HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE!

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

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

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

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

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

By Slawomir Elsner (images via TIH, as per)

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Robin F Williams

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Diane Dal-pra

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

So it turns out that going clubbing is still fun, even in middle age! Ok, so I still feel a *bit* like someone has scooped out all my innards and replaced them with sawdust and nails, and I’m hoping the ringing in my ears will stop soon, and I don’t really understand why all the children were wearing sunglasses while dancing (GYAC kids you are all evidently on drugs I can tell even if you cover your pupils), and I confess to being unable to let go of the fact that three separate people in their early 20s independently informed me that I ‘have strong SuperHans energy’, but, broadly speaking, it was a success! 10/10! Would OldClub again!

But you don’t care about that! Frankly, if you’ve been reading Curios for any time at all it’s entirely possible that you don’t in fact care about ANYTHING anymore, so ground down are you by the relentless cynicism, negativity and the general SPAFFBARRAGE – but, still, on with the links!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might be interested in reading a short interview with Kris and I about the Tiny Awards, voting for which closes in a few short days (winners announced next week!).

By Tine Poppe (all images via TIH this week, for which thanks)

WE BEGIN WITH A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF SOUL-Y, JAZZ-Y, LOUNGE-Y TUNES COMPILED BY ROY (WHOSE WRITING IS ALSO EXCELLENT AND WHOSE PAMPHLET ‘ALGORITHM PARTY’ I HEARTILY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT)!

THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT IN THIS TWEET AND IN THIS THREAD CAN BE FOUND, BASICALLY, ALL THE ANSWERS AS TO WHY NOTHING WORKS AND EVERYTHING SEEMS A BIT SCREWED, PT.1:  

By Elspeth Vince

NEXT UP, A RETURN TO BEATS AND BLOOPS AND A GENERALLY TECHNO-ISH VIBE WITH A NEW MIX BY EHEMALIGER REDAKTEUR PAUL, DER SICH WÜNSCHT, ER WÄRE DEUTSCHER!

THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT IN THIS TWEET AND IN THIS THREAD CAN BE FOUND, BASICALLY, ALL THE ANSWERS AS TO WHY NOTHING WORKS AND EVERYTHING SEEMS A BIT SCREWED, PT.2:

• Roast Master: You will probably have seen people doing the ‘get GPT to roast your Insta’ meme doing the rounds over the past week or so – this site basically presents a nice little formalised skin to let you get an LLM-generated takedown of any social media profiles you choose (presuming they’re not locked down) across Insta, Twitter and LinkedIn – just plug in the username and BINGO, you’ll get…well, what you’ll get is a pretty-lukewarm series of burns based on a loose analysis of your bio and your posts, and then a FCUKLOAD of other stuff including ‘horoscopes for MBAs’ (Myers Briggs ‘analysis’), attachment style analysis and a host of other TOTAL RUBBISH that somehow sounds moderately convincing. This very much feels like something that’s big in playgrounds right now, but I can’t pretend that there’s not a couple of minutes of light amusement in The Machine’s assessment of your carefully-curated digital persona – it gets weirdly hung up on certain things (like all LLMs, in fairness), which is perhaps why it kept obsessing about me being really into baking despite, to the best of my knowledge, having tweeted about cakes a grand total of 0 times in 15-odd years, and it obviously makes stuff up, but, equally, it was amusingly mean about my friend’s podcast and as a result I warmed to it slightly. I would quite like to create a variant of this where every time you plug in your LikedIn profile it returns ‘you are a dreadful cnut with dust where your soul should be’, regardless of who you are.
• Good Milk; Look, there is very little likelihood that this link will be of particular use or interest to anyone, but I was so affronted by it that I felt the need to include it, if only so I can ask all of you if anyone can explain it to me. This is a map, on the website of the New England Cheese Making Company, which purports to show suppliers of ‘good milk’ worldwide (‘good’ based on…some sort of arbitrary designation which is never really made clear), and it contains a grand total of ONE UK dairy. ONE. WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH OUR MILK, NEW ENGLAND CHEESE MAKING COMPANY? ARE YOU SLAGGING OFF OUR COWS? I was annoyed and affronted by this to a degree entirely disproportionate to my interest, involvement and engagement with the UK dairy industry.
• The DiCamillo Database:: To quote the homepage, “A continuing project to list every country house built in Britain and Ireland, standing or demolished.” You want to embark upon a potentially-doomed project to visit every single country house in the British Isles? OH GOOD! Presuming that you DON’T want to do that, this is still an interesting resource – I had no idea there were so many ‘country houses’ in London, for example, and might use this to go and check out a couple (I winced slightly as the realisation came to me that I am now the sort of person for whom ‘going to check out a country house at the weekend’ is not a wholly-out-of-character pursuit). BUT if any of you decide to make ‘visiting all of the b4stard things’ a lifelong pursuit then I would love to hear about it (briefly).
• Auglinn: I think I’ve seen at least half-a-dozen AR-enabled ‘leave digital notes attached to physical locations’-type projects over the course of the time I’ve been doing Curios, and obviously none of them have ever crossed my path ever again or ever, as far as I can see, been anything more than an entirely-niche concern. I can’t see this particular variant changing that, but I can’t help but think that we might be at a point when you might finally be able to do something sort-of fun with this. Even if there’s no mass-adoption it feels like a group of people could have quite a lot of fun with the functionality here, building it in to treasure hunts or mystery games, and (if you are a very particular type of person) you could propose using this stuff, or take someone on a surprise tour of a city…I don’t know, it feels like there’s a really underexplored ‘fun and frivolous and slightly-surprising, and leading to Actual Real-World Events and Rewards’-type set of applications to this sort of tech which perhaps might be easier to explore in the VASTLY DIGITAL era of 2024 vs the significantly-less-online years of 2014ish when I last remember this stuff getting attention in any meaningful way.
• Sun vs Moon: I am slightly in awe of Neal Agarwal’s productivity – this is his latest, an entirely-pointless but oddly-compelling battle between the sun and the moon. WHO WILL RECEIVE THE MOST CLICKY SUPPORT??? Basically you open the site and click in support of either one celestial body or the other, with a running tracker of which of the two is receiving the most overall support, which has a higher points-per-second at the time…presuming this is all real , there is a…frankly staggering amount of clicking going on at any given time, and I do think there’s something interesting about the psychology of stuff like this and the compulsion it seems to engender in people to get into low-stakes ‘one side vs another side’ battles, and how that might be usable in various, probably slightly nefarious, ways. Still, who cares – CLICK FOR THE MOON (you have to pick a side, and that, it turns out, is mine).
• Teletubbies: So, er, who owns the rights to Teletubbies these days? I ask only because this is a very fcuking odd, and yet seemingly ‘official’, TikTok account which presents videos of the legendary little weirdos in a peculiar and off-brand ‘very online surrealism’-type style. Are these the original costumes being used? It all feels a bit janky and knockoff, but when you go to the Linktree from the bio you get a dizzying series of additional TubbyProperties – loads of millennial/GenZ-friendly brand crossovers, along with the ‘official’ YouTube and Insta channels, which suggests that this is simply a case of a brand that has basically become part of some sort of equity portfolio and is being rinsed incredibly hard in as many places as possible, because, well, that’s how everything works these days! Basically this made me slightly sad, but your tolerance for slightly-forced “It’s the Teletubbies…BUT WEIRD! AND CAMP! AND POP CULTURE!” lols may be higher than mine.
• Shimmer: This is oddly-soothing – Shimmer is an image search engine which isn’t really a search engine at all (SO WHY DID YOU JUST CALL IT ONE MATT FFS YOU AWFUL FCUKING HACK? I am so sorry), where instead you’re presented with a selection of images in the now-classic ‘infinite scroll’ style, and by clicking on one you’re taken to a wall of images which share the same sort of general aesthetic or composition – it’s not a million miles away from that vibes-based image based search thing from a few years back, but what’s interesting/weird about this is that…I can’t tell what is AI and what isn’t, or rather I can’t tell if it’s ALL AI, or whether some of the pics are real, and there’s no indication where any of this is from, and I suppose it’s just another general indicator of direction of travel, because this is it, isn’t it, the inevitable endpoint of the AI slop boom and the improvements in the imagegen tech, and the degradation of search and the death of the attributory trail, and the presentation of everything in a flat, contextless carousel, and I find this distressing in ways I can’t really quite articulate but which I nevertheless feel quite deeply.
• A Massive Auction of Fairground Stuff: You know the tedious, internet-facilitated ‘I’m SO SCARED OF CLOWNS!’ thing that people with no real personality of their own have been using as a substitute for ‘character’ since approximately the mid-2000s? GYAC COULROPHOBIA IS NOT SOMETHING THAT ANYONE ACTUALLY HAS. Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, I am personally of the opinion that, while clowns are not in fact any scarier than anything else, there IS something inherently sinister about the carnival aesthetic, fading letterwork on ageing planks and stained tarps and tired-eyed acrobats and alcoholic firebreathers and sad-faced animals gazing from between rusting bars, that sort of thing (on which note, semi-related, if you’ve never read Geek Love then you really, really must). Presuming, though, that you like this sort of thing, you will LOVE this forthcoming auction at Bonhams where you will soon be able to bid on all manner of vaguely-carny memorabilia, from old painted signs to carved figures and wooden animals from the carousel…honestly, this is a hell of a collection  and for people with A Very Specific Domestic Aesthetic there could be a lot to entice you in here. Honestly, I will be very disappointed if not one of you can find a home in their lives for “An English carved and painted double-seated juvenile galloper figure of a Boy Scout centaur” (no, me neither).
• The iPhone Photo Awards: Is it actually possible to take a non-AI-enhanced image on a phone anymore? Like, is there any way of literally shutting off the automatic ‘life enhancement’ tech that seems to kick in whenever you hit the ‘shutter’ button regardless of whatever ‘no filter’ options you might have selected? This is possibly exacerbated by my penchant for cheap Chinese Android variants, but I swear it’s not been possible to take a photo that looks like real life for several years now. Anyway, that’s by way of slightly-grumpy introduction to the iPhone Photography Awards, which as ever contain some really impressive images but which I find it hard to get that excited about anymore because everything just looks digitally enhanced to the point of slight-surreality. I do worry that our sense of aesthetics for things like this are set to be absolutely banjaxed in the not-too-distant future, and that we’re rapidly approaching a period where it will be impossible to remember online imagery that *didn’t* have that slight sense of CG about it.
• Ellipsis: What sort of traveller are you? Do you like to plan and itinerarise (whatever spellcheck might want to tell me, that IS a word (or at least it is now)) and generally KNOW WHAT THE FCUK YOU ARE DOING?  If so you might find Ellipsis genuinely useful – it’s AN Other holiday/travel planning app, but with a bunch of nice quality of life features which I think might elevate it for some users; its main draw is that everything’s visible on a map interface, so you can easily see what sort of travel burden you’re committing to by adding all those additional churches to your Tuesday list (for example), but it also allows for multi-user editing and all sorts of other stuff besides. Basically, if you’re the sort of person who REALLY enjoys the planning part of a trip – let’s be honest, probably more than the actual travel with its PEOPLE and HASSLE and UNPREDICTABLE HAPPENINGS messing up your lovely, clear schedule – then you might find this invaluable. Oh, and as far as I can tell it’s a free service, which is a nice bonus.
• BlockParty: This might be really useful, though I sort-of hope none of you feel the need to explore it too deeply. BlockParty is basically a one-stop-shop to help you ensure that all your privacy settings across all your online profiles are set up in the optimal way to give you the privacy you feel you need – it’s designed specifically, I get the impression, for people who are experiencing a degree of online harassment and would like a quick and easy way of covering off all the basic ways to guard against it. This was established by a former Facebook person – thanks, poacher, you make an excellent gamekeeper! – and, per the ‘About’ section, works as follows: “Privacy Party works by navigating and clicking for you right before your eyes — finding all the hidden controls, toggles, and audience selectors it might take hours to sleuth out otherwise. And not just for privacy controls, but for Notifications too. Anything that intrudes on our minds is fair game. Anything that makes us feel surveilled and unsafe online.” Hope you don’t need this, but just in case you do.
• Minute Cryptic: A different cryptic crossword clue each day for you to try and solve. I am bitter about this, because cryptic crossword clues are one of those things I like to think I should be smart enough to get my head round but which I have singularly failed to ever be able to do, however often I have tried. The thing that really boils my p1ss about this (sorry, but it does) is that IT DOESN’T EXPLAIN HOW THESE WORK. Like, ok, today’s clue is “Red and White triumphs, clinching home final (5)” and I can sort-of arrive at an explanation for the answer but there’s one bit that baffles me and I WANT TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS and I don’t, and frankly I just feel sort of stupid and grumpy now and quite want to sit and sulk for 5 minutes or so. Anyway, there’s a new one of these each day so maybe if I keep banging my head against the metaphorical brick wall of cryptic puzzle it will all one day click for me (or I will get an unpleasant metaphorical cranial fracture, either/or).
• Word Associations: This, though, I rather like – it’s both ‘game’ (you can play word association vs the computer, although obviously it’s an infinite game as the computer will never be stumped) and resource, with all the associations made by humans over the course of the hundreds of thousands of plays logged in a database, meaning you can search any word you like and find those other terms which have most-often been correlated with it by previous people to visit the site. I find this really interesting, and there’s something quite pleasing about spending 5 minutes playing Mallet’s Mallet with the computer and knowing that in some small way you’re contributing to a database of actual human knowledge.
• Gisnep: Oh God this is fiendish. Do you want a Wordle-type game, but one which will take you about 15m every day rather than <30s? No, of course you don’t, you have SH1T TO DO, but I’m going to dangle this in front of you anyway like some sort of terrible temptation. Gisnep is…a bit complicated to explain, but it feels a little bit like literate Sudoku (you’ll see what I mean), and while I can’t personally claim to have fallen in love with it I think there are some for whom it will scratch a very particular itch (are you the sort of person who enjoys those massive grandmotherly ‘BIG BOOK OF WORD PUZZLES’-type things (no shade, my friend Mo has been into them since her mid-20s)? In which case this is for you, basically).
• Snakebyte: Play Snake in your browser. Except, after a while, you will realise that this is Not Your Ordinary Snake. Fun, if a bit fiddly, and I very much like both the ASCII-ish aesthetic and the vaguely ‘malware in the machine’ feel of the whole thing.
• Diablo In Your Browser: Do YOU remember the original Diablo? Do YOU want to play the whole thing for free in your browser? OH GOOD HERE IT IS!
• We Play Dos Games: Finally this week, another ABSOLUTE MOTHERLODE of old videogames, playable in full in your browser via the magic of the web. You know the score by now – this is a host of titles from the 90s and 00s, many of which you’ll have seen on other, similar sites in the past, but others which I’ve not seen as freely playable versions before. XENONII (with a soundtrack composed by actual, proper dance music people Bomb The Bass)! Odd 7-UP promo game Cool Spot! TIE FIGHTER!!! Jesus, I’ve just looked and this appears to have ALL OF THE ULTIMA GAMES, which for a very specific type of middle-aged nerd could well end up being career/marrage-threatening propositions. BE CAREFUL, OLD NERDS! Seriously though, there really are some absolute classics here – if nothing else you owe yourself to check out the classic Lucasarts ‘point and click’ games they have here – Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island I&II, Indiana Jones – because, honestly, they are design classics and SO SO SO GOOD. Honestly, this one’s a fcuking GOLDMINE, you will not regret bookmarking it. OH MY GOD IT HAS CHAMP MAN 97/98 I MAY NEVER FCUKING EMERGE FROM THIS.

By Yoshitomo Nara (this one via Blort, for which thanks)

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS A PRACTICALLY-PERFECT COLLECTION OF WHAT, WERE I A SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE PERSON THAN I LIKE TO THINK I ACTUALLY AM, I MIGHT DESCRIBE AS ‘LATE-SUMMER GROOVES’, MIXED BY VARUMI! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Adam Hale: Very cool little animations. Not quite sure how else to describe these – there’s something very ‘design’ about them, is probably the best I can do (sorry, this is fcuking shameful, I am going to make a cup of tea before the next bit and see if I can improve).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Andrew Hem

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Look, I need to be honest with you – I am VERY VERY TIRED. For reasons literally none of you need or want to know about, this has been a week of relatively-minimal shuteye and as such I have written what follows through a general fug of insomniac incomprehension – can we all pretend that it’s usually better than this, and that ‘normal service’ will be resumed next week?

THANKS EVERYONE! Although actually given that I am meant to be going ‘clubbing’ tomorrow, specifically to see a set that runs 230-4am, there’s every possibility that I’m going to be trotting out the same excuse again next Friday so, well, apologies in advance and I am sorry that this isn’t, er, better.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can probably get through this week’s car-crash of an issue if you squint and just ignore most of the words.

By Muretz (once again, credit and thanks to TIH for the images)

A CRACKING SELECTION OF TRACKS TO BEGIN WITH THIS WEEK IN THE FORM OF ALL OF THE MUSIC USED BY THE BREAKDANCERS AT THE OLYMPICS (YES, EVEN THAT AUSTRALIAN ONE WHO HAS BEEN MEMED TO THE POINT OF NOW BEING ALMOST-ENTIRELY-POST-HUMAN)! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELATIVE AVAILABILITY OF AMPHETAMINES VS COCAINE IN THE UK IN 2024 EXPLAINS MUCH OF OUR EXISTING NATIONAL MALAISE, PT.1:  

By  Joseph Töreki

NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY EMMA SLADE’S SET FROM THIS YEAR’S BOOMTOWN, SEVERAL HOURS OF BIG, JUMPY BREAKS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELATIVE AVAILABILITY OF AMPHETAMINES VS COCAINE IN THE UK IN 2024 EXPLAINS MUCH OF OUR EXISTING NATIONAL MALAISE, PT.2:  

• Victor’s Way: This is rather wonderful. Victor’s Way is a sculpture park in Ireland, specifically devoted to a collection of works made by Indian sculptors and commissioned by the titular Victor to sit together in the verdant splendour near the Wicklow Mountains National Park which lies South of Dublin. The sculptures may be great, but, honestly, that’s not what we’re here for – we are here for the website, which is a classic piece of late-90s/early-00s html with a…very particular vibe. Victor is not shy about telling you what the park is, and what it very much isn’t: “Victor’s Way is a contemplative space for adults. (It is not a fun park for families)”, says the homepage, and in case that were not specific enough the ‘About’ Page goes on to elaborate that, specifically, it is “designed as a contemplation (or meditation) space for adults between the approx. ages of 28 and 65 who feel the need to take some quality time out for R&R&R (i.e. rest, recovery & spiritual reorientation) in order to find a way out of the mid-life life (purpose transition) crisis.” The whole site is basically a joy, and the fact that the park apparently still exists and still accepts visitors (for the low, low entry fee of 10 Euros!) is just a lovely little bonus.
• TheoGuessr: ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN AI? On the one hand, of course you are! On the other, you are so, so much worse than it at so, so many things! Here is just one of them – TheoGuessr is a somewhat scope-reduced play on Geoguessr in which you’re tasked with guessing where exactly a photograph was taken inside the apartment of a bloke named Theo. You get presented with two views – one of the room as photographed, the other a top-down map of the whole apartment space. Your task is to look at the image, work out where exactly you think it was shot from and what angle and then make your guess – you’ll then be told how close you got to being exactly right, and exactly how much closer the AI got than you did. Quite a nice use of tech, and an equally good demonstration of ‘stuff The Machine is significantly better at than us ambulant meatsacks’.
• Horror Film Locations: Are you the sort of person who has to watch films through their fingers, for whom even relatively-light-touch scares are A Bit Too Much? Or are you instead the sort of person who laughs in the face of jumpscares and stunt blood and who yawned their way through A Serbian Film thinking ‘not sure what all the fuss is about mate’ (NB – if that is in fact you then you are a sociopath and I no longer desire your readership)? If the former, this probably holds little interest for you; if the latter, then welcome to your next big holiday planning tool. Horror Film Locations is, basically, a Google Map that’s been tagged with, er, the filming locations of a fcukload of horror films, sorted by genre – given a significant proportion of horror movies are low-budget, it means that a not-insignificant proportion of said locations are in central and Eastern Europe, meaning you could plan a pretty interesting route through some fascinating places while ALSO visiting the place where they filmed THAT scene with the bats and the amateur tracheotomy from ‘Blood Sister IV: The Murder Superior ’ (not in fact a real film, to the best of my knowledge).
• The Counties Game: Football fans in the UK will be aware of the concept of ‘doing the 92’, or, more prosaically put, ‘visiting every single football league ground in the UK as some sort of obsessional pilgrimage’ – well, for people who like that idea but think that it lacks scope and ambition, why not take on a more substantial one? This is a site that lets you see how many of the individual counties of the US you can visit, or of Canada, or Mexico, or even the UK, tracking your progress, finding Geocaches, entering your progress on a leaderboard…Incredibly, to my mind at least, there are people who claim to have ACTUALLY DONE THIS for all of the counties in the States which is, frankly, an insane amount of traveling – but I reckon the UK is probably doable without TOO much hassle, over the course of a lifetime. So, er, depending on how old you are, you may or may not be able to fit this in before your inevitable demise – WILL YOU TAKE ON THE RACE AGAINST TIME?
• ReMediate: It feels like a bit of a minor boomtime for digital magazines, particularly ones exploring writing around the intersection of tech and AI and art – ReMediate is another, recently-launched and found via Kris, whose mission statement is as follows: “At remediate, our goal is to contribute to an active conversation about what good Computer-Assisted Writing, or C-AW, can look like. remediate is anti-gatekeeping. The mission of remediate is to make a home for informed experimentation and conversation in the field of computer-assisted writing. Regardless of form and genre, all of the pieces included in our magazine serve a dual purpose: 1. To be computer-assisted art or criticism; 2. To inform and inspire readers to make computer-assisted writing or criticism about computer-assisted writing.” If I’m being wholly honest I wasn’t hugely whelmed by any of the pieces in the inaugural issue, but it’s equally possible that I caught this on a particularly tired day this week (did I mentionzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz?) or that I am simply just a bit too overexposed to this sort of stuff at the moment and have lost a small sense of wonder – see what you think.
• Film Frontier Latest: THE GREAT AI CONTENT SLURRY FLOOD CONTINUES! This is a YouTube channel which, even by the standards of the people peddling this crap, has a quite breathtaking production cadence – this is dropping what looks like between 6-20 new clips each day, every single one purporting to be a trailer for a film. Except they’re not – they’re about 3 seconds of trailer footage followed by a poorly-cut series of stills, with an LLM-generated script describing the theoretical movie, alongside AI-generated stills. Some of these are for ‘real’ films, some of them are for imagined sequels (Sonic the Hedgehog 5, coming next year apparently!), some of the thumbnail images are ripped from real movie marketing materials and others are AI-generated slop with accompanying textual fcukups, and occasionally there are moments of hallucinatory high comedy (I would personally not be UN-interested in ‘Twilight Saga 7: Unraveling The Mystery of Forks’, for example), but this is all utter dreck and none of the videos have more than 600 views…can this be making meaningful ad revenue? Per the Facebook slop factories story from last week, I imagine this is all being run from a part of the world where an extra $40 a month makes more of a meaningful difference than it does in London. Still, WELCOME TO THE GLORIOUS PRESENT! Does make you think that the Flux+Runway workflow I’ve been seeing a lot of this week is going to make this sort of problem significantly worse.
• The Postcard Printing Press: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a Kickstarter in here, so let’s break that trend with this LOVELY (if not exactly cheap) project which is fully-funded with a couple of weeks to go – it’s basically a small, perfectly-appointed printing press, designed to let you craft your own handmade postcards to a pleasingly-high standard. This is obviously aimed at people with at least a passing knowledge of ‘how printing works’ and with, presumably, enough baseline artistic/crafty ability to sort of get the process, but, equally, they say it will ship with detailed instructions and a dedicated series of training videos, and, honestly, there’s something really charming about the idea of being able to make your own cards and notices and flyers with your own printing setup. That said, the entry-level price here is £200 so, well, you probably need to be committed to make a reasonable number of postcards to make this worth the cash.
• Stuck In The Scroll: Ooh, this is good, and made me think that there must be a bunch of ways this could be flipped or extended – this feels like something you might be able to have fun with, perhaps in a ‘buddy system’/accountability kind of way? Hang on, I haven’t actually told you what the fcuk it is – here: “This site reveals, in real-time, whether I—artist and professor Ben Grosser—am currently scrolling TikTok. Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool aimed at defusing the intense compulsion I feel every day to endlessly scroll the world’s most popular video app. It’s also a way of asking questions about the designed effects of the TikTok platform and related social media apps. Why do I keep on scrolling even when the videos on my For You page are boring, annoying, or unrelated to my interests? How is the app clouding my sense of awareness, frequently leading me into a sort of trance state propelled by infinite swiping? What is it about the TikTok interface that leaves me forgetting what I saw and losing track of how much time I’ve spent? By making my compulsions public, I aim to not only break free of the engagement loop this app has trapped me in, but to also challenge the prevailing narratives about how and why we stay stuck in the scroll.” At the time of writing, Ben is not currently scrolling – but he has done so for just under 180h since 1 July. Which I was initially horrified by, but then realised was probably a fraction of my own time spent just generally STARING INTO THE WEBBY ABYSS and so I should probably just wind my neck in. Anyway, I think there’s definitely something you can do with this (but, er, I don’t have the time to think about it any more so am leaving it with you to take forward, ok? OK!).
• Skate Oregon: I do not skateboard, despite what my aspirational shoes and silly trousers might tell the casual observer (lol, literally noone observes me and thinks ‘that man skates’ – at best they might wonder ‘does that man eat?’), and I have never been to Oregon and, in all likelihood, I am probably never going to go. BUT that didn’t stop me really enjoying this website which basically collects photos and short descriptions of seemingly every skatepark in the State (and, inexplicably, a few in California and a couple of other places), and which presents an interesting parallel geography of the area as told through small, often community-built, concrete skating arenas. I don’t know why but there’s a certain sort of weird narrative beauty to this (/pseud).
• Third Friend City: It is very rare to be presented with a completely new way of considering urban space and the built environment, but this is JUST SUCH A THING! Third Friend City is a very small and very simple website which does one thing and one thing only – it tells you which streets in Manhattan can comfortably be walked down by two, three or four people abreast, the idea being so that you can plan group walks in areas where one of you isn’t forced to walk behind the others. Obviously this is a bit silly, and OBVIOUSLY insisting on walking shoulder-to-shoulder with your friends, when there are more than two of you, is COMPLETELY SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOUR (I mean this very strongly and I will fight you), but, equally, I very much like the hyperspecificity of this.
• Shmupulations: This is a pretty amazing, if VERY niche, archive – would you like to read an incredible selection of translated interviews with Japanese developers of shoot-em-up games (‘shmups’, in the vernacular)? OH GOOD! This is VERY much a fan service site, born out of a Patreon, and unless you’re the sort of person who really wants to get into the weeds about the item drop rate in Galaga (I am making this up, but you get the gist) or someone with aspirations to make this sort of thing yourself then it might be of limited appeal, but for the ONE PERSON reading this for whom that applies, know that I do this all for YOU.
• The Ghost and the Golem: This is a fragment of a whole game, but WHAT a fragment – I really enjoyed this, and you might too. Self-described as “a Jewish historical fantasy of bandits, betrothals, klezmers, and kabbalists!”, this is basically a massive piece of interactive fiction/roleplaying, set in Central Europe and featuring liberal lashings of period character and Yiddish (which you can helpfully ask for hints and explainers on at the outset, for those of you, like me, who don’t necessarily know your schmuck from your schlemiel. The browser version contains three chapters of the whole game, which is an app download on iOS or Android, but there’s LOADS to explore and it’s well-written and funny and properly interesting in terms of the history and the Judaic lore than runs through it, and I think it’s definitely worth a look.
•  Wordlike: This is basically ‘Scrabble, but turned into a single-player game with levels’ – there are multipliers and bonuses and challenges and modifiers and all sorts of other things going on which I could try and explain but which, honestly, you’ll pick up as you go along. This is FUN, although I have been annoyed at my inability to get past level 13 so please don’t tell me if you clock it first time as I will feel inadequate.
• Conan Throwbrien: You know what? I slightly resent the amount of knowledge I have of US late night talkshow hosts. I have never watched any of these fcuks, ever, and yet I am forced to be aware of the existence of Jay Leno and John Oliver and James Corden (ok, fine, he’s our fault, but still) and Trevor Noah (also not American, but wevs) and Conan O’Brien, and, well, NO! I DO NOT WANT TO! Anyway, this is a game featuring the last of those, red-headed human jawline Conan O’Brien, and basically this is ‘blackjack, but twisted slightly’, and the game is all about having to deliver setups and punchlines in a monologue to keep the audience adequately entertained and, look, I bounced off this one slightly but am including it because the visual style is actually pretty cool and I figure there might be some of you who like this (although be warned that it has the single most irritating soundtrack to a browser game I have ever heard, ever – seriously, it’s almost aggressively-unpleasant with some really, really nasty crackle – and you might want to mute the tab in anticipation).
• Sokoblox: A simple Pico-8 game in which you have to roll blocks around a maze to get them to specific positions. This quickly make me VERY ANGRY, but only with myself and how fcuking appalling my sense of spatial awareness is – it’s very clever and rather satisfying when it clicks.
• Tramsterdam: Last of the miscellaneous webspaff is quite possibly my favourite link of the week – Tramsterdam is not a million miles away from ‘cosy browser-based town creation toy Townscaper’ except with the added brilliance of TRAMS (I have a slightly obsessional love of trams, no idea why)! It’s super-simple – you’re presented with a blank canvas, onto which you can plop individual units of land – trees, houses, paths and TRAMLINES! Everything just slots together seamlessly, and whatever code magic is happening below the hood ensures that whatever you do just looks incredibly cute and well-put-together, and, honestly, the tram animation is SO CUTE and, er, should anyone whose opinion I particularly value be reading this and wondering ‘hang on, is this cnut into train sets?’, please be reassured that the answer is very much ‘no’. Still, this is gorgeous and soothing and will not fail to make you smile, I promise.

By Tyedied

OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS WEATHER-APPROPRIATE SUMMERY TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY ISLE OF WAX! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Thomas Connelly: I had no idea who the fcuk Thomas Connelly was until the ‘Kanye’s dentist has him hooked on laughing gas, says disgraced UK tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos’ story broke (a brief aside – it is genuinely astonishing, and not a little upsetting, to me that that fcuking cnut has been cropping up in my life for NEARLY 20 YEARS now, ever since he was an appalling tech hack getting repeatedly fired from the Telegraph, to the days he was making my life a professional living hell c.2011, to The Kernel, to the Gamergate years…honestly, are you aware of Vonnegut’s concept of the ‘karass’? It feels very much like he is part of mine, ffs), but now I do know and WOW does his Instagram look EXACTLY what you’d expect the Instagram of a man who provides incredibly expensive grills to the hiphop elite to look like. SO MANY TATTOOS! SO MANY TOOTHY GEMS! SO MUCH LATENTLY-RAPEY ENERGY! Honestly, it’s like a can of Monster Energy was granted a genie’s wish and asked to become a REAL BOY.
• Tales of AI Cats: AI-generated cartoon cats in the vague Pixar-adjacent style. Some of these are fcuking mental – I slightly lost it at the image of the sad kitten weeping whilst observing an exam paper that has clearly been graded ‘F-’ (in fact, a lot of the cats are crying – WHY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE AI CATS???).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Mayumi Tsuzuki

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Welcome to England, a country now reaching the ‘results’ stage of a decades-long experiment designed to answer the question ‘so what do you think happens to the social fabric of a nation when its inhabitants spend 20 years watching their quality of life diminish by almost every conceivable available metric while a significant proportion of the people responsible for said diminishing continually tell them, with a straight face, that it is all in fact a direct result of the arrival of people who do not look, sound or behave EXACTLY like their grandparents did’!

Oh, and to anyone suggesting that what’s been seen in the past week isn’t a demonstration of racism and specifically Islamophobia – how else would you characterise a group of people being demonised, protested against and attacked for a crime THAT LITERALLY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM? I don’t know, man, feels weird.

Anway, you’re not here for this – why are you here? Don’t think, just click.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can all join me in shouting Allahu Akbar in Robert Jenrick’s stupid fat Tory face.

By Joe Webb (images this week again via TIH btw, to whom thanks)

WE START WITH AN OLD MIXTAPE WHICH I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO A LOT THIS WEEK AND WHICH I THINK IS A PARTICULARLY GOOD SOUNDTRACK TO SLIGHTLY-MUGGY CITY AFTERNOONS AND NOT SETTING FIRE TO THINGS! 

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN WANTS TO TAP THE ‘YOU DO KNOW WHICH OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRE ELON IS GETTING A LOT OF THIS END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION’-TYPE SCHTICK FROM, DON’T YOU?’ SIGN AGAIN BUT WHICH REALISES IT’S LIKE A BROKEN RECORD ON THAT TOPIC AND SO WILL FOR ONCE RESTRAIN ITSELF, PT.1:

By Gil Rigoulet

NEXT UP, WE’RE BACK TO THE MINIMAL BEATS AND BLEEPS WITH ANOTHER OF FORMER EDITOR PAUL’S ‘I SECRETLY WISH I WAS GERMAN’ MIXES!

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN WANTS TO TAP THE ‘YOU DO KNOW WHICH OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRE ELON IS GETTING A LOT OF THIS END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION’-TYPE SCHTICK FROM, DON’T YOU?’ SIGN AGAIN BUT WHICH REALISES IT’S LIKE A BROKEN RECORD ON THAT TOPIC AND SO WILL FOR ONCE RESTRAIN ITSELF, PT.2:  

• Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle: A special link for all you lovely North Americans! I confess to finding certain aspects of the Walzian love-in this week ever so slightly…icky? Childish? I don’t know quite how to explain it, but it’s the same sort of slight disgust I’ve mentioned before at the whole ‘phew, the grownups are back in charge!’ thing, a slight feeling of disappointment that all it takes for people to express ‘LOVE’ for a politician is the very smallest suggestion of their humanity or being even vaguely in the same ballpark as ‘someone you might once have met and not actually hated on sight’. Then, of course, you look back at the procession of ghouls that the American electorate has been presented with over the course of the past decade and you realise that, yes, fine, perhaps the relief is at least *slightly* comprehensible. Anyway, back in the OMG EPIC BACON LOL era of the Obama years, everyone was so enthused and excited by Barack and his promises of hope (let’s not scrutinise those too hard) that someone set up a Tumblr called ‘Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle’ which would spin up a new ‘Barack is AWESOME’-type message each time you refreshed (very much in the vibe of Chuck Norris memes from The Old Web) – this is the same, except it’s HOMELY UNCLE Tim Walz who’s being lionised here as (for example) being ‘happy to check over that job application for you’. Honestly, I don’t personally get this parasocial aspect of politics AT ALL (I have worked in politics, they are all basically weird lizards, even the good ones), but if you’re a US Democrat looking to keep the feelgood buzz this week going then you might enjoy this (don’t want to talk about the US elections too much because a) they are still going to be happening at the time of the heat death of the universe, or so it feels; and b) I don’t want to jinx anything, but, well…it feels vaguely positive? SHUTUPMATTDONOTBRINGTHEBADLUCK).
• The Banned Book Club: A neat segue into one of the (many, many) reasons why it is probably quite an important thing for the US that the Republican party don’t in fact win on November 5th – this is an initiative by The Palace Project, which aims to “support public libraries in their mission to provide equitable access to digital content, while restoring the direct relationship between library and patron.” The Banned Book Club is a brilliant initiative – apps available on Android and iOS which will enable students at schools in states that have banned specific texts from the curriculum on grounds of conservative complaints to access them securely in digital form via inter-state lending protocols. This is very much only for people in the US who I think are registered students – but it’s a brilliant idea and a great act of resistance against intellectual myopia and mad fundamentalism.
• Did You Make It?: I have on occasion featured websites that have a physically-reactive component to their function – sites that only function when the sun’s out, say, or which follow a diurnal rhythm in terms of content or design – but I think this might in some small way be my favourite, conceptually at least. “”Did you make it?” Is a poem writen by Sam Mason de Caires. It is contained within this website which is synchronised to the tides of the coast line where Sam lives. As the tide rises it covers the beaches and also the lines of this poem, as the tide recedes it reveals more, until at low tide it will reveal the entire poem. The accompanying music is meant to be listened to while visiting the site and reading the poem and is made from local recordings and samples made by Sam and also gifted by friends.” SUCH A BEAUTIFUL IDEA – and, let me repeat this for the nth time, SURELY something which you can use as ‘inspiration’ for something big and shiny?
• Millennium Skills: One of the lovely things about YouTube is that it’s demonstrated the universal human appeal of ‘watching people do stuff they are really good at, however ostensibly-dull that practice might initially seem’ – this channel is FULL of footage of people in (I think) India just making things. Gold-dipped statue of Ganesh? CHECK! Cricket balls? CHECK Hammers? CHECK CHECK CHECK! All the videos are just ambient audio with some light plinky piano behind it, so there’s a vague ASMR vibe to these things, and all the titles have that peculiar tone which you find in so much stuff from south Asia (lots of ‘Amazing!’ and ‘Most Incredible!’) which I personally rather like, and, look, if you really enjoy watching people doing ONE THING very very well indeed, and if you don’t mind if that ‘thing’ is something seemingly-mundane like ‘making melanin crockery’ then you will very much enjoy this.
• 100 Vending Machines: ANOTHER photo website with an unusual interface – this is, er, what I presume is 100 photographs of vending machines, taken across several months in 2024 by…some nameless person – as you move your cursor across the white screen, so the photos are dropped following the path you trace, making a sort of trail of vending machines which, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, I find very pleasing indeed. It’s not, fine, perhaps the best way of displaying them for anyone who has a really deep interest in the vending machines of Japan and who wants to really go deep into the details, but let’s presume you just want 30s worth of pleasing UX/UI before you move onto the next link and just leave it there.
• What Vegetable Are You?: Ok, fine, this is a very silly quiz, but there’s something honestly really charming about the vague sense of whimsy and how (really, very) silly it is. In case you’re curious, I am broccoli (I am fine with this).
• The SmallWeb Subway: Oh I like this a LOT – it’s a really simple idea, presenting a bunch of thematically-linked websites as though arranged on an imagined city’s underground map, each ‘stop’ a new site and each ‘line’ a collection of web projects linked by a particular quality or subject, with intersections from line to line taking place at sites where two conceptual ‘lines’ converge. From the creator’s explanation: “The Smallweb Subway is an experimental project that seeks to connect communities online using webrings. A webring is a list of websites linked together in a circular structure. The usage of webrings dates back to the early days of the internet before search engines were widely adopted and when there were no big social media platforms with discovery algorithms. Webrings were ways for people to discover new sites by clicking through conveniently organized links, eventually bringing you back to where you started…The subway system theme is my attempt at making the internet feel more like a place where you can have neighbors. If a webring looks like a subway line, then it’s easier to imagine a friend only a few stops away!” Beautifully, they’ve provided code so that anyone who owns a site they think would fit can add themselves to a particular line, making this a theoretically organic, growing series of connections – which is lovely, but, equally, I really like the idea of giving people the tools to make their own versions of this. I can’t imagine – lol, I KNOW FCUK ALL ABOUT HOW TO BUILD STUFF, WHAT DO I KNOW? – that it’s beyond the wit of man to create a simple interface to let anyone create their own version based on their own taxonomies and selections, and I would genuinely be thrilled were someone to create such a thing (do, er, any of you want to thrill me? Please?).
• Quick Share For Windows: Sincere apologies for what is, objectively, an incredibly-fcuking-tedious link – BUT IT IS USEFUL. Would YOU like an app (and an official one too!) which lets you simply and easily send files from your phone to your laptop without having to do that fcuking annoying thing of emailing it to yourself (literally half my life is me emailing links or files to myself; I promise the other half is less sh1t, though)? Yes, of course you would! Simple, quick and actually useful, in a way which, if I’m honest, pretty much none of the links I usually give you are. BE GRATEFUL.
• Auto Highlighter: This was sent to me by the aforementioned reader who’s doing the Curios Back Catalogue Marathon, one Tim Magee from Cambridge, who is using it to help them filter out stuff they’re not interested in from their online reading. It’s a really clever little idea for a browser extension – you basically give it a bunch of keywords which will, from point on, be highlighted in whichever colour you want, or hidden, basically helping you either easily identify topics of interest, or avoid trigger topics or spoilers…the only annoying thing about this is that it’s seemingly Firefox-only, although I’d be amazed if there wasn’t a variant on this on Chrome somewhere.
• Rick Steve’s Travel Forum: There are a few rules of thumb that I have found it useful to live by over the years – never drink in a flat-roofed pub, or one built directly into a housing estate; never, ever assume that the pills are duds until AT LEAST an hour has passed, etc etc – but in recommending this site I am having to abandon one of those I hold to be most true, to whit ‘never, ever trust a man who has two first names’ (I once worked with someone called ‘Robert John’ who is comfortably the worst human being I have ever encountered, personally or professionally – he is a former Conservative councillor now living in Dubai, which, I think, probably tells you all you need to know). Rick Steve’s Travel Forum is, I have now seen said in various places I trust, THE single best source of European travel advice anywhere on the web, a community of people who just really, really like sharing tips and tricks and recommendations about places to go. I am told that if you have a question about traveling ANYWHERE, your first port of call should be ‘check the Rick Steve forums’. The fact you need to register an account upfront is a good sign that Rick Steve’s Travel Forums (sorry, there’s just something inexplicably pleasing about typing the full name out – I’m doing that very odd thing of reading the words as I type them because they are just VERY SATISFYING) is a Serious Place for Seriously Helpful Travel Experts, and, generally, this gives me Good Vibes – although, equally, there’s every possibility that once you’re in it’s just 300 different flavours of Minnesotan asking about why there aren’t any Starbucks in Naples.
• Mumbdle: Congratulations to the creators of this (very good) little daily puzzle game on coming up with a name that is really quite particularly unpleasant to say out loud (try it, go on – HORRID) – although perhaps I’m just bitter as this is one of those things that I am simply Not Built To Be Good At. The premise here is simple – each day there’s a different song for you to guess based on the hummed interpretation of the site owner; you get five guesses; with each guess, a new layer of humming harmony is added, fleshing out the track and making it (allegedly) easier to guess what it is. You might be able to do this with nary a thought, but I am basically tone-deaf (not quite, but almost) and as such this is, for the most part, a bit like staring at a Magic Eye picture and consistently failing to see any sailboats whatsoever.
• ASCII Frogger: This is only a demo, really, so don’t expect to spend more than 30s with it, but I can’t tell you how wonderful the squished frog effect is and so it definitely deserves you to die at least once so you can experience it.
• The Point Clicker: A clicker game which is also a really annoying maths problem. I didn’t realise at first and was clicking like a slack-jawed yokel until I cottoned onto what was happening and realised that, actually, no, my brain doesn’t actually work in the right sort of way for me to be able to do anything other than attempt to brute force this and, honestly, life is too short. I like to think that one of you will look at this and just sort of GET IT (and then explain to me what the optimal strategy is here and how you arrived at that, in a manner which a particularly-docile ruminant might understand).
• Sets: Ooh, I like this – it requires you to look at and think about patterns in a way that is *just* unusual enough to mean that you (or at least I) feel it tugging at the edge of your brain slightly as you solve them (does…does anyone else get this? Like a near-physical feeling in your head when you’re doing thinking that is outside your usual wheelhouse? I feel it most either when I’m being forced to ACTUALLY THINK by something like philosophy, or when I am trying to use one of the bits of my brain that mostly languish unbothered, like ‘spatial awareness’ or ‘pattern matching’ or ‘anything but the most cursory aesthetic judgement’). Created by Shelby Wilson, the premise is simple: “Set is a card game in which each card has four properties: color,  shape, shading and number of elements. A ‘set’ is created by finding three cards that are either all the same or all different for each property. In a deck of 81 cards, this means there are 1080 unique sets.” It’s match by similarity or exclusion, basically, and it’s surprisingly addictive when you get your head round what it’s asking of you.
• Eidercake: A cute little interactive fiction game set in a mediaeval cloister. You play as a young woman working in the kitchen – per the short description, “It’s the feast day of your patron saint, and a recipe has gone missing. A short tale of birds, books, and the cloistered life” – and it’s a gentle 10 minutes of exploring the different rooms and looking for the recipe book and talking to the various other inhabitants of the cloister who, inexplicably, are all birds of various sorts. The sounds and the visuals are really lovely here too.
• Asciicker: This week’s final ludic distraction is quite incredible. This is a project which has, as far as I can tell, been going for YEARS, cycling through phases of development as the person or people behind it get better at coding and what they can do with the limited palette of ASCII characters…it’s basically a sort of limited proof-of-concept for a browser MMO which is, remarkably, all built from the ASCII characterset – but wait, honestly, click the link and click ‘new game’ (and then click one of the options below it – the interface is…sub-optimal) and then marvel at what they have been able to create. I promise you, this really is quite incredible from a technical point of view – functionality’s a bit limited, and you might have to google around a bit if you want to work out what the fcuk is meant to be going on, but you can explore the landscape and collect items and meet other players and while this is very far away from being a ‘game’ in any meaningful complete sense it’s certainly a pretty amazing exploration of what you can do with some pretty simple tools (honestly, when it loads up try right clicking and moving the mouse to make the camera circle, it’s a proper ‘oh wow, this *is* smart’ moment).

By Takashi Nakamura

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS 70s-INFLECTED SELECTION BY MY FRIEND DARIO (I DO NOT KNOW THE MAN, HE IS NOT MY FRIEND)! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Andy Altman Studio:  Andy Altman is a graphic designer, whos Insta feed is just a collection of really good-looking bits of design. Oh, and he’s currently posting old detergent boxes, which is an aesthetic that is RIGHT up my street (BONUS 70s DETERGENT PACKAGING FACT! According to Jonathan Meades’ excellent-if-genuinely-horrible novel ‘Pompey’, OMO-brand washing up powder was used by British housewives in the mid-20th Century as an indicator of their availability for sexual favours, OMO being a handy TLA for ‘Old Man Out’. No idea if this is true, but I like to imagine so.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Konstantin Koborov

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE! Are you enjoying the Olympics? Or are you instead choosing to use it as an opportunity to pursue your single-minded fixation on incredibly complex questions of human biology?

However you’ve chosen to spend your week, I hope you’ve had a fabulous time – unless, of course, you chose to spend any portion of it chanting ‘we want our country back’, in which case can I ask that you fcuk off? Thanks!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably want to click all the links this week, they really are ACE.

***OH, AND PS, THANKS TO EVERYONE VOTING IN THE TINY AWARDS AND TO EVERYONE WHO’S SHARED THE LINK PLEASE CONTINUE TO DO SO THANKYOU!***

By Pale Flare (and via TIH)

CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING ALIVE TO SEE AUGUST 2024! CELEBRATE WITH THIS GORGEOUS SELECTION OF JAZZY CUTS MIXED BY TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ALL THE BLOKES PICTURED LOBBING BRICKS AT MOSQUES THIS WEEK ALL LOOK LIKE TOTAL FCUKING SH1T, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT BEING A VIOLENT RACIST IS TERRIBLY AGEING AS WELL AS BEING STUPID, PT.1:

By Ollie Jones

NEXT UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF HIGH-QUALITY REMIXES CURATED AND COMPILED BY THE LOVELY FRED DEAKIN OF LEMON JELLY FAME!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ALL THE BLOKES PICTURED LOBBING BRICKS AT MOSQUES THIS WEEK ALL LOOK LIKE TOTAL FCUKING SH1T, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT BEING A VIOLENT RACIST IS TERRIBLY AGEING AS WELL AS BEING STUPID, PT.2:

• Twanalysis: Plug in your Twitter handle (don’t worry, it doesn’t do anything nefarious) and get an AI-generated summary of what The Machine thinks you’re like based on its analysis of your feed. I have to say I was impressed with its assessment of me, not least the age thing given that I don’t think I’ve really mentioned it on Twitter before – although on reflection all that means is that my prose is middle-aged-coded, which is admittedly *slightly* crushing. Anyway, you  can plug in any username you like, so feel free to spend the next 10 minutes getting it to assess all your hatefollows after it’s done you.
• T Minus: Ooh, I quite like this – feels like this might be EMINENTLY THIEVABLE for a bit of easy brandwork (if nothing else it feels like you might be able to use this to game ‘website dwelltime’ stats, in the unlikely event any of should have that as a metric on your ‘do I get a payrise or bonus?’ bingo card). “T-minus is a collaborative online game, contributed to by hundreds of people from across the internet! The objective is to get the counter down to t-0! The player who makes the last click gets a special reward….” I can’t imagine that this will ever get to the end – but, equally, I can TOTALLY imagine this becoming a weird internet craze if, say, Nike were to do something similar with the promise of an EXCLUSIVE DROP for the final clicker. This is basically Peter Molyneux’s ‘Curiosity’ game stripped down to the very bare bones, but that doesn’t mean you can’t totally lift this for PR gain.
• Date Like Goblins: How long has everyone been writing the ‘hmm, online dating and the apps really suck, huh?’ thinkpieces? FCUKING YEARS, it feels like, and yet still the western world persists in tapping and swiping and ghosting and breadcrumbing and all of the other miserable neologisms that reflect the increasingly-miserable process of ‘trying to find someone to see out the apocalypse with’. Date Like Goblins is a new spin on the old horror, with the gimmick that it’s designed for people for whom even the prospect of ‘chatting to someone on a dating app’ is A BIT MUCH – instead, the service offers to match you with a potential date via the medium of games. This is a beta project seeking to raise funding – there’s a link to the Kickstarter on the homepage – but the gist, per their blurb, is: “We let singles meet and then seamlessly schedule dates in their favourite video games while voice chatting. We’re for the introverts, neurodivergent, and the perpetual third wheels who know their person is out there, they’re just having a hard time finding them.” Look, I can’t imagine for a second that this is the sort of thing that will a) get funding; or b) ever get beyond the basic problem that all the users will be desperately horny teenage boys, but part of me approves of the hopeful intent behind it.
• Traini: Do you have a dog? Do you want to train it to do EXCITING CANINE TRICKS? Would you like to do that THANKS TO THE MAGICAL POWER OF AI????? Oh good! Traini is an iOS app which purports to let you learn all sorts of exciting training commands to get your dog to, I don’t know, roll over, or play dead, or rip out the postman’s jugular (there’s a big splash at the top of the homepage which seems to suggest you should use it to teach your dog to skateboard, which, well, ok!) – I have a sneaking suspicion that this has existed for a while now and the whole ‘AI!’ thing has been added to the copy by a zeitgeist-chasing marketing drone, but there’s an alleged ‘video analysis of your dog’s posture and behaviour’ gimmick which is meant to give you detailed insight into ‘your pet’s bone structure’, which feels worryingly close to some sort of weird canine eugenics-type thinking, but I’m sure it’s all entirely benign. Terrifyingy, the homepage also promises to help you “make dogs into KOL” – presumably ‘key opinion leaders’? – which is both horrible and also utterly ridiculous, so well done whoever penned that line.
• On Track: No idea whether any of you are the sorts of people who would like the opportunity to download a ‘game’ which provides you with a procedurally-generated view out of a virtual railway carriage, with bucolic scenery sliding by, which is basically designed to give you a soothing vista to gaze at while you, I don’t know, get on with tedious, menial bits of digital administration from your small-windowed urban hovel, but, well, this is what this is! You’ll obviously need a second screen to play this on if you want to use it for its intended purposes as ‘productivity tool’, but should you be one of the fabled ‘two monitor’ tribe then this could be quite a nice, soothing addition to your screen setup.
• Look So Unique: Leaving aside the slight horror or ‘so unique’ as a phrase, this is a terrible ‘generate a tshirt design using AI and then get it printed and shipped’ service which has literally nothing to recommend it, other than the fact that you can opt to have your original prompt included in the eventual design, which lends the resulting creations a weird sort of poignancy – without the caption it’s just another sh1tty Stable Diffusion image of a kitten wearing a suit; with the caption it’s a strangely-poignant vision of a feline businessman, captioned “the most professional cat in the world gets ready for the most significant meeting of his life”, which I think we can all agree elevates the resulting creation to ART status.
• Gaping Maws: A website dedicated to photos of animals with VERY WIDE-OPEN MOUTHS. Literally just that – this hasn’t been updated since 2007, sadly, but I hope whoever’s responsible for its creation is happy to know that a whole 17 years later his collection of mouthy critter pics is still bringing joy to the world (or at the very least the three of you who click this link).
• The Best of The Far Side: Anyone old enough to remember the late-80s/early-90s will have a soft spot for The Far Side, Gary Larson’s single-panel comic strip which was for several years an IMMENSE cultural juggernaut, literally everywhere, and which then just sort of…stopped being everywhere, and which hasn’t, to my mind at least, really achieved the same sort of post-web fame and love that other strips like Calvin and Hobbes have. The link takes you to a selection of QTs of people sharing their favourite panels, and fcuk me you forget how GOOD so much of this is. Seriously, if you’re a YOUNG PERSON and you’re not au fait with the strip, this really is worth digging into – there’s an internal logic and coherent worldview across the strips which really makes them stand out, a sort of inherent ‘Larson-ness’ that permeates the canon, which imho is the hallmark of the very best comics work, in the same way that Calvin and Hobbes is clearly imbued with a significant amount of Bill Watterson’s personal philosophy. Pick your favourite – personally speaking, I think the ‘thagomizer’ cartoon might be mine.
• Italian Air Pollution: Via Giuseppe, this is a very simple but LOVELY bit of visualisation work, presenting shifting air quality in four Italian cities over a monthlong period in a genuinely-inventive, clear and effective way. Really, really smart – this feels like an approach that can be repurposed for other data, potentially.
• Off TikTok: I have a vague feeling that a few of you reading this are in India – if so, this is for YOU (and for Americans, should the TikTok ban actually go ahead, about which I continue to be…sceptical, frankly). This is a simple website that lets you watch TikTok’s off TikTok, meaning that it should let you view them even in countries in which the platform is technically banned.
• Zack D Films: Via Former Editor Paul, this is the Facebook page of Zack D Films, which seemingly pumps out two genuinely-batsh1t CG video ‘explainers’ per day, covering subjects as diverse as ‘getting struck by lightning’, and ‘the importance of not eating undercooked bear meat’. Do you remember about ten years ago there was a brief online craze for sharing the CG news summaries created by some South East Asian TV channel, in which big news events would be recreated in dreadful, clunky 3d models? Of course you do! Well this is pretty much in the same stylistic ballpark, and I can’t stress enough how marvellous it is to (for example) watch a computer-generated mountaineer curl out a perfectly-rendered CG brown as part of the clip for ‘why is Mount Everest covered in poo?’ video (you really do need to see that one).
• Public Work: SUCH a good resource, this one. “Public Work is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.” Not only can you keyword search for anything you fancy, but there’s a lovely bit of ‘similarity matching’-type code doing on which means that you can explore stuff that has the same visual energy too – this is just a really pleasing site to scroll around and explore, leaving aside its obviously utility in terms of finding images that are free to use.
• The LAAX Highline World Championships: Slacklining is one of those things that gets me properly sweaty-palmed when I watch people do it, but I’d totally forgotten about its existence as a sport until I stumbled across this site this week – JESUS GOD DOES THIS LOOK TERRIFYING. Last month, the 2024 highlighning (slacklining, but, well, VERY HIGH UP) world championships were held in Switzerland – this site features videos of them doing their thing. If you can watch these without your stomach doing strange cartwheels as you watch them bounce and caper and, on certain particularly-terrifying occasions, DO CARTWHEELS AND STUFF, on a loosely-tied rope hanging over a massive alpine ravine then you’re a braver person than I (lol, of course you are, I am a total physical coward).
• Corals:3d models of a whole bunch of different types of coral, collected by the Smithsonian museum. Why? I have no idea, but corals are cool. Actually I do sort-of know – the page features five separate guided education modules to help people learn about corals, what types there are, their shapes, etc, so you can either use this to learn about them or, if you’re perhaps less invested in IMPROVING YOUR MIND, just to look at some really impressive renderings of some cool undersea organisms.
• Tim Andraka: You might have seen these doing the rounds this week – Tim Andraka is an illustrator who creates wonderfully-inventive and surreal drawings of animals. I can’t really explain these beyond ‘no, I meant it when I said ‘surreal’, honestly’ – and yes, I know that I always say that, but click the link and then try and work out how YOU would explain these. See?
• Blue Screen of Death Maker: Working in an office with minimal IT support? Want to take the rest of the day off? Chuck this up on your screen, throw your hands in the air and head to the pub! NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any implications resulting from your paymasters seeing through this incredibly obvious ruse.
• Online Dice: Did you ever read the 70s classic ‘The Diceman’ and briefly think ‘hm, that does sound like quite an interesting way of approaching life and decisions, even if one which would eventually lead to some absolutely-fcuking-catastrophic places’? This site lets you roll any number of any-sided dice you choose at the push of a button – ostensibly I presume it’s designed for online tabletop/roleplaying games, but I prefer to think of it as your very own decisionmaking device. Why not spend the rest of the afternoon leaving all of your personal and professional decisions UP TO THE DICE? Go on, what’s the worst that can happen? NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for your life being entirely fcuked beyond all recognition as a result of you handing over its reins to the capricious whims of The Dice.
• Glitch Game: This is a really interesting riff on the nascent ‘text adventure game using LLMs to allow for natural language in game’ – in Glitch Game, your job is to exploit your knowledge of prompting to subvert the mechanic and escape the weird simulation. It doesn’t QUITE work, but I really liked the way it uses LLMs’ own inherent weaknesses to exploitation as part of the narrative/ludic hook. If you’re confused or struggling you can read the developer’s writeup here, but I’d advise you to have a play around blind first as it’s quite nice to discover the premise by yourself the first time round.
• Arsonate: Occupying the coveted ‘last slot in the miscellaneous links section’ position this week is this excellent little game – a demo for the forthcoming full release – in which you play a card game against a sinister, gas masked antagonist. There’s a fire coming – the way you play your cards determines which of you gets consumed in the flames. Really nicely done, this – pleasingly sinister, the game is simple but surprisingly chewy in terms of strategy when you get your head round it, and the PS1-era graphics make the whole thing feel grubbily retro in a vaguely-Manhunt-esque way. An excellent way to spend an hour or so trying to see all three endings.

By Maisie Cowell

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS BEAUTIFULLY-ETHEREAL SELECTION OF WISPY, BLEEPY AMBIENT (WISPY AND BLEEPY REALLY ARE THE APPROPRIATE ADJECTIVES, I PROMISE) MIXED BY NORUS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• OO KK AA: I *think* this is someone whose work I featured in a video a while back – stop-motion animation featuring matches, ring a bell? – but this is an Insta feed full of some of the most incredible, short pieces of stop-motion work I’ve ever seen, ever. Beautiful, precise, verging on the sublime (no, really, it is that good).
• Life Imitates AI Art: Ooh, a WHOLE NEW AESTHETIC! No, seriously, you may not even have thought that was possible here in the used-up, dried-out husk of the 21st Century, but this really is a properly novel thing – welcome to the brand-new category of ‘actual photographs which look like AI-generated images but are in fact actual images of the real world’! These really, really mess with my brain and I think this feels like a potentially-interesting visual direction for a very particular type of campaign, should you be in the market for such a thing. Even if not, there’s definitely a bunch of w4nky thinkpieces all you creative directors can get out of this for LinkedIn – you dreadful, soulless fcukers, you!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Martha Rich

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Natalia Gonzales Martin

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

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

By Janet Maya

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

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

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

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Daido Moriyama

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Stephen A Scheer

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

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

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

By Mark Forbes

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Maureen Dougherty

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

By Jason Levesque

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

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

By Mobolaji Ogunrosoye

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

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

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

By Roope Rainisto

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Nick Prideaux

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO I AM BACK HELLO!

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

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

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

That’s…that’s progress, right?

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

By Jessica So Ren Tang

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

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

By TS Harris

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

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

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

By Casey Goddard

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Amie Dickie

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

By Keita Morimoto

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

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

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

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

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

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

By Irina Selaru

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jenny Holzer

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: