THEY MADE FOOTBALL WOKE, ALAN! THEY ONLY WENT AND DID IT!

(As ever, this is an INTENSELY-anglocentric opening line which I can only apologise to any non-UK readers for; although, honestly, for any North Americans reading this, it feels like a reasonable exchange for having to hear so much about that tedious fcuking anti-Apple case)

Yes, another week and another preposterous, confected argument about something of no consequence whatsoever to distract us from the fact that nothing works and everything is a broken mess and the only certainty we can have in these times of chaos and flux and change is that there is no prospect of it improving anytime soon.

Oh, no, hang on, there is one other certainty – Web Curios! Except, er, I am taking a week off because Easter’s coming up and it’s a bank holiday here in the UK next Friday, and I see no reason why I should get up at 6am to produce a massive, unwieldy mess of a newsletter for an audience of people who’ll be too bloated on confectionary eggs to care.

So enjoy these links – they are good ones, I promise, better than the usual sh1t I palm you off with – and enjoy whatever flavour of Paschal fun you have planned (unless you’re planning on staging an actual crucifixion – I don’t endorse that), and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Til then, though, I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might want to consider celebrating this Easter by manifesting stigmata or something.

By Brigitte Yoshiko Pruchnow (all images this week are from TIH)

IT IS CURRENTLY 659AM AND I AM WAKING MYSELF UP WITH THIS FUN HOUR-LONG SET OF JUMP-UP D’N’B AND SOME EXCELLENT MC’ING TO BOOT – YOU SHOULD TRY IT! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS INEXPLICABLY HAVING EMBARRASSING FLASHBACKS TO GOING TO MIDNIGHT MASS IN ROME FOR EASTER AS A SMALL KID AND OUTRIGHT REFUSING TO KISS THE FEET OF THE CROSS WHEN IT WAS PARADED ROUND BECAUSE EVEN AS A CHILD THAT FELT WEIRDLY-FETISHISTIC, PT.1:  

By Sarena Vand

OUR NEXT PLAYLIST IS ANOTHER ONE BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL, WHO THIS WEEK PRESENTS WHAT HE CALLS ‘HAUNTOLOGY’ AND I CALL ‘VAGUELY-SPOOKY ELECTRO-AMBIENT STUFF’! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS INEXPLICABLY HAVING EMBARRASSING FLASHBACKS TO GOING TO MIDNIGHT MASS IN ROME FOR EASTER AS A SMALL KID AND OUTRIGHT REFUSING TO KISS THE FEET OF THE CROSS WHEN IT WAS PARADED ROUND BECAUSE EVEN AS A CHILD THAT FELT WEIRDLY-FETISHISTIC, PT.2:  

• Pencilbooth: You know how we have very much reached podcast saturation point? Yeah, well, probably also newsletters too if I’m honest with you – I think I’m currently at a point of receiving approximately 35 a day at the moment, and, even as someone whos tolerance for ‘having a violent quantity of information fired at their eyeballs’ is reasonably high I think that I might be reaching my upper limit. Still, such obvious, pathetic gatekeeping aside, I appreciate that there may be some people with CREATIVE ASPIRATIONS who might still like the idea of having an occasional missive to send into the void, but who might equally have previously been put off by the whole ‘writing’ thing – well Pencilbooth is for you, in that case! This is a new newslettering platform which has been designed to be visual-first – so if you want to send a monthly email blast featuring your drawings, say, or curated works that you have found, this might be an interesting (and aesthetically-worthwhile) platform to explore. It’s paid, obviously, but at $29 a month for lists with fewer than 5000 subs that strikes me as a not-unreasonable cost (and there’s a free tier for upto 100 people, which strikes me as perfect for people who just want to keep their friends and family updated with, say, their photos or their DREADFUL INSTAPOETRY).
• GPT4All: Want to download your own LLM onto your own machine and fiddle around with the great unknowable black box that is current-gen AI? GREAT! This is a pretty good place to start if you’re curious – this is techy, but also nowhere NEAR as techy as it can be, and it’s actually pretty userfriendly from an installation point of view: “GPT4All is an ecosystem to train and deploy powerful and customized large language models that run locally on consumer grade CPUs. The goal is simple – be the best instruction tuned assistant-style language model that any person or enterprise can freely use, distribute and build on. A GPT4All model is a 3GB – 8GB file that you can download and plug into the GPT4All open-source ecosystem software. Nomic AI supports and maintains this software ecosystem to enforce quality and security alongside spearheading the effort to allow any person or enterprise to easily train and deploy their own on-edge large language models.” You will need a reasonably powerful rig to make this work without it bricking your machine, to be clear – still, if you want to futz around with making your own personal digital slave that lives on your machine and does your bidding, HERE YOU ARE!
• Make Your Pet: Oh I love this! A YouTube channel which seemingly exists for the sole purpose of helping people build their own, slightly-unsettling, 3d-printed, many-legged scuttling robot! Fine, you’ll need to be in the 0.001% of the global population that has access to a working 3d printer (remember when 3d printing was going to be a thing and usher in the first wave of post-scarcity economics? Man was I stupid to believe in all that!) and you’ll need to be the sort of person for whom the prospect of ‘soldering stuff to a motherboard’ and talk of ‘servos’ isn’t total anathema, but if you’re significantly more practical and engineer-y than, say, me, you will find a lot to love here. For the right type of person (or the wrong type, potentially, from their partner’s point of view) this is a whole new obsession waiting to happen.
• The British Wildlife Photography Awards 2024: MORE PICTURES OF THE CRITTERS! It’s quite hard to find anything to feel particularly proud of at the moment from a ‘being British’ point of view, but we do at least have some very pretty wildlife – or at least we do now, before the final sewers overflow and all the rivers are forever irrevocably bemerded. Still, while we wait for that fecal apocalypse to overtake us, why not take a moment to enjoy these genuinely beautiful pictures of local fauna – these are SUCH great photos, with a wonderful range of subjects and styles. My personal favourite is the one with the badger (you’ll know the one I mean), but they are all gorgeous.
• Flagwaver: A website which does nothing other than show you a flag, rendered in 3d and fluttering in an imaginary digital breeze – you can replace the image on the flag with an image of WHATEVER YOU LIKE, and so I am including it because I quite like the idea of using it as a way of gently trolling people who have chosen to take inexplicably-strong positions on something really dumb; there’s something quite pleasing about the idea of making a really shit ‘flag’ in MS Paint saying “NO TO WOKE FOOTBALL KITS” and flying it proudly on a digital background to point out how incredibly fcuking pathetic it is.
• Vision Unbound: This feels like a companion to the HTML review – certainly the four works collected here wouldn’t be out of place in that collection, seeing as they cover similar themes of the interplay between words and digital form. Vision Unbound is “an exhibition taking place during Women’s History Month, that honors the genius of four women—Melody Mou Peijing, Amira Hanafi, Priti Pandurangan, and Marisa Parham—whose art challenges us to rethink the possibilities of the digital medium and our perspective of the world.” Ok, so one of the works is in Arabic and as such I can only marvel at the beauty of the webwork and the script, but the other three are gorgeous (and not new – slightly disappointed in myself that I hadn’t seen them before). In particular I enjoyed the interplay between voice-over and animation in “Meghadūtam” by Priti Pandurangan, but you will have your own favourite (you’d better).
• Moai In Games: Have you ever thought to yourself “you know what? I wish someone, somewhere, was undertaking a selfless quest to exhaustively catalogue all the instances in which a Maoi – one of those massive stone heads from Easter Island – appears in a videogame?” OF COURSE YOU HAVE, WHO HASN’T, NO FCUKER THAT’S WHO! Thank God, then, for this website which is doing EXACTLY THAT – here you will find a list of seemingly hundreds of titles which at some point have featured a Maoi, even if fleetingly, along with screenshotted (and occasionally YouTubed) evidence. Why? According to the FAQ, ‘because Maoi are awesome’, which feels like all the justification one really needs here.
• Trangram: No, not a typo. My regular ‘link nicked from Giuseppe’ of the week comes in the shape of this rather useful webtool for creating simple animations in-browser; obviously this is a LONG WAY from anything I am ever going to use (images scare me, what can I say? LEAVE ME ALONE WITH MY WORDS) but it looks like it might actually be pretty flexible and useful for any of you who have the creative talent and visual acuity to actually make something.
• Nobody Sausage: I was sent this on Twitter by Paulina Mitelsztedt – THANKYOU PAULINA – and she’s right, it *is* funny. Nobody Sausage is a Twitter account (I presume it’s multiplatform, but fcukit, we’re sticking with Twitter) featuring short CG animations of vaguely-sausage-like humanoids (yes, I know, but it makes sense in context) having ‘relatably funny experiences’ which I know sounds about as likely to be my ‘thing’ as ‘taking a cheesegrater to my knees’ but whose gently-Mr Bean-ish Eurohumour (I think it’s a Spanish thing) amused me more than expected, thanks in part to the (genuinely charming) character models and animation style.
• Movie Posters Perfected: I’ve honestly never met an actual human being who owns a ‘digital display frame’, but I presume that some must exist – I can’t imagine for a second that any of them are the types of people to read Web Curios, but in the vanishingly-unlikely scenario that YOU, gentle reader, are in possession of such a thing AND you really, really like film posters from the past then BOY do I have the link for you! Movie Posters Perfected sells itself as “a curated collection of digital movie posters—from today’s blockbusters to classic films. As a live, cloud-based library, you never have to lift a finger to add new posters. The moment we add a new poster to our library, it automatically appears on your connected display”, and, well, it certainly does appear to have a lot of film posters. Apparently they’ve all been touched up and optimised for hi-def display, and given the fact that the site’s promising you access to the collection IN PERPETUITY (I do not believe this) for a mere $20, this feels like a non-terrible deal for the gadget-obsessed movie buff in your life (should you not have one of those in your life, you can probably skip this one).
• The AI Minecraft Challenge: Are any of you really into coding, AI AND Minecraft? No, didn’t think so. Still, maybe you know someone who is – I think this is a really interesting contest and I am genuinely curious to see what ends up coming out of it. “The Settlement Generation Challenge is about writing an algorithm that can create a settlement for a given, unknown Minecraft map. The challenge is to produce an algorithm that is adaptive towards the provided map, creates a settlement that satisfies a range of functional requirements – but also looks good and evokes an interesting narrative. The goal is to basically produce an algorithm that can rival the state of the art of what humans can produce. So far there have been 5 iterations of the challenge: once in 2018, and in 2019, in 2020, in 2021 and in 2023. You can watch the presentation for last years winner’s”.Now I’ve never played Minecraft and don’t have a particular personal interest in it, but I scrubbed through the 2023 winners video and the stuff being generated here is pretty astonishing and suggests that even if narrative game development’s a way away from being upended by The Machine we’re going to see some really interesting leaps in what’s possible with procgen and algorithmic worldbuilding.
• LightTwist: This is VERY beta, and there’s not an awful lot of info up on the site beyond the demo video, for which reason I’m appending a very big ‘THIS MIGHT IN FACT ALL BE B0LLOCKS’ notice to the link – still, the aforementioned video certainly *looks* impressive, and the basic premise of LightTwist (“we let you do pro-quality greenscreen work using just your phone and browser, which means that you can effectively start doing ‘studio-quality’ (hm) broadcast work from your own bedroom without a bunch of super-fancy kit”) seems like an obviously attractive one in the CREATOR AGE (so tired).
• Bad Movies: Slightly amazed that I haven’t apparently featured this before, but, well, apparently not. Still, better late than never (I am disgusted with myself) – Bad Movies is, as you might possibly have guessed, a site dedicated to celebrating films that are, objectively, bad. There are reviews, there are screenshots, there are links to buy and watch some of them, and were it not for this wonderful trove of cinephilic information I would never have learned that someone once greenlit, financed and filmed an actual cinematic release called ‘Nude On The Moon’, in which man goes to space and discovers it is covered in naked (or at least topless) women. It is FULL of this stuff, and if you’re a particular type of person I have your next ‘newsletter or film club project’ RIGHT HERE (but, per an earlier link, maybe not the newsletter, eh?). BONUS OBSCURE FILM CONTENT! This is RareLust, “a personal project started  in 2012 to keep rare flick rips alive freely and stop sellers who sell these movies at insane price”, and which features links to rips of HUNDREDS of (incredibly fcuking obscure and in all likelihood often probably terrible) films. You want somewhere to get a torrent of ‘Ninja Zombie’, a 1992 film in which “Orlan Sands is threatened by an evil spider-themed karate cult seeking the location of an archaeological dig unearthing a rare magical artefact”? OF COURSE YOU FCUKING DO!
• TokiPona: Do you speak Esperanto? No, you don’t, stop lying. Still, if you DO fancy taking up a synthetic language, and if the desperately-uncool vibes that Esperanto has always given off have put you off somewhat, why not explore TokiPona, which is not only FAR cuter-sounding but has apparently been around for a decade or so, contains only 137 words and is the work of a SINGLE PERSON! I think this is astonishing and honestly quite beautiful – leaving aside whether or not you think we ‘need’ an additional synthetic language (and, parenthetically, fcuk you and your tediously instrumental view of the world), there’s something hugely interesting about the attempt to distil meaning into a deliberately small and constrained quantity of signifiers. Maybe I’ll start offering Curios translated into TokiPona.
• List of Rejected Icelandic Female Names: I both adore this and am baffled by it. According to the webpage, “In Iceland only names which appear on the Personal Names Register are allowed to use. Other names cannot be used, but it is possible to apply to a committee for permission to use a name which is not yet listed. The committee does not accept every name. A name submitted to the naming committee for approval is considered for its compatibility with Icelandic tradition and for the likelihood that it might cause the bearer embarrassment. It must be compatible with Icelandic grammar and contain only letters occurring in the Icelandic alphabet. A name’s grammatical gender must match the sex of the person bearing the name. There are occasional exceptions, e.g. if a name has traditionally been used by a certain number of Icelanders.” This, therefore, is a list of all the rejected names, ones which you shouldn’t bother trying to register because, well, they’re already on the banned list. WHY ARE YOU NOT ALLOWED TO BE CALLED ‘KELLY’ IN ICELAND? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ‘MAXINE’? Honestly, are any of you Icelandic? Does anyone fancy explaining this to me properly, because I am honestly baffled. Oh, the root url of this webpage is a site dedicated solely to Nordic names – no idea why, but if you’re writing a scandi noir and want to make sure that all of your clinically-depressed characters have authentic monikers then this might be helpful.
• Riddler: Start with one word, get to a different word by changing each of the initial word’s letters, one at a time – this is a daily puzzle, with the challenge not so much ‘can you solve it?’ as ‘how quickly can you do it, you miserable worm?’ which adds a pleasing element of ‘against the clock’ tension to what’s a nice potential addition to the daily pre-work procrastination round.
• You Are Laika: Finally this week, a small text adventure in which you play as Laika, the first dog to be sent to space. This is BRUTAL, I have to warn you, but also incredibly effective – I know this is quite a w4nky observation, but I have a real thing for ‘interactive fictions’ which play with one’s expectations about player agency as an integral part of the narrative (sorry – I did say it was w4nky, though). But, mainly, it is utterly, utterly brutal – if this doesn’t in some way affect you then you have a heart of absolute stone and frankly I think you should possibly be on some sort of list. Many of you will absolutely bawl your eyes out at this, so, er, there’s a reason to click! Fcuking hell I am bad at this.

By Yana Olen

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS EXCELLENT AND PLEASINGLY-HARD TECH-HOUSE SET FROM MHA IRI! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Vallesia Obscura: VERY GOTH-Y HALLOWE’EN-Y AI IMAGES! Basically everything on here looks EXACTLY like the very specific sort of visual style that every single vampirey horror film seemed to aspire to in the mid-00s (that isn’t as much of a cuss as I appreciate it sounds), with a light dash of Tim Burton and that poor dead guy with all the bones tatted on his face.
• X New Worlds: “I’m Suze, a London based visual artist experimenting with surreal and absurd dreamscapes” – so runs the bio on this feed, which presents fragments of work combining AI-generated imagery with more traditional editing software to make…fcuk, I LOVE this, it is creepy and horrible, but not in the way that so much AI stuff is and therefore in ways that are INTERESTING and unpredictable, and there’s something about what’s being done with movement in these films and images that feels wrong in a really pleasing way. This is significantly more interesting than the vast majority of work being made with AI at the moment, imho at least.
• The Sketchymaker: The insta feed of an Aberdeen-based artist who makes 3d printed, or concrete-cast, models and sculptures, featuring things like LEGO minifigs, and places them around the city as public art and a general ‘here’s a surprisingly lovely thing’ bonus for residents (that’s not all he does – there’s other work there too, though it all tends towards the pop culturally-scultptural) – this is just LOVELY.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Pierre Huyghe

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This week in the UK, racism and monarchy – it’s just like old times!

I imagine you’re probably all DESPERATE for something to read that isn’t about That Fcuking Family, in any case, so thank GOD for Web Curios, Republican (not in the American sense, for the avoidance of doubt) and largely-disinterested to the very end.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and aren’t you glad you know how to pronounce ‘Cholmondley’ now?

By Fran Alvez

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A FABULOUS SELECTION BY MARSHMELLO WHICH I CAN BEST DESCRIBE AS ‘SORT OF JAZZY HOUSE’ BUT WHICH HONESTLY IS LOADS BETTER THAN THAT HAMFISTED ATTEMPT MAKES IT SOUND! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHY IT’S OK TO KINK-SHAME WILLS FOR LIKING IT IN THE BUM FROM HIS MISTRESS, PT.1:  

By  Jess Allen

NEXT UP WE HAVE THIS EXCELLENT ACID TECHNO SET BY NINI WHICH WILL APPEAL TO ANY OF YOU WHO REMEMBER THE LIBERATOR DJS! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHY IT’S OK TO KINK-SHAME WILLS FOR LIKING IT IN THE BUM FROM HIS MISTRESS, PT.2:  

• Browser Buddy: This is BRILLIANT, and really unexpectedly so – serendipitous discovery engines for the web are an idea I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time thinking about, and talking about, but without ever really being able to work out what a ‘good’ modern version of Stumbleupon or similar might look like. For a while there were a few useful, fun tools that scraped Twitter’s API to find links being shared in interesting communities (RIP Belong, I miss you and you are wiv da angles now), but in their absence I’ve been jonesing for something that would send me to interesting, unexpected and new (to me at least) online spaces…and now, thanks to Browser Buddy, I sort of have one again, and it is GREAT. This is basically just a Chrome extension – install it, and a small window will sit in the bottom right of your browser window. Each time you visit a website, a selection of other sites that Browser Buddy thinks are ‘similar’ will be displayed in the window which you can click on to visit in a new tab – that’s it. BUT HONESTLY IT IS SO GOOD! I narcissistically tried it on the Curios domain, and it recommended 9 sites to me, three of which were sources I already use (good, shows relevance) and six which were personal blogs by total strangers that were all COMPLETELY new to me and which led me down a bunch of odd rabbitholes and the whole experience was joyfully random and un-funneled, and, honestly, I think this might be brilliant. CAVEAT: I obviously have no idea if this is hiding some sort of unpleasant malware – so far I don’t SEEM to have been defrauded, but should that change I’ll be sure to let you know.
• The TFL Archives: A lovely archival project by the people at Google Arts and Culture, in conjunction with TFL, which presents literally ALL the information you could ever possibly want about the tube (ok, fine, it’s possible that there are some of you for whom even this trove won’t suffice, but some of you have PROBLEMS is all I’m saying) – from the history of each line to pre-underground public transport to the evolution of the legendary map to the design of the roundel…this is lovely, and exactly the sort of thing that, let’s be honest, TFL totally wouldn’t have made without the corporate ‘philanthropy’.
• Adam Fuhrer: The Twitter account of Adam Fuhrer, an artist and illustrator from Toronto whose work I was going to feature in here this week anyway but who in an AMAZING ACT OF ONLINE SERENDIPITY got in touch with me yesterday to introduce himself and his work, which was genuinely lovely and a nice reminder of the fact that when you make things and put them out online they will always have a life of their own, however small and however transient. Anyway, Adam’s twitter feed features a selection of his ink work, which is beautiful and mathematical and code-inspired and which honestly I would pay money for if he wanted to flog me one (oh, hang on, there’s a shop here), but you can see more on his website alongside a few creative coding projects (one of which I feel certain I’ve featured in here before) – this is lovely work, and almost perfectly up my street.
• The Greatest Name In Sports: I am a HUGE fan of ridiculous names – for years I’ve featured the annual ‘name of the year bracket’ in Curios (I totally forgot last year’s, but 2024’s has just been announced and you can enjoy the selection here – Zarique Nutter is a particular favourite) – but this is possibly the apogee of the quest to find the most ridiculously-monikered person ever to have played professional sports anywhere in the world. This has been going on on Reddit for AGES and now they’re down to the last 8 – but the real joy comes from the ORIGINAL MASTER SPREADSHEET which contains nearly 3,000 verified sportspeople with truly remarkable handles. From the regal majesty of Vonteego Cummings to the insanely-pleasing-to-say Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, every single one of these is a joy – that said, I’m finding it hard to see beyond ‘Ugly Dickshot’ as winner of the ultimate accolade.
• Dead Simple Sites: A collection of websites characterised by simple, no-frills webdesign, based on the principle that, sometimes, less is better. I don’t necessarily find all of these to be to my taste, but there’s something undeniably arresting about the starkness of some of the design choices here.
• Sebastian Lempens: Pretty much the diametric opposite of the design ethos espoused by the previous link, this is a VERY fancy, massively-overengineered and utterly charming personal site for French developer Sebastian Lempens, presenting his work and his CV in genuinely gorgeous fashion. I promise you it’s impossible not to smile at the moped.
• James Taylor-Forest: Another personal website, this one on the more minimal end of the spectrum but which features one of the most elegant bits of webdesign I’ve seen in ages and which I would like all of you to experience. Click the url and then click some more to explore James’ work and writing, and tell me if that isn’t one of the most satisfying visual interface elements you’ve seen in years.
• Digging: I do hope that the imminent IPO doesn’t ruin Reddit – though obviously many would argue that as it’s slowly become mainstream and morphed into ‘Facebook for people who think they’re somehow more edgy and interesting than people on Facebook’ it’s long been ruined anyway. Still, I can’t possibly have anything other than love for a website which fosters communities like this one, on a subReddit simply entitled ‘digging’, in which people (I am going to hazard a guess that the overwhelming majority of them are men, though this is possibly unfair and I am sorry to erase any female digging obsessives out there) talk about how much they like digging, how the digs are going, and share pictures of various digs-in-progress. It’s not, it’s probably fair to say, the most visually-compelling sub out there, but it is SO CHARMINGLY GOOD-NATURED. Via the wonderful blort.
• Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet?: Super Mario Maker is a Nintendo game which let anyone create their own custom Mario levels and then share them online for anyone else to try and beat – after many years, Nintendo is finally shuttering the servers which support the player-created levels, meaning they’ll become unplayable at some point next month. Which, obviously, means that people around the world are now racing to complete all of the levels before they disappear forever – no mean feat considering there were tens of thousands left to beat just a few weeks ago. Now, though, there are just (at the time of writing) TWO LEFT – this website’s tracking progress of the project, but you can read more about the whole thing at this Metafilter thread, which also contains various links to let you see playthroughs of some of the trickier levels getting beaten. This is obviously sort-of pointless but I adore the sense of collective endeavour here and it feels like one of those perfect expressions of the best bits of being online, which frankly you don’t get that often.
• Refrakt: Another attempt to create an app for photos that does what Insta did back when it actually cared about being a platform for photography – Refrakt is nice-looking, minimal in design, self-describing as ‘an independent space to share your photography in a way that shows it best. No ads, alogorithms, or attention stealing. It’s a more contemplative online space. You are encouraged to spend your time with intention, form new connections, and be inspired to get out and make photographs.’ It’s free, unless you want to start uploading big, hi-res pics, and it looks lovely, but as with all these things I question whether it can ever find enough of a community to survive – that said, if you’re someone who’s SERIOUS ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY (it does feel rather as though it’s pitching to the semi-pro crowd) then you might find this worth a look.
• Disconet: Metadata for LPs! “Vinyl sounds better, looks better, feels better and even smells better. But digital does have its benefits, musical metadata is one of them. Having the key, tempo and other musical metadata for your records at a glance would be useful!” Disconest uses Spotify to get the metadata, so if Spotify doesn’t have a track then you won’t get the BPM info, but this is nevertheless a potentially-useful tool for any of you who play records and like to pretend you can mix them.
• Open: You may have heard that Ernest Cline, author of the execrable piece of fanboy fanfic ‘Ready Player One’ is in some way signed up to create A METAVERSE, which is being touted as being like that envisaged in the novel (despite their being a not-inconsiderable technological gulf between what is currently technically possible and what is depicted in the book) – while details are still…sketchy, there’s now a website you can visit to lear…no, actually, you can’t ‘learn more’, but you can watch an entirely-meaningless CG trailer or alternatively click the ‘about’ section to learn…no, sorry, I am going to have to reproduce this verbatim: “Open, the hero experience in the readyverse, is the first genre-defining aaa metaverse gaming experience with top-tier ip powered by web3 technology. a multi-biome, multi-ip, multi-mode battle royale competition, in development for pc and next gen platforms.” I mean, those are definitely words but…but they mean nothing! Still, good to know that there’s a web3 element, just to eliminate any faint traces of doubt I had that this would be anything other than a horrible, empty grift.
• Pod Engine: A service which promises to let you search podcasts and monitor across thousands for brand and keyword mentions – I have no idea if this works, or whether it’s any good, but I figured it might be the sort of thing that some of you might find genuinely useful and so, well, here it is.
• The Alternative Videogame Screenshot Art Exhibit: You need to download this – and it’s a big file – but it’s also strangely wonderful and oddly beautiful, and if you’re as interested in the idea of ‘games as spaces’ and digital geographies and all that sort of semi-esoteric w4nk then you will adore this. “Carefully curated & polished Virtual Photography (videogame screenshot art) from the community. A mixed bag, including my Noclip images. ‘Epic’ or ‘cinematic’ style corporate Bullshots and other ‘promotional’ style marketing generally avoided. Instead we highlight the kitschy, the mundane, the liminal, the overlooked and unexpected. A sense of the hyperreal..” I did some digging into who this is by and…I don’t really know how to describe this, so I think I’ll probably just leave the link here along with the description and let you make up your own mind. “welcome, netizen! consider ‘republic of bob: internet as lifestyle’: a way to think about and around web3, digital neoliberalism and ‘the future of the net’. something casual and friendly that happens between people, in the collective imagination. an informal culture protocol – like holding doors open for others, offering guests a drink or being quiet in a library. an expansive laboratory for adventurous creatives to hang out, #rob is a surreal, lo fi social experiment in keeping the net strange. #rob does not strictly exist; some call it the real meta, tim’s house, gibsonville, videodrome, interzone, black atlantis ii. the name isn’t important however – rather, it’s the unique interrelationships outside the capitalist net that #rob helps grow and encourage.” This is, not going to lie, quite odd, but it’s also interesting and curious and feels very much Curios-adjacent – I spent a bit of time spelunking around Rob’s site, and it is a LOT.
• Coffee Receipt Stories: This is SUCH a wonderful little project. Four years ago the person behind this website was sitting in a cafe, bored, and so doodled a small comic on the receipt for their coffee – from that, this site was born, collecting hundreds of tiny vignettes, comics, anecdotes and pictures sketched on the back of receipts. These are perfect – small pictures of moments, snapshots of places and people and windows into a life which I could peek at all day. I really do love this.
• Othello: A simple, lightweight, in-browser game of Othello or ‘Go’, a game which is famously complex and where humans have for a while now been second best. Or, if you’re me and really can’t get your head around this game AT ALL, a very distant last.
• Needledrop: This is a GREAT little game – each day you get a different song, and all you have to do is guess in which film it first appeared; for each wrong guess, you’ll get an additional clue. Simple but good, quick, clean fun (I am fcuking TERRIBLE at it).
• Babyrace: Finally this week, a small browsergame made (I think) as a promo for a chain of Swiss supermarkets, which inexplicably features a baby participating in a Super Mario-like platformer over a dozen or so levels – this is baffling to me, but…actually not bad, as it happens, and you can pass a pleasing 15 minutes zoning out as you bounce the infant around the levels and collect dummies and milk bottles while, for reasons known only to the developers, attempting to reach the doors of the alpine equivalent of Sainsbury’s.

By Paul Davis 

OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS ANOTHER CRACKING SELECTION OF BREAKS AND BEATS PUT TOGETHER BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Pillars of Barbican: An insta feed in which the nameless photographer behind the camera takes pictures of all the massive concrete pillars that make up London’s Barbican centre, in some sort of celebration of cylindrical brutalism. Beautifully-obsessional, and there’s something bizarrely-interesting and oddly compelling about seeing all the pillars arrayed on the Instagrid, identical-but-different. This came to my attention via the Twitter feed of the world’s most personable stationery shop.
• Might Delete Later: THIS IS WONDERFUL! An Insta feed sharing musical tracks made from samples of anonymous voicemails left on a Dutch (I think) phone number and other bits of found audio… silly and creative and playful and just brilliant, I am a huge fan (via Nag).
• Who’s Who: An art Insta, via Things Magazine, which shares fragments of images by different artists which share a visual language. Which I promise will make absolute sense when you click on the link – this is so interesting, particularly if like me your art history and general knowledge of the contemporary scene is…somwhat lacking.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Michael Kirkham

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HAPPY BUDGET WEEK DO YOU FEEL RICH?

Lol!

Sorry, once again I have to remind myself that not everyone reading this is from the UK, and therefore not everyone will have had the uniquely-unpleasant experience of having a succession of millionaires appear on television to tell you that actually, contrary to every conceivable visible and invisible metric, things ARE going well and getting better and you would have to be a fool or a communist or possibly one of them illegals from the small boats if you thought otherwise.

Still, the yanks get to watch one mad, useless old cnut lose to another, worse, mad, useless old cnut. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE! Can someone living in a non-US/UK country and currently having a nice time drop me a line to remind me that there are other places in the world, and some of them even occasionally function in a way that doesn’t make you want to take a knife to your own viscera?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can rest assured that there is relatively little additional whinging and moaning from hereon in.

(PS – sorry about fcuking up the very first link last week; as a general rule, if they’re broken or wrong in the email, check the website a few hours later and I will probably have fixed it)

By Luke Chueh

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A MIX BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL, WHICH THIS TIME AROUND IS A MINIMAL DRUM AND BASS SET AND WHICH I RATHER ENJOYED AND THINK YOU WILL TOO!

THE SECTION WHICH, CONTRARY TO THE WONKA STUFF, HAS REALLY ENJOYED ALL THE BEER MEMES THIS WEEK AND WONDERS WHETHER THE INTERNET IS BRIEFLY BECOMING GOOD AGAIN, MUCH LIKE THE TERMINALLY ILL OCCASIONALLY HAVE MOMENTS OF BRIEF BUT SEARING LUCIDITY BEFORE THEY FINALLY CARK IT, PT.1:  

By Maïté Jane

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS SUPER, ECLECTIC AND GENERALLY-CHILL MIX FROM A FEW YEARS BACK, BY CHANCES WITH WOLVES WHOSE WHOLE CHANNEL IS VERY MUCH WORTH A LISTEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH, CONTRARY TO THE WONKA STUFF, HAS REALLY ENJOYED ALL THE BEER MEMES THIS WEEK AND WONDERS WHETHER THE INTERNET IS BRIEFLY BECOMING GOOD AGAIN, MUCH LIKE THE TERMINALLY ILL OCCASIONALLY HAVE MOMENTS OF BRIEF BUT SEARING LUCIDITY BEFORE THEY FINALLY CARK IT, PT.2:  

• The Mumbai Metaverse: I was a bit conflicted about including this one, to be honest – I am trying to include more ‘look, this is brilliant!’ links and fewer ‘oh good look what the morons have spunked six figures on’ diatribes, and I have on at least one occasion been contacted by a dev who claimed to work on something that I’ve given a kicking to, and, honestly, that didn’t feel great – but then I thought about it a bit and I figured actually, no, fcukit, this is not only genuinely terrible but it’s also a piece of political comms and it was launched by a local politician in one of India’s major cities and therefore it is an ABSOLUTELY legitimate target for scorn because, let’s be clear, this is FCUCKING RISIBLE. Click the link, and marvel – at the graphics, at the speed of the site, at the new and hitherto-unimagined redefinition of ‘metaverse’ as ‘a webpage’, at the idea that the VR elements of this are EVER going to be built…but the very best bit, the very pinnacle, is when you click into the ‘games’ section and you realise that someone’s literally just dumped in a shovelware mobile phone game, dropped onto the website for reasons known only to the devs, in a genuinely staggering example of ‘will this do? No? Oh, sorry’. India has exceptionally talented designers and developers, but seemingly none of them were consulted in the creation of this; it…it doesn’t feel like a GREAT use of the city of Mumbai’s budget, put it that way.
• The 88×31 Archive: Would you like a collection of literally thousands of those small, glittery little buttons you used to see all over Geocities and the like? Would you like to be able to download them to do with WHATEVER YOU PLEASE? Yes, of course you would – I personally quite like the idea of using this dataset to train a VERY SPECIFIC and remarkably-pointless AI which is capable only of producing small, sparkly badges, but can do so about an infinite range of topics.
• Title Drops: This is far, far better than it ought to be – Film Drops is a website/project whose sole apparent aim is to record and document the exact points in a film’s runtime when the title of the film is spoken out loud in dialogue. That’s it. Want to know at what point in Raging Bull someone says the words “Raging Bull”? Well sorry, I can’t help you, the site doesn’t actually mention that particular one – but there are loads of others, and this is both an interesting Pudding-style bit of dataanalysis and fiddling, and also just a really nice bit of webwork; the UX/UI for ‘scrolling’ through the films is really satisfying and something I’ve not seen done before, so WELL DONE designperson.
• Simply News: I’m presenting this largely without judgment – the thing is, I may not like it but it really does feel inevitable that stuff like this is, to a large extent, the future of ‘news’. Simply News is an AI-powered news aggregation project which basically outsources the whole process of working out what is interesting that day, what to say about it and then publishing the content to The Machine as a series of themed podcasts, start to finish (or so they would have you believe – I am not quite certain that the tech here’s good enough to let this run entirely autonomously yet). The ‘how’ bit is interesting, at least the characterisation of the different ‘Agents’ the process employs: “Simply News works by coordinating multiple AI-agents to produce a cohesive, news-focused podcast across many distinct topics every day. Each agent is responsible for a different part of this process. For example, we have agents which perform the following functions: The Sorter: Scans a vast array of news sources and filters the articles based on relevance and significance to the podcast category. The Pitcher: Crafts a compelling pitch for each sorted article, taking into account the narrative angle presented in the article. The Judge: Evaluates the pitches and makes an editorial decision about which should be covered. The Scripter: Drafts an engaging script for the articles selected by the Judge, ensuring clarity and precision for the listening.” I have had the ‘Politics’ version playing for a few minutes, and while it’s incredibly bland it’s…God, I fcuking HATE saying this, but it’s…fine. It’s fine, and as we all know, fine is good enough. This is coming, and I really wish it wasn’t. But it is.
• Homes & Studios: A lovely little project collecting information and photos about the homes and studios of various contemporary(ish) artists – this is very much a labour of love, and they invite contributions from anyone able to help them build out the info in the collection. I now REALLY want to visit the Villa Aalto in Helsinki.
• The Endangered Language Alliance: I should have known, but didn’t, that New York is the most linguistically-diverse city in the world. The ELA is “a non-profit dedicated to documenting Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages, supporting linguistic diversity in New York City and beyond”, and the website details some of the projects they’re currently undertaken to preserve and record languages as diverse as regional dialectical Italian and Bukhori (which I just learned is a SouthWest Iranian language spoken by Jewish people from the region). This is SO interesting, I would love to know if there’s a similar initiative in London (which, yes, I could Google, but if anyone knows and would like to just tell me that would be great thanks).
• Send: This is literally just a money transfer platform – sorry, nothing particularly exciting about it – but I *really* like the webdesign here, and as far as I can tell it is secure and cheap, and might be useful to any of you who need to ship cash to Europe, the US or Africa.
• A Star Wars Auction: Is there really anyone left in the world who likes Star Wars enough to buy Star Wars memorabilia who does not already own ALL THE FCUKING THINGS? Can we maybe have a new story, please? NO MORE FCUKING STAR WARS DEAR GOD. Sorry, but it’s been here my whole fcuking life and IT’S NOT EVEN GOOD. Ahem. Anyway, look, I appreciate that I am not necessarily representative of the wider world in my opinion here and that there may be several of you who want nothing more from life than the chance to bid on Harrison Ford’s ACTUAL COKE STRAW from the set of Empire (NB – I am yet to check, but I’m pretty certain that’s not in fact one of the lots here) – so here, a link to this frankly MASSIVE auction of Star Wars props and memorabilia taking place in the US next week, in which you can expect to pay a cool million bucks for a light-up model of C3PO’s head (in fairness there’s a bunch of other film stuff in here too, like Indiana Jones’ leather jacket from Raiders, so it’s actually worth having a bit of a dig despite my tedious and all-too-predictable anti Star Wars screed).
• The Organic Software Directory: This feels like A Good Thing – a list of programs that confirm to the broad definition of ‘organic software’, here explained as follows: “The term was coined by @pketh in 2023 in his blog post “In Search of Organic Software”. TL;DR1: Businesses change when they take VC money. Certainly, there were already terms like “Indie” and “Bootstrapped”, but what do they really mean? The “organic” label for software means something specific: Organic Software is software that… 1. Has no external pressure (eg. from funding sources) to chase funding rounds, grow unsustainably, or to get acquired. 2. Has a clear pricing page, discloses their sources of funding, and sources of revenue. 3. Doesn’t make majority revenue from selling user data to third parties” Which frankly sounds like a good set of principles to live by – this is a small, but updated and maintained, list of tools which conform to the ethos, covering website builders and notetaking apps and all sorts of things inbetween (it includes Are.na and mmm.page, to give you an idea of the vibe).
• FloppyKick: I didn’t realise, until reading this article earlier this week, that there was a thriving (well, in a small way) experimental music scene worldwide, making music and sharing it on floppy discs – I can’t imagine there are THAT many of you who are foaming at the mouth in anticipation of being able to drop (for example) 3 Euros on a floppy disc, emailed to you from Hungary, featuring a single track of ‘experimental noise’ entitled ‘Contagious Orgasm’ which lasts for exactly 30 seconds, but JUST IN CASE I’ll leave this here for you. I don’t feel a need to ever hear this music, but I am very glad that it exists and that people are making it.
• Walden Pond: Via my friend Simon comes this lovely little project which I think will appeal to a few of you – this is basically ‘Pocket, but instead of reading the articles on the Tube you can instead get them all printed and sent to you as a physical magazine each month, for the genuinely astonishingly low price of a tenner including packing and postage (the price goes up to 14 quid for the 4-hour long version featuring LOADS of articles, which I think seems entirely reasonable)’. I honestly think this is a brilliant concept – not the first time I’ve seen something vaguely like this, but definitely the first time it hasn’t felt like someone was trying to get rich off it or make a PROPER BUSINESS; this instead just feels like a nice hobby project that only wants to cover it’s own ar$e, moneywise (but obviously if the creators happen to read this and feel like I’m misrepresenting either their ambition or their rapaciously capitalistic natures then do feel free to write in and I will happily correct the online record).
• Death By Numbers: Would you like a dataset covering details of deaths in London between about 1600 and 1750? Would you like to be able to download that for whatever weird (look, fine, whatever, but you can see why I might think that) reason you so choose? GREAT! This is probably a bit niche, but obviously of huge interest to historians and anyone wanting to write a novel set in the 17th or 18thC in which the causes of death are REALLY accurate – I am enjoying scrolling through the tags and noting that ‘headache’ is listed as a potentially fatal condition, as is ‘horseshoehead’, which I really really hope just means ‘was twatted in the head by a horse’.
• The 2XL Archive: I had genuinely never heard of this before, but perhaps it’s a North America-only thing – anyway, apparently “2-XL was an educational toy robot by Mego from 1978-1981 and re-released by Tiger from 1992-1995. Games originally came on 8-track tapes and later on cassettes during the re-release. Pressing 2-XL’s buttons would change the track, creating a choose your own adventure style path that made it seem as if the toy robot was coming to life.” This website has painstakingly collected and uploaded an amazing collection of the tapes that were packaged with the toy, even going so far as to code in the interactivity bits so you can, should you so desire, replicate the GENUINE EARLY-90s CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE of what I presume was a pretty rich suburban kid – this is very much something which will mainly appeal to anyone who remembers the original, I think, but there’s something curious about the tech which I get the impression a few of you might find worth digging into.
• The Run: Did you know Montblanc made perfumes? I certainly didn’t – to be honest I had totally forgotten the company existed, which I imagine will pain any executives reading this deeply; SORRY, FACELESS PEN EXECUTIVES – and I was equally baffled to discover they also make watches and a bunch of other non-pen stuff too. Anyway, perfumes – The Run is a perfectly-serviceable little browsergame which is presumably designed to make you…er…want to buy some sort of biro-themed stinkwater, I presume, via the medium of making you guide a ball down a track at speed. This is actually pretty fun and a not-terrible way of passing the time while you wait for the kettle to boil, or for that idiot to do that thing (why does the idiot always take so long to do the thing?), but I remain utterly confused as to why this game – which, to be clear, features a ROLLING BALL, exactly the sort of ROLLING BALL you get in a BALLPOINT PEN – links to the perfume range rather than the FCUKING BALLPOINT PENS. Come on guys, EMBODY THE BRAND.
• Prairie Culture: This is a TikTok channel which, according to the bio, is sharing ‘Mongol cuisine and horseback culture’ and honestly it’s great. Although I confess to being possibly not *quite* carnivorous enough to sit and chow down with these people – the (what I presume were) sheep testicles do look pretty good, though, which isn’t honestly a phrase I had ever imagined committing to digital page.
• Suck Up: This is a link to an actual game that you have to pay for – sorry! – but it’s here more as a ‘how curious!’ link than as a ‘play this’ recommendation. Suck Up is a really interesting attempt to integrated LLMs into gameplay in a way that makes sense and ‘works’ – now I’ve not played this, so I can’t tell you to what extent it’s a winning mechanic, but I have watched some videos of the gameplay and I think there’s the kernel of something genuinely impressive and fun in here. The idea is, basically, that you play as a vampire and you have to persuade the various villagers in the game to let you into their houses so that you can exsanguinate them in typical drac fashion – the LLM integration comes in the dialogue with the NPCs, who are all GPT-or-similar-powered and as such will interact with you in natural language conversation. From the footage I’ve seen this is…imperfect, but it’s also evidently fun and interesting and surprising in a way that games so rarely manage to be; equally, LLMs are still stylistically vapid and as such there’s something of a paucity of style to some of the interactions, but this is one of the first times I’ve looked at this stuff and thought ‘actually, yes, this makes sense and might one day actually be good’. BONUS CONTENT: you can read more about this genre of experimental gameplay here, if you like.
• AA Roads: Are…are roads HAVING A MOMENT? I ask only as I swear I’ve seen an uptick in tarmacadam-focused content over the past six months, and now here’s another road-obsessive’s website (genuinely had no idea ‘road obsessives’ was anything other than an unfunny throwaway gag, and yet here we are) – AA Roads! “Our mission is to provide the most comprehensive coverage of roads and highways online. Featured throughout our site are photo guides, highway history, project news, maps and other resources. A variety of topics on AARoads aids in trip planning and research while providing the latest information on an assortment of subjects covering roads across the United States.” I have literally NO IDEA who this is for, but, er, here! WHY ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE TAKING PHOTOS OF ROADS AND POSTING THEM ONLINE?
• Tangleword: I have to confess that I got annoyed with this game because, er, I didn’t really understand it at first and as such it made me feel both thick and resentful (I am nothing if not a good loser). Still, you might get on with it better than I do – it’s the very opposite of intuitive, though, so you’ll probably want to read the instructions (or don’t! See if I care!).
• Matt Round’s Flash Games Archive: Friend of Curios Matt Round has recently got, er, round to updating some of the old Flash games that he made years ago so that they now work in modern browsers – and you can play a few of them here. Janey Thompson’s Marathon made me laugh out loud – Matt, should you read this, I genuinely think we should offer a cash prize to anyone who can prove completion.
• A Text Adventure: Finally this week, I *think* this is very old and has been resurrected, but I can’t for the life of me remember where the fcuk I found it and there’s no information on the site. BUT! That doesn’t matter! What DOES matter is that this is BRILLIANT – I don’t want to spoil anything, but it’s very likely that your first playthrough will end in failure, but that that failure will totally change your perception of the game. This is really smart, really nicely-made and well-written, gently-amusing and really worth an hour of your time while you wait for that same bloody idiot to do the thing.

By Lee Madgwick

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS AN HOUR OF LOUNGEY 70s AND 80s ISH TRACKS SELECTED AND MIXED SUPERBLY BY NEBRASKA! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS IS EMPTY THIS WEEK DUE TO MY NOT HAVING SEEN ANY PARTICULARLY-INTERESTING INSTA ACCOUNTS!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Butternut Collage

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I didn’t think that UK politics could be rendered more unpleasantly-risible, but the return of George Galloway to Parliament (and for those readers to whom this name means nothing, please do yourselves the favour of watching this, keeping in mind throughout that this man was just democratically selected by several thousand people as the best person to represent their interests and DEFINITELY NOT just to feather his own nest and reinvigorate his media profile) has unexpectedly upped the ridiculousness ante – WELL DONE, PEOPLE OF ROCHDALE!

Still, on the plus side, FEBRUARY IS OVER WELL DONE YOU SURVIVED! Consider this week’s edition of Web Curios a reward for your continued existence – you deserve it, you’re worth it and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if I could reach through the screen I would give you the very gentlest of pinches and punches.

By Clayton Schiff (and via TIH, along with the rest of this week’s pics)

LET’S START THE WEEK’S LINKS AND WORDS WITH A NEW VINYL MIX BY THE RELIABLY-TASTEFUL TOM SPOONER!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN NOW QUITE HAPPILY LIVE OUT THE REST OF ITS DAYS WITHOUT SEEING ANY MORE REFENCES TO THE FCUKING WONKA THING, PT.1:

By  Stephanie Davidson

NEXT, TRY THIS ODDLY-INTROSPECTIVE ELECTROAMBIENT MIX BY ALEJO WHICH I SURPRISED MYSELF BY REALLY ENJOYING! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN NOW QUITE HAPPILY LIVE OUT THE REST OF ITS DAYS WITHOUT SEEING ANY MORE REFENCES TO THE FCUKING WONKA THING, PT.2:    

• Galatea: Have…have we all always been insanely-horny for werewolves? WHAT IS IT WITH ALL THE LUPINE BONGO??? I ask because a significant proportion of the ‘literature’ (look, no judging, but I have tried to read some of this sort of stuff and it’s fcuking tripe, in the main) available on this website – Galatea, a place where you can basically get LOADS OF ‘BOOKS’, mainly of the fantasy/romance/erotica stripe, for a fixed monthly fee – seems to fall under the broad heading of ‘submissive woman gets dommed by a man who is also sometimes a dog’ – is…is this what we’re all into? Anyway, the point of this site is not the questionable quality of the collected prose, but the fact that, as far as I can tell, a genuinely staggering quantity of it is being produced using this specific AI novel-writing software – and, judging by the number of works available on Galatea and the seemingly-thriving community of ‘book-lovers’ that has spring up around it, noone seems to care. I just want to tap the sign again (but I promise I will stop soon, because I am starting to bore myself on this topic) – THE AI CONTENT WILL WIN BECAUSE A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF PEOPLE HAVE VERY LOW STANDARDS AND SIMPLY DON’T CARE THAT WHAT THEY CONSUME IS, OBJECTIVELY, FCUKING RUBBISH.
• Doordash Gremlins: A subReddit in which people share images taken of them accepting their food delivery orders (is this a thing in the States, where drivers have to prove they’ve handed over the scran? weird) – pictures in which they look, in the main, a bit feral. We are all basically horrible little raccoons, aren’t we?
• Steamboat Willie: As seems to be the norm these days, the end of copyright for a whole host of old cultural properties at the beginning of 2024 has so far ushered in a grand total of zero interesting or creative uses of said formerly-copyrighted material – still, this little bit of promo for a French digital studio is rather nice, letting you move an old-school, rubbertube Mickey around the deck of the titular steamboat, collecting musical notes which, once you’ve found them all, ‘rewards’ you with the chance to enjoy the agency’s showreel. Ok, fine, it’s not MUCH of a reward, but the digital work on display here’s really quite nice and it’s certainly more interesting than the inevitable ‘Steamboat Willy Bongo’ that is being made in some miserable basement somewhere right now.
• Stephen Malinowski: THESE ARE BEAUTIFUL! This link takes you to the YouTube channel of one Stephen Malinowski, who you can learn more about at his site, who’s (as far as I can tell) a musician and music theorist and someone who’s interested in how one can express music and sound visually, and whose YouTube channel is a GLORIOUS collection of animations which accompany various different pieces of music, rendering them visual in a range of glorious shorts. I find this stuff mesmerising – there’s a vaguely-synaesthesiac quality to the way the visuals match the notes, and the creativity and range of different viz styles employed really is hugely impressive.
• Betterverse: I get the impression that some of you reading this might be vaguely involved in the ‘futures and imagining’ space – you might therefore find this site useful, which collects a whole load of different games and resources to assist in…well, with this sort of thing: “We believe futures literacy is an essential 21st century skill. With this project, we want to give creatives and impact designers give insight in the complexity and potential of futures thinking, provotyping and world building. We want to give them first-hand experience of how to use their talent as a lever, a crowbar with social value. The goal: to stimulate a new generation of architects, designers, copywriters, filmmakers and other makers-slash-thinkers to initiate change.” Potentially useful for teachers and educators, but also designers of all stripes, and indeed for anyone interested in tools and mechanisms to help you explore and imagine different, better futures.
• Lapse: Another week, another attempt to make the broad idea of ‘a photo app’ cool and interesting again. Lapse has been getting a decent amount of buzz this week, and the idea is nice-if–not-groundbreaking – the idea is that you take a photo with your phone and it won’t show up until…sometime later, removing the instant gratification from digital photography and harking back to an era in which you had to wait WEEKS to find out that you’d wasted £4 and an entire roll of film by taking photos of your thumb. Users can have ‘profiles’ and you can follow your friends, and all your photos get complied into monthly ‘photodumps’ which is a nice automatic album feature which strikes me as quite neat. Basically this does the square root of nothing new, but it’s got a pleasing aesthetic and it’s born out of London, so let’s all be supportive and wish them well (but ffs, iOS-only development is SO ANNOYING in 2024, iPhones are for cnuts as any fule kno).
• BeScene: Do you want to get into film or telly? GREAT THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT! BeScene sort of self-describes as ‘professional Tinder for people who want to work in moving pictures’, and while that obviously sounds like seven shades of awful it also sort-of makes sense; the ‘swipe/cards’ interface probably makes sense for a talent/contact searching app, and presuming that this gets decent traction it could be a useful way of finding people to collaborate with on AV projects (although I have a sneaking suspicion that if your geography is more Lewisham than LA you might not find quite so many eager partners on the app).
• The Monthly Tricycle Haiku Challenge: I was not aware that the buddhists had a magazine, and that that magazine was called Tricycle – but they do, and it is! For reasons known only to them, the magazine each month runs a contest for readers (or, presumably, any fcuker who wants to participate) to write the best haiku – the only constraints are the traditional 5/7/5 format and the fact that each month there’s a specific seasonal word that you need to include in your composition (this month’s is the suitably-wintery ‘turnip’, for example). I have a peculiar affinity for the haiku – many years ago I had a job where each morning we had an all-company meeting (a meeting at which it was not entirely-unusual for people to use cocaine as a non-traditional hangover cure – the 00s, they were a time!) and I made it my ‘thing’ to write the meeting notes up each day, which I would always begin with a haiku inspired by something in that day’s papers. My personal favourite was “Welcome Suri Cruise / Real kid or creepy changeling? / Only time will tell” – honestly, apart from the aforementioned drugs issue and the fact that people cried literally every day in the office, often before 830am, I really loved that job. Anyway, I would be genuinely proud if one of you won this contest, so GET WRITING.
• 100 Cameras: This is SUCH a good gimmick/premise/setup for a documentary – a Japanese series, produced by NHK World, where the whole thing is literally ‘we go somewhere interesting and set up 100 cameras and document LOADS OF STUFF so you can see what X or Y place is like and how it works’ – or, in their slightly less ham-fisted words, “Each episode of this documentary series focuses on a different place of interest. One hundred cameras are installed and left to record, showcasing the habits and behavior of the people they capture. Without the presence of a camera crew, the subjects gradually begin to share glimpses into their lives, and we receive an unobstructed window into personal conversations and real-life events.”. There are only a few shows on the site at present, but the potential in the format is huge and the one I skimmed through – looking behind the scenes at videogame developer Capcom – suggested that the producers get some genuinely-interesting material and insight from the setup.
• Hiccup: Hiccup is one of the seemingly-endless parade of startups hitting the digital shelves at present which promise to help you ORGANISE YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS via the magical medium of AI – here’s the spiel, which you may want to take with a small pinch of salt: “Hiccup transcends traditional note-taking and diary apps. It is the Shazam for your brain – a dynamic, intuitive space where you can jot down anything that crosses your mind. From daily reflections to sudden eureka moments, Hiccup is your canvas to paint your thoughts, unfiltered and unbounded. But Hiccup is more than just a passive recipient of your thoughts. Powered by cutting-edge AI, it actively helps you retrieve the right answers and information when you need them. Think of it as having a conversation with your past selves, guided by an AI that understands you. Just write down your thoughts or inquiries, and let Hiccup work its magic, fetching the precise information you seek amidst your vast repository of notes.” Does this sound appealing? I am FASCINATED to see how much this stuff takes off, and how that ends up…affecting things – I think the insane popularity of fitness tracking apps and the like over the past decade or so suggests that we’re very much into the idea of quantifying, managing and optimising ourselves with digital assistance, and there’s no reason to assume that there won’t be a significant number of people who won’t want to extend that to their general, day-to-day thoughts…God it’s going to be fun when the most popular of these services crashes forever in 2029, taking several billion people’s thoughts and memories and notes and ideas with it and leaving a host of people unmoored and alone without the digital Virgil on which they’ve come to rely (probably).
• The Tartan Register: As a pseudo-Scot, or at least enough of one to have a Scottish surname, I was genuinely embarrassed that this site had to be drawn to my attention by a reader – so thanks Marcelo Rinesi for making me feel inadequate! This is the official register of Scottish tartans, where all new designs must be recorded – here, for example, are all the officially recognised versions of Muir, should any of you for whatever reason fancy ordering several bolts of me to clothe yourselves in.
• Klemmbrett: Let me for a second peel back the curtain, show you how the metaphorical sausage is made – before it gets turned into the SPARKLING PROSE you are currently reading, Web Curios exists as a series of links chucked haphazardly into a GDoc as and when I find them over the course of  a week. Does that sound like an onerous workflow to you? No, of course it fcuking doesn’t – and yet there are people for whom the act of ‘switching tabs’ is simply TOO MUCH and TOO DISTRACTING and RUINS THEIR FLOW, and it is those people, I presume, for whom Klemmbrett is designed. This is an honestly-slightly-baffling browser plugin that lets you open up a little note-taking window in your browser, meaning you can take notes about anything you’re reading without having to move away from it – which, er, doesn’t really feel like the sort of thing that needs to be coded, frankly, but I am sort-of pleased that someone’s bothered (credit where it’s due, it’s VERY nicely designed).
• Swimming: Via Giuseppe’s consistently-interesting weekly data newsletter comes this BEAUTIFUL bit of visualisation work – the code it’s built on is by Krisztina Szucs, and it is SO PRETTY. This presents a series of results from the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and…oh, look, I could try and explain it but it’s simpler just to tell you to click the link and enjoy. Honestly, I could watch these for hours, they are SO satisfying.
• Amsterdam Typography: I imagine that you can probably guess what this is about, but for the two of you who are inexplicably reading this whilst not being able to understand relatively simple terms like ‘Amsterdam’ or ‘typography’ “Amsterdam Typography is a project by Arno Verweij that explores Amsterdam through the lens of typography. One or more photographs of typography are published on this website every day at 2 pm local time (CET/CEST). The collection currently contains 2110 photographs documenting typography in public and semi public spaces in Amsterdam. You can find all photos via the interactive map that has a list of categories at the bottom.” This has reminded me that I haven’t been to Amsterdam for about 7 years and I really miss it.
• Pasta Shapes: Via Caitlin comes this micronewsletter all about pasta – sign up and you get a month’s worth of very short (literally 100 words or so) daily emails, each about a different pasta shape. Now obviously as a wop I’m biased, but this is GREAT content and today’s email described orecchiette (objectively the third-best pasta shape) as ‘interdimensional pasta’ which, honestly, made me swoon slightly.
• Be Part Of A Massive Digital Artwork: Do you run a website? Would you like to use it to MAKE ART? This is a new project by (I think) Chia Amisola (but sorry if I’m misattributing it), which is described thusly: “I’m working on a net art piece about internet territory, cybersquatting, density… I want it to live hosted on friends and strangers sites – as an iFrame embed slowly overtaking the site page.If you fill up this short form, I’ll send you a customized embed that you can paste onto your page to be a part of my piece (being showcased first week of March) – thank you for being a part of it!” Now obviously I have NO IDEA what this is going to entail, but I’ve featured Chia’s work in here loads of times before and there’s nothing about them that makes me think ‘this is going to be a massive malware lol’, so, well, what’s the worst that could happen? Bonus points, millions of them, to any reader who can somehow make this happen on an actual corporate website for the lols.
• Allen Bukoff: The personal website of artist Allen Bukoff. You know how somehow I feature personal websites that are examples of gorgeous, creative coding? Yeah, well this is basically the opposite of that, and as such is practically-perfect in every way (plus I genuinely enjoy Bukoff’s work – it’s funny and anarchic and silly, and there’s a lovely art movement rabbithole that you can wind up down should you be interested in linkspelunking your way through it. BONUS PERSONAL WEBSITE: this one, by a digital designer who goes by the name of Athena, is very much one of those ‘gorgeous creative coding’ projects I mentioned earlier and, honestly, I could just move my mouse around this one for hours, the fluid dynamic effects here are GLORIOUS.
• The Riker Maneuver: I appreciate that this is the second week in a row in which I’m sharing a Star Trek-themed link despite my repeated protestations that I have no fcuking interest in Star Trek – I promise it won’t happen again. This, though, is very much worth highlighting – a campaign to have a statue of fictional character William Riker, the bearded bloke from The Next Generation who I’m reliably informed was the source of a few fevered teenage dreams back in the day, erected in the town of Valdez in Canada. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT! Brilliantly the plans specify that the statue should be designed to replicate a very specific pose for which the characters is apparently famous – I FCUKING LOVE THIS PLEASE HELP MAKE IT A THING. If Slough can have a pub called The Wernham Hogg (no, really) then this feels essential.
• Weird Fcuking Games: A site collecting descriptions of, and occasionally links to, some weird fcuking games that in many cases you can play online. Some of these have been featured in Curios in the past, but many of them were utterly new to me and all of them are headscratchingly-odd and often pleasingly-upsetting in tone. If you’re interested in speculative/experimental game design then this is an excellent resource to explore.
• Terramaker: SUCH a great little browsergame, this – a puzzle/platformer where you have to build out the scene as you play to prevent your tiny pixellated adventurer from plummeting to their death. Which I appreciate might not make that much sense but which will become crystal clear as you play, promise – this is a really neat premise, smartly-executed.
• Brothers: Our last miscellaneous link of the week is a rare one to an actual product you have to pay actual cashmoney for – but, I promise, it really is worth it. Brothers is a videogame from…I think a decade or so ago, which has just been remastered and released on all the current formats. I don’t want to say much about it, or describe it too closely – all you need to know is that it’s a beautiful puzzle game with gentle-but-rewarding challenges to solve, a genuinely-unique control scheme and, honestly, one of the most astonishing bits of emotional storytelling I have ever experienced in a game, ever (I’m not joking about this – when I first played it I properly gasped out loud at a certain point, and this game made me cry like nothing else I have ever played). It’s about 6 hours long, I think, and £15 or so – which I appreciate might sound like a lot, but this really is a rare and beautiful thing and I promise you it is worth every penny.

By  Mr Bingo

 FINALLY THIS WEEK ENJOY A SLIGHTLY-LOUNGE-Y AND VERY SUNDAY MORNING-ISH MIX BY COYOTE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Eunice Denise: The feed of Eunice Denise, a designer who makes BEAUTIFUL block-prints from LEGO and whose stuff is so nice and generally charming that it made me almost forget how bad I am at arts and crafts.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Mark Badger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Gah! I have a call in 24 minutes and I am still in my pants and need to wash! Gah!

Apologies, you didn’t need that image – but then again, none of us needed the sight of our elected representatives competing to see who could demonstrate the most nakedly-self-serving and venal behaviour while ostensibly pretending to give a fcuk about the deaths of thousands of people, and yet we all got that anyway, so frankly you can quit your whinging and be grateful for the links and the absence of my sub-Marina-Hyde ‘satire’ in the upfront.

[NB – non-English people, I promise it gets less obscenely-parochial in a few short paragraphs, don’t worry]

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re probably wondering how the everliving fcuk venture capital keeps getting away with this sh1t and if I’m honest I am wondering that too.

By Julia Maiuri

MAY I SUGGEST THAT YOU SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST BIT OF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS, AND INDEED PERHAPS THE REST OF YOUR WEEKEND, WITH THE EXCELLENT NEW RECORD FROM MANGA ST HILARE? GOOD! I WILL THEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS GENUINELY FOND MEMORIES OF GETTING DRUNK IN THE VICE PUB BUT WHICH ALSO CONCEDES THAT ANY MEDIA BUSINESS THAT THINKS ‘BUY A PUB’ IS A VIABLE WAY TO INVEST SOME OF THAT VC CASH IS PERHAPS NOT DESTINED FOR SUCCESS AND LONGEVITY, PT.1:  

By Asger Carlsen 

OUR NEXT MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT IS THIS SUPERB, FUN AND EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY FRENETIC NUKG MIX BY OPPIDAN (STARTS AT 1H IN)! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS GENUINELY FOND MEMORIES OF GETTING DRUNK IN THE VICE PUB BUT WHICH ALSO CONCEDES THAT ANY MEDIA BUSINESS THAT THINKS ‘BUY A PUB’ IS A VIABLE WAY TO INVEST SOME OF THAT VC CASH IS PERHAPS NOT DESTINED FOR SUCCESS AND LONGEVITY, PT.2:  

• The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet: A caveat here – this is a physical book, which you have to order and pay for, and I have not yet done that and as such I have no idea if it is any good or not. BUT! I am on the mailing list for it for some reason (GDPR be damned!) and it features work by all sorts of people whose writing and thinking I have featured here over the years and who are all loosely sort-of affiliated with the wider “‘small/tiny/cosy/insert your own twee signifier here’ web” movement, and the description – “This is a book about how to survive on the internet. It’s about the cozy web, the dark web, the dark forest, the clear net, the dark net, and a new social world emerging around us. This is the Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.” – really interested me. It features a selection of essays and thinking about the web and where it goes and what it is and what it was, and if you’re interested in the (admittedly quite w4nky) questions of ‘whither the web and the people on it in the mad uncertain days of AI and post-social media?’ then you might well think spending £30 on this limited edition tome might be worthwhile.
• Netflix En France: For those less linguistically-blessed than I am, that means ‘Netflix in France’ – you’re welcome! While it may be clear to everyone that we have come to an end of a specific era in media, specifically the end of the era of ‘free money’ (but sadly, I fear, not the end of the era of ‘genuinely terrible morons sitting at the top of these companies and making awful decisions’), noone appears to have told the people behind this excellent, lavish and sort of magically-pointless bit of webwork for Netflix France, which basically seems to exist as a sop to the French government and tourist board for letting the company film shows within their borders. This is, basically, a bunch of not-particularly-in-depth ‘tourism guide’-type content, all themed around various French Netflix shows that have been shot in France, featuring GORGEOUS video and basically showing all these gorgeous locations off to their very best – still, if you’ve been really getting into, I don’t know, “Lupin X Marie Antoinette” (I don’t have Netflix and know nothing about any of its French shows, can you tell?) and want to plan a journey based on ICONIC SCENES from the programme then, well, ENJOY!
• Password Basket: Shamelessly lifted from last week’s B3ta, this is a genuinely brilliant little game which helps you generate a new, secure password each time you need one, and which is so good it ought to be bought wholesale by AN Other online security business looking for some easy promo. Look, I know that there is at least one person reading this who works in a skullfcukingly-tedious branch of comms and who has been waiting YEARS for me to feature something in Curios that’s appropriate for creative thievery – NOW IS YOUR MOMENT!
• Oops Busted: IMPORTANT CAVEAT TO THIS LINK: I am posting this here because I am reasonably-confident that noone reading this is actually going to use it. Please do not use it. ANYWAY, now we’ve got that out of the way, welcome to what I am 100% convinced is the most morally-bankrupt link of the week – I’m going to hand over the description here to the devs, from a Reddit post: “OopsBusted is a unique digital platform designed for those curious or concerned about their partner’s activity on dating apps. In an age where online dating is ubiquitous and the lines of fidelity can sometimes blur, we provide a discreet and efficient way to uncover the truth. How does it work? Simple! You provide the name and location of the person you’re curious about, and our platform does a sweep of popular dating apps to see if they have a profile. Think of it as a helpful tool to either quell your fears or confirm your suspicions—all done discreetly and respectfully. But OopsBusted isn’t just a tool; it’s a community. We’re here to discuss everything from relationship advice and digital dating trends to ethical considerations when using technology in our personal lives.” Take a moment to consider that, and think about the implications – a service that lets you provide a subject’s name AND PHOTOGRAPH, and which uses that information to stalk them across dating sites…you can see how that’s perhaps not ENTIRELY safe? I am genuinely astonished that this exists – the only silver lining is that I have strong suspicions that the ‘AI tech’ under the hood here is largely rubbish and won’t work, given I imagine all the dating apps have reasonable guardrails to prevent exactly this sort of thing from working, but, honestly, this is literally a ‘want to stalk anyone in the world and harass them with ‘romantic’ proposals? GREAT!’ service, and that doesn’t really feel ok. In the unlikely event that you happen to work for any of the major dating apps can you please reassure me that this is just a scam to con stalkers and potential-rapists out of cash? Thanks.
• Don’t Look Down: A subReddit dedicated to sharing videos and photos of VERY HIGH PLACES. I am not particularly afraid of heights – per Sir Terry, it’s the grounds that kill you – but when I found this the other day there was a video on the top of the page that featured two people jumping off a waterfall a la Butch Cassidy and they jumped and the angle panned down…and down…and down…and they kept falling, and basically my stomach ended up somewhere underneath Bounds Green tube. It’s ALL like that, so, well, enjoy!
• 38 North: Are YOU fascinated by North Korea? Are YOU anxious to keep up with Kuddly Kim and his Krazy Kapers? Well you may well enjoy 38 North, in that case, a site seemingly dedicated to ALL THINGS North Korean (from a ‘what are they up to?’ point of view rather than a ‘wow, look at the kooky dictatorship!’ perspective) and which might be useful if for whatever reason you need to have a vague idea about how long it’s going to be til the world’s most famously-mad regime has another conniption.
• Flirt WIth Emma: Earlier this week this app was called ‘Flirt with Los’ – now it’s called ‘Flirt with Emma’ – I think, though, the premise is the same, a sort of art-game-app-thing, which plays on the general concept of the online dating app by giving users the opportunity to date ‘Los’ (and now ‘Emma’), which basically amounts to a few limited interactions each day where you can send messages to a static image of this stranger…and that’s sort-of it, except there’s a real person behind this (maybe even two) as you can read in this article explaining a bit about the project, and I think it might be a bit more interesting and involved than it otherwise looks.
• My Boyfriend: Would YOU like to contribute to the next edition of a magazine featuring writing from new and emergent writers? GREAT! My Boyfriend is a seemingly-ongoing project which will in each edition solicit submissions on a single theme or topic – next up is “My Boyfriend Is A Virgin. Send us short stories and poems which interpret the theme of “virginity” either in the literal or abstract. We especially appreciate absurd, voicey, and experimental works. For this issue, we are not looking for pieces that explicitly reference the mag’s name or that contain a boyfriend character. 1500 word limit. Deadline April 15.” Sound interesting? GO!
• Join The Mars Living Experiment: OK, before you get too excited I feel compelled to tell you that this opportunity is only open to US nationals what with it being a NASA initiative – still, for the two of you reading this on the other side of the Atlantic WHAT AN OPPORTUNITY THIS IS! “Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) is a series of analog missions that will simulate year-long stays on the surface of Mars. Each mission will consist of four crew members living in Mars Dune Alpha, an isolated 1,700 square foot habitat. During the mission, the crew will conduct simulated spacewalks and provide data on a variety of factors, which may include physical and behavioral health and performance” – and they are now accepting applications! Look, you may have things like ‘a family’ or ‘commitments’, but the next programme doesn’t start until next year so you’ve loads of time before that to divest yourself of any and all responsibilities so you can go and live in a simulated hostile environment for a year, drinking distillate of your own p1ss and eating powdered icecream (probably).
• TrudyTube: I’m always something of a sucker for personal quantification projects, particularly when combined with nice design and visualisation – this is a site in which someone called (I presume) Trudy maps all the songs she listens to, when she listens to them and the context in which she’s so doing, and I LOVE IT IT IS WONDERFUL, like a sort of emotional audio relief map of the day – you can hover over the tracks to hear them, click them to be taken to the whole song, explore the changing patterns over different days…honestly, the only way this could possibly be improved is if there were a geo layer over the top so you could see whether / how geography affects style/vibe of song, but I appreciate that there are very good privacy and safety reasons for ignoring this request entirely. Anyway, this is GREAT and I would really like someone at Spotify to read this and request it as a product feature please (LUKE THIS IS FOR YOU).
• The 2024 Webring: This feels like it will be a link that will neatly divide the readership between THE OLD, for whom the concept of a webring is familiar and comforting and oddly-Proustian, and THE YOUNG, for whom it will ins…actually, no, hang on, there is no way in hell that ANYONE reading this fcuking thing is under 30, so let’s assume that we all know what a ‘webring’ is and move on. “This website contains links to 13 single serving sites, connected as a webring. The websites take their starting points in Wikipedia articles linking to the Artificial intelligence page. Next to each link, there is a link to a promotional or explanatory TikTok. The SSS:s were made in February 2024 by the first year students in the Interactive design course at the Visual Communication program at Beckmans Collage of Design in Stockholm, Sweden. The course is supervised by senior lecturer Peter Ström.” SO MANY FUN LITTLE WEBSITES! I honestly think there’s something rather lovely – and due a sort-of reappraisal or comeback – about the idea of the webring, a small, tightly-curated network of interest-connected people or pages, free of algorithmic mediation, a sort of digital desire path through websites…does this make sense or am I just w4nking on? It’s the latter, isn’t it?
• The Best Videos Of The Year: Or at least, the ones Vimeo selected as the best videos of last year. A couple of these I had seen before (a couple were featured in Curios, I AM SUCH A GOOD CURATOR LOVE ME ACKNOWLEDGE MY SUPREMACY), but most were new to me, and there’s a nice mixture of animation, documentary, music video and short film to explore for the visophiles (is that a term? It ought to be) among you.
• Alps Roads: After last week’s links to that twisty roads website, here we are with yet ANOTHER link for the mesh-driving-glove-owners (I may mock you, but also I spoil you – feel the push/pull of the abusive relationship!) – DO YOU LIKE ROADS? I am going to suggest that however deep your love for tarmacadam runs it runs nowhere near as deep as that felt by the administrator and owner of this singular site, dedicated to chronicling all the roads that this person has ever visited (I am not, I don’t think, exaggerating). You want photos of minor trunk roads in Nevada? GREAT! Want some inexplicably-blurry photos of some road signs in Saudi? Er, why? BUT GREAT, HERE YOU ARE! Anyway, I love the fact that this person really enjoys roads and wants to celebrate them via the medium of an increasingly-sprawling single-focus web presence, so well done, anonymous road enthusiast,.
• Clove Garden Recipes: One of the great complaints of the modern age – no, not that one. Or that one – is the weird effect SEO has had on online recipes and the way it’s led to food blogs being cluttered messes of personal writing when all the hungry, lazy chef wants is THE FCUKING RECIPE (but, equally, if you employ one of those ‘just give me the recipe’ Chrome extensions then you’re the monster – look, I don’t make the rules here, that’s just how we’ve decided things work). Clove Garden is a VERY old website which has seemingly been around since…2004, I think? Anyway, I think it spun out of a general sort of health/wellness interest (I am a bit scared to click on the ‘philosophy’ section in case it turns out to be a haven of weird fashiness tbqhwy) but the main draw here is the ‘Recipes’ section which features over 1000 different dishes and…THEY ARE JUST RECIPES! No anecdotes, no chat, just ingredients and method. It’s obviously important to caveat this in a few ways – firstly I have no idea if any of these are any good; secondly, it’s an American site which means that all the recipes in question use their preposterous measurement conventions (‘CUPS’ IS NOT A PROPER MEASUREMENT FFS); thirdly, it’s an American site which means that I can’t promise that half the recipes won’t be ‘a cup-a-soup and a block of velveeta’. Still, er, ENJOY!
• The Google Blobs: Back in the day I remember feeling a genuine sense of…minor shame? Christ, how pathetic…but, anyway, yes, minor shame at how rubbish the Google emoji on my crappy Android phone were compared to the LOVELY AND SHINY Applemoji on other people’s iPhones. I’ve since come to terms with my own pathetic device-based status anxiety, and with the Google Blob emoji style, and I got a proper small nostalgiapang when I found this site, which collects the original designs and animations and makes them available for use in Discord. BRING BACK THE BLOBS, basically.
• Matchonix: A fun little ‘match three shapes’ game with a couple of nice twists and a semi-realtime angle that makes individual matches short and snappy rather than an infinite timesink.
• Flip: Another tiny game made in V Buckenham’s forthcoming ‘Downpour’ tiny game engine, this is an excellent example of the sort of small, silly, pointless things that I am excited to see people making with the kit. Can you get 10 ‘heads’ in a row when flipping a coin? CAN YOU??? This is obviously very silly and pointless, but it’s also annoyingly really fcuking compelling – it’s also a nice illustration of the simple way in which Downpour will let you combine elements, and I am genuinely quite curious to see gets made.
• Squeezy: A word game! I know, I know, but this is quite a nice variant on a theme – there are five words, and five letters; each letter can be inserted into one of the existing words to create a new word – but which letter, into which word, and where? Not particularly difficult, but a pleasing way of starting the day while you chase The Fear away.
• Borg Remastered: Finally this week, another one of those bits of webwork that makes me slightly staggered at what is possible now vs what was possible even a decade ago – and a link which I think it’s statistically probable will make at least one of you ecstatically happy. Do YOU like Star Trek? Do YOU wish that you could experience what is effectively a full-length interactive film featuring AN ACTUAL PROPER STAR TREK ACTOR and two hours of all-new, TV quality Star Trek FMV action? Do these words mean anything to you (because, honestly, they mean the square root of fcuk all to me)? “In the midst of a Borg invasion ten years after the Battle of Wolf 359, Starfleet Cadet Qaylan Furlong is given an opportunity by Q (John de Lancie) to go back in time and prevent his father’s death in the historic battle.” Do they make you think “OH GOD THE BORG, THE GREATEST OF ALL THE STAR TREK VILLAINS!”? If the answer to any or all of these questions is ‘yes’ then welcome to the best link of the year so far – this is a full, playable, in-browser port of a 1996 videogame, from the era in which people thought ‘interactive films’ were the future of entertainment, and you can experience it all through what I imagine is some pretty-impressive in-browser wrangling, with a really slick and very Star Trek-y interface…look, I have to confess here that the meeting point of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Full-Motion videogame that is basically an interactive TV show’ is a place I have literally no personal interest in whatsoever, and as such I only gave this 15m of my life, but it’s quite an incredible bit of webwork and deserves a click even if you would rather apply papercuts to your eyeballs and then rinse them in lemonjuice than admit to watching a second of Trek.

By Dadu Shin

ENJOY THE LAST OF THIS WEEK’S MIXES NOW WITH THIS ECLECTIC-BUT-REALLY-VERY-GOOD-BUT-ALSO-SO-’BERLIN’-IT-HURTS SELECTION OF BEATS AND ELECTRONICA AND GLITCHY AMBIENT STUFF MIXED BY YOSA PEIT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Wonder of Soil: I had to do some proofing this week for an Italian academic’s newly-written paper about soil health (summary: wow, that was a whole new thing that we’ve managed to make a mess of which I had no idea about but which now I will add to my list of ‘vaguely disquieting things I know about the planet!), and I discovered this Insta feed which is dedicated to promoting, er, soil health, and look, it’s not exactly thrilling, but I thought it was important and so, er, here it is.
• Piedras Tirar: A Spanish-language Insta feed which seemingly exists solely to collate and share videos of people lobbing big stones off things. As far as I can tell this is entirely-benign rather than some sort of semi-rural terrorism, and as such I feel reasonably comfortable linking to this – they accept submissions from around the world, so if YOU want a video of you lobbing a rock off the side of a cliff to be shared with a global community of 1.1m people then, er, here!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Erik Sandberg

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO AGAIN CONGRATULATIONS ON NOT BEING DEAD!

(Presuming, of course, that you do in fact consider continued existence to be a general positive – I’m currently ambivalent)

It’s a lovely day here in London and I would quite like to spend at least some of it not staring into the digital abyss – so you’re not getting an intro this week, and instead we’ll pile straight on into the links and the pictures and the songs and the good stuff so YOU’RE WELCOME YOU INGRATES.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are beautiful, no matter what they say, words won’t bring you down.

By Kevin Horan

SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST BIT OF CURIOS WITH SOME CLASSIC UK HIPHOP AND ENJOY THE LEGENDARY CHUPA CHUPS MIXTAPE BY BASHY WHICH IS FINALLY STREAMABLE!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN HIGHLY RECOMMEND THE FRANK AUERBACH EXHIBITION AT THE COURTAULD TO ANY OF YOU IN LONDON, PT.1:  

By F Scott Hess

WE GO BACK IN TIME 11 YEARS NOW TO ENJOY THIS SUPERB TWO HOUR SLICE OF FUNK AND SOUL AND OTHER ASSORTED BITS AND PIECES MIXED BY SADEAGLE! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN HIGHLY RECOMMEND THE FRANK AUERBACH EXHIBITION AT THE COURTAULD TO ANY OF YOU IN LONDON, PT.2:  

• Tangara: When my brother killed himself, I got his iPod – there is something genuinely…odd about a device being able to tell you exactly what the last songs someone listened to before they topped themselves are, let me tell you – but it bricked itself years ago and I’ve been mp3less ever since. I am sorely tempted, though, by the Tangara, a fully-funded project (which still has about a month to go) which will later this year ship an MP3 player which, basically, is like the original iPod but with a bunch of quality of life updates, It features the gorgeous scrollwheel – still one of my favourite interfaces ever (what, you mean you don’t have ‘favourite interfaces’? weirdos) – it’s open source, and highly-moddable, meaning you should be able to keep it going pretty much forever by swapping out the battery when it carks it. It’s not the prettiest device in the world, fine, but the sense of nostalgia this stoked in me was such that I can overlook the shonky aesthetics.
• The Album Cover Bank: ALL OF THE NIGERIAN ALBUM COVERS, EVER! This is a wonderful repository of design and musical/cultural history – from the blurb, “Cover Bank is a digital archive of 5300+ Nigerian album covers from 1950 to date. It provides a unique view into the evolution of Nigerian music. At its core, the archive is a research project that hopes to establish the history of Nigerian graphic design. Through this website, we hope to highlight cover artists as important cultural producers. Cover Bank is also a platform for design and storytelling inspiration. Our goal is to become a valuable tool for artists, enthusiasts, educators and researchers of all kind. The archived is built and maintained by wuruwuru, a collective for independent creators in Lagos.” Even better, all the albums (or at least all the ones I’ve clicked on) link to Spotify, so you can listen to any whose aesthetic takes your fancy (I was so taken by the artist name ‘Lifesize Teddy’, for example, that I am listening to them right now – it’s pretty good!).
• Sabio: I can’t vouch for how good this actually is – and, personally-speaking, I would trust any ‘AI powered fitness coach’ about as far as I could throw an actual, IRL fitness coach (to be clear – that is no distance at all) – but I think there’s the kernel of a clever idea in here. Sabio basically lets you hook your Strava data up to some sort of ‘AI’ (no clues on whose tech this is using, but let’s assume it’s GPT-3.5-level), which will then give you personalised fitness recommendations and the like based on what the app tells it – so, in theory, it will adjust your regime based on the sort of workload you’re putting yourself through already and adapt based on your performance. I have…doubts about the efficacy and value of this stuff, but it’s an nice example of the ‘pipes’ theory of AI utility (er, that’s something I just made up, to be clear, rather than an actual theory) whereby it’s often more useful to think of ‘what data sources can I give to The Machine and what might it be able to do with them?’ rather than just thinking about prompts, etc.
• Creative Fest: A *lovely* YouTube channel which mainly features really fun little making/crafting/science-y projects that you might want to experiment with – this feels like the sort of thing that might be WONDERFUL for a very particular type of child, although perhaps my saying that simply indicates how little I know about children and what they might or might not be into in 2024. It’s all very homespun and a bit shonky, and I really love it for that – also, the videos are wordless and faceless, and I don’t think they are North American, which is another reason to appreciate them (sorry, North Americans, but we’ve had quite enough of you for the past few centuries).
• Carl’s Friends: I appreciate that for the vast majority of you ‘sourdough starters’ are a conversational theme which you’ve long since confined to the Bad Memory Oubliette that is ‘The COVID Years’ – but I am SO THRILLED that this exists that I absolutely must share it with you. Would you like to receive a sample of sourdough starter that has been going for NEARLY 200 YEARS?!?!?! Of course you would, you’re not made of stone! Carl T Griffith, after whom this site is named, died in the early-00s after a life apparently characterised by generosity – Carl apparently gifted samples of this sourdough starter, which had been in his family since the mid-1900s, to everyone he met, and since he died a group of people have maintained his legacy via this site, where you can find instructions on how to order your own sample of INCREDIBLY OLD BACTERIA for practically-free. Honestly, this is SO LOVELY, and were it not for the fact that I don’t think I could cope with the guilty of receiving and then promptly-killing a near-bicentenarian organism I would totally get involved with this myself.
• Chronolog: Via Kottke comes this excellent site which has apparently been going since 2017 and which exists to let anyone post timelapses of a specific location, tagged to a map, to help environmentalists and researchers develop an impression of how a given area is changing over time. This is a really nice idea – anyone can apply to get a physical ‘mount’ sent to them, which they can then put up in the location in question; passers-by are encouraged to take a photo using the mount (which ensures each image captures the same field of vision) and then upload it to the site using a QR code; each image is added to the timelapse, creating a crowdsourced record of how the landscape changes and evolves over time. This is a North American project and as such the locations being captured are overwhelmingly in that geography – there’s obviously one set up near Oxford in the UK, but I want more please thankyou.
• Entrances 2 Hell: “A constantly updated catalogue of entrances to Hell in and around the UK“ – this is obviously a joke, given the fact that the UK *is* Hell, lol!, but it’s quite a funny one and I admire the long-running commitment to the bit on display here.
• Stickers To Manage Replies By: This feels very much like an artefact of an era or two ago, when people still actually shared stuff on social media and Twitter was still alive – I won’t say ‘good times’, because, honestly, lol, but there’s a certain degree of masochistic nostalgia attached to the memories. Anyway, Dan Hon has designed these stickers which are conveniently available on Flickr and which you can append to your social media posts for added clarity – they say things like ‘This is an observation, no reply necessary, no need to help’ or ‘Do not reply to tell me to use Open Source software’, and Dan was apparently motivated to make these because of A Particular Type of Person he’s finding a lot of on Mastodon, and if you want a decent reason why that platform is never going to be anything other than a niche concern then, well, here you are.
• Florence As It Was: I confess to not really liking Florence very much as a city – yes, it’s beautiful but it’s all too white and, honestly, Rome’s just *better* – but I did rather enjoy this project, a joint venture between a bunch of US academic institutions and the University of Florence. “ “Florence As It Was” has as its mission the gradual reconstruction of this major cultural center, one structure at a time, city block by city block. Paintings produced by artists during the early period that feature buildings constructed before 1500 – including those that no longer survive – have been used to recreate the exteriors of churches, municipal offices, and city gates. Using extant architectural evidence, documents, art images, and contemporary representations, we will build a three dimensional model that will allow viewers to circumambulate a structure, venture inside it, and see stitched onto its walls and furnishings the images that once adorned it. Embedded into this reconstructed structure will be texts –in their original language with English translations –that help explain how and why a specific object looks the way it does, why a specific artist was commissioned to produce it, and/or the motives behind its commission from the vantage point of its patron. Literary passages, tax records, even musical performances will be accessed through clicks on ‘hotspots,’ allowing writers and notaries and musicians to speak for themselves. Hyperlinks to other reconstructed buildings will allow us to make connections, literally, to other spaces and the people who occupied them.” This is an ongoing project and as such very much incomplete, but there’s something lovely about the fragments of history you can explore already, and the way it stitches together maps and imagery, and any art historians or simply Fans Of Florence will rather enjoy stepping back in time.
• I Have No TV: I have to give a big upfront caveat here, in that I have watched literally NONE of the content on this site and can’t therefore promise you that it’s good rather than, I don’t know, being seventeen different shades of whackjob conspiracy content. That said, the potential here is vast – I Have No TV is a site which exists to pull together ALL OF THE FREE DOCUMENTARIES on the web – you can search them by theme, or title, or just pick a title at random, and there are apparently over 4000 on the site for you to choose from…I just hit the ‘random’ button and got sent to watch something called ‘My Love, Don’t Cross That River’ which according to the short blurb is “a story of a couple in South Korea who share intimate moments after 76 years of marriage” and now I am crying, so thanks a fcuking lot ‘I Have No TV’.
• Moonlight World: This is a fun idea – whilst I personally have no truck with Tarot and the occult and all that jazz – although, and apologies for the diversion here, but I did once have my cards done at a small esotericists in Covent Garden c.2003 (I was with a friend, she was into it and insisted I get mine done too) and despite the fact I was very much dressed like a 15 year old boy from 1994 (muchlike today, in fact) the reader accurately guessed that I at the time worked in politics, which honestly scared the sh1t out of me – I understand that All This Occult Stuff is quite popular these days, and it’s entirely possible that many of you live your lives by the Major and Minor Arcana. Moonlight World is on the one hand a company flogging online tarot readings, but it’s also offering ‘digital tarot spaces’ for free, meaning if you want to conduct a reading for your friends you can use their ‘virtual tarot room’ to do so, complete with digital cards and some quite nice animations. This is rather nicely done, and a smart bit of promo for the main business imho.
• SandCastle University: I don’t know what you do for a living, but I am going to guess, based on your readership of this newsletter, that most of you have the sort of stupid, made-up, largely-pointless sort of white-collar, early-21stC media-or-’creative’-adjacent jobs as I do (genuine apologies to any readers who actually do make the world a better place on a daily basis via the medium of their toil – sorry to lump you in with me and these other useless cnuts!) – the sort of job that it’s famously impossible to really explain to your parents. Spare a thought for the people who founded ‘Sandcastle University’, though, who presumably at some point or another had to explain to their parents that they were jacking it all in to become, er, professional sandcastle building trainers – although on the flipside this does appear to be their actual job now, meaning they probably win. Sadly I think this is a solely US concern, but if you happen to be in North America and want to pay to have a bunch of people teach you how to, er, build better sandcastles, then MERRY FCUKING CHRISTMAS. I am not sure why, but I think there is something ASTONISHINGLY BLEAK about professionalising and monetising the act of ‘playing in sand’.
• Film Secession: Very much one for the serious cinephiles amongst you, this – you have to pay to get access, the whole thing being subscribers-only, but read the description and see if it sounds like it might be up your street: “The singularity of cinema lies in its unprecedented capacity to transform the energies of the other arts into an integrated audiovisual experience. This synthesis makes cinema particularly engaging, immersive, and resonant, although, precisely because the constituent elements are organically fused together, it can easily be taken for granted. Film Secession creates new ways of exploring the ideas and artistic currents that have shaped different filmmakers, periods, and art forms. Subscribers will discover nonlinear pathways through the histories of the arts, be able to watch rare films provided by the world’s preeminent studios, production companies, and archives, and have special access to events held worldwide.” Does that appeal, or does it sound achingly pretentious and a surefire way to destroy the magic of an artform? YOU DECIDE!
• Curated Design: SO MANY DESIGN EXAMPLES IN ONE PLACE! Searchable, filterable and INSANELY VOLUMINOUS, this is a wonderful resource for anyone who needs inspiration or examples or just a bit of a creative nudge.
• Flaming Hydra: While 2024 sets to be yet another nadir for most media organisations, and the collective Big Beasts of publishing compete to see who can fcuk up the most spectacularly, there are interesting shoots of recovery and germs of alternative models – 404 Media this week announced that its in the black after only 9 months, the Patreon-funded YouTube gaming channel Second Wind seems to be going from strength to strength, and now there’s Flaming Hydra, which might not end up working but which, I think, has a really interesting model behind it. “We’ve invited several dozen noted writers and artists to join us, for a total of 60 members. Each member agrees to contribute a minimum of one original piece per month to an ingenious, brief and captivating daily newsletter, in exchange for an equal share of the subscription proceeds, payable monthly. Flaming Hydra members retain the rights to their work absolutely. Subscribers to Flaming Hydra will receive articles and essays, comics and criticism, humor, literature, photos, and reviews, with surprises each weekday. Because there are a lot of us, only a small amount of work is required of each member. We’re sharing audiences, work, and resources, so that all can benefit and thrive.” It’s worth checking out the list of contributors who’ve signed up – it’s a really impressive selection of names, and if they all commit to this for the long-term then it stands a chance of thriving, I think. Subs are about £2.50 a month, which feels…reasonable, I think, so if you can afford it and like the concept it could be one to try out.
• No Vehicles In The Park: Have you ever had to think about community rules and boundaries? Anyone who’s ever been in a position of moderator responsibility ANYWHERE knows that it’s a peculiarly-horrible role, mainly because it is SO FCUKING HARD to set working rules and principles that do what you need them to. “Nonsense!”, I hear you scoff, “you’re a moron, Matt! I could totally come up with a set of universal principles to mandate accepted conduct on a theoretical social platform!”. To which I respond “well try this little game and see how you get on then, mr fcuking big boll0cks” – honestly, this is SUCH a clever and nicely-made exploration of how community moderation works.
• Periodic Tables of Almost Everything: Would you like a Pinterest board collecting hundreds of different images of different periodic tables, displaying information about EVERYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE (apart from chemicals, as that would be BORING and TRADITIONAL)? YES OF COURSE YOU WOULD! I genuinely have no idea why people have made all of these things – WHY DID ANYONE FEEL THE NEED TO BRING A PERIODIC TABLE OF HARRY POTTER INTO EXISTENCE, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? – but (aside from that specific Potter-y example) I am happy that they exist.
• Hurt Party: I’ve featured one of Amy Baio’s card game Kickstarters in Curios before, and this is her latest – Hurt Party sounds like a genuinely fun little game, perfect for quick sessions over drinks, in which players compete to offer the best, sincerest apologies for slights delivered. It’s about halfway there with a month to go, so there’s a good chance it will get funded, and if card games and light roleplaying are your thing then you will enjoy this I think.
• 500 Meals: This is the photo website of one Jack Baty – or, specifically, the part of it on which Baty for reasons known only to him, documents 500 meals he has eaten over the course of (more or less) a year. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH – honestly, there’s something sort of brilliantly-deadening about seeing one of the essential elements of life laid out so baldly, so unsentimentally, so…poorly-lit. Also, I do slightly worry that Jack might not be getting as much fibre as he ought – is…is it good to eat that much meat and eggs? I am not sure it is. Anyway, this is a GREAT project and I am honestly tempted to replicate it (I won’t, but the temptation is very real).
• Part-Time Hermit: This is quite remarkable, and oddly-beautiful – were I a less miserably-cynical person, who has dust where their soul should be, I might even say ‘almost spiritual’ (but I am, so I won’t). This is the YouTube channel of (I think) a Portuguese Friar, who spent a year living as a hermit in Italy, and who is releasing a series of videos documenting his experience, and, honestly, they are BEAUTIFUL and peaceful and even I found myself slightly-mesmerised by…look, there’s no other way of saying this and so apologies for the hokiness here, but by his sort of ineffable peacefulness…each one is about 40 mins long, but give ‘January’ a try and see how it grabs you, you might be surprised.
• Fartographics: FREE COMICS! Specifically, free comics from a bunch of young Croatian artists who are publishing their work as a collective under the charming ‘Fartographics’ brand. There are two editions online so far, each helpfully translated into English for the non-Croatian speakers, and they’re available for free (though you can chuck them a quid or two by way of thanks should you feel so inclined), and there’s a really nice mix of art and narrative styles on display here which are worth exploring.
• Lemmings: Taking up the coveted ‘game at the end of Curios’ link this week is this ABSOLUTE GIFT of a link. Are you English? Did you grow up in the 80s? Did you or anyone you know have a computer on which to play games? GREAT, in which case you will doubtless be familiar with Lemmings, one of the first genuinely brilliant puzzle games whose simple premise (‘help all the lemmings get from one end of the level to the other without them all dying in a variety of comedy slapstick ways’) masked level design of quite fiendish complexity, and whose titular characters are one of the most incredible examples of ‘how to design an iconic character with approximately 9 pixels’ work you will ever see. Honestly, I can’t stress enough how AMAZINGLY GOOD this game is – if nothing else you all need to play it at least once, because the small vocal sample you hear when you set the ‘Armageddon’ command, whereby all the Lemmings explode after a short countdown, is honestly an audio tic that soundtracks my internal monologue EVERY FCUKING DAY and has done since approximately 1991 when I first played this.

By Amy Sherald

OUR LAST PLAYLIST OF THE WEEK IS THIS, MIXED BY MALKÖ, WHICH I CAN BEST DESCRIBE AS ‘THE SOUND OF COCAINE ON SKI SLOPES IN THE 1980s’ BUT WHICH YOU MIGHT MORE HELPFULLY THINK OF AS ‘GENTLY-BALEARIC’!  

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Chocolate Bob Ross: Genuinely-horrible AI-generated imagery and animation, in the classic ‘plastic body horror’ style – these are properly unsettling, in a good way.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Jill Mulleady

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

In the 90s, did people in the US have to suffer through endless coverage of David and Victoria, their courtship and their eventual nuptials and the outfits and and and?  Presuming that the answer to that question is ‘lol no you fcuking loser’, can someone please tell me why the fcuk it is that we are now being pelted with news about The Singer and The Meathead and The Big Match? Is it not enough that the world has to suffer the mediatic – and economic, and political, and environmental, and social – fallout from The Next Most Toxic Election Since The Last without also having to feign interest in this latest iteration of ‘entertainment industrial complex power couple’?

Yes, I am old and tired, why do you ask?

Look, I have nothing against Taylor Swift and those who love her; I have little to no opinion on her pituitary paramour. I had rather hoped, though, that the global media era of the web might free us slightly from American cultural hegemony; no such luck I suppose.

Anyway, GO 49ers.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and yes, I am exactly this fun in person.

By Mark Beyer

LET’S KICK THE WEEK OFF WITH A CLASSIC JEFF MILLS SET MIXED IN TOKYO IN THE DISTANT PAST BUT STILL SOUNDING ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH WHICH ALWAYS FANCIED STEPH MORE THAN FLICK ANYWAY, PT.1:  

By Timothy Lai Hui Ming

NEXT, ENJOY 45 MINUTES OF ELLA FITZGERALD, LIVE IN 1974! 

THE SECTION WHICH WHICH ALWAYS FANCIED STEPH MORE THAN FLICK ANYWAY, PT.2:  

• Book Cover Review: Via Good Rishi, this is a lovely project dedicated to, er, reviewing book covers. Which, frankly, feels like something that should have existed already but I am glad that David Pearson and others have decided to make this. Each ‘review’ is a 500 word essay about the book, its cover, how the two relate, and whatever else the writer fancies dropping in – there are a bunch on there already, and you could spend a very pleasant 20 minutes leafing through the various covers and the thoughts they inspire. Gorgeous.
• News Poetry: You know how I was talking earlier on about THE FUTURE OF SEARCH and how that’s basically going to involve information being packaged and fed to you by The Machine? Well, now imagine that, but for news – and that the package you’re being fed is POETRY. Really, really bad poetry. Well done! You’ve just invented NewsPoetry, which manages to fail both as a poet AND as a means of effectively conveying useful information! I am being unfair here – this is obviously just a hacked-together bit of fun and isn’t meant to be anything more than that. I think, as far as I can tell, there’s a semi-automated ‘New York Times headlines’-to-GPT-to-website pipeline that throws these together each day, and, per usual with your standard LLM-text, the ‘poems’ it throws out are execrably bad – today’s opens with “Hey, Biden cleared of documents case / But concerns arise, memory’s embrace / Retaining material, after VP reign / Sharing with a ghostwriter, memory’s strain.” which once your eyes have stopped bleeding you will agree is NOT GOOD; still, it’s sort-of fun in a pointless gag way – I now want to see someone crowdfund a Matt Webb-style digital display that shows ONLY that day’s NewsPoem because, actually, that would basically be ART.
• Road Curvature Atlas: Given the proportion of you I believe to be middle-aged men, stereotype dictates that I must ALSO believe that a significant number of you are the sort of middle-aged men who get REALLY enthused about driving and cars, and for whom the prospect of a pair of mesh-backed gloves, a droptop, a curving mountaintop road and an end to the curse that is your male-pattern baldness is basically nirvana – DRIVING MEN, THIS WEBSITE IS FOR YOU! Brought to me by Giuseppe, this site serves a single purpose – it “helps those who enjoy twisty roads (such as motorcycle or driving enthusiasts) find promising roads that may not be well known. It works by looking at the geometry of every road segment and adding up how much length of the road is sharp corners, broad sweeping curves, and straight areas. The most twisty segments can then be viewed on the web or downloaded as KML map files that can be viewed in Google Earth.” This is very clever, and there’s something pleasingly-geeky about the maths behind this, and I love the fact that this project has apparently existed in some form since 2009(!) – Adam Franco (for it is his website), whoever you are I am genuinely impressed by your 15 year dedication to the beauty of curvy roads.
• The Atlas of Intangibles: This is one especially for the Londoners, although as a project it stands alone – a lovely project by Priti Pandurangan, in which they attempt to apply layers of connection to walks they take through the city. Sounds, bits of urban infrastructure, signs of the city’s decay, marks and scars and signs and graffiti, spotted as Pandurangan walked through Canary Wharf or Ravensourt Park or along the South Bank, all arranged along mapped routes or visualised as a series of connections…there is something genuinely gorgeous about the way in which these disparate little datapoints and observations are weaved together into a strange sort of narrative of the physical, and while I appreciate I am making something of a pig’s ear out of describing this I really do hope you’ll forgive me and take the time to click, because this is charming and such a novel way of considering the urban space we find ourselves surrounded by.
• The Carnivore Bar: Do you find that your HARDCORE LIFESTYLE and the IMMENSE PHYSICAL DEMANDS you place on yourself require you to ingest VIOLENT AMOUNTS OF PROTEIN? Are you saddened by the fact that the current range of protein products currently taking up approximately 70% of all cornershop shelving (seriously, WHO IS BUYING ALL THESE PROTEIN BARS AND WHAT IS IT DOING TO THE NATION’S BOWELS?!?!) don’t, as a rule, contain MEAT? Well the carnivore bar is for you! Beautifully, the website’s homepage screams ‘’nutrition without compromise’, presumably for all those people who think ‘ingesting something that wasn’t once able to draw breath’ is some sort of pathetic cuck move.
• Postcard Models: Would you like a small online shop where you can buy a variety of small, perfectly-formed models of quaint English houses? GREAT! These are cute, everyone loves miniature stuff (EVERYONE, it is the law), and these are almost insanely-cheap, with kits to build your own version of a rickety wooden lighthouse starting from a mere £15. COME ON YOU SAID YOU WERE GOING TO GET A HOBBY.
• The Library of Congress National Jukebox: Oh my word what a resource this is. From the blurb: “The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings. At launch, the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.” Everything I have clicked on this site has been great, and I just soundtracked the writing of this and the previous link with this EXCELLENT song from 1908.
• Style Hunter: Potentially very useful for those of you who have to wrangle images for a living, Style Hunter is a Chrome extension which lets you click on any image on the web and generate another image, based on your probe, which mimics that style – so, for example, you might see a painting by Egon Schiele and think ‘ooh, I wonder what it would look like if Egon had drawn a portrait of Barry Chuckle?’ and in a few short steps you will be able to find out. Truly, the future is amazing.
• The Brutal Web: A directory of websites developed in the ‘brutalist’ style of webdev, which I remember being particularly fashionable circa 2014-16 – per the blurb, “Web Brutalism is one the most ‘true’ design style that prioritizes functionality over form and effectivity over aesthetics. It comes from the French phrase ‘béton brut’, which translates to ‘raw concrete’. Some people call brutalism ‘ugly’ and ‘gloomy’, but it’s just a matter of taste. Beauty hides behind roughness. In some ways, Web Brutalism is an ancestor of web design — insofar as the sites of the web 1.0 era took the form of their function. After the surge of interest in 10th decades the style’s been forgotten a little bit. This gallery serves as a reminder as to how of Web Brutalism’s raw unpolished beauty and new forms.” Useful should you be considering a minimal design template for anything you’re working on, or just if you want to spend some time browsing some really stark pages (also, quite a few of the linked examples are genuinely fun, like this one).
• Comics Devices: Do you or anyone you know like drawing comics, or want to get into drawing comics? GREAT THIS ONE IS FOR YOU THEN. This is “a library of visual-narrative devices that are specific to the medium of comics, furnished with definitions and examples by contributors. It is a practical, accessible resource for creators, teachers, editors, scholars, critics, readers, the curious, the open-minded, and anyone with an interest in comics…The primary purpose of the library is for creators to use as a learning resource and reference tool, regardless of professional level. It is curated by an active creator with more than 10 years of experience and 1000s of comics pages under their belt, and contains contributions by fellow creators from various and diverse places in the industry. It aims to provide clear and practical language without being bogged down by jargon.” This is such a wonderful, and generous, resource.
• Zuckerbackerei: A baking blog! Just like it’s the past or something! This is in German – I KNOW! HOW RUDE! – but it translates beautifully via Google, and whilst you might come for the cakes (the cakes look great, I keep meaning to make the maple syrup and tahini ones) there is also a weekly rambling ‘a bunch of stuff I found interesting this week’ roundup which is honestly GREAT and has given me a whole load of brand new interesting links (most of which seem to be in English) each time since I started reading it a few weeks back. This is by one Jana Wiese, and it’s really really…nice (which I know sounds like faint praise, but it’s not meant as such in this case).
• All of Jay Rayner’s Restaurant Reviews, Mapped: I don’t know if you’re the sort of person who reads and enjoys restaurant reviews, but I very much am, and Jay Rayner, who writes for the Guardian, is one of the UK’s best; some kind soul has undertaken a massive labour of love and mapped every single one of the hundreds of reviews that Rayner’s done over the years, meaning you can bookmark this and have a reasonable selection of potential places to eat wherever you may end up visiting. Except Grimsby – there is nowhere nice to eat in Grimsby (NB – look, I’m sorry if you read this and you’re from Grimsby but I have been there and this is a fact).
• All The Design Images: Or, to give it its official name, VADS (my name is better) – VADS is ‘a national collection of over 140,000 images from over 300 art and design collections across the UK, which are freely available for non-commercial use in education. The images cover the broad range of the visual arts including applied arts, architecture, design, fashion, fine art, and media’, and if you’re in need of visual resources or inspiration or just want to look at a bunch of really cool stuff, this is ACE.
• The Free Internet Library: I love this – not so much because of the texts that are here collected and made available for free download (a weird and eclectic collection running the gamut from the Whole Earth Catalogue to some literature on the history of the Palestinian state, to a book about critical meme reading), but because of the general ethos underpinning it: “After starting several brands and doing massive amounts of research, we ended up collecting so much information that became incredibly useful to us, and we wanted to create a system to help better distribute what we’ve got and spread it as far as we could. What started in a small apartment bedroom is now a full-functional studio, and we owe a lot of that to our community and the research we’ve done.” MORE PROJECTS LIKE THIS PLEASE – it’s nice that we all ‘make content’ all the time, obvs, but occasionally it’s also nice when people do/make things that are just, well, kind and helpful.
• Lists: ‘A collection of shopping lists to choose from’, reads the short site blurb – I don’t know about you, but I find there’s a certain beauty in this sort of hypermundane snooping, and something oddly-personal that you can scry inbetween the notes reminding you to buy eggs, bread and toilet paper.
• Spock Logic: Would you like a YouTube channel whose sole purpose is to provide a series of short lessons on the principles of logic, delivered to you by the animated Mr Spock from the 70s Star Trek cartoon? OF COURSE YOU WOULD YOU ARE NOT A FOOL! There are about 70 of these, part of a project that’s seemingly been running for 10 years (!), and basically if it’s on this list of logical fallacies then you can expect to find it here – this is, honestly, a really good way of getting your head round certain principles and I personally wouldn’t mind it if the creator of these couldn’t also see fit to get Spock to explain, I don’t know, why everything is so hard and why we can’t just stop.
• All Of The Space Pictures: Not ALL of them, obviously, but NASA does a daily ‘here’s a picture of space’ on one of its websites, and this is the archive of all of them, going back to 1995(!) when they first started posting them, and this gives you HUNDREDS of nebulae and galaxies and star systems and the like to click through and gawp at (or, if you were so minded, to train an SD instance on so you can spin up your own infinite machine-imagined space infinities, should you wish to do so).
• Rising Up: This week’s EXCELLENT BROWSER GAME comes in the shape of this really nicely-made and reasonably-shiny Streets of Rage clone, complete with a decent chiptuney soundtrack (though still not a patch on the original’s, obvs) – play a mild-mannered office drone driven to breaking point by a printer malfunction, smashing and kicking your way through swathes of other office drones in what ends up being a surprisingly-cathartic and fun beat-em-up which took me right back to spending a worrying amount of time in what were, in retrospect, some pretty seedy Italian arcades playing Final Fight.

By Daniellle Roberts

KICK BACK AND ENJOY AN HOUR’S WORTH OF LOUNGE-Y, JAZZY STUFF NOW, COURTESY OF RISO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Jean Jacques Balzac: The first of several Instas this week which came to me via the wonderful Things Magazine, Jean Jacques Balzac’s feed is described as ‘wrong architecture illustrations’, and I can’t really do better than that, sorry. These are ODD, in a good, non-obvious and slightly-unsettling way.
• The Tube Map: I am slightly astonished that I have somehow avoided featuring this over the years, but, well, I CANNOT POSSIBLY SEE ALL OF THE INTERNET (however much of my life I waste by attempting to do so) – still, here it is now, an Insta feed dedicated to all things tube map-ish, including old maps, modern riffs on the classic design (including the annoyingly-good Samsung activation currently live in some London stations), and assorted tube-related ephemera.
• I Don’t Give A Seat: Photographs of the upholstery used in the world’s public transit systems. You may not think this is going to be your latest source of sartorial inspiration, but, honestly, some of these absolutely slap and I would totally wear some of these fabric designs as flourishes on tshirts or somesuch (on the other hand, I dress like an increasingly-skeletal tramp, so perhaps don’t take my opinion too seriously).
• Avenrood: Just photos, often featuring street furniture and the shadows it casts. I really like the style here, simple though it is.
• Tiny House Perfect: An Insta account which shares the sort of propertybongo typical of the platform – all tiny, perfectly-formed dwellings with impossibly-well-arranged interiors and a perfectly-cosy aesthetic – except all the houses here are by AI, which means they all look superficially like places you could live until you look a bit closer and notice that the ceiling clearance on the first floor is apparently slightly less than three feet, or that there appears to be a portal to the infinite in the garden. I found this via this piece in the NYT, which I thought interesting about the ways in which the subtle – and unheralded, given a casual observer could easily think these were real – introduction of these aesthetics to the platform which serves as probably the biggest mass-market determinant of aesthetic culture on the planet might affect what we start to see around us in coming years.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Oli Frape

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

February is the worst month of the year. January gets all the attention and the opprobrium, true, but it’s February that’s the real cnut – all of the misery of January with none of the sympathy.

BUT I AM SYMPATHETIC! I FEEL YOUR PAIN!

Still, WE CAN GET THROUGH IT TOGETHER! Here’s the deal – I promise to provide you with four massive, jam-packed, link-filled newsletters over the course of the month, and you all promise not to throw yourselves off the nearest tall structure in protest at how incredibly fcuking sh1t this time of year is. Ok? OK!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably thinking ‘wow, he’s basically like The Samaritans but with better webspaff’ right about now, and you’d be right to do so.

By Vuk Palibrk

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH THIS, BY TOM SPOONER, WHICH FEATURES ‘CHARITY SHOP SAMBA’, ‘GHOSTLY HAWAIIAN DITTIES’ AND ‘DO WOP’ AND REALLY IS VERY GOOD INDEED!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT WHEN PEOPLE WITH 6-FIGURE SALARIES TALK CONFIDENTLY ABOUT HOW AI IS NOT IN FACT A RISK TO JOBS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY MEAN IS, SPECIFICALLY, *THEIR* JOBS AND THOSE OF PEOPLE LIKE THEM, PT.1:  

By Jeff Wall

A STYLISTIC SHIFT NOW INTO SOME VAGUELY-CHIPTUNEY BUT HARDER-THAN-YOU-MIGHT-EXPECT TECHNO, BY OKRUG!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT WHEN PEOPLE WITH 6-FIGURE SALARIES TALK CONFIDENTLY ABOUT HOW AI IS NOT IN FACT A RISK TO JOBS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY MEAN IS, SPECIFICALLY, *THEIR* JOBS AND THOSE OF PEOPLE LIKE THEM, PT.2:  

• Oil Spills: Among all the froth and cant and b0llock being spouted about AI at present – much of it by me, admittedly, I am nothing if not self-aware – it’s easy to forget the extent to which we’re starting to see its application in genuinely interesting and innovative and potentially-transformative fields; fields which can also on occasion be a *bit* depressing. So it is with Cerulean, a new system developed by a company with the RIDICULOUS (sorry, but it is) name of ‘SkyTruth’ – Cerulean uses AI combined with satellite imagery of the world’s oceans to identify the location, size and shape of oil slicks, and specifically designed for: “finding oil slicks in satellite imagery using deep learning models” and “identifying nearby vessels and offshore oil platforms that may have been responsible for those slicks.” Which, to be clear, is amazing and smart and brilliant and such a clever use of machine vision and pattern recognition and datasources…and then you click on the link and you see the world map and you see FCUKING HELL that is a lot of oil slicks, Jesus. Interestingly, the software also seems to make ‘best guess’ estimates as to the vessel most likely to have caused each slick, which seems…I don’t know, legally iffy? Still, I’m sure they’ve done their due diligence and aren’t about to get sued into oblivion by DP World.
• Project Tapestry: On the one hand, it’s undeniably true that The Now is rendered evermore complex as a result of the increasingly-fragmented nature of modern communications and information flows, and the need to be across a dozen or so sources (at best) if one wants to have even a vague and passing idea of What The Everliving Fcuk Is Going On (in one’s own friendship circle, never mind ‘the world’) is increasingly onerous and burdensome and, well, ANNOYING; on the other, it seems equally true that attempting to put the firehose of ALL YOUR FEEDS into one place would result in an infostream so dense, so thick, so clotted, so POWERFULLY DENSE that it’s reasonable to assume that looking at it would do something to your face akin to what the Ark of the Covenant does to the Nazi. AND YET! Project Tapestry is our second Kickstarter of the week, this one having matched its funding goal with over a month to go, and promising backers “a universal, chronological timeline for iOS for any data that’s publicly available on the Internet. A service-independent overview of your social media and information landscape. Point the app toward your services and feeds, then scroll through everything all in one place to keep up-to-date and to see where you want to dive deeper. When you find something that you want to engage with or reply to, Tapestry will let you automatically open that post in the app of your choice and reply to it there. Tapestry isn’t meant to replace your favorite Mastodon app or RSS reader, but rather to complement them and help you figure out where you want to focus your attention.” Does that like something that you’d want? Personally-speaking it sounds HORRIFIC (if nothing else, the already-ruinous problem of context-collapse is hardly going to be improved by the daily juxtaposition of in-feed genocide alerts and ‘funny cat videos from the girls’ and a girthy d1ckshot from the latest squeeze…no, sorry, this sounds like a horrible mess.
• The Fresh Loaf: Are any of you still conducting a one-side, potentially-abusive relationship with sourdough? No, of course you’re not, lockdown was YEARS ago and we’ve all lost those positive habits and new broom impulses and are back to PizzaMan and pubgak – still, for the seven of you who have managed to KEEP THE STARTER ALIVE and are who are still very much on that baking tip, you might enjoy The Fresh Loaf, an online community – a FORUM! Like in the old days! – for breadmaking enthusiasts, where you can share recipes and tips and, you know, just generally BOND over your shared love for gluten and proving and all that sort of thing. I appreciate that this is hardly a novel or earth-shattering link, but equally I believe that forums as a concept are due a comeback and as such let’s start with this one.
• Where Is Madeline?: V Buckenham announced that she was creating her own, simple game-making engine, called ‘Downpour’, a year or so ago, and while it’s still in development it’s slated to release ‘early’ this year, and you can now fool around with an example of something that its creator has made in it – Where Is Madeline is a sort of ‘Where’s Wally?’-ish game in which your task is to identify a specific cat (Madeline, since you ask) amongst all the others across a variety of screens. This is pretty much the antithesis of shiny webwork and is SO CHARMING (in part because of the writing and presentation rather than the mechanics), and I am genuinely interested to play with Downpour when it comes out to the public later. OH LOOK, THERE IS MADELINE!
• Migallo Submarines: I don’t, as a rule, ask to know anything about you – we’re never going to meet, and as such I don’t know why I ought to pretend to care who you are. That said, should any of you be INCREDIBLY RICH SUPERVILLAINS then this specific link is very much for you – Migaloo is a company whose website advertises them as being purveyors of ‘private submersible yachts’ but honestly the description doesn’t even begin to do justice to the insane, jaw-dropping Bond villain-style offerings that you can purchase via this website? Want a ‘private floating island’ anchored to a submersible? Yep, they can do that! This is…look, if you have $2bn spare then maybe you’re willing to overlook the fact that the website looks a *bit* shonky in places, or that the English is at best…creatively-translated, or that the company is based in famously-landlocked Austria, or that, if this is real, then it is almost certainly being monitored by Interpol or a similar international crimefighting body because I refuse to believe anyone interested in anything these lads are selling has come by their wealth entirely legitimately. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a finer selection of floating (and submerging) cocaine palaces (and also, the graph on this page is one of the best examples of meaningless non-communication I have ever seen in my life)!
• Awqāt: Self-describing as ‘the most beautiful Islamic prayer app on the iPhone’, it’s hard to disagree – this is a gorgeous piece of minimal design, should any of you be in the market for a means of keeping track of prayer times on iOS.
• I Didn’t Have Eggs: I am slightly-astonished I’d not come across this before – I Didn’t Have Eggs is a subReddit dedicated to documenting all those instances when people found a recipe online, decided to amend it in certain very specific and creative ways, and then decided to share their displeasure at the resulting culinary car crash with the recipe’s original author. Sample reviews might include “substituted a can of cream of chicken soup for double cream – 1 star, will not eat again” (no, really), or “didn’t have whole milk, used tinned beans instead” (again, no, really), and you will never be more grateful that you don’t live in the American midwest than you will when reading these (because, honestly, you know that 80% of these come from the middle of the States).
• Untranslateable: “Untranslatable is an indie project that delves into the hidden aspects of languages by explaining words, idioms, and expressions contributed by native speakers. It goes beyond traditional translation, offering insights into usage, context, and cultural significance.” Beautifully this appears to be a personal passion project started by one person a few years ago and which has now grown into a properly-interesting database of linguistic tropes and idiomatic speech from across the world. I have just learned that there is a word in French for when one has been made to wait a long time which translates as ‘leeking’ – literally waiting around ‘like a leek in the ground’ – which has basically made my week, hopefully you will be similarly blessed with the gift of largely-untranslateable metaphor and simile.
• Unkee E: Occasionally you stumble across a really GOOD Flickr album, full of odd-but-interesting stuff with no obvious curatorial theme other than ‘things the curator has thought are worth putting together’ – muchlike Curios, frankly, but, er, visual and significantly-easier to digest – and this is JUST that sort .There are nearly 1000 images here and I couldn’t for the life of you tell you what they all have in common other than that they all sort of *feel* like they belong together.
• Potential Music Video: I’m going to have to defer the explanation here, because, honestly, it’s a bit beyond me: “a (low-key) collaboration with Pițipunk singer and artist IIOANA, an alternative demo music video is created by Naoto Hieda using Hydra, a live code-able video synth and coding environment that runs directly in the browser…The music video explores the visual stimulus through the eyes of synaesthesia and neurodiversity. Visuals are purely generated by Hydra code, triggered by cues and a sequencer written from scratch in JavaScript. A bank of Hydra code snippets made by Hieda are randomized, and some parameters are interpolated by faders, which are coded in Choo.io front-end web framework. The interface uses XP.css stylesheet to add a touch of vaporwave along the visuals, and the interface is fully functional in the demo page below. While being a short demo video, it showcases the aesthetic endeavor of Hieda and various technical elements that they developed over the years using Hydra and the front-end framework” – you can read more of that here, but otherwise click the main link, toggle the settings on the left, and play around and get slightly-mesmerised by the sythaesthetic…well, the synaesthetic mess (a beautiful mess, but a mess nonetheless) before you.
• The Iceberg Database: When was it that ‘iceberg diagrams’ were everywhere – 2019?2020? Anyway, you know what I mean, right? Those images showing a tiny emerging part of an iceberg and the massive, hidden lump beneath the waterline, annotated to demonstrate to a normie audience the difference between what was visible and known to the masses and what is lurking out of site (you’d be amazed how often, according to these people, the answer to ‘what is lurking out of site?’ is so often ‘the jews’, by the way)? Of course you do! Anyway, this website collects a whole range of those so you can explore all sorts of different made theories about what everything is the way it is (NO IT IS NOT THE BILDERBERG GROUP).
• 100 Ballads: “Broadside ballads were single-sheet songs that sold for a penny a piece. This website concentrates on over 100 resoundingly successful examples that you can investigate through recordings, images and a wealth of other materials. Whether you are interested in music, art, love, gender, tragedy, politics, family life, crime, history, humour or death, you will find something to engage you here.” THEY HAVE ACTUAL RECORDINGS OF THESE BEING SUNG. Honestly, if you enjoyed the ‘sea shanties’ thing (what is wrong with you ffs) then you will LOVE this; I particularly enjoyed this one, in which a lovelorn suitor sings of his despair at having to leave Bristol for Italy because his beloved will have nothing to do with him – mate, trust me when I say you were making entirely the right decision and your descendents will all have thanked you.
• The World’s Best Villages: I have to say, given recent talk about the environmental impact of tourism and all the various ways in which millions of us going to gawp at pretty things in far-flung lands each year are fcuking the planet, I find it…curious that the UN has a specific section on its website promoting ‘the world’s prettiest villages’ – surely we shouldn’t be encouraging the world’s intrepid travellers to descend on these places en masse lest they all get Venice’d to oblivion? Anyway, if you can ignore the cognitive dissonance and if you’ve got ‘find somewhere to go on holiday this year which hopefully won’t be overrun by the locust that is the American tourist’ on your ‘to do’ list for 2024 then, well, HERE YOU ARE.
• Pong Wars: This is so upsettingly, hypnotically mesmerising that it’s almost like I can *feel* it tickling my dopamine receptors and I am not sure that I like it. Click the link and see how long you’re stuck staring for.
• Chime: A digital wind chime in your browser. I am including this for two reasons: 1) it is the only wind chime sound I have ever heard in my life which hasn’t made me want to plug my ears with concrete (possibly because I can make it stop whenever I want); and 2) I always (perhaps wrongly) associate the sound of wind chimes with superficial spirituality and profundity, and so I really like the idea of using this as a sort of audio sting every time someone in your life says something achingly-pretentious.
• Noted Or Not Noted: I had meant to include this last week and totally forgot – sorry Dave, whose creation it is. Still, if you want a fun game which riffs on Rishi Sunak’s habit of saying things on Twitter which turn out not to stand up to rigorous fact-checking then you will enjoy this – aside from anything else, this is a great example of how to spin up and churn out a quick, topical game in next-to-no-time, and the sort of thing which I personally think is a far better use of your ‘creative’ budget than another fcuking terrible piece of video that literally nooone in the world ever needs to see.
• Web Adventures: Classic text adventures! In your browser! THEY EVEN HAVE ZORK! Honestly, if you have any interest at all in interactive fiction and narrative y gameplay then this is sort of a must-click; there is SO MUCH in here, and it’s a wonderful series of examples of different styles of gameplay and design within an ostensibly-restrictive medium.
• Play Old Sierra Games: Gamers of a certain vintage – and a certain *type*, you’ll have had to have been the sort of person who had a domestic PC in the 80s and the wherewithal to know that there were games for it, which isn’t everyone – will be in paroxysms of joy at this site, where you can play the first three King’s Quest games, the first couple of Space Quest titles, the original Police Quest…all in their original EGA glory, and all with the peculiar design quirks that distinguished the Sierra titles from their contemporaries (you will die a LOT). These really are a lot of fun, and good rainy afternoon / slow day in the office fodder.
• Improbable Island: I am agog at this, honestly. Via Andy, Improbable Island is…it’s a text-based RPG, it’s an old-style MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, for the children), it’s a comic fantasy adventure whose writing is heavily-indebted to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, it has been going for over 15 years, it is all written by seemingly one person, and it is…it is VAST. I spent about an hour playing around with this this week and only scratched the very surface, and I appreciate it won’t be for everyone, but the writing is consistently very, very funny and I find the scope and scale and the fact that it has obviously been built over time with love and affection for a community that very obviously love it back very hard indeed so appealing, and I am thrilled that this not only exists but that it is thriving. Interestingly it’s gotten attention this week because its creator recently updated the site’s community guidelines (behavioural code, basically, and it’s been held up – rightly, imho – as an ur-example of how to write these things and how to go about setting enforceable standards for digital communities. At heart, though, this is a VERY geeky and very oldschool digital RPG, and I think that there might be a few of you for whom this could be absolute catnip.
• Infinite Craft: The last miscellaneous link this week comes from the indefatigable Neal Agarwal, who’s basically made his own version of Little Alchemy (a longstanding browser toy which lets you play to combine various elements to create new ones) except this time it’s powered by AI – I presume there’s an LLM coming up with the resultant outputs of combining, say, mud with a helicopter – which means that you can sort of keep on going forever. This is surprisingly enjoyable, moreso than I might have imagined, and there’s something quite fun about the odd and oddly-poetic results that arise from smushing together seemingly-incompatible things. Give it a go, there’s something pleasingly ‘fridge magnet poetry’ about it (I promise you’ll see what I mean).

By Kathrin Landa

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS ANOTHER SUPERB SELECTION BY ROY WHICH IS 4 HOURS OF SOLID GOLD AND A PERFECT SET FOR A LAZY AFTERNOON! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Vuk Palibrk: This is actually the second link to this artist/cartoonist’s Insta feed in the newsletter this week, but I didn’t want you to miss it – they did the comic strip featured above, which if you are yet to enlarge it to read the copy then, well, do that now please.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Malika Favre

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (ALL OF WHICH ARE VIA THE EXCELLENT GOOD MUSIC NEWSLETTER THIS WEEK!:

How is it possible that a company whose last recorded profits were over $5bn needs to sack 10% of its workforce? How is it possible that literally none of the galaxy-brained investors that have taken turns worrying at the increasingly-ripe corpse of media with their private equity spoons have managed to work out how to make the businesses sustainable? HOW DOES ALL THIS WORK?

Is it…is it the case that the version of Modern Capitalism that we have arrived at, the Final Evolution, quite possibly, is one which basically turns every single potential human endeavour into just AN Other asset to be strip-mined by a cadre of investors and VCs, and that the whole idea of value creation was basically a gigantic myth?

Is…is ‘profit’ and ‘the markets’ and ‘economics’ all basically just lies?

I don’t know! I don’t understand any of this! It certainly feels FCUKING TERRIBLE, though!

Still, as the apparently-illusory ground on which we’ve spent the past 150-odd years building our sandcastles continues to fragment and crumble to dust around us, let’s ignore the tearing and rending sound of everything falling apart and instead spend a bit longer staring at some screens. That might make things better.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you believe that then I have some incredibly good value NFTs to sell you.

By Xan Padron

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH AN OLD ALBUM THAT I ALWAYS THING FEELS PARTICULARLY APPROPRIATE FOR COLD JANUARY AND FEBRUARY DAYS, SPECIFICALLY ‘ROSSZ CSILLAG ALATT SZULETETT’ BY VENETIAN SNARES!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND THE WHOLE BARBIE OSCAR DISCOURSE THIS WEEK AN ALMOST PAINFULLY ON-THE-NOSE EXAMPLE OF PANEM ET CIRCENSES, PT.1:  

By Malika Favre

WE GO BACK IN TIME ONCE AGAIN NOW TO ENJOY SWAY’S ‘DOTTED LINES’ MIXTAPE FROM ABOUT 2005ISH WHICH I REMEMBERED THIS WEEK AND WHICH HOLDS UP REALLY WELL AND WHICH I THINK YOU WILL VERY MUCH ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND THE WHOLE BARBIE OSCAR DISCOURSE THIS WEEK AN ALMOST PAINFULLY ON-THE-NOSE EXAMPLE OF PANEM ET CIRCENSES, PT.2:  

• Powerpoint Karaoke: This link feels almost too powerfully ‘London 2010/11’ – it is redolent to me of Silicon Roundabout (LOL!) and the startup scene and the social events and the overwhelming sense (if you were me, anyway) that despite appearances there was in fact no ‘there’ there and the whole thing was eventually going to evaporate and leave very little trace…AND LO! IT CAME TO PASS! Anyway, you don’t need my reminiscing – PowerPoint Karaoke, for the uninitiated, is a parlour game in which someone has to stand and improvise a presentation based on a bunch of slides that will autoadvance behind them, with the gimmick being that the people presenting have no idea what will be on each slide and therefore what the fcuk they are going to say next. Whilst obviously that sounds about as fun as having unanesthetised bone spur surgery it’s actually surprisingly enjoyable (oh, ok, if you are VERY DRUNK or everyone’s on certain types of drug), and this site lets you play along; I have no idea where it’s pulling the slides from, but there seem to be a LOT. This is, to be boringly serious for a moment, a non-terrible way of helping people get better at presenting, or of doing those awful ‘icebreaker’ things at the beginning of big meetings, should you be in the awful, miserable position of needing either of those two things.
• London Crime: I appreciate that there are at least six of you who don’t in fact live in London – still, I think quite a few of you do and therefore might be interested in this excellent, interesting data dashboard pulled together by Naresh Suglani (and found by Giuseppe) which presents London crime data, broken down by crime type and sortable by individual Borough; it’s one of those nice, simple bits of data work that makes you immediately think ‘hang on, why wasn’t this already available in this really convenient format’, and feels like a simple object lesson in ‘ways we might want to consider making useful, important data visible and available to the public’. For those interested, crime is slightly up year-on-year – but, in general, London remains a remarkably safe city considering its size.
• Useful Spaces: Apologies for the second London-centric link in a row, but this really is useful – it is “A collectively maintained list of welcoming and low-cost spaces…There’s a huge demand for meeting and event spaces in London, particularly those that are fully accessible, low cost or free, and welcoming to a wide range of activists and organisers.” It’s only partial, and needs people to add venues to it to continue to be useful, but it’s a good start and worth bookmarking if you’re ever in the market for ‘a place to hold my ecstatic dance workshop’ or something.
• Artificial Skies: I was largely underwhelmed by all the futureTech coming out of CES this year – there wasn’t even anything that creepy, ffs, and the only genuinely weird-looking tech had been in Curios a whole year ago (once again, while the internet is not a race it also most definitely IS a race and I WON IN YOUR FACE CES. Ahem) – but my desire for ‘technological innovations that cause a deep sadness in the very core of my being, a sadness which may never be fully healed’ has been sated by the website for ‘Artificial Skies’, a company which offers the ability for you to buy a digital skylight or window so that you can stare at an unbroken field of azure blue and make believe that your dwelling or cubicle affords an external view whereas in fact you’re packed into one of several hundred windowless battery pods and the sky outside is the colour of death. This is so astonishingly bleak that I think we’re just going to move on and try to forget (but we may never be able to).
• Slime Or Goo?: Is it slime? Is it goo? What, exactly, is the difference between the two substances and how exactly would you define each? IT DOESN’T MATTER FFS IS IT SLIME OR IS IT GOO PICK ONE PICK ONE NOW.
• Graveyard: I’m not quite sure where I found this, and it’s very…personal, but it’s also really rather sad and lovely and hopefully the person who made it doesn’t mind me presenting it to a few dozen webmongs like this. Graveyard is a little webpage which commemorates dead relationships – leave flowers by the gravestones to learn more. I think there’s something genuinely poignant about this and I think it’s rather beautiful.
• Global Threat: I do rather like the slightly-grandiose way in which this site self-describes; “Welcome to the forefront of security innovation with our cutting-edge AI-driven platform for Real-Time Global Threat Assessment. Our solution harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to continuously monitor and analyze a vast array of data sources across the globe. From geopolitical shifts and emerging cyber threats to natural disasters and public health emergencies, our system provides instant, actionable intelligence to keep you one step ahead of potential risks.” Lads, you are a website that maps news stories as they break and uses rudimentary AI to gauge their relative ‘threat’ level (threat to who, anyway? I have to say I don’t personally feel *that* threatened by the prospect of wildfires in LA right now). Still, I think there’s something halfway interesting about this as a way of presenting and topline-assessing the news, and I wonder whether we’re going to see a resurgence of sentiment analysis as a metric (except this time it won’t be total bullsh1t, maybe).
• What If Asian Countries Were Videogames?: A few caveats here – a) this is just a bunch of images hosted on Imgur, meaning I have no idea who made them or why; I am assuming that it’s all in good faith and there’s no horrible racist subtext happening behind any of the prompting here; b) it’s AI art, which I know we’re all TERRIBLY bored of (but I promise this is funny); c) there are no details on what tool was used or what the prompts were (but I’m guessing Dall-E3, personally). Now, with all that out of the way, enjoy this selection of WONDERFUL imagined oldschool videogame box art for “PAKISTAN: The NES Videogame” or “Cambodia (A SEGA Master System Exclusive” – this is basically one of those ‘oh look at all the stereotypes and prejudices built into the model!’ gags, but with the benefit of using a selection of countries that tend to feature less often (at least in the content I see). This is SO interesting – the number of countries featuring evident war and gunfire, the genuinely bleak tragedy of the Maldivian example, the sense of intense anger the Kazakh people must feel towards Sacha Barron-Cohen…, honestly, even if you’re heartily sick of AI art and anything adjacent to it, this is a great selection.
• The Threshold: A READER SUBMISSION! Jeremy Shapiro (an incredibly-suave-sounding name, now I come to think of it, one that speaks of luxuriant chest hair and possibly the ability to grow an impressively-Selleckish moustache) writes: “my oldest mate Sam is rereading all the fantasy novels he’s read that he still has a copy of in chronological order and blogging about it. And amazingly it’s good and he’s now probably got about as far with it as Sufjan did with his US states albums.” Jeremy is not wrong – if you are Of A Certain Age and spent more time than was perhaps healthy reading fantasy books as a kid then so much of this will be a powerful hit of nostalgia. The Dark is Rising! Some of the Fighting Fantasy Books! All I need is for Sam to reveal that he too had a long-running and in retrospect probably a *bit* sexual obsession with the Dragonlance Chronicles (look, it was a long time ago and I don’t have to be ashamed anymore) and this will be basically perfect.
• Practical Typography: Are YOU into letters and kerning and all that sort of stuff? In which case I would like to genuinely apologise for the appalling mess that is the Web Curios layout and pagination, one day I will fix it. But! Also, have this link! This is an ONLINE BOOK – an actual whole book, all online, and all in lovely HTML, and it’s been online for just over a decade, and if you have ANY QUESTIONS AT ALL about, er, stuff pertaining to typography then they will probably be found here. This is amazing, honestly, I fcuking LOVE the fact that someone has made this and just left it here for people to find and use, and that they have made it USEFUL and HELPFUL and FUNCTIONAL and, look, more of this please.
• People and Blogs: A part of the ongoing ‘2024 is the year of the small and personal web, you see if it fcuking isn’t’ movement, here’s a lovely newsletter which you might want to subscribe to: “People and Blogs is a weekly newsletter, delivered every Friday, where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. The goal is to both highlight wonderful human beings and their blogs, and also to promote a healthier way to inhabit the web and show that traditional social media is not the be all and end all when it comes to having an internet presence.” If you’re the sort of person who publishes into the void online then you might like to read about other people who plough the same furrow; if not, this is an excellent way of finding new voices and topics and themes and interests and connections in a stubbornly non-algorithmically-determined way.
• Vintage Patterns: I genuinely hope that if any of you sew it’s because you enjoy it and find it therapeutic rather than because you’re having to darn holes in your pants to keep them viable – presuming that that is in fact the case, you will almost certainly find something to love here: “We are a collaborative Wikia dedicated to documenting Vintage Sewing Patterns (25 years old or older) that anyone can edit! Browse vintage dress patterns and completed vintage sewing projects, explore amusing illustrations and ogle classic movie stars. Search patterns available from our vintage pattern vendors or add your name to a wishlist.” Beyond that, this is part of a seemingly VAST network of different wikis on different topics, all of which can be explored via the left-hand sidebar and which seem to focus on fandoms of different types – basically if you’re a fan of ANYTHING (probably) you can find an appropriately-themed wiki linked from here via which to indulge said fandom in hopefully-healthy and un-obsessional ways.
• The Apple Parer Museum: Have you ever thought “wow, my life is pretty good but there is a gaping whole at the centre of it which can only be filled by photographs and information of antique devices invented for the sole and specific purpose of peeling apples”? WHAT ARE THE FCUKING ODDS! At this link you will find the Apple Parer Museum, which soberly introduces itself as being ‘dedicated to the exhibition and educational study of antique apple parers, which have both historic and artistic value’, and, well, who are we to argue? NO FCUKER, etc. Aside from anything else I am genuinely puzzled by the amount of ingenuity and endeavour that seems to have been devoted over the course of humanity’s existence to the question of how best to automate apple peeling – look, I don’t mean to cast any ancestral shade here, but, honestly, IT’S NOT THAT FCUKING HARD TO PEEL APPLES BY HAND.
• Headphone Commute: It’s no Pitchfork – but maybe that’s a good thing. If you’re in the market for a new online destination where you can read intelligent writing about new music, you could do worse than bookmarking this site which features reviews and features about all sorts of music and artists I’d personally never heard of, but all with a specific curatorial…ear? Yeah, let’s go with curatorial ear. The site’s anonymous, but self-describes as “an independent online resource of candid words on electronic, experimental and instrumental music. The range of covered genres includes ambient, modern classical, shoegaze, downtempo, experimental, minimal, IDM, film music and everything in between. Headphone Commute is not associated with any artist, band, record label, promoter, distributor or retailer covered by the reviews. There is no hidden agenda behind these words. What you see is what you get. All that means is that we share our love for music because we want to, not because we have to. Created entirely by humans, with no artificial intelligence.” I like this a lot.
• Modern Illustration: SO GOOD. “An archive of illustration from c.1950-1975, shining a spotlight on pioneering illustrators and their work, Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim to is preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating a valuable and accessible resource to build a better understanding of illustration history.” Honestly, as a source of visual/design inspiration this really is wonderful.
• Rambalac: I appreciate that the genre of ‘slow internet vids of people walking around Japan’ is not per se that new or innovative, but I found this particular example of the genre to be particularly pleasing; whoever the person behind Ramblamac is, they have a very pleasing walking style (yes, I know, but I promise you’ll see what I mean) and the selection of walks is interesting and a bit more varied than your standard ‘Shinjuku/Shibuya/etc’ routes round Tokyo. I came to this via Frank Lantz, who wrote this excellent essay on the qualities that make the channel and its videos ‘work’, and I think he’s 100% right about the whole ‘vague sense of liminality’ thing.
• The Ocean Art Photo Awards: Piscine pics! Oh, ok, fine, it’s not JUST fish – there are crustacea and molluscs and the occasional swimming bird or mammal, but none of those were as pleasingly-alliterative. Anyway, here’s the annual selection of ‘amazing photos of stuff underwater’ as selected by the Underwater Photography Guide – some of these are good, but there are also a few that caused my eyebrows to shoot up rather (I am talking specifically about YOU, “Water Sprite”) and the whole ‘underwater fashion’ category in general) and it’s actually quite nice to see a photo contest where there is some stuff that I think is actually a bit aesthetically ugly (I NEED MORE GRIT IN MY VISUAL OYSTER). Oh, and while we’re here, BONUS PHOTO AWARD CONTENT: this is the 2023 selection for ‘Travel Photographer of the Year’ (genuinely curious as to how exactly you define ‘travel’ photography to any meaningful degree, but wevs I guess) and if the photo of the guy with the pangolin (don’t worry, in the wild) doesn’t melt your heart then, well, fcuk you.
• Neon Knives: This is VERY CLEVER, and a nice example of a multiplayer website which I am increasingly convinced are going to become A Thing this year – play with a friend, with each of you tasked with first identifying who YOU are onscreen, then who your opponent is, and then assassinating them before they assassinate you. Honestly, it makes perfect sense when you click – this is an afternoon’s worth of distracting, work-free fun with your office best friend (or, er, actual friends – I forget people have those sometimes).
• Horse Master: This is, honestly, one of the best little browsergames I have ever played – the writing is BRILLIANT, odd and weird and creepy and *visceral* in the most literal of ways (you will get what I mean) and the ability of Tom McHenry to create genuinely-unsettling equine body horror out of what is a VERY SIMPLE basic interface and platform is remarkable. I really don’t want to spoil too much for you here, but I will give you this much: “Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery challenges players to grow, train, and nurture their own horse from birth in the hopes of earning the most coveted tenured position in the world: Horse Master.” Please don’t do any more research, just click and ENJOY.
• Haxball: Our last game of the week is this fun little 2d football-type game; teams of players are thrown together to pass and score in what is basically a simplified 5-a-side (wall passes and all); what I enjoyed about this is that there is obviously a small but dedicated community of people (almost certainly 9 year old kids, on reflection, but hey ho) who play this regularly and are…quite good, but they were SO tolerant of my ineptitude and malcoordination that it I spent a fun 20 minutes or so playing a dozen or so matches and they STILL PASSED TO ME, which, honestly, didn’t even happen at school. I really enjoyed this, and figured some of you might quite enjoy it too.

By Jean Aubertin

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY SIN FOSSIL AND IT’S SORT OF AMBIENTY ELECTRONIC-Y AND SYNTHY AND EFFECTIVELY IS THE SONIC ANTONYM OF THE FIRST ALBUM I POSTED UP TOP! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Rate My Chives: I really enjoy cooking (something people who meet me often find surprising, given my increasingly-hollow-cheeked countenance and general air of someone who survives almost entirely on fags, white wine and cheap speed (lol like you can get speed ANYWHERE these days (seriously if anyone knows anywhere then please do let me know)), and specifically find the act of very finely chopping things (brunoising, if I am feeling like a real cnut) INCREDIBLY therapeutic – which perhaps is why I fell in love with this Insta account at first sight. It shares photos of finely-chopped chives, with a bit of associated commentary about the quality of the chop. IT IS PERFECT NO NOTES WHATSOEVER.
• Monster Track NYC: I am slightly amazed that I haven’t ever heard of the Monster Track cycle race in New York – but then again, looking into it, I suppose the people involved have reasonable reason to keep it quiet. Monster Track is an annual cycle race that takes place around Manhattan and as far as I can tell seems to involve cycling at frankly insane speeds, against the traffic, on fixed-gear (so no brake) bikes. The Insta feed features photos and footage from last year and will doubtless ramp up activity as the 2024 event approaches, but if you want to get a feel for the general vibe here then you might want to check out this video of 2023 (and yes, the ‘most replayed’ bit of that video is EXACTLY as brutal as you think it’s going to be).
• Scaleful: ‘Urban oddities, some real and some AI’ runs the bio to this feed, apparently run by Danny Murphy-lookalike Kyle Branchesi. The AI stuff is interesting and the non-AI stuff is just WEIRD – this is, overall, an aesthetic I like a lot.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By David Van Der Leeuw

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

MY GOD IT IS SO FCUKING COLD. And yes, I know that there are few things more tedious than making banal, obvious observations about meteorological conditions, but I’m afraid the part of my brain that normally spaffs out the intro section has frozen solid and as such this is all you’re getting this week.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you’re cold as well then you could do worse than printing this newsletter out and setting fire to it.

By Tanya

FEEL FREE TO ACCOMPANY THE INITIAL SELECTION OF LINKS AND WORDS WIITH THIS PLEASINGLY-CURATED SELECTION OF AMBIENT-Y TUNES MIXED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS SAD IT WILL NEVER RECEIVE A 10.0, PT.1:  

By Kathrin Landa

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE NEXT BIT WITH THIS FUN LITTLE ONE-MAN-ALBUM WHICH IS BY SOMEONE CALLED ‘LOCAL TEEN’ WHO I FOUND VIA LAST WEEK’S B3TA NEWSLETTER AND WHICH I REALLY RATHER ENJOYED IN A SORT OF ANGULAR LOFI SORT OF WAY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SAD IT WILL NEVER RECEIVE A 10.0, PT.2:  

• Eastern European Animation: It feels a little bit…wrong recommending links to Twitter accounts here in 2024, like linking to articles in The Spectator or something. Still, the site continues to limp on and I continue to demonstrate myself utterly incapable of letting it go – in my defence, it is still professionally useful for me in a way that none of the alternatives are, with Bluesky continuing to feel like a largely pointless chore and Threads’ refusal to do ‘’search results, but chronological’ rendering it largely useless as a newstracking platform, and as such I will continue to log on and feed my addiction until there’s literally noone left but Elon and his awful fashy mates. Thankfully, despite the fact the site is very much a shadow of what it was even a year ago, there are still occasional gems to be found – such as this account, which does nothing but share clips of vintage Eastern European animation, mostly (as far as I can tell) from the 70s and 80s. This is SUCH a strong aesthetic – honestly, I really do adore the specific palette and general vibe of Euro animation houses in the mid-20th Century – but there’s also a pervasive sense of Soviet-era misery and resignation just sort of lurking in the background of all of these, like the ghosts of failed potato harvests past.
• Gatwick Gangsters: Ok, this is a bit niche and you’re only really likely to get much out of it if you’re aware of the very particular weird ‘celebrity’ landscape inhabited by people like Dave Courtney…but for the approximately three of you to whom that applies, ENJOY! Gatwick Gangsters is a film which was released in 2017 and whose existence I had been entirely ignorant of until this week when an image of its promo poster/DVD cover floated across my timeline, and I learned that there existed a film which apparently starred not only the aforementioned Dave Courtney (for those not familiar, a man who found fame in the permissive 00s as a ‘reformed’ gangster and notorious London hardman and who as a result starred in some genuinely atrocious sub-Lock, Stock films in which he chewed scenery and almost certainly did not have to act too hard when pretending to be on violent amounts of gak) but also FORMER SNOOKER PLAYER WILLIE THORNE and FORMER SUN TV CRITIC GARRY BUSHELL and, inexplicably, FORMER DARTS SUPERSTAR BARRY GEORGE (I appreciate that for any Americans or New Zealanders reading this my excitement may be confusing, but I can only encourage you to do a bit of light Googling because, honestly, you need this cultural education), alongside an ‘actress’ called ‘Shampayne’ (no, really), all of whom are involved in a tale of CRIME and DOUBLE-CROSSING and, er, GATWICK AIRPORT, and this is the website for said film and, well, just enjoy it because it is SPECIAL. The film is available to rent on Amazon, and I can honestly say that it may well be the worst ever made – and I say that as a man who once watched ‘Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell’. What I would really like is for someone to explain the specific and doubtless incredibly convoluted series of tax avoidance and money laundering schemes resulted in this getting made, because I refuse to believe that this is anything other than the result of some low-level criminality.
• Buy Betty Boothroyd’s Stuff: Sorry for another VERY anglocentric link hot on the heels of the last one – still, this is a slightly more highbrow representation of our sceptered isle than the last one. Betty Boothroyd, for those unaware, was a Labour MP and later Speaker of the House of Commons in the 90s, but generally had quite a remarkable life, seeing history up close and personal as a result of a rather remarkable career that started off in showbusiness as a dancer, took her to the US as an assistant to a Congressman in the early 60s, and eventually saw her enter Parliament in the early 70s – next week, a selection of her belongings are set to be sold at auction and the listing for the sale, which you can see at the link, is a remarkable selection of artifacts from the second half of the 20th Century (and a frankly INSANE diamond ring, well DONE Betty). This is a crazy collection of things, from the very personal (clothes and jewellery) to the institutional (official House of Commons briefcases) to the…weird, frankly (signed copies of DVDs of ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, anyone?), but if you dig through there are some pretty amazing items (the order of service from the Kennedy inauguration, that sort of thing) which might be of interest.
• Make Paper Fish: GIven that it’s too cold to leave the house and that it’s January and we’re all too poor to spend money on entertainments, perhaps you’re in the market for some GOOD, CLEAN, WHOLESOME, CHEAP FUN? Well GREAT – here’s a website which features what feels like hundreds of papercraft models of fish for you to print out and make. Yes, ok, fine, it’s only ‘cheap’ if you can go to an office and rinse their printers, but presuming that’s an option for you then you are in for HOURS of papery piscine entertainment (via Nag).
• 2023 In Graphics: This is Bloomberg’s roundup of all the dataviz-ish stories it ran in 2023, which is in part an interesting lookback at the year’s news through a slightly-different series of lenses, but also a really good source of inspiration for different dataviz styles and techniques, which is probably worth bookmarking somewhere next time someone asks you to make some incredibly boring numbers look halfway-visually-appealing. There is a LOT of work in here covering a wide range of data types and visualisation styles, a properly-useful (and interesting) selection (via Giuseppe).
• Common Product Features: One of those occasional, genuinely-useful Reddit threads which also make you feel INCREDIBLY stupid, this is a selection of people responding to the prompt ‘What common product has a feature you’re not sure everyone is aware of?’ and OH MY GOD THIS IS REVELATORY. You will all find a different example in here that makes you slap your forehead – for me it was things like ‘Swiss army knife, parcel hook. Most people don’t know what it’s for, but it lets you use the knife as a handle for carrying stuff’ (WHAT????) or the fact that you can SCHEDULE TEXT MESSAGES – but I can guarantee that there will be at least one thing in this thread which will improve your life (or at the very least stop that particular relative or colleague from asking you the same fcuking question every fcuking day).
• Euratlas: Want some maps? Want ALL THE MAPS? Great, here, enjoy! Maps of Europe, various historical maps, maps of the ancient world, custom maps…look, this is basically the cartographic motherlode, and I very nearly lost 10 minutes just now exploring the evolution of European geography between 100-500AD so I imagine that one or two of you might get something out of this.
• The CIA On Flickr: I always forget that Flickr exists and that there are institutions that have HUGE archives on there – thankfully I was reminded of the fact by Annie Rauwerda’s newsletter, which informed me that the CIA has LOADS of albums on the site, covering everything from old intelligence maps to LOVELY PHOTOS OF DRUG DOGS to albums full of old spy cameras…this is SO interesting, partly because of the content but also because I am always fascinated by the ways in which institutions which are, objectively, not exactly ‘cuddly’, attempt to humanise themselves in their external presentation. “We may have killed Martin Luther King but LOOK AT THE FUNNY OLD SPY TROUSERS!”, that sort of thing.
• All Of The Clocks: I would like this on a huge wall, please – honestly, I think it would make a fabulous triple-height installation at an airport, for example. This site is a selection of different timepieces, all monitoring a different unit of time – seconds, hours, days, years, decades, decaseconds, gigaseconds… – all presented on one page, which affords a pleasing and slightly-dizzing sense of time passing at different rates, and the relative nature of the whole ‘time’ concept overall, and basically this just scratched a very particular part of my brain and I would to be perfectly honest with you quite like to stop writing this right now and just sort of enjoy the sense of pure time passing for an hour or so (it’s 931, I’m having a slump, it will pass – MORE BREW).
• EuroSmell: Yes, ok, fine, this isn’t *technically* called EuroSmell, but it really should be and I hope that by calling it that I will somehow persuade the assorted EC functionaries involved in the creation and maintenance of the site to sort it the fcuk out. This is ACTUALLY called ‘The Odeuropa Smell Explorer’, which I think we can all agree is a significantly less evocative title, but which self-describes as “a brand-new web tool developed for the exploration of smell as a cultural phenomenon. This searchable website enables you to discover the smells the past and understand how they shaped European history and culture. The Smell Explorer is the result of three years of intensive research and development by an international team of computer scientists, AI experts and humanities scholars. Its target audiences are scholars, perfumers, heritage professionals, artists, and basically anyone with an interest in the world of scents, in olfactory language and imagery, and in the important role scents play in our daily lives.” This is a bit hard to get your head around, but basically you can search this VAST database of smell-related information, tagged in a quite remarkable set of ways – you can sort by smell source, the vessel from which a smell emerges, the emotion the smell evokes…so for example it would be possible to gather ALL THE RESOURCES pertaining to upsetting, dog-related smells emanating from clothing in the 19th Century. Why one would need or want to do this is a complete mystery to me, but I am genuinely thrilled that one can – the resulting materials range from literature to poetry to news reports to sculpture and painting and there’s something SO pleasing about the ability to take a wander through history guided by smells and our interpretation and relation to them. I think you could probably do something rather cool with this, with a bit of thought and the right sort of brief – so, er, go on, do it.
• Rocketsized: You perhaps didn’t realise that the only thing you required to make your life functionally complete was a website which collected information on the relative size of all the various rockets that have ever been launched from Earth but actually that is in fact the case and you should be grateful to me for bringing it to your attention (but you won’t be, will you? ffs).
• Twisted Draughts: The website calls it ‘checkers’, but it is not checkers it is DRAUGHTS. Ahem. Anyway, this site lets you play a game of draughts against the computer, on boards that range from ‘standard’ to ‘appear to have been through a mangle’ – playing on a twister board changes the game in some fairly fundamental ways, and it’s more fun than you’d expect trying to work out exactly how the modified topography affects tactics in each case. Or it might be – I got so appallingly-frustrated after approximately three minutes of having my arse handed to me by my digital opponent that I bounced off this quite quickly, but perhaps you are a smarter and more diligent strategist than I am (not, frankly, difficult).
• Freestyle: Ooh, this is a fun new daily word game – the premise is very simple, with a different seed word each day which you, the player, are tasked with finding rhymes for. There are two modes, ‘easy’, where you have a set number to find, and ‘hard’ where you just have to guess as many as you can within a time limit. I have occasionally been slightly annoyed by their insistence that something isn’t a rhyme, or poor vocabulary (the site is American, what do you expect? SORRY AMERICANS BUT IT’S TRUE), but generally this is a worth addition to your morning puzzle work avoidance routine.
• 53 Excellent Games: I don’t tend to link to magazine listicles, but I will make an exception for this, compiled by Craig Grannell at Stuff Magazine because it is SUCH A WONDERFUL LIST, Craig here compiles links to 53 of the best browser games available to play online RIGHT NOW – some of these you may have heard of, some have even been linked to in Curios over the years, but plenty more will be new to you and there are some absolute CORKERS. From personal favourite life simulator Alter Ego (a game which, by the way, I have spend about 15 years trying to convince various clients to rip off and recreate because, honestly, this is the PERFECT FCUKING SOFT PROMO VEHICLE FROM AN ATROCIOUSLY-DULL PERSONAL FINANCE OR INSURANCE BRAND FFS) to a fully-functional freeware ripoff of Civilisation that you can play online RIGHT NOW, this list of games is a genuine act of public service and each and every one of you should bookmark it now because each and every one of these is a better and more fun use of your time than whatever act of white collar busywork it is that you’re currently being paid to perform.

By Ada Zielinska

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK COMES FROM THE BEAUTIFULLY-MONIKERED TOMMY AWARDS AND IS A VERY PLEASING SELECTION OF SLIGHTLY-FUZZY ELECTRONICA WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ENJOY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Quantum Cover Art: Have any of you ever thought “You know what would render the long-term aesthetic project that is ‘filling my house with weird tat’ complete? Yes, that’s right, a lamp made out of an old VHS box whose cover art features a cult movie from yesteryear!”? No, I don’t expect you have – still, on the offchance, this Insta feed shares images of exactly that – there’s an accompanying Etsy shop should any of you decide that you MUST own a nightlight which is also the original video case for The Lost Boys.
• Aheneah: The best way to describe this is ‘street art that basically looks like 8/16-bit graphics’, so that’s probably what I am going to stick with. This is an excellent look which feels oddly fresh.
• Bizarre Doctor: An Insta feed collecting odd images – yes, I know, but the vibes on this one are genuinely impeccable (also there is some GREAT weirdness here collated).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Sophie Yerly

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: