HELLO EVERYONE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Edu Monteiro

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Coco Capitan

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Faith 47

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

And so, the monkey’s paw curled.

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

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

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

By Sonmina

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Matt Hansel

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Chet Zar

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Alex Eckman-Lawn

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

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

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

By Photo in Moz

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Shannon Cartier Lucy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

Am…am I a cnut?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Molly Bounds

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

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

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

By Not The NoName

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Jeremy Hutchison (via Blort)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

By Yuwei Tu

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

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

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

By Chang Ya Chin

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Andrew Brischler

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hello everyone, hello hello! For those of us in the UK, this weekend is a GLORIOUS THREE-DAY WEEKEND, and oh look what a surprise it’s going to rain all weekend FFS BRITAIN CAN YOU DO NOTHING RIGHT?!?! Still, on the plus side, at least we get to watch some of the worst cnuts in the world get the first of their MASSIVE ELECTORAL BATTERINGS while the drops hammer down – silver linings and all that.

Anyway, that’s by way of brief introduction to this week’s Curios, which as ever on weekends such as this contains more than enough internet to see you through until Tuesday (unless, heaven forfend, you have, I don’t know, BETTER THINGS TO DO with your three days of illusory freedom than spend them indoors, clicking like some sort of dopamine-starved ape in captivity) – I hope you enjoy ALL OF THE LINKS!

Oh, and before we move on, a quick note of congratulations to two Friends of Curios who have new projects out this week; Jared, whose frankly INSANE ‘Big Book Of Cyberpunk’ anthology was published this week in the UK and which is sort of a must-read for anyone interested in the genre (and, frankly, even if you don’t think you are), and Caitlin, who relaunched ‘Links I Would GChat You’ this week, with a subscription tier, and whose newsletter is one of half-a-dozen (see also Garbage Day, Today in Tabs and a couple of others) which I really do consider essential reading.

Anyway, enough of all this sickening niceness and camaraderie – on with the cynicism and the links and the general sense that we’re all going to die and, honestly, that it can’t come soon enough!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re alright, you can live forever for all I care. 

By Suzanne Saroff

WHY NOT EASE YOURSELF INTO THIS WEEK’S LINKS BY ENJOYING 45 MINUTES OF BLUES RECORDS FROM ALL OVER THE PLACE, MIXED INTO COHERENCE BY TOM SPOONER? 

THE SECTION WHICH LAST NIGHT WENT TO SEE A SOLO SHOW STARRING A SINGLE, VERY NAKED, MAN, AND HAS BEEN HAVING A LOT OF ANALLY-FOCUSED FLASHBACKS THIS MORNING WHILE WRITING WHICH HOPEFULLY DON’T COME THROUGH IN THE PROSE, PT.1:  

By Anthony Gerace (via TIH)

NEXT, A TRULY BEAUTIFUL NEW ALBUM BY JIM CANNING YATES, WHICH HONESTLY DESERVES TO BE LISTENED TO PROPERLY AND NOT WHILE YOU’RE READING THIS DREADFUL SH1T! 

THE SECTION WHICH LAST NIGHT WENT TO SEE A SOLO SHOW STARRING A SINGLE, VERY NAKED, MAN, AND HAS BEEN HAVING A LOT OF ANALLY-FOCUSED FLASHBACKS THIS MORNING WHILE WRITING WHICH HOPEFULLY DON’T COME THROUGH IN THE PROSE, PT.2:      

• Prosperity Quest: Welcome back to the world of ‘massively-overengineered game experiences designed to somehow promote financial literacy via the medium of a gentle, 3d adventure game’! Yes, that’s right, once again an international financial services institution has seen fit to spaff a bunch of its digital marketing budget on some sort of vaguely-educational ‘game’ – oh, hang on, this time it’s Intuit, which is apparently an accountancy software provider rather than a bank. Still, fcuk it, the principle is the same – wander round a nicely-rendered 3d environment, completing tasks and learning about such exciting principles as ‘profit’, ‘loss’, and ‘massively overleveraging yourself in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of the coming tsunami of financial ruin’ (the last one, fine, may be an invention of my own). This is actually…quite fun (ok, ‘fun’ with a very small ‘f’, but still) and is actually rather nicely made/designed, and, honestly, if you work in advermarketingpr for something tedious and unfun like – well, like accounting software, for example – then why not spend the afternoon playing around with this under the guise of ‘research’? DO IT.
• Beautiful Air Patterns: Oh, this is so so so pretty! Effectively a bunch of air traffic data layered over a world map, this lets you zoom anywhere in the world and pull visualisations of the movements of aircraft – you can select various types of data (so, for example, ‘all the planes’, or ‘high performance aircraft’ or, should you be so minded, ‘balloons’) and each will produce a different, beautiful visualisation of the movements of the craft, beautifully coloured and just generally presenting as pieces of semi-abstract art. Take a moment to scroll around the airspace of a country you’re familiar with – there’s something lovely about seeing the takeoff and landing routes being represented like this, and when I look at London’s data it’s possible to see the exact ways in which flights route over and around the city, which is, weirdly, giving me proper visual memory flashbacks of what the city looks like from the window as you make those turns…I love this, and I am pretty much the opposite of an aviation nerd, meaning if you like planes and stuff then you probably want to take a beta blocker before clicking this lest it all become Too Much.
• Folio400: This is a project that formed part of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio – the first printed edition of his collected works – which took place last year and which I singularly missed. Anyway, this contains all sorts of information about Shakespeare and his works and the history of the Folio, and where copies can be found, and the people involved in its genesis and eventual publication…if you’re interested in the Bard then this is pretty great, and there’s an outside chance that there will be some of you whose kids are in the throes of exam season and who might find this maybe slightly useful (but, more likely, your kids in the throes of exam season really don’t need you throwing additional ‘helpful’ sources and resources at them as they struggle to cram several years of learning into their already-overstuffed skulls).
• Watch Films On Atari ST Cartridges: Look, this is far, far too geeky and too technical for me, and probably involves you having to do all sorts of actual technical and vaguely-codey stuff, but for all I know there may be some of you for whom the allure of a home crafting project that will eventually allow you to watch full films in terrible resolution via the medium of a games console from four decades ago will be almost powerfully-erotic, and so I leave this link here for you.
• We Expire: I’m rather a fan of this idea. We Expire is another ‘message from beyond the grave’ services to enable you to let people know when you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil (or been taken seriously ill). “WeExpire is an opensource tool for creating emergency notes that can be read by your trusted contacts only after your death or if you are seriously injured. Soon after you write your note, it will be encrypted and converted into a QR code which you can give to a person you trust. When this person tries to access your message, WeExpire will try to contact you via email as soon as possible; if you do not reply within the period of time you previously defined, your note will become visible to your trusted person.” So basically a Dead Man’s Switch – but, generally, A Good Idea, I think.
• Explain That Stuff: Oh God, this is quite incredible, and all, apparently, the work of a single human being. Explain That Stuff has been apparently going for AGES (sorry, sorry, late again), and is basically a resource (primarily designed for kids and young people, but not exclusively so) full of articles which Tell You How Things Work And Why. “Explain that Stuff is an online book written by science writer Chris Woodford (author of many popular science books for adults and children). It includes over 400 easy-to-understand articles, richly illustrated with over 4000 photos, artworks, and animations, covering how things work, cutting-edge science, cool gadgets, and computers. We take the “pain” from explain and the “tough” out of stuff! There’s more information on this website than in your average expensive science book, it’s  continually updated, and it’s completely free to use!” I am in awe of this, and have fallen slightly in love with Chris Woodford – the generosity on display here is astonishing, the amount of work and care and attention that has gone into building the site and the corpus of information, and to give it away for free is SO NICE and genuinely warms the cockles of my nonexistent heart. Aside from anything else, the ‘About’ Page is an object lesson in how to clearly and cogently address any and all questions about a website, copyright, reuse and fair use, and is so eminently sensible and clear that I want to point other publishers at it with a short note reading ‘learn’.
• Classics Garage: Do you like cars? Do you like CLASSIC CARS? Do you like looking at classic cars from a variety of angles, admiring their paintwork and the flare of their exhausts and the detailing on the hubcaps? Do you wish that there was a website that let you do that to your obsessive heart’s content? OH GOOD! This is, as far as I can tell, just a hobby/showcase site, made by the frankly-fabulously-named Anderson Mancini (seriously, WHAT a name), which features 4 different models of vaguely-luxe vehicle that you can perv at digitally to your oily heart’s desire.
• Doom Scroll: Via Andy, this is a really nice bit of clever webwork which basically uses smart coding and (I presume) some sort of parallax effect (is this wrong? Am I being an idiot here) to basically give you a little game-like interactive experience styled to look and feel like Doom. Basically as you scroll you ‘move’ through the map, on rails, with the ability to click to ‘shoot’ the various monsters as you pass through. It’s very much a trick, but a very neat trick, and I wonder whether there might be some of you for whom this might act as EXCITING CREATIVE INSPIRATION.
• One Button Tekken: Ok, this is quite niche, but also quite funny and also feels like there might be a vague half idea in here somewhere. Tekken 8 is a fighting game which came out a few months ago – in common with all fighting games, the core mechanics are based around what is effectively a very complicated game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’, with players attempting to put together strings of moves that will be either complex enough, or disguised enough, that their opponent won’t be able to either work out or input in time the presses required to trigger the string of counters that would protect them (basically – I had to learn about this stuff when PRing StreetFighter IV about 17 years ago, and it stays with you a bit). Anyway, someone on Twitch has set up a bot which plays online Tekken matches in a very particular way – by simply spamming one button, repeatedly, over and over again, which amusingly seems to be enough to achieve a pretty decent ranking in global leaderboards. You can read more about the project here – I really like the idea of creating these very silly, very specific bots and putting them out into the wild to see how people play with them, and it feels like there’s…something in this, but I’ll admit to flagging slightly at this moment in time so I’ll leave it to you lot to figure out what.
• Air Bark: Do you regularly fly internally in the US, or transatlantically from London to New York? Do you wish that when you did so you could, rather than sharing a plane with pesky people, instead share it with LOVELY DOGS? Well apparently that is now a thing that you can do, thanks to Air Bark, a seemingly legitimate and going concern, which will, for a fee (we’ll get to that bit) take you and your pampered pooch on a plane ride like no other, with planes kitted out especially to provide comfort for your pet. “The planes we operate are Gulfstream G5s and we never book to their full capacity to ensure you and your dog have enough room to spread out comfortably. The cabin will be prepped with calming aids such as: pheromone, music, warm lavender scented refreshment towels, and other comforts to help each dog feel settled. Our concierge will also have a ‘just in case’ bag filled with calming treats, leashes, poop bags, and more will be provided at the gate. Once onboard, dogs will be served their beverage of choice (water, bone broth, you name it),  during ascent and descent to ensure they do not experience any ear discomfort commonly caused by the change in cabin pressure. In addition, a variety of BARK-branded treats, snacks, and surprises will be served throughout the flight experience.” Are you reading this and thinking, “Hm, this is increasingly sounding like a way of parting some very rich people who are very used to getting what they want from an obscene amount of money”? YOU’RE RIGHT! The price of a flight from NYC to London, or vice-versa, is $8,000. One-way. 8 FCUKING GRAND, to spend multiple hours on a plane surrounded by – let us be clear – dogsh1t. Air Bark, you are marvellous, imaginative grifters and I applaud your chutzpah!
• Crying Minecraft TikTok: Click the link. Go on, click and watch the short video. What do you see there? You see, seemingly, a young Asian man expressing performative, tearful distress as some sort of baffling, Minecraft-based…stuff happens in the other half of the split-screen – so what this actually is is a streamer doing the ‘Minecraft TNT Challenge’, where the gimmick is that they ‘have to’ keep streaming until they create a tower of bricks of a certain height on a Minecraft map…but if viewers donate, they can trigger TNT blocks to spawn atop the tower, thereby destroying some of it, thereby setting the streamer back. So, the idea is that this is a torture loop – the viewers are paying money to keep the streamer trapped in this sisyphean purgatory of building and building and building, and ostensibly getting off on the tears and distress being shown on the streamer’s face…except the streamer is using an AI filter, isn’t crying at all, and may in fact not even be there (it’s theoretically possible to automate all of this with a bit of work). You can read more about the phenomenon here if you like – I am presenting this largely without comment, other than ‘fcuk me it is genuinely astonishing how many different ways we have found to effectively ‘w4nk for pennies’ in the digital age’.
• Slice of Live VR: A YouTube Channel posting very high definition point of view videos, designed specifically to be experienced via a VR headset – I’m including this mainly as I am told that the resolution and quality here is a step above the majority of 360 or first-person video you see on the platform, and there’s something quite impressive about the degree of ‘presence’ afforded by the experience if you use a headset to experience it. The videos are a decent mix of ‘walking about places’ – the most recent ones are ‘spring break’, fine, but you can ignore those unless you’re some sort of weird creep and instead enjoy ‘wandering around Vegas’ or ‘hiking an appalachian trail’, should you be one of the still-vanishingly-small number of people who own an Oculus.
• Colle: Colle is a lovely magazine/newsletter that focuses on collage as a medium, and where I occasionally lift artists for the images in this newsletter. It’s just had a redesign, and it’s worth subscribing to if you’d like a weekly hit of interesting contemporary art/design in your inbox (or if you’d just like to explore the archives, which are fulsome).
• Barry’s Tire Tech: I LOVE THIS I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. Barry is a retired tire engineer from, I think, somewhere in the US. Barry has chosen to share his wisdom and knowledge, or at least the bits of it pertaining to tires, with the world. THANKYOU BARRY! To be clear, this really is just a website about tires, and as such it’s likely to be of limited interest to anyone who doesn’t have a particularly-technical question about, I don’t know, the optimal PSi on a Goodyear, but it’s a lovely example of a type of website I adore, where someone who knows stuff just decides to share that knowledge BECAUSE IT IS THE GOOD AND RIGHT THING TO DO. Going back to the earlier point about ‘stuff you miss from the past internet’, it’s so nice being reminded of an era where people didn’t feel they had to sell or monetise every last fcuking thing in their lives in order just to make ends meet.
• Talk To Me, Human: Ok, I haven’t had a chance to try this yet – and to do so you need to pay a one-off fee of $5, which may put most of you off to start with – but it *looks* interesting and I think it might be worth checking out, particularly if you work in or around games or narrative design. Talk To Me, Human is a ‘game’ – or at least it aspires to be one – which leverages LLMs (no idea which) to make natural language conversation the core gameplay mechanic. The game takes place entirely in-browser (suggesting its using a GPT API) and basically requires you to talk your way into, out of and around a variety of different scenarios with a range of different conversational companions to achieve a set of goals – so, for example, ‘gain access to your office’, ‘sweet talk your boss’, ‘go on a date’, all of which is achieved through either talking or typing to the characters and seeing how they respond as part of a ‘natural’ dialogue engine. As I said, I haven’t tried this yet and can’t vouch for its competence or quality – and, honestly, I have pretty serious doubts about whether this can be anything other than an incoherent mess – but I am interested enough to give it a go for the price of a coffee (maybe you will be too! Let me know what you think if you do try this).
• Super Moxio Bros: Someone’s recreated the first level of Super Mario using only typewriter marks on paper (which makes no sense when I type it, but will make PERFECT SENSE as soon as you click. Go on, click).
• Games on LinkedIn: I continue to lose friends and alienate people on LinkedIn, mainly by posting a link to this every week along with some horrible, sneering commentary about how everyone on the platform is dead inside – perhaps I ought to interrogate why it is I seem so keen to render myself entirely unemployable? Hm, no, actually, let’s not dwell! – but this week I can’t help but feel vaguely-better-disposed towards what is literally NOONE’s favourite digital platform, because this week LinkedIn launched GAMES! That’s right, you can now play a selection of Wordle-ish games on the platform, three so far but doubtless with more to come, in order to…look, you know and I know that this is simply a smart way of gaming interactions in order to massively swell average user engagement/dwell-time on the platform (come on), but I do sort of enjoy the official line being taken by LI that suggests it’s a ‘new way to network’ – “How did you find your new job, Tonya?”, “Well Aimee, it’s funny really, I just kept posting my incredibly impressive Crossclimb scores and eventually someone from KPMG tapped me up!”. It’s not, it is yet another way to waste your time while simultaneously cosplaying as someone who LOVES WORK, but, well, who really even cares anymore?
• Fallout In Excel: Finally this week, if you REALLY want a game you can play at work without anyone having the faintest idea what you’re actually doing, pay $5 Australian dollars and download this, which lets you play a surprisingly-sophisticated version of Fallout in Excel, in a way that makes it look like you’re doing something terribly complex with numbers and cells whereas in fact what you’re doing is attempting to scrounge together enough bottlecaps to buy a new pistol. Superb, honestly, and FAR better than you think it’s going to be.

By Noelia Towers

WE CLOSE OUT THIS WEEK’S MUSIC WITH A VERY UN-WEB CURIOS MIX OF DISCO, COMPILED BY BUTTERY CUTS, WHICH SURPRISED ME BY BEING GENUINELY GREAT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Julian Frost: Via blort comes the Insta feed of Julian Frost, whose illustrations and animations are just…lovely feels like damning them with faint praise, but they really are, and there’s a pleasing late-70s/early-80s vibe to the style here which I very much enjoy.
• John Holcroft: More illustration – still gorgeous, but possibly a little on the dark side compared to the previous link. Again, though, there’s a certain aesthetic here that reminds me slightly of work from a few decades back, in an entirely-positive way.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Leonard Baby

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Look, I probably ought to warn you upfront that I appear to have suffered a particularly violent attack of logorrhoea this morning and have somehow managed to break the 11k word barrier – this is your chance to just quietly delete this email/close this tab and get on with doing something better and more productive with your life.

Go on, fcuk off, I won’t mind (well, I will, but I won’t know, because I don’t track traffic or clicks or numbers and so YOU CANNOT HURT ME).

The rest of you, though, you SCURRILOUS LINK PERVERTS, settle in for a bumper Curios, packed with promise and thrills and WEIRD STUFF, and, at a rough guess, about 16-odd hours worth of INTERESTING THINGS FROM THE WEB, all held together with this sort of dreadful writing, in much the same way that the glory of the testicle is contained by the frankly-hideous mess that is the nutsack.

Hm, wasn’t quite expecting that to end up there, but, well, here we are.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are almost certainly hovering over the ‘unsubscribe’ button at this point and I can’t honestly say I blame you.

By Marty Schnapf (via TIH, where 75% of this week’s pics also hail from)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH WHAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS SOME INCREDIBLY SELF-INDULGENT NOSTALGIA BY WAY OF AN ALBUM I ABSOLUTELY RINSED WHEN I WAS AT COLLEGE AND WHICH I AM DISCOVERING STILL HAS THE POWER TO REMIND ME OF COMING UP IN A FIELD AGED 16!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND ITSELF IN A TERRIBLE PUB IN TOWN LAST NIGHT AND WHICH CAN CONFIDENTLY ASSERT THAT, BASED ON ALL THE BACK-OFFICE FINANCE STAFF DOING LOW-QUALITY PUB GAK, LONDON NIGHTLIFE IS DOING FINE THANKYOUVERYMUCHINDEED, PT.1:  

By Elspeth Vince

WE CONTINUE THE NOSTALGIA TRIP NOW WITH A GENUINE UK HIPHOP CLASSIC WHICH TURNS 20 THIS YEAR AND WHICH DESERVES SIGNIFICANTLY MORE PROPS THAN IT GETS IMHO, SKINNYMAN’S ‘COUNCIL ESTATE OF MIND’!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND ITSELF IN A TERRIBLE PUB IN TOWN LAST NIGHT AND WHICH CAN CONFIDENTLY ASSERT THAT, BASED ON ALL THE BACK-OFFICE FINANCE STAFF DOING LOW-QUALITY PUB GAK, LONDON NIGHTLIFE IS DOING FINE THANKYOUVERYMUCHINDEED, PT.2:  

• The World Press Photo Awards 2024: This doesn’t really need an explanation, does it? Beautiful as ever, distressing (in parts) as ever, these are all gorgeous but, weirdly, my favourite this year is a shot of some genuinely enormous industrial machinery (but, as ever, pick your own!).
• The Claude Prompt Library: We all know that ‘prompt engineering’ isn’t really a thing when dealing with LLMs, and that ‘having a dialogue with The Machine’ generally tends to be the best way of getting it to spit out stuff that is halfway useful, right? Good! With that caveat, any of you regularly using GPT or Gemini or Claude for personal or professional gain might find this collection of starter prompts for various purposes, compiled by Claude creators Anthropic, useful – there are about 30-ish, designed for a variety of purposes, some frivolous and some more directional, and even if you don’t find them hugely useful in their starting form they might be helpful should you want to explore query/instruction construction a bit.
• Some Sort Of Map Of The Web: I honestly have no idea whatsoever where the fcuk I found this or what it is or how it is shaped or compiled, but, well, I searched for Curios and I AM ON THERE so basically it gets included for reasons of sheer, arrogant hubris – I FEEL SO SEEN! Anyway, this is…well, yes, it’s a sort of ‘map of the internet’, which I *think* seeks to create some sort of thematic link between various ‘clusters’ of sites based on inlinks and outlinks to them (but, honestly, no real clue). This is actually not-unuseful (elegant construction, well DONE Matt you fcuking hack!) in terms of finding vaguely-thematically-linked clusters of sites around a particular area of interest, although the interface isn’t hugely conducive.
• Ketchup: This is a new platform for mentoring which I can’t quite see taking off but which I found intriguing and sort-of horrifying in equal measure – effectively it’s a matchmaking site for mentors and mentees, where anyone can sign up to offer themselves as a ‘mentor’ (whatever the fcuk that means, I’ve never really been sure to be honest), with a fixed fee for a set amount of their time; eager ‘mentees’ can then pay said fee for access to a videocall with their mentor of choice, where they can presumably ask them all the questions about, I don’t know, accountancy that their heart desires. Mentors are vetted based on their LinkedIn profiles, which doesn’t feel…entirely watertight if I’m honest with you, and part of me is convinced that this is going to devolve into sex work because, well, much like we all tend to crabs eventually, all web platforms will tend towards the exchange of coin for access to mucous membrane, and there’s generally something a bit…icky about the whole thing – equally, though, I can see the appeal to a certain subset of hustlegrind kids and MLM-style guru figures, which could me a match made in (miserable, horrible, dead-eyed) heaven!
• Click The Red Button: “In the vast realm of the internet, where information, entertainment, and communication reign supreme, there exists a peculiar corner that defies conventional purpose. We’re talking about useless websites. A collection of digital oddities and bizarre experiments that serve no practical function. While the internet is a treasure trove of valuable resources, sometimes it’s refreshing to explore the absurd, the nonsensical, and the downright pointless. Here on Click the Red Button, we have it all carefully curated for you.” Basically this is one of those ‘here’s a portal to a bunch of vaguely-pointless, frivolous websites you might half remember from the past’ sites, but it has the pleasing addition of all the sites it throws up being rendered in a frame, meaning you don’t have to open up loads of new tabs and can move from one ephemeral distraction to another with ease. If nothing else there seem to be reasonable number of distracting browser games with which to help kill all those tedious, timesheetable hours.
• The Data Driven DJ: The website of Brian Foo, whose work I’ve actually featured in here before but whose personal site I only discovered this week – Foo is an artist working around the intersection of data and sound, and who has created a host of interesting ways of exploring information through audiovisual presentation. His site features ten different projects, ranging from one which creates songs based on air pollution data from Beijing, to another which takes information on the race and gender representation of Hollywood films to create shifting soundscapes. These are SO interesting, and many of them have their own, rather beautifully made, standalone websites through which you can play with the sonifications and explore the data they represent. I have a real soft spot for this sort of work, and I think sound/data crossover stuff is super-interesting – if you share this small fascination you will love Foo’s work, and you might also be interested in this other site belonging to the Loud Numbers project, which also works on data sonification and has a podcast all about this stuff which you might enjoy.
• The Music Museum of New England: What famous music comes from YOUR hometown/region? Despite being born in London, due to some Poor Personal Choices on the part of my parents (and my dad then subsequently fcuking off when I was 4) I ended up growing up in a town called Swindon, whose musical heritage consists of Gilbert O’Sullivan (look him up), XTC (look them up) and, er, Billie Piper (oh go on, have her ONE BANGER linked here as a treat) and doesn’t really merit a music museum. You’d sort-of expect New England as a region of the US to have a…slightly richer musical heritage, so I was somewhat surprised to come across this website (via blort) which celebrates the musicians hailing from the Northeastern US and which takes a pleasingly even-handed approach to the artists it chooses to feature on the homepage, and the order in which it does so. You might think, for example, that The Breeders or Tracy Chapman might get top billing in the rundown of ‘people from the area who make music’ but instead it’s the slightly-less-famous Lennie Petz who stares out at me from the head of the page (actually I think it’s a randomised selection each time you load the page, but I still love the even-handedness of this that sees no real distinction between, say, Morphine (a band a reasonable number of people have heard of) and, say, Sleepy Labeef (who objectively has a better name, I concede). Anyway, I was slightly charmed by this, not least as a way of discovering a bunch of completely disparate new musicians and bands I would otherwise never have heard of.
• Fun Websites: Via Kris, this is literally a Google Sheet that…someone, no idea who, has compiled featuring a load of ‘Fun Websites’ – there are 204 links here, and while about 75% of them were familiar to me (too online? TOO ONLINE??? Yes, almost certainly) there were a good 40-50 that were totally unknown – these are all broadly ‘interesting, silly, frivolous or timesinky’, and this is a pretty much perfect way for you to wind down the working week by spelunking around some obscure corners of the web (also it links to Time Cube and I can never not love anyone who links to Time Cube).’
• Discontinued Microsoft Creative Software: This is, literally, a blogpost featuring a dizzyingly-exhaustive list of ‘creative’ products that Microsoft has shipped and then shuttered over the course of the past three decades – interesting partly as a general ‘wander down memory lane’ type of thing, but also as a nice reminder that SO MUCH STUFF gets build and deployed by big companies that just…doesn’t work, doesn’t stick, doesn’t build an audience, and that’s ok! Or, er, it is if you’re Microsoft – possibly not if you’re smaller, or a single creator. Hm, that’s possibly not the reassuring pat on the back I was hoping it to be, is it? Fcuk.
• Yone’s Lists: A page on the personal website of one Yone, who self-describes as ‘an artist and researcher based in philadelphia. most of my work is about thinking through open-access digital archives, their overlap with cultural work and anticolonialism, and personal memory work and archival practice. i also do digital accessibility work in academic publishing, and am a student of the disability justice movement” – this is a collection of lists, thoughts, notes, recipes, pictures, jottings…honestly, I love this, like reading someone else’s notebook (but not creepy or voyeuristic) or seeing inside their brain for a bit. I really, really like the idea of exploring a platform that lets anyone do this sort of thing and make it open and accessible should they desire – which, I suppose, is sort-of what Are.na does, but I personally would like something a bit more textual. Anyone?
• Puppet Playhouse: Use your hands to manoeuver a pair of puppets on-screen, with your laptop’s camera tracking the movements to allow you to physically puppeteer the marionettes – simple, and very much ‘one for kids’, but I do like the interface and the simplicity, which makes me feel that there might be something a bit more sophisticated and fun that you could do with this if you were so minded (or, alternatively, you could just have some fun playing ‘puppet dragon’ with your child, your call really).
• TrekTerest: As previously discussed here, I have no interest whatsoever in Star Trek, but I appreciate that that is not true of everyone and as such some of you might enjoy this frankly-ridiculous collection of trekky pictures and ephemera and stuff – personally, though, I am including this almost entirely because it features one of my all-time favourite scroll animations I have ever seen on a website. Seriously, just scroll down and you will know what I mean when it happens – BEAUTIFUL WEBWORK, and the sort of thing I really hope you’re all going to be including in every single web build you oversee from hereon in.
• Angry Girlfriend: It’s fair to say that it’s not 100% certain that the web has been entirely great for male-female relations, and that young men in particular have been exposed to some at-best-questionable advice on ‘how to relate to women and girls’ – still, thank God that that’s all going to be ameliorated by the magic of artificial intelligence! Proof of this glorious future can be seen in Angry Girlfriend, a genuinely-appalling-sounding app which is apparently designed to ‘help men deal with angry partners’ by, er, ‘simulating an angry partner’ via LLM and tasking you with de-escalating the situation with your HONEYED WORDS. You get to choose the degree of p1ssed-offness that your theoretically-fictional interlocutor starts out feeling, and your goal is to reduce this below some sort of arbitrary threshold within a set number of conversational exchanges…BECAUSE THAT’S HOW CONFLUCT RESOLUTION IN RELATIONSHIPS WORKS, RIGHT KIDS? This is, obviously, a terrible stupid product aimed at idiot children who have never actually spoken to a woman before, but it’s indicative of a miserable sort of attitude which feels unfortunately prevalent at the moment, built around tediously-reductive gender stereotypes and a weird idea of a semi-intractable ‘battle of the sexes’ and, dear God, if you have teenage sons just fcuking talk to them for God’s sake and don’t let them anywhere near sh1t like this (says the know-nothing bozo with no kids who knows the square root of fcuk-all about parenting and should probably shut up with the opining).
• Backdrop: A game that presents you with a series of artworks and asks you to identify where in the world what they depict is located by dropping a pin on a map. Which is, on occasion, rendered incredibly easy by the name of the place being IN THE ACTUAL FCUKING NAME OF THE WORK ITSELF, which does rather spoil the fun, but the rest of the time this is a really nice spin on Geoguessr.
• Blumgi Soccer: Kick the ball into the goal. That is literally it. Simple, and weirdly soothing, this is a ‘puzzle’ game in only the very loosest sense but it is intensely satisfying despite the lack of any real passion.
• Neltris: This starts out being Tetris, and then at a certain point it does something that will slightly unhinge your brain. And then it will do it again, and again, until the whole thing is a gloriously-unplayable mess that makes your cerebellum literally throb and glow white hot. Quite remarkable – I don’t want to spoil this by explaining how this works, but if you can get beyond about the third iteration of the gag then you are some sort of terrifying savant and I am legitimately frightened of what you might be capable of.
• Crow Flies: Matt Round has made one of the component games from his GLORIOUS nuclear bunker internet simulation Arcc available to play as a standalone – this is Flappy Bird, reimagined as a wireframe first person game as might have been played on a forgotten 70s home console system, and, as with the rest of Arcc, it is picture perfect in tone and detail as well as being fun to play. If you get above a certain score you also get a discount code to the full Arcc experience, which, as previously discussed in here, is worth every penny as it’s one of the most fully-realised bits of theoretical retrocomputing and parallel world building I’ve seen in years, and made with so much love and care.
• Sudden Death: This is basically a short story/novella, about 40-50 mins long, but it is VERY good. Sudden Death tells the story of an Aussie Rules football team trying to break into the bigtime, of queer love, and success and sacrifice and and and and and it’s all presented in a hyperstylised multiwindow, multiformat fashion with vaguely-CGA graphics and a cracking soundtrack (the vaguely-techno soundtrack to the football games in particular is excellent), and generally this is a really good example of how to do a relatively ‘straight’ (if you’ll pardon the pun) linear narrative in a way that makes the most of the browser window as a delivery mechanism. Really very good indeed, and worth your time over the weekend – I am both boringly straight and understand NOTHING about Aussie Rules, but I still though this was fcuking great.
• Equinox: Occupying the coveted ‘final link of the week, usually reserved for a really good game’ slot in Curios this week is one of those occasional things that make me think ‘fcuk me, it is genuinely incredible what can be accomplished in-browser these days, this would have been an actual proper videogame when I was a kid that you paid actual cashmoney for’ – Equinox is, as far as I can tell, basically a sort of ‘hey, look what WE can do!’ calling card by a French digital studio called Little Workshop, and is an ASTONISHING accomplishment. All played in first person with a beautiful art style vaguely reminiscent of the sort of hand-drawn work of a particular style of gallic comic book artist, this sees you playing as someone who awakes on a spaceship that is, inevitably, IN TROUBLE. Can you solve the puzzles and save yourself? The graphics, the sound, the voicework…this is all SO SO SO GOOD, and it’s genuinely fun to play too – I promise you this is more fun than whatever you’re currently doing in your other tabs, so click and ENJOY.

By Jess Allen

THIS WEEK’S FINAL MIX COMES FROM HUDSON’S CHOICE AND FEATURES CASSIANO, OUTKAST, MARVIN GAYE, KHRUANBIN AND MORE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Un-Archive: Via Pietro Minto comes this excellent Insta feed which is pretty new (only 12 posts! So fresh! So unsullied!) and which as far as I can tell exists solely to share weird images pulled from the Internet Archive. Gems so far include a slightly-confusing Marlboro-branded map of the Lebanon (no idea) and a reminder that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles once did a rap song advising kids that Drugs Are Bad. Wonderful stuff.
• Flowers In Cinema: Er, literally that – frames from cinema in which flowers appear. In vases, clasped to one’s bosom, or just general ambient flora – if there’s a flower on screen, it’s probably on here somewhere.
• The Boy Room Show: This week’s BIG INTERNET CONTENT HIT, you will doubtless have seen clips of this floating around your social platform of choice over the past few days – the premise, should you somehow have failed to see this stuff, is that a winning young woman in NYC visits various men’s apartments to expose the frankly astonishing ways in which so many of them seem to live. WHO IS TELLING THESE PEOPLE THAT PILLOWCASES ARE OPTIONAL FFS??? The little segment at the end of each where she does a little ‘this is how I would make this space marginally less squalid’ CG makeover is a particularly nice touch. I await the inevitable English ripoff of this which will inevitably take the vaguely light-hearted vibes of this and instead manage to produce something deeply sinister and slightly-cursed.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Cloro

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

You know what, gentle reader? It’s 11:52 am, I’m 18 pages of CurioB0llocks down and I’ve scrolled up top to write an intro…and, honestly, I have nothing. NOTHING. Not even a cursory gag about how I was right about how ‘all people who call themselves ‘Matty’ are obviously cnuts’ (thanks for the confirmation, Taylor!).

I am going to go and wash the inside of my head out for a bit. I’ll leave you with the links (yay!) and the words (a necessary evil, I’m afraid), and I’ll do my best to actually manage an intro next week, whether you like it or not.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can pretend I wrote a special opening paragraph just for YOU if you like.

By Jessica Hays

OUR FIRST BIT OF MUSIC THIS WEEK IS THIS SURPRISINGLY AMAZING SOUNDTRACK TO A VIDEOGAME FROM THE EARLY-00s THAT NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED (BEAR WITH ME HERE) AND IS CALLED ‘RAT TAXI’ (OR WOULD HAVE BEEN WERE IT REAL) AND WHICH IS, HONESTLY, REALLY REALLY GOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY APPRECIATES YOU TAKING TIME OUT FROM TAYTAY TO CLICK SOME LINKS, PT.1:  

By Rita Lavalle

NEXT UP WE HAVE A NEW ALBUM BY PURVEYOR OF WONKY-AND-INTENSE-AND-EMOTIONAL AND GENERALLY WEIRD-BUT-GOOD HIPHOP FROM WEB CURIOS FAVOURITE OLOFF WHICH I AM VERY MUCH ENJOYING! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY APPRECIATES YOU TAKING TIME OUT FROM TAYTAY TO CLICK SOME LINKS, PT.2:      

• Video2Game: This is a university paper rather than something you can play with, but the link contains enough examples of the tech in action to make it interesting even for people like you and I who have about as much chance of understanding the underlying maths of ‘what’s going on here?’ as, say, a duck. This is basically a demonstration of AI-enabled tech that lets you effectively turn any video into a rudimentary videogame, showing the ability to drop a figure into a video which is then able to treat said video as a navigable 3d environment which can be interacted with – honestly, it’s quite amazing whilst at the same time not actually looking ‘fun’ in any meaningful sense. Still, it’s not hard to look at this and imagine that in a couple of years’ time I’ll just be able to take a video walkthrough of my flat and in a couple of clicks turn that into some sort of physics-based racing game – why I’d want to is…uncertain, but it certainly feels like it will be possible. BONUS AI TECH STUFF: this is another paper demonstrating the latest advances in ‘enter a prompt, get a fully-3d image’ technology, which is similarly impressive.
• Vana: What’s your relationship with ‘you’ like? Do you like ‘you’? Would you like to hang out more often? Well, now you can create a model ‘you’ and keep it on your phone, interacting with yourself like you’re your own pet or something – GREAT! This is Vana, which self-describes as “a mini “you” that lives in your pocket, unlocking a new way to connect and experience the world.” Effectively this involves a small AI model which I think lives locally on your phone and you fine-tune with data from your texts, your social profiles, your photos, your voicenotes…”Take your “digital persona” and your data to different apps to explore the power of personalized AI.  Play with your “digital persona” by speaking to it or dropping it into simulations to discover what your data says about you, literally!  Or use it in real-world applications: co-writing break-up texts, giving you a motivational boost, or telling you what to make for dinner when you can’t decide.” Does that sound good? The bigger play here, or at least the long-term idea, is that EVERYONE will have a digital twin a bit like this, and an ecosystem of websites and apps will emerge which lets people effectively plug their Twin into the API to act on their behalf, in a manner reflecting the data they’ve been trained on IE YOUR LIFE. Per the site, “your “digital persona” is made up of several AIs working together to simulate different aspects of you. There’s one AI that learns the sound of your voice, one AI that tries to understand the way you speak and who you are, and another one that tries to understand how you look. ‍As you can imagine, this is fairly powerful stuff. That’s why its so important that you (and only you) own and control it. This is why Vana uses the latest in encryption and privacy-preserving tech to create a safe space for you to play and explore.‍” I am HUGELY skeptical about this, not least because I don’t think there’s any model currently out there that can make this do the things that it seems to be promising it can do, or at least not well enough to be useful, but I can’t pretend I’m not (appalled and) fascinated.
• Close City: Via Giuseppe comes this useful site – well, useful for North Americans, possibly less so for the rest of you but it’s still interesting, honest – which neatly presents data about urban areas in the US, specifically the average transit time for residents to a selection of specific local amenities – schools, libraries, doctors, etc etc – based on different modes of transport. So, basically, it gives an overview of how walkable or otherwise cities are in terms of access to services, a sort of ‘15-minute City overview’ if you will. There’s only data for the US, and so it only covers North America, but it’s fascinating to see the variance from city to city and to observe that, wherever you are, basically nowhere is walkable or really even public transportable to a significant degree outside of the very largest of cities (and even then, not always).
• The Iron Chef Database: I’ll be honest, I don’t care about the TV show The Iron Chef, which I have never seen and have no real knowledge of whatsoever (it’s this sort of high-quality curation and commentary that keeps you reading!), but, for any of you who are more enamoured of it, you might find this database of all the recipes ever featured in the programme of use. The main reason I am including it, though, is to ask WHY IS THERE NOT A SIMILAR THING FOR UK TELEVISUAL SENSATION ‘COME DINE WITH ME’? WHY? Can someone please sort it out for me? Thanks!
• CLI Jukebox: I think you can divide the world neatly into two camps – people who know what CLI means, and people who go outside and have friends and stuff (I JOKE, I JOKE – also, I am one of the former so, er, the joke appears to be on me); if you are one of the LUCKY ONES who understand the mysteries of the Command Line Interface then you might like this minimalist jukebox app which lets you not only play files that you have stored locally but which also integrates YouTube and Soundcloud streams into your playlist, so you can SEAMLESSLY switch between your own tracks and stuff from the web with, I think, no ads at all. This is smart, if a touch on the geeky side, and I can imagine appealing to those of you with a hard drive full of MP3s.
• Get Any Plant: This is a US-only site, but I feel compelled to point out that I think this is a GOOD IDEA and EMINENTLY STEALABLE. Get Any Plant is a site that effectively acts as a searchable portal layer over the top of various online retailers of flora in North America – of which there are LOTS, given the post-pandemic boom in horticultural enthusiasm amongst The Kids. You can filter by various qualities – plant type, your location, etc etc – and the site will return items that are currently in stock, that will mail to you, and that match your criteria, taking (I presume) a small vig on every transaction; seriously, I don’t know what size the UK houseplant market is but it feels like this could be quite an easy win for anyone willing to spin it up.
• Mars Wants Movies: A YouTube channel dedicated to ‘exploring the history of science fiction in film, from 1900 to the present day’ – it’s been going for seven months or so and is currently up to the mid-1930s, so you can get in on the ground floor, so to speak, should this be your kind of thing.
• Symbols: One of the Great Unspoken Truths of modern life is that noone – literally noone, not one person currently alive on this planet – can ever remember the exact combination of keystrokes required to make a UK or US English language keyboard render accents, umlauts or circumflexes. NOONE. If you, like me, find yourself googling ‘e with a hat’ (and then ‘e with a backwards hat’ when you realise you’ve got the wrong one) and then copying and pasting the character from the search results every time you need to type anything in even-vaguely-correct French or Italian then you will LOVE this site, which is literally just an admission that noone knows how to type these things and it’s useful to have all the main ones on one page to copy and paste whenever you need. Bookmark this, future you will be grateful.
• Parallel Lives: This is a really interesting bit of visualisation that doesn’t *quite* work but which presents information in quite a cool way – basically this is a collection of ‘notable people’ from history, drawn from Wikipedia, which progresses through time as you scroll, showing you when they lived, how old they were when they died, and giving you an idea of who else they were contemporaneous with in history. The UI is a *bit* shonky and you have to scroll very, very slowly as otherwise it’s just a jumbled mess, but it’s interesting to learn that, for example, Vlad the Impaler was making merry with sharpened stakes around the same time that Donatello was perfecting his pictures.
• Sitcom People: A Twitter account which exists solely to share images and occasionally footage from the opening credits of 20th Century sitcoms, specifically the bits when the actors were introduced at the top of the show, making some sort of winning face with their name superimposed over the top of them. That’s it. No, me neither.
• Storiaverse: This is interesting, and REALLY reminds me of something I remember from the relatively-early era of mobile… Storiaverse is effectively an attempt to create a new category of narrative media (well, sort-of), combining writers with animators to produce short stories which exist in a sort of hinterland between cartoons, comics and prose. Writers submit stories, illustrators illustrate them, and you, the reader/watcher, consume them via the Storiaverse app, with everyone involved apparently getting some sort of payout for their efforts (although given the app is a free download and doesn’t appear to have any ads, I am fcuked if I can work out what the business model is here). It’s worth downloading this and having a look – the stories are…underwhelming to me, but I get the impression I am probably several decades outside the target market; more impressive is the way in which the animation and the copy work together to create what feels like an interestingly-novel combination of reading and watching which works nicely as a user experience. I don’t hold out high hopes for this existing for that long – again, don’t really understand what the model is here – but I think there’s something worth exploring in the format.
• Autonomous Racing League: I know that F1 is more popular than ever by many metrics, but I am convinced that that’s all down to the sport’s pivot into being effectively a soap opera about VERY RICH people travelling around the world in massive trucks (and occasionally racing some cars) rather than the actual sport itself, which continues to strike me as one of the most objectively-tedious things one can do with one’s eyes. Which makes me curious as to who the everliving fcuk wants to watch races between cars which are entirely self-driving – the ONLY appeal of F1 as a sport, surely, is in appreciating the skill and endurance of the overpaid advertising hoardings doing the driving (and, let’s be honest, the dark fascination of the cars disintegrating into very expensive confetti after a 200+mph collision) – but we are shortly set to find out, as next week the inaugural Autonomous Racing League event will take place in Abu Dhabi (of COURSE it’s in Abu Dhabi!). Actually perhaps I am being unfair here – this is obviously hugely technically-impressive, and it’s evidently at the cutting edge of what’s possible with autonomous vehicles…but, on the other, who is this for? Although I’m now enjoying a pleasingly-dystopian reverie about rabid ultra fans getting REALLY into supporting their motoring algorithm of choice, which feels interestingly weird.
• Diamond Jubilee: I’ve seen this written up in a few places as a TREND PRECURSOR – God knows whether that’s accurate, but I am very much into the fact that musician Cindy Lee has made her new album, Diamond Jubilee, available to download exclusively through this Geocities page – MORE SHONKY PERSONAL WEBSITES FOR PERSONAL PROJECTS!
• Wikipedia Rectangles: I don’t *really* know what’s going here, but I like it – as far as I can tell, every time you click the screen it adds a new image drawn seemingly at random from Wikimedia Commons, with every click adding a new picture and further subdividing the screen, eventually becoming a disorienting patchwork mosaic of disparate images with no thematic links whatsoever other than their vague connection to the broad concept of ‘the corpus of human knowledge’. Different every time, this is more compelling than i expected it to be – I only wish I could export some of the resulting composites, as they’re occasionally rather cool.
• Read, Write, Own, Web: This is a lovely bit of nostalgia, as well as a pleasing reminder that we don’t actually need big platform infrastructure to exist online. “Those who don’t remember the web before platforms, tend to believe that for 10 years web users stared at their monitors in anticipation. Actually they were made to believe it. First by Web 2.0 proponents, and nowadays by aggressive Web3 campaigns that rewrite the history by stating that Web1 was a dull, passive, read only place…Though, the opposite was the truth, the web before platformization was the place where users owned, wrote and also read. In this post I collected a lot of screenshots that refute the picture or “read only” web before or outside of social networks and hosting services. The websites they represent were tagged by me during the last 13 years as “before_…”. For example “before_ wikipedia”, “before_ebay”, “before_airbnb”. Not all the tags are mentioned here. Also not all the files that we have for a particular tag are represented. I hope it gives an idea of web users being able to organize their own content and provide services to each other.” So here presented you will see a bunch of screenshots and reminiscences about How We Used To Do Stuff Before Big Platform Dominance – photosharing and filesharing and film reviews and and and God it’s so nice to be reminded of how VARIED things were (but, equally, what a royal fcuking pain in the ar$e it was to get things done, and, honestly, how nice it was when people bothered to make nice user interfaces for things – look, I am all for nostalgia but let’s not pretend that this stuff was always necessarily ‘better’).
• Streams: BEAUTIFUL. ““Stream of a stream” is an ongoing gathering of streams. Each stream sound is captured with an underwater microphone and uploaded to the cloud. There, the sounds of the streams — the natural flow of water — metamorphose into a steady, continuous flow of data transmitted over the internet.” This is exactly that – a collection of audio files of the sounds of streams, burbling and gurgling and generally doing the whole fluid dynamics thing to their heart’s content. This is likely to be an unhelpful website to spend time on if you REALLY need the bathroom, but otherwise I recommend it unreservedly.
• Orifice: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a genuinely miserable digital sex project in the less-than-coveted ‘weird fcuk machines’ segment of Curios, but WOW is this a particularly horrid example of the genre! ‘Orifice’ (the name is apparently because it’s gender and – dear God – ‘species neutral’) is basically a fleshlight that’s been hacked to ‘respond to stimuli’ – effectively it’s hooked up to a camera, an LLM and a text-to-speech synthesiser, so that when you’re ‘interacting’ with your weird mechanical flesh-sleeve it ‘knows’ what you are doing and ‘responds’ appropriately, and…oh God, this is so utterly bleak, not even particularly because of the tech or the idea, which is, honestly, just AN Other sad little teledildonics project with some added AI, but because of the overall tone of the webpage (and this interview with the creator which really is quite unpleasant and makes me think they should possibly be on some sort of watchlist somewhere, and certainly kept far away from firearms) is just incredibly sad. “DISCOVER A MORE CONNECTED, INTIMATE, & INTERACTIVE WAY TO HAVE NON REPRODUCTIVE SEX”, screams the homepage, seemingly ignorant of the fact that actually humans have been having non-reproductive sex ever since the times of Onan. The one reassuring thing about stuff like this is that in actuality the market for this sort of tech is vanishingly small – but less reassuring is the mindset behind it, which feels uncomfortably close to ‘mad incel shooter’ and therefore a bit scary.
• Same Energy Snap: Our last miscellaneous link this week is this fun little game by Monkeon – simply guess which pictures have been adjudged to have THE SAME ENERGY by the web, and pair them appropriately. MORE FUN THAN YOU MIGHT EXPECT!

By Nina Mae Gordon

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS ANOTHER PLEASINGLY-CURATED SELECTION OF BEATS AND BLEEPS SELECTED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Doors of Kypseli: Kypseli is apparently a district of Athens – a posh one, according to a cursory Google – and it has doors; these doors are being recorded by this Insta feed, which is a nice place to, well, see doors, but doors with a particular aesthetic – the local style is obviously for relatively-elaborate ironwork patterns, and the account does a nice job of juxtaposing shots of the doors in situ alongside more diagrammatic images showing the designs. Sent to me by Kris, in Athens, who may or may not live here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Carolle Benitah

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I went on an open-top bus tour through London last weekend, and, honestly, it was FCUKING GREAT and you should all do one. That’s it, that’s basically all I’ve got for you this week, just a general sense of unbridled enthusiasm for taking a bus around some tourist attractions – seriously though, it is ACE and less expensive than you might think, and people are SO NICE TO YOU! I mean, look, most of the time it’s fair to say that the London attitude to tourists is usually stuck somewhere between ‘you cnuts, it is your fault that M&M World exists, and you deserve the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse franchises as your penance’ and ‘STAND ON THE FCUKING RIGHT JESUS FCUKING CHRIST ARE YOU THIS INCAPABLE OF PICKING UP BASIC SOCIAL CUES IN YOUR OWN NATION???’, but when you’re on an open top bus, well, people WAVE and SMILE and generally act like they are sort of happy you’re alive.

Anyway, that’s by way of an unusually-positive introduction, designed in part to reassure the very kind person who emailed me last week evidencing what sounded like genuine concern about my mental wellbeing – see? PEOPLE WHO ARE TERMINALLY UNHAPPY DO NOT TAKE OPEN TOP BUS RIDES!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you will thank me when you take the bus advice, I promise you, it really is fun.

By Melanie Garcia

IT IS 06:53 AM AND I AM ATTEMPTING TO KICKSTART THE CURIOS PROCESS BY LISTENING TO SOME RAVE AND BREAKBEAT (AND, SIMULTANEOUSLY, THE TODAY PROGRAMME; THEY DON’T REALLY FIT TBH) – WHY NOT JOIN ME, WHATEVER TIME OF THE DAY IT IS RIGHT NOW AS THESE WORDS ENTER YOUR HEAD?

THE SECTION WHICH ALSO LEARNED THAT IT CAN DO A SURPRISINGLY-CREDITABLE RENDITION OF ‘DON’T MUG YOURSELF’ BY THE STREETS IF PRESSED, PT.1:  

By Travis Lampe

NEXT UP, A VERY COOL MIX INDEED COMPILED BY JESSICA PRATT AND FEATURING WHAT IS HERE DESCRIBED AS ‘SPECTRAL ’60S INDIE, HOLLYWOOD SHOCK ROCK AND PSYCHEDELIA’!

THE SECTION WHICH ALSO LEARNED THAT IT CAN DO A SURPRISINGLY-CREDITABLE RENDITION OF ‘DON’T MUG YOURSELF’ BY THE STREETS IF PRESSED, PT.2:  

• Oreo Menu: Apologies for the advermarketingpr link here, but this irritated and confused me in equal measure. The Oreo Menu is a promo being run by the inexplicably-popular biscuit brand (seriously, though, the flavour profile of an Oreo is literally ‘incredibly sweet’, regardless of which bit of it you are consuming, why are they ubiquitous?) – because you know those menus on websites characterised by three horizontal lines, which your experience of navigating online tells you means ‘click this to expand the nav options’? You know how everyone calls them ‘hamburger menus’? Yes, well they are WRONG, those are OREO MENUS because THREE LINES LIKE THE BISCUITS (are you listening, Adidas?)! Anyway, that’s your (dreadful) starting premise – the core of the promo is that if you see a hambur- sorry, OREO menu anywhere online, all you have to do is go to this website and enter in any of the menu navigation options (literally things like ‘About’, ‘Newsletters’, ‘Fistulae’, that sort of thing) and you’ll get given a code giving you $1 off the diabetes-inducers. Except it hasn’t worked with any website I’ve tried it on, meaning you need to enter the website url so it can ‘check’, meaning you have to jump through three hoops to get a buck’s discount – presuming you’ve remembered the fcuking promo exists in the first place. At the very least making this a Chrome extension that automatically alerted you to being on a website with an eligible menu would have made vaguely more sense – as it is, this feels very much like a combination of a brand person getting overexcited and noone at the executing agency having the balls to tell them that ‘Oreo Menu’ is never, ever going to become a thing.
• True By Now: I have quite strong ‘this has been hacked together in about 10 minutes’ vibes from this site, but that doesn’t really matter – I very much enjoy the premise behind it, which is basically to go back to old headlines and see whether the thing that it confidently predicted has come to pass has in fact come to pass (it may not surprise you to learn that, as it happens, they mostly haven’t). Obviously we’ve got Elon’s repeated ‘WE ARE GOING TO MARS!’ and ‘VIA A SELF-DRIVING TESLA’ pronouncements and their breathless reporting, but there are also fun nuggets from the past such as ‘underwater holidays will be ubiquitous by 2024’ and ‘Bristol set to become UK’s entirely smoke-free city by 2024’ and if nothing else maybe this will relax you, seeing as seemingly nothing that ever gets predicted anywhere ever seems to come to pass (don’t worry, guys, the planet will be fine!).
• Joseph Wilk: The website of artist Joseph Wilk, whose work spans data and digital and a bit of AI, and whose artist statement reads as follows: “I’m a London born artist working with programming code, realtime media & audio. Through live coding in front of an audience I’ve worked in other performance fields such as dance, theatre, music & cinematography. My experience of disability strongly impacts my practice. Living with pain, physical limitations, disillusionment and disconnection from society affect my thought process and how I create, using my disability and its limitations as part of my process. Performance is a key part of my practice as it fulfils a need to be seen physically and creatively, but in a form I control. We experience the world through our bodies and design dictates how much friction we feel moving through it. I explore automotive forms of expression that utilise new interfaces for alternative bodies.“ There’s some really interesting work here which goes back several years and shows the evolution of the tools and processes available to people working around this space – the generative music stuff from a few years back is particularly interesting imho.
• The Threads API: No, I know, and I don’t care about it either – who, exactly, is using Threads, and what for? I have an account there, but only so I can follow a dozen or so journalists who migrated there from Twitter and as such I don’t really have a feel for the site’s ‘vibe’ (sorry)…it’s interesting though that in almost a year of existence it doesn’t seem to have generated a single cultural moment or meme, despite the user numbers being objectively great…so what is it FOR? Fcuk knows, but now there is an API meaning that if you can be bothered you might be able to start making WEIRD AND INTERESTING THINGS in Mark’s otherwise-sterile ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ textual playground.
• Likewise: This is a cultural recommendation app/website which has INTEGRATED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, to create a natural language layer over its content and thereby somehow MAKE IT BETTER – and, as with so many things where people have just tried to ‘AI it up’…it doesn’t quite work! Oh, ok, that’s not totally fair – it did give me a reasonably-interesting set of book recs when I asked it for ‘dark literary fiction exploring themes of death, family and incest’ (not a personal interest – it’s just curious to test where the guardrails are, and I wanted to see if I could get it to specifically recommend ‘The Cement Garden) which included Nabokov, Eugenedis and ‘Flowers In The Attic’ which in fairness is a decent spread of styles – but it’s slow, and the recommendations don’t link out to anything, and it’s simply not yet better than either just Googling or asking a librarian (on which point, I re-registered with my local library yesterday and it felt genuinely lovely to take out a bunch of graphic novels, highly recommend it), or indeed just asking Claude or another model of your choice. Still, get used to this sort of interface because there are an awful lot of people who have businesses whose futures are predicated on them becoming ubiquitous.
• Donghua Jinglong: Also via Ryan in Garbage Day comes this excellent TikTok account which answers the question ‘what happens when a short video platform becomes the dominant marketing and sales channel, even if your business is not in fact particularly suited to making advertising or content for a short form video platform?’ and which is a window into the exciting world of glycine manufacturer in mainland China. These videos are GREAT – drone footage of glycine factories. Inexplicable smash-cuts, weird visual overlay effects and, of course, the words ‘PREMIUM GLYCINE MANUFACTURE’ in big letters all over the place. This has obviously broken containment and moved away from what I presume is its standard audience of, er, large-scale chemicals buyers (is glycinetok otherwise big?) and has become Somewhat Memetic, to the point that there are apparently a bunch of cryptohustlers attempting to leverage this into memecoins (because obviously there are, it’s 2024 and we are expected to just accept that sentences like that have meaning).
• Clio Books: One of the many exciting ways in which generative AI is making the world better is via the medium of AI-generated books, which anyone who’s spent any time searching on Amazon recently can attest are fcuking EVERYWHERE at the moment (seriously, I wrote this for Another Publication last week: “Amazon continues to fail to get anything resembling a grip on the AI-generated books proliferating on its platform, and which are now guaranteed to show up in search results for any book by, or about, a celebrity. Witness Pogues frontman Shane Macgowan who died in November 2023 and who is commemorated in a range of high-quality tomes,  several of which include AI-generated covers of a suspiciously-healthy looking Macgowan and one in particular which describes the famously-hard-living singer as a business guru who ‘had the ability to solve complex problems and find innovative solutions to any challenge that came his way’. Another ‘celebrity’ to get the AI treatment is Liz Truss – anyone (anyone?) searching for her new book will also find a slew of profiles of the UK’s least-successful Prime Minister, also featuring AI-generated covers and high-quality prose like “Once upon a time, amongst the hallowed halls of British Politics, there emerged a figure whose journey would be etched in the annals of history.” Well, quite.”) – now you too can get in on the LITERARY GOLDRUSH thanks to Clio, an app/website thing which for…some money, will literally Cyrano you through the process of writing a business book, even to the point of letting you (or at least so it claims) just ‘dictate some thoughts’ into your phone and have those turned into a potential-bestseller in minutes! It’s almost certainly not quite that simple – I would imagine, reading between the lines, that it’s just structuring you through some fairly-standard LLM wrangling with successive prompts – but it’s not hard to imagine the market for this, and the sort of INCREDIBLE WISDOM that is going to result. I appreciate that some of you might feel differently about this, but I am firmly of the opinion that all business books are Bad, and largely For Idiots, and this sort of thing is going to make the market even worse.
• Hover States; I don’t seem to have featured this before, despite it being 12 years old – FIE ON ME. “The home of alternative design, code and content on the world wide web. Browse our growing archive of web design inspiration which we have been curating since 2012. We look out for websites that are experimenting with design, interactivity and content in new and interesting ways.” This is HUGELY-useful and definitely worth bookmarking.
• Roots: A collection of images of the root networks of various different trees and plants of different species. These are incredibly satisfying, partly because they just are and partly because they give me an excuse to use the word ‘dendritic’.
• Aruba’s Digital Archive: I heard a really interesting thing on the radio this week about digital curation and archiving and the constant, Cnut-like (again, king not swear) battle against the inexorable and inevitable forces of entropy that all physical and digital media face, and it made me think once again that we are going to one day wake up and realise the vital importance of things like the Internet Archive (and the tragedy of all of the terabytes and petabytes that are gone forever). Anyway, this is a genuinely brilliant project – the tiny Caribbean nation of Aruba (I once lived with a guy from Aruba, who was tiny, incredibly-cheerful and who had the name ‘Juan Sanchez’, making him literally impossible to ever track down again) has digitised its archival history, supported in part by the infrastructure of the Internet Archive, and you can explore it at this url – this is less about the collection (although ethnographers and historians and, perhaps, YOU, will find it interesting) and more about the ethos underpinning it. That which is not saved will be lost forever, innit.
• ASCII World Map: “MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world map renderer for your console” That…that is literally it, but perhaps one of you will find it useful! Maybe it will change your life in some small way! But, in all likelihood, it probably won’t!
• Vertebrate Models: “The openVertebrate project, oVert for short, is a new initiative to provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public. X-ray CT allows researchers to visualize and quantify hard-to-measure characteristics. This image shows high and low density areas of the skull of an Angolan burrowing pig-nosed frog. Florida Museum of Natural History image by Ed Stanley.  Over the next four years, the oVert team will CT scan 20,000 fluid-preserved specimens from U.S. museum collections, producing high-resolution anatomical data for more than 80 percent of vertebrate genera.” Which, yes, is all fine, but what I am taking from this is the fact that there is shortly going to be a massive database that includes models of EVERY SINGLE VERTEBRATE (ish) ON THE PLANET! Which means that if you want a perfectly-accurate representation of, I don’t know, a cane toad, or a sugar glider, or an asp (and you are in the 0.1% of the world’s population who owns or has access to a 3d printer) then you can just make one! The future!
• Eclipse Simulator: Did you get to EXPERIENCE TOTALITY? No, me neither, and yet as is ever the case with ‘stuff that happens to America’, we still have to listen to a bunch of people wang on about it. Still, click this link and see what all the fuss was about.
• Drawback Chess: What if ‘chess, but with each player playing under slightly-tweaked rules in an attempt to even out differences in skill between mismatched opponents’? CLICK THIS LINK AND FIND OUT! This is quite fun, in a ‘I wonder what it would be like playing chess if I am only allowed to move my knights in one specific configuration?’ sort of way.
• Apollo: A brilliant little platform game in which you play as a small, initially-flightless, bird, and have to wander round collecting stuff – this is tightly-designed and just challenging enough, and lasts pretty much the perfect amount of time to make a pleasing 15-minute distraction from whatever it is that is currently causing you pain.
• Poet Gang Playing Cards: Our last miscellaneous link this week is this…surprisingly excellent game, which has equally-surprisingly seemingly been made by hiphop producer Kenny Segal and which sees you engaging in a variety of hiphop-themed card battles with a range of opponents, writing rhymes and dropping beats and building up your card deck…honestly, if you’ve ever played Slay The Spire or one of those types of things then you’ll get this immediately, but if not there’s a decent tutorial and the learning curve’s not too steep. There’s a lot of depth to the mechanics if you want to search for it, with four different characters with different cards and playstyles to unlock, but perhaps the biggest draw here is the music which really is far, far better than you’d expect it to be for a browsergame with graphics that look a little bit like they were made by a 17 year old in 1994 (in a nice way). This is really very impressive and a surprising amount of fun.

By Raymond Lemstra, via TIH

EASE YOURSELF INTO THE HOME STRAIGHT WITH THIS EXCEPTIONAL AND PERFECTLY-SPRINGLIKE MIX OF GENUINELY OBSCURE DISCO, FUNK AND OTHER BITS AND PIECES CHOSEN BY TEE CARDACI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Stamp Curse: The curatorial principle behind this account isn’t ENTIRELY clear to me, but, well, STAMPS! LOTS OF STAMPS! I think, as far as I can tell, the stamps featured tend to be in some way related to the news – there were loads featuring images of eclipses over the past week, for example – should that give you a compelling reason to follow this one.
• Artificial Drag Race: Hosted by an AI Betty Boop, and featuring a host of highly-copyrighted cartoon figures from pop culture, this probably isn’t going to be online for very long – but if you’ve ever wanted to experience Bugs Bunny facing off against Donkey Kong to see who serves the most cnut, then, well, HERE YOU ARE!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Leela Corman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

You know what, everyone? I…I really enjoyed having a week off. I know, I know, I’m supposed to say that I missed all the web and the links and stuff, but in actual fact it was really, really nice not to actually have to read 300 fcuking websites every day.

Yes, I know that I don’t technically *have* to do this – after all, noone is asking me (some, I am sure, would very much prefer it if I stopped) and noone is paying me and, in the main, noone cares – but the one thing that I did realise from taking a short break is that I am now in the unfortunate position where ‘writing the fcuker’ is effectively so much a part of my idea of myself at this point in time that without it I worry I might just sort of collapse into nothingness.

What I am saying, basically, is that you may want these emails to stop, *I* may want these emails to stop, but these emails may in fact never stop until I stop (in the definitive sense).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably hoping it picks up after this bit (it doesn’t, sadly).

By Shardcore

LET’S EASE OURSELVES INTO THE LINKS (GENTLY!) WITH THIS LOVELY MIX OF WHAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘GREAT SONGS’ COMPILED BY TOM SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH WITH ALL THIS SEXY POLITICAL KOMPROMAT NEWS IN THE PAPERS IS TODAY FONDLY REMEMBERING THE STORY OF FORMER LIBERAL DEMOCRAT POLITICIAN MARK OATEN, WHO WAS EXPOSED AS A COPROPHILE WHEN THE SEX WORKER HE HAD BEEN EMPLOYING TO POO ON HIM RECOGNISED HIM ON NEWSNIGHT, PT.1:  

By Shannon Cartier Lucy

OUR NEXT MIX IS ANOTHER BUNCH OF BEATS AND BLEEPS MIXED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH WITH ALL THIS SEXY POLITICAL KOMPROMAT NEWS IN THE PAPERS IS TODAY FONDLY REMEMBERING THE STORY OF FORMER LIBERAL DEMOCRAT POLITICIAN MARK OATEN, WHO WAS EXPOSED AS A COPROPHILE WHEN THE SEX WORKER HE HAD BEEN EMPLOYING TO POO ON HIM RECOGNISED HIM ON NEWSNIGHT, PT.2:

• Geddit: I genuinely had no idea that Reddit was used by some people as a sort of online shopping destination, sort of like Facebook Marketplace for people who unironically use the word ‘normies’ in actual, out-loud conversation, but apparently it is and Geddit is a nice little window into the slightly-odd world that is peer to peer online selling. You can filter by location or specific subReddit, but there doesn’t seem much going on in the UK – instead, it’s fun just to scroll through and treat it as a sort of temperature reading of Middle American wants, by which token WOW are people worryingly into flickknives in the States right now!
• Cellular Automata: I genuinely don’t understand what this is or what it’s for, but it makes oddly-pleasing low-res black and white abstract pixel renders which for some reason I found oddly soothing and for some reason you might too.
• The Curricula: This doesn’t feel like a good idea, I must say. “What if Wikipedia, but spun up entirely by an LLM?” is the question which as far as I can tell the Curricula appears to be trying to answer – type in…well, anything related to an area of study or field of knowledge and the site will spit out a bunch of ‘information’ (or at least, information-shaped words) and a bunch of related concepts you can ‘dive into’…except it’s all so depressingly *thin* and *stupid*, like the very worst of tissue-thin AI-generated prose, and it feels like gruel by comparison to the FILLING, HUMAN-COOKED MEAL that is Wikipedia (this is both a terrible metaphor and a weirdly-funny one – imagine going back 20 years and suggesting to anyone that Wikipedia would one day be looked upon as a heartwarming example of collective human effort and endeavour!). If you want a vision of the level of ‘content’ that we’re going to get as a result of the ubiquity of LLMs, this is very much it and it is empty and stupid and hollow.
• Am I Flying On A Boeing?: Plug in your flight number and let this site tell you whether you need to supplement your aviophobia with, er, Boeingphobia! Feels like a rival plane manufacturer could reasonably chuck whoever’s behind this a few quid for a badging exercise here.
• Palmsy: Have you been enjoying the latest smartphone-related moral panic? No, me neither tbh. Still, you probably have OPINIONS about the extent to which ether smartphones have ruined lives OR the problem is and always has been PEOPLE and SOCIETY and PROBABLY CAPITALISM (delete per your personal preference) – Palmsy is either a darkly-funny bit of satire or a slightly-troubling reflection of how broken we all are by Posters’ Disease (probably a bit of both tbh), which presents itself as a new social media app with all the functionality you’d expect, posting and liking and sharing, except…there’s no social network there, it’s all a ‘game’, and all your posts exist only within the app; the ‘reactions’ and ‘responses’ you get are all from the app itself, with commenter names ascribed to real people from your contacts so you get the illusion of a real network…IS IT ART? IS IT DIGITAL METHADONE? I genuinely have no idea, but I found some of the comments on the App Store listing a bit…weird, tbh. “Palmsy is just fun. The people “liking” your posts didn’t actually see your post. Palmsy just pretends they did by pulling random folks from your contacts. It’s funny to see who is still in my contacts. Then, I weirdly get the dopamine hit of social media likes without the indignity of posting on social.” That’s the interesting bit, I think – the fact that the dopamine hit exists with nothing behind it, which admittedly sounds like there might be something psychologically…a bit *off* with our relationship with this stuff (STOP THE FCUKING PRESSES, I KNOW!).
• NewspaperMap: ALL OF THE WORLDS NEWSPAPERS, ON A MAP! Ok, fine, I have no way of knowing whether it is in fact ALL of the world’s newspapers, and I suspect it probably isn’t, but there are definitely a LOT – zoom around and see where their offices are and get links to their websites. Surprisingly useful if you want to get an overview of local media in a specific geography, and, presumably, should you want to finally make a pilgrimage to the Socialist Worker HQ (it’s in Deptford. Of course it’s in Deptford).
• A Call For Crab Jokes: I had no idea that there was a Crab Museum in Margate (I suppose there needs to be more than just the art gallery and half-a-dozen terrible watercolourists to sustain all those chronically-overpriced small plates restaurants), but there is, and they need YOUR help. 26th of April is INTERNATIONAL CRAB DAY (I am telling you in plenty of time so that you can start planning the street party), and the museum is celebrating by (and this is slightly baffling to me, but wevs) asking YOU, the great unwashed, to submit their entries for THE BEST JOKE ABOUT CRABS OF ALL TIME, which will be judged by a genuinely-impressive panel of comedians to find the winner, which will be honoured at a special ceremony. I’ve spent the two minutes it’s taken me to type this bit trying to think of a crab-related joke and I am fcuking BAFFLED, but then again I am approximately as funny as AIDS and I expect you all to do significantly better. Should one of you win, I ask only that you dedicate the victory to ME.
• Get A New Emoji Approved: It’s that time again! The Unicode Consortium, the oddly-shadowy body that oversees the emoji universe (they’re not shadowy, to be clear, just that the name very much *sounds* like they should be – protip, if you want to sound benign and not in fact massively sinister, maybe avoid the word ‘consortium’), is once again accepting suggestions for new emoji that they should add to the canon (over time – this is a slooooooow process). I have featured this before in Curios, because I think it’s a genuinely interesting and perfectly-democratic opportunity to actually have a lasting, if small, impact on human culture – I fcuking HATED emoji when they first became part of our common lingua franca (look, I like letters and words, I am a traditinionalist) and I still largely disdain them for personal use, but I grudgingly accept that mine is a minority viewpoint and that they are hugely useful for billions, and they are culturally significant in a way that my having spaffed out over a million words of this sh1t over the past 13 years will never be (not bitter), and the idea that YOU, gentle reader, could be responsible for the creation of an entirely new communicatory symbol that will be used by people who haven’t even been born yet is quite magical, even for dead inside me. You can read a decent guide to ‘what they are looking for in a new emoji’ here – GO, WEBMONGS, GO!
• British Place Name Finder: Would you like a website which will help you find every single village in the UK with the word ‘bum’ in its name? Yes, yes you would, don’t pretend that you’re ‘better’ than that. This is potentially really useful for anyone searching for places with specific name-types for PR stunt purposes, but also for really, really puerile reasons. Why not use it to plan a ‘childishly-named places’ holiday tour of the UK?
• Fightback NYC: This is interesting – not sure what I make of it, but it’s certainly a curious idea. The blurb is as follows: “Fight Back is a theatrical experiment. It’s March 13, 1989, and you are attending a meeting of ACT UP New York, the passionate group taking direct confrontational action to fight the AIDS crisis. But here’s the thing. There are no actors. It’s not a performance that you sit and watch. You and everyone there are active participants in the meeting.” It’s basically ‘Historic Moments In Social Justice: The LARP’, which, I’ll be honest, makes me do some pretty intense internal self-pretzeling at the imaginary awkwardness of it all, but this is taking place in NYC and hence I imagine all the people participating will have that peculiarly North American level of self-possession that means that they can do sh1t like this and not feel like a terrible fcuking pseud. Anyway, should any of you reading in New York happen to check this out I would love to know what it’s like to experience.
• OffShore Wind: A global map of offshore windfarms, presented more out of curiosity than because I expect any of you to do anything with it. It did strike me, though, that there really should be more of these and I was slightly surprised by how sparse some regions are in terms of coverage (although, equally, I am utterly ignorant of the meteorological conditions needed for a wind farm to be viable, other than the very basic ‘wind’, and as such should probably shut up).
• Not To Do: More app-based artfun from Friend of Curios Damjanski – Not To Do is a very simple app with a very simple premise, which is that each day it will present you with a list of three tasks that you definitely, 100% SHOULD NOT DO that day. It’s $3, because artists have to eat, but as far as pointless, silly, funny apps go I rather like it.
• Ahead: An old art project that I have only just come across: “In English, AHEAD means to move forward, to lead or progress. The title is also a pun: A HEAD (one head). Kruithof began this project by thinking about how to create an anonymous portrait, where the subject’s identity remains private. By capturing the back of the head, one cannot recognize gender, nationality, age, and emotions of the sitter. Removing these features, which always fall within the tradition of portrait photography, unifies all resulting pictures. In addition, facial recognition algorithms are unable to identify or verify a person’s identity from a picture like this: AHEAD shows a flaw in human encyclopedic tendency by means of anti-labeling and anti-classification. For AHEAD, Kruithof took 1,080 pictures in Berlin, New York and Mexico City using an iPhone. She left each subject to choose her or his background color, as if they were taking a selfie, but facing the background instead of posing in front of it. For the final installation, the pictures have been arranged in a grid, the same way digital photographs are usually organized online and visualized on mobile devices. From the distance, each portrait in this series looks like a single dot, resembling a pixel forming, in turn, a bigger picture.” There’s something very pleasing indeed about the accumulated backs-of-heads here, though I couldn’t quite explain why.
• Latent Places: Via Jamie Stantonian comes this excellent TikTok account which shares AI-generated horrors which have been treated with some pleasing filters to give them the grainy air of handheld camera footage, along with 50s-doc-style AI voices, making the weird all the weirder. Really nicely done with a very strong unifying aesthetic (/pseud).
• Ways of Seeing: This is SUCH AN INCREDIBLE INTRODUCTION TO ART! Classical art, to be clear, but for anyone interested in art history who wants a ‘from the top’ grounding, this is superb and so, so interesting. “Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art” – honestly, this is really wonderful, a proper grounding in the social and economic and cultural backdrop to works across styles and eras. In 2024 this would be a 9h YouTube video – which is fine, but sometimes words are good too.
• A Green Fuzzy Ball: In your browser. Pick it up. Move it around. Marvel at the physics of the little green hairs. That’s it, we can move on now, but wasn’t that nice?
• Concrete: The world of specific and niche professional organisations always intrigues me (I think it stems from discovering that there is, amongst the Guilds of the City of London, a Worshipful Guild of Basketmakers, who I can’t imagine are THAT busy at this particular juncture and who must feel a bit…inferior when hanging out with, say, the goldsmiths or the bankers), and so I was thrilled to discover that not only is there a Global Cement and Concrete Association (there is!) but also that they run an annual photo contest (which must at this point be the only fcuking annual photo contest I have yet to feature in this sodding newsletter) celebrating the very best photos of, er, stuff made out of cement and concrete. Ignore the environmental impact of the building materials in question (no, really, you have to because otherwise you can’t really enjoy them) and instead enjoy the ENORMOUS GREY EXPANSES on view here – not all of the images are stellar, to my mind, but there is some quite remarkable architecture on display in some of these, and the framing in a few shots is exquisite. One small note – the Global Cement and Concrete Association doesn’t appear to have a mascot, which feels like a MASSIVE OVERSIGHT and an excellent opportunity if you ask me (“Conky The Mixer”, anyone?).
• The World Nature Photography Awards 2024: From brutalism to beautiful nature, now (SEAMLESS, Matt, seamless!), with this year’s World Nature Photography Awards – I say this every year, I know, but personally I find all these images so post-produced and HDR’d that I don’t really see them anymore, but you may have a higher tolerance for this particular style than I do. You can buy all of the featured images as prints, should you so desire – which does rather beg the question ‘who the fcuk is buying a wall print of that photo of all the severed monkey heads in a basket, because fcuk me that is some bleak domestic art?’.
• Flipbook: The Dataviz wizards at The Pudding are running a little experiment in collaborative webwork – they’re asking people to submit a single hand-drawn frame to contribute to the longest collaboratively-created flipbook animation ever. Click the link, draw a frame, sign up to get alerted when (if) it ever gets completed. This is, per their explanation, a question about data corruption: “This is essentially an experiment in generation loss; how will the original drawing mutate as it is traced by more and more people?” Genuinely curious to see the end result of this.
• Insane Interior DesignTok: You know people say that we haven’t quite worked out how odd ‘content’ is going to get in the very imminent future? I felt that when watching these. This TikTok account shares CG videos of VERY VERY ODD interior design stuff, with an equally odd, stilted, AI-generated voice-over…I don’t quite understand the workflow here or how these are being made (the CG feels ‘proper’, though), but there’s something undeniably, weirdly compelling about them…I think the weird thing is that I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY. It’s scratching something somewhere in my brain that I recognise but can’t quite define, and I wonder whether this is something we’re going to get more of – stuff that The Machine works out ‘works’ for people, and which appeals to us but for reasons that we simply can’t define because it’s exploiting patterns or quirks that we ourselves haven’t noticed yet…Anyway, this is fcuking weird and I like it a lot – no idea how much if anything is AI’d here, but it FEELS of that ilk of thing.
• Guess My RGB: Move the sliders until you’ve matched the RGB value to the background colour on-screen. Which I appreciate sounds about as much fun as self-administered urethral surgery, but which I promise is significantly better than that!
• The New York Times Simulator: A wonderful little game by the perennially-talented Molleindustria, who’s created this game in which you have to ‘run’ the New York Times, selecting headlines for the front page which will appease the various audiences you’re beholden to. This is SATIRE, and so the stakeholders in question are the Police, the Rich, and Israel (on which point, regardless of your position on the conflict in Gaza right now I don’t think it’s possible to look at the way it’s been reported in the NYT and not think ‘yes, ok, there is possibly some pandering here’), and there are some nice touches such as the ability to rewrite headlines into the passive voice to curry favour.
• Knot: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this very simple game which sees you attempt to unscramble the links by moving tiles around – this is SUPER GENTLE, and scratches a very particular part of my brain that doesn’t get scratched as often as I feel it might want to be.

By Mercedes Helnwein

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SUPER 80s-ISH LASERDISCO-Y SELECTION BY PRIZ! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Patchwork Letters: Sent to me by Kris, this is a lovely Insta maintained by one Alicia, in which they share pottery and paintings they are making – there’s an occasional series of little watercolour squares of that day’s sky which are genuinely beautiful.
• Parisian Chairs: Literally just a collection of photos of the patterns on chairs in Paris – you know, the ones whose seat and back are made from woven plastic strands in different colours? Yeah, those ones. Like all these sorts of collections, this is unexpectedly and slightly-weirdly compelling.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Allegra Pacheco

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: