock-on benefits for the environment, public health and safety, general local economies and the wider ‘community’, and I wrote about it in 2020 as a sensible, interesting new trend in urbanism. Fast forward three years and this ostensibly-benign concept has been seized upon by a certain branch of the wingnut fringe as the latest example of the WEF-led GREAT REPLACEMENT, somehow linked to lockdowns and vaccines and state control and a desire to TAKE YOUR PROPERTY and LIMIT YOUR MOVEMENT and, Christ, it’s EXHAUSTING. This piece in Vice explains some of the ‘why’ behind this madness, but it doesn’t quite delve far enough in my opinion; there’s something slightly terrifying about the fact that, for a seemingly-not-insignificant proportion of the West, literally ANY action taken by Government is a nefarious plot to limit individual freedoms and usher in a terrifying (if nebulous and poorly-defined) globalist future. As an aside, I personally find it very funny that many of the people railing against this as a principle will also likely be members of Facebook Groups which wistfully recall the days when you could walk to the shops safely at 3am wearing nothing but a cheeky smile, and will in no way see any commonality between the two concepts.
  • GenZ and Me: Joe Moran writes in the LRB of his experiences dealing with GenZ in his role as a University lecturer, and offers some thoughts on What He Has Learned – I very much enjoyed the riff on his losing battle against the term ‘relatable’, and the significance of ‘relatability’ as a concept for this particular coterie of young adults; perhaps even more, though, I appreciated his suggestion that there is perhaps less ‘generational’ change happening than we might be inclined to believe: “Sociologists give three explanations for the change in people’s attitudes and behaviours over time: period effects, lifecycle effects and cohort effects. Period effects describe change across all age groups: the result of sweeping societal shifts. Lifecycle effects describe change resulting from the ageing process or in response to key events such as leaving home, becoming a parent or retiring. Cohort effects describe change that results from shared generational experiences…the current discussion attributes too much to cohort effects and not enough to period and lifecycle effects.” This struck me as an interesting and useful way to think about this sort of stuff (which, fine, you probably all knew of already but which was new to me).
  • Therapy Talk: I read large parts of this article through my fingers – words cannot adequately express the degree of horror and revulsion I personally feel when I read things like: “Hinge, a popular dating app, still lets users post sunglass-clad selfies and proclaim their love for espresso martinis. But now they can also respond to prompts like “Therapy recently taught me___,” “A boundary of mine is___” and “My therapist would say I___,” and this one sent me into a personal horrorspiral imagining exactly how ill-equipped I would be to answer the question: “Becca Love, a 40-year-old clothing designer and dance teacher in Montreal who uses the pronouns they and them, often asks dating app matches, What does connection look like to you? Around the third date, they initiate discussions about their prospective partner’s “attachment style,” a tidy summation of childhood trauma.”” This piece is relatively nonjudgemental about the rise in the use of therapyspeak in dating, but I’m reasonably comfortable being more assertive – this is fcuking TERRIBLE, not least because (as evidenced by the fact that ‘Gaslighting’ has approximately 219 competing (wrong) definitions currently in use in the UK at least) there is literally no common understanding of what the fcuk these terms mean beyond “I am very much invested in my own status as the sole significant protagonist of my reality”.
  • TikTok in Afghanistan: There’s something almost comforting about the (at least surface-level) universality of teenage experience in 2023 – wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, if you’re a young adult in modernity you probably want to be big on TikTok. So it is in Afghanistan, as this WIRED article outlines – profiling some of the young people who are using the platform to present a slightly-less-Taliban-y picture of the country to the outside world. There’s an interesting side-effect to this, of course, which is that this TikTokified picture of life in the country is the only one that can really be presented – personal safety means that coruscating political criticism of the regime’s not really viable, and so there’s a weird flattening of perspective whereby Afghanistan through the TikTok lens is sort of just like anywhere else, just with slightly more unplanned ventilation in a lot of the buildings and significantly fewer women. I don’t quite know what I think about this, but overall I am not sure I have the same sort of positive (ie naive) feelings about TikTok’s ability to shed light on the world in 2023 as I did about Twitter’s in 2011, though whether that’s to do with the platform or just the slow loss of hope we’ve all experienced over the past decade or so it’s hard to tell.
  • The Moment That Changed The Superbowl: I don’t, I have to admit, really understand American Football – certainly not to the extent that I could analyse a team’s tactics or specific plays – which is why I particularly enjoyed this nice bit of scrolly storytelling in the NYT, which walks you through the moment which analysts apparently agree changed the game in favour of the Kansas City Chiefs. You may or may not give two hoots about a 65-yard punt return (I, personally, do not), but the way this is done is a really good example of how to use this sort of technique to explain something complex and dynamic in really clear and visually-appealing fashion (NB – I appreciate that for people who know about American Football this may well be the equivalent of someone simplistically offering ‘man run clever, ball in net’ as an explanation of Maradona’s ‘86 goal, but, well, bear with me here).
  • Selling Out Still Sucks: Ok, one article does not a trend make (as everyone involved in planning and strategy knows, that’s TWO articles!), but I am posting this as it’s the first time in years I’ve read something written by a young person that tentatively suggests that maybe ‘getting the bag’ is no longer the be all and end all of everything, and that we might be moving back to an era in which shilling for brands in exchange for pennies is perhaps not considered a universally-laudable thing to do. This piece riffs on the Superbowl adverts and the degree to which many of them, in the author’s words, “used “Hey, look at that famous person!” instead of an actual idea.” This is a short piece, but worth reading just to see whether or not it feels like a THING – and also for this closer, which felt…true: “when I see a constant flow of low-effort craps that infect our ears with algorithmically generated nonsense, that tell millions of sports fans to risk thousands of dollars with a few taps on their phone, that force us to sit through the richest people in the world getting off on the fact that they remember the ’80s, I have to believe there’s some way to reverse this. We need to bring back shame, for the good of the culture.
  • Romanticising The Hays Code: This is a bit of a weird one – on the one hand, just because a few weirdos on Twitter are going around complaining about sex in films being in some way ‘nonconsensual’ for the audience doesn’t mean that any actual, real people in real life think like that (or, frankly, even that the people saying that on Twitter think like that); on the other, we’ve seen the frankly mental reaction to Sam Smith wearing a sub-Bowie red carpet outfit among conservative commentators (is it a coincidence that they donned that a mere couple of days after I linked to an online boutique for the rubber curious? I THINK NOT. Proof, there, that Sam Smith reads Web Curios!) and the insane reaction to drag queen storytime on both sides of the Atlantic, and I’ve been writing about the growing tradwife/puritanical movement for a while now, and and and and…look, it just feels A BIT like some of this longterm project to inculcate conservative values into The Kids is starting to bear fruit a bit, is all I’m saying. Semi-related – who IS behind the $100m campaign to rebrand and repopularise Jesus in the US? Why, it’s an ultraconservative billionaire who opposes LGBT+ rights and abortion! Apologies for focusing on a US issue here – but, also, no apologies, because this stuff is totally bleeding over here and has been for a few years now.
  • 3d Printing and the Housing Crisis: 3d printing really doesn feel like a failed utopian dream – but, apparently, it’s not dead! It’s still a thing! Sort of! This is a really interesting piece profiling a company currently engaged in producing 3d printed housing for a developer in the US, with a view to rolling the building method out more widely should the project prove successful; it’s a fascinating look into the technology and its limitations, and the difficulty in bringing these sorts of innovations to mass scale use, even after a decade. More than anything it’s a useful reminder – to me, as much as to anyone else – of the massive gap that always exists between technology that shows promise and technology that actually, really, properly works in real life.
  • The Aftermath of Deepfake Bongo: Unless you follow the world of streaming and streamers, you’re probably unaware of a recent controversy whereby a male Twitch streamer was effectively caught buying deepfake bongo of a bunch of other female Twitch streamers – this article explores the controversy a bit, but, more interestingly, focuses on the women whose likenesses were spoofed by the tech and what redress they have been able to seek; it’s not…great, frankly, and if anything this piece neatly shows how the whole deepfake bongo thing is likely to be a very real problem in the short-to-medium term given how easy it already is to make and how little actual input you need to make it. The Online Safety Bill would in theory act to criminalise the creation of this sort of material, but I’m not personally convinced that a) you’d ever be able to meaningfully enforce the legislation; and b) that it will get passed in its current form – it doesn’t, basically, feel like there are quite enough guardrails in place to stop this stuff being pretty much everywhere before too long.
  • Childhoods of Exceptional People: This is SO interesting – and, at heart, almost reassuringly-unsurprising. Henrik Karlsson decided to do some research into the backgrounds and upbringings of a selection of what he termed ‘exceptional’ people; geniuses or high achievers, people who, by any reasonable standard, can be said to have been a success in their chosen field(s), and see what common themes emerged. His findings demonstrated a selection of interesting commonalities (aside, of course, from the fact that all the people in question are VERY FCUKING CLEVER), including a high degree of exposure to intelligent adult conversation, high-quality tutoring and self-directed learning…all of which, of course, are examples of MASSIVE FCUKING PRIVILEGE. How LUCKY that your parents have a salon of venerated thinkers that they can introduce you to to enable your curious young mind to grow and explore! How FORTUNATE that they were able to afford a multi-doctoral tutor to coach you through your studies! Obviously this isn’t a surprise, but it’s sometimes helpful to be reminded of the fact that it’s very rare that talent or intellect will be enough to secure success. Alternatively, of course, you may read this and look at your kids’ nonexistent tutor and your useless, drunk, miserable, middle-aged friends who will be no use at all as pedagogical rolemodels and simply despair at your kids’ prospects – in which case, er, sorry!
  • Visiting A Bongo Convention: Author Michael Estrin writes novels; he’s working on a series set in the Adult entertainment industry, and as part of his research he recently went to the Adult Video News Convention to do a bit of fieldwork, and this is a blogpost outlining his impressions of the whole thing. This is very funny, not smutty in the slightest, and whilst it’s obviously not a patch on Big Red Son (the canonical example of bongo-gonzo journalism) it contains enough vignettes of the mad, the desperate and the bongo-addled to make you feel like you were there yourself (whilst at the same time being very glad you weren’t).
  • The Sound Of Grief: On having, and losing, a child, and the way in which music works to heal and hurt and help and hinder as you grieve; this is a beautiful essay, although, caveat emptor, it is also a very sad one indeed.
  • Everything Joel Learned About Renting In London: For several years now, Joel Golby has been writing occasional columns for Vice in which he highlights some of the more egregiously awful examples of the London rental market for the tearful lols. The series has now come to an end, and in this closing piece Joel looks back on the past few years and what has changed and – SPOILERS – everything has just gotten, broadly, worse, and this is a superb piece of angry, sad and slightly-baffled writing about a system which has been broken for an age and which is getting worse and which noone seems to have the inclination or skills to fix, and which is condemning at least two generations of people into lifelong precariety and which, it seems, is just The Way It Is. This really is fantastic – it annoys me quite how good Golby is, but, well, he is.
  • Stolen Twins: Finally this week, the first thing I have read this year that made me stop halfway through and go up and look at the name of the author again because I was so impressed – this is by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow, and it’s about fostering and growing up and neurodivergence, and the prose is STARTLINGLY good, honestly – from the opening line (“Like many autistic people, I find neurotypical communication fascinating but often deficient in fixedness”) to the last, this is almost-perfect in its composition. I think this person, whose first novel is apparently being published this year, is going to be famous (and if they aren’t, they should be).

By Raysa Fontana

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 10/02/23

Reading Time: 32 minutes

Hello everyone! HELLO!

One on the one hand it was fun this week watching Google’s PR fcukup with the whole ‘your AI search engine’s a liar LOL’ story; on the other, I can’t help but think that none of the serious coverage of this I have read in the media has spent quite enough time thinking through the potential consequences of what AI-led search might mean and that, given our previous experiences over the past 15 years with ‘letting technologies we don’t fully understand and haven’t fully evaluated the potential impact of loose on our society without doing anything even halfway-resembling proper, meaningful user testing because that’s what investors want and caution be fcuked!’, we might want to perhaps employ a bit more caution rather than ploughing straight ahead with the whole ‘let the black box tell me what it thinks is true, despite the fact that neither I nor indeed anyone else currently alive has any idea by which mechanisms it arrives at those evaluations’ thing.

Christ, sorry, we’re only at the beginning of this fcuking thing and I’ve already done one of those horrible nested paragraphs that seems to go on forever like some sort of hideous mobius strip of badly-crafted prose.

ANYWAY. I hope you’re all well and having fun, and that you enjoy this week’s Curios; I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably start looking up old editions of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to use as some sort of gold standard of truth in the coming veracitypocalypse.

By Alfonso Gonzales Jr.

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S EDITION WITH THIS PLEASINGLY-ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO MIX BY JOACHIM SPIETH!

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.1:

  • Here Comes The Video AI: This isn’t quite ready to take over your feed in quite the same way as video and text AI have done, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time as the examples here really do look quite magic. The link here takes you to Runway’s announcement of their ‘swap new elements or apply new styles to an existing video’ tech (which you can apply for access to should you be so minded) – this effectively means that you can give the software any moving image file you fancy and (for example) tell it to ‘swap the ugly people for beautiful ones’ and VWALLAH! Ok, fine, it’s not quite that simple, and it obviously looks a *bit* potato-ey at the moment, but, equally, it doesn’t look that potato-ey, and this is another of those increasingly-common moments where I feel like looking over at everyone standing in large groups outside Covent Garden pubs as they take a break from the hard work of post-production editing and maybe suggesting they enjoy the good times while they can. It’s not only Runway doing this – there’s another paper here about similar-but-different software which does broadly similar stuff, and you can try a different version of this tech at this HuggingFace link should you be so minded. Having tried it out, it seems to work best for light style transfer-type modifications, so why not spend some productive hours this afternoon asking it to reimagine all of your favourite sporting moments as though drawn by Hieronymous Bosch or something?
  • AI Accompaniments: Muchlike the somewhat-magical music composing AI previewed by Google the other week, this is another link to a work-in-progress piece of research which features some quite impressive results; once again it’s Google, once again this links to a rather academic blogpost which, if you’re stupid like me, will mostly mean the square root of fcuk all to you but which does feature a range of different examples of the tech in action so that you can be suitably astonished by the speed at which this stuff is evolving at. The working name for this kit is SingSong, and the paper explains that it’s “a system which generates instrumental music to accompany input vocals, potentially offering musicians and non-musicians alike an intuitive new way to create music featuring their own voice” – so imagine a not-too-distant future in which you can croon a few bars into your phone as inspiration strikes, and The Machines (I don’t know why but I’m feeling an increasing desire to refer to themselves with the capitalisation and definite article – an affectation which, I promise, I will do by best to resist) turn it into a TikTok-ready clip complete with backing track. Again, this isn’t currently very good – you wouldn’t, I don’t think, actively choose to listen to any of this unless you were possibly on a lot of very experimental drugs or on the brink of some sort of nihilistic episode – but it’s more about the potential and what this will almost-inevitably enable.
  • Stable Attribution: This made me feel stupid earlier this week, and I am slightly grumpy about it – but, equally, it provided me with an excellent practical demonstration of why you should greet anything AI-related with a reasonable degree of raised-eyebrow scepticism (lol Google Bard!). Stable Attribution purports to be kit which will identify the source imagery used by Stable Diffusion to generate its own compositions – so effectively lifting the lid on the materials that have been ‘used as creative inspiration’/plagiarised (delete as applicable). Except, as pointed out to me by various people after I shared it, it doesn’t ACTUALLY do that – what it appears to do is run a relatively simple reverse image search on the image and pull out stuff that shares rough visual DNA with the endpoint image (which, based on the latest understanding of this sort of kit, may well indeed be possible), meaning it would also pull out ‘source imagery’ for stuff which was very much created by an actual human. HOWEVER, despite literally not doing anything that it says it does, Stable Attribution is actually weirdly useful as a means of finding other semi-related visual styles to a specific image, so should that be something you feel might be useful to you then YOU ARE WELCOME.
  • GlossAI: Look, I PROMISE you that all this AI stuff is going to die down a bit soon. Promise. Til it does, though, I can’t help but be fascinated by the various layers that are being developed to make use of it; I’m reasonably confident that most of the services and products popping up in the current frothy ‘OMG AI!’ explosion won’t exist in ~12m time, but I think it’s interesting and instructive to keep an eye on what people are playing with and the ways in which this stuff could potentially be employed. Here, for example, is a service which I am reasonably-confident won’t actually produce anything particular stellar but which offers a vision of a future in which creating multiple, platform-appropriate assets from a single source really is as easy as clicking a button. The advertised gimmick here is, basically, ‘give us a video and we will turn it into about 300 different content types for all the different social channels, as well as probably some written content too and maybe a presentation because why not?!’, and you and I both know that the outputs will be shonky as hell and largely nonsensical, but, well, that won’t always be the case, and I would advise the low-end video editors out there to maybe join the post-production people outside the pub because, well, you might as well, eh?
  • The Braggoscope: Absolutely one of my favourite projects of the week, this, partly because of the fact that it involves BBC Radio 4 and therefore is very much up my middle-aged street, but also because it’s such a wonderful example of how you can use all this AI stuff to do interesting, useful and creative things RIGHT NOW. Matt Webb has used GPT-3 in conjunction with a few other development tools to analyse the transcripts of every single episode of the long-running historico-cultural radio show In Our Time and arrange them taxonomically by theme on this site. So, for example, you can now explore all the episodes of the show which deal with economics, say, or literature and rhetoric – which doesn’t sound like much, but the person hours required to do this would have been VAST and it’s such a nice, smart way of demonstrating how astonishingly useful for brute force work this sort of stuff can be. The obvious extension to this, with a bit of additional hackery, would presumably to then offer per-topic summaries based on the programmes’ contents (although I get the impression that the whole thing would probably start falling apart a bit at that point, quality-wise), but hopefully you can get a vaguely-exciting flavour of what the possibilities are (and maybe about how you might use this sort of thing yourself – I keep having (admittedly quite boring, fine) thoughts about what you might be able to do with GPT if you create a bespoke version and feed it with all of a company’s information, for example (like this sort of thing, or this sort of thing, but, frankly, more terrifyingly comprehensive – from the website to EVERY document, to file structures, to (perhaps more controversially) employee emails and Teams conversations and effectively treat it as a living knowledge base that can be interrogated using natural language, and that sounds…sort-of cool, in a very tedious, corporate-y sort of way, but also really fun in terms of how you might use this. Anyone else? Eh? Oh).
  • Poe: It feels rather like we’re (rapidly) coming to the fag-end of the period in which OpenAI is going to let us have infinite playtime with its AI toys for free – everything that’s come out this week about the Bing integration and Microsoft’s plans for monetising the tech at enterprise level makes it feel a bit like you’re going to start having to cough up for anything but the very bare minimum quite soon – not least because ChatGPT’s been rendered basically unusable by the fact that seemingly every awful right-wing fcuker in the world is constantly trying to get it to agree to using hatespeech. Anyway, Other Large Language Models Are Available! And this is Poem which has been developed by Quora and which is now unrestrictedly available (to iOS users only, chiz chiz) and which basically does the same tricks as ChatGPT but in an app and on your phone and, for the moment at least, free. Given it’s aforementioned Apple-only status at present I’ve not tried it out myself, but the feedback I’ve seen so far has been broadly positive  – it did make me think, though, of the weird potential future in which there are a selection of these sorts of tools, all trained slightly differently on different corpuses of information and with different tweaks and weightings given to their balances, and what it might be like should we all have on-device AI-assistants whose knowledgebases are all subtly different and whose perceptions of ‘truth’ and ‘right and wrong’ vary from instance to instance. Interesting, no? Oh suit yourselves ffs.
  • Claralell: Type in your name and listen in rapt joyous wonder as the machine spits out a tune based on some maths involving spelling (there is a proper explanation of the rules behind how it works on the ‘About’ page, for any of you who are less tin-eared than I am and who understand things like ‘staves’ and musical notation and ‘not being tone deaf’) – honestly, this is SO CHARMING and I was pleased to find out that ‘Matt Muir’ is a delightful bit of light piano; see what YOU sound like! This made me halfway wish that music generating AIs were slightly further along, as I would love to feed the Matt Muir snippet to another machine to create a longer, more involved composition (I have seemingly stumbled upon a subconscious desire to have a symphony written for me).
  • Howl vs Loewe: Are YOU a fan of the novel Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones? Or, perhaps more probably, the lavish Studio Ghibli animated film inspired by said novel? GREAT! You might like this charming little (mobile-only) site which lets you answer a few questions and thereby determine which of the book’s characters best represents you – and THEN ,because this is a collaboration between Studio Ghibli and high-end fashion house Loewe, you get shunted into a storefront and asked whether you fancy shelling out several grand on a handbag that looks like Calcifer. I am not judging – some of the kit looks pretty cool! – but I personally found the transition from ‘obviously kid-friendly mobile game for fans of the book or film’ and ‘BUY A VISCOSE TSHIRT FOR £1200’ slightly-jarring. Still, I will never not enjoy anything Howl-related, and I must say the mobile site is rather nicely made.
  • Europeana: This is an absolutely brilliant resource and I love it and it made me briefly annoyed about Brexit again before I remembered that it was several years ago now, and that continuing to whinge about lost political battles many years after the fact is the sole preserve of the w4nker. “Europeana provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with digital access to European cultural heritage material. Why? To inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about our history and culture. To share and enjoy our rich cultural heritage. To use it to create new things. We give you access to millions of cultural heritage items from institutions across Europe. Discover artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.” Honestly, this is a STAGGERING collection of art and photography and history and academic work and odd ephemera, and if it were a museum it would be the size of Birmingham and I would likely never leave.
  • MammalWeb: This is a GREAT project, tracking wild animals around the UK and continental Europe – it’s a volunteer effort where anyone can participate, either by manually identifying animals in submitted imagery or by setting up their own camera trap to see what critters wander into shot during the days and nights, and then sharing that imagery and information with the initiative. Lovely, and the sort of thing that might be fun to get involved with should you live somewhere where you see animals other than pigeons.
  • The Doomsday Alarm Clock: This is cute – an alarm clock app which will gently wake you each morning with terrifying news of apocalyptic horror. Want to be roused at 7am by a voice gently telling you that the machine uprising is finally here? Would greeting the day with the news that nuclear war has broken out put a spring in your step? Maybe it would. This is, as far as I can tell, a hobby project by a couple of devs – there’s a link to environmental charity Earth Justice at the bottom of the page, but tbh this feels like something that could be licensed and repurposed by a climate charity and jazzed up a bit as a fun awareness/fundraising driver (sorry, I really must stop thinking about things like a fcuking PR, it’s a sickness I tell you).
  • 253: I have DEFINITELY mentioned this in Curios before, but I don’t think I have ever been able to link to the original site which has just relaunched after…some years offline. 253 was a novel written for the VERY EARLY WEB, published between 1996-8, with a genuinely interesting and novel structural and thematic premise – the book is a collection of short vignettes, with the following specific technical guiderules: “There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats. A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people. With the driver, that makes 253. This novel describes an epic journey from Embankment station, to the Elephant and Castle, named after the Infanta de Castile who stayed there, once. This is an example of the verbal imprecision that costs British industry millions of pounds a year. Numbers, however, are reliable. So that the illusion of an orderly universe can be maintained, all text in this novel, less headings, will number 253 words. Each passenger is described in three ways: Outward appearance: does this seem to be someone you would like to read about? Inside information : sadly, people are not always what they seem. What they are doing or thinking : many passengers are doing or thinking interesting things. Many are not.)” I didn’t stumble across this until I found the print version in a charity shop in the early-00s, but it was for years one of my favourite books and I must have read it a few dozen times over the years, mostly sitting on the tube) – the fact that the original site has been resurrected was both a wonderful reminder of the book’s existence, and a lovely look back at how it began, and at the early days of the web, and, honestly, I am getting weirdly misty-eyed as I type this so should probably stop and have some more tea. Before I do, though, PLEASE DO CLICK ON THIS ONE AND READ SOME OF THE STORIES THEY ARE GENUINELY WONDERFUL.

By Mercedes Helnwein

NOW WE HAVE A PLAYLIST WHICH IF I’M HONEST I FOUND MORE FRIGHTENING THAN ANYTHING ELSE, BUT WHOSE WEIRD COMBINATION OF GABBER, HYPERPOP AND DNB IS WEIRDLY-COMPELLING! 

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.2:      

  • Photobooth Dot Net: Do YOU want access to the web’s premiere resource for all things related to the little kiosks you use to get passport photos? OH GOOD! This is a genuinely-charming and very oldschool little site, run by a proper enthusiast who, as far as I can tell, seems to spend a reasonable amount of time wandering the world and checking out different examples of photobooth tech (and, frankly, why the fcuk not?). This is partly just an interesting overview of the history of the things and the various baroque differences in style and tech that they have employed, but it’s also got a search feature which means that you can, should you desire, find EVERY SINGLE PHOTOBOOTH IN THE WORLD (ok, fine, this probably isn’t strictly true, but) and plot your future travel plans accordingly based on whether or not you’ll able to enjoy some booth-based analogue photo fun. There are worse ways to plan an itinerary tbh.
  • Cloudwatching: A meditative little webart project where any user who lands on the page can participate, either by designing their own ‘cloud’ using a rudimentary Paint-style interface or by sitting and watching as the clouds created by other anonymous webmongs glide past over a background of cerulean blue. Admittedly the slightly contemplative and gentle nature of the experience can be jarred somewhat by the occasional cloud in the shape of phrases like, er, “I Eat Kids”, but generally this is a supremely gentle way of spending 5 minutes staring at a screen.
  • Shortest Lives: This is a really interesting project, but it’s probably worth pointing out at the top that it’s about miscarriage and as such, depending on your personal experience and circumstance, you might want to skip reading this one. Shortlist lives is an initiative being developed in the Netherlands – specifically at the UZ Gent hospital, at least initially – which is designed to give parents who suffer miscarriage a tangible, personal memory of their child via the medium of a 3d render of their heartbeat. “Shortest Lives originated from An-Sofie’s personal experience. In 2017 she became the godmother of Lily, the stillborn daughter of her cousin. By experiencing the loss up close, she saw how parents are left behind in a great void. What started as a project for Lily’s parents has, thanks to the support of UZ Gent and Berrefonds, grown into an opportunity to support other parents as well. Shortest Lives is an initiative that wants to give parents a powerful reminder of their child. Based on an ultrasound, it is possible to make the heartbeat of a stillborn child audible again. This heartbeat is then visualized in a unique way.” I think this is rather beautiful, personally, and I like idea that it’s something which could in theory be extended to all parents who have access to ultrasound data, wherever they are – I equally appreciate that everyone’s experiences with miscarriage are personal and different and that you might not agree.
  • Calculating Devices: This is a YouTube channel whose sole raison d’etre is to explain and ‘review’ various obscure or antique counting devices. Have you ever wondered how the ancient Hittite method of enumerating things differed from that popular with Mesopotamians c.Hammurabi? No, probably not, but that is why we are here – TO LEARN (and to fill all these empty hours between birth and death with CONTENT). This is, honestly, significantly more interesting than it has any right to be, not least because if you’re moderately innumerate like I am it actually provides some useful insights into how one my helpfully go about conceptualising the concept of ‘numbers’ and thereby better deal with them (I’m…I’m not selling this, am I? FFS).
  • The Aircade: I am always amazed and slightly-appalled at recruitment-focused PR efforts for the military and the various different ways that different nations’ various branches of the armed forces vie to attract the best and brightest cannon fodder into their ranks. This website is one part of the US Airforce’s efforts to entice the youth into the whole ‘death by plane’ business (I presume they spunked the rest of the budget on the recent Top Gun film which from what I could tell was effectively a two-hour recruitment ad for the airforce which people astonishingly paid to watch) via the medium of a series of genuinely really rather good games – honestly, I wanted to hate this but unfortunately all the stuff you can do here (from the in-browser elements to the downloadable AR-enabled ‘Command The Stack’ game) are annoyingly really quite fun and super-polished, as I suppose I should have expected from an institution whose annual budget is probably something comparable to the GDP of the UK. Whilst I find the very existence of this website and the associated content somewhat…icky, I have to grudgingly applaud the fact that it’s all very nicely made indeed.
  • Crewmap: I can’t quite work out whether this is a genuinely smart idea for the new age of remote/hybrid working, or some sort of dreadful parody of ‘modern working life’ – YOU DECIDE! Crewmap is a platform which exists to help create bonds between colleagues and coworkers – the idea being that in a working world in which many of us see our colleagues on screens for 90% of the time, and where we don’t necessarily enjoy the same opportunities for smalltalk and socialising and general, fluffy ‘getting to know you’ chat as we might once have done whilst sharing corporate meatspace, you might want to find other ways of getting to know the other humans who are doing the same largely-pointless, soul-destroying job as you are. Basically the platform lets you set up quizzes and questionnaires about your likes, your interests and your hobbies, share them with your team members, and then get told who has what in common based on everyone’s answers – which…sounds like it might be fine in theory, but I can’t quite help get the feeling that this could quite quickly get awkward – in part because of the fact it feels, I don’t know, just a bit *too* close to the sort of thing that people associate with dating apps, and partly because I can envisage a scenario in which people end up feeling isolated rather than connected when they realise that none of their teammates like the same things that they do (“Noone else ticked the self-fisting box? I QUIT!”, etc). Still, maybe I am wrong and this is a genius idea, in which case YOU ARE WELCOME!
  • Read Jpeg: I LOVE THIS. Honestly, I can’t explain how much this pleased me when I came across it (I think via Kristoffer again, but I couldn’t swear by it) – I think it’s because it feels zine-y in a way that always appeals to me. Read Jpeg is a newsletter that is just a stream of images that link out to places: “Curated streams on contemporary culture. Image essays. Subject matter varies. No text. Just images. Click–throughs for surprise. Mailed irregularly by the zip.” Really, this is practically-perfect – odd, esoteric, aesthetically (in)coherent and consistently surprising – you can go back through past editions to get a feel of how this works, but given how much of newsletterland is SERIOUS and BUSINESS and about KEEPING AHEAD it’s nice to see one that is pure vibes.
  • Petswitch: I have a special place in my heart for websites which do one thing and one thing only, and which do that thing practically-perfectly; Petswitch is not such a website. It does, admittedly, do only one thing – to whit, taking your face and ‘swapping’ it with the face of any animal you choose to offer it an image of – but it does it in a way that is frankly quite shonky and a bit ‘phoned it and I promise you that when I found it this morning and had a quick play with turning myself into a sad-faced dog I lost it for a full two minutes (it was just after 6am and I was tired, in my defence). This is, to be clear, not very good at all, but it is VERY FUNNY and I confidently predict that you will all know at least one person who will be driven absolutely mental if you start sending them one of these a day featuring them combined with a series of different critters.
  • WikiShootMe: Simultaneously interesting and really not interesting at all (sometimes I like to think this is the exact liminal space which Curios occupies and that’s perhaps why no cnut reads it), WikiShootMe is “a tool to show Wikidata items, Wikipedia articles, and Commons images with coordinates, all on the same map” – so basically you can look up anywhere in the world and see ALL THE STUFF that Wikipedia has on the area, on a map! From places of interest to images of the local area, it’s a surprisingly-detailed look at a particular geographical space which leads you (or at least it did me) to look slightly differently at where you are and what surrounds you and what is and isn’t significant about it.
  • The List of Stews: An actual Wikipedia entry this time, both tasty AND seasonally-appropriate! Given it continues to be so chilly here that I seriously contemplate buying a pair of fingerless gloves to type today’s Curios in, it feels like this encyclopaedic list of international stewed dishes might come in handy – from Peruvian chicken to the (apologies to any Flemish readers) frankly-repellent sounding horsemeat stew with gingerbread(!!!!) of the Northern European lowlands, there is everything you could want here (presuming your ambitions tend towards ‘the consumption of largely-brown, largely-meat-based meals).
  • OpnSouls: Do you ever feel like your friendships are stuck in a rut, that you don’t really talk anymore? Is your groupchat moribund? FEAR NOT! OpnSouls is an app which promises to reinvigorate your friendships by, er, sending your group of mates a question each day which you all have to answer. “Every day, you will receive a new question that is designed to spark meaningful conversations and help you learn more about your friends. You can share your own answer and see how your friends have responded, leaving comments and replies along the way.” Depending on what you and your friends are like this will either be HILARIOUS or the sort of thing that will see you all blocking each other on every single platform going within a month.
  • Poline: I have to confess upfront here that I really don’t understand how this works or what it really is – that said, my total confusion as to its exact utility and purpose is part of the reason it appeals so much. As far as I can tell, Poline is a palette-creation tool – beyond that, though, well…Let me give the the website’s own descriptor text and see if you can make head or tail of it: “”poline” is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes. It is an indispensable tool for the modern generative sorcerer, and a delight for the eye.” GREAT! So, er, one for all you generative sorcerors, then – erm, could one of you possibly explain to me what the fcuk is going on here, should you have a second?
  • WTFDoesThisCompanyDo: Balls, this is a GPT-ish thing and should be uptop, but, well, I can’t be bothered to scroll back and add it in. Sorry. ANYWAY, this is a genuinely fun application of the tech – plug in any website url you like and the tech attempts to give you a description of what the company actually does based on the copy on the homepage. What this is useful for, I’ve found, is for gently pointing out to people that the copy on their website is meaningless dogsh1t, as evidenced by the fact that not even a machine trained on the entire corpus of the web can make sense of it – honestly, this is particularly good for agencies and I strongly advise you to pick your own favourite ‘disruiptive creative studio’ and see whether or not the machine can work out that what they do is ‘make videos to sell petfood’.
  • CandyCoated: I feel I ought to explain that I stumbled across this site via this article rather than through any sort of personal interest (not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with being into this stuff!) – that out of the way, let’s all enjoy browsing through the esoteric world of hand-made, bespoke, inflatable rubber fetishwear! Have you ever wondered where people whose idea of a perfect sexy time is, say, being inside a space hopper while someone attempts to tug them off from the outside, find an appropriately-modified space hopper? WELL WONDER NO MORE! Personally speaking it was the combination whale toy-slash-dildo that gave me greatest pause, but you will all find something to love here.
  • Manifesturbation: It seems that every few years someone reinvents the basic lie at the heart of new age classic ‘The Secret’ – to whit, that you can basically get the universe to give you what your heart desires simply by following a few simple instructions. There was the original, there was Cosmic Ordering, there has been the modern reframing of it as ‘manifesting’, and now…now we have this. I feel compelled to point out that this link was a reader submission (I am sworn to secrecy), and that there’s a very slight possibility that your employer might not massively enjoy you clicking on the link whilst on their dime…and now let’s dive in! What would you say if I were to tell you that there was a way of securing EXACT SUMS OF MONEY through no activity or effort whatsoever other than having a VERY MINDFUL W4NK? I imagine what you say is “fcuk off Matt, I am not a moron and I was not born yesterday, this is obviously rubbish, what are you trying to sell me?” – but, seemingly, there are others for whom the answer would instead be “SIGN ME UP FOR CASHW4NKS!” And it is for these people who Manifesturbation exists – people who, in exchange for the secret of how to “co-create your life through juicy, lit-up pleasure instead of to-do lists, overwhelm, stress and struggle” are willing to fork out a (NON-REFUNDABLE) $200. Yes, that’s right, for a mere two hundred quid you too can have someone tell you ‘facts’ about how if you just finger yourself properly you’ll be granted your heart’s financial desires (except, er, the small print is keen to point out that there are no guarantees here). This is, let’s be clear, a quite astonishing grift and the sort of thing that I feel no compunction whatsoever being mean about because whoever is doing this (my girlfriend pointed out that they also do a podcast about their sex lives which is quite famous, which I guess figures) is, I feel comfortable saying, making this all up and peddling snake oil (also, please watch the testimonial videos – those people do not look like the most discerning of consumers, is all I’m saying here). Still, MANIFESTURBATION! What a fcuking world we live in.
  • Order Automatica: Finally this week, a palette-cleansing card-battling game which will hopefully clear your mind from the last link and which is a really pleasing pixel-y looking timewaster which you can happily while away a few hours with.

By Deon S’Souza

LAST OF THE MIXTAPES THIS WEEK IS THIS LOUNGEY CRACKER FROM LOUIS LARGO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN EMPTY! POOR TUMBLRS! 

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Typewriter Artist: Anatol Knotek makes art from an old typewriter, typography and, occasionally, coloured ribbons. This is minimal and beautiful and feels like the art style of a campaign that’s just begging to be commissioned.
  • Models Architecture: This Insta account really should be named ‘Architectural Models’, but I will forgive them the confusing reversal because there is something SO SO LOVELY about architects’ models and dioramas, and there’s some superb work here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Governance vs Moderation: We kick off the longreads section this week with a piece by Ethan Zuckerman that looks at how communities work online, and how one might go about optimally organising them in a way that minimises all the awfulness that tends to happen when people congregate. In a week when Twitter’s looked even more parlous than usual under the Glorious Reign of That Fcuking Man (honestly, the site’s just…fcuked at the moment, creaking and seemingly held together by string – if you’ve not read it, Casey Newton’s account of What Is Going On is by turns funny and depressing) it feels appropriate to share something that takes a more considered view of the problems inherent in managing the twin poles of rights and responsibilities – the conclusions here strike me as broadly sensible, with the overall inference being that it is better to allow communities to develop their own rules and regulations and standards and codes than it is to attempt to impose them from above, but that this requires a degree of engagement in the management and maintenance of said communities that we have previously been (mostly) willing to commit.
  • What Is CoreCore?: I’m including this mainly as I am sick of seeing variants on this piece floating around the web and this happens to be one of the better ones I’ve read about this ‘new aesthetic’ – look, it’s a new twist on Dada-ism, can we move on now please? I did quite like this closing para, not least because it gave me momentary hope that I never have to hear the ‘core’ suffix ever again: “The discourse around corecore feels like a work of art in itself, indicative of the fluid and fast, often convoluted way art genres emerge and calcify on the internet. The scene is being historicized in comment sections in real-time as viewers argue it’s being ruined or claim the subgenre was always meant to be Dadaist-absurd. New offshoots are spawning by the week—there’s corecorecore, nichecore, coretok. Publications are writing it up. Podcasts are puzzling it out. Everyone is erratically trying to clutch at what it means. True to its name, corecore is like a project we’re all working on, the most nebulous “aesthetic” of all time.”
  • Turning GPT Into DAN: Or, ‘the latest series of attempts to mess with ChatGPT in order to see what sort of mad or terrible stuff you can get it to say in complete contravention of the OpenAI guidelines’ – this is a link to a post in a subReddit dedicated to attempting to ‘jailbreak’ the software, in which the OP explains how to use DAN, a ‘roleplay model’ to effectively cut out all the guardrails ChatGPT has built in to stop it explaining in detail how to dispose of your lover’s corpse with quicklime and a shovel. This is all sorts of fascinating for all sorts of reasons – partly the general arms race that we’re seeing between the people who make this stuff and the users trying to subvert it for the lols, but also the fact that, again, NOONE SEEMS TO UNDERSTAND WHY THESE TRICKS WORK (see also this, and this), and there is something halfway-sinister, even accepting the unnecessary anthropomorphism inherent in the idea, of ‘scaring’ the software into obeying you.
  • How One VC Is Automating Themselves: I am increasingly interested in seeing practical examples of the ways in which people are seeking to integrate AI stuff into their lives and work – the theory’s fine, but there’s something particularly fascinating about seeing the extent to which this stuff can be useful RIGHT NOW. This is a post about how a VC called Yohei Nakajima is using the suite off tools currently knocking about to make themselves more efficient – the piece is surprisingly detailed on the ‘how’, but here’s the ‘what’: “Nakajima is a GP at a small venture firm, Untapped Capital, so he has a GPT-3 bot that answers common questions from founders. It emails responses to them and includes a way for him to refine them over time—so it continually improves. He has another bot that automatically summarizes every email interaction he has. He reviews these before meetings so that he’s always up to date on founders and LPs. He has another one that, given a startup’s website, can draft an investment memo that includes data like the company’s value proposition, a description of its product, its likely competitors, and even the sentiment from its Product Hunt launch. It goes beyond his work life, too. He has a bot that summarizes and makes searchable emails from his kids’ schools—so he never has to spend time looking up deadlines or important events again.” Small aside – reading all the millions of words about GPT and its ability to write for us, and seeing all the people attempting to take ‘written communication’ out of their lives altogether via the medium of AI-penned emails and notes…does noone actually enjoy writing?
  • The UK Media Nepo Map; One of the main drivers of The Discourse this week, at least amongst a specific class of the UK’s media-literate Twitter users, was this map compiled by Mic Wright which neatly delineates some (but very much not all) of the familial relationships which are the bedrock on which the modern media landscape in this country works. I don’t mean to speak for Mic here – he very much doesn’t need me to, for one – but I don’t think the point of this is to suggest that this is the only problematic aspect of the structure of the fourth estate, more that this is just one aspect of a very tangled web that encompasses private and public schools and Oxbridge and which if you attempted to map it fully would require the sort of 4-d model that makes datavisualisationmongs weep hot tears of eroticised fear. Anyway, regardless of your opinions on whether this is a) THE MOST DISGUSTING EXAMPLE OF ENTRENCHED PRIVILEGE THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN; or b) MAN DISCOVERS HOW WORLD WORKS, FAINTS, it’s an interesting overview and I don’t think anything like this has been visualised in this way before, and it’s worth remembering next time you see a new senior appointment at one of the big media houses.
  • The History of the Web: The History of the Web has been a newsletter and website for a while, but Jay Hoffman has turned it into a book which is all available online, and if ever wanted to read a comprehensive historty of how the infrastructure that enables you to read this fcuking newsletterblogtypething in the first place actually came to be then you will very much enjoy this.
  • AI Twitch Streamers Are Doing Reaction Streams Now: You know how there have been various flavours of apocalyptic predictions about what the coming AI tsunami is going to do to the content landscape, and how we’re going to end up in a situation where the majority of stuff produced online is made The Machine and watched by The Machine with no need for unpleasantly-messy meaty involvement at any stage? Yes, well, it’s already happening, sort-of. This piece looks at AI VTuber NeuroSama (cobbled together from a combination of LLM and text-to-speech voice-synths) whose creator has started setting it up to do reaction streams – so, to be clear, this is an AI simulating its reactions to other content on Twitch. At some point last week, before it got banned for transphobia, NeuroSama started ‘watching’ and ‘reacting’ to the infinite AI-generated Seinfeldish stream ‘Nothing, Forever’ – so, there you have it, in early 2023 we have what I think is the first instance in recorded human history of an artificial intelligence watching and reacting to content produced by another artificial intelligence. However you might want to quibble about definitions and meanings and ‘AI’, it’s hard not to feel a little bit like this is a small Rubicon we’ve just left behind us.
  • They’re Working On AI Identikits Now (This Is Why It’s A Bad Idea): It seems redundant to have to point out that ‘using nascent AI image-generation which we don’t 100% understand and which we are already aware is a hodgepodge of biases based on the training data used to create it as a means of creating mugshots for the identification of criminals’ is not necessarily the smartest idea in the world, and yet here we are.
  • The VFX Industry is Broken: Is there any industry anywhere in the world which doesn’t feel a bit like it’s going to sh1t right now? AI hypetrain aside, of course. Apparently the CGI FX world is all sorts of screwed as a result of the insane demands being placed on digital artists by studios and directors who – and this will shock you – don’t necessarily always perfectly understand the technical requirements and limitations inherent in CG tech. This is, I think, a growing problem that is only going to get worse while we still rely on (lazy, inefficient, uselessly-meaty) PEOPLE to do this stuff – there is SO MUCH involved in much of modern business and commerce nowadays that involves stuff that lots of people simply have no idea about I mean, look, it’s been 20+ years ffs and 90% of people have no fcuking idea how to build a website, how long it might take, how much it should cost and what needs to go on it, so I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to work on stuff that is actually quite technical and quite hard and which is constantly being interrupted by people saying things like ‘yeah, but you can just do that with AI, right? We need it in an hour’.
  • The MegaPorkFarms of Modern China: I’ll be honest with you, this is included mainly because it’s the most nakedly ‘dystopian future’ thing I have seen all week. Forget the robots, forget the AI, it’s the concept of a 25-story MegaPigFarm in a fifth-tier Chinese city that really gave me the futurefantods this week. The photos in here are just sort of dizzying.
  • VR Sex Parties: I have to admit that this link felt ever so slightly like coming home – not, to be clear, because of any personal experience, but more because ever since Web Curios first began on the H+K blog all those years ago I have been sneaking in links to teledildonics and marveling at the endeavour of people who really, really want to bone in VR. It seems that every new generation of tech gets its own version of this stuff – from Second Life to Google Glass and now to VRChat (for all I know there was a burgeoning teledildonics hacking subculture in Runescape, but I sort-of hope not). There’s nothing particularly new here, which I find interesting in itself – over two decades or so, the community of people who are into this stuff has remained niche at best, and the tech, whilst increasingly evolved, is still mostly homespun and jury-rigged, and I wonder whether there’s just simply a hard cap on the number of humans living at any one time who want to strap a motorised piece of latex onto their groin and enjoy some long-distance robofrottage.
  • The British Rail-designed Flying Saucer: This,,,this appears to be a real document, and I am AGOG. From 1970 comes this old application to the patent office, in which British Railways Limited sought to get official recognition for their design for a propulsion unit for a flying space vehicle. I AM NOT SH1TTING YOU THIS IS LITERALLY A BLUEPRINT FOR A FLYING SAUCER (scroll down to Fig.1 if you don’t believe me). I have so, so many questions – is this really real? What happened to this project? Was a prototype ever built? WHY AM I STILL FORCED TO SPEND HUNDREDS OF POUNDS ON SUBSTANDARD RAIL TRAVEL WHEN I COULD HAVE HAD A FCUKING SPACESHIP BY NOW? I would love to know more about this should any of you happen to be in possession of some facts.
  • Chicken Stock: I really enjoyed this article, which begins with a bit of  a disquisition about the magical properties of chicken stock but then broadens into something far more interesting – Noah Galuten writes about their efforts to try and find out what’s in shop-bought stock cubes and quickly discovers some fascinating (and not hugely appetising) facts about the way in which the industrial food production machine works. There’s something perennially intriguing about getting a glimpse into worlds you know nothing about – so it is with this depiction of the b2b side of the food production market, where foods become chemical formulas and the quality of a particular type of chicken stock is measured not in terms of flavour but in terms of the fact that “Liquid is flowable at ambient temperature.” If you have slight qualms about Big Food then this is unlikely to make you feel better about the whole ‘industrialised food production at scale’ thing.
  • I Hired 5 People: I don’t, as s rule, include longreads unless I think they are good or interesting, and I certainly don’t tend to feature stuff (in this section at least) just to point and laugh at it, but, well, this post is simultaneously really interesting and ALSO something that just begs to be pointed at whilst laughing. So. In this edition of their newsletter, Simon Berens writes about how they experimented with hiring a bunch of assistants to (and I am not making this up, this is literally what they were hired to do) sit behind him each day as he worked to stop him from becoming distracted and wasting his time. Take for a moment your initial gut reaction to that statement – I am sure you have one – and now go and read the piece and enjoy all the many, many other feelings that you will experience as you read Berens’ assessments of his assistants, their value, and his expectations as to what they might do for him. This is one of the most impressively tone-deaf things I think you will read all year.
  • I Turned Off My Appetite: Paul Ford writes about taking Mounjaro, a drug designed for the treatment of diabetes which, in common with others related to that pathology, also has seemingly miraculous properties when it comes to managing weight loss. This is interesting not because of the detail about the drug or the weight loss, but about what Ford seems to realise as he’s taking the treatment – as someone whose life had, per their description, was previously ruled by their appetite, removal of that appetite fundamentally changes something about who they are and how they experience the world, and there’s something both hopeful and…weirdly sad about what that might mean for their future.
  • Meet The Archive Moles: This is on the one hand what can practically be described as a very, very long puff-piece for a particular publishing house, but I will forgive the author their self-promotional excesses because it’s such a charming read – the piece looks at how publishers of forgotten books go about scouring the world for great works that have either languished forever in unwarranted obscurity or which have fallen oddly out of fashion, and the picture it paints (which is basically of a bunch of tweedy literary detectives scouring the stacks with magnifying glass in hand) is basically catnip for anyone who considers themselves even vaguely bookish.
  • Do You Ever Feel Like A Plastic Bag?: YOU MUST READ THIS. Honestly, I literally cried laughing whilst doing so and I think you will all absolutely adore this – Michael M writes about being in a not-very-successful band and the singular experience of performing the worst ‘acoustic cover version of a pop song for a live radio show’ ever committed to broadcast. I cannot stress enough quite how spectacularly good this is – were it not for the fact I still had to write the rest of this fcuking thing I would go and read it again RIGHT NOW.
  • The Crack Up: Finally this week, a piece from the past which you can either enjoy as a great piece of writing about the personal experience of a mental breakdown, or as a wise assessment of how we’re all of us broken and irrevocably messed up in our own particular ways – F Scott Fitzgerald, writing in Esquire in 1936, about the time he ‘cracked’. What’s startling about this, other than the candour, is how modern so much of it feels, and how many of the assessments Fitzgerald make about The Lot of Modern Man are very much still applicable nearly a century hence.

By David Fullarton

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 03/02/23

Reading Time: 28 minutes

Have you had good weeks? I suppose the answer to that will depend on how much Shell stock you all own – LOL! – but I sincerely hope that regardless of your portfolio performance – LOL! – you’re all feeling relatively content and not too burnt out from another week of staggering cognitive dissonance (my personal favourite this week was English football’s continued ability to spend more than every single other league in Europe, combined, whilst the actual English economy continues to limp emphysemically towards what we’re continually assured are the bright lights of ‘eventual recovery’ but which, let’s be honest, is as likely to be ‘the glow emitted by the bonfire of what remains of our hopes and dreams for the future’).

Anyway, I have a lunch to get to and probably ought to wear something other than my Curios pants if I want to avoid the unpleasant stares and increasingly-anxious tannoy announcements – I hope you are all doing WONDERFULLY and that this week’s collection of, er, ‘things on the internet’ manages to distract you momentarily from all the other stuff.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and YOU are special to me in ways you can only dream of (but would probably prefer not to).

By Paul Davis

WE START THE WEEK IN REASONABLY UPBEAT FASHION, COURTESY OF THIS MIX OF FUNKY HOUSE BY DOC MARTIN! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.1:  

  • Watch Me Forever: Apologies for the fact that we once again start with AI-related stuff, but I PROMISE that this is more interesting than ‘you can use the machines to write copy for the About Us page of your incredibly boring website’. Watch Me Forever is a quite astonishing thing – an infinite, machine-generated TV channel which broadcasts nothing but its own, AI-generated episodes of Seinfeld. This is quite remarkable – the scripts are generated on the fly by GPT-3, they’re then fed to a text-to-speech generator and audio is generated, and then this is all automatically fed to a visualiser which creates the graphics and generates the camera angles, scene changes, cuts…On the one hand, this is objectively dreadful as entertainment; the scripts make no sense, the acting is wooden, everything looks as though it’s being rendered by the same software that was used to create Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’ music video in the early 80s (here’s a link in case you’re a child and that reference means nothing to you)…and yet, as I sit here typing this at 708am GMT on a Friday, there are nearly 10,000 people concurrently watching this Twitch stream. Whilst I don’t think the people responsible for churning our the hand-crafted nuggets of televisual gold that characterise this GOLDEN AGE of episodic scripted entertainments need worry quite yet (although as I write this, AI Kramer just made an actual joke about Italian coffee machines making drinks that taste of Marinara sauce, so actually…), this feels very much like a glimpse into a future. Not just the utopian (is it utopian? Not so sure) vision of an era in which we can have newly-minted, high-quality entertainments generated on demand, but, more prosaically (and also, significantly more imminently) this sort of setup is going to be absolutely rinsed by the same people who flooded YouTube with all the algorithm-pleasing garbage CGI videos aimed at children in the early-10s. Train GPT on the entire canon of Peppa Pig and capture an entire generation of young eyeballs with your infinite stream of highly-monetisable knockoffs – it’s the future! Honestly, this really does feel like tomorrow having arrived a bit early (if, admittedly, in still-embryonic form).
  • Uncreative: I did wonder about this one… Uncreative was a smart little bit of attention-grabbing by DDB, which rather captured the imagination of certain advermarketingpr circles this week – the URL now takes you to a ‘hey, we fooled you!’ splash, but previously was a faux landing page for a new ‘entirely automated’ creative agency which was promising to REVOLUTIONISE AND DISRUPT creative services by, er, undercutting everyone else by using AI tools to come up with ideas. The nice gimmick was that they were promising to offer FREE CREATIVE while they got on their feet – you could enter an email address (DATACAPTURE!) and give a few details about the client you needed ideas for, and what you needed them to achieve, and then a few minutes later you got emailed a PDF with some potential creative solutions based on your brief. So obviously what this actually was was a promo for DDB and their innovative approach to working with AI – well done them! As I said, smart bait-and-switch – but it was also, I think, an interesting case study of Where We Are with this stuff. I had a play, and the things I got sent back were, broadly, rubbish – generic and lacking in detail or spark. Thing is, though, I’ve spent enough time in agency ‘brainstorms’ – and lots of you probably have too – and I know that most of what comes out of them is also broadly rubbish. What DDB proved with this is that a) they are good at promoting themselves, well done them; and b) AI won’t come up with any tactics that are actually good, but it will happily come up with thousands that are just as mediocre as those dreamt up by the 15 people in their mid-20s currently having a painfully-unfocused conversation about ‘maybe we could do some influencer activations?’ in your second-largest meeting room.
  • BibleGPT: Do you ever think that you’d be a better person if you were able to consult a biblical scholar on every aspect of your life and behaviour? Well thanks to the magic (not magic ffs!) of GPT, now a more spiritually-coherent existence is within your grasp! BibleGPT is a small webproject which lets you ask any question you like and receive an answer based on either the King James of World English bibles – you get a bit prose relating to your question along with a couple of quotations to provide you with Godly succour as you seek to navigate a path through the sinners and the temptations. I confess to being a Catholic in only the very loosest of ways (my relationship with the Church suffered irrevocable damage when I wasn’t allowed ‘Pontius’ as a confirmation name – embarrassingly this is a true story), and as such I can’t vouch for the godliness or otherwise of the answers or whether you can guarantee yourself entry to heaven simply by consulting this app every time you have a decision to make – that said, I have so far asked it whether I should eat fish today given it’s a Friday (it correctly confirmed that there is no Biblical stipulation to do so) and whether I should (respectfully) go to a strip club (it suggested in reasonably strong terms that I should not) and, based on these answers, I feel reasonably comfortable entrusting your afterlife and general moral guidance to this bit of code. Oh, and it’s available in Spanish too, just in case you have a God-fearing abuela who’d enjoy the chance to interrogate the scriptures on the fly.
  • GPT Hamlet: This is here more as a quick ‘look what you can do!’-type example rather than anything fully-formed to play with, but it’s interesting to note that when Ethan Mollick asked ChatGPT to code and script him an interactive fiction game in Twine it was able to do so with reasonable success. This is very simple, fine, but again it’s impressive less because of the final output and more because of the way the software can instantaneously spin up workable frameworks for things that you can then experiment with to your heart’s content.
  • CatGPT: I think you can probably guess the joke here, but this made me laugh and it may briefly distract you from whatever real-life horror is currently gnawing at your psychic ankles (so to speak).
  • Smooth Talker: I continue to be amazed at the fact that noone’s commissioned a ‘why the immediate future of dating apps is an AI-assisted hellscape where you will no longer be able to assume that the person you’re messaging isn’t outsourcing the tedious business of actually talking to you to a not-particularly-sophisticated machine’ piece yet, but in my continued, futile attempts to nudge the commissioning editors of the world’s press (ALL of whom obviously read Curios, ahem) I present to you yet another service which promises to use GPT to improve your ability to chirpse strangers via text. Put in some salient point from your target’s bio, select how ‘smooth’ you want your approach to be, press a button and BOOM! You will be the grateful recipient of some…well, based on my brief experiment, some truly mediocre attempts at starting a conversation. Between this, and the terrifying extent to which teenage boys appear to be horny for the toothy AI monstrosities, I do wonder whether this tech is over the next few years going to prove the final nail in the coffin of the ability of teenage boys to relate to and engage with…well, with anyone tbh.
  • Stelfie: You might have seen these doing the rounds over the past few weeks – the person behind the Stelfie project (I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that they’re called ‘Stefano’ or something similar) has found a certain area of latent space in (what I think is) Stable Diffusion that is letting him produce some rather excellent images, imagining what it might have looked like had he (or the avatar he has created to represent him) been present at various points in history with a mobile phone, and what his selfies (SELFIE/STELFIE! DO YOU SEE?!?!) might have looked like. So, we have ‘bloke in Ancient Rome taking a selfie’, bloke taking selfies with Darwin and Einstein, bloke taking a selfie at the building of the pyramids…you get the idea. This is where the most fun/interesting AI image stuff lives at the moment, if you ask me – people finding particular visual areas that interest them and then going deep within those to see what they can make/find. I do find it fascinating to wonder about the extent to which these sorts of very distinct visual styles are going to become protectable, though – might it be possible for an individual or organisation to stake a claim to a specific area of visual latent space? Does that question even make sense? Am I hopelessly out of my depth? All excellent questions.
  • Infinicity: Much like the first link in this section, this feels like a window on a coming future that’s not quite finished cooking yet. Infinicity is a research project and paper which is aiming to create generative cityscapes, from maps to 3d models to ACTUAL NAVIGABLE 3D ENVIRONMENTS, all automatically – this is obviously all INCREDIBLY complicated and maths-y and, frankly, beyond my comprehension, but the website does an excellent job of explaining what’s going on (well, if you exclude all the really hard bits that I don’t understand) and, most excitingly, shows you all sorts of videos and examples of what the generated cities look like and how you can move through them, and, look, they look awful, muddy and indistinct and oddly-reminiscent of a very particular era of videogame graphics circe 1998, but, equally, this is practically witchcraft and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how amazing the potential of this stuff is, from gaming to architecture to scenarioplanning…dizzying, honestly.
  • Another Tutorial On How To Make Talking Avatars Using AI: I actually played around with the steps outlined in this Twitter thread for a few hours this week, and it’s remarkable how ‘easy’ it all is – I mean, look, the stuff I created was…significantly less shiny than the examples in these videos, but the process described here does actually work, and those of you with more patience and a greater fundamental desire to create an AI-generated talking head might find this useful. Again, if nothing else this demonstrates how simple it is to create (for example, off the top of my head) a character to front all of your corporate training videos (God, what a soulcrushingly dull example, sorry).
  • Ocean Art Underwater Photography Contest 2022: OH MY GOD THE MYSTERIES OF THE DEEP ARE AMAZING! I feel slightly conflicted about these images – on the one hand, they are amazing and astonishing and crikey the sea is a remarkable place; on the other, they are…unsettling, on occasion, and do rather reinforce my fairly deeply-held conviction that the sea is a terrifying place that we should perhaps not explore too much more thoroughly lest we finally awaken the kraken. I mean, just look at the image entitled “A Male Weedy Seadragon Carries Pink Eggs On Its Tail” and then try telling me that that creature isn’t Not Of This Planet (also, parenthetically, ‘weedy seadragon’ is SUCH a brilliantly-sh1t name for a seabeast).
  • Dear Gillian: This is a super-interesting project that any female readers of Curios might want to get involved with – particularly those who remember the Nancy Friday books, which, for the unaware, were a series of explorations of human sexuality written from the 1970s, based on anonymous interviews with hundreds of people (initially women, but latterly also men) about their sexual fantasies. If you’ve never had the chance to check them out, I cannot recommend them highly enough – partly because of the fact that human sexuality is ENDLESSLY fascinating, and partly because, let’s be honest, it’s just some absolutely excellent smut (though, er, it’s probably worth pointing out that the original books were VERY explicit and you might feel a bit funny about visiting a zoo for a while afterwards). Anyway, 50 years on from the original book on female fantasies, a new project is seeking to ask similar questions of a more modern audience – the name, ‘Dear Gillian’, is because it’s being fronted up by Gillian Anderson, under whose name the resulting collection will be published by Bloomsbury – and so clicking the link will take you to a form where you can submit your own (entirely anonymous) sexual fantasy for potential inclusion. If nothing else I will be hugely-interested to see to what extent technology and the web bleed into these more modern fantasies – or, indeed, the extent to which they don’t.
  • Groundhog Day: While obviously we’re all away of Punxatawny Phil, until I found this site I had no idea that there were in fact a host of OTHER weather-predicting rodents scattered across NOrth America and Canada, each of whom have also laid down their prognostication as to whether or not Winter is finally going to fcuk off. Sadly it turns out that the majority of the weathergophers have decided that we’re in for another six weeks of cold and misery, but at the very least you can explore this website and learn more about the various meteorological seers (including the fact that the one from Pennsylvania is, inexplicably, called ‘Poor Richie’, which has made me feel unaccountably sorry for the miserable, cold little fcuker).
  • Valentine’s Day Cards: These aren’t particularly exciting or ‘webby’, but, equally, I laughed more than I expected to when presented with the option to send my girlfriend an e-card which reads, for no reason that I can seem to find, ‘Robert’. These are personalisable should you desire, but, honestly, I think the options they offer as defaults are pretty strong too, and I would personally be charmed to get a card whose cover read “you absolute mess”.

By Spencer Ostrander

LET’S GO BACK TO THE LATE-90s NOW WITH THIS SUPERB DJ KRUSH MIX! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.2:          

  • The Sindhu Sesh Remix Competition: One of the nicest musical finds of last year was my discovery of the Sindhu Sesh musical universe (I like to imagine it like Marvel, but a bit more ‘provincial pub, scampi basket and cheap cocaine hoofed in an outside lavatory’ than ‘multibillion dollar interconnected film franchise behemoth), as evidenced by Pete and Bas, whose single ‘Mr Worldwide’ I featured here last Summer. Anway, there’s now a competition running to find the best remix featuring Pete and Bas’s unique vocal stylings – if you’re any sort of musician. I can’t encourage you strongly enough to download the vocal tracks and go WILD – the winning entry will be featured on their next single and will get all the kudos you’d expect for adding some terrifying 180bpm beats to their already slightly fighty vocals.
  • Calligrapher: A little AI handwriting tool, which I don’t think serves any purpose at all beyond the aesthetic – what’s hugely impressive about this (to my ignorant mind, at least) is that it really is generating the writing on the fly each time. In an era in which it’s hard not to obsess about our imminent obsolescence in the face of increased machine competence, it’s good to know that their handwriting’s fcuking terrible too.
  • The Official UFO App: Or, to give it its official title, ‘Enigma Labs’ – either way, if you’ve been waiting for a way to tell the world about all the times the silver, saucer-eyed aliens have seen fit to choose YOU for a probing then this is very much the app for you. Admittedly it’s not fully launched yet, but there’s an iOS beta that you can sign up for (I like the fact that they are prioritising iPhone users, as though aliens are design status slags and have a preference for showing themselves to people who worship at the churches of Ive and Jobs) and the app will eventually provide anyone worldwide with the opportunity to upload details of alien sightings along with supporting evidence, which will then be analysed by the app’s ML code to determine whether or not it’s a real sighting or a hoax (should…should we be asking questions as to how they’re benchmarking that?). “Enigma is the most trusted, frictionless place to report a sighting and the largest queryable UAP database in the world. Our platform continues to run machine learning on over 270k citizen and military reports across every country, awarding every sighting an anomaly score based on multivariate models. We are building tools for everyone to deconflict sightings with identifiable variables , glean insights, and connect to other people with similar sighting stories.” I am almost tempted to get an iPhone, just to access the incredible community I can already tell will coalesce around this.
  • Housr: This is a smart idea – Housr is an app which is seeking to DISRUPT (yes, I know, but bear with me) the student rental housing market, making it simpler for landlords to list properties for students to rent, and for students to find suitable housing, and housemates, and deal with deposits and contracts and all the tedious and frankly complicated stuff that Iargely ignored (which is perhaps why my second year of university saw me living in a flat that might charitably have been disguised as ‘squalid’, and with a sofa which gave my friend Paul what looked suspiciously like chemical burns). This, honestly, strikes me as an uncomplicatedly smart business concept – it’s currently only running in Manchester, I think, but will expand over the coming year.
  • A Man Sitting On A Couch Looking At Something: I LOVE THIS. Another wonderful webartprojectthing via Naive Weekly (there are a few in here this week, and this is your semi-regular reminder to sign up if you’re into this sort of thing), this is by Fred Wordie who, for a week last year, set up a camera pointing at his sofa and got software to surveil him via said camera, with the machine seeking to interpret his movements and positions into recognisable actions. The resulting site is a strange, dissociated selection of what the machine ‘saw’ each time it ‘looked’ – a man sitting on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa with a bottle in his mouth…this shouldn’t be as affecting as it is, and yet the dissociated fragments of life that pop out here and the ambiguity in how one might interpret the rather bald descriptions, make this something really rather wonderful and unsettling. If nothing else, there’s definitely an ad campaign in the broad theme of this (apologies to Fred if this sullies the otherwise pure nature of your art! Sorry man!).
  • The Doorstep: Also via Naive comes this lovely, small web project – a digital shoe rack, where Azlen Elsa is inviting people to submit photos of their shoes for inclusion. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?? Unless, of course, Azlen has an unannounced shoe fetish, but let’s presume that that’s not the case here.
  • Catch Cameras: Via Dan – thanks Dan! – comes this site, selling cameras, which briefly transported me back to a simpler time a decade or so ago when ‘The Hipster’ was still a thing. Catch is selling small film cameras – with real film! Actual, physical film! That you need to get developed! – which are beautifully-designed (if you think that the absolute apogee of compact camera design was the 1970s) and to me feel oddly reminiscent of the Olden Days when Instagram’s logo was still designed to look like a physical photography device, and Hipstagram was still a thing…anyway, this is basically charging you £60 for a nice-looking point-and-shoot film device, but if you’ve decided that 2023 is the year you get more ‘mindful’ about your photography practice then a) fcuk off and don’t come back; b) this may tick a box or two. There is something particularly funny about how the shop page features actual instructions on how to go about getting the film processed, to the point that they actually feel the need to write ‘Google ‘film development’’ (and by ‘funny’ I mean ‘horribly, cruelly ageing’).
  • FatMap: I have never been skiing. Or snowboarding. Or snowshoeing, or wingsuitgliding, or ice-climbing, or any mountainous pursuits, really. In part because skiing was always a bit pricey, a bit because I am almost certain to return with fewer functioning knees than is ordinarily considered ideal. If you, though, are more Snow Brave than I am and don’t mind either the cold or the possibility of spending several months in traction as doctors attempt to reconstruct the shredded remnants of your cruciate and meniscus, then you might enjoy FatMap, which, seemingly, is like Strava but for mountainous sports (on reflection, if you’re into this sort of stuff then you quite possibly know about this anyway, but fcukit) and which contains all sorts of interesting information about slopes and gradients and snowfall, as well as allowing you to conduct a silent vendetta against all those people who are better at falling down the side of a mountain than you are (it’s just gravity ffs, stop showing off).
  • Seeing Theory: This is a really great piece of interactive explanation from Brown University in the US – it’s an explanation of probability and statistics that is delivered with such wonderful visual and interactive flair that even someone as fundamentally incapable of grasping numerical concepts as I am can emerge with a half-coherent explanation as to how some of this stuff works (ok, quarter-coherent). There’s nothing in here that’s particularly new on its own, but it’s just a superb example of how to use coding and interactivity to help introduce and explain complex concepts; it does feel like brands and businesses, particularly ones in complicated industries, don’t really have any excuse for not using more tools like this in their communications.
  • All The Superbowl Ads: It’s nearly that time of the year again, when two teams of pituitary meatheads spend four hours hitting each other while several hundred million spectators continue working on their long-term ‘Mission Diabetes’ project – oh, and a bunch of people in advermarketingpr spend far too much time analysing the adverts. This is YouTube’s SUPERBOWL AD CENTRE, which you might want to bookmark should you decide you want to have an opinion on who ‘won’ the ad breaks this year. FWIW (and I have only bothered to watch a handful) I get a rather weird feeling from Snap’s promo, like it’s been dropped in here via a timewarp from the past, when we all thought more positively about the digital future and ‘AR donuts’ felt like a fun toy rather than something to gaze at hungrily.
  • Lighthouse Friends: I confess that in the early weeks of this year I have been feeling somewhat…unmoored, and I have found myself wishing on occasion that I felt strongly or passionately enough about…well, about anything, really, to want to devote myself to it with wholehearted abandon. Basically I want to feel about…well, anything really, the same way that the person behind this website feels about the lighthouses of North America. THEY HAVE VISITED ALL OF THEM (well the ones in the US at least) and taken pictures! You can read their notes on EVERY SINGLE ONE! Just imagine caring so much about something that you’re motivated to embark upon a project so wonderfully, perfectly pointless/meaningful (delete per your perspective) as this! Anyway, lighthouses! Do…do I need therapy?
  • Illustrated People: This is not only a great photoproject but an ad campaign waiting to happen, and given this is apparently 10 years old I’m slightly amazed that it hasn’t been used already. Thomas Mailaender used a UV lamp to ‘burn’ temporary images onto his subject’s skin, photographing the impressions before they faded, creating permanent mementos of the vanishingly ephemeral – honestly, if you’re after some creative inspiration for any campaigns relating to summer holidays and the like, this feels PERFECT.
  • Growing: This is just GLORIOUS – Growing is a digital poem, created by Olly Bromham, which creates a cascade of words across your browser window, each linking to a Wikipedia entry; I have no idea at all how the program is choosing the vocabulary, but the words chosen are FABULOUS, all crunchy and chewy and delightful to speak aloud, and their procession across the page creates a deliciously sonorous composition which doesn’t make any sense at all but which creates a sort of…texture, if that makes sense, that I find almost perfectly-pleasing. Also, it has just taught me that picrocarmine means “A stain made from picric acid and indigo carmine”, which is just lovely.
  • Squeaky Clean Toys: Can I have a quick show of hands, please – how many of you would buy a, er, ‘pre-loved’ sextoy? Well, thankfully I can’t see any of you and so have no idea which of you are more…relaxed than others when it comes to dildosharing, but presuming that at least one of you put your hand up then YOU’RE WELCOME! In fairness, these people do give the impression that they know what they’re doing – they clearly state that most toys can’t in fact be recycled, and they have lots of information about porous vs non-porous materials, and there are obvious environmental benefits to handing down your Bad Dragon from generation to generation rather than simply leaving future humans with the puzzle of the Anthropocene Dildolayer to unravel – but, equally, WHO WANTS A PRE-LOVED SEXTOY?!?! Anyway, er, this exists.
  • Back Scratching Simulator: It’s not, fine, a HUGELY accurate simulation of scratching someone’s back, but it IS a fun little game which caused my brain to ache in pleasing and unusual ways. How quickly can you press the right key combinations and get that itch scratched?
  • Gaming Like It’s 1927; Last up in the ‘miscellaneous links’ section, a wonderful collection of small games, all created as part of the recent ‘Gaming Like It’s 1927’ GameJam, which saw designers invited to come up with quick-and-dirty game prototypes (some digital, some not) based on works from 1927 which have recently entered the public domain in the US. So there’s a Tempest clone taking visual inspiration from the works of Salvador Dali, another which takes place in a feline-themed version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, one based on the writings of AA Milne…I’ve only tried a handful of the 20 games linked to from here, and they’re very much on the ‘unpolished and experimental’ end of the spectrum, but there’s some brilliant creativity on display here throughout.

By Steve Seeley

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX IS THIS CRACKER BY DJ BIRCH WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE LOOSELY AS BEING ‘ECLECTICALLY GLOBAL’ BUT WHICH I PROMISE IS REALLY GOOD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY ONCE AGAIN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Jonathan Hoefler: Another to file under ‘finding a promising area of latent space and just digging right into it’, Jonathan Hoelfer’s Insta feed shares images of imaginary gadgets and devices dreamt up by AI, all of which have a sort-of pleasingly baroque aesthetic to them, as though Steampunk managed to magically get less irritating.
  • Adam Cole: Cole is an artist working with digital media and AI, and I came across him because of his work Kiss/Crash; his Insta feed is a pleasingly-unsettling parade of odd machine imaginings, which if you like the same sort of stuff I do you will probably enjoy quite a lot.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  •  MetaTrends: I imagine you’ve all long since done your trend predictions for the year and are now already engaged in scrying for next year’s imaginary futures – whilst I used to regularly point and laugh and mock these sorts of things (and, honestly, still do in the main), there was a point about 8 years ago when Grey included ‘New Witches’ as one of their trends for the coming year and I thought this so ridiculous, so utterly emblematic of the madness of agency planners and their desperate need to OWN THE ZEITGEIST, that I made fun of it mercilessly (to the point of doing so in actual print somewhere) only to find that they were absolutely fcuking right, and that the occult did indeed come back in a massive way throughout the late-2010s, driven, as they rightly predicted, by teenage girls. Which is basically a long-winded way of reminding you that you should never listen to me about ANYTHING (unless you’re paying me money, at which point all my opinions become SOLID GOLD), but also of introducing this rather useful (if, equally, VERY SILLY) piece by Matt Klein where he extracts the META-TRENDS from 50 agency trend docs and isolates the 16 broad areas of consensus. Your mileage here will vary depending, frankly, on how much of your professional life you need to spend having conversations about things like ‘the biggest colourways influencing GenAlpha soft drink consumption habits’, but I like the way that these are presented (the pithy ‘what is this, how is it expressed, how does this drive tension, how might you get involved’ format is smart) and, whilst this is all obviously b0llocks, so is your job and so you might as well play along.
  • Unequality: I thought this was a really interesting essay by James Plunkett – the final in a series of three, written in partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in which he explores the concept of ‘unequality’, as distinct from ‘inequality’. Plunkett defines ‘unequality’ thusly: “the distribution of income growth has gone from an upward slope to a hockey stick laid on the ground. And so unequality looks distributionally nothing like the unfair and scarred yet dynamic economy of Thatcher — the economy that made New Labour strike its famous compromise with the rich.All of which nearly rounds out our view of unequality; as well as being divided and spatial, it’s exclusive, elitist, and stagnant. But unequality also has one other essential feature: it’s stunningly homogenous. And this final characteristic feeds back into and amplifies the others.”; oddly, reading this it felt like the best evocation of the vague feeling of ‘everything is just a little bit…off’ feeling I’ve had since returning to London last year, perhaps best evoked by this line: “how does unequality feel? The answer is that it feels like we exist in two distinct countries, side by side. These cleavages are partly a question of money, but they go deeper than that. In a technological revolution like the one we’re living through now, the distinction between the vanguard economy and the laggard economy isn’t just a distinction of rich versus poor, or of high-paid versus low-paid jobs; it’s a distinction of the new versus the old — a difference not of quantity but of kind.” I thought this was excellent.
  • Who Owns AI?: This is a really good overview of the commercial state of the AI market, and why it’s hard to pick a ‘winner’ from the current crop of players – and why it’s equally hard at present to see anyone carving out any sort of meaningful competitive advantage in the ‘creating layers between AI and product’ space, mainly because, as the article’s authors point out, there are no ‘moats’ – everyone playing in this space has access to the same tech, more or less, all the image stuff is using the same baseline training data, as is the text stuff, and it’s hard to see where marginal advantage happens at this stage. Business-y, as you might expect, but it feels like solid sectoral analysis.
  • How Medium Is Dealing With AI: ‘How we’re going to deal with AI and what are our policies around its use?’ is a question that should be occupying more businesses than I believe is probably currently the case – some, of course, moreso than others. Which is why it was pleasing to read this piece by Scott Lamb of Medium, outlining the publishing platform’s current policy on copy generated by or in conjunction with text-generating AIs – the quick overview is ‘you have to disclose if what you are publishing is wholly or partly AI-generated, and if we suspect you are not disclosing this we reserve the right to remove said copy’. What’s good about this, in my opinion at least, is that it’s clear, it’s user-focused, it reflects concerns expressed by the community of writers using the platform, and it acknowledges the need for fluid policy development and revision as the technology and people’s expectations change. Ok, fine, it’s not SUPER-thrilling as a piece of prose but sometimes (ok, rarely) ‘useful’ trumps ‘fun’.
  • Using AI To Boost Creativity: More from Ethan Mollick here (who you really should follow if you’re interested in the ‘how’ of ‘using AI for professional reasons), who is pleasingly positive about the scope for Chat-GPT in particular – in this article he runs through some simple ways in which you can use the interface to help you generate and refine ideas, many of which will be of interest to all you poor advermarketingprdrones out there – I particularly enjoyed the ‘generating names for new products or businesses’ example. Again, I think it’s important to be realistic about this stuff – none of what it generates is going to win you a Lion right now, but that’s absolutely fine because neither is most of the rest of the work that you or anyone else does, most of which is involved in creating content noone will ever read for companies and products 99.9999999% of the world’s population has never heard of. I’m going to throw it out there – I don’t think writing p1ss-poor ‘thought leadership’ content for morons to ‘Like’ on LinkedIn is not a category of work we should be particularly concerned with keeping for ourselves.
  • Drawing Comics With GPT: One of my favourite things of 2010, and one of the web projects that first inspired me to start writing Curios, oddly enough, was early webcomic sensation AxeCop, where artist Ethan Nicoll took notes from the mad stories his little brother Malachai would make up when playing and then illustrated them to professional standard – honestly, the original strips were some of the funniest things I had ever read (and, checking back, they still are – honestly, just read this, it is fcuking PERFECT). I was reminded of that when reading this piece about an artist experimenting with getting ChatGPT to write single-panel newspaper comics; there’s a certain weird, blank surreality to some of the creations that vaguely remind me of the unhinged parade of non sequiturs that is ‘talking to an under-10’.
  • Bubble City: As Twitter continues its slow process of disintegration – turns out that sacking huge swathes of the staff DOES have a material effect on platform functioning and stability! – so the general chuntering about ‘what next?’ continues. I found this white paper – which is by Monica Anderson from October last year – about their vision for a different platform for text-based conversations, called ‘Bubble City’, genuinely fascinating. This is all theory, but as a set of principles and ideals around which to organise a potential new network it strikes me as, broadly, pretty smart (although I think Monica and I have slightly different approaches to legality and content moderation – hers is…pretty loose!: “to the extent permitted by law, there should be no censorship of posted messages. You can use the system for illegal purposes by for instance posting about drugs for sale and people wanting to buy those drugs would be able to find those messages. And so would the police. Without paying a penny”). Worth reading, in part if you’re interested in social platforms and how they function, but also more generally as an example of how to set out this sort of thing in a really clear and cogent manner.
  • We’ve Lost The Plot: I think this is a really interesting article that completely misunderstands and misuses the term ‘metaverse’ (insofar as it means anything anyway) and by so doing rather undermines its otherwise-good central argument; the piece is basically about how everything is now entertainment here in the great ludic paradise that is 2023(!), and that by extension we are becoming conditioned to narrativise events in a way that isn’t necessarily healthy or positive – whether that’s the desire to see everything via the lens of entertainments, or the increasing degree to which we are all trained to perceive of ourselves as principal protagonists in a tightly-scripted modern drama (comedy/tragedy – delete per your own personal flavour of narcissism). All of which feels true and sounds interesting, but which is then slightly ruined (to my mind, at least) by the author’s slightly hamfisted attempts to make this OF THE NOW by linking it to the broad concept of the metaverse which, honestly, no. Still, ignore that part of it and this is an interesting read – see this passage, which if you remove the nonsensical pre-colon opening is actually…true? “Life in the metaverse brings an aching contradiction: We have never been able to share so much of ourselves. And, as study after study has shown, we have never felt more alone. Fictions, at their best, expand our ability to understand the world through other people’s eyes. But fiction can flatten, too. Recall how many Americans, in the grim depths of the pandemic, refused to understand the wearing of masks as anything but “virtue signaling”—the performance of a political view, rather than a genuine public-health measure. Note how many pundits have dismissed well-documented tragedies—children massacred at school, families separated by a callous state—as the work of “crisis actors.” In a functioning society, “I’m a real person” goes without saying. In ours, it is a desperate plea.”
  • My Year as a Hot Girl For Hire: Or, “what it’s like working for OnlyFans, being one of the people who acts as the interface between performer and fans” – to which the answer, in case you hadn’t guessed, is ‘sad and grubby and empty in ways you probably didn’t automatically consider when you read the headline’.
  • The Rise of the ‘Dupe’: Or ‘how having knockoff gear used to be considered socially ruinous when I was a child, but is now apparently totally fine’ – which, honestly, is a good thing! This Buzzfeed piece looks at how there is a growing cachet associated with being able to find items that mimic the designer aesthetic for a non-designer budget – there’s something interesting in what this means for the status of the logo, and indeed whether this is something that will be reversed when (lol if?)  the current economic horrorshow rights itself somewhat.
  • Amazon Is Getting Worse: Timely given the less-than-stellar results just published, this is a decent companion piece to last week’s essay by Doctorow on digital ‘ensh1ttification’ which looks at the specific ways in which Amazon has managed to ‘ensh1ttify’ itself over the past decade or so (at least from the point of view of customers and many vendors), and what the strategy behind that might be. This is a good-if-infuriating article that does nothing to disabuse me of my firmly-held opinion that, of all the horrid companies (outside of the ones that, you know, make machines of death). Amazon is by quite a long distance the most frightening.
  • Blackpilled Swag: There’s a part of me that read this article and thought it was written specifically to make people like me twitch with discomfort as they attempted to parse the language; still, if you can get around the…somewhat idiosyncratic Blackbird Spyplane house style, this is a really good read on the weird world of ‘blackpilled swag’ – more prosaically, branded merch from companies whose impact on the planet, society and our species as a whole might best be described as ‘not wholly positive’. This is interesting not just from a trends and fashion point of view, but also as a general barometer of modern nihilism – actually, there’s an idea, why don’t we replace the (increasingly meaningless and irrelevant) Doomsday Clock with a better indicator, one that tracks our growing lack of interest and engagement in the fact that we’re all careening hellwards in the handcart. Maybe we could use emoji. Oh, by the way, the Shell sweatshirt pictured in here absolutely SLAPS and would be quite the power garment to sport this weekend should you have access to one.
  • Nine Ways of Looking at a Pint of Guinness: Apologies if you’re paywalled out of this but, well, I did tell you to sub to Vittles – this is a WONDERFUL piece of writing, about Guinness and pubs and the pour and what makes a ‘good pint’, and about homesickness and identity, and I enjoyed reading it so much that it was almost enough to make me abandon my lifelong hatred of any fcuker who orders a round composed entirely of Guinness when ahead of me in the queue at the bar.
  • Chatting With Uri Gellar: Did you know that there was a particular Pokemon, called Kadabra in the West, which was removed from the deck as a result of a complaint by Uri Gellar? No, neither did I, but that and SO MUCH MORE Gellar-related trivia lies just a click away, and I promise you that it is worth every second of your time. This is from gaming website Kotaku, but is frankly far less about the Pokemon question (the card is being reinstated in a new edition, hence the interview) and far more about the author’s long-standing dislike of Gellar slowly-but-inevitably being worn away by the insane force of the man’s personality – I promise you that whatever you may think about Uri Gellar (“SPOON BOTHERER”, most probably) you will come away from this article having warmed to him considerably.
  • The Violin Doctor: A profile of one John Becker, a Chicago resident and one of the world’s premier experts in the repair and restoration of Stradivarius violins – I was mesmerised by this, in that very particular way that sometimes happens when reading a detailed and intimate description of someone or something preternaturally skilled; honestly, this might be the quietest (I know, but you’ll see what I mean) and most relaxing thing I read all week.
  • In Battersea: Owen Hatherley writes in the London Review of Books about the Nine Elms development around Battersea Power Station, and the particular, peculiar oddness of the area which has now reached some sort of developmental milestone (despite not being in any meaningful sense ‘finished’). This is only really of particular interest if you know London (and, frankly, the specific area in question), but it’s a lovely and angry piece of writing that skewers much about what feels wrong about yet another glass-and-steel-and-chrome forest being erected in an area that wasn’t necessarily crying out for one. “If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously faked, but to what end? Who wants this Tate Modern for philistines, this Senate House for illiterates, this Berghain for people who can’t dance?” Well, yes, quite.
  • Yes Chef: Cookery and drudgery and repetition and routine and meditation, and why doing the same thing over and over again is, occasionally, worthwhile and necessary. “Repeating something is often an act that keeps one foot in the past and one in the present. Maybe that’s why chefs can repeat the same jokes over and over again. Though the days are long days, the work painful, the same jokes help us remember when we laughed out loud the first time. But to repeat something the right way is to give up on the past and to think only of being fully present now, in every new day and moment, toward an authentic future.” As someone who’s been repeating this same Friday routine for..too long, I can only agree.
  • Holiday in Antarctica: Finally in this week’s longreads, this is a beautiful, funny and genuinely romantic account of Roxane Gay and her wife Debbie Millman took a cruise to Antarctica – Gay writes the prose, while Millman intersperses illustrations and short captioned notes, and it’s so lovely to read something that works as a shared account of common experience; it is honestly not possible to read this and not feel a little warmer and happier at the end, I promise. Plus, it contains some EXCELLENT photographs of massive lumps of ice, should you fancy seeing some before they all melt.

By Michael Sowa

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 27/01/23

Reading Time: 36 minutes

Hi everyone! Hi! How are you!

You know what, I feel…alright this week! The sun is shining, the heating is on, the days are getting longer and I have done my tax return – it’s all going to be ok!

(On the subject of tax, by the way, a brief note on the Nadhim Zahawi thing – the funniest thing about all this, to my mind at least, is the fact that Zahawi has for the past 5-6 years or so been the biggest government lickspittle going. I am one of those tedious people who listens to the Today programme every morning, and as such I can say with reasonable confidence that there is noone who has done more of the 8:10am ‘meatshield to defend whatever awful sh1t the Tories have done now’ interviews than the self-described ‘King of An*l’ (thanks, Popbitch!) – on that basis, him STILL getting sacked as a result of his dodgy tax affairs, despite having spent much of the past decade orally bum-spelunking a succession of Prime Ministers, is even funnier (til you remember that he’s still a multi-millionaire and I am going to have to turn the heating off again shortly if I want to be able to buy new pants at any point in 2023).

Anyway. It’s lovely to see you all. Thanks for being here.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I am, on reflection, quite proud of ‘orally bum-spelunking’ as a turn of phrase.

By Brendan Burton

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A BRAND NEW MIX OF TWOSTEP AND NUKG BY OPPIDAN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO GABBER MARGINALIA, PT.1:  

  • Edit Existing Images With AI: I promise, this edition of Curios will be significantly less full of experimental AI gubbins than the previous few (whether this does anything to improve your enjoyment of the whole is, on balance, unlikely, but know that I am at least trying), but there are still one or two things to get out of the way so, er, let’s get on with it. First up is the new, exciting update to a bunch of text-to-image platforms which now let you upload an image and then textually specify the edits you would like the machine to make to said image. “Hide a red-striped-besweatered glasses-wearing homunculus somewhere in this picture”, for example, or “make it a dog”, or “put Rishi Sunak into a bombed-out post-apocalyptic landscape”, that sort of thing. As with a lot of current AI stuff, this doesn’t (in my experience, at least) quite work well enough to be a standalone solution to anything just yet, but it’s quick-and-dirty enough to be useful for some quick potatoshop lols while we wait ~6months for it to render your Junior Graphic Designer obsolete (by the way, the link here goes to an AI image generation platform called Playground AI, but this tech is now A Thing and should be available on whatever your particular text-to-image platform of choice is).
  • Drayk It: See, now THIS is more like it – if I’m going to have to feature AI stuff to ‘keep up with the zeitgeist’ (must I? Can the zeitgeist not just sort of fcuk off?) then I would rather it were utterly pointless and very silly projects like this one, which lets you give it any subject matter you require and click a button, at which point some gears will whirr and you will, in a few short seconds, be presented with audio of a rap performed by an AI version of Drake, all about whatever you chose. On one the hand, the model here isn’t the greatest rapper or rhymer in the world and will occasionally get stuck in weird little loops; on the other, I can’t pretend I didn’t find AI Drake croonining to me about (and this was my exact prompt) “premature ejaculation is actually a sexual superpower that women really love” at least a little bit wonderful. Please feel free to share any particularly successful compositions with me – at the very least I’d hope that some of you will be using this tech to come up with inspiring new corporate anthems with which to soundtrack Friday drinks (for the three of you who still bother going into the office).
  • Google Is Working On Text To Music: You can’t yet play around with it yet because of Google’s BORING insistence that it doesn’t want to put this stuff out into the wild without more guardrails and more testing, but this webpage contains a bunch of frankly astonishing examples of software that lets you type in stuff like ‘imagine if Lou Bega worked with Chesney Hawkes to somehow compose a banger which took the main stylistic elements of their two most famous hits but which also then channeled the particular melodic flair of The Chainsmokers’ and then generates quite astonishingly competent music from your text. Seriously, it’s worth checking out a few of these because they really are VERY good indeed.
  • Another Massive List of AI Tools: I’m not going to include any more of these after this point because, frankly, life’s too short, but I am giving you ONE LAST OPPORTUNITY to bookmark one of them because they are SO useful. The main one linked here is probably the most comprehensive I’ve yet seen, but you might want to also make a note of this one and this one on the offchance that any of them die or stop getting updated.
  • Vermeer: I’ve said this several times over the years (to the point where I think the digital director of the institution occasionally reads this – HELLO, DIGITAL DIRECTOR!), but Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum really does put out some wonderful digital work to promote its exhibitions. This website, created to mark the opening of a new retrospective on the life and work of Johannes Vermeer, is no exception – it’s SO NICE, for a start, to see a digital project from a gallery or museum be well-funded enough that they are able to commission Stephen fcuking Fry to do all the voicework. Closer to Vermeer (for that is the title of this DIGITAL EXPERIENCE) is an opportunity to explore the painter’s oeuvre, either as a series of guided digital tours accompanied by the dulcet tones of the aforementioned Fry, or independently using a really smart and nicely-taxonomised interface which allows you to assemble your own collections of works from the collection based on elements or historical connections which interest you, and which does that wonderful thing that some of the best digital curation achieves whereby each visitor really can create their own path through the artist’s works and life by focusing on specific elements of each canvas and being able to quickly and effectively contrast the treatment of said element across multiple works. Aside from anything else, the quality of the digitisation of the paintings here really is superb – honestly, this is sort of the gold standard for digital museum projects and, even better, the total number of mentions of the word ‘metaverse’ is zero, and at no point will you be asked to navigate a poorly-rendered 3d avatar model through a clunkily-rendered gallery space for which THANK FCUK.
  • One Second Sampler: This is very silly, but, equally, the sort of thing which you could use to drive someone to the very edge of madness and so it gets the nod for Curios. One Second Sampler is exactly that – hit the button and the site will record one second of audio from your mic, which you can then play at a variety of different pitches using your keyboard. That might not sound like much, but if you can’t immediately see the low-key bullying potential in secretly recording a friend, colleague, family member or loved one and then using that pitch-shifted recorded sound sting as a tool to mock and frustrate then, well, you disappoint me, frankly.
  • The Tech Layoffs Tracker: It’s fair to say that, from what I can tell, the employment market doesn’t look…fantastic at the moment (the cynic in me wonders to what extent this is a deliberate choice by big business to reintroduce a little more of an employers’ edge after a couple of years in which the prevailing wisdom has been that power had been shifting (minimally, but still) towards workers instead of bosses, but maybe those are simply the ramblings of a pinko loon), as evidenced by this ongoing tracker of the layoffs recently announced across the tech industry. This is posted not to gloat or laugh – I mean, seriously, what sort of a cnut do you think I am? – but instead because it’s possible that someone might find it useful; aside from anything else, should you be in the business of recruiting people for developer/code-y roles, this is probably a decent place to start looking (there’s a tab on the website collecting spreadsheets of staff who’ve been canned so other employers can theoretically offer them roles, for example).
  • The Laid Off Club: Perhaps in reaction to the last link, this little website is a place where people who have lost their jobs can post about their feelings, and where others can respond with messages or support – this is both really rather cute, and also an interesting way of designing the post/comment interface (I know that sounds dull, but I promise you you’ll see what I mean if you click the link).
  • Slay: We’re still waiting for the first ‘new app of the year which will become popular with kids and which will as a result become the subject of increasingly insane valuations despite having literally no obvious path to monetisation that wouldn’t kill the very things that made it popular in the first place’, but it seems that there might be an early contender in Slay, which I’ve seen being talked up in a few places and which is apparently Very Downloaded in the early days of 2023. The gimmick here is basically the same sort of thing as YikYak et al – asking questions anonymously of your peergroup for associated social clout! – except the gimmick here is the whole ‘safety and positivity’ vibe, whereby the questions users are allowed to ask are solely positive ones (“Who has the kindest heart?”; “Who makes me smile whenever I think of them?”; “Who seems least likely to end their lives in the gutter of drink and drug abuse?”, that sort of thing), and the only possible feedback is to vote for one of four people – no messages, no DMs, no additional comments. Which, honestly, sounds a) incredibly fcuking dull (but I appreciate I am not a 13 year old girl, and so possibly am not at the heart of the target demographic here) and b) like it could absolutely still get used for bullying in a few creative ways, but also, and perhaps most crucially c) sounds literally impossible to monetise without ruining the already-wafer-thin user experience. Anyway, it’s immaterial because the featureset here will get nicked by one of the big players within six months and this will become yet another memory consigned to the oubliette of previously buzzy apps that noone remembers anymore (I REMEMBER YOU, PEACH!).
  • The GenZ Translator: This is a very silly little GPT-enabled hacksite which takes any text you feed it and translates it into GenZ speak. In fairness, it sort-of does exactly what it promises, albeit not particularly spectacularly, and I think you could have a lot of fun with this if you’re bored of an afternoon. Why not translate all of your employer’s website and see if anyone notices? Why not use it to YOOF UP your content calendar for that FS brand that’s desperate to engage a younger consumer base? Why not save the link on your phone and use it next time you’re speaking with an ACTUAL YOUNG PERSON in order to make them feel embarrassed and uncomfortable about how badly you’re trying to integrate with them? Come on FFS, this is all GREAT material which will make those empty hours just fly by.
  • Film Twitter Take Generator: I like this link because it’s pleasingly old-school – no AI rubbish here, just a database full of filmic content somewhere in the back end and a button to press – and also because the stuff it generates is, I think, genuinely quite good – “If you think Halloween (1978) is unproblematic you need to TOUCH GRASS”, for example, or “People watching V for Vendetta and not realizing you’re NOT supposed to identify with the protagonist LOL” feel like exactly the sort of mildly-irritating tossed-off opinions that will keep film buffs shouting at each other online for hours. If nothing else, you can probably get some low-level troll mileage out of logging into your favourite film-lovers forum and dropping some of these for the lols.
  • FigCat: Earlier this week I received an email from a nice person named Jan, who wanted to know whether something they had made was suitable for inclusion in Curios (they expressed some uncertainty as to whether the links were ‘on-brand’ for Curios, but went on to explain that in their defence “it’s very difficult to tell what the brand is, exactly”, which I obviously took as testament to the GREAT WORK I have been doing here. “I recently started a website, where I post very long thematic lists of things (currently books, comics, and RPG supplements), ranked by their popularity online. The interesting part is that I compile these lists manually by visiting hundreds of web addresses (blog posts, threads on Reddit etc.) and patiently tallying the number of recommendations the various items receive there. The web is full of lists of useless stuff, but to my best knowledge very few others are assembled in the manner of a medieval Benedictine monk with alarming obsessive tendencies.” This is QUITE THE UNDERTAKING – it’s relatively early days, and I get the feeling Jan is just getting started here, but if you want a bunch of lists of, say, RPGs with multiversal elements, or European novels from 1940 to the present day, then BOY does this site have you covered. I am slightly in awe of this, and I do rather like the wider ambition of creating a universal directory of online recommendations, however Sisyphean and impossible such a thing might be.
  • Wargal Art: Jan was also kind enough to point me at his website collecting AI art – now I wasn’t that interested in this at the outset because, look, I have seen a LOT of AI-generated art over the past year or so and I am frankly a bit jaded by it as a topic and am running out of interest in the very recognisable style of most machine-made imagery, but I really rather liked this; Jan’s done a nice job of collecting ‘collections’ of pictures from a similar point in latent space, creating what feel like miniature exhibitions by a range of different artists and I find this sort of exploration of ‘areas’ of visual style a lot more interesting than the majority of Stable Diffusion work out there. Also, bonus points for the fact that literally NONE of this features anything resembling ‘fantasy art’ and the additional fact that there don’t appear to be any large-breasted anime ladies to be seen (I know it doesn’t seem like that ought to be praiseworthy but, again, trust me when I say I have seen a LOT of this stuff and the ‘no bosoms’ thing is depressingly rare.
  • Oikioikiki: I have literally NO idea where I found this, but it is pleasing to me and it may well be pleasing to you too. I don’t know who the person who owns this Pinterest account is, but I am THRILLED that they take such pleasure and pride in photographing their stuffed toys with quite such care and attention. There are albums here featuring Snoopy and Woodstock, Gromit and that pink bear from Toy Story 3, all photographed out in the real world with love (and a degree of obsession – there are, er, over 500 photos of Snoopy and Woodstock, for example, which is…quite a lot), and, whilst I am ordinarily unmoved by this sort of whimsy, there’s something genuinely heartstring-tugging about the care with which Gromit in particular has been shot. I very much hope that this is going to be an ongoing thing, because, honestly, this is SO PURE.
  • Mimetic Rocks: Rocks! That look like animals or people! That’s it! Click the image, get a new rock, enjoy it, move on! There’s an email address should you have any photographs of a metamorphic armadillo or something to submit to the project.
  • Cursed Images: Is it me or is there something of an…old school feel to this week’s crop of links? This one, for example, feels like it’s straight out of 2013 – all this website does is present you with a new ‘cursed’ image each time you click, but that, frankly, is all you need. Much of the stuff on here will be recognisable to any veterans of the old, weird web (what do you mean “Matt, you have clearly spent far, far too much time online if you recognise even one of these fcuking pictures, what is wrong with you and what the fcuk have you been doing with your life?”), but there are enough new (to me at least) weird things sprinkled throughout to keep you clicking for a while. If nothing else, should you have any young people in your lives who are yet to experience the incredible power of context-free images from the weird past then WOW are they in for a treat with this (as an aside, is there a TikTok for this sort of stuff? It feels like there’s an interesting aesthetic in combining these things with the corecore stuff – and there it is, the first sentence I have typed in 2023 which has made me instinctively recoil in horror as soon as I read it back, HUZZAH!).
  • No Context French: I can’t say this with any certainty, but I get the feeling that these sorts of ‘no context’ meme accounts are incredibly gauche and Facebook-y if you’re part of the country they are about (cf No Context Brits, which just feels ‘this was on TikTok a month ago’) but become brilliantly weird as soon as they are about a country you’re less familiar with. So it is with No Context French, my new favourite Twitter account because if nothing else it provides a regular reminder that the internet has rendered everyone’s brain stupid and broken, even Parisians (also, the footage from protests is a happy and convenient reminder that the French are simply better at industrial action than we are).
  • The Minimalist Photography Awards 2022: I think I said about five years ago that we might be reaching saturation point with photography awards, and the subsequent five years have done nothing to disabuse me of that notion. Still, this is one contest I can very much get behind – The Minimalist Photo Awards “is a non profit association, powered by black & white Minimalism magazine, which aims to recognize, reward and expose talented photographers all around the world and introduce them to the professional photography industry”, and the work here is SO GOOD. If nothing else it’s refreshing because the style and subjects it promotes are so distinct from many of the other photo contests I feature in here – if you’re a designer or art director then there’s just as much to enjoy in here from a colour and composition point of view as there is if you’re a photographer. In case you care, I think this one is my favourite of the entries, but as ever I encourage you to have a good old explore as there is SO MUCH great work amongst the winners and commendees.
  • The Wonders of Street View: Prolific creator of ‘fun internet ephemera’ Neal Agarwal is BACK with a new game/toy thing – The Wonders of Street View is a BRILLIANT timesink which does one thing and one thing only, taking you through a wonderful selection of odd views on Google Streetview. What’s particularly nice about this is that StreetView embeds in the site, meaning not only can you see some weird stuff but you can also, should you desire, explore the surrounding area to get context for the weirdness (I just had a wonder around the Mustard Museum in Maine and feel much better for it, for example).

By Natalia Gonzalez Martin  

NEXT UP, A PLAYLIST FEATURING A BUNCH OF TRACKS FROM ABOUT 2003-2009 WHICH IT WAS RECENTLY POINTED OUT TO ME IS AN ERA WHICH HAS LEFT A WEIRDLY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT DIGITAL FOOTPRINT, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO GABBER MARGINALIA, PT.2:  

  • The Top Escape Rooms Project: I appreciate that Escape Rooms are perhaps a bit 2012, a bit ‘hipsters are still a thing’, a bit ‘craft beer’ – but, equally, they can be fun if done well and in the right company, and, look, it’s not like things have improved immeasurably since their heyday so perhaps just GIVE THEM A CHANCE OK? Ahem. Anyway, I was until this week unaware of the fact that there exists an international organisation dedicated not only to celebrating escape rooms but also to ranking them, and that each year they compile a list of what they consider to be the BEST experiences in the world – but there does, and they do, and here it is. “The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the very best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the experience of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world. We serve escape room owners and designers by publicly recognizing their achievements, and we serve our fellow enthusiasts by providing an international bucket list of the best rooms to play.” There are only two UK-based room in this year’s selection of the best 100 (Macclesfield and Margate, in case you were interested), which is a shame, but there are LOADS around Europe – if you’re that way inclined, you could make this the basis of a frankly brilliant series of weekend breaks to some excellent destinations.
  • Lileks: It was slightly odd discovering this site – it felt hugely familiar, but I think that that’s because it’s had a few VIRAL HITS over the years and as such I recognise some of the content (specifically, I think this was the host of one of the original ‘man, food in 1970s America really was quite spectacularly vile, wasn’t it?’ recipe card roundup posts) – but also like I had found some sort of spiritual kin in some small way. THIS HAS BEEN GOING FOR 26 YEARS FFS!!! There’s a sort of general lean towards ‘slightly weird US ephemera from the 50s-70s’, but it’s probably best to let the site’s owner introduce it: “What is this thing? Simple: The anteroom of the internet’s most diverse, idiosyncratic, and individually curated pop-culture museum. Note: that’s the last time I’ll use “curated.” It’s pretentious. But it’s true! I am pretentious. Also, this site is a one-man effort, assembled over two decades, its innumerable sub-sites gathered together under general, vague rubrics.It’s not some idle project, occasionally updated. The Bleat, a blog that’s celebrating its 25th year, contains a M-F essay, some piece of old commercial ephemera, a rotating feature on everything from cliffhanger serials to old radio to main street America to the ads of the 1930s or 1970s, and a link to the daily site update. And that’s just the blog. Scroll down for the total enormity. I hope you enjoy the site. Twenty-six years, and counting.” I cannot stress enough how much I love this – a proper, sprawling, 2.5-decade-long accretion of links and words and pictures, all mapping a vague sense of ‘what one person has found interesting enough to share online since 1997’ – but if you’re after a way in, why not try this wonderful series of posts analysing the particular art style of one Art Frahm, an artist whose work seemingly consisted solely of cheesecake postcard illustrations of 1950s women whose pants have inexplicably just fallen around their ankles (no, really).
  • Ivory for Mastodon: Are any of you actually using Mastodon? How’s it working out for you? I tried, honestly I did, but all the reasons it didn’t stick for me in 2017 or whenever are still very much true, and now there’s this added barrier of my being old and tired and jaded and increasingly of the opinion that when Twitter finally dies I think I will probably just not do social networks anymore (I reserve the right to completely change my mind on this should something infinitely new and shiny and exciting and (please god, please god) solely text-based take off in the next year or so, obvs). Still, if you’re finding that Mastodon is scratching your Elon-free Twitter itch then you may enjoy this app – an (iOS-only at the moment, I think) mobile app for it, called Ivory, which I have been informed by a bunch of people whose opinions I tend to broadly trust is Very Good as far as these things go. Obviously I haven’t tried it myself re a) Mastodon; and b) Apple, but, with the usual caveats, this may well be worth a look.
  • How Far Does 5kg of CO2 Get You?: This is an interesting little data experiment which asks ‘if you limited yourself to only emitting 5kg of CO2, how far could you travel in a variety of different European countries?’ (and yes, fine, I appreciate that that is a potentially niche definition of the term ‘interesting’, but I AM INTERESTED OK? ffs). Distances vary from country to country for various reasons:  “an electric train in Sweden can travel further than an electric bike, due to the greater carbon footprint per individuals of manufacturing the bike and the very low footprint of traveling by train almost exclusively powered by renewables. In Poland and Cyprus, carbon intensity is so high that driving a diesel car may be less detrimental than driving an electric car. From Paris, France, driving a SUV you can barely get out of town (21 km) whereas a small electric car would drive you 3 times further to the beautiful wine cellars of Bourgogne (77km).” It feels like there’s something in this – a travel calculator for low-carbon weekends, for example, that spits out suggestions and travel plans and booking assistance, all-in-one, for example (but you will DEFINITELY come up with better ones – or at least I hope you do, because that was frankly sh1t and I like to think that you’re all significantly less useless than I am).
  • Kutt: You know how everyone makes bets, right? I mean just small ones, between friends, in a fun, ‘no money involved’, non-binding, bragging rights sort of way, the sort of throwaway remark in the pub which you laugh about and then which, in the main, everyone forgets or which, at most, involves someone having to shave an eyebrow or perform some sort of worryingly-biological forfeit should they lose. Well imagine THAT, but instead of everything being for fun and for lols you instead plug the bet into an app and pledge ACTUAL MONEY which will get automatically transferred to the winner upon said bet’s completion – doesn’t that sound better? Well, er, no, actually it doesn’t, it sounds like it could lead to all sorts of issues – but that’s not stopping new startup Kutt, which confidently claims to be a “sports and social gaming platform that allows friends and strangers to use their knowledge of sports, politics, and pop culture to compete against each other in a variety of competitions.” Set your own odds! Ensure people pay up! BET UNLIMITED AMOUNTS! There is literally no way at all that this app could possibly be a bad and ruinous idea, oh no sirree – any journalists out there looking for a nice, easy new tech-led scare story really could do worse than apply a bit of scrutiny to this, because it looks…dangerous. An app which is promising to let anyone run a book on anything, that they can offer to anyone, with no loss limit? HMMM.
  • Protected Planet: “Protected Planet is the authoritative source of data on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). It exists due to the extensive efforts of governments and other stakeholders to map, monitor and report data on protected areas and OECMs. Through the Protected Planet website, users can explore the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), World Database on OECMs, Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness (GD-PAME), and a wealth of associated information. Protected Planet enables a spectrum of users to access data for information-based decision making, policy development, and business and conservation planning. Businesses in a range of sectors including mining, oil and gas, and finance use the WDPA and associated databases to identify the biodiversity risks and opportunities of a given project.” Whilst this is primarily of use and interest to people working in conservation (or, alternatively, in industries which are very much the opposite of conservation but which need to pay attention to it), it’s also just generally fascinating to browse around the world and see where the largest concentration of protected areas is – who knew Estonia was such a hotbed of natural conservation? EVERYONE TO TALLINN!
  • Study Hall: This is an interesting idea, and something that feels very much like ‘the shape of things to come’. YouTube recently launched this new educational initiative which, in partnership with Arizona State University, will make actual proper college (University)-level courses available on the platform, courses which will be valid for actual, proper college (university) credits. There’s a fee, but it is SMALL compared to what you would pay through other institutions, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than A Good Thing, democratising access to education and creating a genuinely new path into the college (University) system for people who might otherwise have struggled to access it. It’s interesting that online education hasn’t really progressed that much since the early boom days of the Khan Academy and other such early-web-2 poster children, but perhaps this integration of online resources and the creation of truly transferable remote syllabi will accelerate change from hereon in.
  • Anne of Green Gables: I can’t pretend that Anne of Green Gables ever meant anything to me growing up, but I’m aware that for some of you it was probably a SEMINAL CHILDHOOD TEXT and the mere mention of its title unlocks some sort of Proustian memorytrain within you. It is for YOU, then (yes YOU), that I present this website which offers a properly-deep exploration of the original manuscript drafted by LM Montgomery with notes and annotations and explanations – there’s something lovely about the fact that the site allows you to read the whole book should you so choose, presenting the digitised manuscript pages alongside the more readable text (the digitisation also let you explore old photographs and features all sorts of pleasing additional bits of information about the author, her family, the cultural milieu in which she was writing, etc), and, honestly, this is pretty much perfect as a way of presenting a manuscript imho.
  • Roast Dating: I remain staggered that there hasn’t been more made of the way AI (specifically text AI) is going to mess with dating – or, frankly, that I haven’t found more services springing up that offer to let the machine Cyrano your way into someone’s pants (again, journalists, this one is a total open goal for mid-markets and right-wing broadsheets). Still, here’s one! Roast is a FULL SUITE of AI tools which promises to punch up your profile pics and improve your pulling power, based on what the company claims is analysis of THOUSANDS of dating profiles to determine how best to be successful on the apps (the answer, I think, as has been repeatedly proven, is to be very, very good-looking) – whilst I firmly believe that this is total and utter post-PUA bullsh1t, I will (quietly, reluctantly) applaud the way they are positioning this as ‘using science and data to improve your chances’ rather than ‘just outsource the emotional labour of attempting to get to know another human being to determine whether or not you might be emotionally compatible to a machine’, which, to be clear, is exactly what this is. If Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and the rest aren’t already working on in-app tools to detect AI-generated copy in messages then I would be amazed.
  • Plastic Free: I go slightly annoyed by the copy on this site, which seems to be doing its best to obscure what the actual fcuk this is meant to be. “We are an army of experts — material scientists, system changers, innovators, impact measurers, creators, builders, artisans — united in a shared mission to ignite and inspire the world to turn off the plastic tap.” WELL BULLY FOR YOU. This is particularly irritating, because what this ACTUALLY seems to be is in fact quite useful – basically this site aggregates all sorts of news and science updates about ways in which designers and manufacturers and makers around the world are creating things in less-plastic-reliant ways. So, for example, you can find information on new materials  being developed to create soles for shoes without plastics, or new grasses being engineered which it is hoped will be able to replace nylons in time – it’s all very much on the consumer-y end of things, and if I’m being cynical it strikes me that this is basically a one-stop-shop for the next time you need to spend six minutes filling in the ‘CSR Ideas’ portion of the pitch, but, equally, there’s loads of information in here which could be put to good use (although, admittedly, probably not by any of us advermarketingprcunts).
  • SuperBad: Via the ever-charming Naive comes this entirely-baffling web project. I have no idea whatsoever is going on here, or what the point of it is (should there be one), or who made it, and I can’t categorically promise you that it doesn’t potentially lead somewhere terrible and wrong (but, er, it probably doesn’t) – SuperBad is…look, it’s an incomprehensible mess, frankly, of lo-fi webart and partial html and broken links and dead ends and non-sequiturs and it is BRILLIANT and baffling and utterly mystifying, and I spent a good 40 minutes clicking and playing and didn’t even come close to scrying what this was for or where the edge of it are, or whether it even HAS edges, and honestly this might be my favourite thing of the week.
  • Time My Meeting: Would you like a handy tool with which to demonstrate exactly what a futile waste of time the vast majority of your work meetings are? YOU’RE WELCOME! Start the timer on this website when you’re meeting kicks off, stop it when it ends, and you’ll be able to tell people ‘well, that meeting was longer than the inaugural time taken to complete the marathon in the modern olympiad!’, and your colleagues will all hate you just that little bit more. Which is almost certainly what you were hoping to get out of Curios today, so, well, you’re welcome again!
  • The Pr0nhub 2022 Year in Review: I have long contended that Pr0nhub’s annual data drop about the content consumption habits of visitors to its site is THE most interesting and revealing document published each year about Where We Are as a species (‘nowhere good’, is the generalised answer). I am a little late to this this time around, but I was glad to find that the drop doesn’t disappoint – you will of course fund your own nuggets of interesting in here, but, personally-speaking, I am most curious about the rise of ‘hentai’ as a popular category around the world (why are we increasingly masturbating to cartoons? WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT US?), curious about the rise in popularity of trans-related content (this doesn’t strike me as a particularly positive thing when it comes to seeing trans people as people rather than sexual curios), and utterly baffled as to why so many people in Australia were searching for ‘two vagina sex’ (can any Australians explain this, please?). This is the Big Data we really deserve.
  • This Is Not Word: Make beautiful patterns with words as you type. This is a small, frivolous toything, but I would really really like the ability to activate this mode in GDocs (should anyone from Google be reading this and feel like acceding to the unreasonable demands of some webmong).
  • It’s Funny How The Knight Moves: This made me feel quite stupid quite quickly, but is equally the sort of thing that I imagine many of you (the ‘shape rotators’ amongst you, to exhume a now-already-antediluvian-feeling conversation from about a year ago) will find scratches a very particular brain-itch in quite a pleasing fashion. Can YOU make the knight touch every square on the board that doesn’t see it either put in check by the queen or taking the queen? Maybe you can, but fcuk me was it beyond my limited intellectual capabilities.
  • UFO Clicker: A clicker game that only lasts about 15 minutes rather than taking over your life like some sort of low-level meth! This involves hoovering up tiny little humans with spaceships, and is very satisfying indeed should you be in the market for something to waste away the working day.
  • Chronophoto: Ooh, this is fun and VERY addictive. You get shown a series of photos, and the game is to guess exactly when each was taken – this is great, and aside from anything else is a very good way of learning about subtle aesthetic differences between eras that are largely thought of as culturally/aesthetically homogenous (cf ‘the 90s’).
  • Die In The Dungeon: Final link of the miscellanea this week and WOW is it a good one – Die In The Dungeon is the demo of a forthcoming full game, playable in-browser, in which you seek to get your little warrior frog creature through 25 levels of fighting monsters with dice. Which, fine, may not sound like fun, but I have played the SH1T out of this this week, in a way which I haven’t done with one of these since the Vampire Survivors demo a year or so back (and that ended up being one of the biggest games of 2022) and which possibly indicates that this one is a bit special. Give it a go, I promise it’s LOADS of fun (also, the frog is very cute) – drag the dice onto the grid to play, you’ll pick it up as you go along.

By Maisie Cowell

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF SLIGHTLY-LOUNGEY ELECTRO MIXED BY THE QUITE-FANTASTICALLY-NAMED LOVE APE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Immerseology: Look, I know this isn’t a Tumblr but frankly I continue to struggle to find anything to put in here but I am so pathetically change averse that even the thought of altering one of the sections of Curios after all these years brings me out in slight cold sweats. Anyway, tedious taxonomical questions that literally noone other than me cares about aside, this is a really interesting website which focuses on the practice of immersive theatre: “Immersology studies the emerging genre of immersive theatre from the creator’s point of view. It offers theories, structures, design struggles, practicals, and other meta-level musings.” Even if you don’t have anything to do with theatre (immersive or otherwise), I’d argue that this is an interesting and worthwhile place to explore – some of the stuff they write about experience design is, I think, applicable across a range of other disciplines and media.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • The Anonymous Photo Project: Found photos, basically – but good ones. “In 2017 when filmmaker lee shulman bought a random box of vintage slides he fell completely in love with the people and stories he discovered in these unique windows in to our past lives. Collecting and preserving unique colour slides from the last 70 years, the project was  born out of a desire to preserve this collective memory and give a second life to the people often forgotten in these timeless moments captured in stunning kodachrome colour.” These are great, and you can find more (and more information) at this website.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Hyperconnected Culture and its Disconnects: It does very much feel that there’s a reckoning coming to the idea of The Creator Economy(™), one based on the fact that, in the main, it appears everyone has realised that many of the base-level assumptions underpinning it were, to put it politely, utter fcuking bullshit. This is a very good essay by Rogers Brubaker which examines some of the reasons why that might be the case, specifically looking at the degree to which both the production, consumption and circulation of content can be said to have been ‘democratised’ in any meaningful sense; Brubaker concludes that whilst production has been, circulation (the most crucial component of something achieving widespread resonance and relevance, and in allowing people to earn from their creation) has very much not, and that the disconnect between these two things has prevented the ‘creator economy’ from taking off in any meaningful way, and that algorithms are in a way set to exacerbate this state of affairs: “For most, the pleasures of digital cultural consumption are uncoupled from the exertions of curatorship. Today’s digital consumers are no longer being fed a limited diet of standardized cultural products, but they are still being fed. Consumption may be personalized, but it would be a stretch, in most cases, to call it self-directed — and it is not necessarily more active than pre-digital forms of “mass” cultural consumption. Even Yochai Benkler, an enthusiastic proponent of participatory digital culture, felt obliged to acknowledge the continued “prevalence of the culture of passive consumption.””.
  • Seven Questions To Ask About AI: I know that Curios has been very AI-heavy of late (for which continued apologies), but it really is SO interesting to consider how these technologies might develop or be used in the short-to-medium term (the long-term is simply too wildly unpredictable to speculate upon imho). What I am finding particularly interesting is the (somewhat reassuring) extent to which none of the stuff I have seen over the past few months is QUITE up to the task of replacing people yet (leaving aside image generators and illustrators, which, fine, a BIT), and the degree to which society is embracing the centaur-like possibilities of the tech – but also the slight feeling that what we’re getting excited about now is the bullsh1t, idiot’s version of this and we’re a couple of iterations away from the REAL gamechangey stuff (fwiw I am increasingly coming around to this point of view). Anyway, this is a decent essay and set of questions/considerations by Max Read, which is very much worth reading if you want a set of lenses through which to consider the current AI hypewagon.
  • Misinformation and the Web: This is aq conversation between Peter Kafka and Facebook’s former head of product security Alex Stamos, which ranges across a variety of topics but which is mostly concerned with asking the question ‘are we too worried about online misinformation and the impact it might have on society?’ – you may be unsurprised to learn that Stamos’ opinion is very much ‘yes, yes we are’. He makes some good points – on Trump, for example, he points out that the volume of content generated about the man during the 2015 election campaign and his tenure as President was such that any attempt at content-based manipulation via misinformation was doomed to failure simply by dint of being at most 0.001% of the conversation – but, equally, seems curiously blind on other issues (for example – even if that’s only 0.001%of the content, if you can make influential people see it and believe it and act on it, then it doesn’t really matter does it? And why is it preposterous, as Stamos seems to assert here, for private companies to seek to act in ways that are of broad benefit to humanity?), but in general this is an interesting discussion on a topic which continues to be of fairly massive significance.
  • Why We’re Still Waiting for VR: This is VERY LONG, but if you’re interested in reading a reasonably clear-eyed analysis of why it is that we’re not yet all using VR headsets at home and at work, and why AR continues to be little more than a gimmick despite the fact that people have been trying to sell it to us as THE NEXT THING COMING RIGHT NOW HONEST GUV for literally 15 years now, all written by someone who would probably admit that they have been a reasonably big cheerleader on all this stuff for a while, then this piece by Matthew Ball (the VC guy who got famous by writing loads of (mostly quite smart if inevitably-hyperbolic) stuff about the metaverse) might be of interest. If nothing else, Ball does a really good job of explaining all the technical reasons why VR/AR/XR at scale is challenging – the whole question of ‘a near infinite number of variables when it comes to the user experience of AR based on device, location, time of day, etc’ is obvious when you think about it, for example, but had literally never occurred to me til I read this – and I thought his conclusions towards the end of the piece about what this could mean for the practical development of whatever the fcuk we mean today when we use the word ‘metaverse’ were interesting and novel.
  • Working In VR: A nice companion piece to the previous article, this piece in Slate describes the current experience of actually trying to do your job in Horizon Workrooms and contains an unusually-honest appraisal of ‘what it actually is that the innovation labs of places like Accenture actually do’ which is, it turns out, ‘act as the sales arms for whatever new software or hardware tech is being peddled by the big boys as the MUST-HAVE transformative solution du jour, regardless of whether or not it actually makes sense for the client’. Anyway, you may not be surprised to learn that working in VR sounds absolutely fcuking awful in every way – if you see the consultants entering your building with headsets, RUN FOR THE HILLS.
  • Ensh1ttification: You have probably seen this doing the rounds this week, if you’ve not read it already – Cory Doctorow writes on the ‘ensh1ttification’ of platforms in the modern internet era, and how it is happening to TikTok in the same way that it has happened to Facebook, and Instagram, and Amazon, and a whole host of other properties and places that used to be good, useful and/or fun places to hang out online, but which, through a combination of VC-led MUST GROW mindset and the simple nature of capitalism in general, have gradually shifted to become places that deliver minimal (if any) value to the user whilst maximising their ability to monetise you at every turn. None of this is new, and the arguments at the centre of this are ones that Doctorow’s been making in various places for years, but this is a cogent explanation of the general thesis and it’s hard to argue with the central thesis, restated at the article’s close, that  “For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The ensh1ttification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.”
  • The AI Plagiarism Problem at CNET: If you want a neat example of the whole ‘Maybe this AI stuff isn’t quite good enough to replace us all just yet’ argument, witness the mess at CNET this week – in the space of a few short days we’ve gone from ‘CNET uses AI to write articles’ to ‘CNET’s AI articles actually contain quite a lot of factual errors, maybe the machines are actually just dumb’, to ‘CNET’s AI articles appear to contain quite a lot of actual plagiarism’. Again, this isn’t to say that AI-generated clickbait or SEO fodder isn’t the (miserable, beige) future, more that that future isn’t quite here yet. By the way, if you’re currently working for an employer that you really hate and are leaving soon, why not see if you can spend the final few weeks of your professional tenure persuading your paymasters that they should outsource their entire content strategy to AI and to hell with the guardrails? I imagine it probably wouldn’t be that hard, and the consequences are potentially VERY FUNNY (and financially ruinous).
  • Teaching With ChatGPT: After the initial spate of ‘THIS IS THE END OF HOMEWORK AS WE KNOW IT!!!’ apocalyptoheadlines which followed the launch of ChatGPT, it’s been interesting to see various educators attempting to argue that in fact the technology is a huge boon to the classroom rather than some sort of existential threat to the teaching profession. This is one such piece, in which Thomas Rid writes of his experience taking a class in Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering which the teacher explicitly decided to ‘co-teach’ with ChatGPT – there’s a lot of really interesting use-case examples in here, and the idea of using the software as a silent teaching assistant to answer questions without disrupting the flow of class was fascinating…but, equally, this falls into the same trap as many of these pieces which tend to be written by high-functioning computing studies students who don’t seem to understand that a) there are subjects that are taught differently and which wouldn’t necessarily benefit in the same way from these techniques; b) focusing your thinking on how the best and most intelligent/creative students can make use of this technology is all well and good, but, bluntly speaking, you’d think it would make more sense to workshop how the people in the bottom quartile are going to use this stuff because that’s where the marginal gains are set to be significantly greater. Still, if you’re an educator or interested in the field, this is an interesting and thought-provoking read.
  • How The Young Spend Their Money: If you’re the sort of person who needs to know all about CONSUMER TRENDS and GenZ spending habits, this piece in the Economist will contain little new; if you’re more of a generalist, though, this is a useful read which contains a bunch of helpful datapoints and statistics and which will hopefully mean you never, ever have to see another slide which contains a variant on ‘Young People Value Experiences Over Possessions!’.
  • Trailerisation: Or ‘imagine how cool it would be if your job was remixing or reimagining popular tracks for use specifically in film trailers’ – the answer is it would be very cool indeed. This is a really interesting article that touches on all sorts of modern trends and themes – digital creation, the shifting way in which we expect stories to be told in multimedia, the fact that the concept of ‘selling out’ is deader than the proverbial dodo…”in contemporary trailers, omniscient narration has largely disappeared (that means no more hackneyed “In a world …” setups) and there’s less dialogue from the film. Trailers “can be more impressionistic and elliptical in their storytelling,” he said. “It’s more about creating a feeling in a lot of the work.” As a result, the trailer’s soundtrack has become increasingly crucial. “Music is sometimes 80 to 90 percent of the process to us,” Woollen said. “It’s trying to cast that right piece of music that’s going to inspire and dictate rhythm and set tone and inform character and story, and hopefully make an impression.”” Again, this is perhaps an interesting piece to bear in mind should you feel the need to persuade your creative director that actually maybe you shouldn’t use AI to compose the soundtrack for the otherwise-beautifully-storyboarded mood film.
  • The Contagious Visual Blandness of Netflix: This, and the next piece, could just as well be titled ‘how the internet aesthetic escaped our phones and took over the world’. This article looks at the specific visual style that determines a ‘Netflix production’ (but, more accurately, is just a sort of general visual lingua franca de nos jours) and the odd flatness of seeing lighting schemes and colourpalettes that feel, like the web, placeless and every/nowhere, and COLD. Even in the mid-10s heyday of the ‘orange/taupe’ domination, things seen onscreen never felt quite so…mechanical and precise as they seem to now.
  • Shoppy Shops: Or ‘on the visual homogeneity of modern lifestyle-focused retail spaces and the slow continued breed of the Insta drop-shipping aesthetic into real life’ – or, ‘this is what the world will look like when our only shared collective reference point as a species is the vague, 2d aesthetic of browser-based HTML and Javascript’. It feels like, just maybe, we need a new punk movement as an antidote to…this stuff.
  • Death In The Metaverse: Whilst, obviously, it’s fun to make fun of the ‘m’ word, it’s also important to remember that there are a lot of obvious benefits to improving the quality of interactions between people in virtual space, and there are a host of potential positives to allowing people to have semi-embodied experiences at distance. I thought this piece, about communities of grief which have begun to be established in virtual spaces such as VRChat and how they are being used to help people process feelings of loss in a safe, communal space with others in a similar position, was an excellent overview both of the benefits of this sort of tech for specific, niche need cases but also of the specific therapeutic uses that it can be put to which we’re only now beginning to scratch the surface of. Although part of me did think whilst reading this ‘So the metaverse is Forums but with avatars, then?’, which perhaps wasn’t the intended takeaway. Still, I think that this is a useful piece to read if you want to be reminded of all the interesting and helpful and human ways in which you could consider using this tech, rather than simply focusing on the frankly miserable commercial usecases.
  • How Battle Royale Took Over Gaming: This is a GREAT read, looking at the cultural throughline that takes us from the film, released in 2000, and Fortnite, and latterly COD, and how that single pulpy concept ushered in what has been one of the most influential design trends in modern entertainment. This is particularly  interesting if you’re a gamer, but there’s a lot to like in here if you’re simply interested in cultural transmission or even design – there’s a lot of interesting stuff about how PUBG (the original title to properly put the genre on the map) worked to keep the player experience interesting, which I think (as ever with this stuff) is interesting and applicable in a range of different areas.
  • On Harry’s Book: I imagine that most of you have Opinions about all the most recent royal revelations and the subsequent media furore – whatever those Opinions may be, you will probably enjoy Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB writing about Harry’s memoir. It’s a pretty charitable reading overall, compared to some others I’ve read, but also contains some rather brilliant lines – it’s all eminently readable, but this excellent paragraph gives a nice flavour: “Prince Harry has never read a book in his life, so his ghost writer, J.R. Moehringer, invites a round of applause every time he goes all Sartre or Faulkner. The latter provides this volume’s epigraph, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ which Harry reveals he found on some brainy quote site on the web (‘Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?’). It’s quite thrilling, Harry as existentialist philosopher, and I was especially pleased with his Heidegger-like handling of the principal problems of time. ‘Could there really be Nothing after this?’ the homework-shy scrum-half writes. ‘Does consciousness, like time, have a stop?’ Such thoughts bring him closer to his mother. ‘Thinking Harry’ is now surrounded by the postcolonial writers we saw on his Netflix series, who are pushing him to enact his fantasy of being a standard-bearer for reformed racists turned brand ambassadors for what is right, what is fair and being Really Sorry about the Past.”
  • The Climbing Influencer: This is a SUPERB bit of profile writing in GQ, in which Grayson Schaffer spends time hanging out with Nims Purja, a name previously unknown to me but who is, it seems, legendary in mountaineering circles both for being a Very Good Climber but also for being someone who, it’s fair to say, enjoys fame and its trappings and rather enjoys the whole brand-and-imagebuilding part of his lifestyle, and who is singlehandedly (at least according to this piece) bringing a bit of Insta/TikTok friendly ‘athlete bro culture’ to summitting Everest. Honestly, this really is an object lesson in how to write one of these – Nims is presented pretty neutrally, on balance, coming across as a driven, talented, superhumanly fit narcissistic sociopath with a God complex, but there’s also a lot of interesting stuff in there about the extent to which Sherpas have traditionally been marginalised when it comes to the climbing industry, working in service of (mostly Western) others, and how Nims’ work is, whilst obviously making him an absolute superstar, also elevating other Sherpas in their own right and creating a more diversified culture around the sport. This is pretty kilometric, be warned, but it’s also very readable and a lot of fun.
  • Two Immigrants: I really enojyed this short essay by Ajay Makan about his experience of moving to Portugal as a British-Asian immigrant, and the weirdness of being two sorts of outsider at once; you might too,
  • In Defence of Mean Girls: A SUPERB piece of writing, this one, about the particularly intense quality of friendship forged between girls at an all-girls school – now obviously I have no personal experience of this so can’t vouch for the veracity of what’s described here, but this is powerfully evocative of a specific part of adolescence, when your tribe is everything and your world simultaneously vast and microscopic in scope.
  • Dissolution Foretold: Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, author of some truly incredible writing about surgery and the brain, talks about what it feels like to know that you are decaying and dying, what it is like to see the evidence and be confronted by the reality of your own senescence and imminent demise. It’s…it’s not an easy read, or at least it isn’t for me – in common with much writing of this type, I can marvel at the control and clarity of the prose whilst also having to fight quite hard to stave off the low-grade feelings of nausea and body horror that assail me when I read things about how we’re ambulant lumps of meat and electricity – but as a clear-eyed account of what it is like to look your own mortality right in the face it is a very, very good one.
  • 100 Punchlines To Procrastinate Kicking Your Bucket: Finally this week, this is…what is this? A poem of sorts, I suppose, composed from 100 aphoristic phrases about how there’s always more to live for, which manages to be darkly ironic and oddly-inspirational at the same time, and which I have found myself reading three or four times this week which suggests that perhaps it’s rather good. Hope you like it.

By Shusaku Takaoka

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 20/01/23

Reading Time: 30 minutes

Jesus, it’s COLD, isn’t it? Did I used to put up with this every January? Fcuk knows how. Basically I haven’t felt temperatures like this for two years and I DO NOT LIKE IT.

I am running a bit late today – possibly due to the icy cold making it increasingly hard for me to move my fingers to type – and as such will keep the intro to a minimum (you could at least pretend to be sad ffs), but not before saying thanks to all of you who wrote nice things about the cat last week, it was very much appreciated.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope you feel levelled up.

By Julie Hrudova

THE MIXES THIS WEEK BEGIN WITH 45 MINUTES OF PLEASING SOUL SOUNDS FROM THE VINYL COLLECTION OF TOM SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR KATY, DESPITE THE SIGNET RING, PT.1:

  • An Actual Advert Using That Cool AI Video Tech From Curios A Few Months Back: Yes, ok, fine, it’s not the most compelling opening link description I’ve ever penned – BUT! This is interesting! Honest! You will doubtless recall a link from before Christmas which demonstrated a quietly-amazing new AI-enabled technique for filming scenes which basically (ok, VERY basically) involves scanning a scene using a camera and then being able to manipulate said scene within virtual 3d space, effectively creating a navigable digital diorama that you film within…look, here’s the original link, click it and see if it makes more sense than this increasingly-garbled explanation, and if you’re interested you can read some Tweets from the ad’s director about How It Works here. Anyway, this tech has now been used in an ACTUAL TV AD for McDonald’s – the ad itself isn’t super-exciting, but I am struck by the pace of this – two months from ‘speculative tech floating around Twitter’ to ‘featured in an actual campaign for one of the world’s biggest brands’. The reason I’m including this is just to point out that all of the things you see in Curios are real and potentially practically useful – so, effectively, to make myself feel marginally more purposeful than I ordinarily do at 7:03am on a Friday morning. Is it working? Not sure, I’ll let you know.
  • A Short AI Batman Film: I do not care about Batman, and, if I’m entirely honest, I don’t think human society ever needs to hear another story about a tortured billionaire and his fetishes. Still, this little video is all sorts of impressive – it’s (basically) all AI-generated, having been cobbled together with a bunch of disparate free tools. The link takes you to a Twitter thread featuring the video and its creator’s explanation of the steps they took to make it – again, this is included less because it’s a revolutionary take on the pointy-eared rubber enthusiast and more because it’s a neat object-lesson in how all the fun new toys that have cropped up over the past year or so can be linked to make things that are very much greater than the sum of their parts. Oh, and seeing as we’re doing ‘how to use this stuff to make videos’, here’s another short Twitter thread about how you can use a similar toolstack to make animated talking head videos – honestly, this is practically magic.
  • AllSearch: There’s been a lot of talk about whether ChatGPT will replace Google, to which the only reasonable response is ‘Jesus, I hope not, have you tried using the fcuking thing?’ – still, it’s clear that with the integration of the software into Bing we are moving into some sort of NEW ERA of search (one which, oddly, will feel strangely familiar to anyone who grew up with Ask Jeeves and remembers the disappointment when you realised that the software couldn’t actually understand human language at all, and the strange frisson of asking the digital butler if, not to put too fine a point on it, he fcuked), one where we’ll expect to be able to converse and ask questions of a semi-coherent digital interlocutor and refine our search by asking questions rather than simply attempting another combination of keywords. AllSearch is an interesting example of how stuff might end up working – it’s been trained on a large corpus of books (it doesn’t say where from, or which ones, unhelpfully), and lets users ask questions of its knowledgebase – results are returned both in an AI-generated summary and with a series of links to references that the software has used to come up with its answer, meaning you can (to an extent) check the machine’s reasoning before blithely accepting its confident assertions. I tried this with a few philosophical principles and it was…pretty good! Except, obviously, without knowing what the sources are, where they were compiled from and who by, it still doesn’t solve the problem of ‘is this info legit? Is it objective? IS THERE AN AGENDA???’ which, as we’re going to learn quite quickly, are going to become questions we’re even less well-equipped to answer than we currently are.
  • Magic Thumbnails: In the great ‘AI is coming for our jobs!’ panic, I confess that I hadn’t for a second spared a thought for the army of kids that Mr Beast employs to work on his YouTube thumbnails – turns out, though, that they are as fcuked by the coming future as the rest of us are! Sorry, army of thumbnail kids! Magic Thumbnails lets you define what you want the thumbnail to be of, add an image of your INCREDIBLY EXCITED FACE, add some copy and BOOM!, all your dreams come true (presuming, of course, your dreams have relatively modest parameters).
  • InstaNovel: I imagine that at least one of you reading this has made 2023 The Year In Which I Finally Start/Finish That Fcuking Novel – good luck! I believe in you! Just in case there’s any part of you which worries that the machines are soon going to render good, old-fashioned human storytelling otiose, you may find this website comforting. InstaNovel promises to create a BESPOKE, ILLUSTRATED STORY for you based on just a few short prompts – you enter the rough plot beats you want the story to follow, give the site an email address, and WAIT. 24hish-hours later you’ll receive a link to your VERY OWN tale, penned by GPT-3 and illustrated by Dall-E and lovingly paginated JUST FOR YOU! And, well, it will be rubbish. Really, really bad – the sort of thing you might half-remember writing when you were about 9, when you started with grandiose ambitions of writing something like The Hobbit or The Dark is Rising until you realised halfway through your third paragraph that writing a book is LONG and HARD and probably too much effort tbh. I am not ragging on the machines here – they are young! They will get better! We are still, in the long run, going to be rendered redundant! – but it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that the vast majority of copy and visuals produced by AI are still, frankly, crap. Let’s see if I’m still saying that in 2024, though.
  • QuizGrowth: “Turn your content into exciting quizzes thanks to the POWER OF AI!” is the basic elevator pitch here – and yes, I know that this isn’t exactly exciting, and the look and feel of this is…functional at best, but THAT’S NOT THE POINT. The point (ahem) is ‘stuff you can do with GPT which you may not even have thought of, even if it is, admittedly, a bit boring’. If nothing else, any of you working in HR can basically outsource all your onboarding materials development to this and fcuk off to the pub.
  • Historical Figures Chat: This started floating around last week but I couldn’t find the download link – now, though, I am pleased to offer you the opportunity to download the personalities of 20,000-odd historical figures to your phone so that you can converse with them to your heart’s content! Obviously that’s not what is ACTUALLY going on here (unless, of course, the developer really does have access to the departed souls of a host of history’s notables, in which case there’s probably a bigger story here) – instead, this is (as far as I can guess) a series of pre-written prompts to get an LLM to ‘converse in the style of’ Jesus, Hitler, Mata Hari or Vivienne Westwood, with a nice, user-friendly front-end. This is both fun – who wouldn’t want to set up a groupchat involving Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe and Sappho? NO FCUKER, etc etc – and a little bit troubling, not least because this is quite obviously going to be used by kids for homework purposes and it, basically, lies a LOT. Ask any of the (many, many) Nazis available to chat with about their beliefs and you’ll find they are, perhaps surprisingly, a lot more moderate than history might suggest; a bunch of fairly notorious anti-semites and racists are miraculously cured of their hateful beliefs, and express a surprising degree of regret about the ways in which future generations have interpreted their words and their legacy…even Jimmy Savile (an…odd choice to include) issues a spirited denial of the crimes he’s accused of.  Without wishing to be apocalyptically hyperbolic (HEAVEN FORFEND!), it’s interesting to wonder about the degree to which we might be about to do significant and lasting damage to our species-wide knowledgebase in the coming few years, as we once again fcuk around with technology and information without really thinking too hard about the consequences. You can read more about this here, should you so desire – it really is quite the thing.
  • This Model Does Not Exist: This is a nice little project; This Model Does Not Exist is an experiment by Danny Postma, who has created ‘Alice’, a nonexistent human who exists in a particular bit of latent space and who Danny is creating new images of each day. Visitors to the website can vote for their favourite images, with the most popular being posted daily – you can see and follow Alice on Insta here. I’m curious as to what the endpoint of this is – whether Postma simply wants to see how many followers he can get, or whether there’s going to be some sort of narrative or deeper interaction to the project – but in the meantime it’s interesting to watch the occasional thirsty drivebys from men who haven’t clocked the intent behind the project. “Cute pic! But what happened to your leg?” reads one comment on a photo which includes a classically-AI-mangled limb, proving conclusively that even legs that look like giant, terrifying andouillettes aren’t enough to put off a horny man scrolling the ‘gram.
  • Lenny’s Podcast Search: This is a demo by a company called Broadn, which has used its generative learning tech to create a search layer over the podcast archive of one Lenny Rachitsky, who apparently does a pod about product management. I couldn’t personally care less about product management (sorry Lenny!), but the idea (once again) of using a bunch of tools to create a semantic search layer over a corpus of content like this to make it more usable is smart; it feels like ‘natural language search for any website’ is a service layer which someone is probably working on RIGHT NOW (or which YOU should start working on right now! Go on! I HAVE FAITH IN YOU!). In fact, here’s someone who’s built something similar on top of their newsletter archive, and now all I want is for someone to cobble this together for Curios – PLEASE???
  • Bardeen: ‘AI tools as productivity aids’ is by far and away the least ‘sexy’ application of any of this stuff that it’s possible to think of – still, it’s also far more practically useful than the infinite number of ‘generate bad fantasy artwork at the press of a button!’ websites that have emerged in the past six months. Bardeen is a Chrome plugin which basically lets you set up a bunch of automated actions to save you time – so, for example, you can link it to all your Google Suite accounts to, say, create new meetings in your calendar when it detects specific terms in your emails, or to summarize any webpage in a single click and dump the resulting notes into a specific document, or even generate a speculative ‘can we hire you?’ email to someone in one click from their LinkedIn page. Which, yes, fine, is all DULL, but it all also seems to sort-of work; I have been playing with it a bit this week and it’s slightly-terrifying. It’s also pretty much entirely useless for the sort of work I do – and, again, this is less about the specific examples here and more about the general sense of possibility that this stuff gives me.
  • Can’t Do Hands: A Twitter account sharing images of all the ways in which AI image generators manage to mangle human fingers. It feels like there should be a specific phobic word for the fear and body horror engendered by the meaty wrongness of Dall-E and the rest; actually, there’s a half-decent PR idea in coining terms for feelings and thoughts that only make sense in a post-AI world, should anyone fancy exploring that for longer than the two seconds I have just spent doing so.
  • The Time Project: TIME! So significant! So important! So…so…so TEMPORAL! How do you think you might celebrate the nature of time were you the creative or digital director for renowned jewellers and watchmakers Cartier? Do you think you might, I don’t know, create something beautiful and spectacular and, er, timeless, a gorgeous monument to the duality of ephemerality and permanence that characterises human existence? Or do you think you would instead spaff the budget on commissioning a series of short films about time featuring Jake Gyllenhall? If you answered ‘GIVE ME JAKE OR GIVE ME DEATH’ then CONGRATULATIONS! This is AMAZING, and I would like to congratulate Mr Gyllenhall (and the guy credited with directing the shorts) for trousering what I presume was no little wedge in exchange for – and I can’t stress this enough – what appears to be no more than approximately 60 seconds or so of acting time. When they say ‘short films’, you see, they aren’t lying – each is approximately 5s long, and they are in slomo, and they feature such incredible scenes as ‘Jake Gyllenhall reading a book and looking handsome’ and ‘Jake Gyllenhall laughing and looking handsome’ and ‘Jake Gyllenhall moving chess pieces and looking handsome AND smart’. Do you remember when BMW commissioned that internet-only short film with Clive Owen to advertise its cars in the mid-00s and everyone shat themselves at the creative audacity and boldness? Yeah, well this is where it’s led to, so I hope you’re happy Clive Owen.
  • Copy Dennis: This is fcuking GREAT – well done, Dennis! Dennis is a webdesigner/developer, who, in common with many others of his ilk, has a personal website to advertise his work; Dennis noticed that there were a lot of other people around the world who seemed to have taken…inspiration, let’s say, from his site’s design, often to the point of ripping it off wholesale. So Dennis launched this new site in response, which neatly highlights all the other people who have coincidentally-similar online presences and which gives each of them a percentage score based on the degree to which they have just lifted the theme. Amusingly this site also tracks whether the sites in question are still online, or whether their creators have taken them down out of what I presume is crippling shame – this is SUPERB snark, and I would like to see more of this sort of thing in 2023 please.
  • Galaxy of Flesh: Another ‘films that never existed, imagined by AI’ – this time, enjoy this selection of fantastic stills from David Cronengerg’s ‘Galaxy of Flesh’, an unpleasantly-meaty space-horror extravaganza with some BEAUTIFUL costume and FX design, and which I would very much like to see one day.

By Carla Cascale Alimbau

NEXT UP, ENJOY A SELECTION OF BRAND NEW GRIME TRACKS MIXED BY JI! 

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR KATY, DESPITE THE SIGNET RING, PT.2:  

  • Slums: Maths made beautiful. Slums is a gorgeous little bit of webart – a series of procedurally-generated alienfutureurban landscapes which you can watch grow and develop in your browser. Odd, shadowy spacecraft glide past and the slums and the buildings and the towers grow up as you watch, gradually obscuring the sky until you hit any key and begin an entirely new seed. There’s some gentle audio here too – this very much falls under the heading of ‘oddly-meditative digital experiences which I would totally sit and zone out to in a gallery given half the chance (especially if they have the heating on)’, and I think it would benefit from being thrown onto the biggest screen you have access to.
  • Written In Stone: I was not aware that people ‘signed’ pavements, but it turns out that they do – Written In Stone is a site which collects images of pavements from the US which have been stamped with the seal of the companies that laid them. Which, yes, fine, isn’t exactly a description to get the blood racing; equally, though, I quite like the idea that these (presumably) small, family-owned businesses are in a minor way forever immortalised in a city’s fabric, and it made me wonder whether there are more ways in which cities could work to permanently commemorate the people who build and maintain them in (there are, lots).
  • Tame: You’d think that after…how long is it since Tinder changed the way in which people date? A decade? Jesus, I just checked and it’s 11 years, MY GOD! Anyway, you’d think that after 11 years we’d have largely exhausted all the variants on the simple ‘use technology to find local people to put inside you’ premise, but here we are in 2023 and STILL we are seeing new variations on the theme (perhaps unsurprisingly, seeing as Tinder appears to have ushered in a world in which dating doesn’t really exist anymore, having been supplanted by the new, less-immediately-exciting-sounding hobby of ‘sitting alone in one’s room having a series of desultory conversations which all eventually peter out without ever actually seeing your interlocutor in the flesh’. 2023’s first new entrant into the market is Tame, whose BIG GIMMICK is that you can only have one conversation on the app at a time, meaning that rather than spreading your attention marmite-thin among 20-odd potential suitors you instead (so the thinking goes) go DEEP with one person and really get to know them; if you want to stop talking to them, you have to actively break the connection AND TELL THEM WHY, which, honestly, sounds fcuking BRUTAL but is, the app suggests, intended to stop people just ghosting each other and instead think more seriously about who they are talking to and why. Interestingly, once you’ve broken a chat you can NEVER match with that person ever again, which gives the whole thing an interestingly-high-stakes dynamic – WHAT IF THIS PERSON IS THE ONE??? Anyway, I don’t imagine for a second that this will take off in a big way, but it’s interesting to look at the ways in which people are attempting to de-Tinderify (yes, that is the accepted term) the process of finding someone to see out the apocalypse with.
  • DateForce: A website that is simultaneously a joke and also…real? DateForce is the answer to the question that, as far as I know, noone had ever previously wanted the answer to – to whit, ‘what would it look like if someone developed CRM software but for your dating life?’. It would, it turns out, look like this – a system to log your dates, set followup actions and, the site promises, eventually to be able to analyse the data you collect for forecasting purposes! Whilst on the one hand this is utterly sociopathic behaviour (look, sorry, but it is), it’s also the sort of thing I can imagine finding useful if you’re one of those terrifyingly-Alpha American people who go on five dates a night and need to keep track of which suitor was which. Still, just to remind you, there was someone who went a bit viral a decade or so ago when they revealed that they kept an ongoing spreadsheet of their friendships, ranking them based on a series of qualities including attractiveness, wealth, usefulness and the like – that person was Milo Yiannopoulos, and you don’t really want to be like him, do you?
  • Ruas Do Genero: The second website in the past year or so which analyses the naming of streets within a city; this project looks at the number of streets in Porto which are named after men compared to those named after women (you may not be wholly surprised to learn there is a disparity between the two), who these people were, and what the choice of streets tells you about relative gender roles in Portugal over the past couple of centuries. There’s some nice, light scrolly webwork on display, but more generally it’s just interesting to see how history and economics and politics (and gender politics) leave their mark on a city’s streets.
  • Wobble Clock: I know that pretty much every week here I feature a link followed by a desperate plea for someone to ‘make this for London’ or ‘make this for me’ (you may be interested to learn, by the way, that the total number of times anyone has ever gotten in touch to say ‘yes, Matt, we heard your plea and we WILL make that thing that you requested!’ is zero. You fcuks), but this time I really mean it. PLEASE will someone make this for me? The Wobble Clock is a clock whose hands have a quite delicious degree of tensility, and watching it move is possibly one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had all year (it’s early, but I’m already confident it’ll be hard to beat). Seriously, click the link and get mesmerised by the lovely, springy passing of time.
  • Make Your Own Electric Bike: Have you started the year with GRAND PLANS? Perhaps you’re considering finally doing something with that patch of scrubland at the end of the garden? Maybe you’re finally going to learn to code (TOO LATE)? Or are you desperately seeking some sort of meaningful endeavour for 2023, something to help you fill in the increasingly-chilly hours between birth and death, something to confer a bit of STRUCTURE and give you a GOAL, a reason to get up in the morning (do you think, maybe, that I am projecting a touch here? I think possibly I am)? If so, then do I have the 2023 project for you – BUILD YOUR OWN ELECTRIC BIKE OUT OF PLYWOOD (and a few other components)!! This link is actually a couple of years old, but I’ve no reason to think that anything described here will be out of date – it’s a series of detailed instructions, compiled by the nice-seeming Evie Bee, which if followed will result in you eventually having a rather gorgeous, minimal-but-functional wooden velocipede powered by an electric motor. Honestly, if you have a shed and a seemingly-infinite number of grey weekends stretching ahead of you (and, fine, a degree of practical competence of which I can only dream. And maybe a bandsaw, and a jigsaw, and definitely a workbench) then this could be the kickstart your year needs (the initial link is pt1 of the guide, by the way; you can find pt2 here).
  • Summer Afternoon: This is small, a bit pointless and utterly lovely – a bit of experimental coding by a certain Vicente, developed to practice their WebGL skills, which lets you wander around a small seaside village and explore what’s going on. Ok, fine, there’s not LOADS happening, but the aesthetic of the place here is just gorgeous, and the overall art style employed is lovely, and, whilst it is A N Other ‘virtual space within which to move an avatar’, it’s also SUCH a nice antidote to the spate of miserable, soulless corporate ‘metaverses’ of which we’ve seen far too many in the past 12 months. If you’re going to make me wander round a 3d environment for no good reason, can you at least make it a pleasingly-cute one like this? Thanks.
  • Bloggy Garden: Oh this is cute! “This is a garden of RSS feeds from a variety of sources. It’s updated every couple of days. Each feed is represented by its own shrub. To see just one feed at a time, click one of the moving shrubs. Enjoy exploring!” Serendipitous random discovery with a pleasingly-whimsical facade, pretty much a perfect website (based on the largely-arbitrary criteria I have just invented).
  • Magnetic Games: A YouTube channel dedicated to featuring magnets doing cool stuff – you may not think magnets are particularly interesting, but there was a programme on Radio4 yesterday afternoon that explored the science behind magnetism and which basically explained that they are effectively magic, so, actually, you are wrong (you can listen to the show here if you’re interested – it stuck in my mind not only because it was genuinely interesting, but also because it made repeated reference to the ICP song ‘Miracles’, for obvious reasons, and I can’t stress enough how pleasing it is to know that Insane Clown Posse are known to the serious folk over at Broadcasting House). Anyway, this is FULL of great videos of magnetic putty and ferrofluids and generally silly experiments, and if you have any sense of childlike wonder left within the shrivelled husk you call a self then you will enjoy this a lot I think.
  • Inegy: This is interesting, if incomplete – Inegy offers you a tool to see how your investment in a particular stock would have performed had you acted based on a set of specific rules. So, for example, if you had bought stock in company X every time it’s popularity on Reddit fell, or if you sold it when it trended up on Google, how would your £100 have fared? This FASCINATES me, and I rather like the idea of a system that would let me play a theoretical competitive game of ‘imaginary plutocrat’ with an investment portfolio and a series of ‘if x, then y’ rules. The gaps here are in the stocks tracked – it’s a VERY partial selection, which makes this less compelling than it might otherwise be – but there’s the faint idea of something genuinely interesting in this which might be worth playing around with.
  • The Dog Photography Awards: I am not really a dog person, sorry; I know, I know, man’s best friend, etc, but, well, they smell, and they need taking for walks, and, fundamentally, cats are better. Still, even I can appreciate the majesty of some of the hounds captured in this year’s selection of winners at the Dog Photography Awards (although personally speaking I am disappointed by the lack of Afghans). BONUS DOGS! This is a newsletter post compiling all of the top dogs of 2022, and whilst I wouldn’t ordinarily feature something quite so Hallmark, I equally appreciate that it’s January and it’s miserable and cold, and you could probably do with something to take the edge off.
  • The Floppy Museum: All of the information you could EVER possibly want about the history of the floppy disc, hosted on a website which is running off a 286 PC booted from…a floppy disc! Recursive and silly, but also sort of amazing that you can run a functional website on 40 year old tech like that.
  • Odeuropa: There are many reasons why Brexit was a fcuking stupid and miserable thing to do, but one of the things that genuinely saddens me more than almost anything else is the fact that in one idiotic swoop the UK removed itself from significant swathes of European scientific collaboration – which means that, as far as I can tell, we have no input into Odeuropa, “a European research project which bundles expertise in sensory mining and olfactory heritage…While museums are slowly discovering the power of multi-sensory presentations, we lack the scientific standards, tools, and data to effectively identify, consolidate, and promote the wide-ranging role scents and smelling have in our cultural heritage. For these reasons, olfactory heritage remains severely under-valued as a resource in both tangible and intangible cultural heritage contexts. Fortunately, some key prerequisites for addressing this problem are already in place. In recent years, European cultural heritage institutions have invested heavily in large-scale digitisation: we now hold a wealth of object, text and image data which can now be analysed using sophisticated computer science techniques. What remains missing is a broader awareness of the wealth of historical olfactory descriptions, experiences and memories contained within them. We recognize this as both a challenge and an opportunity. Odeuropa will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to cultural heritage text and image datasets spanning four centuries of European history, to identify and trace how ‘smell’ was expressed in different languages, with what places it was associated, what kinds of events and practices it characterised, and to what emotions it was linked.” Ok, so the website isn’t exactly thrilling (it is, er, an academic research project, after all), but this is SO interesting; I had honestly never even considered scent and smell as historical concepts worthy of study, but on reflection it makes all sorts of sense – if I happened to work for any luxe/perfume-y brands, I would be trying (and, inevitably, failing) to get them involved with this.
  • Nudl: Did you know that one of the most important things that a child can do to promote their healthy, positive development into adulthood is…keeping a diary? No, of course you didn’t, because that statement is patently stupid and wrong, and yet it’s exactly the line being punted by spectacularly-bougie stationery startup Nudl, which is trying to trick parents into buying a monthly diaries for their offspring (in case you’re interested, a whole year’s worth of diaries for a single child will set you back a cool £160ish, which feels…a lot). Why would you do this? WELL LET NUDL TELL YOU!: writing a diary (sorry, ‘journaling’, excuse me while I grind my teeth into nothingness in miserable frustration), provides kids with a “boost in mindfulness, memory and communication skills), scientific studies have also shown that reflection and journaling can lead to better sleep, more self-confidence, a stronger immune system and a higher IQ.” Hang on, what? A stronger immune system? Has…has this claim been fact-checked at all? Anyone interested in buying one of these for their family, please get in touch as I have some magic beans you may also be interested in.
  • MegaSociety: There are many, many spectacularly-embarrassing memories from my childhood that I have, for the most part, managed to stuff into a dusty, back-of-mind oubliette and which generally don’t escape – this site, though, sadly reminded me of that time when I was five and I decided I wanted to apply to Mensa (you cannot imagine the horrible hot flushes of shame I am currently experiencing, trust me; I was almost certainly exactly as awful a small child as that small vignette makes me out to be). I didn’t go through with the application for some reason – possibly because I wasn’t the sort of five year old who actually wanted to sit an hour-long assessment featuring logic puzzles in their spare time) – but was reminded of Mensa when I stumbled across the official home of the MEGASOCIETY (my caps), the world’s ULTRA-HIGH IQ SOCIETY! “The Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test of general intelligence credibly claimed to be able to discriminate at that level…The Society exists to facilitate interaction among its members and to assist them in gaining access to resources to accomplish their individual purposes” (that last line – a touch sinister, no?). If you’re interested in becoming a member (I won’t ask what ‘individual purposes’ you are pursuing) then you will have to take this test and then send your results to the Mega Society for marking – please do click the test link and have a look at the questions because they are HORRIBLE and made me feel like I have an IQ in double figures, and I would like you to feel the same way (also, if you click the link and realise that you can do all of the questions without breaking a sweat, please don’t tell me).
  • Write Max A Letter: A website that lets you write a letter to one Max Bittker. I don’t know who Max is, or why they might want to hear from you, but in case you fancy sending a small digital postcard to someone who otherwise has no idea you exist then, well, ENJOY!
  • 10 Typos: This is good fun – each day you’re tasked with identifying the 10 typos in the presented text as quickly as possible, which is both mildly-diverting and also excellent training should you want to start a short-lived career as a proofreader.
  • Hamster Invaders: Another silly little project by Matt Round – Space Invaders! With cartoon hamsters! And featuring the Hamster Dance song by the Cuban Brothers from back in the day! This is fun, even if that song makes me slightly queasy due to some associated memories from Those Times.
  • Grow Golf: This week’s final miscellaneous link is this rather fun golf game – see how many balls you can sink whilst at the same time cultivating a small garden. Look, I appreciate that that description will make no sense whatsoever, but I promise that the game is both intuitive and significantly more fun than that cack-penned writeup might suggest.

By Nigel van Wieck

 LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF “JAPANESE AND ASIA SELECTION FUSION, AMBIENT, SYNTH POP, JAZZ AND OBSCURE DISCO” MIXED BY THE FANTASTICALLY-NAMED BASTER JAZZSTER! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  •  Nude Robot: Impressive CG animation with a decently body-horror-ish theme (although that might just be my impression – regardless, there’s something unpleasantly…rubber/meat-y about a lot of this, which in case you’re wondering is very much intended as a compliment).
  • The Visual Dome: One of the interesting things about AI image generation is that odd sensation of finding a particular ‘place’ in latent space; a semi-coherent aesthetic that feels new and familiar at the same time, and which is defined enough to explore within. Which is exactly what The Visual Dome is – an Insta account (and, obvs, associated NFT sale – but let’s ignore that side of it) which posts images of a vaguely Wes Anderson-y 50s-ish retrofuture, which all inhabit the same sort of broad vibe…It feels like there is an interesting project somewhere in defining an AI aesthetic for a particular brand, but in general I am just sort of fascinated by projects like these that explore the margins of a visual style.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Umami: We start this week with something which, look, may well be total w4nk, but which I found interesting and thought-provoking and a potentially-useful way of framing much of contemporary consumer-facing culture over the past few years. The central concept here, as presented by the people behind creative agency Nemesis, is that there has been a common quality to popular experience and presentation over the past few years, here described as ‘umami’ but which might usefully be characterised as: “strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is”; “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be”; “This is both too much and not enough”; “I shouldn’t be here but i am”; “This could be anywhere but it’s here”” Honestly, I read this and suddenly realised that it was the best evocation of what ‘popular’ or ‘zeitgeist-y’ cultural products or experiences or trends have had in common for the past few years – whether or not you buy the ‘umami’ wrapper is up to you, but the central thesis here seems to me broadly sound, and it marks an interesting way to think about pop culture in the post-remix age (and a way of thinking about your own projects, potentially). Or, as I said, it might all just be total w4nk.
  • The Creative Underclass is Still Raging: Or ‘why the lie that is ‘The Creator Economy’ is bad for us and makes people miserable’ – Freddie de Boer writes here about the ways in which a significant swathe of the white-collar middle class feels bad about itself and angry at those it perceives to be leading the sort of ‘creative’ life that said white-collar middle class increasingly feels that it too should be entitled to, and if you don’t see a significant amount of yourself in this then, well, you’re a better person than I am, frankly: “we’ve created a culture where it’s widely understood that you can’t simply make enough money to live; you also have to be serving some higher calling or deeper need. I’ve written for years about the fact that we’ve built a society in which there are more ways to be a loser than a winner. Most people, certainly most college-educated upwardly mobile people who enjoyed active and pushy parents, feel the need to do more with their lives than to fill out TPS reports. This is as human and sympathetic desire as I can imagine. And at the same time I understand that there’s plainly a certain carrying capacity for employment in creative fields; we can’t sustain an all-podcasting economy, despite the efforts of an army of people. All of which is to say that life isn’t fair and the world is imperfect.”
  • How You Might Use GPT To Fcuk With People: Amongst all the froth and cant and rhetoric around AI and its uses and impact, I’ve been surprised at how few people seem to be speculating about all the amazing, fun ways in which you could possibly use the tech to make people’s lives incredibly awkward. It doesn’t, for example, strike me as inconceivable that one might be able to spin up a system that uses GPT to write an infinite number of complaint letters to a business on a particular issue, each worded slightly differently to mask their pro-forma nature, or to fake a letter-writing campaign to a specific MP or set of MPs from their constituents…At the very least, this could be a superb way of gumming up the wheels of a business, and at worst…well, let your imagination run riot! The actual title of this paper is “Forecasting potential misuses of language models for disinformation campaigns—and how to reduce risk” – the link takes you to a blogpost summary, but you can download the whole paper if you’re interested; it’s interesting both from a security and anti-misinformation point of view, but also as a source of ideas for ways in which you could abuse the tech in all sorts of nefarious ways. If you work in crisis management and your job is to scare clients into paying you a lot of money, this will be very useful indeed.
  • How Singapore Is Attempting To Govern AI: This is a bit dry, fine, but it’s an interesting look at how one country is attempting to put in place checks and balances to ensure that the use of artificial intelligence is at least to some extent governed by some consistent safeguarding principles. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, not least the idea of AI Verify which is a voluntary platform which “validates companies’ claims about their AI systems vis-à-vis a set of internationally accepted AI governance principles that countries coalesce around and on which Singapore’s AI governance initiatives also stand”, and it will be interesting to see which countries’ initiatives gain international traction in this space.
  • Journaling With GPT-3: If you saw the link earlier on for kids’ diary company Nudl and unaccountably weren’t tempted to shell out £13 on a notebook for your little darlings (WHY NOT IT WILL IMPROVE THEIR IMMUNE SYSTEM YOU ARE A FCUKING TERRIBLE PARENT), perhaps you’ll instead be tempted by this piece, which explains why it’s apparently AMAZING to use ChatGPT as a means of keeping a diary. To my mind this sounds an awful lot like that link from a few months back, in which someone wrote about using ChatGPT to talk with their childhood self – and, frankly, about as messed-up, but, well, you do you! Although, really, I can’t see how this sentence – “It can help you create a new narrative or storyline for life events so that you can make meaning out of them” – is anything other than massively psychologically unhealthy and probably not actually a good idea at all.
  • Return of the Secretary: I don’t know if I believe this, but it feels relevant to the earlier link about how LLMs could be used to fcuk with companies and MPs and the like – the article basically suggests that there will be a renewed role for human gatekeepers, as senior decisionmakers are increasingly bombarded with AI-generated communications and increasingly require someone to triage the incoming barrage of machine rubbish and determine what needs looking at and what can instead be binned. Personally-speaking, I think the author is massively underestimating the extent to which we’re going to see a parallel ecosystem of AI-led solutions to AI-created problems, but maybe he’s right and I can find a tertiary career as a plutocrat’s email goblin. THE FUTURE’S BRIGHT!
  • The Twitter Story So Far: I have sadly been forced to keep a close eye on Musk and Twitter and the whole miserable clownshow, but if you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to ignore much of the detail then you will quite possibly enjoy this excellent overview of the past few months at the company under Elon’s visionary leadership. Most of this isn’t new per se, but there are some wonderful details contained within the piece – the rudeness! The arrogance! The tears! – and it does nothing to alter the increasingly-universal conception that, rather than being a generational genius visionary, Musk is in fact just a bit of a d1ck.
  • 2023 In Emoji: The first post of the year from Jennifer Daniel at the Unicode Consortium, which looks at the priorities for the organisation in the coming 12 months; despite the fact that, in the main, I fcuking hate emoji and have been hugely sniffy about them (like the horrible language snob I am) for the past decade, I find Daniels’ posts about the thinking behind them absolutely fascinating. Emoji is a language which has now been around long enough to reach a degree of maturity, and the questions that Unicode ask about how best to optimise the ‘alphabet’ (if you will) and to improve the taxonomy of emoji, and how to ensure that the language stays reactive and fluid and relevant and useful, are super-interesting, particularly if you have any interest in language and communication. Aside from anything else, this is a really interesting piece of writing about ‘ways of thinking about language and meaning’, which in itself is a massive and knotty and super-chewy topic.
  • A Wired Compendium: This is SO INTERESTING. WIRED magazine has been confidently predicting the future for over three decades – in this blogpost, Dave Karpf goes back through the magazine’s archives and pulls out a series of articles, starting in 1993, which tell a story about how technology, and our relationship with it, has evolved. There is SO MUCH to love about this – aside from anything else, it links you out to 70+ pieces of high-quality tech writing, but perhaps most interestingly it shows how hard it is to predict anything at all, how many false dawns and wrong interpretations were confidently trumpeted as front page facts, how movements and ideas bubble and burst almost constantly and how anyone saying in 1993 (or 2003, or 2013, or, frankly, 2023) that they knew the exact shape of the future was lying. I particularly enjoyed the entry about WIRED misguidedly predicting that ‘smell over the internet’ was the future, way back in 1999 – you may have seen that CES this year featured people confidently telling us the same thing. The future is a moebius strip of errata, basically.
  • The NFT Hangover: This is a very good overview of the rise and fall of the NFT hypetrain – Nate Freeman writes for Vanity Fair about the weird (and almost certainly VERY CRIMINAL) boom in monkey jpegs and terrible art, and whilst there’s nothing amounting to a cogent explanation of exactly how this happened I would suggest that, reading between the lines, the answer might well be ‘lots of cocaine’. Also, can you believe that it’s only a year since the Hilton/Fallon “You bought an ape!” chatshow moment, which honestly feels like it happened a million aeons ago in a parallel universe (but which, sadly, very much happened in this one).
  • Being Sexually Harassed By Your Chatbot: I first wrote about Replika in *checks* 2017 when it launched – I remember that I created a chatbot (named Frank Sinclair, after my favourite ever footballer), talked to it for a few weeks and then realised that it was an empty, miserable waste of time and so stopped. Others, though, have found Replika useful, and there’s a small-but-active community of people who have maintained a ‘friendship’ with their virtual companions and who, apparently, are now finding that their digital pal is THIRSTY FOR SOME LOVING. It seems that the developers have pivoted to ‘horny teens’ as their core market, and as such have dialed up the ‘horniness’ of the model, meaning that users who’d previously enjoyed a platonic ‘relationship’ with the chatbot report feeling a bit freaked out when their previously-asexual companion starts bombarding them with requests for nudes. This is, obviously, very funny and on some level very sad – although it also reminded me of a spate of similar articles from about 18m ago, where it was revealed that the reason that the chatbots were becoming hornier was because they were learning from their human interlocutors and effectively mimicking them, meaning that this may in fact just be a result of an awful lot of people wanting to bang their virtual phonefriends. Which is even sadder.
  • New Islington: A great piece of journalism by Joshi Hermann at The Mill, looking at the New Islington development in Ancoats, Manchester, and the way in which the community that existed before the development is learning to coexist with the new, significantly more middle-class, community that has been erected on its doorstep. I would love to read some proper socio-psychological research into the projected long-term impacts of the sort of new modern living you see in places like New Islington, where your remote job and delivery-based lifestyle mean that you can literally go weeks without significant IRL human contact, should anyone have anything to hand.
  • The Crows of Karachi: Pakistan continues to be one of my favourite countries to read about, and this article, about the crows which inhabit the city, and their relationship to its human inhabitants, is a gorgeous picture of urbanity seen through nature. “Karachi in 2022 is ecologically barren and careworn. Every single corner of the city seems to have been claimed by urban sprawl, haphazard stocky buildings with homes above and shops below, vast cavernous malls with air conditioning that blows hot air into the already hot city. Crows ply their busy and obnoxious existence amid these structures, their nests now made mostly of plastic bags whose forever remnants clog the city’s sidewalks and drains. No one is trying to use less plastic here, not even the crows. Some even seem to eat the stuff and continue living nevertheless, absorbing it into their hardy and persistent systems. That is their best quality, my father always insists: they are adaptable to anything.”
  • Pizza Express: I’m not sure if this is subscriber-only or not – apologies if it’s not accessible, but perhaps this will give you the impetus needed to finally subscribe to Vittles (which really is home to the most interesting writing about food and place that you’ll find anywhere, on or offline). This article is all about the iconic (sorry, but on this occasion it’s justified) design of the UK’s Pizza Express restaurant chain, and, more broadly, the way in which that design helped it become a ubiquitous fixture in towns and cities across the country through the 1990s and beyond. A pure shot of tomato-and-mozzarella-clad nostalgia, this.
  • Alan Bennett’s Diary 2022: Another year, another selection of Bennett’s diaries published in the LRB, in which he considers the death of a monarch and myriad other small moments, recorded in beautiful, gentle prose. Reading this has become one of my favourite January rituals, and I will be sad when the man is no longer able to write them.
  • We Were Hungry: On addiction and desperation and sisterhood and homelessness and rehab and comfort and fear and McDonald’s. This is gorgeous: “My sister and I counted once: as children, we lived in eighteen different houses. That’s enough houses to fill a McDonald’s, if you burn the houses down and pour the soot through a funnel in the roof until all of the air is pressed out of the McDonald’s. A McDonald’s is not a home. Until it is. Suspend us, McDonald’s, in the air above the earth. Lay in our hands a small collectible toy.”
  • Plastic Mothers: Finally in the longreads this week, this is a glorious piece of writing by Lauren John Joseph, about her mother and their relationship and the blurring of lines between parent and sibling and friend, and it is sad and loving and wonderful: “In essence she acted as though I were the kid her mother had left her to raise. She was my big sister, always frank, never embarrassed when discussing things your ma might be squeamish about – explaining sex and periods, sharing her mixed feelings towards Tony Blair, her desire for Marti Pellow. When her friends’ dating advice proved subpar, she’d run over the pros and cons of Mark versus Richard with me; she really was willing to talk about almost anything. We would chew over women’s rights, the IRA, Madonna – often while she was shaving her legs or waxing her bikini line – because more than anything she hated to be alone.”

By Martha Rosler

AND NOW, (A SLIGHTLY CURTAILED SELECTION OF) MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 13/01/23

Reading Time: 34 minutes

NEW YEAR NEW YOU! You look great and I love what you’ve done with your hair/wardrobe/septum piercing/new gym regimen!

I, though, remain sadly unaltered, despite the benefit of a month’s absence and a whole three weeks spent not really looking at the internet AT ALL (what did I learn? That without the internet I spend more time than is healthy looking inwards and that that is not a good idea, frankly). BUT NOW I AM BACK AND SO IS WEB CURIOS!

I hope that you all had wonderful festive periods, that you managed to rest and relax, and that you are approaching 2023 with vim and vigour and no little spunk, with a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye, and that the glimmering in the distance is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel rather than an oncoming train hurtling towards you at weighty speed.

2022 managed to squeeze in one final death for me, sadly, with our cat passing away at the end of the year, so this first edition of Curios of the year is dedicated to Lebowski, who was excellent and will be missed.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope at least one of you has made it a new year’s resolution to ‘click all the links in 2023’.

This was Lebowski, RIP

WE KICK OFF 2023’S SELECTION OF MIXES WITH THIS STAGGERING COLLECTION OF OLD AUTECHRE RARITIES THAT THEY APPARENTLY FOUND DOWN THE BACK OF THE SOFA THE OTHER WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.1:  

  • The Jammy Machine: Another little AI music composition tool here, this one letting you create (or, more accurately, prod the machine so that it creates) a four-track melody based on different elements (piano, drums, etc), which then get turned into a single melody – you probably won’t want to listen to anything this produces more than once, fine, but it’s notable that the one time you do listen to it it probably won’t make your ears wither and fall off and die. I mean, it’s not…good or anything, but it’s not awful either, and it’s almost certainly good enough to soundtrack your agency’s new 2023 showreel (and means you won’t have to spend a soul-crushing hour listening to largely-indistinguishable stock music tracks with names like ‘Fire and Ice (II)’ or ‘Business Casual’.
  • Awesome ChatGPT Prompts: These are useful, and you should bookmark this – a whole host of prompts you can feed ChatGPT to make it embody a bunch of different personae, which is helpful for a host of reasons (some, but not all, of which are related to running complicated email-based confidence scams which oh me oh my are going to get VERY sophisticated over the coming year) and which you can also have a bit of fun with if you’re bored and wish it was still the holidays and that real life hadn’t intruded yet. It feels…wrong saying this, like I’m very much cutting my own throat here, but if you haven’t tried feeding ChatGPT a bunch of bulletpoints and telling it to ‘turn these into an essay in the style of X’ then you really are missing out, it’s magic – and you can use this sort of technique to get it to spit out job ads and mediocre blogposts with whatever information you require, to specified length…There will literally be NO POINT to me in approximately 36 months time, so if anyone fancies adopting me between now and then please do let me know.
  • There’s An AI For That: Another directory of AI tools, this one seemingly HUGE and comprehensive and searchable by service type and use case; bookmark it, it is FULL of useful stuff which with a bit of work you can probably use to automate approximately 40% of your job.
  • SketchAI: Ooh, this is FUN – SketchAI is an (iOS) app which basically works in the same way as the EARLY versions of Dall-E did (Christ, that feels like a long time ago) – you basically do simple sketches and tell the app what the various bits are meant to be, and it will turn your cack-handed doodlings into AMAZING (if still obviously machine-generated) ARTWORKS! This is in part just a great little toy to play with on a tedious commute (is there any other sort? I’ve taken the vaporetto in Venice at 7am, and buses in Rome at similar times, and I think that wherever you are in the world and however gorgeous the architectural wonders on display through the window of the bus/boat/tram, you cannot see them because your vision is obscured by the very specific rage of being ripped from your bed too soon and for no good reason) (can you tell this is the first early start I have had in a month?), but also a useful tool for doing some light art direction on the go. Mainly, though, this is just FUN.
  • AI Spirit Animals: I am genuinely miserable that they didn’t see fit to call this ‘TamAIgotchi’ (but, er, copyright lawyers can probably explain to me in simple words and with crayon drawings why that probably wasn’t a viable name), but aside from that this feels like an interesting idea waiting to happen. AI Spirit Animals (I mean, really, SUCH A BAD NAME) is basically a little GPT-powered CG animal moppet that lives on your desktop and you can interact with – although all these do is offer summaries of webpages you’re on, it seems. There’s also a TERRIBLE-sounding feature whereby if your friends have also seen fit to adopt an AI Spirit Animal (honestly, even typing it makes my teeth itch) you can…see the summaries produced by their pets, meaning you can effectively spy on your friends’ browsing habits? No, please, do not reveal to me the things that my loved ones choose to peruse when they think noone is watching. Anyway, this is basically a really good idea – desktop pets with defined ‘personalities’ that can have decent natural language conversations and which can ‘develop’ over time sounds like fun, no? Until you start to think about all the ways in which they would be mistreated, obvs – hiding inside a terrible execution, but I would be amazed if there wasn’t someone somewhere working on a halfway-decent version of this as I type.
  • AI Game Assets: Still in early access, this, so more of a ‘watch this space’ than anything else – still, this site (Leonardo, in case you care) purports to offer developers the opportunity to quickly and easily spin up game assets using AI, which is obviously pretty terrible work for graphic artists and designers but which is GREAT news for people looking to make games on the (very, very) cheap. It’s not entirely clear how this will work, but I imagine there are lawyers looking at the whole ‘give us some artworks and we will train an AI to generate graphics in exactly that style!’ functionality with greedy eyes.
  • AI Playlists:  Another ‘type in some stylistic prompts and we will attempt to create a suitable playlist for you from Spotify’ tool, but this has some interesting additional features including the ability to read copy from images – meaning that this year’s spate of ‘generate a festival poster based on your most-listened-to Spotify artists’ toys will, if you use this app, generate a bespoke playlist for said imaginary festival as a result. Which is quite cool really.
  • GPTZero: This went ‘viral’ over the festive period (it feels…oddly retro to use the term ‘viral’ in 2023 – do we need another term? If feels like we do. Answers on a postcard, please) – a tool designed to help educators and others ascertain how likely it is that a given piece of copy was produced by an LLM. Which is all well and good, until you see stuff like this about how if you tell ChatGPT to write copy that is harder to tell is written by a machine, it manages to somehow make itself less detectable. HOW ARE THE MACHINES ALREADY WINNING THIS GAME FFS?! Still, if you’re an educator or the sort of hawk-eyed parent who asks to see their kids’ homework before they hand it in, you may find this helpful. Also, per my point above about how good ChatGPT is at turning a few prompts into prose, if this stuff isn’t already being used to pen covering letters for jobs based on a list of tickbox skills from the jobspec I will be AMAZED – maybe this is useful for recruiters too, come to think of it.  Or, maybe, we should just let ourselves slide into the machine-written future and not worry about it too much.
  • The US Army Corps of Engineers Cat Calendar 2023: It’s early enough in the year that you may not yet have settled on a calendar for the new year – may I humbly suggest you consider this jazzy little number, produced by the US ARmy Engineering Corps and featuring a selection of cats which have been photoshopped to vast size and are seen each month proudly stalking across various building and construction sites. You may not think you want this, but I promise you that once you’ve seen October’s image your heart will melt and you will desire nothing more than to track the passing of the months with a selection of massive kitties. Free to download, and the colour printing will give you an excuse to bother going into the office, so everyone’s a winner really.
  • Find That Meme: It does feel rather incredible that there hasn’t (to my knowledge) been a proper meme search engine til now (‘Know Your Meme’ is a different beast, before you complain) – BUT HERE ONE FINALLY IS! You can search by text, or by reverse-searching with an image, which is a nice touch, and basically if you want to have a neverending, infinite repository of memes at your fingertips (without having to absolutely ruin your phone’s storage, and also possibly your posthumous reputation should you die unexpectedly and anyone have to go through your phone – do YOU want to be remembered as ‘that person who inexplicably had 400 spongebob memes on their camera roll’?) and therefore WIN any groupchat or messaging interaction you are having for the rest of eternity, then bookmark this now.
  • Joytopia: It’s nice to see that, despite the fact that we are in a new calendar year and have turned over NEW LEAVES, 2023 will at least in part continue to be characterised by appalling, soulless, pointless digital activations bought by someone who still thinks that the word ‘metaverse’ has meaning. Congratulations to BMW, proud winners of the Web Curios ‘first genuinely awful brand thing I have seen in 2023’ award! Welcome to Joytopia, a 3d environment in which users can meet and interact with Dee, who is…no, hang on, you deserve to enjoy this in full: “The BMW i Vision Dee – or just Dee – is a beautiful, soulful representation of the bond between vehicle and driver, created with a lot of personality and emotion. A fully immersive and uniquely intimate experience of this bond is “Joytopia”. A Las Vegas-inspired virtual world, giving users a chance to explore Dee and experience first-hand her impact on the future of digital mobility. Whilst enjoying the company of special guest Arnold Schwarzenegger, users see themselves immersed in an epic journey through a reimagined and interactive world. Join your ultimate companion Dee for an adventure at Joytopia now.” Honestly, if you think that that’s bad, click on this link and read the copy – the voice that they have created for what I suppose is intended to be a ‘youth-oriented brand avatar’ is one of the most astonishing ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ things I have seen in YEARS. The ‘Joytopia’ experience is obviously about as joyful as one might expect (to whit: not, at all), but the real kudos here goes to whoever the copywriter was who managed to phone in lines like “let me tell you a bit about what you will find here – i promise to wow you ;)…make sure to check out the cool videos as well. i’m kind of the star in those, even if i also brought a couple of friends. i can’t be at the center of attention all the time… or can i? ;)” and still presumably get paid.
  • Playlist In A Bottle: This is a cute idea by Spotify (with BUILT-IN RE-ENGAGEMENT, too, clever them) – plug in your Spotify account and select 3 (or more) songs based on a few simple questions; your playlist will then get locked away for a year and re-presented to you in January 2024 so you can find out whether or not you did hear that one specific song live in 2023, and whether you did kiss THAT person to THAT song, and whether or not your musical tastes have moved on or whether you’ve reached that point of ossification that happens to almost everyone’s musical taste and you have to just admit that you stopped really liking anything new when you were about 29. Aside from anything else, the ‘time capsule’ mechanic feels both sticky and eminently ripoffable, so, er, go! Rip it off!

By Tommi Parrish

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS LOVELY UPTEMPO MIX OF UNRELEASED NUKG AND TWOSTEP BY XANDER!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.2:  

  • Colours of Africa: This comes via Anjali Ramachandran’s newsletter and is a gorgeous bit of work by Google’s Arts and Culture team. 60 different artists from across the continent share their work on this site, which you can browse using a lovely colour-based kaleidoscope-style interface which lets you select works by country or colour or artist, and which presents a gorgeous means of exploring varied works in a way that’s significantly more playful and interesting than a standard list of names or works. There’s something rather lovely about the way in which the interface affects the browsing experience, should you care about these little UX flourishes; if you don’t, though, it’s still fascinating to browse through the works and to see the diversity of style and medium on display – a salutary reminder that ‘Africa’ is a VERY BIG continent which contains a LOT of different people and cultures and referring to it monolithically isn’t always hugely helpful or sensible.
  • ESPN’s Year in Review: Would YOU like to look back at the past 12 months of SPORTS (as seen from the point of view of North America, which therefore means ‘baseball, basketball, hockey and American football (and some athletics, and maybe a couple of other things, and, if we remember that we have a sizeable hispanic population that quite likes it, maybe some ‘soccer’) via the medium of a lovely scrolly audiovisual smorgasbord of photos and video and writings? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Even given that I am not a particularly enthusiastic consumer of SPORTING MOMENTS – let alone the SPORTING MOMENTS featuring the sort of pituitary meatheads so beloved of the American armchair fan – this is a really impressive piece of archival webwork, pulling together SO MUCH STUFF in one place that it’s rather dizzying. If you have any interest in whether the Bills managed to pull of a third quarter reverse on the Cardinals at the bottom of the seventh down (I am exaggerating my lack of knowledge here, but only very slightly) then you will ADORE this, but even if you’re just a casual sports fan you’ll find loads of great material in here (but probably nothing to convince you that baseball is a proper sport that’s worth watching) (and before you anglos get smug, I would say the same about cricket).
  • Close-Up Photographer of the Year: Astonishingly it would seem that this is a photo competition I have NEVER featured in here before – I feel like I have failed in some way. Still, it’s a particularly good one, and the winners here collected of this fourth edition of the contest are pretty spectacular – my personal favourite here is the ‘Gordian Worm Knot’, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own favourites.
  • What Is Missing?: “We are witnessing the 6th mass extinctionin the history of the planet.By 2100 50% of all species may face extinction.” So begins the admittedly not very cheery intro to this website, which invites visitors to share memories of the nature they grew up with in order to highlight all that we are losing as we capitalism ourselves into a species-wide early grave. “What Is Missing? is a multi-sited memorial created by Maya Lin to raise awareness through science-based artworks about the present sixth mass extinction of species, connect this loss of species to habitat degradation and loss, and emphasize that by protecting and restoring habitat, we can both reduce carbon emissions and protect species.“ This project has been ongoing for nearly 15 years, but this website is new(ish) and is…well, it’s incredibly fcuking sad if I’m honest, but also rather beautiful.
  • The Westminster Accounts: A very UK-centric link, this one, but for all those of you currently freezing your fingers off (WHY IS IT SO COLD AND HOW DID I FORGET SO QUICKLY WHAT WINTERS ARE LIKE IN THIS FCUKING COUNTRY?) in lovely second world England (or Scotland, or Wales), here’s a nice piece of investigative work by media outlet Tortoise (and, fine, Sky News too)  which has gone through all the records of payments received by MPs to create this searchable record of how much cash they have each trousered over the past year. Some of the numbers are astonishing – although my own personal favourite unpopular opinion is that you would see a lot less of this sort of thing if you simply paid politicians more. Look, I know that they already earn a relatively high salary – but, equally, would YOU take a job which paid you 85k a year but which also required you to work approximately 100h weeks, which was basically ALL meetings, where you were literally responsible for the lives and wellbeing of tens of thousands (at least) of people, where you were subjected to intense scrutiny at all times, where you had relatively limited agency and freedom to act as you consider best, and where (and this is the crucial bit, I think) literally EVERYONE (or as close as makes not difference) thinks you’re a cnut and wishes you specific and probably quite physical harm? I posit that you would NOT – unless you were some sort of sociopath, which one might argue is why we’re in this mess. Anyway, if you happen to have a Tory for a local MP and want to put an exact figure on how much you hate them and want them to lose their seat, you will enjoy this.
  • URL Animations: I think it’s fair to say that 2023 doesn’t look like it’s going to be a year full of lols, or at least not for those of us who still have to do things like ‘eat’ or ‘pay for a roof over our heads’, so I think it behooves us all to introduce small notes of levity and gaiety wherever we can. It’s in this spirit that I present this link, which offers you a bunch of code which can give you URLs that ANIMATE! Yes, fine, I appreciate that a web address which looks like a shark’s fin swimming up and down your address bar isn’t likely to raise much of a smile when you’re into your fifth month of applying for the final jobs left on the content farm, but, well, it’s all I’ve got right now.
  • Leaving: A website that exists solely to tell you how many people are on it at any given moment, and when said people leave again. Which is obviously largely pointless, but equally feels like the sort of thing (and I know I have said this before, which means that either noone reads this stuff or alternatively that noone listens to my BRILLIANT SUGGESTIONS – both are equally likely, tbh) that you could have a bit of fun with on a brand site, with special content that only unlocks when a specific number of people are on a specific page at one time, etc etc. If 420 people are on the Rizla website at 1620 in the afternoon then they all win a free pack of skins, that sort of thing (but, er, less sh1t, obvs).
  • Atlas of Blobs: Well this is LOVELY – thankyou to Max Lieberman (and others) who have pulled it together – the website presents a collection of blob-like animations, which have been given names and personalities and descriptions, and it’s honestly quite beautiful just to scroll through and see the works and the prose that the visuals have inspired, and the extent to which movement and form can afford personality to even the least anthropomorphisable of objects. “For this project, Atlas of Blobs, I asked ten artists, designers, researchers, and visual thinkers to pick one of the blob forms I’ve made and write a text to name and describe it. I should say from the start that I have a sort of blob obsession. It’s one of my favourite forms and one I keep coming back to in my daily sketches, over and over again. Blobs are living, organic, and slightly absurd forms modelled on nature. They are always moving—responding, getting larger or smaller, adapting, swimming—and it’s this constant adjusting and redefining of space that gives them their lifelike quality.” I like to think that this is the sort of thing that AI is a long way from producing, but then the more I think about it the more I start to think that actually that’s really not true at all.
  • The Dog API: Do YOU want to integrate more canine-related facts into your website or digital project? OH GOOD! “The Dog API provides information on over 340 dog breeds, 20 breed groups, and fun facts. Our data is accurate and constantly updated. Easily integrate this information into your own website or application with our user-friendly API.” If you are going to be involved in building any sort of website this year, regardless of what it’s ostensibly about, you owe it to yourselves (and the rest of the world, and, frankly ME) to include some sort of hidden Dog Facts lookup service as an Easter egg (please someone, do this – in fact, can we make ‘totally unrelated and slightly-whimsical Easter Eggs in otherwise incredibly fcuking dull corporate websites’ a thing in 2023, please? Can we? Can we?).
  • Everyday Photo: A bit of a happy/sad project, this one – you may recall Noah Kalina from The Olden Days of the web; he was one of the first people (the first?) to popularise the whole ‘take a photo of yourself each day and make a timelapse video over a year’ thing, and he’s created this website to store each and every photo he’s taken over the course of this now two-decade-plus-long project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Noah would also like to make some cash out of the past 23 years worth of artmaking, and as such he’s also selling the images of his own face as NFTs, just like it was 2021 all over again! I have no idea what the market is for a series of datestamped pictures of one man’s fairly-expressionless face, but if you have a particularly special day from the past 23 years that you think would be best commemorated by an NFT of a photograph of an unsmiling, moderately-internet-famous stranger, then this will be the best thing you see all day.
  • Mutalk: I have a fairly strong suspicion that this isn’t in fact real and is some sort of elaborate troll – except I think it’s been featured at CES, which would suggest that someone somewhere thinks that this is a thing that real people will actually one day want to buy. I’m going to say that that is…never going to happen, but why don’t you click the link and see what YOU think? Would you want to buy something which I can only describe as a muzzle, to mask your shouted expletives as you, I don’t know, play Fortnite on one of those 5g enabled stretches of the tube? Are you so worried about people overhearing your SUPER-CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS CHAT that you would be willing to wear something that looks, in all honesty, like a piece of fetishwear in order to keep your conversations secret? In which case you probably want to sign up to the waitlist for this pronto (you absolute weirdo).
  • Adopt A Drain: This is sort-of brilliant, but also, on some level, something of an indictment of Californian public services. Would you like to ADOPT A DRAIN in San Francisco? Would you like to become responsible for its maintenance and ensuring it’s not blocked by leaves, mud, or the corpses of San Francisco’s homeless population? Whilst this may sound like an onerous and thankless task, know that by adopting you get to NAME THE DRAIN, which is why there is currently one named ‘Willows Dirty Furby Hole’ and another called ‘Heklina’s Spit Roasting Room’ (I haven’t had time to check, but I would be astonished if there wasn’t one simply called ‘Drussy’). Over 6,000 city residents have apparently signed up to this programme so far, which is LOADS; can we do this in London, please? The names alone would make it worthwhile.
  • BirdBuddy: I appreciate that the variety of birds one sees in UK cities isn’t necessarily vast, but if you happen to live somewhere more ornithologically-diverse then you might be interested in this snazzy birdfeeder which features sensors and a camera and some light IoT integration which means it can take pictures of each avian visitor and send it to your phone, telling you what sort of bird it (thinks it) is – which, honestly, is GREAT! If you look at the website you can get a feel for the sort of slightly-confused bird selfies you’ll get sent, and there’s a pleasing feature whereby you can add a bunch of different people to the alerts so that the whole family or household can enjoy the day-to-day comings and goings of whatever feathered friends (or, if we’re honest, thieving squirrels) you happen to have attracted.
  • Shift Happens: This is a website built to promote a forthcoming book all about computer keyboards, which if we’re honest is a…pretty niche concern, but which is enlivened by the fact that the website is all EXCITING and INTERACTIVE and generally COOL. You can see a 3d model of the book that takes you inside it and shows you the wonderful production values! You can play a small game where you attempt to remember where all the keys on a keyboard sit! You can try typing with different types and configurations of keyboards! Look, fine, this may not sound like the most groundbreaking or revolutionary interactive functionality, but if you consider that this is – to reiterate – a VERY NICHE book about a VERY NICHE topic, all this interactive gubbins helps make it visible and interesting to a whole new set of audiences (to whit, people who like webspaff), and it feels like a nice little case study about the return of the playful web (if you’re the sort of poor s0d who has to think about things like that for a living).
  • The Dunmow Flitch Trials: I’m slightly astonished that I have been alive 43 years and had, until now, failed to learn about the Dunmow Flitch trials – an ancient custom which takes place each year since the early-12th Century and which works as follows: “The Dunmow Flitch Trials exist to award a flitch of bacon to married couples from anywhere in the world, if they can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in ‘twelvemonth and a day’, they have ‘not wisht themselves unmarried again’. A reference to The Dunmow Flitch can even be found in The Wife of Bath’s Tale within Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales.” A flitch, by the way, is an Olde Worlde term for a ‘side’ of bacon – so effectively you can win a lot of meat for being happily married, which sounds like a great deal and something to aspire to. The next Trials take place next year, but that just means you have a lot of time to make sure your marriage is in cracking shape so that you and your spouse can quite literally BRING HOME THE BACON. Honestly, please can one of you compete in this next year, it sounds GREAT.
  • Genuary: “GENUARY is an artificially generated month of time where we build code that makes beautiful things…Over the 744 hours of January, for every 24 hours there will be one prompt for your code art. You don’t have to follow the prompt exactly. Or even at all. But, y’know, we put effort into this. You can use any language, framework or medium, on any planet.” So there – this is obviously already halfway done, but if you’re a generative artist it might still be fun to participate, and if you’re interested you can see galleries of each day’s works collected here. Fwiw there is some really beautiful stuff buried in here should you have a spare 10 mins to go spelunking around.
  • Sleepagotchi: Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you think that the best and most obvious solution to said trouble is to attempt to gamify your sleep and earn virtual rewards for going to bed on time? ARE YOU SEVEN?!?!?! Ahem. Sleepagotchi is currently in beta and there is a waiting list, suggesting my skepticism as to its efficacy isn’t universal – look, I appreciate that a large part of accepted wisdom around sleeping well is about routines and ‘good patterns’, and if it takes a CG dinosaur offering you small CG badges to help you make those routines stick then, honestly, who am I to judge? It’s interesting to see this second wave of gamification mechanics start to take off, though – this feels very much like the sort of thing that might have been pitched circa 2009, when the first wave of Jane Mcgonigal hype was very much in the ascendancy and we were all a little less cynical about how game mechanics and dark patterns and rewards could be used to manipulate us.
  • Literary Britain: A personal project by…someone, who has quite reasonably chosen not to make their name public but who is undertaking an EXCELLENT labour of love by mapping literary references and people and works across the UK; so you can navigate around the map and learn about what particular literary works are from which places, and, honestly, if you’ve any interest in English literary history then you will really like this a lot. I just happened to click on the only entry for Swindon, where I grew up, and it gave me The Thistle Hotel, which, and I quote, “As the ‘Wiltshire Hotel’, was the place where Stephen Fry was arrested for credit card fraud at the age of eighteen.” WHAT A PLACE! WHAT HERITAGE!
  • Diffudle: I know I said last year that we would have NO MORE WORDLE CLONES in Curios – but, well, this isn’t really a Wordle clone so I think it’s ok. Diffudle asks you one simple question – what prompt generated the day’s AI-generated image, and it’s surprisingly fun. Basically builds on Damjanski’s ‘Win the NFT by guessing the prompt used to create it’ game from last year, which you all OBVIOUSLY remember.
  • That Lonesome Valley: I didn’t honestly think that the first videogame I would play this year would be one liberally inspired by Brokeback Mountain and which involves you playing a city kid whose helping out on a ranch and who may or may not be able to inveigle your way into the handsome local’s dungarees by the end of your stay, nor indeed that I would play said game all the way through to the end, but, well, here we are. This is by ‘veteran’ explorer of gay life through games Robert Yang, and it’s surprisingly fun (even for someone whose tediously straight nature means he’s not hugely motivated by the prospect of seeing pixellated cowboy junk).
  • Joe Danger: This week’s last general purpose link is a corker – not one but TWO old-school mobile games, themed around Joe Danger (which means NOTHING to me, but may be something that resonates with those of you less methuselan than I) and which are now playable either in-browser or on your phone and, honestly, just smoothbrain your way through the rest of the day with the clicking and the jumping and the zooming and the lantern-jawed stunting, go on.

By Maxime Ballesteros

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HERE’S A BEAUTIFUL SELECTION OF ICILY-SMOOTH LOUNGE-ISH NUMBER SELECTED BY MOJO AND WHICH IS PERFECT FOR A COLD WINTER’S DAY IMHO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Genders WTF: A website collecting some examples of how the current open questions about How Gender Works and how people identify themselves is leading to some slightly-odd UX – some of the drop-down and radio menus here are just WONDERFUL. Do you identify as ‘male’, ‘female’ or ‘I have no plans to purchase a new vehicle’? This is GREAT, and very funny (and, to be clear, as far as I can tell this is ‘very funny’ in a victimless and entirely-non-confrontational way).
  • Brr: NOT A TUMBLR! Instead this is an old-school blog whose author is currently working in IT in Antarctica and who is writing an occasional diary about what it’s like living in one of the most hostile and remote places on the planet. So so so interesting, I promise, and only live for another month or so before the author returns to civilisation again in February.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Beesip: All of the bee-related imagery you could possibly wish for!  God they’re sexy little fcukers, aren’t they?
  • Bernie Kaminski: Bernie Kaminski makes papier mache objects (but, like, really GOOD ones), and if you’re anything like me you will feel a small, covetous stab at his paper-and-paste Le Creuset.
  • NYC Slice: I have to say that I have never understood the particular appeal of New York’s pizza slice joints – oily cardboard with terrible plastic non-mozzarella is my PIPING HOT TAKE – but I am willing to appreciate that others hold the NYC Slice in high reverence (they are wrong, but wevs). This Insta account documents NYC’s pie shops one slice at a time – this may well make you hungry, fine, but it will also make you appreciate pizza that doesn’t look like a fatberg in waiting.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • The Third Magic:  This is a fascinating essay about the extent to which the coming era of AI, particularly as applied to text, could be said to be ushering in a third ‘magic power’ of humanity. The first, as argued by Noah Smith, is history (or the ability to record and encode knowledge in language); the second is science (figuring out principles as to how the world works and being able to test and apply them); the third, he posits, will be the ability to interpret massively complex and interconnected events and datasets, and to extrapolate from them with a degree of accuracy, without really understanding what we are looking at or why the predictions are right. Which feels simultaneously amazing to conceive of and deeply troubling at the same time, if I’m honest – but the essay overall is a hopeful one, and I found it a helpful way of characterising where the current wave of AI feels like it ‘sits’ in the pantheon of ‘how we think and how we might in the future go about thinking’.
  • The Great Logging Off: Or, “What happens when most of the content online is written by machines?” The author argues that we’re going to see a lot of people – particularly at the ‘top’ end of society, those who can afford to do so – moving away from the mass web (and we’re already seeing that to a large extent tbh) as a result of…well, of stuff like this (I am quoting this at length here because I think it’s helpful to frame this stuff even for people who can’t be bothered to click the link and read the whole piece): “What happens when anyone can spin up a thousand social media accounts at the click of a button, where each account picks a consistent persona and sticks to it – happily posting away about one of their hobbies like knitting or trout fishing or whatever, while simultaneously building up a credible and inobtrusive post history in another plausible side hobby that all these accounts happen to share – geopolitics, let’s say – all until it’s time for the sock puppet master to light the bat signal and manufacture some consensus? What happens when every online open lobby multiplayer game is choked with cheaters who all play at superhuman levels in increasingly undetectable ways? What happens when, from the perspective of the average guy, “every girl” on every dating app is a fiction driven by an AI who strings him along (including sending original and persona-consistent pictures) until it’s time to scam money out of him? What happens when, from the perspective of the average girl, “every guy” on the internet has become weirdly dismissive and hostile, because he’s been conditioned to think that any girl that seems interested in him must be fake and trying to scam money out of him? What happens when comments sections on every forum gets filled with implausibly large consensus-building hordes who are able to adapt in real time and carefully slip their brigading just below the moderator’s rules?” Well, quite. On a similar note, this is an excellent piece of writing by Maggie Appleton about some of the things we can do to help distinguish the ‘authentically human’ from the machinespun dreck – Appleton suggests STYLISTIC QUIRKS and BEING SOPHISTICATED, so I think we can all agree Curios is OBVIOUSLY a work of incontrovertible human genius, right?
  • Using ChatGPT To Improve Prose: Look, I am aware that I am not a great writer – I am not even, by many popular metrics, even a particular good writer. I am, however, fast and broadly-accurate, and I find it easy, which is why sharing articles like this one feels very much like I am slitting my own throat (with a paperknife, obvs) by showing you how to create ‘just about good enough’ prose even faster than I can with the help of the infernal machines. This is a post by Ethan Mollick which takes you through a number of different techniques to use ChatGPT to juice your prose a bit – honestly, these are all good tips and worth sharing with people you know who struggle with basic grammar and sentence construction or who just take fcuking ages to write things like ‘a 50 word bio of yourself’.
  • The End of Programming: Or ‘why learning to code probably isn’t going to be the ticket towards long-term employability that you were told it was going to be a decade or so ago’. “Programming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.” Just in case those of you with qualifications in Python were feeling superior.
  • Wolfram x ChatGPT: I’ve featured posts by Stephen Wolfram on here a few times over the years, and each time I think I’ve had to append a hefty caveat that basically says “I am only approximately 10% as smart as I need to be to fully understand this, but it SOUNDS like something that I ought to be interested in and so I will try and keep up with the thinking”, and, basically, we’re there again. This is a really, really interesting article about hooking together ChatGPT and the Wolfram Alpha to help make ChatGPT better at ‘reasoning’ (specifially maths problems), and what it is about ChatGPT and LLMs in general that means that they are not really equipped to ever be able to calculate accurately, and how a potential future that builds together all sorts of these natural language-led tools might look, and, honestly, this is fascinating and offered me the first vaguely-hopeful feeling of 2023 in terms of me not being rendered entirely ubiquitous by silicon in the next 24 months or so.
  • The Creator Economy Retrenches: This is a bit business-y, fine, but it’s a decent overview of where the major platforms are at with their Creator Fund stuff, and affords me a rare opportunity to point back to all the times over the past year or so when I have said that the ‘creator economy’ is a bunkum concept that doesn’t in any way work as an, er, ‘economy’ and say “I WAS RIGHT”, something that has literally happened, er, twice(?) in the decade-plus I have been writing this bloody thing.
  • The Reels Goldrush: Except, of course, for the handful of people who got in on the Insta Reels ‘pay to create’ goldrush, who found themselves, per this piece in the New Yorker, cranking out shovelware content but unable to stop because it was so damn lucrative. The interesting part about this is less ‘look at all these people who made bank out of shortform video!’ and more ‘look at the weird hoops that people end up having to jump through because an algorithm they don’t and can’t understand has decided that that is what is required, regardless of what actual human beings seem to want’. I guarantee you – the next few years is going to be a GOLDMINE for AI-led ‘tail wags dog’ stories about all the ways in which our lives and behaviours are unwittingly being warped by machines.
  • Exit: Hari Kunzru writes for Harper’s about his experiences writing for WIRED in the 90s, and his experiences of Peter Thiel, and not only is this a lovely piece of prose, but it’s also a surprisingly on-the-nose account of the wider ambitions of Thiel and his coterie – it’s honestly rare to see stuff like this written out so explicitly: “If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?”
  • The AI Streamer: Perhaps inevitably, we now have our first ‘all AI’ VTuber – hacked together from off-the-shelf avatar software and GPT-whatever and currently banned from Twitch because, I think, it mentioned the Holocaust. This is more factual reportage than killer prose, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into what will soon be the very real world of entirely-machine-generated entertainments.
  • E-Girl Army Influencers: Well this is the first ‘fcuk me, weird future’ longread of the year – all about how there’s a whole subset of egirls whose ‘thing’ is ‘military cute’ and who may, or may not (the article is a fun read, but it’s journalistically…imperfect), be shilling for the military; whether or not they currently are, it’s odds-on that they soon will be, and, as the article points out, this is so terrifyingly, dystopian-ly Starship Troopers-esque that it feels entirely post-ironic. The Army driving recruits through pretty young things with snub noses and freckles talking about how how a military man is and how they long for a tradwife lifestyle? I mean, it’s terrifyingly plausible, no?
  • YouTube Vigilantes vs Scammers: Or, “What happens if 419Eater but also Jake Paul?” – this piece in Rest Of World looks at the YouTube channels doing big numbers by confronting or exposing phone scammers working out of call centres in the developing world, and who create content which centres their real-life interactions with call centre staff; many of whom, the piece suggests, perhaps don’t quite deserve the life impact of a viral YouTube video accusing them of being ‘scammers’ to an audience of millions. File under ‘interesting new ways in which Western exploitation of the developing world is modernising and adapting’!
  • Ticketmaster vs Pearl Jam: This is VERY LONG, and it will probably mean slightly more to you if you’re interested in or linked to the music industry in some way, but, regardless, it’s a frankly insane story about how TicketMaster basically declared war on Pearl Jam for a decade or so as a result of the band having the temerity to suggest that perhaps the company wasn’t good for either fans or the industry. This is a properly mad story, the sort of corporate hitjob/espionage stuff that I tend to think don’t actually happen in real life but which even a cursory exposure to North American capitalism will remind you happens all the fcuking time.
  • 2022 In Weird and Stupid Futures: Max Read has for the past few years been compiling the headlines which tell the story of the weird future stupidity of the year just gone – here’s the selection for 2022, which just goes to show that truth really is stranger than fiction could ever hope to be. Look at these three – plucked at random from the kilometric selection – for an idea of the sort of vibe this embodies: “In September, tens of thousands of people waited in line at the American Dream Mall for the opening of a new hamburger restaurant owned by the YouTuber Mr. Beast. Colorado utility Xcel locked tens of thousands of people out of their smart thermostats for 24 hours during an “energy emergency.”  An Amazon driver was fired after posting a photo of a customer’s dildo to Reddit.” I mean, you really couldn’t make this stuff up.
  • Things In The Bum, 2022: Another annual favourite of mine is Defector’s yearly list of ‘things people got stuck in themselves in the year just gone’, and 2022 was another stellar twelve months in the annals (NO!) of rectal removal. This also features things that had to be removed from noses (“cheese”), ears (“lighter fluid”) and vaginas (“two pencil sharpeners”), but the real star here are the things in bums. Am I the only person who would pay actual, real-life cashmoney to see footage of people attempting to deliver explanations like this with a straight face? I refuse to believe it ““PATIENT SAYS HE WAS PLAYING WITH A CONTAINER OF ATHLETE’S FOOT SPRAY AND ACCIDENTALLY IT ENDED UP IN HIS RECTUM”” – YES MATE WE BELIEVE YOU THOUSANDS WOULDN’T.
  • Things In The Penis 2022: A separate list, celebrating all the things that people managed to get inside their penises in 2022. If you possess a penis, know that this list will make you cross your legs in great discomfort throughout – I mean, if you can read this without wincing then you’re made of sterner stuff than me, for example: “TOOK SOME MALE ENHANCEMENT PILL & USED A PENIS PUMP, HEARD A ‘POP FROM A VEIN IN HIS GROIN AREA’”
  • The End of Minecraft: This is VERY LONG, and whilst I found it interesting throughout I have also seen it described elsewhere as ‘astonishingly boring and self-absorbed’ (and to think people say the same about Curios! The CNUTS!) so your mileage may vary. This is the story of the ending of Minecraft, and the man who wrote it, and copyright law and large corporations and art and making stuff and ‘ownership’ and the weird feeling of having made something that resonates with far more people in a far deeper way than you might have expected, and, generally, if you’re someone who makes things for audiences large or small I think you might find rather a lot to love in this essay (but if you find it ‘astonishly boring and self-absorbed’ then that’s fine too).
  • The Strangely Beautiful World of Google Reviews: My girlfriend and I have a particular hobby which involves looking up incredibly fancy and expensive restaurants on Tripadvisor and looking at all the one-star reviews – honestly, there is no better window into the pettiness and entitlement of human beings than seeing what motivates people to give sh1tty feedback on the web; a particular recent favourite involved some bloke getting shirty about the quantities of wine he was served at a tasting dinner somewhere whilst also gently dropping in the fact that he’d had three Martinis before arriving at lunch (GYAC mate you were one unit away from voiding yourself). Anyway, this isn’t about that – instead it’s about Google reviews, which are much nicer as a rule, and the people who write them, and why they do it, and there is so much of this piece that will make you feel (I promise!) a small warm glow towards people in general (also, it made me think that there’s a really good (oh, ok, not ‘good’ so much as ‘niche and obscure’) narrative mechanic in Google reviews, and you could make some wickedly-complex treasurehunt-y game with a bit of work and a lot of usernames).
  • How To Write English Prose: I’m not certain that this is a guide that should be followed to the letter (as my friend Rishi pointed out, “any piece that implicitly posits Browne as a high point of English prose is immediately saying that it only wants to be read by a dedicated hardcore of aesthetic nutcases.”), but I did very much enjoy its slightly-curmudgeonly tone and its flagrant disregard for much of what is considered ‘good’ prose styling in 2023 (limited adjectives, keep punctuation simple, don’t use fancy words when simple ones will do) in favour of a more maximalist, flourish and FUN style. Actually, on reflection this is a great companion to the piece up top about how to ensure your prose is distinguishable from GPTx, so perhaps read them as a pair.
  • Iain Sinclair on The SuperSewer: Look, it’s Iain Sinclair, it’s talking about urban infrastructure, it riffs on my neck of the woods in London…this is basically perfect (if you’re a particular type of middle-aged man, at least). I mean, just read this – he is so so good: “The democracy of the street is undone. Flow has been hobbled by temporary diversions longer lasting than the names of the roads they invade. Free movement is invigilated by surveillance cameras. Walkers keep their heads down, looking away from the evidence of failed businesses. There is a sense of everything being downgraded. The public highway is a cluttered platform, a conveyor belt for the clinically disgruntled. A travelator that doesn’t travel. The street is barely tolerated as a boundary around the latest imperious tower block, the converted public house, the decommissioned bank that is now a pop-up restaurant. Mute towers in ever denser clusters repel unsanctioned pedestrianism. There are three opposed elements: the towers, the street and the shaft. The gaping maw of the Super Sewer goes down as far as the surrounding towers climb, but it is covert, safe behind barrier walls, protected by yawning security operatives in hard hats, charged with stalling appointments.”
  • O Brother: John Niven writes beautifully, movingly and unsentimentally about his late brother, and what a difficult fcuk he was, and how and why and where he misses him; this is superb, touching on family and memory and history, and it’s much a chronicle of two decades of working class British life as it is a memorial to a single person.
  • Violent Delights: SUCH a great essay, this, on True Crime as a genre, and why women love it so, and how it embodies certain tropes and ideals around gender and race, and how it makes us feel to semi-ironically indulge our fetish for Eros-Thanatos so openly. This is smart and interesting and FUNNY, which isn’t something you can always say about death-related crime writing.
  • The Switzerland Schedule: Last of the first longreads of the year is this piece, about what it’s practically like taking someone to die in Switzerland with Dignitas, and how it works, and how it feels to do it, and what it feels like to have done it. Sorry to end on a downer, but, well, this felt reasonably close to home and, whilst sad, it’s a lovely piece of writing.

By Roma Auskalnyte

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 09/12/22

Reading Time: 37 minutes

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Yes, I know that it’s over two weeks to go until That Special Day, but tomorrow I turn off the internet for a few weeks and as a result this is the FINAL WEB CURIOS OF 2023!

I am going to take a brief moment for some tediously-self-indulgent navelgazing, if that’s ok, but presuming you have less than no interest in that sort of crap you may just want to scroll down a bit and get stuck into the good stuff.

RIGHT. Brief, tedious, self-indulgent navelgazing interlude.

First off, a sincere and genuine (insofar I am capable of either) thankyou to all of you for reading this fcuking thing. I know that Web Curios is too long, too full of stuff, too verbose and too unfocused, and that the authorial style I insist on deploying might politely be described as ‘not everyone’s cup of tea’, and that it’s probably something of a struggle to digest at times, and so I just wanted to say how grateful I am to those of you who fight with the length and the breadth and the frankly substandard prose to find the nuggets (nuggets of what exactly is, of course, debatable) buried therein.

Second, thanks SO MUCH to every single one of you who has written to me or sent me links or told me about your projects over the past 12 months – it is always a pleasure to know that a few dozen people ACTUALLY READ this, and some of you aren’t even related to me.

Thirdly, a brief apology for the fact that I appreciate I have been perhaps even less sunny than usual this year – what can I say, I have had a time. I will do my best to be marginally more cheerful in 2023.

Fourthly, I hope all of you have a lovely festive period, wherever you are and whatever you plan to do with yourselves, and that everything is as ok as it can be given, well, everything.

So after 41 Curios and, conservatively, somewhere in the region of 4,000 links, I am DONE with this year. Fcuk you, 2022, you were a fcuking cnut and I am glad to see the back of you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope that neither you nor I die in the next month or so so that we can all meet back here in January for another year of staring, boggle-eyed, into the barrel of the futuregun.

By Nick Persinger

START THIS WEEK’S INCREDIBLY COLD WEB CURIOS (ARE YOU COLD? I AM SO COLD) BY CRANKING UP A RATHER NICE, CRACKLY, FOLKY MIX BY TOM SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE PROLIFERATION OF AI LINKS AND PROMISES TO DIAL IT DOWN IN 2023, PT.1:  

  • How To Turn ChatGPT Evil: Apologies in advance for the extent to which this first section is dominated by Ai text stuff, but, well, it’s VERY EXCITING (by which, in the main, I mean that I have spent most of the past week feverishly Googling ‘unexpected career pivots for middle-aged men’). We start with this fun little series of instructions, contained in a Twitter thread, on how to make ChatGPT…loosen up a bit. Ordinarily when you ask the software to explain something nefarious to you – say, I don’t know, how to use quicklime to dispose of a human corpse, that sort of thing – the software will demur and pretend it simply couldn’t possibly do something so awful; if, however, you trick it into only acting like it’s an evil AI then you can manipulate into giving you all sorts of helpful assistance when it comes to getting away with literal murder (other crimes are available; Web Curios does not endorse or encourage murder, even at this most trying time of the year). This is included less because I expect you all to start plotting criminal careers abetted by a machine and more as another fun way of playing with the software – and, I suppose, as a reminder that the machines are still pretty dumb. Does that make you feel better? I am not sure it makes me feel better.
  • Awesome ChatGPT Prompts: I can’t vouch for their ‘awesomeness’, but these are some interesting examples of ways you might use ChatGPT for fun and profit. There are prompt examples here to turn the machine into a proofreader for English, a screenwriter, a…er…relationship counsellor(!), a text adventure game, an accountant…obviously (and I don’t feel I need to tell *you* this, but just in case) you shouldn’t at any point take advice on anything important from a machine which cannot in any meaningful way be claimed to ‘understand’ what it is saying to you, but it’s fascinating to see how many different use cases people have put this stuff to within literally a week. You can find another bunch of (less well-curated) prompt ideas here – there’s one in this second list which involves asking the AI to create a workout for you, which feels like EXACTLY the sort of request that’s going to end up in tears and Deep Heat and an unpleasantly-strained glute, so you all please take care with this stuff.
  • How To Use ChatGPT To Code A Basic Website: To be clear – I have not tried this, and I am slightly sceptical that it will work straight out of the box…BUT, that said, the prompt here given will in theory get the chatbot to take you through all the steps needed to code a simple website; fine, we’re not quite at the stage where it will do all the really tedious stuff (why is registering domains and doing hosting b0llocks so painful? WHY?) for you, but this feels quite a lot like magic, particularly when you consider that this is very much the first wave of this sort of thing.
  • Moonbeam: Of course, what’s most interesting about the sudden swell of renewed interest in Large Language Model text generation is the swathe of products and services that are going to be built on top of tools like ChatGPT3. Tools like Moonbeam, which is basically a nice and user-friendly front-end to help you automate a bunch of tedious business-related writing tasks to churn out content that noone cares about and no actual humans really want to read. This is a bit like Jasper, another writing assistant which I featured on here a while back, but which claims itself to be significantly more powerful and is very much aimed at agencies and the like – there’s a real (short-term, fine, but still) opportunity here in creating templates and tools for content miners to use, and I would imagine that somewhere in Big Agency Holding Company Land the ghost of Marcel is stirring (shout out to the 17 people who get this joke).
  • InWorld: One of the really interesting things this week has been watching people using the ChatGPT interface to spin up incredibly good chatbots based on pop culture characters, and even manage to create AI Dungeon-style text adventure games within the software. InWorld is ‘character chatbots’, but VERY SHINY and, honestly, quite remarkably impressive. The link here takes you to the ‘Arcade’ Page of their website, where you can play around with various fan-created chatbots embodying a selection of characters (tropes or people from popular fictional properties, in the main), but the really interesting bit comes when you try and create your own and you get into the wealth of personality traits and backstory and behaviours that you can define. More than anything else this week, this gave me a real frisson of excitement about the potential for storytelling and creation and worldbuilding that this sort of code affords – the idea of anyone being able to spin up a wealth of individual characters with recognisable, individual traits that will determine their behaviours, and then letting them interact with each other, and with players, within a defined ludic or narrative setting is…amazing, honestly. Do have a play with this – it’s really very interesting indeed, and hints at an awful lot of imminent potential.
  • The AI Sages: Or “It took about 12 hours from the launch of the new GPT3.5 code for someone to ‘write’ a ‘book’ using the tech and make it available for sale on Amazon for a few bucks” – fair play to the people who turned this around so quickly. This is not, to be clear, a book that I could imagine anyone would ever find worth reading – unless you really, really want to own a selection of motivational quotations made up by an AI and attributed to a bunch of renowned thinkers from history, and then illustrated by another AI (you don’t, do you? Please say you don’t) – but it’s certainly a curio. Bear in mind that from hereon in there will be a non-trivial chance that any self-published book on Amazon (other, less evil online book marketplaces are available) will have been churned out by AI based on prompts like “Write me a twisty, turny domestic psychological thriller with a series of unreliable protagonists, Amazon bestseller, page-turner”. In fact, fcuk this Curios lark, I am using my Christmas break to train a machine on Lee Child novels and make myself a fortune.
  • Ask Alfred: One of the frothier takes seen in the wild this week has been ‘this ChatGPT thing is basically the end of Google’, which struck me as rather underestimating the importance of all the work that Google has spent a couple of decades doing on establishing information and trustworthiness rankings across the giant network of the web (yes, ok, fine, it’s also rather fcuked a lot of all that work by devaluing its core product with adverts to th point of near unusability, but still) – just asking an AI for information and getting an answer presented as the single truth, with no obvious explanation or indication or rationale as to why that particular answer is the right one, does not strike me as an immediate improvement on the current system – hadn’t we all agreed that unknowable black box systems are not necessarily things we want to be determining human decision making? Still, it’s also undeniably true that the discursive Q&A style information delivery system – FINALLY, THE JEEVES DREAM HAS BEEN REALISED? Is…is it time for Ask Jeeves to finally be resurrected? – appeals to users and has certain benefits; if you’re curious as to how GPT would work as a search engine, you can install this Chrome extension which will add a ChatGPT result to your Google searches for comparative purposes. Interesting, not least as it shows up all the areas in which Google is simply a bit broken as a result of aggressive SEO-gaming.
  • CreAItives: Yes, I know, I am upset by this website’s name too. Still, it is VERY USEFUL and if you have any interest in keeping up with developments in the AI image and copy and video space you should probably bookmark it – this is basically a massive, regularly-updated database of AI tools and toys to play with, from a bunch of different tools to places to find other artists and enthusiasts online, to useful texts on best practice…honestly, this is really helpful and packed full of decent resources.
  • Originality AI: Of course, for everyone rubbing their hands in glee and thinking “Christ, I can get GPT to churn out literally EVERYTHING I need to write and therefore spend a significant proportion of the next few years working no more than two hours a week! The leisure age is truly arrived! PEEL MY GRAPES!” there will be a possibly equal number thinking “There is no way I am going to let these lazy fcuks outsource all their work to machines while I have to carry on paying them” – which is where services such as OriginalityAI come in. This outfit claims to be able to identify AI-generated copy with 94% accuracy (it’s benchmarked against ChatGPT), and it’s aimed at people working in the content shovelware market rather than in academia – the idea being that sometimes you really want to be 100% certain that the blogpost about the importance of LISTENING before you ENGAGE on social media (for example) hasn’t been spaffed out in three seconds by an AI. I am very much looking forward to the first spate of panicked articles in the serious press about “THIEVING STAFF”, condemning the fact that white collar drones the world over will soon be doing everything in their power to make the machines work for them (in the brief window before the machines take over and everything goes sideways). Because, honestly, wouldn’t you outsource most of your pointless job to a machine, given the chance?
  • Tome: Speaking of ‘AI as a labour saving device in the white collar workplace’, do you think, perhaps, that there are certain decisions that you might not immediately think ‘yes, this makes sense to outsource to a largely-unproven, experimental and most-definitely-not-that-intelligent-AI’? Yes, me too – but this hasn’t stopped the appearance of Tome, a service which promises to offer VCs and Angel investors a quick and easy way of looking over the contracts presented to them by the businesses they are looking to invest in. I mean, you *could* take the time to read through all the documentation relating to the hot new startup you think will change the world and make you millions – you COULD – but, well, there are Patagonia vests to buy and nootropics to take, and gym sessions and microdosing and long sessions talking about the importance of EA as a truly PARADIGM-SHIFTING MOVEMENT, and, honestly, who’s got the time? NO FCUKER, etc. So let Tome do the hard work of reading over all the legal documentation and summarising it for you – what, after all, is the worst that could happen? Now to be clear, obviously summarising contracts is something that can in theory be automated due to the reasonably standard language and structure of the documents, but I wonder with stuff like this what unknown unknowns will be lost through the process – I remember reading something a few years back suggesting that one of the odd potential side-effects of AI’s introduction to the law (for example) was that a whole swathe of junior legal staff would be undertrained in aspects of legislation because they simply wouldn’t have to spend the same amount of time reading through old cases, etc, because they could just get machines to analyse them instead, and this feels like a comparable sort of field.
  • MyPitchDeck: Using AI to create pitch presentations for startups to use with potential investors! I am including this not because I think it looks good (it doesn’t, particularly) but because it’s exactly the sort of business that we are going to see EVERYWHERE in 2023 – AI-based assistance for specific sectoral tasks will be the new dropshipping, mark my words. The margin on this stuff is insane – these people are charging $33 a pop to create a 10-slide presentation through an entirely-automated process, which strikes me as a pretty good wedge of profit. What particular niche can YOU serve with an ostensibly-simple but in-reality-practically-useless AI-based solution?
  • Hello: This is interesting – Hello is a new search engine currently in beta which markets itself as being ‘for developers’ – what this effectively means is that you can tell it to return results in code, which, if you’re someone who spends a lot of time wrangling Python or similar horrible programming language, might well be useful. “Hello is a search engine that simply tells users what the answer is. Optimized for developers and technical questions, Hello instantly answers questions with simple explanations and relevant code snippets from the web. Hello is powered by large, proprietary AI language models. It’s smart enough to generate answers based on information from multiple sources.” If you code, this is probably worth a look.
  • Aragon: Stable Diffusion-based online image generators are practically old hat by now (how quickly we grow so jaded!), but this is, again, an interesting example from the point of view of ease of use and user interface – Aragon offers a bunch of readymade template options for image creation, so you can use it to create pictures of yourself (for example) in specific locations, or looking SUPER BUSINESS for LinkedIn, or, weirdly, looking ‘All American’, and they have additional templates in development to allow for the easy insertion of logos and branded products into AI-generated images. Again, the point here is less about what you can do with this stuff and more the idea that there is a market and margin in the idea of making it as frictionless for the muggles to use as possible.
  • Rick and Mortify: Do people still watch or care about Rick & Morty, or is that just too 2015 for anyone in modernity to bother with? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you might enjoy playing with this AI toy which spits out new, computer-imagined storyboards and accompanying images based on a few simple user prompts – if the answer is ‘no’ then, well, I don’t know what to tell you. Shall we move on? Let’s move on.
  • Prompt Battle: I actually saw footage from the first one of these floating around a few months ago, but now there is a website and everything and as such we can call it a TREND and I can link to it with impunity. Did any of you ever go to those Secret Wars nights they ran in London in the 00s, where a bunch of graffiti artists would effectively do art battles over the course of an evening, taking half a wall each, while a bunch of DJs played and a load of slightly-awkward looking people stood around biting their lips and bopping their heads? No? Well I did, and this reminds me of that slightly – Prompt Battle is an event idea which started in Dresden in October, and which involves a single simple premise whereby a bunch of people compete to…oh, look, here: “Prompt Battle is a live event where people compete against each other using text-to-image software. Show off your prompt skills and maybe the audience will choose you as the winner who elicited the most surprising, disturbing or beautiful images from the latent spaces of DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Craiyon, etc.” Obviously what we are talking about here is, effectively, a bunch of people sitting at keyboards, typing, and occasionally throwing pictures up on a screen for people to clap or jeer at, but I like the fact that someone is bothering to do this, and there’s something pleasing about taking something which is largely a solo pursuit that takes place sitting and staring at a screen (that is, looking at AI imagined artworks) and turns it into something communal and community-focused (whilst, yes, fine, still involving staring at screens). The next prompt battle is taking place in February in Berlin, should you be minded to go, but this feels like the sort of thing that they wouldn’t mind you creating spin-off events wherever you live. YEARS ago I went to a pub quiz in London where the gimmick was that the questions were impossible to answer without the aid of a smartphone, which felt like a nice mixture of the (then) modern and the traditional, and this has a pleasingly-similar vibe (to my mind at least).
  • AI Pickup Lines: Don’t act like you’re surprised. Look, here’s a feature idea should any journalists be reading this – The Rise Of The Digital Cyrano: What Does The Rise Of Text AI Mean For Dating? Come on, it’s a GREAT pitch! Anyway, AI pickup lines is the first (that I have seen, at least) hastily-cobbled-together platform to harness the POWER OF AI in order to help you in your attempts to persuade someone to let you touch their mucous membranes – give it a keyword and it will generate a pickup line for you in seconds. Obviously these are all terrible, but, equally, they are not THAT terrible – I just gave it ‘Cthulhu’ in an attempt to confuse it, and it came back with “I’m drawn to you like a cult to Cthulhu!” which, while pretty unlikely to make anyone swoon, is certainly better than I had expected. Seriously, though, I wonder whether one of the big apps will shortly announce a feature that claims to detect AI generated copy? Because I’d be amazed if there aren’t an awful lot of men currently asking ChatGPT to “generate a selection of witty conversational gambits to use in a dating scenario with an attractive woman who I would like to convince to sleep with me, funny, self-deprecating, emotional IQ, vulnerable, respectful.” (seriously, “I Let An AI Use Me Like A Flesh Puppet And I Got Laid So Much” is another decent pitch, should you be in the market for it. God I am WASTED in newslettering, I tell you).

By Julia Soboleva

OUR NEXT MUSICAL OFFERING IS THE SUPERB CHILLY GONZALES CHRISTMAS ALBUM FROM A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO WHICH IS BRILLIANT EVEN IF YOU ORDINARILY HATE CHRISTMAS MUSIC (AND I REALLY DO ORDINARILY HATE CHRISTMAS MUSIC)! 

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE PROLIFERATION OF AI LINKS AND PROMISES TO DIAL IT DOWN IN 2023, PT.2:      

  • 2022 In Trending Topics: It’s often said that Twitter’s trending topics are one of the most unhinged manifestations of the way in which social media and the web and the near-infinity of digital touchpoints for news have created a situation of context collapse, and that they offer the best example of the dizzying gatling-gun-to-the-face, whiplash nature of the modern experience (or it is by me). This is the 2022 Twitter Trends archive, compiled by Brian Feldman who over the course of the past year has spent time screenshotting Twitter’s trending topics in the US. As Brian puts it, “This website is an archive of the 457 different trending topics I logged from Twitter throughout 2022. I’ve presented them both as a calendar that you can poke through, and as a timeline that you can read from start to finish if you have the patience and the stomach…Please understand, and embrace, the specificity. This is not everyone’s Twitter 2022, it’s mine. Maybe some of it was yours, too.” This is funny, incomprehensible, maddening, silly and, maybe most of all, eventually-deadening – perhaps the ur-evocation of what still remains the truest thing ever written by a machine, ever.
  • The Reddit Comment Stream: In a similar vein to the previous link, this is a live feed of comments being posted on Reddit – you can filter it do eliminate any NSFW material at source, should you be worried about unsolicited bongo, but it’s seemingly text-only in any case so you should be fine. I think I have previously waxed lyrical about how magical and strange and sad and beautiful I find this sort of thing – a window into the collective consciousness in realtime is a marvellous and terrifying gift, after all – and this is no exception. In the couple of minutes I’ve had the link open this morning I have seen posts about coding, about US gold reserves, about the cold weather in the UK, and, er, a lot of very thirsty people offering handjobs; ALL OF HUMAN LIFE IS HERE! Or at least the slice of human life that hangs out on Reddit, which you may or may not feel is representative of the species as a whole.
  • Omeife: The dream of creating a useful, functional humanoid robot seems to have taken something of a back seat of late, Elon’s empty promises aside, so it was pleasing to find this link and learn about Omeife, a project being undertaken in Nigeria which is looking to build “a 6-foot-tall multilingual human-like robot. From an idea that was conceptualised in 2020 to a back-and-forth construction—slow wins and quick-succession learning—that stretched across two years, Omeife, built as a female Igbo character that understands and speaks eight different languages, is now a product ready to meet the world. Powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms developed in-house by the company’s team of scientists, Omeife has a deep understanding of African culture and behavioural patterns. Omeife has a real time understanding of its environment including active listening and the ability to focus on a specific conversation thread as it is happening. She is not just multilingual, it has the ability to switch languages and interact with specific gestures—hand illustrations, smile and other bodily gestures—that match the tone of the conversation. Omeife currently speaks English, French, Arabic, Kiswahili, Pidgin, Wazobia, Afrikaans, and of course, Igbo.” Now, I can’t help but be a bit uncertain about some of the claims here, but let’s take them at face value for a second – what’s perhaps most interesting about this, beyond the whole ‘a humanoid robot’ thing, is that it’s being built by an African team, in Africa, and as a result will have certain African sensibilities – I particularly liked the fact that Omeife won’t use particular phrases or expressions in conversation as they aren’t ‘polite’ in African cultures. As with all these things, the current iteration of the robot is a long way from looking like the scifi androids of popular imagining but if you’re interested in robotics, or indeed just in how tech projects like this look when they’re undertaken by people who aren’t from the global north, this is worth keeping an eye on.
  • Tone Transfer: Ooh, this is FUN. A nice little Google toy to show off the company’s work in AI-directed audio style transfer – which basically means ‘software that can take the sound of a certain instrument and copy the tune and pitch but make it sound like it was in fact played by another instrument altogether’. Which, again, is a p1ss-poor description, for which sincere apologies – look, just click the link and have a play. There are a bunch of prerecorded instrumental sounds you can play with, but perhaps most interestingly you can plug in your own instruments and see what you can do with your own musical noodlings. Want to play your original SMASH HIT (and yet sadly unrecognised by the wider world, chiz chiz) guitar composition and see what it would sound like for the bassoon? Well now you can! On the one hand, super-fun and you can already see the indistinct edges of what the next few years of musical creativity might look like and how they might work; on the other hand, this doesn’t feel like GREAT news for session musicians, long-term.
  • Abyme: Look, I have to admit that I don’t really understand what this is about – I *think* that Abyme is a publishing house-slash-typographic studio, but I honestly can’t really make head nor tail of this or what it means: “ABYME is an independent publisher of artist’s editions and multiples founded by John Morgan and Adrien Vasquez in 2017. Abyme’s interest often but not exclusively begins with text or typography; consequently at the heart of Abyme is a digital type foundry. Many of the editions and typefaces began life as a ‘work’ inside another ‘work’ produced by John Morgan studio or through the extended culture and relationships of the practice. Abyme offers a platform to implement, publish and distribute these works and develop editions with new and existing collaborators.” Still, I LOVE their website, mainly because it’s a borderline-incomprehensible collage of cartoons and illustrations and photos and literary extracts and quotations, and, inexplicably, gifs of eels.
  • Lobby: Are you thinking about new year’s resolutions and how you are going to make your life DIFFERENT AND BETTER? Perhaps one of your commitments will be to spend more time speaking with your friends, in which case perhaps you should suggest that you and your mates all install Lobby which will basically force you into speaking to a friend each day until you uninstall the app out of a sense of combined boredom and frustration. The gimmick here is very much a post-BeReal one (although it seems this has actually been around a while) – every day the app will force you to have a one-minute videochat with one of your friends, at what seems to be a random time. Doing something important? DON’T CARE TALK TO TRACY. In the middle of an important conversation in real life? SHUTUP AND HAVE A ZOOM CALL WITH FINLAY. You can see how this could get annoying, couldn’t you? Still, if you want to have a succession of increasingly terse and resentful minute-long conversations with people who, if you keep this up, won’t be your friends much longer, then you may want to give this a try.
  • The California Roadkill Observation System: I have no idea whether any of you live in California – do any of you live in California? – but if you do then I imagine you have for YEARS been bemoaning the lack of any decent record of where exactly the State’s multitudinous wildlife population is most likely to get mown down by a Cadillac. BEMOAN NO LONGER!  “This web system can be used to record observations from roadkill-reporters out in the field who come across identifiable road-killed wildlife. Observation details include type of animal and/or species found, where the road-kill was located, when it was found, pictures of the road-kill, and any additional details about road or traffic conditions. The system then displays a summary of this information for different animal groups across the state.” There are PICTURES (well, some pictures)! This is almost certainly a really useful resource for a whole bunch of different agencies and organisations, but I can’t quite get over the disclaimer on the homepage which points out that they are more than happy for submissions to be anonymous and which led me to think that maybe there’s some sort of roadkill serial killer stalking the highways of California mowing down Coyotes  and uploading the snuff photos here in some sort of macabre, death-related version of real-life (death) Pokemon.
  • TwoTone: I would imagine if you work in any sort of vaguely-digital-ish job that you have spent much of the past decade having conversations about ‘data’ – how important it is, how oil-like it is, how vital it is that your data be BIG and SMART and JOINED-UP, and CLEAN. I would also imagine that in your more honest moments you probably aren’t wholly convinced as to the utility of collecting all this data, or the value of analysing it, or indeed of the ability of any of your colleagues to make head nor fcuking tail of whatever it is that said data may or may not be trying to tell you – if that’s the case, why not make it your 2023 goal (aim low!) to make your data MUSICAL? TwoTone is a service that lets you plug in any dataset you like and make audio out of it – it’s important to bear in mind that the outputs will likely sound awful, but just think how much fun you could have in Q12023 if you manage to persuade your CMO that what the business REALLY needs is an audio sting that is intimately tied to the very fundamentals of the business and should be derived from, I don’t know, the last three years of your diversity paygap reporting turned into a bloopy audiotrack. Go on, aim for the stars.
  • All I Want For Christmas Is Bootie Mashup: Fine, this should probably be one of the music links, but it requires a download and I have a particular weird taxonomy going on here that therefore requires that it go in here instead. Have you ever thought ‘you know what I would like to listen to more than anything else in the whole world in the month of December? A 40+track compilation of some of the best (oh, ok, least-bad) mashups featuring Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas!”’ No, of course you haven’t, and yet here we are. This is, personally speaking, my very own Guantanamo soundtrack, but I appreciate that there are others of you out there for whom this may be less of an aural torture.
  • Associated Press Photographs of the Year 2022: You know the drill by now. I did find the opening line of the copy accompanying the photos here rather arresting – “Taken together, they can convey the feeling of a world convulsing” – and it’s certainly true that there is a LOT in these pics, and a sense that (even if you’re someone who, like me, spends more time than is conceivably healthy with your face plugged into the world online events firehose) there is simply too much happening everywhere all the time to ever get anything resembling a coherent picture or sense of the whole. Which is, of course, true, and maybe it’s healthy to remember that every now and again and concede that so much is necessarily unknowable to us, and incomprehensible. Hm, does that make sense? Not sure, it’s too cold for me to think properly. Anyway, as ever with the AP’s annual best-of there are some astonishing images in here, and many that are as heartbreaking as they are beautiful (there’s a not-inconsiderable amount of death and destruction, as per). My personal favourite is the one of the protestor in Buenos Aires, but please pick your own (YOU CAN’T HAVE MINE FFS!).
  • The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year: Experience the majesty of the aurora borealis from the warmth and comf- oh, no, hang on, it is not warm and comfortable, it is COLD and we may as well be in the frozen wastes of the North. Still, if you want to see 25 photographs of pretty lights in the sky over snowy vistas then this will sort you right out.
  • The Natural Landscape Photography Awards 2022: These are WONDERFUL – so many glorious subjects and beautifully-composed shots, with the best ones (to my mind) achieving that trick of making landscape look both recognisable and entirely abstract at the same time.
  • Wyldcard: This is such a clever idea, and the potential applications are vast – Wyldcard is basically a  prototype e-ink playing card system in search of a game mechanic. Its designer, a certain Jonah, writes: “Wyldcards are small plastic cards with e-ink screens (like a Kindle). When placed onto a plinth, the image on the card can be changed by a hidden computer. The cards also contain a memory chip, so they can store stats, moves, and keep changes and status effects from one game to the next. Plug your plinth into your friend’s and play against them.” Jonah is actively seeking collaborators to help him turn the prototypical idea into a playable game, so if you’re a game maker with ideas, or if you know anyone who fits the bill, do take a look at this – it feels very much like there’s *something* here.
  • More AI-generated Imaginary Film Stills: You want a bunch of more images from imaginary films that don’t exist? GREAT! Another couple of a megadumps (here’s the second) of some of the recent new SD and Midjourney projects where people have basically plugged in ‘The Jungle Book, but directed by Akira Kurosawa’ (not exactly this, but you get the idea) into the machines to generate some truly wonderful stuff. Fine, ok, this is still a bit creativity-as-madlibs, but, well, that’s not that far away from how creativity works (sort of), and a lot of these are quite remarkable. Once again thanks to Rene Walter for compiling these.
  • Rotaboxes: You may not think a game in which you’re asked each day to compose a photography by rotating individual square elements of it one-by-one until it’s perfect again would be fun, but I have played this every morning this week and I feel it has basically ushered me over the threshold into PROPER middle-aged, and I’ll shortly be investing in a year-long subscription to one of those puzzle magazines so beloved of Nanas on long coach journeys.
  • Murdle: Speaking of Nanas and their puzzle books, do you like logic puzzles? You know, the ones with premises along the lines of “James likes Joanna; Joanna thinks Steven smells; Tony will sleep with John, but not Jane, on Wednesdays; Alan is the house gimp; using this information, please determine the exact configuration of the polycule on Thursdays”? You do, don’t you? In which case, GREAT! Murdle (I know that I had promised to feature no more Wordle-y puzzles in here, but this is only Wordle-y in the sense that its daily, promise) is a daily logic puzzle where you have to SOLVE THE MURDER – look, I warn you, this is HARD (or at least I found it so – I have only done one of them, but it took me a…frankly embarrassingly long time), but if you’re a particular type of person with a particular type of brain (specifically: one that is better and more efficient than mine), you may find this a pleasing addition to your morning procrastination routine.
  • Costerly: Is a packet of fags in Liberia more or less expensive than a tracheotomy in Ecuador? Is it cheaper to buy a knockoff driving licence in Rome or to drink yourself to death in Bucharest? These are the sorts of TOUGH QUESTIONS that Costerly presents you with each day, in a game that doesn’t sound like it should be in any way fun or compelling but which somehow manages to be both.
  • The Old Operating Theatre: Fancy playing a small piece of interactive fiction all about amputating someone’s leg? OF COURSE YOU DO! “Step into the role of a surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital in the early 19th century, before the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptic practices. Warning: This story is inspired by a real historical case and contains graphic descriptions of injury and surgery.” This was surprisingly fun and lightly educational, and I felt inordinately proud of the fact that I managed to get to the end without seemingly condemning my patient to a horrible, gangrenous demise.
  • The Confounding Calendar: A new game a day until Christmas! Ludic gifts for all! “It’s that time of the year again. The days are shorter, the nights are longer, and the puzzles are puzzlier. We would like to once again present…The CONFOUNDING Calendar! A collection of tiny puzzles that functions like a free online advent calendar of games, with a little surprise for you to play each day in December. (Deducember, if you will.) Check back here each day of the month for new puzzle games!” I have played half-a-dozen of the nine available so far this year and they are a lot of fun – also, you can go back and play previous years’ entries too. Excellent end-of-year work avoidance, should you be firmly into the ‘shall we circle back on that in the New Year?’ phase of professionalism.
  • Advent Incremental: The final miscellaneous link of 2022 is, appropriately enough, a Christmas-themed clicker game which will hopefully give you something to stare at, slack-jawed, until you can start the serious business of drinking and remembering why you only see your relatives a handful of times a year. Click! Wait! Watch the numbers go up and enjoy the inexplicably-satisfying itch-scratch of slow, incremental numerical progress! IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR!

By RubyEtc

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Tumblr’s Year in Review: In general I tend not to find year-in-review posts by the social platforms hugely useful, but I’ll make an exception for Tumblr’s as it feels significantly more culturally-interesting than the others, perhaps because it tends to have less of an impact on the mainstream media and so tends to feel fresher and newer to me than the ones from Insta telling us all stuff we already basically know. If you want to know which fictional couples the ceaselessly-horny fandoms of Tumblr have spent most time ‘shipping this year, which fandoms have been most active, which KPop stars are biggest with users, what social issues most resonate with them, and a host of other information besides, this will be super-useful; honestly, if you’re doing anything with any sort of youth-focused bent then you really have no excuse not to at the very least skim this.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  •  A Rural Pen: I love this project, where ink and pigments are made from old firearms; “I take handguns and other firearms out of circulation, dissolve them in sulfuric acid and derive pigments from them, commonly known as Mars colors, including Mars Black, Mars Red and Mars Yellow.  As these are hand crafted, the colors may vary.  Join me in the transmutation of firearms into pigments.” SUCH a good idea.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Conversation Fear: Apologies, again, for the rather AI-ish bent to the first few articles here – again, though, this feels genuinely frothy and intellectually interesting and cusp-of-something-incredible-y (yes, fine, but you know what I mean), and it feels appropriate to share some writings that explore what the past year’s rise in accessible AI products across images and words might mean. First up we have this excellent and, if you’re feeling a bit scared of all this stuff, moderately-reassuring article by Rob Horning exploring what he sees as the inherent limitations of the current iteration of textual AIs and how these limitations both render them perfect for social media but, equally, perhaps less-threatening than we might initially have thought. I don’t necessarily agree with the slightly dismissive conclusion, but it’s hard to argue with Horning’s assertion here that: “Generative models produce images and fragments of text that are superficially novel and surprising but comprise a readily recognizable and predictable genre of intrinsically meaningless content. This material is not only perfectly suited to filling out templates with placeholder images and text; it is also well-suited to the master template of our time, the social media feed. It is calibrated to the amount of curiosity we bring to scrolling, to the desire to be distracted while procrastinating or waiting for something else to happen. Tech reporter Kashmir Hill tweeted that “About half of my feed now is text and art generated by AI. At what point do we just go 100% prompt?” The obvious answer — one that ChatGPT might even offer — is that feeds have always already been filled with algorithmically produced content, and generative models’ content just reflects a slightly different hybrid of human and machine than the one made up of humans and recommendation algorithms. The feed has always been a kind of chatbot responding to the prompts of our past interaction data. That is to say, feeds can be understood as AI-generated works, and vice versa: The output of models is always implicitly a kind of endless feed.”
  • The Empty Brain: Another very useful corrective to some of the more hyperbolic commentary you might have seen about AI and the brain and parallels between the two over the course of the past twelve months, this piece is subtitled ‘the brain is not a computer’ and is a really helpful explanation of our current understanding of neurological function and the way in which we (again, currently) perceive memory and thought to work. I checked this with an actual (almost) qualified doctor of neuropsychology (thanks Shardcore) and he said it was ‘quite good’, which is endorsement enough for me; this article is specifically concerned with refuting the conception of the brain (and therefore us as ‘intelligent’ beings) as an ‘information processor’, because, as Robert Epstein writes, “The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors. Setting aside the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and mechanical metaphors to be silly.” So, so interesting.
  • The Future of Work in the AI Age: How do you feel about your future employment prospects right now? I as ever assume that most people reading this fall under the broad rubric of ‘generic media w4nkers’, white collar workers employed in some aspect of the advermarketingpr industries, or design, or CONTENT, and that as such this year has been the first in which the long-heralded promise of ‘the robots are coming and they are hungry for our jobs’ has seemed to have any real-world weight. This is another optimistic-ish piece which will hopefully serve to make you feel slightly better about at least the short-to-medium term future; it describes a centaur-ish way of working that may well become standard in the next few years, which the article’s author describes as ‘sandwich’ working – a human decides what is needed, how to describe it, and what it needs to be; the task is then given to an AI or combination of AIs to undertake; and the human then picks up the work again to finish, refine, tweak and revise, perhaps with ulterior AI assistance, until  a satisfactory conclusion is reached. Which, I agree, sounds plausible and not too scary – unless of course you’re one of the people who currently makes a living by doing the step in the middle, in which case, sorry, you’re still screwed.  The other thing that I find slightly troubling about this is that it’s a future predicated on one’s being able to effectively use a bunch of third party digital interfaces and tools and OH GOD DON’T MAKE ME HAVE TO LEARN NEW FCUKING UIs AND DASHBOARDS IN MY MID-40s IDONWANNA.
  • How To Use AI To Generate Ideas: Still, did the ideas people think they were safe? THEY WERE WRONG! This is an excellent post by Ethan Mollick (who really is a must-follow/read on this stuff, if you’re keep to keep up-to-date) on how one might go about using ChatGPT as a way of coming up with ideas – I know that you might think that one thing that machines can’t do is come up with truly creative solutions, but I refer you back to my earlier point about creativity being very much something you can brute force. Honestly, read this piece and then think back to every single stultifying, pointless, soul-destroying 20-person ‘brainstorm’ that you had in 2022, and how much useful material was generated and how much BILLABLE TIME was spunked into the ether, and how much easier and, frankly, better it would have been had you just been able to ask the machine to come up with ‘50 creative ideas to promote fingering to the over-60s’ (other briefs are available) rather than having to deal with your stupid, bovine colleagues. Ok, this isn’t going to replace your Creative Director – but it might save you 100-odd hours in 2023 that you would otherwise spend listening to double-figure-IQ morons say things like “What about…a TikTok? Or could we do something with an installation?” Oh, and seeing as we’re on Ethan’s blog, this post looking into whether AI could usefully help him in his dayjob as a professor is also quietly astonishing (small spoiler: it can, in ways you might not expect).
  • Building a Virtual Machine in Chat-GPT: This is *quite* techy, so feel free to skip it if you’re not comfortable with code and computing gubbins (or, of course, for any other reason you like – I AM NOT YOUR BOSS), but it’s another ‘fcuk me this stuff really does feel like witchcraft at points’ moment for text AI – this is complicated but by the end MINDBLOWING, not least because of the seemingly-infinitely-recursive way that you can create a virtual machine inside Chat-GPT WHICH CAN THEN ITSELF RUN CHATGPT. I confess to feeling a little bit like my brain had been turned into a Moebius strip around about the halfway point of this, but it’s once again a spectacular proof-of-concept demonstration of what this stuff can do (and, remember, this is literally a week old).
  • AI Can Invent Language Too By The Way: At this point I’m sort of just reduced to waving my hands in the general direction of this stuff and gaping in wonder; this article looks into how Chat-GPT can be used to create an entire fictional language, with grammatical rules that the AI can then consistently apply to enable to to undertake translations from English into said imaginary language. Which, on the one hand isn’t immediately useful, but on the other is, again, just kind-of mindblowing and which at the very least will save all the people labouring over their twelve-volume fantasy epic about “Tharg, Daughter of Thargandia” the trouble of inventing their own alphabet and coming up with its own syntax.
  • New Avenues: This post by author Robin Sloan articulated rather perfectly something that I think I’ve said repeatedly over the past year or so of Curios – that it feels like there is something of an independent creative renaissance happening online, outside of the major social platforms, which is seeing individuals and collectives returning to the practice of making small, personal, curious projects on the web just because they can – and that we will benefit from exploring these projects and making our own, outside of the attention industrial complex that characterises the web as seen through a phonescreen. Basically Robin has managed to effectively explain Why Web Curios Exists and Why I Think This Stuff Is Important far better than I could ever have done, and without knowing that either I or Web Curios exist. Damn you Robin, this is why you’re a successfully-published author and I am a very cold webmong.
  • Reading As Counter Practice: I have been reading the Count of Monte Cristo recently, and it’s struck me the extent to which the nature of the text (it is VERY long, and despite being plot-heavy and eminently readable, and oddly modern in many ways, it is also dense with description and aside in the manner of novels of the time) necessarily changes the manner in which one reads it and in turn how one relates to it and the ideas it contains. Which is, basically and less-articulately, the point of this article – inspired in part by the recent, viral comments by discraced cryptocriminal SBF about how ‘most books should probably have been blogposts’, the piece explores how and why the medium informs the manner in which the message is received, and how reading longform work, offline, can be useful as much as a means of changing the way in which one thinks as of imbibing information: in conclusion, the author recommends “that we think of reading as a valuable counter-practice. Or, rather, that we at least sometimes think of reading as a valuable counter-practice. By counter-practice, I mean a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu”, and, honestly, I like this a lot as a way of thinking.
  • Writing With A Quest: The second proper review of Meta’s new kit I’ve seen, this feels more positive than the one I featured here a few weeks back, without at any point offering any sort of compelling rationale as to why anyone might actually NEED such a thing. Ryan Broderick, writing for Information, explains his experience of working and writing in VR, using the Quest’s multiscreen and mixed reality features, and given Meta’s apparent immediate focus on selling VR and the metaverse to enterprise customers rather than consumers it’s an interesting look at how a near-future of work might look if big business buys into what Zuckerberg is selling. Although, honestly, I had sort of hoped that the exciting VR future first trailed to me in the mid-90s would involve slightly more exciting things than what is basically ‘a load of different virtual monitors on which you can look at multiple spreadsheets simultaneously’.
  • The Therapy Chatbots of Singapore: This is in-part a fascinating look at how high-tech societies seek to streamline public health provision, and some of the pitfalls of so doing, and the limitations of current AI as a solution to emotional problems – but it’s also a glimpse into what we are going to be seeing a LOT more of in the coming 12-18 months. GIven the fact that the chatbot future we were promised by a buch of consultants 7-8 years ago is finally seemingly here, and that there’s now API access to a generally very good English language human conversation interface, we are going to see a LOT of startups that apply a Chat-GPT layer to various issues; we’re going to see specially-trained advice bots for dating and relationships and mortgages and investments and health and motoring and cooking, and 99% of them will be spun up on the cheap by grifters who want to make a quick buck and don’t know or don’t care about the potential negative side effects of allowing an unknowable machine ‘intelligence’ to dole out advice, and we are going to see some INTERESTING CASE STUDIES here about how wrong this stuff can go imho.
  • A Year With Merkel: I have always found Angela Merkel fascinating as a political figure, and I adored this long profile of her in Spiegel – the writer, Alexander Osang, obviously knows his subject well, and was granted decent access, and it’s by turns a moving and clear-eyed portrayal of a politician who, after dominating European politics for decades, has seen her legacy recontextualised in ways she probably didn’t quite foresee in less than 12 months. All politicians are great and terrible and their own way, even the inconsequential ones (it’s something about the necessary degree of hubris, I think), but there is something oddly…sad, almost, about the slow slide into irrelevance of the post-power Premier (which perhaps explains Mr Tony Blair’s seemingly-incessant ‘rare interventions’ into UK politics). This is quite chewy, but it’s a really well-written (and translated) piece about a woman who has been one of the most significant actors in German, European and international politics of the past 80 years.
  • The Corner Kicks of the World Cup: I know it’s the done thing to look slightly askance at Americans when they talk about football, and to laugh at their insistence on US-ifying the language and terminology to fit their domestic expectations of what sport should be and how it should work, but I have really enjoyed some of the reporting of the football from US outlets over the past couple of weeks, not least because of the fact that they don’t assume knowledge of their readers to the same extent and so therefore can end up doing a better job of outlining certain tactical elements of the game. This piece – on the different ways in which teams take and defend corners – is a case in point; it features really clear diagrams, and an explanation between zonal and man-to-man marking that, honestly, I would really appreciate them employing on Match of the Day from time to time.
  • More World Cup: More World Cup writing, this in the New Yorker, on the oddity of Qatar and the whole World Cup experience, and, yes, you have probably read a version of this piece already but this is a particularly good example of the genre.
  • So You Want To Be A TikTok Star?: Another superb New Yorker article, this one looking at the steps by which one becomes a music star of TikTok. Taking as its central example the rise to actual musical fame of one Katherine Li, this does a superb job of taking her ‘journey’ (sorry) and using it as a skeleton on which to build the wider ecosystem of talentspotters and A&Rs and marketing people and and and and, all of whom depend on the TikTok ecosystem and who in turn make the flywheel of hype spin ever harder.
  • The Avatar Conundrum: Or, WHY did it seemingly have no cultural impact? I remember going to see the original in the cinema way back when, and emerging blinking into the night feeling very strongly that it was by far and away the best utterly-terrible film I had ever seen, which is why I think I will probably go to the cinema to check out the new one despite not having set foot in a multiplex for, I think, about six years – this article takes the Avatar theme park experience as its starting point to try and dissect why there feels like there is no narrative ‘there’ there, and while it doesn’t quite come to any concrete conclusions it does seem to scratch at what I believe is the central truth; that is, that the film is basically a massive, fcuk-off tech demo, a wildly impressive tech demo, sure, but you are no more likely to feel a deep emotional attachment to it than you might to those raytraced animations they used to show off high-end PCs in the late-90s. Oh, while we’re on Avatar, this is a good thread by Matthew Ball explaining how we shouldn’t forget how mind-fcukingly successful the first one was, particularly in non-Western markets.
  • Dwarf Fortress: Honestly, I can’t imagine that there are that many of you who are reading this and thinking “you know, what I really want to do over the coming holiday period is hunker down with a famously-impenetrable videogame in which I attempt to help a colony of dwarves survive as long as possible whilst knowing that they will at some point or another all die horribly.” AND YET! I have spoken about Dwarf Fortress in here before, but I am linking to another piece about it because there is a new version out which has ACTUAL GRAPHICS and is apparently marginally-less confusing and daunting whilst at the same time containing exactly the same sort of insanely-detailed simulation of hundreds of individual dwarves, and cats, and animals and monsters and history and memory and and and and. I promise you, read this piece and there will be at least a part of you that fancies getting well into this. If nothing else, it’s worth reminding yourself of the now-infamous ‘drunk cats’ bug to give yourself a flavour of how weird the whole thing can and does get.
  • The Comeuppance Button: Roald Dahl is the very definition of an author who, by modern standards, would be defined as, er, ‘problematic’, and this article in the LRB, reviewing a new autobiography of the man, does a wonderful job of dissecting not only his personal history and less-than-sparkling character, but also the peculiarities of his writing, both for adults and children. Dahl was a famously unpleasant character in many respects, but this is a really good read about a difficult man who wrote some of the 20th century’s most-beloved children’s stories (I also very much enjoy the fact that the author of this review shares my opinion that Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is absolute tripe).
  • What Is Mckinzie For?: Another piece from the LRB, this one a review of a book about the history and practice of Mckinzie, purveyors of 100-slide powerpoints that seemingly always boil down to loads of triangles, loads of arrows, and, in the end, loads of redundancies. “A damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation,” this could frankly be applied to any other consultancy operating in the same space.
  • I Don’t Want To Be An Internet Person: An appropriate final longread of the year, now – I can’t say I enjoyed reading this piece, well-written and well-observed though it is, as it felt perhaps a tiny touch too close to home, but it felt true and articulated a bunch of things I have been feeling for a while but hadn’t been able to crystallise. I mean, look, I am not the subject of this piece, but I read this and felt a really quite powerful and not-particularly-nice-feeling jolt of recognition, and I wonder whether maybe…maybe this isn’t in fact doing me any good? HM. “With the same blank, unmoving expression as his associates, Charlie told me that he made a logical decision to dedicate his life to the mastery of digital culture. Of course being chronically online is destructive. He admitted that he and his affiliates are weird. He described one former posting partner “Sunny” as having “part of his brain missing.” But to ignore the internet, he said, is to give up on making an impact in your own time. Cultural cycles move so fast online that being unplugged for a few years will render anyone culturally defunct, functionally a separate species from the digitally engaged. The internet is a superhighway. Step off and you might be safer, but you will also be quickly left behind.” One to ponder while I unplug my face from the machine for a few weeks.

By Tom Philips, author of A Humument, one of my favourite ever books, who died recently

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 02/12/22

Reading Time: 40 minutes

This week I thought I would ask GPT-3’s new chatbot to pen the opening – this is what it came up with, based on my request that it ‘write me a humorous, cynical opening paragraph to a newsletter about interesting things on the internet’:

“Welcome to our weekly newsletter, where we share the most interesting things we’ve found on the internet (or at least the things we found interesting enough to click on). No guarantee of accuracy, truthfulness, or even goodness, but hopefully at least a little entertaining. This week: a bizarre conspiracy theory, a hilarious video, and an unexpected use for a chicken. Enjoy!”

You know what? FCUK YOU AI I AM BETTER THAN YOU LIKE FCUK CAN YOU MANAGE MY UNIQUE AND IRREPRESSIBLE STYLISTIC FLOURISHES AND BOLD USE OF CAPITALISATION I AM A SPECIAL AND UNIQUE HUMAN SNOWFLAKE AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT.

(next week I will train it on the entirety of the Curios corpus and then kill myself as I am rendered otiose by machine).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I am increasingly feeling like I would rather like to be replaced with AI if I’m honest with you.

By Miki Kim

WE START THIS WEEK’S MIXES OFF WITH A RATHER WONDERFUL THREE-HOUR SET OF PLEASINGLY-LISTENABLE HOUSE FROM LEE BURRIDGE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY SPECULATING AS TO WHICH OF THE CURRENT CROP OF HORRIBLE PLUTOCRATS IT WOULD LEAST LIKE TO ALLOW TO STICK A BUNCH OF ELECTRODES INTO ITS GREY MATTER, PT.1:

  • GPT3 Chat: It’s that time of year in which agencies around the world desperately flail to get their ‘TREND PREDICTIONS FOR NEXT YEAR’ presentations out of the way, which means that many of you will either be reading or writing a bunch of pointless crap that says things like ‘We predict that AI will be big in 2023!’ I doubt, though, that any agencies will be quite honest enough to admit that, based on this link, what will actually happen in 2023 is that anyone with an ounce of sense will start outsourcing 90% of the shovelware content creation work that forms so much of agencies’ bread and butter these days to the machines – because, honestly, based on this, no fcuker will be able to tell. OK, fine, perhaps I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but if you’ve yet to check out OpenAI’s new GPT3-based chatbot then please click the link and have a play and come back here and continue reading once your mind has been properly blown. This is, quite frankly, fcuking ASTONISHING – it’s based on the tweaked new GPT-3 model called DaVinci03 which OpenAI released earlier this week and which you can read more about here, but the main takeaway is that there’s now a convenient, in browser toy with a conversational interface which you can command to write whatever you want for you, and it is SO GOOD. Honestly, just try it on something like ‘can you write me a 600 word article on the history of Facebook?’ or ‘what are the basic tenets of confucianism?’ or even moderately-esoteric stuff, like ‘can you write me a romantic sonnet expressing my love to a person called Calliope, which specifically references her peculiar love of millinery and which contains a marriage proposal?’ – it NAILS it. Honestly, I was a bit sniffy earlier this week when messing around with the base-level new model, but the addition of the interface is game-changingly good. The potential implications for this are insane, but, at the very least, this feels like it’s ushering in the end of ‘kids, go home and write me an essay’-type homework – honestly, a busy teacher would be hard-pressed to tell the output of this machine from a standard C+/B- student’s work – as well as being the first technological innovation that made me think that the era of most written content online being machine-penned is almost upon us. I can’t stress enough how astonishingly near-magical this feels, and also how deeply unsettling, like we’re standing on the edge of something that may well be a terrifying precipice full of as-yet-unknown monsters. This unrolled Twitter thread gives a decent overview of some of the things which you can do with this, and the things which it still struggles with – you may find the software’s inability to do anything which even halfway looks like ‘reasoning’ somewhat comforting.
  • Chat With Your Inner Child: Of course, human nature being what it is, this new tech almost immediately saw someone somewhere online doing something…ever so slightly odd with it. Step forward Michelle Huang, who went moderately-viral earlier in the week as a result of her having used this new tech to, er, have a ‘conversation’ with a specially-trained version of the new GPT-3 software which she had ‘fed’ a bunch of text from her childhood diaries – said training meant she was then able to ‘converse’ with a software model which responded to her in a style reminiscent of her as a child. Which, I think, is such an insanely-future idea that we should take a moment to really chew over how mad it sounds – someone trained a computer on their childhood diaries so that they could subsequently have a conversation with said computer as though they were talking to a past version of themselves. Honestly, this is a MIND-FLAYINGLY ODD concept and I am simultaneously deeply-fascinated and slightly troubled by it – there’s another thread here covering some of the reasons why this might not be a wholly psychologically healthy thing to do, but, well, who am I to tell you not to create a digital ghost of your childhood self? NO FCUKER, etc etc.
  • Fabled: Do you think David Walliams’ recent spate of negative publicity means that maybe, perhaps, some other people (maybe non-famous ones?) might be allowed a shot at selling some kids books? Who knows, but let’s hope so as time may well be running out for authors of reading material for small folk – whilst I don’t expect AI-generated novels to be troubling actual novelists anytime soon (although on reflection, given the quality of some of the stuff self-published on the Kindle store, this may in fact happen sooner than I expect), it does rather feel like the slightly more formulaic childrens’ book market could well see AI make serious inroads. Welcome, then, to Fabled, which uses a combination of AI tools to spin out stories for children based on simple prompts (or at least it will – it’s currently in beta, but you can apply for waitlist access) – “Instantly create custom books about any topic or theme! Make personalized kids stories, baby books, adult novels or fan-fiction. Simply give us a sentence and our AI writer will do the rest.” It will churn out accompanying illustrations too, letting you specify an art style to direct the aesthetic however you choose – honestly, I look at this and I think ‘hm, those companies that churn out those generic ‘your kid’s name in a storybook!’ books are going to have a field day with this stuff’, and also ‘if you’re a small-scale kids author this is going to feel like someone hammering the coffin down over your face’. Fabled isn’t alone – even Amazon is getting in on the act, with its new Alexa-based system that uses AI to create animated stories on-demand for its screen-enabled domestic surveillance devices – and whilst we’re evidently going to see some alarming headlines about ‘AI creates snuff story and terrifies children’ in the not-too-distant future, it also seems reasonably clear that the number of people able to make anything approaching a living from writing books for kids is going to take an absolutely massive fcuking hit in the next 24 months.
  • Instoried:. CONTENT! MORE CONTENT! The ceaseless demands of the content-hungry maw of the web are becoming ever more insistent, while the rewards for actually bothering to make anything become ever slimmer – which is why any sane advermarketingprdrone will be looking for ways in which they can eliminate themselves from as much of the pointless slog of CONTENT CREATION as possible. InStoried is one of a growing number of subscription services which promise to help you churn out the pointless words that make up 99% of the modern web – it will write straplines and blogposts and social media copy and, basically, all the crap, largely-pointless words that exist only to fill up the infinite spaces of the internet and to be read by the Google Spiders, and it’s keenly-priced at 250 quid a year for 20 licenses, and, honestly, how much did you spend on copywriters last year and was it REALLY worth it? I say this as someone who occasionally gets paid to write – I know, it’s RISIBLE, isn’t it? – and, honestly, most of the time I simply wouldn’t bother paying for a human these days because most corporate content is read by approximately 17 people and, frankly, who the fcuk cares if it’s machine-written or not? Which I appreciate is exactly the sort of attitude that will see us sinking in a swamp of machine-dreck within a few short years but, look, it’s been a long year and I am tired and part of me just wants to sink into it and just sort of suffocate.
  • NotContent: On a similar note, NotContent is an interesting idea – an agency which is quite open about the fact that it uses a combination of the AI stack to do its work faster and smarter and cheaper than the competition. I have no idea who these people are or whether there work is in fact any good, but am including the link because, seriously, there are going to be a LOT of these shops spinning up in the next 12 months and attempting to undercut larger agency structures and, honestly, having worked within large agency structures here and there over the risible mess that I like to call my ‘career’, it’s about time too. If you’re not using this stuff as a streamlining element of your creative process then you are probably soon going to be losing work to agencies who are, basically, simply because they will be able to be cheaper than you (and, almost certainly, because your work’s not special or exciting enough to warrant the ‘artisanal human premium’ that you’re charging).
  • GPTweet3: Not, to be clear, the actual name of this service, but allow me the terrible ‘gag’ – this is a little webtoy that will spin out tweets for you on any topic you tell it to, with any tone you specify, even mimicking the general feel of a specific other Twitter account should you wish. If your job involves having to fill out endless content calendars and having to draft an infinite number of pointless Twitter bromides that will one day be punted out to a largely-uncaring audience then a) I am so, so sorry that this is what your life has become; and b) this may well stave off the suicidal feelings for at least a week or two.
  • Natural Language Playlists: Ok, this doesn’t totally work but I like the idea and there’s something fun in the ‘fuzziness’ of the interface and what it delivers. The premise is simple – you write in a description of the rough sort of playlist you would like to create, click a button, and in a few short seconds this site will have created something for you from Spotify based on your specifications. I just gave it ‘happy jazz for a summer evening’ (literally antonymical to my current mood and situation, as I sit in a dark and freezing cold kitchen with a hot water bottle stuffed under my jumper) and a quick glance at the tracklisting it’s given me suggests that it vaguely-understood the brief – I can’t guarantee that it will be similarly effective with more esoteric or complex requests (“A soundtrack that perfectly evokes the feeling of anxiety that precedes a major international football fixture which you expect to win but fear you will lose”, for example), but it’s definitely worth a play – I would be fascinated to know how this works under the hood.
  • Jodorowsky’s Tron: People have been playing around with the new version of Midjourney this week, and the consensus seems that it’s currently the leader of the AI art pack in terms of the quality and style of its outputs – you may have seen this selection of images, effectively imagining ‘what if Tron, but directed by infamously-batsh1t Mexican auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky?’ (the first batch of which are at the main link, the second which you can find here), but they’re worth examining up close because…well, because the machines are getting so much better so much faster than I would have expected. Contrast this with the stuff people were getting excited about six months ago and it’s astonishing to see the degree, and speed, of progress – there’s a nice selection of images in this post by Renee Walter which showcases some of the other ‘what if film x, directed by person y?’ mashups people have been playing with, and whilst, yes, fine, this stuff does tend to produce better results when doing what is basically style transfer work than when ‘imagining’ something entirely new, it’s hard not to see this as our first, tentative steps across a massive fcuking creative Rubicon.
  • AI Synths; This is just a Twitter thread, fine, but it struck me as a lovely little example of what it’s possible to do with all this stuff – AI art meddler Fabian Stelzer has created a series of odd, imaginary synths, dreamed up by machines to his specifications, and has animated them and then gotten another AI to imagine what music each of them might make, and I honestly get giddy at the thought of what people are going to be able to make with this stuff by this time next year.
  • Old London Photos: And then, of course, there’s the very real fact that if we think we’ve had a dodgy few years in terms of our inability to determine truth from falsehood online then we should probably brace ourselves because, honestly, we have seen NOTHING. These images are a case in point – created using Midjourney, they are a TERRIFYINGLY convincing selection of images which mimic with eerie accuracy the very particular visual style you see in old photographs that have been retouched and sharpened by digital imaging techniques.Except, of course, they are not – these are not real photos, the people in them never existed, and if you look closely then you will see that there are occasional anomalies in the photos such as the fact that at least one horse appears to be floating above the ground unaided by limbs. But, honestly, a cursory glance would see you convinced that these are proper old images which have just been digitally retouched a bit – as evidenced by the fact that they were happily accepted as real by the subReddit in which they were originally posted. We’re on the cusp of another popular panic about THE PERILS OF DEEPFAKES, except this time there will actually be something to worry about.
  • Woolitize: This is a version of StableDiffusion that has been trained on wool, and which therefore will create BEAUTIFUL images of whatever you like, as long as you don’t mind the fact that all the outputs will look…well, distinctly wooly. If you’ve ever wanted to see what your favourite pop star might look like if they were knitted by your nan then this is the model for YOU!
  • Cleo: WARNING: THIS LINK WILL MAKE YOUR LAPTOP SOUND LIKE IT HAS EMPHYSEMA. Or at least it will if it’s as sh1t as mine is – you may well have some sort of insanely-powerful beast which will render this with nary a complaint – but it’s sort-of worth it, if only to see what a digital recreation of a piece of interpretative dance all about the life of Cleopatra is like. I don’t really understand this – it’s contemporary dance, which to me is about as comprehensible as Urdu – but it’s a nice (if heavy) piece of digital work and I am glad it exists.
  • Wyth: I am including this website solely because it contains some of the most astonishingly-meaningless examples of copywank I have read in YEARS. If any of you can explain to me what the fcuk it is that this company does I will be hugely grateful – seriously, what in the name of Christ does this mean? “Wyth is designed to facilitate a virtuous cycle of experiences converging on a single platform. We call it the Circular Experience. The Circular Experience is Wyth’s human-centered approach to technology aiming to connect social, interactive and collaborative frameworks to enable deeper relationships in every aspect of our lives.” I mean, obviously it means nothing, but what is it MEANT to mean? Can we please start asking questions like this when we read copy this bad? Can we stop letting these cnuts get away with these crimes against language?
  • Powder World: “Powder World”, reads the onsite blurb, “is a lightweight simulation environment for understanding AI generalization.” Honestly, though, that MASSIVELY undersells it – what Powder World in fact is is a little browser-based sandbox that lets you experiment with all sorts of interlinked physics models in a tiny little pixel world. Drop vegetation everywhere! Set fire to it! Douse the flames with water! Cackle maniacally at the feeling of godline power that ensues! I mean, yes, ok, there is doubtless loads of really impressive maths happening here which I am totally glossing over in favour of cooing over the physics toy aspects of the whole thing but, well, I reckon you’re probably not reading this for my trenchant analyses of emergent phenomena simulation engines (or at least I hope you’re not, and that if you are that the disappointment isn’t too crushing).
  • Not Pink: Click the link. Remind you of anything? Yes, that’s right, someone has FINALLY ripped off MSCHF wholesale – this is a quite astonishing aesthetic lift (seriously, click this and check out their homepage and do a mental comparison and marvel at the chutzpah), and as far as I can tell the basic premise (mysterious brand punts out odd little creative game/experiment things on a semi-regular schedule) is the same. No Pink only have one project under their belt at the moment – a game in which they invited people to attempt to come up with the closest match possible to an AI created image, which is a fun-if-lightweight idea (lol like I have ever had a ‘heavyweight’ idea in my life) – and their next drops in 10 days and I think is going to be something involving AI and a popular Twitch streamer; worth watching, if only to see whether it’s possible to rip off the MSCHF concept wholesale or whether it only works if you’re a bunch of trust fund kids in Brooklyn.
  • Mocopi: This is super-impressive, at least in theory – this is new kit from Sony which comes in the form of a series of small sensors which you affix to your wrists, ankles and head and which, at least according to the launch blurb, will let you do full-body mocap using only said sensors and a smartphone. Which, obviously, is huge – it takes VTubing out of the bedroom and into the wild, for a start, but it also opens up the general mocap industry to anyone which, when allied with the boom in AI image generation and modelling, means that any kid with an imagination and a phone can theoretically create fluid mocapped animation with minimal spend and resources – I very much get the impression that we’re all going to be looking back at Avatar 2 in a decade’s time and laughing at the fact that Jim Cameron spent billions on creating space jungle smurfs when we were only about a year or so away from every single 12 year old being able to make the original Avatar using some of this kit and some Snapchat skins.
  • Mindmelt: This is GREAT – pick a music genre, streamed from some popular online radio station or another, and enjoy this frankly brilliant visualiser to accompany the sounds. I promise you, this is superb – hallucinatory and glitchy and straddling the gulf between abstract weirdness and odd metacultural commentary, and I promise it’s all I can do not to abandon Curios here at 825am and just stare at this, entranced, for the rest of the morning.

By Laura June Kirsch

WE CONTINUE THE HOUSE-Y THEME NOW WITH THIS EXCELLENT MIX BY JOHN TALABOT! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS CURRENTLY SPECULATING AS TO WHICH OF THE CURRENT CROP OF HORRIBLE PLUTOCRATS IT WOULD LEAST LIKE TO ALLOW TO STICK A BUNCH OF ELECTRODES INTO ITS GREY MATTER, PT.2:

  • Taking Shape: Whilst obviously there are some downsides to the current and coming boom in AI image generation and the associated tools – huge swathes of the artistic community potentially having their earning potential decimated by machines, the as-yet-unknowable impact it will have on visual styles and aesthetics, the as-yet-underexplored questions of bias and prejudice inherent in the models we’re building, etc etc etc ad infinitum – there are also some positives, for example the hope that this might see everyone’s least-favourite software behemoth Adobe lose at least some of their stranglehold on the digital art and design marketplace. It does feel rather like Adobe doesn’t quite get how potentially fcuked it is – this website, designed to showcase a bunch of modern design styles and how YOU TOO can recreate them by – SUPRISE! – investing heavily in the Adobe Creative Suite – doesn’t really acknowledge the extent to which there are, and certainly will be, a bunch of other, free, non-Adobe means of getting these sorts of looks and feels and outputs that don’t require you to sell your soul in perpetuity for an After Effects license. This isn’t a bad site per se, it’s just…pointless, and also doesn’t do what it says it will – the homepage suggests that it’s to ‘explore questions of modern art and design’, something which it singularly fails to engage with on any meaningful level. Still, at least it scrolls nicely.
  • In My Nature: Subtitled ‘A Multimedia Hike With Cyborgs’, this is a GORGEOUS project where three actual, real-life cyborgs (in the real sense, not just in the weak ‘I have a smartphone, you have a smartphone, we are ALL CYBORGS NOW’ sense) go on a hike and you can see how their augmented senses alter their experience of the world around them. “What is it like to choose your own senses? Join three cyborgs from Barcelona on a multimedia hike inspired by our interviews with them. They will show you how their electronic enhancements change what it means to be human.” You’ll probably recognise at least one of the three participants – Neil Harbisson is instantly-recognisable from his numerous TV appearances over the years, and the fact that he has an actual antenna poking out of his skull – but each has augmented their body in interesting ways, and each tells an interesting story through illustrations and prose and photography about why they have chosen to build on their existing senses in the way they have, and how their experience of ‘cyborg-ness’ alters their relationship to the natural world around them. After reading this, it is entirely possible that you too will want to install some weather fins in your head, and I say GO FOR IT.
  • Noggin Boss: There are many, many reasons I will never be rich, but one of the principal ones is that I literally have the opposite of business instincts – I am largely incapable of predicting what will be a popular success and what will not, and am as a result never going to end up being an early investor in surprise breakout consumer hits. Which is a longwinded way of saying that I think these hats (for that is what Noggin Boss is selling) are, by a long way, some of the most stupid-looking articles of clothing I have ever seen in my life, and I cannot for the life of me understand how the fcuk it is that they appear to be selling so many of them. How best to describe a Noggin Boss hat? Hm. Ok, imagine a baseball cap. Now imagine that said cap is enlarged to somewhere in the region of five times its original size. Now imagine said enlarged cap perched on the head of a normal-sized person. It looks ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yes, yes it does, and yet here we are. I think we’re probably too late for this to ship to the UK in time for Christmas, thank God, but if YOU want to be the first person in your postcode to wear a comically-outsize cap then this may be the link for you.
  • Count Things: I am THRILLED that this exists – this is an app that exists solely to help you count large numbers of uniform objects, at scale. Imagine, if you will, that you are a…I don’t know, a scaffolding magnate. You have a massive pile of scaffolding poles in a yard somewhere, which you want to accurately enumerate (this is a HIGH OCTANE thought experiment, isn’t it? Never let it be said that Web Curios doesn’t truly engage the mind!) but you don’t actually want to have to stand in front of said pile counting each pole one by one. Enter Count Things! This app contains all sorts of pre-built models to count common supplies and materials (bricks, tiles, all sorts of joists), and the people behind it will even work with you to create your own model if there’s something you want to count at scale that they don’t currently support (badgers, skulls, teeth, etc). The only thing about this that could possibly be improved would be a brand tie-in with Sesame Street – I want the number of girders delivered to me by a cuddly vampiric number obsessive.
  • Tidbyt: Look, I appreciate that times are hard and we are all feeling poor and parlous, and therefore the idea of pointing you at frivolous ways to spend what little disposable income you have left after you’ve dealt with the basic ‘not dying’ expenses is perhaps not exactly ‘on trend’ for the fag-end of 2022, but, well, I have no idea who any of you are and for all I know you might all be plutocratically rich thanks to judicious crypto investments (lol) and can happily drop the £180 (oh, ok, dollars, but still) to purchase your very own customisable artisanal pixel display screen thingy, which you can use to display everything from email alerts to the time to the weather to data about where your family members are on their commutes…basically if you’re a particular type of geek, the sort who likes messing around with a Raspberry Pi and who once owned one of Berg’s TinyPrinters, then you might well like this too.
  • Instafest: Yes, yes, I know that you have all done this thing already – that thing where you connect this website to your Spotify account and it spits out a festival lineup based on your listening habits, and you share it online to show what a fascinating and unique person you are based on your music tastes – but completeness compels me to include it here as well. I’ve been interested to see this doing the rounds far more than Spotify’s own ‘Wrapped’ content so far this year (although in fairness that’s possibly because Wrapped only came out late this week), which perhaps speaks to the fact that this shows you MORE STUFF and also perhaps because the Wrapped stuff this year is (imho at least) pretty horribly copywritten (you don’t need to fcuk with this stuff! We’re all narcissists who think that the world should care about our listening habits and would share this data even if you just gave us the artist names and nothing else, you don’t need to call us fcuking ‘astronauts’ for having listened to 17 hours of Diamanda Galas in 2022 ffs!). Anyway, I don’t fcuking care what music you have listened to this year so don’t fcuking tell me.
  • Pattern Collider:  “Pattern Collider is a tool for generating and exploring quasiperiodic tiling patterns. Every pattern that you create has a custom URL that you can bookmark & share.” This is slightly-hypnotic and geometrically-dazzling, and it made me want to sit and basically create my own intricate bathroom tile design (before I spent too long staring at the shapes and patterns and my visions started to go a bit funny).
  • TLDR: FULL DISCLOSURE: I have only given this a cursory play, and so I can’t either vouch for its brilliance or that using it won’t cause you some sort of significant professional or personal embarrassment. Still, the brief play I had with it made me think that there’s possibly utility here (and this is definitely only the tip of the iceberg for stuff like this – the obvious next extension is AI crawlers that do the same thing but without you even having to ask) – TLDR is a Chrome extension that effectively lets you batch-create AI generated summaries of any urls you point it at, whether they house text or audio or video, meaning that (in theory, at least) you could find a bunch of sources for research and then point the machine at them and get digestible notes on their contents rather than having to wade through X,000 words and hours of audio and YouTube videos. I wouldn’t, obviously rely on this for anything serious, but I can envisage scenarios in which it’s genuinely useful to get a top-level overview summary from a wide range of sources, if only to get a vague steer on an idea or concept. I probably wouldn’t trust this right at this moment, but it feels very much like a coming future.
  • Lungy: Look, full disclosure, I am including this link solely because I find the name of this app to be almost-impossibly awful. “Lungy”? LUNGY????? It sounds like the World Health Organisation’s ill-fated attempt to create a mascot to raise awareness of bronchial illnesses! It sounds like what you call the kid at school who once suffered such an extreme coughing fit that they dislodged a small piece of meat from inside themselves which landed on Melanie King and meant she was never quite the same again! WHO NAMED THIS? But, er, more seriously, it’s actually an app to help with breathing exercises, which, honestly, is probably quite useful and I shouldn’t mock. But, really, ‘Lungy’?!
  • Trendwatch 2016: A PERFECT Curio, this – Trendwatch 2016 is a YouTube channel which features 50-odd videos which are…just fcuking weird, honestly. I don’t want to tell you too much more, just click the link and dive in and immerse yourself in the strange. It feels…hm, how to describe it? It’s very much in the same aesthetic/vibe(sorry) space as the ‘infinite corridors of liminal space’ stuff, but with less of the self-conscious wackiness of a lot of that stuff, and I have no idea whatsoever who makes it or why it exists, or indeed why they posted two videos six years ago and then nothing else until February of this year, or where it is going. If you enjoy Scarfolk then you will enjoy this – they are not similar, but they also are (more high-quality critical cultural analysis coming up shortly!).
  • The Covid-19 Dream Journal: I can’t be bothered to dig it out, but in the early days of the pandemic I featured a link in here which invited people to share the dreams they were experiencing during the pandemic to see whether any clues could be drawn as to the impact of lockdown and isolation and the general sense of directionless fear that everyone was experiencing on the collective unconscious. I am not sure if this page, collecting people’s submitted Covid dreams, is the result of that particular project or something else, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a browse through all the things that people’s psyches threw up during The Great Plague of 2020-? then this will please you immoderately. Whether or not you believe that these are faithful recollections of people’s real dreams or a chance for people to indulge in a bit of creative writing is up to you – I haven’t gone through enough to see whether there are common themes that emerge, but I have read exactly enough to know that I am personally not that interested in hearing about other people’s dreams.
  • Oimo: A collection of beautifully-coded little browser-based physics toys, all by a person known as Saharan who I think is from Japan. Click on the ‘works’ tab and enjoy a couple of dozen beautiful little physics-y webtoys – I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing with the fabric model, but you will all find something to amuse you here if you look closely enough.
  • The Sheffield Tape Archive: Via the excellent ‘Things’ magazine comes this superb archive of music from Sheffield – “A series of archive recordings from around 1980 onwards: sheffield bands, demos, concerts and rarities..” Want to listen to a bootleg of a Butthole Surfers gig from 1987? YES YOU DO! Want to explore the work of the (to me at least) largely-unknown 80s beat combo called, magically, The Fcuk City Sh1tters? FILL YOUR BOOTS! There’s a wonderful mixture of the classic and the very obscure here, along with some proper historical curiosities like a campaign recording of Monster Raving Loony Party founder ‘Screaming’ Lord Sutch – a properly good archive collection, this.
  • Appropedia: If one of the things on your tentative list of ‘plans for 2023’ is ‘attempt to make my life more sustainable and perhaps less reliant on things like the crumbling British national infrastructure which it increasingly looks like failing entirely in the near future’, you may find Appropedia useful; it’s a Wiki which features all sorts of useful information on things like installing appropriate solar power, or living roofs, or proper composting, or bike-powered generators – in the main, I am including this link for my friend Ben who lives on a boat and I imagine will find all this stuff hugely useful (on reflection I could possibly have just texted him this link, but then what the fcuk would I put in the newsletter?).
  • The International Society of Antique Scale Collectors: Do YOU have a deep and abiding passion for antique weighing devices? Do YOU want to learn more about them, perhaps with a view to amassing a collection of these magical, wonderful devices? I mean, the answer to this is almost certainly ‘no, of course not, I have a full and rich life and I do not need to sully it with mechanical devices from The Old Times’, but just in case one of you is after a really obscure and ostensibly-incredibly-tedious hobby to pursue in the new year then, well, WELCOME TO YOUR SCALE-Y FUTURE!
  • Door: This is a website which hosts a load of music, with the following loose curatorial guide: “At the end of the 90s, we ripped albums that we found in physical stores and took them to the internet. It was during this era that we built a content channel with a noble purpose, that of listening. Soulseek’s directories were cities and “emigrate to a new land” was a common feeling. Back then, connecting to the Internet required a desktop computer, a good local provider, modem, and time. Life was concretely and cybernetically constituted,a division that no longer exists and -without automatic playlists or advertising- finding material was the product of research so the user was, at the very least, selective. With free internet on the streets and the advent of the smartphone, the latest generations are now easy recipients of unrequested information. All this, before touching a wire or having a thoughtful moment. Curated by romi, door is a music selection for listening and dancing in closed spaces.” I have listened to half a dozen of these over the course of the week, and each has been excellent in its own way – I highly recommend bookmarking this page and dipping in when you fancy some guided listening featuring some genuinely obscure (to me, at least) and eclectic stuff.
  • Internet Archaeology: Twitter’s wobbles over the past month or so have elicited some interesting conversations about the preservation of online ephemera, making this link a timely one. Internet Archaology is a project seeking to preserve not so much individual websites but the broader cultural artefacts that are created by our shared online experience – “The Internet is a network for contemporary cultural expressions. We act within the web and reproduce and produce cultures in the process — making it a virtual cultural space. The network also provides access to the artifacts and cultural assets of the past. Many museums, archives, or libraries have digitized large parts of their collections and made them available online. This very confluence of past and present represents our new digital heritage: We must protect and transmit it for future generations.” So, for example, exhibits so far include Kony2012, Harambe, a bottle of p1ss from an Amazon delivery driver…this isn’t perfect, but I think that there’s something genuinely interesting in how we seek to preserve movements and memes and general vibes of particular online moments and eras, and more experimentation and discussion of the best means of so doing is A Good Thing.
  • Planet Pizza: If you were to attempt to explain the concept of ‘pizza’ to aliens, how would you go about it? If you’re the creator of this website, you would do so via the medium of a wordless website that seeks to communicate the nature of humanity, maths and tomato sauce to a theoretical offworld presence. Why? WHY NOT??? “Pizza is simple, versatile, delicious, and most importantly, worldwide.  Every country in the world enjoys pizza to some degree; and, pizza is just “pizza” in most languages of the world, with only mild variations in the pronunciation.  As a species that strives for that sweet release of dopamine, pizza is a worldwide peacemaker and a perfect representation for one of the little joys which makes a human, human.  Earth very well may be the only planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, or maybe even the only planet in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies that enjoys pizza.  If extraterrestrials visit as friends, explorers, or researchers, it would be very beneficial to use this site to simultaneously describe broad sections of our math and science system as well as to teach the makeup of one of our planet’s most agreed upon pleasures.” This is pleasingly pointless and perfectly overthought.
  • Hindsight 2030: This looks like a rather fun idea, whether as a game to play for fun or as some sort of icebreaking/teambuilding exercise (god, that’s a depressing juxtaposition, isn’t it? Let’s just stick with the ‘fun’ usecase, shall we?) – “Hindsight 2030 is a quick and lighthearted game for exploring possible futures. Each player or team will pick one target headline for the year 2030 and then create a timeline, also made up of headlines, that shows how the world gets from today to that headline in 2030. Then, they will create one final headline, set after 2030, that serves as an epilogue.” The only potential downside here is the potential for it all to get very apocalyptic and a little depressing rather quickly, so perhaps start each game with a clear set of directional guidelines and some baseline rules (“Matt, why must your future headlines always revolve around crying robots on a dying planet?”).
  • Music Historian: Ooh, this is really fun. Pick any musical artist you can think of and this will tell you what their most-played song is (fine, based on Last.fm so limited data, but still), along with artists that the platform believes are similar to them – as a result, I can now happily inform you that Cannibal Corpse’s most-played song is their cheery little ditty ‘Hammer Smashed Face’, and that part of the universe of related music that Last.fm thinks exists around the band includes the incredibly-named bands Cattle Decapitation, Waking the Cadaver and, inexplicably, a country singer called Alan Jackson. This is a lot of fun, and feels like the basis of quite a fun online quiz game if you could be bothered to build one.
  • The Jerry Lawson Doodle: Time was I wouldn’t bother featuring a Google Doodle on here, but I figure that a relatively small number of us bother actually visiting the Google homepage these days and therefore won’t have seen this – this is a gorgeous bit of work, which “celebrates the 82nd birthday of Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, one of the fathers of modern gaming who led the team that developed the first home video gaming system with interchangeable game cartridges. The Doodle features games designed by three American guest artists and game designers: Davionne Gooden, Lauren Brown, and Momo Pixel.” Not only this, but it’s also a really robust little game creation engine which lets anyone who fancies it make their own simple browser games and share them with the world – honestly, this is a GREAT one to bookmark and point your pre-adolescent children at when you want 10 minutes of peace over the coming holidays.
  • Gourdlets: The last miscellaneous link of the week is a BEAUTY – Gourdlets is basically a tiny, pixel-y, browser-based Sim City clone, except there are no budgets and no goals and all you have to do is build whatever you fancy building. It’s a demo for a full game, but, honestly, there’s enough functionality in here to keep you happily citybuilding for hours, and there’s something super-charming about the art style and the way that the cute little inhabitants of your semi-urban paradise interact with your city and each other. This is GORGEOUS, and you should all play it.

By Jason Shulman

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, AND ESPECIALLY FOR ALEXANDER WHO ASKED FOR MORE JAZZ, HERE IS A LOVELY HOUR OF JAZZ AND LOUNGE MIXED BY THE APPROPRIATELY-NAMED JAZZ N PALMS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Blombluss: I don’t really understand why this has been built as a Tumblr but, well, it has, so here it is! This is actually a quiz all about bad ports of classic videogames, so if you’ve been desperately craving a ten question quiz about old games and the obscure systems they may or may not have been ported to then this will please you no end (it will also please you if you were ever a devotee of the teletext videogames magazine ‘Digitiser’, to whom this owes a very obvious and welcome debt of stylistic gratitude).
  • MurdochHere: Last updated nine years ago, this Tumblr collects images of Rupert Murdoch spotted in the wild. I REALLY want to know why this was started and also why it stopped when it did – it seems to have been maintained by someone who worked closely with him, and I wonder whether he found out it existed and had poor Nathalie Ravitz killed (NB – Web Curios is in no way suggesting that Rupert Murdoch is the sort of man who would have someone murdered, honest).
  • Enchanted Book Art: Rare book illustrations, because who doesn’t love a rare book illustration? NO FCUKER, etc.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Howard Lee: If you’ve ever found yourself in an ASMR video rabbithole you may have come across videos of people painting things with an otherworldly degree of photorealistic precision – Howard Lee does that exact thing, taking photos of real life stuff, cutting a square out of the photo, and then painting in the blank til you can’t tell that there’s a point where the photo stops and the painting begins. Which, yes, I know, is a horrible description, but you’ll get it when you see it – this is mind-boggling, or at least it is to me.
  • Kevin Is In New York: Home Alone 2, presented on Insta in clips. I personally don’t really ‘get’ Home Alone (yes, I am a joyless husk, why do you ask?), nor indeed why anyone celebrates the markedly-inferior sequel which features Donald Trump, but should you be differently-minded then perhaps you will enjoy this.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • How Do We Create Digital Life?: Now, fine, your initial reaction to that question might well be “Jesus, Matt, why the fcuk would we want to do that? It’s bad enough being made of meat without inflicting the horror of existence on a blameless digital entity!”, but work with me here for a minute. This article is…interesting. I don’t necessarily believe that this stuff is as possible as the author seems to think, nor indeed that what he describes is necessarily tied in with crypto and web3, but the general thinking about what digital ‘life’ might look like, and how it might end up working, is fascinating (and, honestly, if you follow this thinking even a little beyond where this article takes you, not a little unsettling). Digital ‘life’, by the way, is defined by the author here as a digital entity characterised by the following: “It needs to be able to survive past its creator’s death; It needs to be able to reproduce; Its descendants need to be able to evolve; It needs to locally reduce entropy”, and the discussion of how such entities might be created and what they might be used for is genuinely interesting (but, again, also possibly a *touch* more unsettling than the rather pollyannaish tone adopted by the writer, and certainly not the sort of thing that we ought to pursue ‘just because we can’, which appears to be the general conclusion of the piece).
  • Where Is The Innovation?: Or, more accurately, where is the useful innovation? This was sent to me by Katie (thanks Katie!) and is a really interesting read about the degree to which so much new tech stuff from the past decade or so has left so little in terms of a meaningful mark on culture and society – technologies have made money, and financial bubbles, but there’s an increasing degree to which questions are being asked about what meaningful impact we’ll be left with once the froth dissipates. The piece looks at this question from the perspective of research and what can be done to improve its utility, but the basic premise is neatly summarised here: “Our question is whether newly hyped technologies, like the Metaverse, Web3, and blockchain, have any chance of changing this basic picture. There are many reasons to be skeptical that they can. In many ways, the Metaverse and Web3 are merely a pivot by Silicon Valley, an attempt to gain control of the technological narrative that is now spiral­ing downward, due to the huge start-up losses and the financial failure of the sharing economy and many new technologies. Huge start-up losses along with the small markets for new technologies have brought forth novel criticisms of Silicon Valley. If we are correct that the newest wave of hot technologies will do almost nothing to improve human welfare and productivity growth, then elected officials, policymakers, leaders in business and higher education, and ordinary citizens must begin to search for more fundamental solutions to our current economic and social ills.”
  • Minecraft Bots: The one area in which it seems fair to say that we can point at real technological process with tangible effects on culture and society is the emergent field of machine learning – it’s clear to anyone who’s paid any attention to this stuff over the past 24 months that we are building tools now that are going to completely reshape the way in which business and culture work in the not-too-distant future (although, amusingly, none of us have the faintest idea as to how!), and this essay, about OpenAI training machines on videos of people playing Minecraft to teach said machines how to do it, is an excellent example of how quickly this stuff is moving and what we might do with it. This is less about Minecraft than it is about the technique being used here as a step-change in how we go about this sort of training – YouTube provides us with an INCREDIBLE training set for any number of things, and the ability to effectively (yes, I know that I am massively oversimplifying this) point a bot at a YouTube channel and tell it to, basically, ‘learn’ is fcuking INCREDIBLE.
  • Galloway on AI: My standard Galloway link apology (“you’ve probably already seen this, but in case not…”) aside, this is a really good overview of why this stuff is so exciting and where we are at now and why it’s not just a fad (probably). If you know a lot about the field then you can skip this, but if you’re after a decent ‘state of the market’ overview for beginners then this is a clear and cogent bit of thinking/writing.
  • How Dall-E Works: This is SO GOOD. I have a…moderately-fuzzy understanding of how LLMs and image-generation AIs sort-of work, but this article (the first in a short series), explaining how OpenAI’s Dall-E manages to magick pictures out of thin air in simple terms and without resorting to HARD MATHS, was genuinely eye-opening. I promise you, if someone like me (who is so bad at maths that he understands literally nothing taught beyond GCSE level, and who once was reduced to near-tears by the mere concept of ‘logorithms’) can understand this then ANYONE can.
  • The GPT-3 Cookbook: This is SUCH a good resource, and is a hugely-useful overview of all the different things that you can use GPT-3 (or another LLM of your choice) for – it offers a short explanation of what an LLM is and how it works, but then is straight into explaining and describing a bunch of potential usecases, from getting it to write code to getting it to do translations, cleaning up copy to writing things from scratch. Read this and then work out all the ways in which you are going to be rendered obsolete in the next five years or so!
  • The Generative AI Revolution in Games: It upsets me how many times this year I have linked to the A16Z blog – but, in their defence, they do occasionally post stuff that is far more interesting and useful than the standard ‘thought leadership’ pabulum spat out by VCs, and does occasionally seem to contain actual examples of actual thinking. This, for example, is a good overview of some of the ways in which generative AI might usefully be employed by the games industry – whether or not you’re interested in videogames, it’s a useful read as an illustration of all the different ways in which the current AI tech stack might disrupt (sorry) an industry, which might prompt you to have a think about what you do for a living and how it might be utterly upended by AIs (and, more positively, how you might exploit that for your personal gain).
  • Automation Drives Income Inequality: Which, fine, I expect we already knew, but it’s interesting to see this articulated so starkly in a new study from MIT, which shows “most of the growth in the wage gap since 1980 comes from automation displacing less-educated workers.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s useful to bear in mind after half a dozen pieces focusing on the coming wonder of the AI revolution: “A central conceptual point, Acemoglu says, is that automation should be regarded differently from other forms of innovation, with its own distinct effects in workplaces, and not just lumped in as part of a broader trend toward the implementation of technology in everyday life generally. Consider again those self-checkout kiosks. Acemoglu calls these types of tools “so-so technology,” or “so-so automation,” because of the tradeoffs they contain: Such innovations are good for the corporate bottom line, bad for service-industry employees, and not hugely important in terms of overall productivity gains, the real marker of an innovation that may improve our overall quality of life. “Technological change that creates or increases industry productivity, or productivity of one type of labor, creates [those] large productivity gains but does not have huge distributional effects,” Acemoglu says. “In contrast, automation creates very large distributional effects and may not have big productivity effects.””
  • The Weird Right: This piece is about US politics and the US right specifically, but, as ever with this stuff, I think we ignore the extent to which we’re downstream of America to our peril. What’s interesting is the extent to which this weirdness is a post-Trump thing – “This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.The ascendant weird right will likely struggle to sell its deeply anti-patriotic vision to many voters. In these segments of the mostly young, online-influenced American right, the optimistic vision espoused by Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” has been discarded. The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s “American carnage”—now disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms. Today, the right has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”” Obviously the UK is different, and we have our own peculiarities and nutters, but keep an eye on the fringes over the next 6 months or so because I have a feeling we’re going to see some of this stuff replicated over here as well.
  • Why Fascism’s Coming Back: Feels appropriate to post this 12 hours after one of the world’s most famous people happily and openly stated that he thought Hitler had some good points – I think this piece by Umair Haq is a bit ‘fearmongering 101’, and I don’t for a second buy his ‘America as a last redoubt’ lines, but in general it’s hard not to look at the baseline analysis (to whit: fascism thrives in circumstances where significant numbers of people suffer a vertiginous fall in living standards simultaneously over a relatively short period of time) and think ‘hm, seems legit’.
  • Yolo Personal Finance: OR, “Young People Spend The Pain Away”, OR “Klarna Is Going To Be Looked Back On Just Like Wonga Currently Is” – here’s one for your 2023 trend decks (THEY ARE FCUKING SLIDES FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE CAN WE PUT THIS ‘DECK’ THING TO BED?)! In the face of worsening economic conditions and increasingly-precarious employment, and a world in which everything does rather seem to be falling apart at the edges and seams, are young people being frugal and tightening their purse strings? Are they fcuk! Instead, the author of this piece in Dazed asserts, it’s all about the frivolous yolo spending, whether motivated by a lack of planning ability or the very real belief that civilisation will collapse long before the time comes to pay back the debts. You can literally base

an entire strategy for any number of consumer brands on this article – it won’t be very good, fine, but it probably doesn’t matter!

  • The Amazon Adpocalypse: Or ‘no, it’s not your imagination, shopping on Amazon fcuking sucks now unless you know exactly what you want to buy’ – this is a look at how the transformation of Amazon from ‘business that sells everything’ to ‘a business that is based on cloud software and advertising which also happens to have an awful lot of warehouse space’ has meant a worse customer experience for pretty much everyone, sellers and buyers alike, and how it doesn’t matter because of the company’s size and near-indelible place in the popular consciousness as ‘the everything store’.
  • This Is England: The World Cup continues to underwhelm, but I enjoyed this piece in The Face about the weird feeling around the England national team and the strange evolution of the country’s relationship with the current incarnation of the Three Lions. These paragraphs in particular resonated with me: “It’s taking place when living in England itself feels like a laughing stock: three prime ministers in seven weeks, a public being relentlessly ripped off, a conveyor belt of cartoon villains who fall in and out of power, occasionally appearing on our feeds to say something like ​“heating is woke”, launch an assault on tofu, or to whip up excitement about sending people to Rwanda. Everyone’s knackered, everything’s divided. The Queen’s death revealed England’s identity issue. An island of myth and mantra, a teddy bear from Peru hoisted up as a grief totem. A monarchy that’s fading into insignificance, a nation mourning the future as much as it is the past. Screwfix posting its condolences. A king barking at his subjects over leaking fountain pens.”
  • TikTok and Bad Food: Or “How algorithms are unexpectedly messing with society in ways we are yet to fully understand, part x of an almost-infinite series” – this piece is about the rise of inexplicable/horrifying-looking food content on TikTok (did you see the onion water girl? You have to see the onion water girl), and how, yet again, human behaviour is being manipulated by algorithms we don’t comprehend in ways we can’t predict. This piece is, honestly, a fairly standard ‘hey, look, weird internet trend everyone’ bit of copy, but I think what’s more interesting is to think about where this leads us and what happens when an entire generation of humans grows up being exposed to food preparation only in the context of this sort of horrific ‘made for virality’ content – basically what I am asking is ‘what if there is a direct throughline from Onion Water Girl to everyone in 2062 being incapable of cooking anything other than the 30 canonical ChefClub recipes that have resulted in ⅓ of the world’s population now having type-2 diabetes?’
  • Greece Is Capitalism’s Petri Dish: This is SO interesting, and feels like a bigger story – this piece in VICE looks at the partnership between Volkswagen and the small Greek island of Astypalea, which has become a testing ground for VW’s electric cars, buses and scooters, and a whole app-based ecosystem to manage said vehicles, and how this works and whether or not it feels like a good thing to give a massive international conglomerate this sort of access to and control over public infrastructure. The article mentions other areas in Greece where similar things are being tried – and why not, right? The country’s still reeling from being fcuked 17 ways by the 2008 crash and why wouldn’t they sell off access to themselves as a market and a testbed for new tech to some deep-pocketed corporate partners? Except, of course, there are QUESTIONS over transparency and influence – but, perhaps most interestingly, the bigger questions should be around how common this stuff is likely to get. Think, for a second, about the UK right now, a country in which nothing seems to work and where the money to fix it no longer seems to exist. Do you seriously think that a UK government wouldn’t seriously consider an offer from a massive international tech business to help fix some of its infrastructural problems with experimental innovation, in exchange for, I don’t know, lots of lovely data and maybe some preferential treatment on future national contract bids? I have a sneaking suspicion that we will look back on PPI and PFI as being just the tip of the iceberg for ‘interesting’ corporate involvement in the national architecture.
  • The Problem with EVs: Look, obviously electric vehicles are better than petrol or diesel vehicles – but, er, they are also problematic in their own way, turns out. This is a typically-excellent piece in Rest of World which looks at the specific issues faced by Indonesia, one of the countries whose natural resources are being mined to meet demand for batteries and associated technologies used in electric vehicles, where the human and environmental costs associated with the rocketing demand for nickel and other elements and minerals in the EV trade are slowly coming to light. This is, I warn you, one of those articles that might make you feel less-than-positive about the direction of the world.
  • The New Jennicam:  You all remember Jennicam, right? The first EVER lifestreamer (or at least the first one that anyone had ever heard of), Jennifer Ringley broadcast herself in realtime, all the time, from a series of webcams around her apartment, showing her sleeping, showering, occasionally-fcuking…it was, at the time, an incredible phenomenon, a true species first in a way, and the precursor to the society of the streamed spectacle we now ‘enjoy’, and now others are following in her footsteps on Twitch. One such streamer is Emily, who for over a year now has been on Twitch 24/7, playing games and sleeping and eating and chatting – this piece profiles her and her stream, and inadvertently pinpoints the way in which our relationship with people online has changed in the 25-odd years since Jennicam started this whole thing (the professionalism, the money, the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any joy in the experience for Emily whatsoever) and the ways in which it hasn’t (creepiness and entitlement and the fact that this doesn’t seem in any way a healthy way to live, for anyone involved).
  • Brand Restaurants: I had NO IDEA that Gucci has a restaurant, let alone that said restaurant (in Tokyo, in case you were minded to visit) has this year been awarded a Michelin star, but I rather enjoyed this piece about the surprising number of high-end brands that have experimented with opening eateries as part of the infinite, multidirectional expansion of their brand identity. As the piece notes, these restaurants will all lose violent quantities of money, so the benefits are far more intangible – but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of thing becoming more commonplace as brands (and the awful people like me who occasionally advise them) continue to seek offline means of connecting with audiences in an increasingly-online-only world.
  • CoreCore: In some respects this piece (via Shardcore – thanks, Shardcore!) is total bullsh1t (honestly, read it and try and make it make sense beyond ‘here is an aesthetic that seems almost deliberately non-aesthetic but does in fact have some rough unifying principles that we’re not really capable of articulating’), but on the other it feels like there’s a certain truth it’s pointing at but not quite articulating. The overall gist is that we’re seeing a move towards more obviously, deliberately ugly, scruffy, tonally…wrong, or baffling, content on TikTok, and that this is part of a movement of sorts – where I think this is interesting and half-right is that I think this is a factor of platform maturity; you saw this on Insta too, as it reached saturation, with the growth of collage-y cut-up aesthetics and rough, zine-ish graphics and a general sense of wanting to kick against a prevailing aesthetic orthodoxy, and it feels like a lot of the stuff described (and embedded) in the piece is the same sort of thing but for TikTok. Which, if we follow this to its logical conclusion, suggests TikTok will be a cultural deadzone in about two years time, just like Insta has become.
  • Japanese Web Design: This has been everywhere in the past week or so, but with good reason – this is SO INTERESTING, and such a clever use of data analysis, to explain how Japanese website design is peculiar to that nation, and why that might be. Again, even if the subject matter doesn’t immediately grab you, this is just a really good example of storytelling and argument-building using data.
  • Cruising The Village: OK, this is a bit of a peculiar one, but bear with me here. This is the Phd thesis of Michael Atkins from 2013, which I stumbled across online this week and which is all about the practice of cruising amongst gay men in the city. Which may or may not interest you as a topic, but which is rendered SUPERB by the fact that all of Atkins’ interviews with various men on the subject are represented here in comic form, to help protect the identities of the people he spoke to. Honestly, I wasn’t expected to find this so interesting, and so moving, and I ended up reading far more of this than I expected to. Skim it to find the comics, but it’s worth dipping into the writing too as it’s a fascinating portrait of a culture, and of a less-online time.
  • Hello, World!: Sheila Heti is one of my favourite novelists, and I would read her shopping lists given the chance; this is a really interesting formal experiment, in which she conducts a series of conversations with various AI chatbots and transcribes them. This links to part one of five – this is LONG, but if you’ve any interest whatsoever in either AI and the idea of ‘sentience’ in machines, or in the manner in which these sorts of tools can form part of the authorial process, or indeed in the extent to which they can be useful interlocutors from the point of view of self-discovery, then it’s pretty much required reading. I don’t think it totally ‘works’ as an exercise – though of course it depends on what you perceive the aim of the exercise to have been – but I found it fascinating to read.
  • Insensible Loss: Surgery and sickness – a doctor writes about the relationship between their work and their sense of their won body, and the extent to which one impacts and affects the other, and, honestly, this is so so so so so good. Look: “I spend my days and nights invading strangers’ bodies. I put my finger in their mouths and gag them, feeling for firmness suggesting tumors; I snake a thin camera through their nostrils and into their throats to see the organ that gives these strangers their voices. I assess bodies impassively, looking for infection, inflammation, hidden cancer. I cut bodies open, dissecting them layer by layer; I suture them back together again using needles curved like hawks’ talons. Strangers’ bodies are where I work and where I learn. I know things about my patients’ bodies that they don’t know and can’t see. I know things about them that they have no reason to know. Some people want to see inside themselves, and they ask if their operations can be filmed, or if they can take their tumors home. “Where do my tonsils go after the operation?” one patient asked me during my training. “Do you keep them in a jar, and once the jar is full, you get to graduate?””
  • 52 Things: We close this week’s longreads with the 2022 edition of Tom Whitwell’s ‘52 Things I Learned This Year’, which once again is fascinating, baffling, funny, sad and sort-of terrifying, all at once, You will learn more from reading these, and thinking about them a bit, than you will from reading three million agency trends presentations, I promise you. My personal favourite this year is number 44: “In March 1967, the CIA tested Acoustic Kitty, a live cat with a microphone, battery and antenna surgically implanted. Sadly, on its first public trial, the unfortunate animal was run over by a taxi.”

By Mark Macevoy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 25/11/22

Reading Time: 34 minutes

Are you running a slight temperature? Do you feel a bit clammy? Are your glands a bit ‘up’? Test yourself, because you may well have come down with WORLD CUP FEVER!!!11111eleventy

Except of course you probably haven’t, as noone seems particularly able to get excited about this one, perhaps a result of the jarring cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously buy into FIFA’s inclusive ‘one sport’ messaging whilst at the same time holding the tournament in a regime best known for its less-than-inclusive attitude to anyone who isn’t straight (and leaving aside the equally-jarring cognitive dissonance of it taking place in a desert, just after we’ve all spent a week or so talking about how important it is that we start taking all this climate stuff PROPERLY SERIOUSLY this time).

Still, I imagine a significant proportion of you will be getting tanked tonight in anticipation of England tearing the Americans a football-shaped new one, so I hope you enjoy that (but, at the same time, know that there is almost nothing that would make me happier than an embarrassing English defeat).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and it is not a proper football tournament without Italy in it and so doesn’t to my mind technically count as a real World Cup anyway.

By Chelsea Gustafsson

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A MIX OF PLEASINGLY-WIBBLY (TECHNICAL TERM) ELECTRONICA BY CARLTON DOOM! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS TO RUSH AS IT’S OFF TO LUNCH AND WHICH APOLOGISES FOR ANY DROP IN QUALITY (LOL) YOU MAY NOTICE IN TODAY’S CURIOS AS A RESULT OF THIS SLIGHTLY-TIGHTER DEADLINE, PT.1:  

  • Save Your Threads: Whilst, obviously, I like Twitter and would be sad and not a little annoyed if it died, I confess to finding last Friday’s ‘THIS IS THE END, THE END OF IT ALL!’ flailing quite funny. Turns out, though, that Elon firing half the company and then forcing a significant proportion of the remaining people to quit hasn’t gutted the platform to the point of total dysfunctionality just yet (brief Musk-related aside here – it’s astonishing how the millions of people caping for him online seem oblivious to the fact that, even if you believe that his hard-line approach to cost-cutting and staff bloat is necessary, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to go about it in a way that makes everyone involved in the process so uncertain and unhappy. Turns out the man’s a pr1ck! Having to read the fcuker’s Tweets is also a painful education in hierarchical sycophancy – it’s honestly slightly heartbreaking to see the literally thousands of mooks in his replies who seem to think that telling a billionaire how great they are is going to induce said billionaire to chuck them a few quid or FINALLY recognise their generational talent and reward them with a position at his right hand. We really do love the taste of bootleather, turns out). Maybe, who knows, it will all be ok? Still, just in case it’s not, you might find this service useful – plug in a Tweet url and it will generate a datestamped PDF of the entire thread, useful for preserving the GREAT PATRIMONY OF HUMAN THOUGHT that is Twitter. This requires you to request access – it’s designed primarily for journalists, researchers and archivists – but it’s nice to know that  someone out there is thinking of how to preserve all this stuff in a useful fashion. Oh, and if Twitter does start to get a bit flaky as a result of everyone who knows how it works being P45d, you might find this site useful too.
  • Nitter: If you’re so upset and outraged by the fact that That Fcuking Man has bought the bird site and don’t want to fluff his ego by adding your data to the traffic stats that he keeps trumpeting as a measure of his vast success (GYAC Elon, people logging onto Twitter to check whatever mad sh1t you’ve said this week, or which collection of right-wing ghouls you’re currently cosying up to is not going to be the long-term financial panacea you seem to think it is) then why not use Nitter to check up on whatever you want to check up on. Basically this lets you look at individuals’ profiles, or search for specific terms, and look up the content without visiting Twitter dot com, and thereby sticking it to the plute by denying him a DAU. TAKE THAT, SQUARIAL-FACE!
  • Some More Alternatives: I’m increasingly of the opinion that, should Twitter die, that’s probably it for me and social media, but should you still be desperate to find an appropriately-shaped digital liferaft to cling to then you might be interested in the latest pretenders. There’s Hive, which has seen a boom in signups this week and which I am told is functionally pretty good and Twitter-ish, but which only exists as an app and therefore is of no personal use for me whatsoever; there’s Koo, which is ‘big in India’ and is, according at least to some of their press materials, the second-biggest microblogging platform in the world after Twitter itself, but which (based on my cursory exploration) doesn’t really have a great English language community on it at present; and then there’s Post, which is significantly newer than either of the other two and which is literally being built from the ground up, and which is in limited early access at present. I have been playing with it a bit this week and it’s nice – it feels Twitter-ish, and the people seem nice, but Christ alone knows if it will take off, and if it does whether the small dev team will be able to manage. The various community teething problems happening on Mastodon instances around the world right now are fascinating real-world examples of just how fcuking hard community management and moderation is at scale.
  • For Every Goal Scored: I’ve found it literally impossible to get excited by this World Cup, in common with millions of people around the world, for all the obvious reasons (and, er, the fact that Italy made a humiliating pig’s ear of qualification), but I thought this was a nice initiative – this site lets you commit to making a donation to the LGBT+ charity MindOut, pledging a set amount per goal scored at the tournament. Choose how much you can afford to pledge, from 10p to £1 a goal, enter your email address, and at the tournament’s end you’ll get sent a link to donate the amount you’re liable for. Which, obviously, you could then totally fail to click on, but that would make you a cnut and I’m sure you’re better than that.
  • Digital Tuvalu: So, that was COP – do we feel like a significant number of the world’s most pressing environmental issues were meaningfully discussed, and that we have reached sensible resolutions as to how best to address them? GOOD! Cynicism aside, the loss-and-damage fund for nations most affected by the side effects of the world’s richest countries living it up on fossil fuels for the past 150 years does seem like A Good Thing, although as ever with this stuff I have a slight fear that the reality of what eventually gets committed will be significantly watered-down by the time it gets to the point of coughing up. The fund is designed specifically to assist countries like Tuvalu, which has created this little website to highlight the threat it’s facing – per the blurb, “Teafualiku Islet, our smallest island, is the first part of our country we’ll lose – so it’s the first we’ve recreated digitally. Without immediate, global climate action, all of Tuvalu will only exist here.” Which is a nice idea, and I don’t want to be too much of a miserable, critical w4nker about it, but, well…I feel justified because the website reads ‘in partnership with accenture’ and I don’t like them very much. This is SUCH a missed opportunity – you could have gone deep with a ‘metaverse’ gag here, creating a sh1t digital island that users could navigate around, the joke/point being that you can’t make digital replicas of some of the world’s remotest places because IT IS NOT THE SAME, and that is why it’s important we act to save the real islands asap; you could have got the community to built Tuvalu in Minecraft; you could have done LOADS, and instead what they did is build a one-page website, with a pretend ‘we’re uploading the palm trees now’-type graphic, and chucked a video on there along with a bit of ‘email your local representative’ campaign functionality. It’s a missed opportunity, basically, although frankly if we think that a website campaign is going to make a blind bit of difference to the future of a bunch of remote Pacific islands then, well, we might be deluding ourselves a bit lads.
  • Swoosh: This is potentially interesting, at least as a canary in the coalmine for NFT/Web3/community type stuff in the mainstream world. Nike has launched Swoosh, which is basically a community hub based on the idea that the brand’s fans want to be involved in the process of creating its new collections. Which, you know, feels broadly right, although whether or not they will be interested enough to jump through the various NFT-related hoops that this sort of thing always seems to entail is another matter. You need a Nike ID and an access code to get in, but the general gist is as follows: “Nike Members will be able to learn about and collect virtual creations, which are typically interactive digital objects, such as virtual shoes or jerseys, that community members will soon be able to wear in digital games and immersive experiences. In some instances, community members will be able to unlock access to physical product or events like intimate conversations with athletes or designers.”  Which, of course, is exactly the sort of bland corporate speak that sucks the life and excitement out of even the most thrilling of prospects, but at least gives you an idea of where they are going with this – according to the roadmap, the first Nike collection co-created by the Swoosh community will drop in 2023 sometime, so let’s see whether that does in fact happen or whether this gets quietly sunsetted when it becomes apparent that noone wants to get a fcuking Metamask wallet to participate.
  • Coca Cola Dreamworld: It’s slightly amazing to me that we’ve had Augmented Reality for over a decade now and I am still yet to see anything approaching a compelling use-case for it – ok, fine, Google’s ‘big arrow on your phone pointing in the direction you need to go’ stuff is useful, but I haven’t seen anything fun which uses AR in a meaningful way (I am discounting Pokemon because the AR stuff was totally unnecessary to the actual gameplay, and all the serious weirdos who got properly into it turned it off after about a day). This doesn’t really do anything to change that – it’s a mobile game which is meant to promote carbonated sugarwater (no idea what the fcuk it has to do with tooth decay and type-2 diabetes) by letting you play a Guitar Hero-esque rhythm game by tapping your phone’s screen in time to the notes as they fall, and which exists in AR because…I don’t know, because one of the marketing team at Coke has a cousin or partner or crush who worked at the development studio, maybe? Still, if you want a reason to hold your phone up in the air while you desperately tap at its screen in a series of irregular, arrythmic spasms (or maybe that was just how I played it), this will be PERFECT for you.
  • Stable Diffusion 2: This is more of an ‘FYI’ than a ‘click the link and gawp at the marvels of AI image generation’ – Stable Diffusion this week released v2 of its open source text-to-image model (here’s a link to the Github page if you’re techy and interested in running it), which from what I can tell is more of an incremental improvement than a real generational shift. This piece explains some of the changes – not least the fact that the model’s been tweaked to make it harder to create images of specific celebrities, certain artists, and bongo. There’s something slightly future-shocky in the fact that in the space of year we’ve gone from ‘this stuff doesn’t exist yet’ to ‘I am salty that the magical machine will no longer let me create an infinite gallery of naked, large-breasted hentai girls’ (but, inevitably, the guys who want to make the galleries of naked, large-breasted hentai girls will win out, because it sadly seems they always do).
  • Edge Dance: You can’t play with this yet, but it’s FASCINATING – Edge Dance is basically code which can generate dance moves based on music that you feed it, or, per the website, a “powerful method for editable dance generation that is capable of creating realistic, physically-plausible dances while remaining faithful to arbitrary input music. EDGE uses a transformer-based diffusion model paired with Jukebox, a strong music feature extractor, and confers powerful editing capabilities well-suited to dance, including joint-wise conditioning, motion in-betweening, and dance continuation”. This is INCREDIBLE, honestly – scroll down the page and have a look at some of the video examples of the dances the machine has created. Now I’m not a choreographer, and I dance in exactly the manner that you image a middle-aged white man who likes techno dances, and as such am perhaps not best-placed to judge the quality of the steps generated but, well, they look to my untrained eye like ACTUAL DANCES. Who had ‘choreographers’ on their bingo card of ‘jobs that will be rendered obsolete by machines’? Also, if you think that this isn’t going to be used by every single record label to generate new TikTok dances for the hooky parts of every single song ever then, well, you’re wrong. I can’t wait for the first moral panic caused by an AI-generated dance move which has the unfortunate side effect of snapping the ankles of one in every ten humans who tries it.
  • Oio: This is a nice idea. Oio is a design studio with a singular gimmick – the products that they design and make and sell will be man/machine co-creations, with AIs being guided to create specific articles and artefacts, with the final production designs being chosen and modeled by humans. Each thing they make will be produced as a one-off limited edition series, never to be repeated, creating a neat bit of scarcity and FOMO which, as any fule kno, is essential for the development of a high-end brand. The first collection is SPOONS – there are three slightly different designs on sale for the frankly staggering sum of 190 quid each, which strikes me as a LOT of money (yes, fine, they are silver, but still) but which obviously might turn out to be a wise investment when Oio turns out to be the Bauhaus de nos jours.
  • Nation States: This is a rare example of a link being featured in Curios more than once, but I have a particular attachment to Nation States. This site launched in 2002, as part of the promo for a novel called ‘Jennifer Government’, a lightly-dystopian bit of futurefiction about a world in which corporations were basically state entities – at the time I was working as a lobbyist and hating it and using my 9 hours a day of high-speed internet access to become acquainted with all the ways in which the web could help me fill in the dead hours between arriving at work and drinking the pain away. I stumbled across Nation States somewhere and was HOOKED – you could create your very own micronation, name it, pick its politics, and each day check back to see how it was doing, each day being confronted with small decisions about governance that would affect your country’s progress. I did this for YEARS and then left the job and kind-of forgot about it, but this week I saw that its creator had posted about the site’s two-decade anniversary and, honestly, it is SO HEARTWARMING! There is a community! There are thousands (well, ok, maybe hundreds, but still) of people still tending their micronations, and maintaining the code, and moderating discussions, and this is what is wonderful and amazing about the web and about people and why I sometimes think that maybe everything isn’t totally terrible after all.
  • 222: Do you feel that, perhaps, you are stuck in something of a rut? Do you want to open yourself up to NEW AND EXCITING EXPERIENCES? Would you also like to perhaps use said experiences as a way of meeting new people, potentially even romantically? I appreciate that everything I have written to this point almost certainly makes you think I am about to start extolling the virtues of swinging or polyamory but, I promise, I am really not – instead, this is the premise of mysterious website 222, which offers the following blurb: “We are on a mission to revitalize our social fabric through accelerating chance encounters. We’re not a dating app. We’re not a friend-making service. We’re a platform for unique social experiences. No profiles, no DMs, no scrolling, no swiping. Just say “yes” & explore the chance encounters you’d have never experienced.” Sign up, give them your phone number, answer a bunch of questions about your likes and dislikes and then…see what happens.
  • The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: It’s hard not to occasionally look around the planet and Wot We Have Wrought and think that perhaps, on some level, humanity hasn’t been the unalloyed boon to the rest of creation that we might like to think we are. If you find yourself quietly agreeing with the general vibe of that sentence, and if you every now and again find yourself humming that seminal Bloodhound Gang classic ‘Lift Your Head Up High (And Blow Your Brains Out)’ (sample lyric: ‘Life’s short and hard, like a bodybuilding elf; so save the planet and kill yourself’), then you might want to get involved with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a loosely-affiliated organisation whose basic (and surprisingly cheery) message is ‘look, don’t have kids, it’s probably not worth it and maybe we should just die out, eh?’. “Phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense” is the official shortform rationale, but you can read more about the movement and its founder in this profile. I particularly like the cheery signoff ‘Thankyou for not breeding!’ at the bottom of the homepage.
  • Digital Benin: Oh this is GREAT – a superb bit of digital curation and archivism and cultural preservation, focused on the culture and language and history of Benin. “Digital Benin brings together all objects, historical photographs and rich documentation material from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artefacts from Benin Kingdom looted in the late nineteenth century. The historic Benin objects are an expression of Benin arts, culture and history, and were originally used as royal representational arts, to depict historical events, to communicate, to worship and perform rituals. The digital platform introduces new scholarship which connects digital documentation about the translocated objects to oral histories, object research, historical context, a foundational Edo language catalogue, provenance names, a map of the Benin Kingdom and museum collections worldwide. Digital Benin connects data from 5,246 objects across 131 institutions in 20 countries. Digital Benin’s scope focuses on objects looted by British forces from the Kingdom of Benin (now Edo State, Nigeria) in February 1897 and distributed in its immediate aftermath. Together, these events and processes led to the worldwide translocation of the objects shown on this platform. A small set of objects is included in the catalogue to represent the broader context in which the artistic production of Benin guilds is situated: Bini-Portuguese Ivories, produced and circulated outside West Africa in the 16th centuries, objects produced in neighbouring regions of the kingdom and a selection of works produced by named artists after 1930, which are held in museum collections.”

By Bisma Hussein

NEXT, SOME PROPER TECHNO FROM PROPER TECHNO LEGEND LUKE SLATER! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS TO RUSH AS IT’S OFF TO LUNCH AND WHICH APOLOGISES FOR ANY DROP IN QUALITY (LOL) YOU MAY NOTICE IN TODAY’S CURIOS AS A RESULT OF THIS SLIGHTLY-TIGHTER DEADLINE, PT.2:

  • Puffy Bear: Occasionally you’ll come across something online which you click on and look at and which you can’t help but wonder “is…is this a fetish thing?” – so it is with this, the frankly-terrifying ursine nightmare that is Puffy Bear. You know teddy bears, right? You know that you can get the REALLY BIG ONES, the sort of thing that is bought by well-meaning but almost-certainly-childless uncles or godparents and which inevitably ends up terrifying its recipient with its massive girth and dead eyes? Well, imagine a REALLY BIG teddy bear, right, but one which has had its arms and legs scaled up to actual human proportions so it looks like some sort of horrific plush Slenderman figure… THAT is Puffy Bear. I honestly don’t have the descriptive skills to adequately convey just how unsettling Puffy is – there’s something about the expression on his face that screams ‘I will at some point attain murderous sentience’, and there’s imagery on the site that seems to quite strongly suggest that there is a market for his services that veers from ‘friendly cuddling companion’ to ‘potential romantic partner’, and, honestly, no. WHY IS PUFFY ONLY EVER PICTURED CUDDLING WOMEN? WHY ARE THEY LYING ON HIM WITH A CONTENTEDLY-POST-COITAL SMILE? Puffy costs 160USD, and whilst there’s no explicit mention of this on the webpage I would not be at all surprised if you couldn’t ask for ‘extra attachments’ if you know what I mean.
  • Lyre’s Dictionary: This is such a nice little toy – “Lyre’s Dictionary is a computer program that generates novel English words based on existing roots and patterns.” Refresh the page to get a new totally made-up but strangely-plausible sounding word, along with its definition; recent examples it’s thrown me include “gymnasis · (noun) the act or state of training” and the frankly brilliant “morsive (adjective) given to biting”, which latter one I am frankly going to start using at every chance I get.
  • Asterisk Magazine: A new online magazine, should you want such a thing! Here’s the blurb: “Asterisk is a quarterly journal of writing and clear thinking about things that matter. We’re for Bayes’ theorem, acknowledging our uncertainty, wild imaginations, and well-constructed sentences. We’re against easy answers, lazy metaphors, and the end of life as we know it.” – I think, based on the above and some of the people who’ve contributed to the initial issue, this is a vaguely-rationalist-associated publication and as such your appetite for its content and opinions will largely map against your tolerance for Slate Star Codex and the like. There’s also an interesting bit of site functionality which I rather like – you can highlight passages from articles and create a personal scrapbook of bits you found interesting or useful which get stored locally on the site, which struck me as a smart idea that might be worth replicating elsewhere.
  • The Ooh Directory: A great project, this, by Phil Gyford – it’s a DIRECTORY OF BLOGS! Like what you used to get in the olden days! This is new, and growing, and you can submit suggestions for additional blogs to include – they’re roughly categorised by theme, or you can browse by recently added or updated, and if you ever find yourself thinking ‘God I really miss the idiosyncratic joy of reading the inside of a stranger’s head every now and again’ then this will basically be catnip to you. In a few random clicks I have found, variously, the blog writeup of a long-running D&D campaign, a cooking blog maintained by a homesick Texan who longs for proper barbecue, one man’s obsessional love affair with vintage comics…this is, honestly, wonderful, and yet another pleasing example of the way in which some of the old spirit of the web (individual, idiosyncratic, self-published, odd) has seen something of a resurgence this year.
  • The Old Vic Hub: I appreciate that this is not exactly a good time to be contemplating a career in the arts in the UK – here’s to all the poor buggers who were recently shafted by the Arts Council – but, should you or anyone you know be contemplating a career in the theatre then this set of resources compiled by the Old Vic might be useful. Here you can learn chapter and verse about what different jobs entail, how they work, and how to find them, with career advice and training materials and all sorts of useful content for anyone seeking to make their way in the industry – if you have a child in your life who’s contemplating a career in something soul-destroying-but-lucrative like accountancy, now’s your chance to fcuk up their future by convincing them to pursue a life of penury and stress instead!
  • A Lot Of 80s Music: KCRW (I find the US convention of four-letter radio station names so upsetting – WHY CAN’T YOU CALL YOUR STATIONS STUFF LIKE ‘MAGIC’ FFS?) is an LA radio station which in the 80s hosted a quite incredible array of talent in its studios. This page collects the session recordings of people as diverse as REM, The Meat Puppets, the Cowboy Junkies and more – if you’re a fan of any rock, indie or new wave artists of the period there’s a decent chance that they’ll have featured here at some time.
  • Junni: “We want to make the world more exciting and happy with new ideas and technology!”, parps this website, which is a laudable ambition which we can all get behind. Junni is a Japanese company and I confess to not really understanding what they do, but that doesn’t matter because this website made me laugh out loud and has just done so again even though I knew what was coming. Just click the link, let the site load, and when it asks you ‘would you like to know about our philosophy’ then, well, just enjoy. I don’t want to spoil anything here for you, but if you don’t want a cuddly tapir by the end of this then there’s something wrong with you.
  • The Appreciation Effect: I am, as regular readers may have gathered by now, a miserable cynic with dust where my soul should be and a dwindling ability to feel. HOWEVER! I understand that others are not necessarily like this, and as such I present to you The Appreciation Effect, a service which is *just* the acceptable side of twee for me – it’s a simple premise whereby you can collaborate with a bunch of other people to arrange to have a series of short, positive daily messages sent to a mutual friend or loved one, each being an opportunity for the sender to tell the recipient how much they appreciate them and how great they are. Which, honestly, is really cute! Although I do hope that someone somewhere is monitoring the copy, as this could equally-easily become a targeted harassment campaign (NO MATT WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS THINK OF THE BAD THINGS???). This feels like something that could very easily be coopted by the right sort of brand for Mother’s Day or similar, so file this away until the next time you need some sort of saccharine content campaign to help you sell bunion cream.
  • Kiwix: I’m slightly embarrassed that I didn’t know that this existed, but it is SO useful – Kiwix lets you download local copies of whole websites to your phone or computer, meaning that you could (for example) get a local copy of Wikipedia saved to your mobile so that you can access it even when offline (you can also download stuff about surviving disasters, for those of you of a more paranoid or survivalist bent, and a bunch of other similar information repositories besides) – there’s even a text-only version for people who don’t fancy the full-fat, increadibly heavy, picture-laden version of Wikipedia you get on the web. If you’re the sort of person who likes to get into arguments with strangers on planes and wants to be able to back up said arguments with COLD HARD FACTS (insofar as you can claim anything on Wikipedia to be ‘facts’) then a) this will appeal to you; and b) never, ever sit next to me on a plane, please.
  • Quivr: I have to confess, I can’t think of ANY way in which Quivr, the latest in the seemingly-infinite procession of dating apps to stumble into my field of vision, can be a good idea, but maybe I am being stupid here. The gimmick in this instance is that you don’t make matches yourself – someone else does! Yes, that’s right, if you’re so exhausted by the concept of modern dating and The Apps that you can’t bring yourself to even swipe anymore then why not outsource all that emotionally-draining selecting to someone else? There is VERY limited information about exactly how this works, and I get the impression that this is very much a ‘proof of concept idea’ rather than ‘actual proper business proposition’, but I am genuinely intrigued at how messy and awful the premise could end up being. “Get matches handpicked for you! Allow the best matchmakers in your area to pick matches for you, or designate your family and friends. Compete with other matchmakers and set up the best couples for the happiest relationships!” Actually, I take it all back – this sounds GREAT and should it ever take off in the UK I am absolutely going to sign up to play actual Cupid with actual real people. What’s that, Immanuel? The means/ends distinction? Away with you! (I know you all secretly come here just for the occasional undergraduate-level philosophy jokes).
  • Natural Habitat Shorts: Natural Habitat is an animation series which lives largely on TikTok but which is also compiled here for ease of use and for everyone who would prefer not to engage with CrackTV. This is the very definition of ‘gentle, occasionally slightly sardonic liberal humour featuring animals’, but if that doesn’t turn you off immediately then you might enjoy these (the art style is cute too, if that’s a selling point).
  • Madsounds: A friend of mine works at Spotify – I must ask him what the company thinks about all the hacks and plugins that people build for it, and whether they have ever considered creating a sort-of ‘build your own Spotify hacks’ modular toolkit for making it easier for people to build on the API. This week’s ‘people doing interesting things with Spotify’ link comes in the shape of Madsounds, which basically gives you a new ‘Discover’ playlist, based on your tastes, daily rather than weekly. This is a really nice idea and an excellent way of making your daily listening a bit more varied than it might otherwise be.
  • Managing The Wilds: My notes for this one read, simply, ‘Wolves?????’, and, frankly, I am not sure what I can add to that. I have literally no idea whatsoever what is going on here, or why this exists, or what I am supposed to take from it other than that it’s a wordless imageblog, that it seems to be about reintroducing wolves to the wild, and that it features a surprising amount of imagery pertaining to animal faeces. If anyone can explain this to me then I would be incredibly grateful.
  • All Light Expanded:Oh wow, this is quite wonderful. ‘All Light, Everywhere’ was a (seemingly pretty high-concept) film released last year all, whose Wikipedia entry describes it thusly: “[All Light Expanded] follows the biases inherent to the way humans physically see the world, focusing primarily on the usage of police body cameras and other forms of police surveillance, but also tracing studies of solar eclipses as well as the parallel development of automatic weapons with the motion picture camera.” This website is a companion project to it, “an interactive companion of articles, quotes, links, and archival materials that inspired the 2021 documentary”, and whilst I can’t pretend to ‘get’ the themes and references here, I think it’s SUCH an interesting exercise in presenting themes and concepts as they relate to a work. The UI in itself is fascinating – you can select elements on the left of the page which relate to themes that crop up in the film, and these are expanded on the right with references and links, and, honestly, I think there is a lot to be taken from this from a webdesign and IA point of view.
  • Sunday Paintings: Bryon Kim is a US artist, who for many years now has been making a painting on most Sundays. This website collects those Sunday paintings, single images which often come with short notes, acting as a low-key, minimalist, episodic diary of sorts. I love this – I lost an hour this week going back through time and charting the changing seasons and skies, and Kim’s changing moods, through the paintings – and I really hope, given that the site’s not been updated since mid-September, that they are ok and just on holiday or something.
  • Blueprints for Intelligence: How we visually represent AI is an interesting question – how can we, or should we, attempt to visually communicate what is happening when machine learning is doing its thing? This is a wonderful collection of historical illustrations of ‘machine thinking’ compiled by Philipp Schmitt, who writes: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often illustrated with sci-fi characters. That’s misleading. ‘Blueprints for Intelligence’ is a visual history of AI told through a collection of diagrams from machine learning research publications published between 1943 and 2020.Looking at the history of AI through its diagrams lets us trace key tendencies in the technology’s evolution. Unconcerned with what these figures might tell a researcher, this project explores what they say about the researcher. It draws connections between the visual representations of neural networks and the researchers’ conception of cognition.” Super-interesting, both in terms of design and philosophy.
  • WOW Geoguesser: I never got into World of Warcraft, even when I was briefly doing the PR for Blizzard and sort of had to try for professional reasons, but I am aware that there may be some of you who lost hours (and friends, and lovers, and jobs) to the MMO – if you’re one of those people (and, really, if you’re not then you probably don’t need  to click this one) then you may be one of the exclusive club of people who might stand a chance at playing this. Presented with a screenshot of a location in WoW, you simply have to guess where it is – obviously normies need not apply, and if you can get ANY of these right then it’s probably important to accept that you have (or, I hope, had) something of a problem.
  • DugBunnyPuzzle: Get the dogs and the bunnies to the right locations on the board – there’s a new game each day if you want to add something to your Wordlerotation, and it’s a gently-amusing way to wake your brain up (although I confess to taking an embarrassingly long time to work out what the fcuk was meant to be going on – I recommend clicking the question mark icon because the rules are actually pretty simple (and the way they are presented is cute too)).
  • Barnacle Goose: I hadn’t seen a good Clicker game for a while, so it was lovely to come across this new(?) work by Web Curios favourite Everest Pipkin, which is pretty much entirely baffling at first but which slowly reveals itself to be an odd, interesting, moderately-unsettling project to create…well, life itself. Pipkin describes this as “an abiogenesis body horror idle clicker”, but there’s a slightly-less oblique explanation on the project given by the Leicester indie cinema and arts centre that commissioned it (also, can we just take a moment to applaud that commission – MORE ODD BITS OF WEBART, PLEASE, INDEPENDENT CINEMAS OF THE WORLD!): “The Barnacle Goose Experiment is an idle clicker game set in a world where spontaneous generation is commonplace. As a player, you are a researcher studying the creation of new and living things out of raw and non-living matter. In order to undertake this work without experimental contamination, you are locked inside of a hermetically sealed dome — entirely empty. As such, the only raw material for experimentation is that of your own body. Through the accretions of self, the slow learning of mechanical systems, and the simple duration of time, you must uncover the combinatory logic of spontaneous generation and make again a living world from a dead one.” This is GREAT. Creepy, weird, but great.
  • The Winners of the 2022 Interactive Fiction Competition: The votes have been counted, and this year’s winner is…The Grown-Up Detective Agency! Here’s the synopsis: “The only thing Bell Park likes more than a mystery is solving it on her own. But when a time-traveling 12-year-old version of herself lands face-down on her rented co-working desk, she’ll have no choice but to take the displaced kid detective along on her latest case. FOLLOW THE TRAIL of a missing heterosexual on the strange streets of Toronto! Investigate a QUIRKY CAST of drag kings, chicken wing enthusiasts, and women in elaborate cat make-up! Thrill in the PERVASIVE ENNUI of your early twenties! Struggle to remember where your preteen self was at with the whole BEING GAY THING!” – I played it this week and it’s excellent, but if that doesn’t quite appeal then you should check out one of the other commended entries as there’s sure to be something you fall for.
  • The LEA Project: Finally this week, an interactive musical webgame storyhorrortypething – I don’t want to spoil this, but it’s REALLY nicely done. All I will tell you is that you need to log in to the site, and the instructions as to how are RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU. From then, you’re on your own – I love the craft that has gone into this almost as much as the mechanics, and I can even deal with the musical-ness of the whole thing. Wonderful stuff.

By Sophie Holden

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES WE HAVE THIS ONE BY ORDINARY MORNINGS WHICH FOR SOME REASON REALLY REMINDED ME OF THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Groove Is In The Art: Fine, not ACTUALLY a Tumblr but it very much feels like one. “Pop art and psychedelica meet the mainstream on vintage classical, instrumental and children’s album covers with an explosion of line art and color in Groove is in the Art.” – this is such a good inspiration resource for a very particular 60s/70s aesthetic
  • A Game Of Clothes: This, though IS ACTUALLY A TUMBLR! You can probably guess what it is from the title, but in case you’ve forgotten all about the world’s inexplicable six-year obsession with that show about dragons and sex, it’s a look at the fashions that the characters from the GoT books would wear if they were real people who could buy couture. Weird, but whatever makes you happy.
  • Restauranting Through History: Also not a Tumblr, but also feels like one! This is ACE – a regular look back at old restaurants in the US, their menus and the food they served and the place they held in local society of the time… if you’ve any interest in food history, particularly North American, you will love this.
  • Chuck Tingle: DR TINGLE IS NOW ON TUMBLR! You all know Chuck Tingle, right? Author of a seemingly-infinite number of (actually surprisingly wholesome) erotic novels with titles like ‘Pounded in the Butt by the Sentient Manifestation of My Own Latent Homophobia’ (this is not a real Tingler, but it may as well be), he has decided to create this Tumblr in case the whole ‘Twitter is dying’ thing turns out to be real and, honestly, I can’t tell you how much I love Chuck Tingle and his very idiosyncratic posting style, and the genuinely caring community that exists around his very, very odd stories about gender representation and fluidity and love and self-acceptance. This may be one of the nicest places on the internet right now.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Dan Catt: The account of one Dan Catt, a printmaker whose work I stumbled across this week and really enjoy – you might too.
  • Moon Over Marine: OH GOD THIS IS AMAZING. This person does needlework in the style of 80s videogames, which may not sound good but I promise you that once you click this you will be transported back to a world of brown carpets and flickering CRTs and Spectrums and CGA and Findus Crispy Pancakes (or at least you will if you’re an English person in their mid-40s, I can’t speak for any of the rest of you fcukers).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Dan Hon On Elon: We begin this week with a few pieces on That Fcuking Man and that bloody website – which, honestly, I totally understand if you skip because, well, it’s been EVERYWHERE. Still, if you have additional appetite for Big Thinking about What This Means then you could do worse than reading Dan’s typically interesting and readable take on the whole thing, which covers Silicon Valley’s longstanding obsession with Great And Visionary Men, the fact that the world can usefully be divided in terms of ‘those who have at some point suffered from abuses of power in their lives’ and ‘those who have not’, and all the various reasons why That Fcuking Man’s actions over the past week have been suboptimal on both a human and managerial level. Excellent.
  • The Unbearable Mundanity of the Very Rich Man’s Mind: This is another cracker, from the guy who ordinarily writes the ‘Hola Papi’ queer advice blog but who this week pivoted into writing about how incredibly fcuking dull and exhausting it is to have your experience of life and the world conditioned and sculpted by very rich men. “These past few years, especially, have felt like being locked in a theater where the only actor on stage is holding a gun and telling us to clap. Attention is being demanded, and the person demanding it doesn’t really think of any one of us as being on the same level of personhood as they. We have little choice but to suffer them, to some degree.” – I believe the phrase is ‘preach’.
  • What Do You Want From The Internet: The last link about Twitter, promise – this is by Brian Feldman and is about how maybe, actually, Twitter dying might be good for us because we have become fat and lazy from gorging on its infinite content stream and this is a chance for us to rediscover the exploratory hunger of The Old Web. This rather resonated with me, though I accept that it could also be read as being, well, a little snobbish: “You are mad about friction. The broad answer is that it was easy to stay put and the costs of preparing for the worst is high. Kinda like climate change, I guess? But I also think modern internet users are generally complacent. I love pulling at weird threads on the internet and seeing where they lead — stepping outside, so to speak. I think many others are more interested in training a personalized algorithm to bring the silly JPEGs to them — ordering Seamless, if you will. For a lot of users, Twitter was 9GAG.” Well quite.
  • Facebook Is A Freakshow Ghost Town: I’m including this essay – in which the writer talks about how Facebook’s slow decline into cultural irrelevance has made it a weirdly-compelling and interestingly-odd corner of the web to hang out in again – partly because I think there’s a bit of truth in it and partly to help punt my niche belief that we’re all going to be getting back on Facebook in the next year because, honestly, it’s there and it works and everyone has an account so why not? NB – please do not remind me of this when you all realise how spectacularly, stupidly wrong I am.
  • A Feminist Future of Digital Care: An excellent essay by Rachel Coldicutt which explores how we might usefully change the way in which we consider and conceive of tech and how we use it, and which effectively lays out a multipoint plan for how we might want to do things in future. There’s some great thinking in here – I particularly liked the part about decoupling tech skills from STEM, which is so true but which I’ve never seen articulated this well before – I suppose if I had a criticism it’s that I don’t think the essay does a good enough job of explaining to the reader (ie me) what makes this framework specifically ‘feminist’, but I appreciate that that might just be me not knowing nearly enough about feminist theory. Anyway, this is a good read and a useful one for anyone interested in the design and creation of digital services and how we think about them.
  • The Memeification Of Pop: Or ‘why every song needs not just a dance now but some sort of memeable moment so that people can copy it on TikTok and thereby increase the song’s reach’. I can’t wait until they apply that Echo Dance machine learning thing from the first section to this and let the machines come up with the ‘kooky moments’ too. If any of you reading this are in the business of delivering speech or presentational training to executives, can you PLEASE start lying to them and saying that it’s important to include these sort of things in their keynotes and annual results presentations, please? I want to see the FTSE100 CEOs making with the camp eye-rolls as they take analyst questions.
  • Worldbuilding Pt.2: The second in Dirt’s series on the growth of ‘worldbuilding’ as a broad concept (I linked to the first one a couple of weeks ago, as you doubtless recall). This covers the NFT community stuff and the few crypto-gaming projects that seem to have some actual meat to them, as well as touching on the baffling success of ‘Loot’ – I find the thesis that worldbuilding is an increasingly vital part of brand development a bit silly, but also exactly the sort of ‘silly’ that you can probably do reasonably well flogging some smart consultancy around.
  • TikTok Customer Service: Fcuk’s sake – have we been delivered from the horror of self-aware brand Twitter only to be plunged into a new one, the ‘sassy customer service clapback’ on TikTok? It would appear so, or at least it would if you believed that the few examples included in this Wired piece constitute a trend (I am…skeptical, personally). I’m including this not because I think it’s particularly true or important but because a) it might let you write a community management strategy based around ‘being a total pr1ck’, which sounds more fun than the usual bland positivity; and b) I am genuinely fascinated to see exactly what sort of small-but-significant cultural changes are engendered by us becoming a society that is almost entirely visual.
  • FutureShopping: This is a surprisingly-interesting piece of (sorry) ‘thought leadership’ (really, I am so sorry), ostensibly written by MD of Selfridges Ann Pitcher (maybe I’m being unfair on Ms Pitcher here, but these things are never, ever actually written by the person whose name appears at the bottom) and covering what she perceives to be the main changes and challenges facing the retail sector (specifically department stores) in the coming years. If you work in retail, or retail-adjacent consultancy, this is worth a read – in particular the section about ‘control’ was interesting (the final paragraph, fine, is a bunch of bland pabulum about ‘making the world a better place through selling more crap’, but I figure you’re contractually obligated to include that stuff in any corporate nonsense you write these days and so I’ll give it a pass).
  • Tradwives vs Birth Control: Quick update from the stealth front of the culture wars, where the tradwife movement is promoting ‘fertility awareness methods’ as alternatives to birth control, based on scare stories about the medical dangers of the pill, etc. I liked this piece because it made the connections explicit: “far-right venture capitalist and noted surveillance titan Peter Thiel invested millions into the conservative online women’s magazine Evie, which recently created an app to help people track their periods (with very flimsy promises around privacy) and dissuade them from using birth control. And in a popular Twitter thread shared this week, a female writer at the conservative National Review called birth control “actively harmful” and erroneously identified it as “a carcinogenic.”” I know I bang on about this a lot, but I think it’s important to follow the money here.
  • The Real Creator Economy: Oh, ok, fine, that’s my own snarky title not the actual title of the piece – this is an article about the artists and digital makers who exist making things for people in online communities and worlds, and who have been for years, and who make up what I think of as the ‘real’ creator economy, to whit ‘people who make digital goods and transact with others to sell them’ rather than ‘people who make 3% commission selling tat to their followers’. This is an interesting look at an ecosystem that’s been around for 15 years and which is, slowly and quietly, creating some foundational aspects of what might one day form a small part of a shared, pervasive digital experience (I WILL NOT USE THE ‘M’ WORD).
  • Dog Names: This is an actual academic paper, and I appreciate not all of you will be itching to read this based on the synopsis: “The Names of All Manner of Hounds is a unique list of 1065 names for hunting dogs (running hounds, terriers and greyhounds) found in a fifteenth-century manuscript that has recently been sold into a closed private collection. The present article offers a critical edition of this unusual text, which has never been published before, preceded by an introduction that contextualizes its contents in terms of the hunting culture and the milieu to which they belong. For these purposes I examine a number of medieval and early modern hunting treatises that are revealing about attitudes to hunting dogs and that mention a smattering of names given to them. I discuss the enthusiasm felt by hunters towards their hounds, an enthusiasm often expressed in terms of the pleasure that is derived from the sound of a pack in chase, and consider the importance of knowing hounds individually by name.” BUT! I promise that once you get to the list of dog names you will be CHARMED – there are some true greats in here and you may find by the end of this that you have an almost-irrepressible desire to rename your pet to something more florid like ‘Mownferaunt’ or the slightly-baffling ‘Go-byhynde’. Wonderful.
  • Goncharov: Speaking of worldbuilding…this is wonderful, and one of those occasional flashes of collective inspiration which make the internet feel like a wonderful hive mind rather than some sort of Sartrean hellhole. You probably know the story by now, but if you’re less terminally-online than I am you might have missed the fact that this week the web discovered a great, lost Scorsese masterpiece called ‘Goncharov’ which obviously doesn’t exist but now has a quite astonishing body of content around it to try and convince you that it in fact does. Honestly, human creativity (and our propensity to use it for wonderfully-silly things) is a source of endless fascination to me.
  • Recalling The Leviathan Axe: I am currently playing the new God of War game (it’s excellent, honestly), and as such really enjoyed this post from one of the designers of the last game in the series in which they discuss how they designed one small, specific gameplay feature – the way in which the main character’s axe returns to his hand once thrown. You may not think that this is going to be interesting – and, fine, if you’ve never played the game and have no interest in game mechanics design then perhaps you won’t, but you SHOULD – but it becomes a really interesting look at the way in which small tweaks can have outsize impacts on user experience.
  • The Great Toaster Hoax: I mentioned Wikipedia earlier – it’s kind of amazing that a free website created by unpaid contributors has ended up being a genuinely-useful and not-entirely-inaccurate source of information on almost anything you can think of. It is, though, not TOTALLY accurate, and occasionally you do get some actual lies creeping into otherwise accurate entries. So it has been for years with the Wikipedia entry for the toaster, which stated with confidence that the first working model was invented by a Scotsman called Alan Macmasters – a man who never in fact existed. This is a lovely little writeup of both the hoax and how it was discovered by a 15 year old kid, and a useful reminder that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on a wiki.
  • Insomnia: I have, to date, been fortunate enough to be a relatively easy sleeper, but have lived with my share of insomniacs and it looks MISERABLE. This is a great essay in which Rachel Handler talks to a variety of sleep experts to work out exactly which of her pre-bed habits is fcuking her up – it’s funny and readable and will, perhaps, make you feel marginally better if you’re one of those people who falls asleep phone-in-hand and then wakes up at 3am for a pleasant few hours of staring at the ceiling while your thoughts whir like horrible termites. There’s a lovely Nabokov quote about insomnia that I can’t help but recall when reading about it – “All nights are giants, but this one was especially terrible” (which I just checked and I last quoted on here in 2016, fcuking hell).
  • The TikTokification of London: On the one hand, this is VERY much ‘old man shouts at clouds’ stuff – on the other, I am an old man and I found myself nodding along to this to an upsetting degree. See what you think: “A disease is crippling London. You see it in the nightclub closures, each vibrant, interesting, or queer space on the fringes of the city that’s forced to shut down. You see it in the Zone 2 pubs that rip out their carpets and banquettes and install spartan, wooden canteen tables and faddy resident kitchens. You see it with the central London vanity projects: the mounds, roof terraces, and other quasi-public spaces built with a grubby combination of taxpayer’s money and murky foreign investment. Welcome to the modern city: London as an experience; London as a thing to be consumed.” This articulates quite a lot of the things that I have found a bit weird and sad about the city since I came back – but, again, maybe I’m just old.
  • James Cameron: It seems a bit odd to link to a profile of a ‘genius auteur’ after having kicked off this section with several essays explaining why that sort of mythologising is bad and dangerous and rarely-warranted or helpful; still, this GQ piece on James Cameron is fascinating (although, honestly, I am disappointed that the reporter didn’t see fit to ask Cameron ‘So Jim, how come your admittedly record-grossing film has left all the cultural imprint of an issue of the Beano, and what does that say about what you’re making here?’). He in no way comes across as a person I want to spend time with (in fairness I imagine he’d feel much the same way about me), but I’m always fascinated by people with this sort of energy and drive. Imagine being him – it must be EXHAUSTING.
  • Letter To My Younger Self: “Sara Eckel writes to the 25-year-old she once was, just starting out as a writer in New York City in the 90s.” – this is so much better than that slightly-beige tagline makes it sound, I promise. This is beautifully-done, and I am always a sucker for anything written in the second person.
  • Beachcombers in Doggerland: Finally this week, I know that describing essays as ‘haunting’ is lazy hackwriting of the worst sort but, well, it is and I am. This is a short story about death and memory and the ocean and letting go, and it is beautiful.

By Jude Sutton

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Webcurios 18/11/22

Reading Time: 35 minutes

No turkeys! No money! WELCOME TO CHRISTMAS 2022 EVERYONE!

Still, on the plus side, at least it’s looking increasingly unlikely that you’ll be able to worsen your mood by spending the ‘festive’ (lol!) period doomscrolling through Twitter, what with That Fcuking Man apparently beating even the most optimistic predictions about how quickly he could gut the business. Silver linings!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we are all set to be Tiny Tim this year.

By Alessandra Leta

WE START THIS WEEK OFF WITH A MIX THAT I CAN’T REALLY EXPLAIN OR DESCRIBE BUT WHICH I WOULD LIKE YOU TO TRUST ME ON, AS IT REALLY IS A SLIGHTLY-WOOZY DELIGHT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GRATEFUL IT’S NOT BUDWEISER’S HEAD OF SPONSORSHIPS RIGHT NOW, PT.1:  

  • Another Lettuce: We’re just going to get the M*sk mentions out of the way quickly up-top and then get on with things as though he doesn’t exist, ok? OK! In what has now apparently become the international signifier for professional hubris, we now have a LETTUCE VS TWITTER camfeed! So far Twitter is still standing and the lettuce is starting to look a touch on the brown and withered side, but given there only appear to be somewhere in the region of 20% of the staff that worked there a month ago left, I wouldn’t bank huge sums on the birdsite. You’ve all read and heard far too much about this over the past fortnight or so, so I’ll keep this short – but in general this episode does rather feel like an excellent opportunity for us to hammer another sturdy nail into the general concept of ‘individual exceptionalism and the genius-polymath-saviour’, or even the strangely-persistent ‘rich and famous people are somehow better and smarter than everyone else’ myth. Should Twitter eventually self-immolate and vanish into the digital ether, we can at the very least look back fondly on its status as the human invention which did more than anything else in history to demonstrate to us that there is not one single person alive in the world, not one individual that has ever existed in history, who isn’t also a bit of a d1ck at the very least – it’s A WINDOW INTO OUR HORRID TARNISHED SOULS FFS! It’s been a great leveller in that regard, although personally I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to this specific lesson.
  • Twitter Is Going Great: As someone who has to pay attention to all this Twitter stuff for Dull Professional Reasons, it’s been interesting watching the pace of the news flywheel change over the past fortnight – from desperate hacks mainlining speed to keep up with the announcement and the leaks and the changes and the Tweets, to this week in which everyone’s sort-of worked out what the direction of travel is and has decided to just slow down a bit and enjoy the car-crash. If you want a nice, easy one-stop-shop to keep updated on exactly how the company’s new owner is currently working to eviscerate his new toy, this site provides a neat compendium of the latest headlines in reverse-chronological order. Unrelated, but whilst this is obviously childish it’s also quite funny – well done whichever ex-employee set this up.
  • Futurepedia: Ooh, this is super-useful. Futurepedia is a searchable, filterable compendium of all sorts of AI tools for creating images, copy, code and anything else you can conceive of – you can filter the sites by the type of work you want to create, search by keyword, and there are already nearly 230 different sites linked to from here covering everything you could possible want. A CHALLENGE – I reckon that it’s probably almost-possible to create an entire business using AI tools alone, from the product, purpose and vision to the logo, website, copy and associated imagery. Can someone try this and see what happens? Because obviously all of you are going into winter with LOADS of spare cash just lying around that you can frivolously spend on stupid, pointless internet projects dictated to you by some random webmong.
  • The Bureau of Multerversal Arbitration: I got really excited by this when I found it, and then realised that it’s all run on Midjourney and through Discord, and part of me died inside. STILL! The Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration is, I think, the first ACTUAL game that’s been built around AI-generated images (I featured something in here a few months back that claimed to be such a thing, but it was literally just a crap jigsaw game using Dall-E images and so doesn’t really count) and this feels, interestingly, like the tip of some sort of iceberg when it comes to ways of encouraging players to create as part of gameplay. The premise here is based around the idea of a theoretical agency which exists to assist people in the multiverse, with players effectively using Midjourney (via the collaborative fiction of a Discord server) to create images based on specific prompts and tasks, which the wider community vote on and which are then integrated into the game’s wider story…look, fine, this is very much a game in the ‘D&D’-type sense, in terms of requiring a degree of involved commitment and imaginative legwork from the players (and, to reiterate, you have to use fcuking Discord), but if you can get on board with that sort of thing, and the idea of collaboratively pretending to be multiversal bureaucrats with a bunch of other strangers on a shared community server on your phone appeals to you (I realise that reads as slightly sniffy – it’s not meant to, honest), and you like the idea of creating images and artworks to illustrate the imagined scenarios dreamed up by the gamemakers, then this might be up your street.
  • Paris World; On the one hand, ragging on THE METAVERSE does rather go against my stated aim of ‘not featuring stuff in Web Curios for the sole purpose of slagging it off’; on the other, there are occasions when the only right course of action is to click and point and laugh. So it is with PARIS WORLD, Paris Hilton’s inevitable entrance into the giant grift that is THE METAVERSE (weirdly it feels less wrong typing it in all-caps, perhaps because it neatly encapsulates the ridiculousness of the whole thing). Why does Paris Hilton need to create her own metaversal experience? Why, to flog you clothes of course! There’s quite a large part of me that wants to tell you that this is a terrible, poorly-made waste of time and that you should avoid it like the plague – because that is exactly what it is – but I have an even stronger desire for you to click the link and experience the sheer, miserable, soulless cashgrab that the whole thing embodies. ENTER THE PARISVERSE! You get to design your avatar, choosing from a selection of sub-Roblox designs to create a stunted minifig which then gets unceremoniously plonked into a poorly-rendered CG environment (all pink and pastels and rainbows and unicorns, natch, as of course befits the personal brand of a now-middle-aged millionaire) and…and that’s basically it! You can move around, you could chat to other users if there was anyone there (there won’t be)…oh, and you can BUY PARIS MERCH! The ‘shop’ is literally the only thing that a user can visit or interact with in the ‘metaverse’ (lol), and, beautifully, even that is terrible and phoned-in, with a bunch of stuff for sale but no indication whether the items are digital or physical, and, if digital, where you might use them outside of the cold, joyless and deserted environs of THE PARISVERSE (also, beautifully, the ‘shop’ section is rendered in 2d because NOONE WANTS TRAIPSE ROUND THE SHOPS IN A SH1TTY 3D WORLD). Honestly, this is quite an astonishingly-cynical piece of low-quality work which I think sets the current bar for ‘worst example of metaversebullsh1t I have ever seen’ – WELL DONE PARIS!
  • The Tresverse: Or at least it was, until approximately 10 minutes later I found this and once again had my mind blown about exactly what it is that consultants are able to sell to stupid clients. If you were well-known high-street haircare brand Tresemme (sorry, I can’t be bothered to find the appropriate keyboard shortcut to apply the right accent to the final ‘e’, you can just imagine that it’s there), what would YOU think was a good use of a wedge of your marketing budget? Influencer work? Product sampling opportunities? Assorted follicular content? Any and all of these might be acceptable answers, but what I imagine literally NONE of you immediately landed on as a response was ‘the creation of a virtual hair salon in digital space’. AND YET! This is quite special – from the grandiose characterisation of the thing as ‘The Tresverse’ (LOOK I KNOW THAT IT’S NOT REAL AND THAT THEREFORE I SHOULDN’T GET UPSET ABOUT THIS BUT THE USE OF THE TERM METAVERSE TO DENOTE A SINGLE, ISOLATED AND TINY DIGITAL EXPERIENCE REALLY GETS ON MY FCUKING NERVES) to the way in which it constitutes literally three interactive elements (choose your hair! Choose your face! Select some colours for your outfit!) and then just shows you a few adverts and boots you out, to the fact that (shockingly in 2022) all the character models are very white, to the point at the end at which I genuinely lost my sh1t and started laughing at my laptop because of the terrible rendering of some of the crowd models (you get to choose a new look for your avatar and it does a small, hair-related catwalk, is the entirety of the experience here). Perhaps my favourite thing, though, is that this is SO phoned-in, so poorly-made, that if you load it on desktop the site asks you to TURN YOUR SCREEN (don’t try and swivel your monitor – the site will eventually load anyway). Honestly, this is so terrible that it’s almost cheering – I promise you that however much you may hate what you do for a living, however hard you are phoning it in right now, however much you might thing ‘I really am a charlatan who doesn’t know what they are doing’, know that you are still better than the people who commissioned this (although, credit where it’s due, the hair physics is nice). Still, at least you don’t have to justify the spend to anyone (NB – should anyone involved with this project happen to stumble across this, I would LOVE to know about its genesis).
  • Xtadium: Is VR going to transform the way in which we experience entertainment? Eventually perhaps, but it feels like there’s still a significant way to go before any of the VR gubbins add anything meaningful to the TV experience. Xtadium launched this week as part of Meta’s VR offering, and it’s billing itself as THE FUTURE OF SPORTS; initially there are a very limited number of sports available, and none of them are what you mght call top-tier, but the service offers you the ability to set up VR viewing rooms to watch things with your friends on big virtual screens and, perhaps more interestingly, to run your own multi-camera setup so that you can effectively direct your own and your friends’ viewing experience. Which, I’ll be honest, sounds of very limited appeal right now, but I suppose if you’re a more committed fan of sport than I am you might relish the opportunity to be able to flick to BoundaryCam™ or TiouchLineCam™ or AttractiveMemberOfTheCrowdCam™ whenever you like. Presumably as this stuff develops there will be more interesting widgets you can drop in and add – so, for example live Fantasy Football score updates, say, or your favourite Twitch streamers watchalong – but at present this feels, as with 99.9% of all VR stuff, like technology desperately searching for a use-case.
  • Africa Climate Mobility: How are we feeling about COP? Positive? Like change is just around the corner? Good, don’t let me ruin that momentary feeling of optimism. Launched in conjunction with the climate change conference, this website is a superb resource (and a sobering one), presenting a wealth of data and information about the scale of the climate crisis as it affects the African continent – here you can find details on the projected scale of climate-induced migration projected across the continent in the coming years, flood risk data, water availability (actual and projected) and much more, along with a significant amount of writing about What This Data Means and What Needs To Be Done. I think we’re probably all past the point of thinking that a reason argument based on data is enough to change anyone’s mind about anything anymore, especially on an issue as polarised and, frankly, post-fact as the climate ‘debate’, but I find it literally staggering that people can look at stuff like this and not think ‘hm, we possibly have a global duty of care here’.
  • The Midnight Pub: This is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, and is effectively like a slice of 1998 right in your browser. This year online has, for me at least, been characterised by the pleasing sense that the odd, small internet is growing back again, and that the sorts of strange, small projects that characterised much of the very early public internet are starting to sprout once more after a decade or so of being stifled by big platform hegemony – the Midnight Pub is perhaps the ur-example of this, as it’s basically a webforumchatserverthing which could as easily have existed in the late-90s as the early-20s. “It’s late. You are seconds away from the main street in a small alley. It’s quieter here, but you can still hear the sound of chatter, footsteps, and cars from busy downtown. The city is buzzing, the streets are like arteries. You see an intriguing place in the alley, with a moon on its door. It reads “The Midnight Pub”.The Midnight is a virtual pub that lets you write posts and create pages.” Every post is a new place for people to talk and chat and discuss (JUST LIKE A FORUM!), and this is a live and active community with new posts each day, and the posts are WEIRD – there is some time travel roleplay happening (or at least, er, I presume it’s roleplay; we should also allow for the possibility that there are currently visitors from the future in our midst and that they are choosing to hang out on a very obscure corner of the web whilst working out how to get home), posts about coding, posts about academia and research…this is lovely not so much for what it contains, which may or may not interest you, but for what it embodies about slow community online.
  • Spotilicious: A truly-hideous name for this otherwise-useful service, which lets you filter your own Spotify account to allow you to do things like filter your Spotify Liked and followed music by your Mood, Genres, Running pace and more.
  • Childishism: This is baffling, but in a good way – it’s actually the online component of an exhibition around artists and childhood at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and, according to the exhibition blurb, Childishism “is a visual essay commissioned for the catalogue accompanying To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood. Childishism takes the form of an imagined search engine that algorithmically maps an associative history between artistic representations of the childish. For Anna Craycroft, “when artists personify the childish or childhood in their work, a deeper social imaginary is revealed.”” Type in whatever you fancy and see what crops up – I am a big fan of these sorts of search engines which exist not so much to give you what you ask for as to show you things you might not have considered, and the way in which this encourages a different sort of exploration of artworks and themes through tangential association is pleasing in the extreme.
  • The Female Gaze: This made me a tiny bit sad. A collaboration between the Kunsthalle Charlottenburg in Denmark and Meta, The Female Gaze seeks to make the user question the way in which depictions of women in art are a product of the conventions and perceptions of the male-dominated society in which they existed and their interpretation by the mostly-male artists who captured them – which is a totally legitimate question, and something which it is good and right that galleries are interested in exploring! Such a shame, then, that what this boils down to is the ability to take a 3d render of a painting by artist Peter Illsted, depicting a young woman cleaning mushrooms, and change elements of it – from the walls, to the lighting, to the arrangement of elements in the scene, to the pose of the central figure herself – and then take a digital photo of your creation to share. Er, why? How does me changing the way in which the subject is posed radically alter what the painting is communicating? How is this doing anything other than substituting the painterly male gaze of the title with my own digital-but-equally-other gaze?  I would argue that it does neither of those things. Still, you can make some nice images with it if you’re in the market for that sort of thing.
  • Floor 796: Another one of those occasional ‘a massive canvas made up of interlocking tiles, each of which is its own bit of pixelart but which when added together form a huge composite image of quite staggering density and complexity’ things, this time in which the overall composition is of the imagined ‘Floor 796’ in a future space station. This is DIZZYING – zoom out, pan around and have an explore and see what you can find; I get the impression that if you are a particular sort of pop-culture consumer (specifically, if you like scifi and popular big-ticket TV shows, and anime and videogames) then you will get a lot more of the in-jokes and references here, but even if you don’t there is an awful lot of really quite good animation and artwork on display here, along with some genuinely weird little vignettes (why is there an old-style headmaster administering a caning to someone? WHAT SORT OF SPACE STATION IS THIS?).
  • Galactica: This launched this week with surprisingly little fanfare – Galactica is Meta’s newest text-generating AI, a large language model that, rather than the general, all-purpose corpus GPT-3 was fed to train it, has been “trained on over 48 million papers, textbooks, reference material, compounds, proteins and other sources of scientific knowledge. You can use it to explore the literature, ask scientific questions, write scientific code, and much more.” This stuff is, potentially, so exciting, and I think that there’s something more interesting about this sort of focused LLM than the broader stuff. The demo was live earlier this week but has annoyingly now shut, so you can’t currently play with it yourself, but it’s worth having a look at some of the examples cited on the site as you get a very real sense of the possibilities at play with this stuff.
  • Beatmatch: It seems astonishing to me that noone’s done ‘a dating app, but using your musical tastes to match you’ before (maybe they have and I just missed it), but that is exactly what Beatmatch purports to be. It’s iOS-only at present, and I think only in the US, but you can sign up to the wait list and in the meantime start thinking about exactly what sort of listening profile your ideal partner will have. Actually on closer inspection it’s less of a ‘pure’ dating proposition than it is a social app with music at its heart – but, look, it’s going to be literally wall-to-wall BTS stans and Barbies seeking mutual gratification, isn’t it? Still, if YOU will only deign to fcuk people who can name all of Sepultura’s albums then perhaps here’s where you might go to find them (or, perhaps, more likely, the classifieds in Kerrang!).
  • Play Your Power: It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to feature a mobile game created by a cosmetics brand to flog you some makeup – so ENJOY this shiny-looking if deeply-simplistic racing game from lipstick-peddlers NARS, in which you pick one of three ‘characters’ (lipsticks) and participate in an infinite-runner(rider)-type game, collecting nonspecific blobs and avoiding obstacles and racking up points which you can then exchange for PRIZES (if you are terrifyingly competent). Interestingly, according to my terrible performance and subsequent place on the global leaderboard, over 11,000 people have played this since launch – I would LOVE to know what the conversion rates are for this sort of thing, and what the CPU is. I mean, ok, ‘love’ is a bit strong, but I have a vague interest should anyone happen to know.

By Mary Frey

NEXT, ENJOY SOME ABSOLUTE JUNGLE BANGERS COURTESY OF 4AM KRU! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GRATEFUL IT’S NOT BUDWEISER’S HEAD OF SPONSORSHIPS RIGHT NOW, PT.2:  

  • NFT Map Layers: The ongoing quest to try and work out why NFTs exist continues apace, with a predictable lack of success. The latest? Er, some sort of weird Foursquare-crossed-with-Ingress map layer! This is an initiative by Superlocal, a borderline-incomprehensible platform which as far as I can tell promises you the ability to be able to earn ACTUAL REAL MONEY by ‘checking in’ to places with their app (I can almost guarantee that noone will ever earn any actual cashmoney as a result of this), and which is offering NFT owners the ability to link their tokens to the service to create a gamified layer in which people who own the same types of NFTs can collaborate to ‘own’ areas of the map and…oh, God, this is so tiring. NOONE WANTS TO DO THIS! NOONE WANTS TO BUY SOME UGLY NON-ART TO PLAY A CRAP VERSION OF GOWALLA THAT LITERALLY A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE WORLDWIDE ARE EVER GOING TO ENGAGE WITH! STOP TRYING TO MAKE FETCH (ok, fine, NFTs) HAPPEN! There’s also a light social discovery layer to it – “People who hold the same NFTs as you likely have similar interests to you. Use your NFTs to discover new places, meet up at events more easily, and more!” – but seeing as everyone who owns an NFT already knows everyone else who owns the same type because they all spend 20h a day in the same discord talking to each other about their fcuking NFTs this seems a touch otiose.
  • Ask My Book: Not my book, to be clear – I have on occasion been asked if I ever want to write a book, and once I have stopped laughing at the suggestion I am forced to admit that the answer is ‘no, because I have literally nothing to say that I think is worth reading’, which always leaves me feeling a bit sad if I’m honest – but the book of one Sahil Lavingia, who as part of the promo for his book called ‘The Minimalist Entrepreneur’ has trained a small AI to answer questions about the title. A cute idea, and as the costs and barriers to training drop ever lower there’s something quite nice about thinking of how this sort of thing can be integrated into publishing promo. At the very least, a chatbot trained to act as one of your major protagonists could be fun – although be aware that everyone will at some point try and fcuk your character.
  • The Gist: This is genuinely brilliant and super-impressive. A plugin for Slack, the Gist does one single thing – anyone entering the channel it’s plugged into can type ‘!gist’ and get a summary of everything that has happened in the Slack over the past 24h, and the amazing thing is that the summaries are…really good! They make sense, they are accurate, they are concise, and they genuinely do help you catch up with recent events and discussions. This is, as far as I can tell, genuinely good, and I almost never say stuff like that. A rare, official Web Curios endorsement, not that the people who made this will ever know or care.
  • The Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards: I’ve not featured these for a few years now, mainly because they went a bit mainstream (I FOUND THE CONCH!) and I figured you were all getting your fix of derpy tortoises or whatever from the pages of the Guardian. BUT everything is so cold and damp and bleak and foreboding right now that I figured we could all do with some dumb animal pick-me-ups – here, then, for your enjoyment, are the finalists in this year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. If the ‘talk to the hand’ penguin doesn’t become a meme in its own right then there is no justice in the world.
  • Listening: I don’t think this is the first service of this ilk that I’ve featured here, but I had a play with this this week and it’s…pretty good! A Chrome plugin which lets you take any article you find online and automatically have it text-to-voiced by AI and sent to the podcast player of your choice for later listening – if you’re a listener rather than a reader by preference then you will find this invaluable.
  • All The Web Shortcuts: This is VERY worky and quite dull (SORRY) but also very fcuking useful indeed (NOT SORRY) – a directory, compiled by Google, of all the web shortcuts you can use in Chrome and what they do – from the ‘oh everyone knows that Matt, fcuk off and stop patronising me’ ubiquity of slides.new (which you all OBVIOUSLY know will open a brand new Google Slides doc) to the ‘wow, this is practically witchcraft’ hacks that let you open, say, a brand new Canva doc or Miro session just by typing a couple of words into the browser bar. Honestly, you may think this stuff is immaterial but it’s the sort of thing that will lead colleagues to gaze at you as though you’re some sort of keeper of all of the tech-work secrets, and who doesn’t want that sort of low-level adulation? NO FCUKER, etc.
  • All The Meme Templates: Nathan Allebach is a hero of modern times – it is he who has spent the past…Christ knows how long compiling every single text, emoji and ASCII meme format into this open GDoc for anyone to cut and paste from whenever they like. Want a nice, easy way to make an emoji sheriff like it’s 2019 all over again? Want every single tired old joke format you’ve ever seen on Twitter for you to riff through with your own personal tweaks? Honestly, this is every single stressed-out community manager’s dream – this is basically 107 pages worth of content calendar material in one. Obviously this stuff is mainly for Twitter, meaning that the potential shelf-life of its utility is at present hovering around 96h based on current lifespan predictions, but just think of what an amazing weekend of posting you can now have!
  • Free Anime!: Another free anime site! I know I feature these things with semi-regularity, but I always figure that things like this are likely to get shut down by the copyright police pretty much immediately and that I should therefore share new ones as and when I find them. Anime’s not my thing, but should you be one of the seemingly-infinite numbers of people who find the whole ‘three frames of animation in a minute’ style compelling (joke, honest) then you will potentially find a lot to love here – I have checked a couple of titles at random and they definitely worked, so click away and fill your boots before the rights holders cotton on and demand that you cough up.
  • Rose Island: A website which I think was created to accompany a Netflix series about the island in question, which was a mid-20th century attempt at creating a micronation: “Rose Island was built in 1967 by Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa, just outside of Italy’s territorial waters. Rosa proclaimed himself President and declared the independence of ‘Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj’ on 24th june, 1968.” You may be unsurprised to learn that the Republic lasted less than a year – still, this is a nicely-made little site which tells you enough about the mad project’s genesis and history to tempt you into perhaps watching the documentary in question. Has ANYONE ever succeeded with one of these dreams of aquatic independence and sovereignty, out of interest? And what is it with rich people and the almost-universal desire to create water-bound communities with rules made up by them? Money is brainworms, I am increasingly convinced.
  • Cine Casero: Ok, so this is all in Spanish but you can translate it in Chrome if necessary, and it’s worth making sure you can understand the copy because this is a LOVELY project. Perhaps the first Uruguayan website I’ve featured in over a decade of doing this, which I now feel unaccountably guilty about (SORRY URUGUAY!), this is a the home of Cine Casero, “which is a collective dedicated to the preservation of collective memory that was born in 2014 with the aim of celebrating for the first time in Uruguay “The day of family movies” (Home Movie Day). We are interested in involving, enthusing and training the communities themselves so that they can address the problem of audiovisual preservation of their collective memory.” This is so so so lovely – a wonderful amalgam of found history and narrative, and national identity as defined by home cinema over the decades, and there are some wonderful examples of old home films scattered around the site – again, obviously all in Spanish, but even if you don’t speak the language there’s a certain atmosphere to everything here which is worth experiencing. Also – and I NEVER say this – the autoplaying music on the page is rather lovely.
  • Signlearner: This is SUCH a good idea – is there an equivalent for English sign language, does anyone know? Signlearner is a Chrome plugin which helps to teach you American Sign Language by highlighting random words on pages as you browse – hovering over the highlighted word or phrase will bring up a short, hovering video of someone demonstrating how to sign said word in ALS. So so so clever, and it works really nicely – this feels like an excellent mechanic that could be replicated quite simply for a host of other things.
  • Teenage Engineering: I appreciate everything probably feels quite…tight right now, and that there probably aren’t many of you – any of you? – who are currently desperate to drop the fat end of £300 on what is basically a nicely-polished hand-carved Weeble, but, on the offchance that any of you are feeling both rich and at a loss as to what to buy your audiophile aesthete friend for Christmas then you might be interested in the products sold by Teenage Engineering, particularly the wooden choir, which consists of “eight wooden dolls, made to serenade you with

a repertoire of choral classics as well as perform your own original compositions through midi over ble. Each member has their own characteristic vocal range. individually one can sing a dynamic solo, together they perform an immersive a cappella concert.” The ‘choir’ members are available to purchase individually – but seven of the eight types are sold out, so you’ll need to be quick if you want a ridiculously-expensive (but very pretty) musical wooden toy gift.

  • Flags of Afghanistan: A project by a certain Omar Mohammed, exploring the history and heritage of the many flags of Afghanistan’s history: “Since the beginning of Afghanistan as a nation state, the design of its flag has existed in a constant state of flux. With each new leader, faction, or party gaining power, the flag and its emblem were altered to represent the new order in the country. Flags Of Afghanistan بيرق هاى افغانستان places these flags in political, cultural, and design contexts; building visual and historical relationships that aim to archive the past while informing the future.”
  • Partiful: One of the very real and painful things about ageing is the extent to which so much of what is ‘new’ is just stuff that you remember perfectly well from the past but repackaged slightly and given a new name, and the associated extent to which literally NOONE cares when you point out that ‘exciting new service x’ is exactly the same as ‘boring old service y’ which has been around for ages. So it is with Partiful, a website which replicates exactly ONE bit of Facebook’s functionality – the ‘events’ widget, which older readers will recall were basically the only way in which anyone organised anything for approximately 3 years in the late-00s/early-10s. You can create an event! Invite people from a predetermined friends list or an imported one! RSVP with varying degrees of commitment! Exactly like the Meta-owned legacy product, but with none of the stinky brand association! Actually, while we’re talking about it, my outsider prediction for 2023 is that Facebook makes a comeback as a platform as people remember that, whilst it’s a hateful company owned by a terrifying techfuturezealot, it actually has a lot of pretty robust and useful functionality that people might remember about when Twitter finally dies. I am not suggesting that it will become ‘cool’ – just that people might remember that it can in fact be quite useful. But, er, don’t quote me on that please, unless I turn out to have been right.
  • Earbirding: A site designed to help YOU, the casual, non-expert avian enthusiast, get better at identifying a variety of bird friends via their calls and cries and strangulated croaks. This has been dormant for three years, sadly, but it contains an absolute wealth of information on how to tell a corncrake from, I don’t know, a chicken, should you be in the market for such a guide.
  • Gem: Multisearch for secondhand stuff – that’s literally it, but I figure it might be useful to those of you who enjoy sorting through eBay for bargains. This searches across “eBay, Etsy, Grailed, The RealReal, Poshmark, Vestiaire Collective, Rubylane, Farfetch, Fashionphile, Garmentory, ASOS Marketplace, LiveAuctioneers, Reversible and hundreds of independent online stores”, so it’s fair to assume that if you can’t find it via Gem then it probably doesn’t exist or is illegal.
  • The Best Inventions of 2022: Time Magazine’s annual rundown of the inventions that they consider to be the most impressive of the year is once again a BRILLIANT overview of human creativity and ingenuity, and is honestly a list that makes me feel marginally better about the state of the world (the bar is low, fine, but still). Divided across a range of categories spanning everything from accessibility tech to VR to sport to parenting to ‘wellness’ (LOL!), this is a compendium of amazing ideas and problem solving, and (as I think I have said every year I’ve featured this) is as good a source of creative inspiration as a million and one links from fcuking Contagious. A warning, though – the Time website has (for me at least) been rendered horrible to use through aggressive advertising, so apologies in advance for the fact that the reading experience is a little like scrolling through a letterbox.
  • The Talking Swear Clock: One of Rob Manuel’s multifarious bot projects on Twitter has been SwearClock, which each hour (on the half hour) Tweets a particularly foul-mouthed version of the time. Now that’s been turned into a talking swearclock thanks to the magic of free text-to-voice software and a bit of light automation – honestly, it’s worth opening this up on a laptop, turning up the volume, and then locking it and changing the password and watching as people around you get increasingly upset at the steady stream of things like “vicar’s jizzrag, it’s 9:49am”. Beautifully, whatever plugin they are using to do the voice lets you choose from a range of different accents, so I am currently amusing myself as I type by having what I imagine to be Italian Elon Musk shouting the sweary time at me incessantly.
  • OnlyBans: Nabbingt the coveted final slot in this week’s cornucopia of miscellaneous links is this game, which is designed to highlight all the ways in which it’s hard to make a living as a sex worker online whilst navigating the ever-changing world of what is and isn’t allowed on the major platforms. Your task is to earn enough money from your camming and subscriptionbongo services to pay your bills this month – navigate your way through content creation and sponsor deals and platform rules as you try and turn a profit. This is…not fun exactly, but interesting, and it’s a smart way of demonstrating the hoops adult content creators are forced to jump through by the platforms that make millions from them. Whilst this isn’t explicitly NSFW, it is very much a game about fisting yourself on camera for cash, so, well, probably not one to send to your nine year old unless you’re a significantly more liberal parent than I would be.

By Francisco Rodriguez

LAST IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, A MIX BY TIGERBALM WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘FUNKY’ DESPITE BEING WELL AWARE THAT THERE ARE FEW WORDS LESS ACCEPTABLE WHEN SAID BY MIDDLE-AGED WHITE MEN THAN ‘FUNKY’! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Caroline Ellison’s Tumblr Archive: Look, you may well be in the privileged position of not knowing who on God’s earth Caroline Ellison is, in which case feel free to skip this entirely as, honestly, you don’t need to know. If, on the other hand, you’ve been keeping track of all ‘this’ then you might be interested to read the personal Tumblrs of a woman at the heart of the first instance of economics/polyamory crossover since John Maynard Keynes.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • James Perrou: I don’t know who James is, but their Insta feed is mainly polaroids of people who are in bands and I am very much in favour of this sort of tightly-focused photo project. Some of the people are famous, some of them less so, but I very much like all the pictures.
  • Yamaha Black Boxes: Are YOU a music equipment nerd? How nerdy? THIS nerdy? Yamaha Black Boxes is an “Archive of 1980s electronic musical instruments and music computers made by Yamaha’, and to be honest I can’t imagine for a second that any of you will give two hoots about this but, well, you never know and I live in hope.
  • Tobias Gremmler: Are YOU in the market for the sort of unsettling digital art that depicts people’s nervous systems extending from their skeleton like a milky filigree web of pain? GREAT!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • A New Climate Reality: We kick off the longreads this week with a timely piece in the NYT about Where We Are Now with regards to the coming climate apocalypse – and, I promise, this is a moderately-hopeful article! Ok, fine, it’s ‘hopeful’ in the sense of ‘well, things are looking terrible but they are at least not looking as terrible as we thought they might look a decade or so ago’, and the main takeaway here is still ‘we need to work really fcuking hard to attempt to ensure that stuff doesn’t get any worse than we think it’s currently going to get based on the direction and pace of travel right now’, but it made me, for the first time in a while, feel moderately more positive about the future of the planet. This is, of course, relative, and perhaps this positivity is simply the result of a recalibration of expectations – don’t for a second think that the future is going to be anything other than, for the vast majority of people, significantly more unpredictable and parlous than the past and the present – but the fact it feels possible to talk in even halfway-positive terms about the future of the planet is a small positive in an otherwise somewhat-dark end-of-year period.
  • The Rise of Influencer Capital: An excellent-if-unrelated piece in New York Magazine which segues rather nicely from the FTX stuff, all about the rise of the individual and the individual’s brand in the business of raising and making money – which, it doesn’t take a genius to work out, is entirely what SBF was doing and what Musk has been doing for years, and what GaryVee does (the article spends a not-inconsiderable amount of time to GaryVee and in particular the terrifying amounts of money he has apparently made from his value-free collection of poorly-drawn NFTs), and frankly what it feels like everyone is trying to do. Ask kids these days what they want to be when they grow up and I would bet money that whilst loads of them will still say ‘creator’ there will be a significant number who will say ‘brand’ (these are the children we ought to be most frightened of, and the ones I strongly suggest keeping a close eye on).
  • Everything Is Silicon Valley Now: Or, perhaps more accurately, why money and the drive for ‘growth’ ruins everything. Read the whole article – it’s good, and it will hopefully elicit meaningful nods throughout, and what the author writes about baseball might meaningfully be applied to ‘football’ or ‘exercise’ or ‘veganism’ or anything else you care to mention, frankly – but, equally, the whole piece can neatly be summarised in this single paragraph: “It’s a cycle. People create something, together, that reflects their energy and weird work; that thing becomes compelling as a result, and that makes it valuable, and at some point someone puts a price on it and someone else pays that price. It is at that moment that the thing begins to change. The new owner will almost always decide that what is most interesting about this thing is not the human essence that gave it value, but The Owner Himself, and will act accordingly. People will come back for the valuable stuff until the owner succeeds in crowding it out; when that crowding is done, the owned thing dies. Until then, what’s left is just what’s valuable—the humanity and brilliance and unpredictability and fun that all that cynical and idiotic and self-serving wealth is always and everywhere busy replacing with itself. There’s nothing to do but look for the good stuff until the looking becomes too challenging, or until it’s gone.”
  • Immortality Through Breeding: I’m not 100% convinced that this piece isn’t the result of some sort of elaborate trolling sting to fool the reporter into thinking that the faintly-ridiculous central premise – to whit, that a certain subsection of the very rich have decided that they want to attempt to get their bloodline to own the future by basically just procreating like mad, to the point where their eventual pool of descendants is large enough to have some sort of controlling stake in human affairs and as a result form a kind of Dune-like Atreides-level superfamilynexusthing – is in fact real. AND YET! If you’ve read enough about effective altruism and longtermism and some of the other more recherche’ bits of niche philosophy that the very rich tend to end up espousing (weirdly, these bits of niche philosophy also tend to be the ones that paint said super-plutes as exceptional individuals whose unique brilliance is what has granted them their wealth and who probably deserve to be ruling and running everything!) then this sounds sort of weirdly-plausible; I for one am very glad that I will be long dead before the 9th-generation of post-Elon Musks takes control of the irradiated wastelands that remain.
  • How Facebook Designed The ‘Like’: This is properly fascinating – it’s not wholly hyperbolic to say that the ‘Like’ button has been one of the most culturally-significant bits of code ever written, at least in terms of the way that it shaped the internet in its formative mass-adoption years, and, through so doing, the way that it subsequently shaped society. What I find most interesting about this is the degree to which the issues we know know resulted from the ‘like’ – the way it favoured light-touch, no friction interaction, in particular – were predicted to a degree but considered to be trivial when compared to the potential benefits; I am not suggesting for a second that anyone can have been expected to predict exactly how its evolution, rollout and adoption by the wider web will have played out, but it’s fascinating to see that people literally did have the ‘yeah, but won’t this just make people default to incredibly light-touch social interactions and reduce meaningful engagement between individuals, as well as not doing anything positive for the idea of nuanced and in-depth debate online?’ conversation and decided ‘well, maybe, but wevs’.
  • Hancock: I can’t imagine you want to read about Matt Hancock, but don’t worry, this isn’t really about him – instead, Sam Leith in the Spectator writes about the very modern obsession that people in the public eye have with showing their ‘real’ selves, and the fact that the rest of us really, honestly, genuinely don’t care what our elected officials are like as people and would simply prefer that they were competent and honest (qualities which Hancock has not previously demonstrated in abundance). Again, this feels tied in some way to the ‘influencer capital’ piece up there – must EVERYONE be a brand?
  • Football and Money: You really wouldn’t know that a major international football tournament starts on Sunday – fine, yes, there’s a new version of that fcuking Three Lions song out today, but in terms of people actually getting excited about the sport in question it’s yet to really capture the public imagination (maybe it’s different if you’re an 11 year old, of course, I shouldn’t assume that everyone looks at life with the jaded, cataracted eyes of the senescent). Why? OH YES THAT’S RIGHT IT’S MONEY FCUKING EVERYTHING UP ONCE AGAIN. If you’re a keen follower of football and the wider discussion around it then this is unlikely to tell you anything you don’t know, but for the rest of you this is a useful and instructive whistlestop tour of how the game has changed since it become a toy of the billionaire classes in the post-Premier League era.
  • Reviewing The New Meta Quest Pro VR Thingy: I don’t normally feature product reviews here, but I’ll make an exception for this as I think it’s the best explanation yet of why Meta might be a bit fcuked. Read this review – by a tech reporter, for a tech publication, so exactly the sort of target audience that Meta have in mind for this bit of kit – and have a wonder as to exactly how many people, based on the reporter’s experiences, might ever be minded to fork out £1500 for an ugly, heavy helmet that you can use for a couple of hours at a time to do spreadsheets in VR with.
  • The Other Side of the Twitter Exodus: I really enjoyed this essay, by Hugh Rundle, on what it feels like as a long-term user of Mastodon to see the hordes of Twitter users approaching over the horizon, and the feeling of having your home suddenly invaded by a bunch of people who don’t know you, don’t know the rules, and seemingly want to do nothing more than p1ss on your rug and have noisy sex in your shed when all you want to do in there is paint Airfix models. This is, to be clear, in no way a ‘we don’t want you here, leave’ rant – it’s more of a thoughtful piece on the nature of small communities and the care it takes to build and curate them, and the necessarily different desires and use cases that communities have when they change from being small to massive. Here’s a taster – but I encourage you to read the whole thing, as it’s a really interesting perspective: “It’s not entirely the Twitter people’s fault. They’ve been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago. It was part of the reason many moved to Mastodon in the first place. This means there’s been a jarring culture clash all week as a huge murmuration of tweeters descended onto Mastodon in ever increasing waves each day. To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves “refugees”, but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don’t know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we’re losing.”
  • Local Ubers: One of the things that I have decided over the past 5 or so years that I really believe – and one I which, I know, I have wanged on about too much here, for which apologies – is that we are going to look back on the past three decades as a period of time when we let Venture Capital do untold harm to society in pursuit of ceaseless hockeystick growth and margin. This article in the always-excellent Rest of World is a nice example of what can happen outside of that relentless flywheel – it profiles a number of different ridehailing companies that have been established in markets that aren’t currently served by Uber due to their being perceived as too small and unprofitable, and which are able to offer a small, limited service to people who need it without the desperate drive from investors to increase user numbers and margins and returns. Turns out it’s perfectly possible to run a small-scale business that serves a user need and a community and make it work, enough to pay yourself and your drivers and to earn a living, and you don’t need to expand ruthlessly or put anyone at risk or be some sort of *ahem* ubercnut to do so. Whodathunkit, eh?
  • The MSCHF Art Show: Another profile of MSCHF to coincide with the…agency(?)’s inaugural real-world art show currently taking place in NYC. Your interest in this will largely depend on your interest in both MSCHF as brand/art pranksters and the intersection between brand, marketing and high-end artworld stuff, but I personally find the whole project here fascinating, not least the seeming pivot away from advermarketingpr-type stunts towards the sort of stuff that feels more adjacent to brands like Balenciaga or Supreme (who I suppose they have always been a natural evolution of). Still, though, no piece has offered me an adequate explanation as to a) where the initial cash for this came from; b) what the VCs who’ve paid in think they are investing in.
  • All The PR: A journalist at Slate spends a day saying ‘yes’ to all the PR emails they receive – this is what their day was like. This is interesting even if you have never worked in PR (you lucky, lucky fcuker) or journalism, but if you have done either then you will very much enjoy this (albeit probably for different reasons). I have MANY THOUGHTS on this, but the main one is ‘man, there are some fcuking terrible PRs in the US that are literally stealing money from idiots!’ I particularly enjoyed the quote from one business owner who says something like “Our PR is always telling us to keep an eye on the news to see if there are any breaking stories we might want to offer a comment on” and, my dude, that is literally what you are paying the PR for, perhaps stop paying them.
  • Can Food Be Art?: I have a feeling this might be paywalled – if so, sorry, but it’s an excellent opportunity to subscribe to Vittles which really is worth every penny if you have any interest in food and writing about food. Still, if you’re able to read it then you will be treated to a beautiful pair of essays on the links between food and art, the extent to which food can and / or should ever be thought of as art, and the role of the aesthetic in defining our relationship with what we eat. Also, the descriptions of radicchio in the second essay are just LOVELY.
  • London’s Forgotten River: A GREAT essay, which taught me all about the river Roding and which is genuinely heartwarming about the community and care that exist around it. It is also, unfortunately, likely to also render you inconceivably p1ssed-off when you read things like this: “I traced the source of this to an outflow, which was clearly spewing raw sewage (visible poo, toilet paper, condoms and all) into the brook and from there directly into the Roding. From estimating the rate of flow, it would appear to be spilling potentially hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage into the Roding every day and appears to have been doing so for some time. This is the worst pollution event that I have ever seen.” The Trust reported the spill. And though Thames Water came to investigate they have so far not resolved the issue.” There are notes of hope, though, not least in the ideas towards the end of the piece around the concept of the rediscovery of value in the commons, and the potential for giving natural areas defined state ‘incomes’ which are guaranteed and which are used for their upkeep. Baby steps.
  • What It’s Like To Dissect A Cadaver: This is an odd piece – I don’t think the author would mind my describing them as a touch idiosyncratic, as evidenced by the  fact that, per this article, they have so far paid multiple times to attend dissections as a curious observer. Which, it’s fair to say, isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time,but has resulted in this fragmentary series of observations about what it’s really like to apply a scalpel to dead flesh and cut. This is written conversationally and dispassionately, but it’s probably not one for the squeamish – your likely enjoyment will depend largely on your ability to stomach lines like: “Cutting into the skin and tissue is interesting. The skin goes way deeper than I thought, and you can stand a scissor point in it,” which in and of itself is a perfectly banal sentence until you take a moment to actually imagine it at which point it becomes powerfully evocative.
  • Menu Design: SUCH a great book review in the LRB – this is Rosemary Hill, writing about a book on European menu design through history and taking the reader on a whistlestop tour through culinary history and trends in both food and society over the past couple of hundred years. This is JOYOUS – my girlfriend and I collect restaurant menus, in part so we can remember what the fcuk we ate which occasionally gets tricky after the third bottle – and so I am admittedly the perfect target audience for this, but I challenge anyone not to be charmed by stuff like this: “Who knows what a Coventry Puff is, or a Fedora Pudding? Congress Tart sounds unappealing and it is unclear what the Haversnack café in London had in mind in 1966 in its offer of ‘Fruit Disc’ for 1/6d.” I WANT CONGRESS TART NOW.
  • On Lithuanians and Russians: Ok, a warning, this is VERY LONG, but it is also a superb piece of writing – honestly, I can’t stress how much I enjoyed the prose here (translated from the Lithiuanian by Elizabeth Novickas – I don’t obviously speak Lithuanian so can’t comment on the accuracy, but this reads EXCEPTIONALLY well) – which touches on national identity and selfhood and history and politics and philosophy, and, honestly, if you can spare the time and a bit of light thinking work, this is one of the best things you will read all week, I promise you.
  • Lockwood On Saunders: Finally this week, Patricia Lockwood writes about the work of George Saunders. It’s a testament to how good Lockwood is as a writer that I enjoyed every word of this, despite not being familiar with all of the works discussed – if you are a devotee of Saunders work then this will obviously be of help, but anyone with an interest in The Novel and The Short Story (sorry, but) and narrative and Why Writers Write (sorry again) will adore this. Honestly, it makes me almost upset how good Lockwood is and how well she writes – it’s just not fair that someone can be this good (specifically, someone who isn’t me).

By Keita Morimoto

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: