This week we’re doing things slightly differently (or at least I am – I presume that the vast majority of you will just ignore this newsletterblogtypething as you ordinarily do) – HOW EXCITING!
I mean, look, it’s probably not VERY exciting, but I’ve been forced into a slight change of format this week due to Circumstances Beyond My Control which meant that I had to spend all of yesterday in hospital (not for me) and had to ask for a copy deadline extension for Actual Paying Work, which meant that I spent three hours this morning writing that instead of Curios, which meant that, honestly, I simply haven’t got the energy to sit here and spaff out 10,000 words of HIGH-QUALITY (ahem) links’n’prose.
BUT! I feel a completely-unwarranted sense of responsibility towards YOU, my unknown-and-in-all-likelihood-vanishingly-small readership, to provide LINKS and DISTRACTION, and as such this week we are doing an EXPERIMENT!
Below you will find Curios in its RAW, UNFILTERED STATE – this is what lives in my GDoc and what every Friday morning at 6am I sit and stare at and then attempt to turn into a newsletter. ALL OF THE LINKS, NONE OF THE DREADFUL PROSE!
*ahem*
Obviously there’s a bit more of a ‘lucky dip’ vibe doing it this way – my notes aren’t exactly fulsome, it’s fair to say – but, on the plus side, you don’t have the unasked for side-order of MattWords ruining all the interesting stuff.
SO! Without further ado, here are A LOAD OF LINKS with literally FCUK ALL CONTEXT! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? ARE YOU?
Normal service will be resumed next week – thanks for your patience, and sincere apologies to any of you who are wrong-headed enough to be somehow disappointed by the lack of overwrought prose in this week’s edition.
I am still Matt, this is (sort of) still Web Curios, and if you prefer it this way I’d really prefer it if you kept that to yourself if that’s ok.
Except, sadly, that’s in the future and noone has quite worked out what happens between the here and now and the ‘magical, tech-greased future’. Still, let’s not worry about that too hard – let’s focus on the Terminator sh1t instead!
(as an aside, it’s been interesting to see the lack of references to EA, longtermism and accelerationism in any of the coverage of this – it seems like a not-insignificant oversight if you’re trying to understand where the various conflicting ideologies at play here are coming from)
Anyway, I imagine you’re all still desperately trying to digest the three tonnes of orange confectionary you extorted from your neighbours earlier this week and probably feeling a touch under the weather – what better way to sort yourself right out than with approximately 100 links with literally no overarching theme whatsoever?
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you print this all out you can probably use it as reasonable kindling for your weekend bonfire so never say I don’t do anything for you.
THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T FEEL HUGELY REASSURED ABOUT THE AI FUTURE AFTER BLETCHLEY, PT.1:
Israel Truth: I was in two minds about including this this week, what with my general stance that this particular conflict isn’t something you need to hear more about in this particular corner of the web; I will, though, make an exception for this link, because it is a really interesting indication of How Campaigning Is Likely Going To Start Working – or, if you’re a specific type of person who earns a living doing a particular type of communications work, how you are going to start running a lot of your ‘let’s mobilise the public’ activity in the next year or so, if you’re not doing so already. To be entirely clear, though, WEB CURIOS DOES NOT ENDORSE THE PERSPECTIVE AND OPINIONS BEING ESPOUSED AT THIS LINK. Anyway, to explain what is going on here – every day this website will, should you choose to sign up, email you a selection of the ‘most biased’ (THEIR OPINION) articles about the Israel/Hamas conflict, along with a bunch of pre-written rebuttal lines which are designed for recipients to cut and paste and post to their socials to ‘redress the balance’ (THEIR OPINION) when it comes to online discussion of what is going on – the interesting bit here is that a) the social media copy is being spun up by AI for ease of use; b) this is actually a sort of promo by a company which sells communications software – there’s no obvious link on the homepage, but this came to me via a friend who saw it on LinkedIn. So, well, this is…interesting. Whatever your thoughts about this specific instance of this sort of tactic/technique – and I’ll be honest, it makes me…massively uncomfortable – you can very much see the appeal for people looking to mobilise their own grassroots campaigns on social, and with a bit of imagination it’s not hard to envisage versions of this that are significantly more sophisticated in terms of the crafting of mass quantities of significantly more tailored messaging – there’s no excuse for bot armies all using exactly the same form of words when you can LLM an infinite variety of rebuttal lines, after all. Specifically, though, does it feel ok that this can exist with no indication of who is behind it and who’s paying for it? I am not totally sure it does. Anyway, interesting in theory if, obviously, immensely fcuking bleak and not-entirely-ok-feeling in practice, as is what happened on October 7th and everything that is currently happening to the people of Gaza and the surrounding areas.
Dot: Elon, as we all now know thanks to his latest pronouncements having been endorsed and ratified by the latest in the long line of contenders for the crown of ‘least-effective Prime Minister the country has ever seen’, is bullish on the concept of ‘AI personal assistants who will know us better than we know ourselves’ (we’ll need someone to guide us and tell us what do do when all the jobs have been majicked away, after all) – and here’s a prototypical version of that very thing for you all to gawp at in awe and wonder! ‘Dot’ is the product name of the inaugural device being produced by a company called New Computer, and the basic idea is that, yes, it really is a talking personal assistant AI which you can chat to and which will remember things about your life and your wants and your needs and desires and fears and the things which wake you up at night sweating and hyperventilating, and which will use all this information to make your life BETTER and MORE EFFICIENT and to almost certainly smooth the edges of your existence to a point of frictionless perfection such that you will never want for anything ever again…probably. All that this is, at present, is a homepage which takes you through a selection of use-cases for the device, presented through the lens of the life of a fictitious user called ‘Mei’, whose Dot device helps her overcome a selection of small challenges whilst also encouraging her to GROW AS A PERSON, by suggesting she take classes, complimenting her progress as a calligrapher, reminding her to change her pessary, etc etc (one of the preceding examples may have been made up). I mean, look, I can’t pretend that the idea being presented here isn’t a lightly-seductive one – who wouldn’t want an omniscient, omnibenevolent personalised God-companion with perfect recall to manage one’s life? NO FCUKER, etc! But, er, just remember my perennial warning that whilst there will obviously be products like the Dot – the mass-market, normie companions for the UNIMAGINATIVE SHEEPLE – there will also be an infinite variety of jailbroken open source variants of these with ‘fun’ personality archetypes and goal profiles acting as perennial personal companions, AND YOU WILL NEVER, EVER KNOW WHO HAS DECIDED TO HAVE ‘NAZI NICK THE FRIENDLY WHITE SUPREMACIST AI’ AS THEIR PERSONAL VIRGIL UNTIL THEY ARE SHOWING YOU THEIR PERSONAL COLLECTION OF SPECIALIST MEMORABILIA.
Silent Hill Ascension: This is interesting – do you happen to recall that during lockdown I linked to a new, experimental entertainment format being trialed by Meta, which basically ran a sort of semi-interactive narrative videogame-type experiment in which viewers could vote to influence the actions of a selection of characters in a ‘kids camping in the woods’ scenario – it was called ‘Rival Peaks’, in case you’re struggling? No, of course you don’t, and why would you? It was a bit shonky and didn’t really work, although according to the Wiki it had over 100m viewers so, well, what do I know? Anyway, that’s by way of preamble to this link – which is basically a similar sort of premise, except this is the first step in the full-franchise reboot of ‘legendary’ videogame series Silent Hill and as such there is a LOT more money invested and the whole thing looks a lot more polished. How does this work? Ok, so…basically there are several months of daily episodic programming planned which will tell a CREEPY STORY about families riven by secrets and lies and THE OCCULT, and who, if previous games in the series are anything to go by, will at some point have various parts of themselves flayed and stretched and possibly salted by EVIL ELDRITCH FORCES and a very tall bloke with a pyramid on his head. You can watch these episodes LIVE each day, and when you do you can influence the course of the action by collectively taking decisions, collectively playing QTE-style games to help save (or doom) various characters, and generally take a community-led approach to how the story develops and which characters live or die. Of course, because this is 2023 this is also tied to a monetisation mechanic – your ability to affect the course of events is determined by the number of ‘influence points’ you have to spend, which points can be accrued either by participating in the show (playing minigames, ENGAGING IN THE COMMUNITY, you get the idea), or, of course, by paying cold, hard cash. I tried watching the first episode (you can watch everything on catch-up too, should you have better things to do than schedule appointments to view a shonky webseries aimed at teenagers) but, honestly, it’s…not great, and the whole thing is quite clunky and feels a bit ‘HOW DO YOU DO FELLOW KIDS?’ in places – but, equally, I admire the ambition in terms of interactive narrative stuff, and I do broadly think that there’s something in the wider idea. You can read a bit more details about how it all works in this article, if you’re interested. DON’T BE SCARED!
3d GPT: Only a research paper, this, but contains some neat little examples of how the current best-in-class ‘text to 3d environment’ software is working – ‘surprisingly well’ is the answer, at least cosmetically. While you wouldn’t necessarily suggest that any of the scenes rendered here are anything other than rudimentary, I feel obliged to once again drone on tediously about how ‘this is only going to get better’ and ask you to think about what’s likely to be possible here in a year or so, presuming the pace of change is maintained.
Del Complex: I confess to not *really* understanding what the fcuk is going on here, but I am INTRIGUED and as such I will count this mysterious project as at least a qualified success. You might have seen a story doing the rounds this week, in the wake of the US’ scene-stealing executive order on AI, about a company offering to set up server farms in the ocean as a way of neatly sidestepping any regulatory burden from the US on the development of AI systems – that company was Del Complex. Except when you do some digging on the site, it seems that the company isn’t in fact real at all, and this is all some sort of…I don’t know, elaborate fiction? ARG? Performance project? Elaborate branding exercise to sell some vaguely-apocalyptic merch? I honestly have no idea, but the project self-describes as “an alternate reality corporation. Our mission is to accelerate human potential through the symbiosis of AGI, neural prosthetics, robotics, clean energy, resilience solutions, and fundamental scientific research” – and there’s an ‘intranet’ bit on the site which requires a login, which is CLASSIC ARG fodder, and there is definitely merch that you can buy…I haven’t had enough time this week to properly investigate this, but I think there might be something moderately-fun hiding under the hood and if you’re the sort of person who can still hear the letters ‘ARG’ without rolling their eyes and muttering ‘fcuking useless transmedia cnuts’ under their breath then, well, you might enjoy this (and you can read a bit more here if you’re curious, although it doesn’t exactly shed a lot of light on what the everliving fcuk is happening).
Tirazain: It looks increasingly likely that whatever territory emerges from the current horror in the Middle East will bear little resemblance to what went before it, which made this initiative particularly poignant to discover this week. “Tirazain is a digital archive and library with the aim to digitally document, preserve and reclaim Palestinian embroidery. While participating in tatreez initiatives, we noticed a recurring challenge: limited access to high-resolution, easy-to-follow and affordable patterns. This obstacle is especially pronounced in underserved communities who often rely on photos of patterns shared via social media which are typically pixelated, cropped or black and white. This access inequality is further exacerbated by the fact that Palestinians in the Arab world are often excluded from international museums where tatreez knowledge is shared. In other words, access to tatreez knowledge has become a privilege.” Click the ‘library’ tab at the top of the page and browse through hundreds of gorgeous embroidery patterns, preserved and communicated for centuries – this is lovely and not a little sad.
Love Letters To Places I Will Never Meet: My very favourite sort of digital project, this – small, intensely-personal, vaguely-elegiac and a bit wistful, Love Letters To Places I Will Never Meet is Elan Ullendorff’s tiny memorial and tribute to businesses which existed in the neighbourhood in which he now lives before he lived there. “When I walked around South Philly I could feel the ghost places haunting me. So I embarked on a mission to summon them, or at least their simulacra, back from the dead: a digital seance, if you will. Map apps do not think you should care about shuttered stores, so they don’t tend to offer an easy way to browse them. But I paid a data broker $5 to let me download a spreadsheet of local closed businesses and cross referenced those with their Google Maps listings. I pulled testimonies of those places in the form of positive reviews and turned them into an interactive map I’m calling love letters to places i’ll never meet. I hope you enjoy it.” Honestly, I think this is SO LOVELY, and I would love to be able to automatically pull this sort of information for any small geographical area you choose, so if someone could make that happen for me that would be great thanks.
Fresh4Trash: How are you enjoying your collection of expensively-assembled 2000-era jpegs? LOL! Whilst, obviously, there is nothing funny about a bunch of poor, lockdown-addled morons getting scammed into spending hundreds of pounds on John Terry-endorsed infant simians, one does rather wonder what’s going to happen to all those colourful 1s and 0s currently taking up valuable space on your hard drive – which is what makes this initiative by German supermarket chain Kaufland so smart. For the month of October (the initiative is now sadly finished) anyone who so chose was able to hand over their NFTs to the supermarket in exchange for vouchers which they could redeem in stores for fresh fruit and vegetables, thereby turning something useless and crap into NUTRITIOUS FOODSTUFFS. A really smart gimmick, this – eye-catching, silly, funny and, crucially, reasonably-limited liability vs the publicity it will have garnered (because, obviously, most people weren’t stupid enough to buy NFTs in the first place).
TV Memorabilia: Do YOU want the chance to spend a bunch of your hard-earned cash on some assorted tat from television shows you half-remember from your past? OF COURSE YOU DO! Next week a whole MOTHERLODE of bits and pieces from old films and TV – mostly scifi, from what I can tell – goes under the hammer in London and OH MY GOD if you are a specific type of person with a specific type of house and a lot of disposable income/shelf space and a very forgiving partner then WOW are you going to be very poor after clicking this link. ‘Stunt Facehugger’ from Aliens? A guide price of £20k for that one. One of the horrible Cenobite murderboxes from Hellraiser? £24k and it’s yours! THE SANKARA STONE FROM TEMPLE OF DOOM? £40k! GET IN THERE INDY! This is INSANE, and there are 75 pages of lots to wade through meaning there should be something in there for everyone.
AI Film Awards: These are put together by leadin purveyor of text-to-video software solutions RunwayML, and while the techniques and styles here displayed won’t amaze anyone who’s been paying any attention to the tech (SO YOUNG AND YET SO JADED!) it’s a decent place to look if you want a rough overview of ‘the current state of AI-generated video’.
AI Football Analysis: So when I wang on about how AI is going to eat all the desk jobs, noone listens to me, but when ELON wangs on about it…FINE, WHATEVER, I AM NOT BITTER. Ahem. Anyway, I stumbled across this this week and was interested as it was a field I’d not seen getting the AI treatment before this point but which is a decent idea in theory, applying generative AI to the player data to produce fast analysis of strengths, weaknesses, etc – effectively this is just providing a multimodal GPT layer on top of third party data from people like StatsBomb and the like, and as such I am…uncertain of what the long-term competitive advantage is for these people, but it’s good to know that ‘data and stats person for sports teams’ is another role in the imminent firing line.
1ft.io: Long-running paywall-evading website 12ft.io was shut down this week as the hosting company that had previously housed the domain decided that it didn’t want to deal with the hassle anymore – so inevitably it has sprung up again elsewhere under a different name, but with the same excellent functionality. To be clear – I believe in paying for journalism, and I do, repeatedly; equally, though, not everyone can afford to pay hundreds of quid a year on subscriptions, and I don’t think in an ideal world access to information should be a function of wealth (and now I will stop pontificating, sorry about that).
The Internet Phonebooth: Would YOU like a service which lets you set up a free, 45m, encrypted video chat with anyone you like – one which has screenshotting disabled by default? WHY WOULD YOU LIKE SUCH A THING WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING ON DOING? Ahem. Web Curios does not judge, Web Curios merely provides links (and, yes, fine, judges a *bit*).
A Story With Borrowed Words: I think this came via Kris, though I can’t recall exactly – regardless, I love it and I am genuinely interested to see how the project works out. “will you help me find new words? my sentences are growing lonely and desire the company of others. other than these words i am writing to you now, i seem to have lost all my words, somehow. beginning december 1, 2023, i will share a piece of writing using the words you’ve gifted me on the first of every month until i am exhausted or the words exhaust themselves.” Submit some words and see how they get used – this is such a sweet idea.
The Extremely Detailed Map of New York: I don’t love New York – sorry, but I don’t, and given the city’s pretty much total indifference to *me* I don’t see why I should feel bad about this – but appreciate that for many people it’s the ne plus ultra of urbanity and inspires STRONG PASSIONS; this new project by the New York Times is a gorgeous bit of city-servicing journalism, creating a street-by-street map of what local residents call their neighbourhoods which produces a beautiful ground-up pathwork picture of the way in which the people who live in a place define its edges more than the planners that name and zone it in the first place.
Dutch Cycling Lifestyle: This is another simple-but-neat ‘how to use AI in a consumer-facing campaign 101’ idea – bizarrely, this is a campaign by the Dutch government, seemingly designed to promote the general idea of ‘Dutch people having a lovely time on bikes’ to an international audience (is this stage one of some sort of sinister clog-based uprising? JUST ASKING). Input your address and WATCH IN AWE as your grey, dirty, car-clogged and fundamentally RUBBISH anglo street gets transformed into a beautiful, idyllic, utopian paradise in which impossibly-tall and strong-looking people with impeccable teeth and STRONG BONES (YES WE KNOW YOU ALL DRINK MILK FFS) cycle happily whilst expressing STRONG OPINIONS at each other and being unnecessarily blunt in conversation (that’s basically the Dutch in a nutshell, right?). This is lightweight but nicely done, and a simple, easy and cheap way to ‘do something with AI’ so that your moron CMO will finally fcuk off and leave you alone.
Not On Amazon: Another year, another website offering you the chance to buy directly from small retailers rather than the evil behemoth that is Amazon this Christmastime – given eBay and Etsy have both rather lost some of that ‘artisanal small business shine’ over the years, it seems timely to introduce Not On Amazon which promises to let you buy a bunch of hand-made things from very small sellers who might not otherwise get the attention. The site’s got about 50-odd retailers selling through it, so it’s worth a look should you want to do your internet shopping in such a way that doesn’t make you feel a bit sick and guilty every time you click.
THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T FEEL HUGELY REASSURED ABOUT THE AI FUTURE AFTER BLETCHLEY, PT.2:
Let’s Get Creative: I might quibble the title here – this describes as a ‘collection of online creativity tools’, but, honestly, they’re not creativity tools, they’re a selection of gorgeous, silly, fun little internet toys (many of which you will OBVIOUSLY recognise from Curios passim, with about ⅓ of these having featured in here at various points over the past decade or so) – there is a whole afternoon’s worth of guileless play waiting for you behind this link, and were it not for the fact that I have a CAST-IRON SENSE OF DUTY I would totally fcuk off right now and spend the next couple of hours making increasingly-complex courses on Line Rider.
Weather Photographer of the Year: A TOPICAL LINK! How are YOU enjoying Cieran? Damp, isn’t it? If you prefer to experience your weather in pixellated two dimensions rather than the cold, blustery reality of meatspace then you will almost certainly adore this selection of fabulous images taken by meteorology enthusiasts over the past 12 months – the snowflake photo is particularly remarkable given it’s apparently taken on a mobile, but it’s hard to argue with the sheer…well, METAL-NESS of the ‘Christ The Redeemer in a lightning storm’ shot.
Spaceborn United: Not, sadly, a non-league football team with a remarkably scifi backstory, but instead an organisation that is dedicated to exploring the science that will permit people (or, to use their in-no-way-unsettling terminology, ‘mammalian lifeforms’) to reproduce in space! On the one hand this isn’t a ridiculous proposition – should we eventually decide that we want to export the human virus to other planets and eventually galaxies, it seems likely that these will be multigenerational journeys and that as such we’ll at some point have to work out how to bone, and breed, in no-grav states. I spent a bit of time reading around this this week, and it is genuinely interesting…but at the same time, I don’t know, there’s something about this website (the design, the not-totally-hi-res imagery, the language…) that makes me wonder whether the whole thing isn’t some sort of sinister front for something totally other (to be clear: it almost certainly isn’t a front for anything sinister at all, probably. PROBABLY).
Carbon Date The Web: SUCH a useful tool, this, made available by Old Dominion University (no, me neither, but I am grateful) in the US, which lets you plug in any url you like and get a rough idea of when it was first spun up – which is HUGELY helpful for a bunch of different reasons, as you might imagine, and is generally A Good Thing. I tried it on Curios and it was pretty accurate – ymmv, but as a rough way of working out how long a site’s been around, it’s super-helpful.
Simply Scripts: Do YOU like films? Do YOU like films scripts? Do YOU want access to a frankly dizzying number of them, all conveniently arranged at a single website for you to browse and read and learn from to your heart’s content? Do YOU want to scrape them all, feed them to an LLM and go about creating your very own Hollywood-grade work in a matter of mere minutes? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN! Simply Scripts is a website that, well, collects scripts – there are other sections on the site (radio, theatre, unpublished works…seriously, there is a LOT), but the link here takes you to the ‘Film’ subsection where you can find full original scripts for everything from 101 Dalmations to Zootopia, and as a resource for anyone who wants to learn the craft of screenwriting this is pretty much unparalleled (but, er, please don’t do the thing I suggested about feeding this all to an LLM if you don’t mind).
MUD Resources: This is quite old school and VERY geeky, but also a bit of classic Old Internet Culture and as such, well, CLICK AND LEARN. The ‘MUD’ here stands for ‘Multi User Dungeon’, some of the earliest shared online spaces ever to be created where people first started to explore how the whole idea of ‘actual people made of meat existing as textually-embodied digital avatars in a nonexistent world interacting with each other’ might actually work in practice (and, as I now feel personally obligated to mention every time this topic comes up, the origin of what is still the best ever thing written about community and society in digital space. “My Tiny Life”) – obviously MUDs are clunky and weird and probably of limited interest to a modern web user, but this stuff is so incredibly significant in terms of the ways in which our present online habits and social mores have developed, and this site offers an excellent way to learn about their history and mechanics, and, should you desire, to play around with a couple of still-extant communities.
The QR Code Menu Printer: Ok, this doesn’t actually exist – instead it’s a set of instructions for building your own, which, fine, requires a degree of practical skill far beyond me and which therefore I can’t vouch for beyond the general sense of ‘I like this idea, it amuses me’ – but I very much approve of the concept. One Guy Dupont has hacked together this small device which exists to perform one single, simple function, to whit: printing out menus that restaurants still insist on presenting as digital-only documents via QR code. Basically all this is is an thermal ink printer with a wifi connection, but there’s something so perfectly…well, so perfectly middle-aged-man about the techy overeingineering of the solution here that really appealed to me. It requires 10 components, all of which you could have delivered to you by Monday if you fancied making me REALLY HAPPY and building one yourself.
Octostudio: Are we still doing the whole ‘hey kids, learn to code, you’ll have a job for life!’ thing? Hm, probably not. Still, regardless of your bullishness or bearishness at the future job prospects for code monkeys, there’s no denying that a basic facility with the principles of ‘how software works and what it does’ is a genuinely useful thing to have (regardless of whether The Machine lets us touch its software ever again) – and, well, making stuff is fun! If you have young people in your life who you think would enjoy ‘making things with code’ then Octostudio looks like a decent way in – it self-describes as “A free mobile coding app developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab”, which is decent pedigree, and it seems to offer a pretty gentle introduction to the basic principles of ‘how code works to make machines do things’: “young people can create interactive animations and games using a mobile phone or tablet anytime anywhere. Take photos and record sounds, bring them to life with coding blocks, and send to family and friends.” This could be a fun toy for the right sort of kid, maybe.
Cambrian Chronicles: Who doesn’t want a YouTube channel whose sole purpose is to provide animated explainers of ‘Welsh and Brythonic history’? Who can, hand on heart, tell me that they know off the top of their head what ‘Brythonic’ means? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! You may not think you care about this stuff, but I got surprisingly sucked in by a video documenting extinct animals that might have roamed the Welsh hills some 1500 years ago and it’s entirely possible that you will too.
CJS Gallery: I have a particular soft spot for bad, vulgar art – not just unskilled pedestrian stuff, but work that is a combination of horrible AND violently-expensive and ostentatious, the sort of stuff that has come to basically define bits of Frieze to a certain extent, or the kind of work that you find in the ‘art’ section of Harrods (which, by the way, if you have never visited I can recommend unreservedly – it’s a spectacular bejewelled graveyard to taste) or in the shops at the Bellaggio in Vegas – which perhaps is why the TikTok account of this Dutch gallery spoke to me so hard. I don’t want to spoil the joy of this by describing it – it really does benefit from going in blind, so to speak – but I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by suggesting that the likely buyers for this sort of thing are the sorts of people who three years ago would have been loudly trading apes. Imagine if Tony Montana was a) real and b) alive in Miami RIGHT NOW and in the market to redecorate his mansion and c) had just banged about six kilos of his own product – this is EXACTLY where he would shop.
Wylder: To be honest, the timing of this link is a bit off – early November is not, to my mind at least, the time when people are desperate to get out into the GREAT OUTDOORS and start rambling and hacking and all that sort of bucolic fun. Still, I found it this week and that’s therefore when you’re getting it – Wylder is an app which is designed to encourage people to get out into the natural environment to walk and explore, and which sets you daily challenges and encourages community and, look, this is TREMENDOUSLY well-meaning and very much A Good Thing, but also rather has the slightly-knitted vibe of a COUNCIL INITIATIVE…because that’s basically what it is. There’s UK Government money in here somewhere, and it’s a Falmouth County Council project, and I really want this to succeed despite the aforementioned wholemeal knitted tweediness of the whole thing because it’s a nice idea and I can totally see the value – I can imagine it being of interest/use/help to people in their 50s or 60s, maybe, although should anyone of that age bracket be reading this, feel free to get in touch and tell me whether or not I am massively misrepresenting you here.
GDK: This is the website for a small chain of fast foot restaurants in the UK called ‘Gourmet Doner Kitchen’. They sell kebabs. THEIR WEB PRESENCE AND BRANDING IS SO GOOD! Seriously, what is it this year with fast food chains getting serious about their marketing – I think this is the third or fourth really excellent piece of digital brand work I’ve seen in this sector in 2023. I still don’t want to eat a fcuking doner kebab, fine, but I would like to congratulate whoever’s responsible for this which is just far more fun than it needs to be (and I am a sucker for the juxtaposition of ‘doner’ with ‘lambo’).
Restaurants In Peace: Another lovely piece of digital memorialisation in the shape of this project which seeks to keep a record of restaurants that have closed – it’s operating in a couple of dozen cities across North America, but the site suggests it’s planning to expand to more places, and the site’s simple functionality lets you add memories for any restaurant you wish to commemorate, and I would LOVE this for London; I think restaurant memory writing is always evocative and beautiful, and there’s something poignant and lovely about creating a crowdsourced record of the memories people have of places that were special to them (108 Garage RIP).
Collaboration Cookbook: I really like this idea, and it’s a nice example of community organisation principles in practice: “The collaboration cookbook is a living resource that includes recipes for real creative projects. Each recipe is an instruction for an activity, initiative, or experiment that is the products of people working together in creative partnership.” So here you’ll find instructions to help organise all sorts of different things – book clubs! Conferences! Record labels! Neighbourhood support schemes – in simple, easy to follow language; anyone can in theory add to these instructions with their own expertise, with the idea being that the ‘Cookbook’ will evolve into a general resource for collaborative action – this is INSANELY hippyish and the sort of thing I would normally be disgustingly cynical about because, well, that’s the sort of miserable cnut I am, but actually it turns out that I can’t be cynical about this at all and it’s just a really nice initiative.
Bathmates: Another example of high-end branding coming to…unexpected markets comes in the form of this company, which, er, as far as I can tell sells pumps which claim to help men achieve ‘better’ erections. Which, to be clear, I am including not because I imagine any of you are necessarily in the market for such a thing – NO SHAME if you are, though! We could all use better erections! – but because it has the branding and webdesign of a very different sort of company, one which exists to , I don’t know, sell you tastefully-curated financial services products rather than a penile sleeve which somehow uses…water? to make all your insecurities disappear (there is a real dearth of info on the site as to how the fcuk this is all meant to work – WHERE DOES THE WATER COME IN HERE?!) – and yet here we are! This is really slick, really clean, and makes me wonder whether we’re just at a point now when we’re all relaxed enough about sex and sexuality that we’re going to see mainstream ads for clitoral suction devices on the tube (which, to be clear, would be totally fine, as long as they’re nicely art-directed!).
Guess You: A new game by perennial creator of online distractions Monkeon, this lets you play ‘Guess Who?’ against the computer, with the wrinkle here being that, by answering a short series of questions about your appearance, the machine will attempt to identify which of the Guess Who? characters you most resemble. This will be funny for you exactly once, but it’s worth it.
QwertyTiles: It continually astonishes me how fcuking terrible so many people are at typing, despite the fact that we all spend so much fcuking time stuck in front of a keyboard-based interface – if you’d like to get marginally better at typing instructions to The Machine while at the same time pretending you’re playing a game rather than effectively doing Mavis Beacon then, well, you will LOVE Qwerty Tiles, which sets you a ‘type the cascading letters in order and in time’ challenge and which will absolutely kick your arse if you put it on ‘Pro’ mode.
Neighborle: A daily game where you’re tasked with identifying which countries share a border with another given country – so today, for example, you’re challenged with identifying the border neighbours of Sweden. You might find this incredibly, almost patronisingly, easy – I am some sort of geography untermensch and this left me feeling SO STUPID I actually had to turn off the computer and go for a walk.
Angry Pumpkins: On the one hand, this is a shonky Hallowe’en-themed Angry Birds clone; on the other, this has been made entirely with AI, from basic code to assets, and as such is worth a look as a curiosity. As ever, THIS IS THE WORST IT WILL EVER GETzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The Basement Chronicles: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is this truly astonishing achievement – you remember the golden era of point-and-click adventure games, as embodied by LucasArts and titles like Day of the Tentacle and The Secret of Monkey Island? Well imagine those games but NEW and playable IN YOUR BROWSER RIGHT NOW – WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! The Basement Chronicles is a really incredible achievement – a 90s-style point-and-click game, complete with voice acting, all playable in your browser (and I think it works on mobile too); the graphics are great, the animation’s lovely and while the script and gameplay are, fine, not a patch on the actual retail classics of The Past, and, yes, the voice work isn’t exactly stellar (you can toggle this in the top-right if you’d like to turn it off), this is still FCUKING AMAZING and the best way of spending the next hour of your life that I can think of that doesn’t involve a hypodermic syringe and the blank wonder of forgetting.
Crochet Creep: Knitting and crocheting of the most sinister kind. Disembodied limbs, monsters from dark corners of the psyche, eyeballs and viscera…BUT SO CUTE THOUGH!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
James Elliott: James Elliott is a man in Scotland who carves things out of wood, and this is his Instagram feed which is basically a collection of the most satisfying craft-y videos I have seen in months, and which will not fail to soothe you on some fairly fundamental level.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
Why We Need Utopias: This is SUCH an interesting interview – Kristn Ghodsee who’s written a new book about (unsurprisingly) utopias, in conversation with Nathan J Robinson for Current Affairs magazine about the value that utopian thinking can have in expanding horizons in popular culture, and the importance of reclaiming the concept of ‘utopias’ from technologists who have spent much of the past 20-odd years grasping the idea in their sweaty little palms and telling us that theirs was the only route to the promised land (and that route was paved in silicon). At heart this is a conversation about the necessity for imagination, and the power of ideas to shape realities, and the importance of having a breadth of thinking when conceiving of the future because without that the future calcifies in the hands of the few, and how vital it is to think of social structures in ways that aren’t just focused on ‘private vs public vs state’. Honestly, I am a miserable cynic and even I found this genuinely fascinating and not a little hopeful: “Every single community that I looked at trans-historically and cross-culturally tended to coalesce around a similar pot mix of policies, about where we live, how we live, with whom we live, with whom we share our resources, and how we raise and educate our children. What I find really interesting is these kinds of more futuristic techno-utopias tend to really be policy oriented about things that we can do in the formal economic sphere to make life more amenable to human flourishing, what Noam Chomsky sometimes calls “expanding the floor of the cage.” And for me, I want to think about, what is it about the family and our relations with each other in our domestic private lives that is also playing a role in upholding this system? Are there ways, if we start to change our domestic and private relations with each other, that will ultimately, down the road, impact the system itself?””
The Balkanisation of the Web: A wide-ranging essay looking at the history of the web and its evolution and the extent to which the increasingly-fragmented nature of the digital/online experience has changed how we – and, perhaps more importantly, the extent to which we even *can* – meaningfully communicate with each other. This is occasionally a bit wooly (to my mind at least), but raises a lot of interesting questions that have been floating around my head this year as The Web Sort Of Falls Apart – for example, “Our online tools on screens enable completely unprecedented methods for connection. When my mom immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s, she’d go months without speaking to her family because of the prohibitively high cost of long-distance phone calls. Today, online messaging tools make this a complete non-issue. The restrictions placed upon context — distance and cost — have been removed. In the time since, we’ve removed many more context-based restrictions. Today, any individual or actor has access to platforms which can broadcast their message to millions of people overnight. This unboundedness offers us incredible freedom to communicate with anybody, but it also represents a fundamental shift in how we communicate, which ultimately determines our reality. TikTok’s For You page — perhaps the site of the current cultural zeitgeist — is a curated feed made for specifically you by the algorithm based on what it thinks you will engage with. It’s a great departure from a TV channel, a radio station — the centralized broadcast network of yore. After the Fall of the Facebook Wall, we had the “Feed” which kept a semblance of a shared experience but the For You page is a step removed from the “Feed”. It further entrenches the user in an individual algorithmic reality, a reality which is thoroughly divorced from the experience of the Other.” If you’re interested in this stuff, you might also be interested in the concept of ‘the web revival’, which is outlined on this Page and which feels broadly-orthogonal to many of the arguments being made in the essay: the web revival “is about reclaiming the technology in our lives and asking what we really want from the tools we use, and the digital experiences we share. The Web Revival often references the early Internet, but it’s not about recreating a bygone web; the Web Revival is about reviving the spirit of openness and fresh excitement that surrounded the Web in its earliest days.”
The AI Executive Order: I appreciate that the vast majority of you will have had it up to *gestures* here with talk of AI this week, but for the few of you who are interested enough to bother digging into the meat of it, the AI Executive Order announced by Biden this week is…well, it’s a start. I strongly encourage you to have a read through it if you’ve the time, as it offers an interesting counterpoint to the more…er…’vibes-based’ schtick coming out of Bletchley this week – in particular, the allusion to a need for union involvement and collective bargaining in the face of the evisceration of the jobs market feels markedly more sensible and real-worldish than the horrid, awkward spectacle of Rishi deferentially-fellating Elon onstage. Gary Marcus’ short take on the whole thing is typically sensible, although if you want an alternative take from someone who is VERY anti the idea of any sort of regulation then you can see such a thing here. Basically, though, this week has gone much as anyone paying attention to this stuff would have expected – lots of noise, lots of handwaving, and nothing meaningful in terms of ‘policies or principles that will go at least some small way to hedging against the mad upheaval of literally everything we’ve come to call ‘the information economy’ that is coming in the next 5 years’. Just because you are convinced that AI is going to (probably) make everything amazing in the future doesn’t ALSO mean that it’s not going to make everything quite spectacularly unamazing for lots an lots of people in the short-to-medium term.
Against Open Sourcing: Rene over at Good Internet has been having OPINIONS about the sensibleness or otherwise of fully open source AI models for a while now, and neatly encapsulates them in this post which I basically just spent three minutes nodding along to as I read it.
Chatting With The Machine: A useful companion to the ‘Dot’ link in the top section, this – Ars Technica looks at how people are coming to use GPT now that there’s an inbuilt text-to-voice system in the app, and how some users are chatting to it like an actual companion and using it as a way of, I don’t know, venting, or roleplaying conversations, or just staving off the hideous lonely realisation that we are all at heart alone and that empathy is an impossible dream. There’s the obvious comparison to the film ‘Her’ (which, please, can we outlaw? thanks!) but other than that this is an interesting look at some of the emergent usecases for this stuff that at the same time raises one or two interesting questions about the wisdom of just letting this stuff develop with no oversights whatsoever because it’s not ‘frontier AI’ and as such it doesn’t matter.
Robots That Chat: I must grudgingly admit to a degree of admiration for the Boston Dynamics PR team who this week seemed to undo about 5 years worth of ‘dear God the killer robots are getting better’ negative buzz by, er, fitting one of their Spot models with some Googly eyes and an LLM-enabled text-to-speech interface with some predefined personality traits, and letting us watch as ‘Sassy Robot Dog’ threw shade at a bunch of human interlocutors. This is less interesting in terms of the specifics – I am personally unamused by ‘Sassy Robot Dog’, joyless fcuk that I inevitably am – but significantly moreso in terms of the explanations here about how they cobbled this all together from a bunch of existing free tools; I can’t stress enough how much SURPRISE AND DELIGHT mileage you can get out of stuff like this at the moment, and it’s really not that complicated to make something quite fun, so pull your fcuking fingers out advermarketingprdrones and, er, accede to my entirely unreasonable demands for branded AI entertainments.
Some Useful Thoughts On Working With AI Right Now: Another week, another superb essay by Ethan Mollick which I will link to here despite the fact that if you have any interest in this stuff you really ought to have subscribed to his newsletter directly by now – this one’s about how to usefully think about ‘prompting’ as a thing in the current iteration of AI models, and why (per what I’ve been saying for 9 months fwiw) ‘prompt engineering’ is not in fact going to be a ‘thing’ in the future.
AI Seinfeld Is Broken: Do you remember the heady days of…oooh…March, was it, when AI Seinfeld appeared and it was a genuinely weird and exciting and novel thing to watch a ‘show’ (loosely defined) that was ALL machine-created? I imagine that after your initial burst of interest (or, more likely utter indifference) you promptly forgot all about the existence of the AI Seinfeld Twitch stream and went back to watching stuff that was, well, actually entertaining, but the stream kept on streaming to dwindling viewer numbers…until this week when it basically just seems to have broken in ways that its creators claim to not really understand, devolving into a surreal stuck-loop-state which, perversely, saw an uptick in interest again as people flocked to watch the AI flid out. It seems to have righted itself a bit since the initial news broke – you can read a slightly more detailed account here – but there’s something BEAUTIFUL about the decay here and how it has all fallen apart like some sort of weirdly-recursive AI ourobouros eating itself (AIrobouros? sorry).
AI Art at MOMA: A review/critique of a recent exhibition at MOMA NYC of a work called ‘Unsupervised’ by artist Refik Anadol – the work’s described in the piece as follows: “The work is not about AI, at least not intentionally. Anadol is using AI to mediate the building in which it is displayed — the Museum of Modern Art. It’s a GAN trained on the MoMA’s holdings. The core structure of the visualizations we see are a “latent space walk,” a video that interpolates points in between all of the data points inside the network. Those “data points” are 180,000 images from the MoMA archive, clustered into smaller bits by visual similarity. So, drawings and sketches, for example, may be in one cluster, while photography is in another, oil paintings and pop art in others, etc. Between these, there may be some kind of overlap, but when I was there the cluster size was just 606 images. The model then interpolates new images — imagine a “slider” that phases one image into the other. The GAN can render these “in between” images across 606 images. Even a small cluster of 606 (out of 180,000) has a vast magnitude of possibilities: every image can move in 606 directions.” So effectively the work exists at the intersection between work and data and classifier and curator and audience (/pseud!) – the critique here is both about the piece’s effectiveness as a means of casting new light on established work, but also about the ways in which it communicates and presents the role of the AI to the viewer, and I found it a really interesting critique of how we think about – and present – the work of The Machine, both in and out of the context of ‘art’.
AI Has A Hotness Problem: This struck me a few months back, and still feels like FERTILE TERRITORY for a brand campaign for the right sort of cosmetics/lifestyle company, so feel free to remember me and where you heard this first when you’re drowning in metal on the Croisette next year. This piece in the Atlantic riffs on something I’ve been thinking of for a while now – to whit, that the nature of aesthetics is going to change in not insignificant ways with the growth of machine-generated imagery, specifically based on the materials said machines have been trained on, and even more specifically the fact that those images tend to be of beautiful people and things. Think about it – the vast majority of the images of people on the web are of VERY BEAUTIFUL people (often naked, but let’s not worry about that right now), and as such The Machine will, not unreasonably, tend towards the creation of images that reflect said training set. Which means that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to create things that are genuinely ugly from AI machines – you can, fine, create stuff that looks like it’s from a horror movie, or from war photography (in both cases with the right sort of jailbroken or open source models), but that’s not quite the same thing. Ask Midjourney, say, to produce an image of an ‘ugly’ person and you will instead get, at worst, people with the sort of ‘interesting’ faces that see them celebrated by internationally-recognised photographers rather than the sort of quotidian hideousness that we see every day on the streets or when I make the mistake of looking into a mirror. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN AND WHAT WILL IT DO TO US? I have literally no idea, but it’s a fascinating question and made me think that there is a REALLY easy win for Dove (or some other similar horrible FMCG brand) to ‘make AI see REAL people’ or somesuch crap.
The Singing Modi: Rest of World looks at the recent spate of ‘fun’ AI-juiced clips of famously-cuddly Indian Premier Nahindra Modi, specifically those of him singing popular tunes, and asks some interesting questions about the ways in which tech such as this is going to affect political campaigning and propaganda in countries such as India where literacy levels are low and video and audio can have a transformative impact on communication and impact, and where you can basically create a video of any politician saying anything you like, to be shared on tiny screens on low bandwidth, thereby making it incredibly hard to determine whether or not something’s been spoofed or not because the overall quality is basically potato.
The New News: A decent overview by Taylor Lorenz of some of the ways in which ‘the news’ is being reported and consumed in this era of all video, TikTok first communications. In common with much of Lorenz’s output, she’s exceptional on detail and knowing her beat and, to my mind at least, significantly less exceptional when it comes to asking critical questions about What This All Means – still, there’s some interesting material in here about the different ways in which people are exploiting the TikTok niche when it comes to packaging and delivering news to an audience that simply won’t ever click a WaPo url.
The Tragically Millennial Vocabulary of the FTX Trial: Yes, I know, ANOTHER SBF link – but I promise it will be the last one now that he’s going to the Big House for a very long time. I did enjoy this article, though, which focuses specifically on the linguistic tics that are revealed through the court transcripts and subpoena’d documents that were shared as evidence, and which basically makes the broad thesis that the only significant and lasting contribution that the millennial generation have made to society to date is the pollution of the language thanks to terms like ‘YOLO’. Which, to be clear, is obviously rubbish – no, people between the ages of 30 and 42, you HAVE accomplished something, I promise! There would be no mattress landfill without you, if nothing else! – but made me laugh a lot, and has given me an excellent stick with which to (metaphorically, to be clear) beat my girlfriend.
Greece, Politics and TikTok: This is an interesting piece, about the recent rise to the leadership of Greek political party Syriza of one Stafanos Kasselakis who came seemingly out of nowhere and ran a social media-first campaign whose focus was rather more on image and vibe than on concrete policy platforms. I confess to being largely ignorant of the day-to-day of Greek politics and as such I have no idea how accurate or comprehensive this piece in WIRED is (should any of you have any additional info I would be fascinated to hear it, genuinely), but I’ve thought for a few years now that Greece is an interesting political petri dish for much of the rest of the world and I think the broad trend here – politicians reaching the electorate directly via video through social platforms – is very much one we’re going to see replicated everywhere, for better or worse.
The Restaurant Revolution: This is very much a niche piece, I appreciate – it’s about the practical business of running a restaurant, specifically in New York – but I found it interesting less because of what it says about that particular business and more because of the lesson I think it teaches about scale and growth, and that CERTAIN THINGS DO NOT WORK ABOVE A CERTAIN SIZE OR SCALE, AND THAT THAT IS OK! I do honestly think that this is a lesson that needs to be internalised more widely – to whit, that not everything can or should exist at vast scale, and that perhaps it is actually better on a human (if not, fine, a Venture Capital vampire) level if in fact they don’t.
Big John Fury: If you want a practical example of the extent to which ‘crossover boxing’ has taken hold of a certain swathe of culture in this country it can be found in the fact that this is the third (excellent) longread I have featured on it in the past month or so. This one, though, is included less because of the subject matter (Tyson and Tommy Fury’s dad John) and more because it’s Joel Golby and he’s on excellent form, and the first ⅔ of this are genuinely superb writing about England and culture and WHO WE ARE AS A NATION – frankly the piece falls off a bit when we have to start listening to Big John himself because, well, I could not possibly give less of a fcuk about the thoughts and opinions of the man, but Joel’s writing is always a joy. The b4stard.
Flambee Confessions: A lovely essay about the particular experience of being one of the people whose job it is to man the flambee cart at one of those insane New York steakhouses (all dark wood and pieces of meat that weigh about as much as a small child and seemingly retail at $300, a price at which, despite its patent ridiculousness, NOONE EVER SEEMS TO BAULK) – this is beautifully-observed throughout, and will give you a small craving for a dish you have probably never eaten (in this case, Bananas Foster – apologies if you’re more cosmopolitan than me and eat this every day, but I had NEVER heard of this).
Weird Games Auteur: There’s a new videogame out called Alan Wake 2 – you don’t really need to know or care very much about that to enjoy this piece, though, which is less about the game than it is about the studio (and the individual) behind it. Videogames is one of the final industries, other perhaps than luxe fashion, where the idea of THE AUTEUR is still indulged in maximal fashion, and that’s what shines through in this piece – the studio behind the game is a small Finnish company called ‘Remedy’, and its visionary head is called Sam Lake…except he isn’t, that’s a constructed identity, and, honestly, that’s one of the more normal things about him. This is a GREAT profile – seriously, whether or not you care about videogames it’s so nice to read something about a genuine creative maverick (and also one who doesn’t seem like they are a total pr1ck, which makes a nice change).
The SEO People: Dispatches from a conference of SEO specialists in – where else? – Florida; you may not think that this will be entertaining, but it’s both a slightly sad portrait of the people who’ve sort-of fcuked the web for the rest of us, and one of those classic ‘innocent abroad’ portraits of a specific, very weird, professional sector getting its jolly on, and I will never ever tire of those.
Real Play: I think this came to me via Caitlin’s excellent newsletter – another of those pieces I mentioned last week on people’s relationship with specific videogames, this one about Devon Brody’s memories of playing The Sims, and now that play reflected the specific shape and contours of their life at various moments…honestly, I would read a whole magazine or anthology composed solely of this sort of writing and I can’t be the only person. Can the LRB do a ‘videogames’ issue, please, for the sort of crushingly-pretentious people (ahem) who like to cite Lacan when discussing Mario? Thanks!
Eds Things: Beautiful and heartbreaking memorialisation of the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai by his sometime-lover Robert Gluck – this is an extract from Gluck’s book, and it is so so so beautiful, sad and sexy and poignant and funny, and a portrait of a time in a city that’s been captured many times before but here feels presented as though fresh. Such a gorgeous piece of writing which I promise you will adore.
The Tea Table: Our final longread of this week comes from Sarah Lippicott, who died on Sunday – she was an editor of science books, and this piece is WONDERFUL, all about her memories of starting in science as a woman in the 1950s and the attendant, expected sexism she faced…the writing is funny and light and the whole thing reminded me to a remarkable degree of the novel ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ (which I expected to hate, but really didn’t) and if you enjoyed that at all (and even if you didn’t) you will be charmed by this.
In a departure from recent weeks I am not going to open by talking about how everything is terrible (HAPPY NOW ADAM?!) – instead, I am going to recommend a play to you, should you be in a position to be able to get to a theatre in London in the next month, and then I am going to fcuk off and have a shower and leave you with the links, of which there is a particularly fine selection this week (especially in the longreads, where there really is something for absolutely everyone) (unless you’re illiterate, in which case you may struggle) (and also won’t have been able to read this, rendering this whole, largely unfunny riff entirely otiose).
Is it…is it better when I say everything’s awful? Maybe it is.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you are still here despite that frankly appalling attempt at an intro then, well, I salute you.
THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT CONCERNED THAT IT IS YET TO RECEIVE ITS INVITATION TO THE FORTHCOMING AI SAFETY SUMMIT BUT WHICH PRESUMES THAT IT’S JUST LOST IN THE POST OR SOMETHING, PT.1:
1337: Has the concept of ‘leetspeak’ (ask your parents, or someone who was terminally-virginal circa 2004) come full circle and become somehow socially acceptable? I am unsure, which makes me wonder whether the branding for this new…thing (yes, I know, but bear with me, this is genuinely a bit weird and hard to explain) is really going to work. Still, it is VERY futureweird, so perhaps none of the old rules (ie don’t name your business after a widely-derided concept of ‘cool’ created by the least-cool people ever to exist) apply any more. 1337 (hurts every time I type it) is, according to the homepage, ‘a diverse ecosystem of AI entities’ – or, more specifically, a new-ish business which has just received a bunch of additional funding to pursue its vision of a near future in which our social platforms and the rest of the web are increasingly populated by AI-enabled…what do we call them? Avatars? Infomorphs (thanks Marcus for the education on that particular term)? Anyway, digital, non-human actors, for want of a better description, which ‘actors’ will have full, autonomous ‘existences’ in digital social space, posting and commenting and generally giving all the impression of being a creature with interests and desires and motivations while under the hood being nothing but a collection of spicy autocomplete prompts and some light Midjourney wrangling. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA. Still, take a moment to go onto the website and have a scroll and a read – there’s some pretty special copy, as you might expect, including this beautiful few paras: “1337, or “leet”, is a nod to early gaming and hacking culture. Once used to refer to the elite [AUTHOR’S NOTE – LOL!] —those highly skilled and with access. Now, we’re democratizing that access [AUTHOR’S NOTE – ACCESS TO WHAT?!?!?!]. Inspired by open-source principles. Together with creators we co-create a diverse ecosystem of A1 Entities, living real virtual lives online—human soul, digital pulse. They connect, educate, and inspire niche communities.” Erm, what? The amount of work that’s already gone into this is pretty spectacular, though – there are about 50 individual character profiles, each with a reasonably-fleshed-out backstory and persona and ‘interests’, obviously vaguely designed to tick a specific demographic box or two; you have ‘edgy tattoo egirl’, for example, and ‘sensitive-but-sporty guy’, and there’s a suitably-2023 emphasis on diversity and inclusion and lots of references to the (to reiterate, entirely fictitious and made-up) characters’ DESIRES and WANTS and EMOTIONAL STATUS, and each character has its own social profiles which have already started populating the web with a bunch of AI-generated scurf (profile pictures and some lame captions, from what I can see, along with curated playlists on Spotify and possibly blogs as well…WHAT IS THIS FOR?!?! There’s a bit more detail on the business idea behind this in
this TechCrunch profile of the business – I *think* that the end play here is to effectively have these characters working as on-demand microinfluencers to the communities into which they ‘fit’, and monetise the whole thing through brands paying the avatars to shill their tat to actual, real people, but I am unconvinced that a semi-AI puppet is going to be able to persuade kids to part with real money for stuff, however cute and doe-eyed it is and however much it pretends to have feelings and plays the long game when it comes to community participation…There’s some interesting talk in the piece about the way in which the ‘community’ will be able to choose the direction of the characters’ narrative arcs and interests, and eventually be able to create their own characters and monetise them in some ill-defined way (monetising your own AI bots is very much the theme this week, it seems, with Quora’s Poe LLM platform announcing that very thing ), but this overall feels like something that is never, ever going to take off (but which I am intrigued to keep a vague eye on so that I am not totally surprised when I am proved wrong and we’re all chatting with our AI friends on Discord by August 2024).
Internet Artefacts: It’s entirely possible you’ve seen this already as it’s been EVERYWHERE this week – rightly so, it’s a lovely bit of webby nostalgia by Neal Agarwal, who returns with a ‘MUSEUM OF THE HISTORY OF THE WEB’, presenting a selection of artefacts which are in some way significant to the development of the internet we know and have a painfully-complicated symbiotic relationship with today! This goes through some classics – the first photo on the web! The Space Jam website! Ishkur’s Guide To Electronic Music (Christ that was a good website)! – and is basically a wonderful, nostalgic trip back through time to an era when all of this stuff felt playful and fun and like we were making and discovering and just sort of messing around in pleasingly-creative ways, rather than, as it often does in the here and now, feeling like we’re worrying at scabs with the compulsive action of a caged and distressed animal (did I say that out loud?). This is not only a great bit of online history and storytelling, but there are SO MANY fun little games and websites preserved in here – the fact that you can play so many of the original games and animations inside the site is a really nice touch. It’s entirely possible that several of you will click this link and get stuck (it’s all I can do not to abandon you right now and just go and play the clicky-hovery helicopter game from 2002 for the next four hours, for example), but I can’t really blame you for that.
The Protest in Roblox: I’m presenting this largely without comment, other than to say that this is the most future thing I’ve seen since that period of the Hong Kong protests when all those photos emerged of the protestors facing off against the police amongst drones and neon. 100% the most Gibsonian thing of the year so far (it feels a bit like that ought to be an award, doesn’t it? Someone forward this to Bill and see if he fancies judging it), and the first real example of something I could point at and go ‘see? The metaverse!’ (lol, jk, I would of course never say those words, but you get the vague point I hope).
Haunted: It does rather feel like there’s enough real-world horror to be going on with right now so as to not to really need the whole Hallowe’en thing, but it appears to be coming round again regardless of my wishes (so selfish), and as such I suppose I ought to pay at least some sort of small degree of linky homage to the Great Pumpkin. Haunted is a neat little web experience thingy made by a Canadian digital agency called ‘The Digital Panda’, and it’s effectively a variant on those ‘how many scary movie titles can you guess from the clues on the webpage?’ games but with a whole bunch of nice little bells and whistles, from the 3d model of the haunted house which you poke around to find clues, to the lighting effects from the lantern, to the spooky sound effects…click around the house, find the ICONIC (sorry) props and clues from the various horror films, identify the correct movies, win…well, nothing (sorry!), but perhaps you can take a small sense of pride and accomplishment away with you.
Five Radio Stations: I think I am slightly in love with this. This is a gorgeous little art project in which five different artists create their own personal interpretations of the idea of a radio station, playing with various idea of narrative and sound design and playing with tech to create a selection of what are basically self-contained audio art projects with a central unifying theme of a shared listening experience – the project self-describes as “a group show comprising five artworks that are also radio stations. Listen to them via this website by clicking ‘play’ on any of the five station pages, or seek out a dedicated listening location. The works can be enjoyed like any radio station, as a focus or in the background, and for a shorter or longer duration of time. Although they are automated, the stations are not on-demand but streamed as live, meaning each listener hears the same thing at the same time as an invisible community of other people.” The five stations are all of the mostly-gentle, a bit ambient variety, but I’ve been enjoying switching between them as I write this morning – currently I’m listening to 24h At The End Of The World, “A radio station by Benedikt H. Hermannsson taking us on a personal, 24-hour tour of his native Iceland. The listener almost forgets they are in his company, or rather, in his ear. They are with the musician-artist and those he meets. The audience hears the sound of his son’s footsteps in the snow, the rehearsals for his concerts, and certain conversations that take place, and so travel across the country in an intimate way”; earlier, though, I was very much enjoying the AI-enabled nonsense warblings of InfraordinaryFM, “A radio station by Daniel John Jones and Seb Emina delivering reliable, real-time information about commonplace and quotidian happenings around the world. Tides, aircraft movements, pinball scores, weather conditions, lost and found items, bird sightings and other ordinary events are gathered from over 150 countries and reported live in the form of spoken bulletins.” Honestly, I really do adore this – there’s something genuinely meditative about each piece in a way you don’t always get with digital art experiences.
Just A Baby: I confess to being…unsure as to where I found this, but WOW did it open my eyes to a community and series of lifestyle choices that I wasn’t hitherto unaware of – as ever, I’m presenting this without comment because, well, I appreciate fertility is hard and everyone has the right to do things differently, but also CRIKEY. Just A Baby is a social network-slash-matchmaking-platform which exists to pair women who, well, just want a baby with men who, well, are willing to supply them with the raw materials to achieve that goal – ‘FIND PEOPLE, MAKE BABIES’ runs the strapline, which at the very least has the benefit of being unambiguously clear. You can basically search for donors or surrogates or whatever you think you need, all without the tedious complications of, I don’t know, officially-sanctioned fertility services – there’s a ‘testimonial’ on the homepage which excitedly exclaims ‘no gatekeeping!’ which raises SO MANY QUESTIONS FOR ME – and there’s obviously a bunch of monetisation stuff going on in terms of your ability to message potential donors, etc…I am SO INTRIGUED by this (not enough to download the app and use it, fine, but), specifically about whether or not you can get ‘super user’ designation if you, I don’t know, ‘give the gift of childbirth’ to a particular number of people (is there a ‘SuperSperm’ badge), and I would imagine that if you dig around there is probably some genuinely-eyebrow-raising lifestyle stuff going on at the edges of all this. I bet Musk’s on there under a pseudonym.
The Analogue Foundation: Are you a sound person? Do you firmly believe that you CAN tell the difference between a £3,000 and a £30,000 B&O setup, that it really DOES matter if your connector cables are gold-tipped and titanium-corded, and that if someone touches your limited edition vinyl stash without gloves that they really do deserved to be slit from sternum to perineum and left to exsanguinate above a cold, polished concrete floor? If so then you might be EXACTLY the sort of person for whom the Analogue Society is intended – it’s “a creative collective, founded in 2016 by world-renowned engineer and producer Russell Elevado, the Soundwalk Collective, an advanced contemporary sonic arts platform, and Audio-Technica, a company dedicated to high-quality sound and music experiences. They’ve since been joined by Berlin-based recording engineer Erik Breuer, who built the listening bar and recording studios that make up Analogue Foundation Berlin”, and the website offers you a bunch of ways to ENJOY ANALOGUE, through details about international events (focused seemingly on the usual Western hipster capitals) and sanctioned LISTENING STATIONS, and even some mixtapes which you can – HERESY! – listen to online should you desire.
Emoji Storm: This is utterly frivolous and pointless and won’t amuse you for more than about 30s or so, but WHAT a 30s – just let yourself go a bit limp and sink into your screen for a short while and let the emoji fountain just sort of wash across your field of vision. Feel better? See? You can even fiddle with the speed and composition of the emoji eruption by clicking the menu icon in the top right, should you want something more particularly tailored to your own specific needs and wants and desires.
Doodloosh: Every now and again I stumble across some poor kid who’s being sold as some sort of arts prodigy, with their largely-abstract daubings being held up as masterpieces of form and composition and being sold at auction by wide-smiling and in-no-way-exploitative parents and agents, all of whom DEFINITELY have the child’s best interests at heart (I always wonder what happens to these kids when they age out of being cute, tow-haired art prodigies and the puberty hits and they enter the creature stage of adolescence and they feel the need to explore THE DARKNESS WITHIN THEM via the medium of collage or something – I feel there’s a documentary just waiting to be made about this, seriously)…anyway, if you’ve always thought ‘hang on, little Kaydn’s got real talent and frankly we could do with him paying his way in these straitened times’ then you might be interested in this website, which as far as I can tell exists solely to offer up a marketplace for kids to sell their terrible pictures on. It ‘empowers kids to take advantage of their creativity’, it says here, but offering them the chance to, er, attempt to auction off their pictures. I am going to tentatively say that this might not be around for long – it’s only launched recently, but it doesn’t seem to be a hive of signups at present and the current roster of ‘artists’ is, er, somewhat sparse – but if you’ve ever wanted to offer your progeny a real-life example of the cruel vicissitudes of the market and the painful realisation that noone actually wants to buy what you’re selling (important life lessons both, as I can testify!) then this could well be PERFECT. If nothing else, if anyone does actually end up selling through this I am 100% using it as a source of birthday gifts (really hope my girlfriend doesn’t read this bit).
Tennis Video Analysis: I have no idea if this is useful or if it even works (great link quality control Matt, ffs), but I figured there may be a couple of you who play tennis and could find this useful – this webapp lets you capture footage of someone playing tennis and using bodytracking tech and some rudimentary AI to offer analysis of your stance, style and technique based on what it ‘sees’ – there’s a free version with some limited functionality, but there’s also a few paid tier options which apparently will offer ‘coaching’ of sorts; it doesn’t, fine, LOOK super-professional, but this could be what you need to drag yourself from the bottom of the parents’ doubles league (if only your other half would put the effort in, etc etc).
Daylyy: I know I am basically the very antonym of the concept of ‘entrepreneurialism’, and that I have all the drive and ambition of celery, but I refuse to believe that ANYONE can launch an Instagram alternative in 2023 and seriously think it has any meaningful chance of taking off (seriously, I have seen DOZENS in the past decade and the only ones still going are the ones like Vero which are backed by seemingly-infinite pools of not-entirely-undodgy money) – still, GOOD LUCK to the team behind the latest attempt to ‘make photo-based social media good again’! Daylyy (looking at that word upsets me) is yet another ‘we’re taking it back to basics!’ offering, aimed squarely at the people upset with the fact that noone sees the photographs they post on Insta anymore re Reels, Stories and the rest – “No filters. No uploads. A social platform for users to casually share pictures and videos like a daily content journal. Daylyy is the opposite of current social media. We are not interested in the edited and polished final product. Daylyy is the journey – all the moments in between” – and, look, maybe it will take off with a niche audience of photography enthusiasts who literally just want to share nice snaps of their life without turning every single moment of their waking day into a poorly-produced piece of reality TV content, but I wouldn’t hold my breath here (based on previous predictive track records of mine, you may want to therefore by stock in this as soon as you’re able).
The Black Gold Tapestry: I LOVE THIS! It’s basically like the Bayeaux Tapestry if the Bayeaux Tapestry was about oil and energy and the environment instead of a bloke having his brains rearranged by an arrow through the eye. “Sandra M Sawatzky has made a 21st century work of art relating the saga of oil, global societal change, and energy transition through the power and beauty of 67 metres of hand embroidery” – the site presents it section-by-section, in pleasingly high-res, and it unexpectedly works really well as a means of presenting the work.
Groundhop Map: If you’re the sort of person who LOVES FOOTBALL and who thinks that a trip to a new city or foreign country is basically just an excuse to visit an obscure local football team so that you can get drunk and leave YOUR obscure local football team’s club sticker proudly plastered to the cistern of one of the toilets (this is, as far as I can tell, what a significant proportion of lower-league football fandom revolves around), then this is going to change your life (in a good way, although that might not be the case for your long-suffering, football-hating travel companion). Groundhop Map maps football matches taking place on, er, a map – pick a day and you can magically see the games that are on, where they are, with the ability to filter by competition and level – honestly, if you’re travelling and want to find a game to watch nearby then this is GOLDEN. It’s very much a work-in-progress and they only have a limited selection of leagues represented at the moment, but it’s worth keeping bookmarked as it could be REALLY useful.
Hospitalithings: I LOVE THIS IT IS SO SUPREMELY MUNDANE! Would you like a website whose sole purpose is to host a range of photographs of very banal objects, taken in hotel rooms over the course of the past 6 years? OF COURSE YOU WOULD YOU ARE NOT MADE OF STONE AFTER ALL! “Since that fateful trip in 2017, my ritual remains unchanged whenever I enter a hotel room. I meticulously photograph the same eleven objects: decoration, door handle, hairdryer, keys, lamp, light switch, personal hygiene toiletries, remote control, shower drain, shower tap and the toilet roll holder. I preserve these moments in the Instagram-friendly square format, embracing the authenticity of the scene, without any embellishments. Over the years, this collection has grown, encompassing hundreds of photos from seven different countries. Yet these images lay dormant on my computer, waiting for the right moment to be shared. Finally I found the inspiration to breathe life into my collection. As a web developer, it was only natural that I decided to create a website. I also christened my photographic pursuit with a fitting name: “Hospitalithings.” This name pays homage to these objects of hospitality.” Honestly, this is practically-perfect and I would like to pay a genuinely sincere thankyou to the nameless person who’s selflessly sharing their weird little obsessive hobby with the world.
Pirr: After the ‘sexy AI ASMR’ from a few weeks back, now we have…AI adult fiction cowriting apps! Would you like to spend a significant chunk of time attempting to co-create erotic fiction with Sexy Clippy, tapping away at your phone as the prompts become more feverish and your breath more ragged? No, I can’t imagine that you do because that sounds frankly weird and about as sexy as mince – and yet, as ever, here we are. Pirr purports to let you use its ‘specially-trained sexy authorial AI technology’ (I am paraphrasing here) to spin up whatever textual grot you fancy, engaging in a ‘co-scripting’ process that sees you and the machine create textual bongo that you can then share with others on the platform – there’s a bunch of stuff in there about how you can make your ‘creative process’ visible to, and collaborative with, others, but I confess to not actually having tried this because, well a) I have literally no interest in penning ‘sexy’ stories whether with a chatbot or otherwise; and b) the last time I featured this sort of thing was the ASMR erotic audio thing, which I did in fact briefly have a play with in the spirit of ‘journalistic’ (lol) curiosity and which, despite repeated attempts to make it stop, has sent me approximately three VERY THIRSTY emails a day exhorting me to check back in and, frankly, I could do without being chased around the web by weird machine sexbots.
THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT CONCERNED THAT IT IS YET TO RECEIVE ITS INVITATION TO THE FORTHCOMING AI SAFETY SUMMIT BUT WHICH PRESUMES THAT IT’S JUST LOST IN THE POST OR SOMETHING, PT.2:
Recursive Recipes: I like this a lot – it’s very silly, fine, but also it works far better than it needs to given it’s basically just a one-note gag taken to an extreme. “A recursive recipe is one where ingredients in the recipe can be replaced by another recipe. The more ingredients you replace, the more that the recipe is made truly from scratch.” So pick from one of the recipes on the site, select how many you want to make and then start clicking to see exactly how ‘from scratch’ you want to get and how long it will take you and how much it would cost if you were to try and do EVERYTHING. This feels vaguely orthogonally related to the old ‘making a toaster from scratch’ project from what feels like DECADES ago –oh God it was 2010 I am SO OLD – but just a bit sillier. Via Giuseppe, whose newsletter is always excellent.
Tertulia: This is an interesting idea: “Inspired by the informal salons (“tertulias”) of Spanish cafes and bars, Tertulia is a new way to discover books through all the lively and enriching conversations they inspire. Tertulia serves up book recommendations and book talk from across social media, podcasts, and the web — all in one app which incorporates seamless book purchasing. If a book has moved someone enough to get them talking, you can find it, buy it, and share it on Tertulia.” There’s an interesting co-ownership element to the project, in which members who pay a fee to get cheap books, free shipping, etc, also have an ownership stake in the company which allows for a say in governance decisions and an eventual share of any profits it might one day make – while it’s unlikely anyone’s ever going to get rich through this, it’s a really nice example of collective organisation and practical community-building without reference to DAOs or NFTs or crypto of any sort (see, it IS possible!).
Maps.fm: This comes to me via my friend Ben and is SUCH A GOOD IDEA (and another example of ‘mapping stuff is just a generally good and useful thing to do from a UX/UI point of view, turns out’) – Maps.fm’s simple gimmick is to let you look at a map of the world and then select podcast episodes that are about or related to a specific location on said map. Want to instantly be able to access every single podcast ever recorded about Swindon? No, of course you don’t, but should you ever find yourself gripped by such a mad compulsion then WOW are you going to be well-catered-for. Podcast discovery is famously terrible, and while this doesn’t fix that it does offer a really helpful way of, for example, researching somewhere you’re going on holiday, or a specific area of historic interest, or of finding some genuinely obscure shows in which people talk very, very seriously about some intensely-local concerns (“Episode 23 of ‘Malmesbury Matters, and we’re delving deep into the one-way traffic plans for the village and talking to Tony about his divorce and subsequent custody battle”).
Notes: I rather love this – the website of Nicolas Soleriou (a lovely name, fwiw) contains a page which is devoted solely to quotes that he has found and thought worth keeping, along with a small line or two of context explaining why he thought it worth noting down, and, honestly, there is something so interesting about this, the chosen quotes and Nicolas’ reasoning for finding them meaningful, like (per all my favourite things) getting someone else’s internal monologue delivered directly to one’s inner ear. To quote Nicolas, “I like a good quote — As shallow as some can be, I’ve often enjoyed the invitation to think that they extend. I’ve been grossed out by how some people abuse famous words. Quotes are everywhere. Most of the time used as marketing tools or worse, twisted to bring a feeling of wisdom to a piece of content. Simplification is necessary and I’ve come to appreciate the imperfection of language, as a mere mirror of our own imperfections. Famous words, stuff heard on the streets, friends, family, graffitis… Rather than just hoarding them in a pinterest board, google doc or some other terrible place on the internet, I’ll have them live here. I can’t write. I tried. So I’ll just add a short note to each post. It all goes somewhere, hopefully.” I really adore this.
2 Girls 1 Comp: This is, I promise, TOTALLY SFW despite the iffy name – nothing to do with scatplay (NO COME BACK) this is instead the wrapper page for a series of little tech/art projects which hack GTAV in various interesting ways to MAKE WORK; so there’s SanAndreas.TXT, which basically adds a Souls-like ‘memories’ mechanic to the game, allowing anyone with a specific mod installed to leave messages to other players (anyone with the mod can both write and read messages in-game), or there’s Every Thing, “A mod that sequentially spawns every object from the GTA V prop database until the game ultimately crashes under the weight of every thing.”I have said this before, I know (but, well, you try writing about stuff on the web for over a decade without repeating yourself every now and again! It’s hard!), but there’s something really interesting about artists using gameworlds as canvases like this and it’s something I genuinely feel has a lot of untapped potential from the point of view of Interesting Communications Techniques.
Latecomer Magazine: I’m always interested to see a new online publication, particularly one which launches with a website as pleasingly-shiny and nicely-made as this one – that said, I appreciate that not everyone will be hugely here for a publication which looks set to explore and espouse ideas around longtermism, the previously-fashionable but now hopelessly-outmoded progenitor of the currently-zeitgeisty Effective Altruism (and now Accelerationist) movements. Still, presuming that Latecomer isn’t going to start publishing too much mad, borderline-fashy stuff about how it’s ok to let poor people starve actually because by focusing all the world’s money and attention and resources on hyper-future tech we’ll be saving the lives of TRILLIONS of future people, it might be worth keeping an eye on; the initial slate of articles is interesting and (from an admittedly-slightly-cursory-reading) not overtly insane or evil – from the editor’s synopsis, “Allison Deuttman writes on how close we are to a future of molecular manufacturing, and what’s holding us back. In my interview with Steve Hsu we talk about the future of machinic and biological intelligence, and how they intersect. Casey Handmer makes the case that abundant green energy is not only going to beat climate change, but also unleash our technological potential. We also have articles that explore the history of the future—how historical contingencies become permanent values. Almost fifty years ago James Yorke named the field of “Chaos Theory”—in his retrospective, he considers what chaos means for our prediction abilities. Jonathan Ratcliffe compares Russian Cosmism with contemporary Longtermism and illuminates their shared ideological ancestor. Finally, Xander Balwit interrogates the pricing of nature, and how we’ll value it when it ceases being productive.” Worth a look (but Web Curios accepts no responsibility if it ends up going full mask-off nutter in ~6m time).
The Mangrove Photography Awards: I know I tend to be a bit sniffy about photo competitions, in the main because THERE ARE SO FCUKING MANY OF THEM DEAR GOD IS THERE ANY PHOTOGRAPHER IN THE FCUKING WORLD WHO HASN’T WON ONE OF THESE FCUKING PRIZES ahem, but this one pleased me no end, mainly because of its specific focus and its aim to raise awareness of the need to protect mangrove swamps as a particular category of ecosystem but also because it features photography and photographers from places that don’t always tend to feature in these sorts of competitions. There are thousands of entries on the site, but you can see the winners here
– my personal favourite is the one from Colombia featuring what is by a long, long way the most Muppet-looking bird I have ever seen (you will know it when you see it), but, as ever, PICK YOUR OWN!
Music-to-Image: Fun little toy hosted on HuggingFace which lets you feed it any audio you like and receive an image ‘derived’ from that audio in return. When I tried it earlier this week you were able to use a YT link, but that appears to have been killed so you’ll need to upload an MP3 or similar, but I can highly recommend just recording yourself singing along to something on your phone and just using that because WOW will you be upset at how ugly the visual interpretation of your warbling is. Your ‘vaguely-subversive but ultimately futile act of corporate rebellion’ task for this afternoon is to surreptitiously get audio recordings of all of the senior management in your company, use this to get a visual interpretation of their voices and then upload said visual interpretations to the company website to show the world what these people are really like inside. GO ON DO IT WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE TO ACHIEVE TODAY?
Biscuit Shells: Via the surprisingly-personable stationery retailer Present & Correct on Twitter comes this link to a Japanese retailer who, as far as I can tell, exists only to stock those wafery biscuit shells into which companies like Kinder stuff chocolate-flavoured paste, in a frankly dizzying array of shapes and sizes and designs and flavours and, look, I can’t make head not tail of the pricing and shipping details given my ability to speak Japanese is literally zero but I like to think that there will be at least one of you who will see this link and be compelled to spend the next month ordering, filling and then distributing tiny wafer christmas trees, so it feels worth including.
The Genrerator: On the one hand, this is a silly, simple little gag website which uses (I presume) Markov Chains to generate a seemingly-infinite array of made-up music genres inspired by legendary (and legendarily niche) music magazine The Quietus – it just gave me “50s Kyrgyzstani Downtempo–Lofi Disco Folk”, for example, which sounds great; on the other, though, thanks to the MAGICAL AGE OF GENERATIVE AI through which we’re now living/limping (delete per your degree of optimism) it’s also a fun way of seeing if The Machine is able to imagine what these invented genres might in fact sound like. Why not try spinning up a few of these and then feeding them to the Google music lab generator thing, or Riffusion from last week? Who knows, you might discover some HITHERTO UNIMAGINED new form of music that will for the first time bridge the aural gap between man and machine – although judging by Riffusion’s attempt at the aforementioned Kyrgysztani grooves, that seems unlikely.
Bionicle Media: I am vaguely aware of the fact that Bionicles were a toy range that were VERY POPULAR with kids perhaps 10 or so years younger than me – if YOU are a millennial who feels nostalgic about this particular brand of aggressively-marketed plastic tat then will THIS be the memoryhole for you! “In 2005, a BIONICLE fan named Auron began collating official BIONICLE content and offering it for download via links in forum threads on BZPower. As the task grew and more people joined the effort, Auron’s Downloads evolved into a new independent website, BioMedia Project. The contributions and work of dozens of fans over the ensuing years have made it the largest repository of official BIONICLE media in existence.” Music! Fonts! Old comics! All the Bionicle media you could POSSIBLY want! Cancel Christmas, it’s impossible to top this.
ANHVN: A genuinely charming personal website by Anh, a designer and artist – this is where they keep their various personal projects, and while there’s a bunch of interesting work in here (and their blog is lovely), the thing that really struck me about this was the GORGEOUS little four-panel projects that introduce each individual project with a small origin story as to how and why it came to be; it’s such an unexpected and novel way of introducing work that really brings it to life, in part through Anh’s art style but also because there’s something that just works about the four-panel narrative as a setup. A really beautiful tiny project, this.
Another AI Video: This one’s a short using Midjourney and Pika Labs to create and animate – again, it’s…limited, but again I am seeing genuine progress in terms of the quality of the visuals and animation, and I encourage you to keep an eye on this stuff because the pace of improvement around the edges of AI animation is really quite dizzying at the moment.
Tory Or Not Tory: On the one hand, it’s total rubbish to presume that you can tell someone’s politics by the way they look; on the other, this little game that asks you to identify which of the two MPs you’re presented with is in fact the HORRID CONSERVATIVE based on their faces alone is surprisingly easy to win, suggesting that there perhaps IS a specific cast of the eye or mouth that’s common to all of those of A CERTAIN TYPE (personally I tend to find the flesh-coloured lips the biggest giveaway, but see what you think).
Dropy Blocky: Horrible name aside (really, SUCH a horrible name; try saying out loud under your breath and you can’t help but inadvertently grimace as you do), this is quite a fun little timewaster that basically asks you to play a simple version of Tetris across various levels against the clock.
Which Way Round?: A game designed to separate the shape rotators from the wordcels, I did surprisingly well at this for a few levels before suddenly hitting quite a hard spatial awareness wall and feeling very embarrassed at my complete inability to manipulate a three-dimensional object in my imaginary headspace. See whether YOU are better equipped to manage the whole ‘existing in meatspace’ thing with this little game, which asks you to keep track of what direction a specific object will be facing in after a series of rotations around an axis – like one of those ‘shell/marble’ games that gullible kids (ie me in Florence when I was 15) get fleeced by on bridges, except here there’s no cheating going on and so if you get the answer wrong there’s noone to blame but yourself.
Halfsies: The last of the ‘nicked off B3ta’ game links this week comes in the shape of this simple-seeming but deceptively difficult ludic diversion in which your sole task is to seek to divide the shapes exactly in half. “Easy!”, I hear you cry – come back and say that around level 12.
The London Tube Station Memory Game: I think every single Londoner must have seen this one by now, but in case not – HOW MANY TUBE STATIONS CAN YOU GUESS FROM MEMORY?!?!? This is GREAT – difficult, frustrating and the sort of thing that you can use to start REALLY bitter arguments between you and your friends and your family and your partner as to who is the REALEST MOST AUTHENTIC GORBLIMEY LONDONER (blood will be spilt).
Suika: Our final cute timewasting distraction of the week comes in the form of Suika, a simple-but-surprisingly-addictive little number where you basically just have to smush fruits together in pairs – think of it as that 2048 game, but with grapes and melons instead of numbers and you’ll be fine. This is REALLY satisfying, and will suck you in surprisingly fast, so possibly finish that spreadsheet before you click this one.
This Isn’t Happiness: So for years I have basically been lifting 90% of the images for Curios from this excellent Tumblr, and its owner got in touch this week to point out that, well, the least I could do is credit him every now and again – which is totally fair, and not unreasonable, and as such let me present this EXCELLENT and eclectic and stylishly-curated artblogthing, which is not only right up my street in terms of aesthetics but which also sells really really nicely-designed tshirts in limited edition ranges, which I can highly recommend.
Maps On The Web: Via the wonderful Things Magazine comes this EXCELLENT tumblr celebrating cartography. Who doesn’t like maps? NO FCUKER, ETC! Why not enjoy some BONUS MAP CONTENT while we’re here – this is the David Ramsey Map Collection which frankly contains so much map-related content that if you want more you almost certainly have some sort of obsessional issue which you ought to get seen to.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
Mosher Mags: An account whose sole purpose is to post photos of articles and photoshoots from old emo/metal/rock magazines from the 90s and 00s. Presuming that they remember to excise all the laudatory LostProphets interviews, this seems like good, clean retro run.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
The 2023 State of the Climate Report: It’s fair to say that there have been one or two other things going on this week that have rather dominated the news agenda, meaning it’s not wholly surprising that this piece of work’s release rather got buried – and, look, I get the fact that you might not be particularly in the market for yet another piece of academic literature that basically feels like the climate news equivalent of a mechanic rubbing greasy hands on overalls and saying “nah, sorry guv, big end’s gone, nothing we can do about it, you’ll need parts shipping in from Poland and GOD knows how long that’s going to take”, but, well, it’s probably important. On the one hand if you’ve paid any attention to Stuff In The News over the past year you’ll have noticed one or two ‘hot, isn’t it?’ reports and so the fact that ‘it’s still getting warmer’ oughtn’t really be a surprise – on the other, there’s something quite troubling about the general sense of resignation in this paragraph from the report’s opening: “The trends reveal new all-time climate-related records and deeply concerning patterns of climate-related disasters. At the same time, we report minimal progress by humanity in combating climate change.” If you (understandably) don’t have the appetite to wade through the whole thing, I can recommend jumping to the conclusions which offer a few practical (if unlikely) steps that might still be taken to mitigate this stuff – note, though, that the first is basically ‘lose the obsession with economic growth at all costs’, which doesn’t feel like an argument that’s going to get much traction with any of the current or future crop of Western governments anytime soon.
Managing AI Risks: ANOTHER OPEN LETTER! This one, though, is significantly better-thought-through than the ‘AI Pause’ effort from earlier in the year, and sets out what look like being some genuinely sensible principles around which businesses and governments and regulators might look to coalesce when it comes to mitigating the real or imagined risks of AI. This is practical and sober and non-scifi, as much as it can be when talking about stuff that still does basically feel like scifi, and feels like something of a useful counterpoint to both
the unfettered madness of the Andreessen vision and the honestly
weirdly-unbalanced set of talking points announced for the AI Safety Summit in the UK next week – on which point, seriously, take a moment to click the link and have a read of the briefing that’s being used to frame the conversation, and take a look at the relative amount of words and weighting given to ‘stuff that might actually have a practical negative impact in the real world in the next year’ vs ‘the mad scifi stuff that Altman et al will have us all focus on so that we don’t worry too much about curtailing their earning power right now’.
The Digital Fog of War: The only war-related link in here this week because, well, I presume you’re all getting your fix of rage and fear and bellicosity elsewhere and could do with a rest, frankly – still, it’s an interesting one and sees Kara Swisher (yes, I know, but she’s on decent form here) discussing all the interesting ways in which it is harder than ever to get anything resembling an accurate picture of, well, anything on social media these days. I honestly do find it incredible that you can have a company like Meta which has basically been forced to tacitly accept that its failures in content moderation and algorithmic promotion have been in-part responsible for an actual genocide and yet is STILL not capable, despite the decade’s experience and the billions, of working out sensible policies around content and conflict. I know that this stuff is hard, but, equally, the lack of meaningful progress at a platform level over the past 15 or so years when it comes to ‘how we deal with information and how we share it online’ is shameful.
The BBC Foresight Report: THE FIRST TREND REPORT OF THE YEAR! And, honestly, the last I’m likely to include in here unless I find something particularly brilliant or especially-moronic – I’m fortunate enough that I don’t really have to pretend to care about TRENDS IN COMMUNICATIONS any more and so, well, I won’t. I will, though, make an exception for this bit of work by the BBC’s R&D Department which is SO interesting and pleasingly wide-ranging in scope (covering everything from geopolitics to climate change to AI to interaction and social systems) and gives you the sort of fizzily-wonky perspectives that you simply don’t tend to get when these things are written by advermarketingprdrones (sorry, but it’s true). Really, really interesting, and an excellent source of ideas.
The Best Inventions of 2023: Always a treat, this, by Time Magazine, and 2023 is no exception – this year’s list of the ‘best’ inventions and innovations across a wide range of categories is as ever a brilliant and inspirational selection of smart pieces of design and innovation, as well as being a reliably-excellent source of…er…’inspiration’ (honestly, if you don’t find at least one thing here that you can riff off or replicate or reuse in some way then, well, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?).
Working With Dall-E 3: A super-useful post from Simon Willison who takes you through some useful ways you can use the new Dall-E’s more LLM-like conversational interface for fun and profit – the details at the end about finding a specific area in latent space and playing around within it is particularly useful for anyone wanting to create consistent image styles or generate recurring characters. BONUS WILLISON: this is another excellent blogpost from earlier this week
, which is significantly crunchier in terms of the concepts being discussed but which, if you can force yourself to stick with it (and I am saying this from my point of view as someone for whom the more conceptual bits of ‘how AI works’ start to get VERY challenging quite quickly), offers a genuinely helpful way to think about where The Machine ‘finds’ concepts, and how things cluster in latent space, and about the way in which much of the magic is just taking a set of coordinates and reinterpreting them as different media…oh, look, just click the link and read it, Simon’s a much better explainer than I am (possibly because he understands this stuff and I very much don’t).
Another Artistic Fightback: I am rather enjoying the increasingly-guerilla moves being made by the artistic community to guard against the ingestion and reappropriation of their work by The Machine – this latest is a tool called Nightshade, which basically (if I am reading this right) ‘infects’ images with code which will render them utterly confusing to The Machine when ingested, meaning that it will fcuk up the link between where the image ‘sits’ in latent space and what it looks like (effectively, if I’m understanding it correctly, it basically works by altering pixels in such a way that the image is unaltered to the human eye but to a machine presents an entirely different subject – so an image which to us looks like a dog is instead seen by the machine as a cat, screwing with its dataset in all sorts of ways). This feels VERY ‘scrappy collective fighting back against big business and the forces of capitalism and THE MAN’ in a 90s adaptation of a Neal Stephenson film, if you know what I mean.
Explore With Alexa: I have no love for Amazon as a company and their creepy digital surveillance devices fill me with fear, but I will give them rare credit where it’s due – this is an article about how the company is starting to experiment with the introduction of LLMs to its Alexa Kids product, and, from what’s outlined in this piece at least, it seems like they are taking a genuinely-sensible and measured approach to rolling out the tech in such a way that minimises the likely risk of, I don’t know, little Noah being given detailed instructions on how to make mittens from the guinea pigs. Worth reading if you’re in any way exploring how you might start bolting on natural language conversational gubbins to your existing products or services (sometimes I read things back and laugh to myself – pretty confident that noone reading this is involved in doing anything that serious, bless you all).
AI and the Military: A timely writeup in the Washington Post of some of the fledgling companies currently seeking to make their founders violently, plutocratically wealthy by flogging their ‘war, but with added AI!’ solutions to the Pentagon – I’m including this not because it contains anything necessarily surprising, but because I think it’s a useful reminder of the sort of practical, right-now considerations that it might be worth focusing on instead of the ‘killer robots take control’ stuff. BONUS AI-RELATED LINK: here’s a piece in the WSJ about smart kids dropping out of elite colleges so as to pursue their dreams of making a quick buck in the AI bear market, which, again, isn’t per se interesting but is useful in terms of what it tells us about what the people who are likely to be running this VERY HOT market are thinking- note the quote in here from the guy who basically says ‘all the jobs are going to be automated away – do I want to be the guy whose job gets automated, or the guy who invents and owns the machines that do the automating?’. Tell me again how it’s the autonomous AI we need to worry about, why don’t you?
The Internet of the Future: As Ryan pointed out in Garbage Day this week, by the point you notice a movement on the web these days it’s probably already over – meaning that the current spate of vaguely-nostalgic-optimistic pieces about ‘remember the good old web, how can we get it back?’ are already set to be replaced with The Next Cultural Zeitgeisty Bubble; still, I rather liked this article espousing the virtues of POSTING ON YOUR OWN WEBSITE, and I can generally highly recommend the DIY ethos when it comes to web publishing (I mean, I say ‘Y’ – the website was built by a friend, the mail software’s another person’s creation, I literally just commissioned some stuff like a useless, non-making arriviste, but you get the idea).
Running In A Body That’s My Own: This is a devastating essay by Caster Semanya about wanting to run – I defy anyone not to feel their heart break a bit at this opening paragraph: “I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man; I’m a woman. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes. I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman.” Honestly, this floored me, and is a regular, useful reminder about the mad multiplicity of human experience and identity and how unhelpful binary distinctions are when talking about anything as complex as biology.
Taiwan’s Ageing Population: A really nice piece of dataviz looking at the way in which Taiwan’s population has aged over the past few decades, and the likely impact on the country, and how it compares to other nations around the world whose populations are also ageing at pace. Lovely graphs (I know that might not sound appealing, but these are particularly nicely-done).
Learn English With Google: Ok, this is less ‘interesting article’ and more ‘useful thing to know’, but still: “We are excited to announce a new feature of Google Search that helps people practice speaking and improve their language skills. Within the next few days, Android users in Argentina, Colombia, India (Hindi), Indonesia, Mexico, and Venezuela can get even more language support from Google through interactive speaking practice in English — expanding to more countries and languages in the future. Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners, providing translations, definitions, and other resources to improve vocabulary. Now, learners translating to or from English on their Android phones will find a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback.” This is HUGELY useful and a really significant development imho.
China’s Age of Malaise: Thanks to Alex for sending this my way; this is a VERY long but very readable look at the current Xi era in China, set against a backdrop of economic stagnation an evaporation of the promise of seemingly infinite-growth seen in the 00s; the piece looks at what this change in economic perspective might mean for international and domestic policy, and how it will likely impact US-China relations (it’s a New Yorker piece and as such Americentric, but still), and the return of ideology, and the increasing feeling amongst swathes of the population that the good times, such as they were, are over…I am far from being an expert on China (lol! As if!) and those more in-the-know than me might find this simplistic, but personally it struck me as well-written, well-researched and well-argued.
Addicted To FUT: I’ve long been of the (tedious, sniffy) opinion that FIFA’s – sorry FC24’s – Ultimate Team gameplay mode (the one in which you have to play games to get points to unlock cards that unlock better players – or you can just pay actual cashmoney to unlock the players instead, which is how EA makes BILLIONS off the franchise) is basically a fixed odds betting terminal with a fancy interface, and this incredibly-dispiriting article in superb PC games magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun does nothing to disabuse me of that notion – the stories here of grown men hiding their spending from their family, pursuing a hobby that they no longer even seem to enjoy, feels miserably familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time with addicts of any description, and reading this it’s hard to escape the feeling that this probably ought to have been regulated out of existence years ago. And yet here we are.
The Bitcoin Wallet Mystery: If you had a crypto wallet containing just over 7,000 bitcoin, currently worth several hundred million dollars, and you had lost the password, and someone told you that they could hack the wallet and get you access to the aforementioned millions…you’d say yes, right? And yet, for reasons that are not immediately discernible to this particular layman, Stefan Thomas (who finds himself in this odd position) doesn’t seem too keen…This is FASCINATING – I’m personally convinced that this whole thing has been an attention-seeking grift that got out of hand and now Thomas is just stuck with the story, but I am intrigued to see how it ends up playing out.
The Bad Art Review: I think that this might be the most ‘online culture and fandom in 2023’ story of the year so far – there’s a painter who’s achieved a degree of TikTok fame for doing pictures of people as they ride the subway in New York; said fame parlayed itself into an actual gallery show, which in turn led to said show being reviewed by an actual art critic; the review was…not bad, considering the lumpen quality of the works in question, but the reactions of the artist’s fandom were…somewhat unhinged, it’s fair to say. This is SO INTERESTING, and I very much enjoyed the writeup here by the critic in question who raises interesting points about the extent to which criticism is even meaningfully possible in a post-stan, direct-artist-to-fandom-link world – as a companion piece, I recommend this article in Dirt in which 10 different music critics opine on the current state of their medium, and includes this observation which is SO TRUE and can basically be applied to frankly any sort of journalism at all in 2023: “when publications offer to pay someone $150 to write 2,000 words, and those words can put a writer at risk of an artist with millions of followers deciding to send their fan armies after someone for an opinion you’re not going to get the best and smartest people.”
The Ethics of Sedaris: This is very funny, but also sort of suggests that David Sedaris is a massive d1ck, which is both a shame and not entirely unexpected. The author recounts their experience of going to a Sedaris book reading and meeting him afterwards, during which meeting an embarrassing anecdote was shared…which eventually found itself in to later Sedaris stage shows. This is SO interesting, about the extent to which stuff like that is expected, or ok, the etiquette around lifting others’ experiences as material…Sedaris might reasonably argue that EVERYTHING IS MATERIAL, especially to an arch anecdotalist like him, but it does rather feel like his interactions here are a touch ungracious…still, this is funny and interesting, although part of me does want to email the author and ask him why, exactly, he felt the need to share the fact that he once bummed himself with a frozen hotdog with ANYONE.
David’s Presence: Yes, ok, it’s ANOTHER piece in Curios about David Foster Wallace (well, ish) – YES I KNOW I AM A TEDIOUS CLICHE OF A CERTAIN TYPE OF MIDDLE-AGED MAN OF A CERTAIN GENERATION, STOP BULLYING ME. Long-term readers will know that I have a long-standing love of the man’s writing and interest in his life, notwithstanding all the Bad Stuff, and this is a beautiful essay written by Gale Walden, a former fiancee and partner of Wallace’s who (to my mind) was rather minimised in the postmortem analysis of his live and work, but who writes movingly about their relationship and grieving and the weirdness of her memories of the man coming up hard against the revised picture of him created by posthumous revelations…look, fine, you’ll get more out of this if you’re a Wallace completist like I am, but as a meditation on death and grieving, and the way you can only really come to terms with some aspects of some people when they no longer exist, this is wonderful.
Lanchester on SBF: I didn’t think I’d end up including anything else on the FTX trial, but I will make an exception for this – John Lanchester writes SO WELL about finance and markets and the madness of crypto, and his portrait of SBF (and of the book about him by Lewis) is nuanced and sad and offers a lot of really interesting perspectives and analysis of the misery of the hard utilitarianism of the effective altruists, and, generally, this is a properly great read even if you think you never, ever want to see the words ‘Sam Bankman Fried’, ‘Alameda’ or ‘polycule’ ever again.
Being Naked: Ostensibly a piece about going to a nudist beach with her husband, Jeanette Cooperman instead turns this essay into a really interesting history of our relationship with our bodies, the history of clothing, the male gaze and the concept of ‘nakedness’ – this is far, far more wide-ranging than I was expecting it to be,
30 Years of Online Writing: I loved this – a wonderful disquisition on why it is that we distinguish the writing done online from ‘proper’ writing, and whether there are solid formal reasons for this, and how form relates to meaning in terms of the digital written word…seriously, if you’ve spent any time over the past few years enjoying Patricia Lockwood’s writing about/on the web, or the HTML review, or any sort of digital poetry that plays with the mechanics of the web to interesting effect, then you will adore this essay by Megan Marz.
Gods & Influencers: Clive Martin is, to my mind, one of the best people writing about mid-culture in the UK today – this is another superb piece for the Face in which Clive attends the insane-sounding KSI vs Fury massive megabout in Manchester the other weekend and paints a picture of the weirdness of the cultural hinterland that is the Influencer Beef Industrial Complex. You will laugh, you will wince, you will Google an awful lot of names and then wish you really, really hadn’t – THIS IS BRITAIN!
The Protagonist Is Never In Control: Finally this week, a short story by Emily Fox Kaplan about childhood and lies and memories and and and. Sharp and jagged, and I am always a total sucker for anything written in the second person; this is very good indeed.
It does rather feel, doesn’t it, looking at the world over the past few weeks and indeed for much of the past couple of decades, that much of recent history has been, well, a mistake. Can we do it all again, please, but different?
HELLO HOW ARE WE ALL DOING? Is everything colossal and jagged and terrifying? Is the future – and, frankly, the present – looming at you in sinister, hefty fashion? Do things BODE, generally speaking, and not in a good way?
Yeah, I know, sucks. Still, for the next…ooh, probably two or three hours if you click EVERYTHING and pay close attention…you can forget all that in favour of the delicious, soothing, nourishing (not nourishing – Web Curios has approximately the same sort of nourishing qualities as an MP3player, probably a Zune) smorgasbord of links and words I have arrayed before you – there are some genuinely CRACKING things in Curios this week (none of them the bits I’m responsible for, to be clear) and so hopefully this will go someway towards soothing the fantods, at least for a short while.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are still beautiful, whatever THEY might be saying behind your back.
THE SECTION WHICH HAS SPENT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THIS WEEK THINKING HOW INCREDIBLY HARD IT MUST BE TO BE AN ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALIST, PT.1:
Riffusion: I have, up to this point in the CRAZY AI JOURNEY on which we find ourselves (a journey which feels like one along a road littered with increasingly urgent and dramatic and exclamation-mark laden signs bearing warnings such as “DANGER AHEAD!!!!” and “BRIDGE OUT!!!!” and “STILL TIME TO TURN BACK!!!!”, driven by someone who’s picking up speed and laughing increasingly-manically and not paying enough attention to the smoke on the horizon) been pleasantly-amazed by the advances in machine-created audio – well NO MORE. Riffusion’s latest iteration (this has been around for a while in various forms, I think) focuses on, well, riffs – the idea here is that you give The Machine a couple of lyrics (it works upto about 25 words or so) and tell it the sort of style and genre you’re aiming for, and it will in a few short seconds spit out a clip of those words being sung to a tune of the style you’ve specified…and yes, while technically that is exactly what does in fact happen, I don’t think that my low-quality prose can even begin to prepare you for what this stuff sounds like. Seriously, if you’re reading this before clicking the link, STOP! Click the link and have a listen to some of the pre-generated examples on there and MARVEL at the fact that we have apparently created an entirely-new kind of ‘uncanny valley’ phenomenon, specifically one around ‘music which could almost maybe develop into a tune at some point but which seems to be almost wilfully refusing to do so’ – honestly, this made me feel SO FUNNY (specifically, ‘odd’) in ways that I can’t adequately describe, like whatever had composed the clips had had the concept of major and minor chords, and, you know, the general concept of mathematical sequences, explained to them, and had nodded along diligently and given every impression of having understood, but, it turns out, really hadn’t at all. Anyway, once you’ve got over the initial weirdness and aural horripilations then you can start to have some ‘fun’ (I use the word advisedly) – the interface has quite sensibly got guardrails in it to prevent you from getting it to pen abusive ditties (I only know this because I tried to get it to sing about Rob Manuel being a bell-end and it got p1ssy with me), but with a bit of creative wordplay and some imagination you can basically get it to sing anything you like (as long as what you like is no more than about 12-15s long), and as such you can basically while away the rest of the day by sending your colleagues and loved ones sweet little billets douces sung by a vaguely-tone-deaf robot. WHO SAYS THE FUTURE’S SH1T, EH? Here’s one JUST FOR YOU.
LucidBox: The vast majority of AI-generated content continues to be garbage, let’s be clear, although there are occasional exceptions (I was charmed by this short clip which images Star Wars as though filmed in 1923, even though it is literally impossible for me to give less of a fcuk about Star Wars in 2023 – special mention for the fact that the sounds here are by Osymyso, who you may remember as one of the original pioneers of mashups when they were a thing back in 2001, and who I used to go and see playing his new records every month at London’s smallest club night (it was literally in a room the size of your nan’s lounge, underneath a newsagent on Chralotte St, and it was called ‘Bstard’, and I loved it)) – if you’re interested in keeping track of what’s getting made and what it looks like, and general aesthetic/technical trends, LucidBox might be a useful site to keep an eye on – it covers animation and podcasts and spoof ads and faked movie trailers, and while the prevailing aesthetic and workflow for basically all of this stuff is, as far as I can tell, ‘Midjourney and then whatever bunch of animation tools you want to use to cobble it into moving pictures’ there are some interesting variations in style, etc, that you might find useful.
Airplane: I don’t quite know how to explain this, other than to say ‘it’s a digital poem’ and ‘it is honestly absolutely beautiful, and takes about a minute or so of your time to play through in its entirety, and after it is finished you might just want to sit with it for a while’. Really, I thought this was genuinely wonderful and I hope you do too.
Martin: For various reasons, I find the name ‘Martin’ almost comically-sinister – it’s basically down to the fact that there’s a very good, INCREDIBLY-CREEPY lesser-known George Romero film from the 1970s called ‘Martin’, about someone who may or may not in fact be a vampire – and as a result I occasionally find myself just sort of intoning the word ‘Martin’ to myself in sepulchral tones and giggling…but you don’t need to know that, and frankly it’s not hugely germane to this link, which has nothing to do with etiolated young men dressed in black and their exsanguinatory habits, but instead is AN EXCITING, PERSONAL, AI-POWERED VOICE ASSISTANT! Yes, as confidently predicted by me pretty much every week for nine months (if you throw enough at the wall, etc etc) we have what I think is the first on-phone personalised Siri analogue for you to play with! Sadly this is iOS-only, and as an Apple refusenik I’ve been unable to have a play with this and am therefore unable to verify whether or not ‘Martin’ (see, it really IS a sinister name!) will make your life better in innumerable ways with its sage counsel and reassuring demeanour, or whether it will instead slowly turn your existence into a waking nightmare of digitally-constructed paranoias and insecurities. “Meet Martin, your personal voice AI. Through natural conversation, you can ask Martin about news, movies, or restaurants near you. Debrief your week or brainstorm a new idea with him” runs the optimistic app store copy – there are no details as to what this is built on, but I do wonder what sort of indemnities the team behind this have in place for when Martin starts telling its users about entirely-fictitious events and films and restaurants…like, NOONE SHOULD BELIEVE LLMs ABOUT ANYTHING FFS, PRESENTING ONE AS AN INFALLIBLE ASSISTANT SOUNDS LIKE A TERRIBLE IDEA!
Views From Mechanical Turk: I think it’s fair to say that the days of the Mechanical Turk marketplace are numbered – it seems reasonable to assume that in reasonably short time all the sorts of digital piecework that were undertaken by people on platforms like Amazon’s MT (or Fiverr, or Upwork) will simply be replaced by AI agents. I can appreciate that the natural reaction to this might well be ‘tant pis’, what with the fact that, well, it was repetitive drudgework in the main, but that’s also a steady source of income which has kept not-insignificant numbers of people in the developing world (and in the US tbh) solvent for the past decade or so which is going to disappear…anyway, leaving aside the semi-perennial thoughts about the coming jobpocalypse, this website is a project by Giacomo Nanni in which they paid people using the MT platform to send them the view from where they were working, and compiled the resulting images onto this site which lets you browse them on a grid. To quote Nanni, “As organisations use Mechanical Turk to create datasets, in this website a more private dataset is shown. Following the logic of the platform, for a small fee workers have been asked to show a glimpse of their private life, their view close to their desk, their working station. At the limit of ethics and labour exploitation we should ask ourselves whether this is an acceptable approach to use in research and in general, if employing randomic workers around the world is the ideal practice to shape future artificial intelligences. With this experiment, design becomes a critical tool, it investigates the sources of datasets, and it helps framing a critical discussion around the decisions that few individuals are taking.”
Notes On Publishing Ecologies: By rights this should be in the longreads section as it’s basically an academic thesis but, well, I have only read about 3% of it and its inclusion here is more because of the fact that it tickles certain very specific parts of my brain when it comes to the interplay between form and function and the written word. It’s by Kim Kleinert, and here is their description: ““Compiling Edge Effects: Notes on Publishing Ecologies” resolves around forms of situated digital publishing and asks how technology can be a vector of a new materialist ontology, towards a “linking of kin and kind” and with that process, learning how to locate and orientate ourseleves within this world. The text does not follow a clearly linear narration, rather it orbits around myriad questions, relations, calls and responses. This is why the grid does not present the numbered sections in a correct order, but positions them depending on their relation towards each other. The site is operatable in three different states and its is interface consistent of text only. The states can be switched through by clicking the descriptive buttons in the top left corner. “Text” shows the main text of the thesis, “Chapters” will highlight the grid, revealing the headline to each of the numbers and works as a table of content, while “Numbers” will put focus on the grid, its numbers and structure only.” Look, this is VERY DENSE and VERY THEORY, but, also, there is something absolutely beautiful about the way the text – its positioning and its movement works in reaction to the user and the users’ position within it. Er, if that makes sense. Look, you really just have to click this one – I think it is beautiful, and were I not planning on going and giving myself gout as soon as I’ve finished writing this I would totally spend the afternoon immersed in it.
Midnight Transmission: A site dedicated to helping you find interesting, fun bits of animation on YouTube – it’s literally just an autoplayer, fine, but from what I can tell the person who’s behind it has put some decent work into curating the videos that sit behind it, so if you are interested in animation and want somewhere where you can just sit and trust that someone else has put in the hard curatorial work then, well, HERE HAVE THIS.
FileLife: This is imperfectly-explained (lads, would it hurt to have a little ‘no, but seriously, this is a simple explanation of this project and what we are doing here’ explainer? WOULD IT?!?) but I am going to take a stab at what’s going on here – I *think* that the project is about taking a USB stick around Europe, using it to store memories on, and share memories from, and the whole endeavour is part of the USB Club, which is an international network of people who are enthused by the idea of using USBs as a physical representation of digital information, and for whom the physicality of the medium is a pleasing contrast to the very much non-physical nature of digital information…Anyway, there’s something pleasingly homespun about this, and I am a sucker for an occasional travelogue in which nothing happens, and you may too.
Ladies On Records: This is a very cool project which exists across multiple platforms – this is the main website, but you can find it on Insta, Soundcloud and elsewhere. “Ladies on Records is a curated multifaceted endeavour created to represent women’s contribution to global and local music of the past decades. Ladies on Records tells the stories of women by the music they created. Ladies on Records’ mission is to reshape and improve understanding and knowledge of female music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s from all over the world and make it re-discovered and appreciated again by the local and global audience. It sheds new light on female creation in music and exposes unspoken, forgotten, or neglected cultural, political, and aesthetic patterns. Ladies on Records’ main goal is to tell the stories of female artists from the past in a new, contemporary way.” There’s loads of interesting stuff in here, from DJ sets featuring some incredible mid-20thC Central European female-led music, essays on the role of women in the 20thC Turkish music scene…I get the feeling there might be one of you, possibly with a troublingly-large vinyl collection, for whom this might be something of a find.
Heartbreak Cards: This is SUCH a cool idea – ok, the practice of making your own looks fiddly (you need to mess around with AirTable which isn’t actually that bad but, well, I’m lazy) but I LOVE the idea behind it. Heartbreak Cards is a concept by someone named Naoto, who writes: “ I started making my own collectible cards in 2022. Growing up with Pokemon Cards, Magic: the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! and other card games, it was always my dream to make my own card game. Although what I imagined in my childhood was full of dragons and spells, as an artist, I decided to make autobiographical cards, i.e., stories about my life. The project is ongoing and never reaches an end; I keep adding new cards whenever I can work on this project This edition, 24-Hour Heartbreak Deck, is made between August 29th and 30th, 2023, this time having a journal in mind rather than a biography. In my example, the focus was about self-reflection, but you can use this tutorial to compile, for example, memories from your vacation a process of your latest dance performance or about your heartbreak.” So what this is is a system for creating a(n infinite) series of cards about anything you like, which can interlink in any way you choose (don’t worry, it makes more sense when you click through), and which you can use to present any sort of set of information you choose. There’s an example deck on the homepage which is obviously what Naoto has been working on – each card is about a different aspect of them or their personality, and each is its own series of symbolic hyperlinks that takes you to other cards in the deck, leading you on a sort of meandering, choose-your-own adventure path through Naoto’s head/heart/soul (delete per your belief in the existence of each). Honestly, I think this is so so so interesting – in part as a means of making your own sort of ‘Tarot Of Me’ (which, yes, sounds intensely eogotistical, but also quite cool) but also as a way of arranging and exploring information and ideas…if you’re a certain type of occultist, or a certain type of strategist (AND WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE, EH?) then you will like this a lot I think.
AI Homer Sings Muse: Do you want to see a poorly-rendered 3d CG representation of Homer Simpson singing ‘Starlight’ by Muse, with the vocal performance imagined by AI as a cast of other poorly-rendered 3d CG characters from popular culture ‘dance’ around in dead-eyed splendour? No, you don’t, but I had to experience this earlier this week and see no reason why you should be spared.
Fonts In Use: FONTS! IN USE! “Fonts In Use is a public archive of typography indexed by typeface, format, industry, and period. Supported by examples contributed by the public, we document and examine graphic design with the goal of improving typographic literacy and appreciation. Designers use our site for project research, type selection and pairing, and discovering new ways to choose and use fonts.” This has apparently been round in various forms since 2010, and so there’s every possibility you’ll already be aware of it, but it was new to me and that’s what counts so there.
Why Some USB Cables Are More Expensive Than Others: Or, “why buying those crap ones from the ‘We Fix Any Screen’ shop on the high street isn’t always a good idea”. You may not think you wanted to read a Twitter thread about exactly what goes on inside a USB cable and what the difference is between one that costs £12 and one that costs £2 is, but, well, you are wrong and I know best.
Space Weather: Would you like a site where you can find out everything you ever wanted to know (and, frankly, quite a lot more than that) about the phenomenon of SOLAR WINDS and, I don’t know, SPACE RAIN (I might be making up ‘space rain’ tbh – perhaps best to check that one before you go making any confident assertions to curious progeny) – I love this because a) it’s a wonderful example of ‘we haven’t updated our webdesign since 2003 and we don’t see why we ought to’; b) it’s about something VERY SPECIFIC AND NICHE; and c) they have the most charming and ‘your favourite uncle and aunt-ish’ AI disclaimer at the top of the page that I actually did a small, involuntary ‘awww’ when I read it (God I bet they enjoy being patronised to within an inch of their lives by pr1cks like me – sorry, space weather enthusiasts).
The Skewer: I’ve been enjoying listening to The Skewer for a few years now – it’s basically an occasional radio show from the UK which takes news footage and chops it up and remixes it with audio to create a sort of ‘Cassetteboy takes a satirical look at the week’s events’-type product which will be very familiar to anyone who ever enjoyed Chris Morris’ work back in the day (I appreciate that this will mean very little to any non-UK people, but I promise that both Chris Morris and Cassetteboy are worth looking up). This is their latest episode which a) is very funny; and b) contains an excellent animated intro with AI wrangling by Friend Of Curios Shardcore, and as such is worth a click and a watch.
Operator: Another AI assistant here – unlike ‘Martin’ (IT IS STILL SUCH A SINISTER NAME) from earlier in this edition, which is intended to be a conversational companion, Operator takes a more functional approach to the question of ‘how can we bend the AI to our will?’ – it’s basically a ‘notes, but with bells and whistles’ app, which a few neat gimmicks. Give it your lists and notes and it will, so the blurb goes, turn them into ACTIONABLE LISTS with PRIORITISED GOALS and clean up your data and sort everything into neat, appropriate job bundles – basically you just use it as a voicenote recorder, and, so the idea goes, the software will take your inchoate thoughts and corral them into something USEFUL and DIRECTIONAL. Which is all well and good, but I find there’s something interesting and…eventually-questionable about the degree of interpretation being required of The Machine here. Am I meant to just accept that the AI’s way of classifying and categorising this stuff is…’best’? Best for who? By what metric? Obviously this is me worrying unnecessarily at this stage – it’s just arranging your grocery list by ‘type of product’ to make aisle-based shopping easier ffs Matt, it’s not attempting to tell you which of your friends’ birthday gifts you should sacrifice due to the imminent energy price-based cost of living crisis! – but it’s not hard to imagine some of the interesting questions raised about the extent to which people are going to (or should) feel comfortable handing over initially-small-then-very-quickly-increasingly-significant questions like this to The Machine.
The Regenerative Field Design Kit: My friend John has just made these available for sale – I am not going to try and explain this, just click the link and read what the idea is, and know that I am a horribly cynical person who finds basically no joy in anything and who is, at heart, basically just waiting to get a terminal illness so that I can decide not to get treatment and just STOP DOING THIS FOREVER, and despite this fact I have had one of these things for about a year now and have kept it in the inside pocket of my jacket and it has made me look at the world differently EVERY TIME I have used it – I promise you that if you are a ‘strategist’ or ‘creative’ or ‘designer’, or any one of those stupid jobs that involve you wearing the sort of clothes worn in previous generations by fishermen despite the fact that you spend your whole day at a desk and don’t NEED to wear a knitted cap or clogs ffs, then you will really, really like these.
Soccer Slammers: A Twitter account which shares images of imaginary wrestling action figures inspired by famous faces from English football. Which, yes, fine, is perhaps the very definition of ‘a niche concern’, but is also very funny (or it is if you, like me, are inherently amused by the idea of Neil Warnock as a WWF character from the 1980s).
THE SECTION WHICH HAS SPENT A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION OF THIS WEEK THINKING HOW INCREDIBLY HARD IT MUST BE TO BE AN ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALIST, PT.2:
The Unbrexit: I don’t ordinarily link to websites for venues that I have never been to – and, let’s be honest, that I am unlikely to ever visit – but I will make an exception for the website for this pub which is somewhere in Germany (the town of Ahaus, specifically – I have literally no idea why this nondescript town near the Dutch border, which according to Wikipedia is mainly known as a place where the German government, in its wisdom, chooses to store spent nuclear waste, decided to body the Brits this hard, but I am glad that they did) and which since 2017 has been a very weird-looking celebration of intensely-mediocre English pub culture. They do quizzes! It wouldn’t surprise me if they had the Only Fools and Horses pinball machine! This is very odd, but perhaps the strangest thing about it is how much it looks like a very, very bad pub built into a 50s council estate in South West London – honestly, it’s UNCANNY.
The Early Office Museum: Two things here: firstly, this is a classic Curios site, monomaniacal and obsessive and poorly-designed, all the good stuff – if you want a really DEEP dive into the workings of the early office life, and a trove of images and information about how the world of work operated in the earliest days of organised, mass-scale white collar and clerical labour then WOW are you in for a treat; secondly, this has perhaps my favourite angry, impotent scream of rage about THE MODERN INTERNET I have seen on any website – specifically, the screed at the top of the homepage railing against people pinning images from the site to Pinterest and thereby royally-screwing the site’s traffic and general raison d’etre, which basically ends up saying “EITHER PINTEREST GOES OR THE MUSEUM DOES!”. Sadly the screed appears to have been posted several years ago, and, well, Pinterest persists, so I think that the forces of The Bad Web have once again emerged victorious – still, here at Web Curios we pour one out for the Early Office Museum and mourn its passing. Also, fcuk Pinterest, such a horrible website.
Kinetic Verbs: Some glorious examples of typographic animation here – the work here is beautiful and clean and really imaginative, and will appeal to any designers or animators of typography-freaks among you.
Romance Covers: The dataviz wizards at The Pudding have turned their attention to the romance novel market in their latest bit of analysis, or more specifically to the COVERS of said romance novels – how have the various hunks and beefcakes and damsels in varying degrees of distress depicted on the jackets changed over time to better represent the shifting morals and mores of the times? This is really interesting – I was particularly struck by the fact that it seems that 2015 was PEAK NAKED for the covers, with lovers depicted on books in subsequent years being more decorously-clad in what is perhaps another sign of the rather more stentorian moral times in which we live. The piece also looks at representations on diversity and the style of the covers (illustrative vs photographic, etc), and is, as ever with The Pudding’s work, a brilliant piece of digital design and usability – there are SO many nice touches here, including the ability to compile the covers that catch your eye from those referenced into ‘reading lists’, and frankly anyone working in the aesthetic side of digital publishing could do worse than learn from the work these people are doing at the moment imho.
Goose Generator: Who wouldn’t like a website which when you click on it generates a selection of seemingly-always-different low-resolution images of the faces of geese in pleasingly-cheery primary colours? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
Photos Of Tiny Things: Or, to give it its full name, ‘The Nikon Small World 2023 Photomicrography Competition’ – but tbh ‘photos of tiny things’ tells you all you need to know. This year’s selection are, as per, VERY VERY SMALL, but equally are pretty fcuking amazing – I think the second-place pic of the match being struck is my personal favourite, although I appreciate that an appreciation for photos of fire is probably considered a bit basic, but I also very much liked the 8th placed shot which looked to me as though Klimt and Schiele had decided to team up and get into abstracts a bit – you, though, must as ever feel free to pick your own. NO YOU MUST.
Musing: I really really like this idea – it’s not a novel one by any stretch of the imagination, fine, but there’s a certain unspoilt purity in the ‘just speke your branes anonymously’ model and it seems to be implemented neatly-enough here. “”Musing” is a deep and reflective thought or contemplation. So if you are looking for a place to share your thoughts, ideas, or just want to write something down, this is the place for you. No feedback, no likes, no comments, no followers, no friends, no ads, no distractions, no bullsh1t. just you and humains thoughts somewhere on planet earth. No account needed, only the date, the message, langitude & latitude “within an area of 500 meters” are saved. Your thoughts will vanish naturally cause only the first 100 messages are displayed. You can be shocked, surprised, amused, or just bored by what you read, but this is the beauty of it.” This feels like an early coding project by a kid tbh – not that that’s a bad thing – and I am pleased to be able to report that there is NOTHING HORRIBLE on there (at least at the time of writing), whether by accident or moderators’ design; most of the contributions seem to be from South and Central America at present, so a bit of Spanish might help if you want to take the emotional temperature of a small subset of the world’s population via this site.
The Righting: This is an interesting idea, in a ‘know your enemy’ sort of way (NB – I don’t think that my politics will come as any surprise to anyone who reads this newsletter, but, for the avoidance of doubt, I can’t help but think of the right wing in modern western politics as being the ‘enemy’ – sorry to anyone of a more conservative bent who might be reading this, it’s almost certainly not personal) – The Righting presents a daily selection of headlines being served up by the right wing media (in the US, in the main, which means it’s obviously a very particular (very mad, very hateful) type of right wing we’re talking about) to give an overview of the talking points being pushed today. Obviously for non-US people this is of less immediate interest, but, personally-speaking, I think anything that the US wingnuts are shouting about now is increasingly-likely to be the things that your Badenochs and Bravermans (and, eventually, Melonis and the rest) will be shouting about in six months’ time (because, and sorry to be a conspiratorial broken record about this, but, IT’S THE SAME MONEY FUNDING ALL THESE PEOPLE) are yelling about over here in six months or so and as such this is worth keeping a vague eye on.
Oort: This is so far from my area of expertise – or even, frankly, comprehension – that I feel a bit guilty including it, but I figure there may be a few of you who get a kick from it. Do you program? Do you do so specifically in Rust? Would you like a(n apparently) fun game which lets you both practice your coding skills AND control a fleet of spaceships and eventually code a sort of Star Wars-type AI that can compete in tournaments against other similarly-minded people? WELL GREAT YOU WILL LIKE THIS THEN!
Neon Flames: This is quite a simple browser toy that lets you create rather pretty abstract images from a limited colour palette – it’s not that exciting per se, but I realised that everything you make with it past a certain point starts to look like an incredible image of deep space nebulae taken by Hubble, and when you think of it more as a tool to create an infinite number of imaginary galaxies, I don’t know, it becomes a lot cooler. There’s something quite soothing about this – seriously, if you’re feeling a bit frazzled I can highly recommend 5 minutes of abstract galaxy painting to take the edge off a bit.
All Of The Slide Rules: OH GOD THIS IS PERFECT. Would you like access to the greatest collections of slide rules ever assembled by anyone ever? Would you like to access the combined archival knowledge of the six greatest collectors of slide rules ever to exist? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is the archive collection of the Oughtred Society, which apparently existed to celebrate how awesome slide rules are – each member has their own interstitial page before the site links to their archive of images of slide rules – let me just reiterate: THEIR ARCHIVE OF IMAGES OF SLIDE RULES – and each archivist gets a small pen portrait and, look, I need to reproduce this in its entirety because it is SO GOOD and SO PURE: “Louis Gotlib grew up after slide rules had largely been replaced by electronic calculators. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from The Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina and has been a chemistry teacher for thirty-two years. One day around 1996 he saw a catalog from the MIT Museum Shop where old slide rules were being sold, bought a few, looked around on ebay and the web, and has been collecting ever since. Louis has been an Oughtred Society member since 1997 and was recently selected to serve on the Board of Directors. Louis has a special fondness for slide rules and calculating devices with a chemical orientation but his collection of 1300 items covers as many makers and specializations as possible. Louis has published papers and given presentations on slide rules, cell biology, and chemistry education. He also coauthors study guides for students taking standardized tests and plays chess. Louis can often be heard in his classroom saying things like “put that calculator away and just think for a moment!” We are privileged to present HERE Louis’s collection of slide rules.” Basically if you don’t love this then you are a bit dead inside. BONUS SLIDE RULE CONTENT: bizarrely I also came across this longread about the history of the pocket calculator this week which contains quite a bit about slide rules and which suggests to me that there is some sort of grand plan afoot and it involves units of measurement.
Old People Reminisce: Or, to give this Reddit thread its full title, “what do young people get completely wrong about past decades?” Obviously this is ALL GenX/Boomer nostalgia and as such your mileage will vary immensely – I am linking it here, though, because there are enough of these that aren’t totally obvious that it made me think it might make an interesting read for anyone younger than, say 20, or something for those of you with kids to share with them as a futile way of attempting to bridge the increasingly cavernous gap between you (LOL!).
Tooth Antiques: Have you been searching with an increasingly-frenzied degree of frustration for a one-stop-shop for all your dental horror-related needs? Have you been looking for that one, perfect, impossible-to-find gift for your odontophobic partner? WELL LOOK NO FURTHER! Tooth Antiques is an online emporium dedicated to selling stuff made out of old teeth – human teeth, to be clear. Stuff like jewellery and clothing and dolls and keyrings…the shop is based in Canada and ships internationally, and the FAQ is very clear to point out that all their teeth are legally and ethically sourced…so GO FOR IT! (thanks to Rina for the tip!)
Literally All Of The AI-Generated Bongo: THIS IS A LINK THAT TAKES YOU STRAIGHT TO AN AWFUL LOT OF PICTURES OF A VERY EXPLICIT NATURE AND WHICH YOU MAY NOT REALLY WANT TO SEE SO BE WARNED! Ahem. I’ve been tracking the relationship between AI image generation and sex for several years here in Curios, and the main reason I include this – aside from the fact that it’s horrific and weird and gross and troubling and funny and awful and HORRIBLY FUTURE, obvs – is that it struck me when I saw it that comparing it to The Machine Gaze, Shardcore’s work on AI and bongo from three years ago, is a pretty amazing showcase of the speed of change of this tech. The link takes you to a website which is both a free AI bongo generator AND a rolling showcase of all the images being churned out by said AI bongo generator – to be clear, as with 99% of all AI-generated bongo, this is intensely cisheteronormative and you’re not going to find much here to interest you if you want anything other than a narrow range of waifu-level archetypes covered in wallpaper paste, and, honestly , there’s something really quite unpleasant about the same themes and styles of image occurring over and over and over again…look, I don’t have any particular viewpoint on the ‘generations have been ruined by bongo’ argument (I simply don’t have the data to draw on, tbh), but it’s hard not to think as you scroll, numbed to the spaff and the ahegao faces and the infinitely-recurring pixie noses, that something very peculiar has happened to male sexuality over the past few years. ANYWAY, this is sort of repellent and dizzying and mad (seriously, if you want to feel a moment of very real bodyhorror vertigo I suggest you go to the ‘generate’ tab of this website and look at the preconfigured tags that you can use to create your own smut – it…it doesn’t feel like a healthy way to conceive of sex, this, does it?), but I managed to find a small window of comedy by toggling the ‘tags’ view on the top menu and seeing exactly how badly the AI gets some of these wrong (seriously, there is some WONDERFUL unintentional comedy in there – ‘surfing’? ‘Lumberjack’ ‘NUCLEAR VAULT?!?’) – in general, though, I can’t pretend that this is anything other than depressing and a bit gross.
Puzzmo: This is a) a great source of daily new puzzle games; and b) a really smart idea for driving interest and adoption of a thing (I think). Puzzmo’s gimmick is that it’s limited access to people with the SKILLS: “Puzzmo combines newspaper favorites like Crossword Puzzles, modern classics like Typeshift, and some brand new puzzles created by me and a small team of artists and designers. For now, Puzzmo is locked. Every day we’ll mail out 500 keys so that only puzzle-loving humans can get in early. If you’re interested in receiving a key – or just having some fun – the first step is solving today’s puzzle.” So anyone can play the daily puzzle, but access to the whole site is limited to people who are into puzzles enough to keep coming back and trying to get on the waiting list, and the competitive aspect will drive interest…yeah, I think this is smart (and the puzzles are good) and as a way of ‘growth hacking’ (sorry) it struck me as decent.
Can You Break The Algorithm?: This is imho a bad title for what is an excellent game – by the same people (AlgorithmWatch) who made Moderator Mayhem a while back, this is another game which also works to educate the player as to the difficult questions and decisions inherent in managing content at scale. Here, you’re cast as the CEO of an imagined social platform (which is definitely Twitter), and over the course of about 30m gameplay (longer if you take your time) you’re asked to make decisions on moderation policy and platform functionality and how to spend investor money over several rounds of fundraising before you get to the eventual holy grail of the IPO – lots of the examples are drawn from the real world, and if you’re the sort of person who’s followed this sort of news at all over the past decade then you’ll recognise much of the material. This is fun, and does an excellent job of showing how incredibly fcuking difficult moderation and community management is – but it also does an excellent job of demonstrating just quite how hard certain platforms and, specifically, individuals have fcuked it of late. Yet ANOTHER example, by the way, of how good game design can work wonders in terms of helping to communicate HARD AND OFTEN BORING STUFF.
Quest At The Museum: Ok, so you need to be able to physically make it to London’s Natural History Museum to play this, but I LOVE it as a concept and it’s the sort of thing that could be adapted for anywhere really with a bit of work and imagination. It’s basically a scaled-down, kid-friendly D&D adventure, using the museum as a game space, designed by…someone anonymous (sorry, brilliant person who designed this, but I can’t find your name anywhere on the site) who has made the whole thing available to download for free here – honestly, how good does this sound? “Ever walked the halls of the Natural History Museum and thought “this place needs more riddles, dragons, and sword fights?” If so, you’re in the right place. We created this game for my daughter’s 11th birthday. It was a lot of work-and fun! So we’ve chosen to make it available for anyone who wants to play. It takes you around the museum, using the exhibits as encounter arenas. The dinosaurs are dragons. The stairs are the Cliffs of Insanity! You get it.” Charming, a great idea, a generous thing to make it freely available, and totally the sort of thing that you can use as CREATIVE INSPIRATON for anything you like – I am serious when I say that the current boom in D&D means that you have never had a better chance to pitch that extremely-geeky activation that you have always dreamed of (also, if anyone can be fcuked, I reckon that there is genuine mileage in creating a ‘UK General Election 2024’ D&D module – I am 100% serious on this, I think you would be AMAZED at the interest if you scripted it right).
Wind Waker: I have never been a Nintendo kid and so never played this version of Zelda, but you don’t have to be familiar with it to enjoy this remarkable little tech demo – someone’s basically recrated the whole sailing mechanic from the game and made it playable in-browser, and while there’s not really anything to DO per se there’s equally something undeniably soothing about pootling around the azure waters in your little vessel, collecting rupees – there’s also another mode where you can play a sort of endless runner-type game, but personally I’m just here for the aimless sailing.
Little Chef: Can you combine all the different ingredients to make all the different possible recipes? This is charming – the look and feel is gorgeous, and there are all sorts of little easter eggs in the animations of the various different kitchen elements to discover, but, equally, I got so frustrated by my inability to find all the various combinations of ingredients after about 15m that I had to go and have a fag, so well, your mileage may vary (by the way, if you’re struggling to get things into the pot, aim for the right hand side – seems to help).
Benjamin Davis: Benjamin Davis designs games – this is his personal website where he showcases his work. Several of his latest projects are app downloads, but if you scroll down the page a bit you can find a dozen or so small browsergames which are PERFECT for whiling away a few bored minutes while you choke back the tears between powerpoint slides and meetings (a few of these need Flash, but you can get a really nice modern emulator for that here if you want one) (this link via the always-excellent Paco, btw).
Hands: It’s rare that you see something in the world of browsergames that stands out aesthetically – there’s a certain tendency towards pixelart or 8/16-bit, as a rule – which is perhaps why Hands charmed me so immediately; it’s got the very particular look and feel of a certain type of mid-90s CD-ROM game, the photos and stop-motion animations style giving it a very specific vibe which is enhanced by the lightly-surreal nature of the setting and the puzzles and…well, you’ll get the idea. Your goal is to get the hands to meet, and clasp – see how you get on. Can we maybe have more stuff designed in this style, please? It’s awesome, sort of ‘maximalist post-Soviet collapse’, if I had to name it (as you can tell, there’s a reason I don’t specialise in the creation of neologisms).
Frasier Fantasy: Our final miscellaneous link this week is SO BEAUTIFUL and SO PERFECT and, honestly, if you like Frasier (the original, not the apparently appalling remake which I am refusing to really acknowledge) then you owe it to yourself to play this. Made in (I think) a Gameboy Colour RPG emulator-type engine, this game is a top-down, GB-style adventure in which you play as Frasier trying to get everything ready for one of his legendary soirees – except obviously there are hurdles to overcome. It will take you a while to get the hang of it, and there are some frustrations around the pace of the text at first, but you’ll get into it and once you do it is JOYOUS – I promise you, the writing is tonally superb and you will be reading all of the lines out in the character voices, and, seriously, I had 20 minutes of pure, unalloyed pleasure with this yesterday and I think you will too (one tip – when you save the game just hit the ‘action’ button when it says ‘saving’ as otherwise it’ll take ages) – this is just good, clean, healthy fun (and hopefully makes up for the AI bongo a few links back, for which I now feel sort of guilty).
140 Characters: Not a Tumblr! I don’t care though! This is amazing, like a time capsule to a VERY DIFFERENT TIME, when people thought that social media was nice and there was still hope that the digital REVOLUTION would change the world for the better – a decade or so ago, Twitter was a lot smaller and, for a certain type of person, its network effects were genuinely transformative – it’s not unreasonable to say that there are thousands of people in media and the arts and adjacent areas who literally made themselves on Twitter in that 2009-12 period, and this project from BACK IN THE DAY is sort of a chronicle of that – in 2011, Chris Floyd exhibited portraits of 140 ‘characters’ from Twitter who he’d shot as part of this project looking at the ways in which the platform gave voices to all sorts of different people to do different things with. It was a London project and the subjects here are very London Twitter, but it’s a really bittersweet relic of a time gone by – happysad in its hope and the way we all know everything turned out eventually. Still, I’m glad that some of these people got newspaper columns out of it all.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
Patrick Bergsma: Patrick is a Dutch artist who works with Japanese pottery and bonsai, and his Insta feed is just GORGEOUS.
Salvos: This is a New York sandwich shop’s Insta account, which I discovered because of this lovely profile and which I am linking to not because the sandwiches are amazing (although they do look nice) but because there is something so lovely about the fact that it’s just a bloke, a bike, and Insta feed and a cooler full of portable snacks. This is exactly the sort of thing that also gets ruined by being profiled in the New Yorker and by being featured in newsletters like this (oh, ok, not like this – cooler newsletters with cooler readers, probably), so let’s hope that doesn’t in fact happen.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
The Trap: I’m not going to link to loads of things about The Fcuking Horror because, honestly, I imagine you have plenty of other places where you can consume more information about if if you so desire – I will, though, make an exception for this piece by John Ganz which I think is probably the best piece of writing I’ve read in the past fortnight about the whole fcuking awful mess.
The Twitter Problem: I wrote something published this week making the point that anyone somehow trying to argue that the changes that Musk has made to Twitter over the past year have made it a somehow better or more useful platform for knowing what the fcuk is going on is either a moron, a blinkered ideologue or a pathetic contrarian (I didn’t say it quite like that, fine), and found a bunch of people attempting to suggest that the questions around exactly what happened at the hospital this week and who might have been responsible invalidated my point. Look, let’s just be very clear about this – while it’s clear that the world’s media made errors in their immediate reporting of the events, TWITTER DID NOT IN ANY WAY MAKE THE SITUATION BETTER. As this piece by 404 Media neatly points out, one of the side effects of the culling of moderators, the nerfing of the ‘report’ function, the removal of headlines from links and the massive sh1tshow that verification now is has been the proliferation of accounts spouting OSINT nonsense in an attempt to get enough attention to earn $30 from daddy Elon through the bluetick trickledown economy, and the related impossibility of telling who is a trusted source with a vague idea of what they are talking about, and who is a 17 year old kid from Bulgaria with a copy of Google maps making hasty annotations to grainy YouTube footage on MS Paint. Here’s more on the same subject from the New Yorker – it’s hard not to look at the past week and think ‘well, ‘objectively-agreed upon reporting was nice when we had it, wasn’t it?’.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto: On the one hand, it’s easy to laugh at this – Marc Andreesen’s latest screed (and it really is a screed) outlining exactly why technology is ALWAYS good and anyone who opposes it is ALWAYS bad (no, no, there is no room for nuance; you’d have to be a FOOL and a COMMUNIST and an ENEMY OF GROWTH to think that) and why it is therefore vitally important to smooth the path for people suspiciously like him and his valley plute mates to just get on with whatever they want because TECH KNOWS BEST is genuinely funny on some level – it’s wafer thin, it’s got an at-best undergraduate understanding of most of the topics it touches on and not even a *smart* undergraduate (seriously, just start reading it and have a biscuit every time Marc says something that is an unsupported assertion masquerading as an objective fact – you’ll have type2 diabetes by the second half), and it does rather read like someone who’s been at the Adderall and whiskey and gak for a few days. On the other, though, Marc Andreesen is one of the most influential men in the world – it seems silly, but it really is true – and the madness of the longtermist agenda which underpins so much of this thinking (which is where the whole ‘if you oppose advanced AI it is basically murder’ argument comes from – the idea being that if you have the opportunity to act in a way that will secure the future of the species in perpetuity (to whit, pursuing the development of AGI) and choose not to do so by, I don’t know, doing silly things like ‘regulating’ or ‘worrying about consequences’, then you are effectively morally culpable for the deaths of all the potential future people whose lives might have been saved the superAI that you didn’t let Marc build fast enough – THAT IS LITERALLY THE ARGUMENT, which even the least-sophisticated thinker out there should be able to see…doesn’t totally hold up) is being drip-fed into the ears of the Western world’s leaders on a daily basis. Which sorts of people do you think will be attending the UK’s AI Safety Summit in a few weeks time? What will they be talking about? I think, sadly, the answer is ‘people like Marc’ and ‘stuff like this’ – honestly, when people write things like ‘ethicists are the enemy’ with no apparent sense of self-awareness it might perhaps be time to start, you know, worrying a bit. Anyway, you can read more critique of this piece of sh1t ‘manifesto’ here and here, and you may enjoy this cartoon which is still far too relevant 25 years on.
Labour Conference: For those of you with an interest in UK politics, it seems even more likely after last night’s byelection results that the Labour Party will win next year’s general election and become the party of Government – The Face sent Kieran Morris to Labour conference last week to soak up the vibes and offer a perspective on what it all felt like on the cusp of the party’s first taste of power in over a decade. I enjoyed this piece, which does a good job of capturing both the weirdness of party conferences and the people who choose to attend them – honestly, nothing more odd than the political fan who goes to these things IN THEIR SPARE TIME – and the sad reality of the fact that there is likely to be nothing transformative or revolutionary about any government led by Sir Keir Starmer (you may think that sounds defeatist, but, honestly, trust me on this – for example, I have it on reasonably good authority that Labour have directly promised the largest oil companies in the UK a pretty much total absence of meaningful additional regulation or taxation of their businesses over the coming parliament, regardless of prior manifesto commitments, which I think gives you a reasonable idea of the direction of travel here).
The Whole AI Jobs Thing: I know, I know, it’s been done to death and you’re BORED of hearing about how AI is going to steal your job/allow you to achieve hitherto-unimagined levels of white collar productivity (delete per your preferred outcome), but I thought this piece was a decent update of the arguments to take into account the latest round of multimodal updates to the major models – it’s certainly the most clear-headed about the practical implications of the latest wave of tech, and I think it’s wise to bear in mind the closing line which I don’t feel we’ve quite internalised yet: ““If A.I. can do anything we can do, it does not just replace the boring tasks,” he said. “It replaces all the tasks.”
Structured Missingness: OK, this is quite a…chewy piece on art and aesthetics and AI, and the idea of degradation and decay of information and how that relates to concepts of information in latent space…basically if you can enjoy paragraphs like this then you will very much enjoy this piece: “The decay of a photograph is the decay of memory, the decay of a memory is forgetting, and forgetting inspires haunting more than memory. If memory is the fulfilment of a promise to the past, then forgetting is a kind of neglect. What is not remembered is missing. What is missing still structures our models of the present. It structures the inferences that we make, whether we draw them from archives, memories, or datasets. If we automate these inferences — extrapolate patterns from data without regard to its gaps — the more that missing haunts the present.”
Every App That Adds AI: With the slow creep of generative AI beginning to insinuate itself into existing products and workflows – first Adobe, now in early November the whole Office package gets the upgrade treatment – this piece is a very funny overview of what every single ‘a service you are familiar with, NOW WITH ADDED AI!!!!’ offering looks and feels like. Whilst I am broadly less sceptical than the author, this is also generally very accurate indeed and will feel eerily familiar to anyone who’s tried one of those ‘we can turn any document into a PPT in seconds…WITH AI!’ tools at any point in the past six months.
Deb Chachra: Deb Chachra is someone who’s writing I’ve been reading for a few years now, and whose thinking I always find interesting – she tends to focus her thinking around questions of systems and infrastructure, which isn’t really my ‘thing’ but which she writes about with clarity and energy and intelligence, and in such a way which makes me think differently about all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with the ostensible subject of her work. The main link here is to one of a series of interviews she’s been doing to promote the book, which is with the excellent Scope of Work newsletter and which touches on all sorts of things, from systems thinking to network theory, and is just a brilliant and interesting conversation with a properly-fascinating mind. BONUS CHACHRA: there’s another superb interview with Frontier Magazine which you can read here, which covers similar-but-different territory and which included this bit which I think acts as a nice encapsulation for the whole: “We think about political or national citizenship as that we have a relationship to people by virtue of the fact that we have the same passport, we share the same flag. But the reality is that all humans have bodies and all those bodies exist somewhere on the planet and all of those bodies need resources to survive and to thrive. And typically those resources come from the land around you, whether that’s close or whether that’s far away. So we can think about infrastructural citizenship as the relationship that we have to the people around us by virtue of having bodies embedded in the landscape. What comes with that is that we have a relationship not just to the people who are around us today, but the people who will be living in the places we live well into the future, right? Whether you live in Boston or in Toronto, there will still be people living in this place in fifty, one hundred, potentially a thousand years. We have a relationship with those people, too, because they will also have bodies in this landscape and they will also have basic needs. So the idea of infrastructural citizenship is to recognize and think about that relationship we have to other people both today and into the future.”
Why I Built Zuzalu: I think I featured a writeup of Zuzalu – the temporary cryptotown which sprang up for a couple of months this year, established by Vitalik Buterin and other Ethereum people to explore ideas of community and self-governance and coworking in a more ‘serious’ manner – earlier this year, probably with some mild and not-particularly-funny snark about how these people are always fcuking obsessed with creating their own communities (I mean, it’s true, they are) – now Buterin has written a short writeup of the experience, why they set the place up, how it worked, etc, for Palladium Magazine and, honestly, as with everything I read by this guy, it sounds…reasonable! Not mad! Not cultish (oh, ok, fine, a BIT cultish)! Could Vitalik be the one crypto person who’s not a dreadful caricature?
My Hair Is Not: A project by the Wellcome Collection, “‘My Hair Is Not…’ is a natural-hair campaign that brings awareness to the microaggressions and discrimination that Black people experience due to their hair. This photo story explores the experiences of eight Black women, men and non-binary people with their natural hair and how each person’s different lives and circumstances directly affect their relationship with their hair.” This is a fascinating set of vignettes and I particularly like the way they’re written in such a way that preserves the original voice behind each.
The Loneliness Economy: Dirt magazine is consistently publishing some of the best writing about digital culture and wHaT iT iS dOiNg To Us at the moment, and this is no exception – this piece by Daisy Alioto, all about the coming tomorrow we can already see in things like the Rewind Pendant from last week, or Martin from the top of this week’s newsletter, and the bongo and the ‘digital friends’, and how this won’t ever stop us from feeling alone because, as the author notes, “You can’t cure loneliness because you can’t cure the power of refusal and any entity worth being in a relationship with has the power to refuse, the power to render us lonely.” Don’t think about this one too hard or you might start crying, FYI.
The Planescape Vision Statement: On the one hand, this is perhaps something of a niche link; on the other, it might be my favourite thing in here this week. Released in 1999, Planescape Torment is a videogame which even 24 years on still regularly appears on people’s ‘Best Ever’ lists – it is honestly one of the most incredibly feats of storytelling and worldbuilding ever conjured into digital existence – but it was only ever really a niche concern. This document is the ‘game vision bible’ produced by the dev team to ‘sell’ the idea to publishers (I think) and, honestly, I think this is one of the most amazing pieces of marketing/worldbuilding collateral I have ever seen. You start reading this and it IMMEDIATELY sounds like the most amazing game ever – and then it just keeps sounding cooler and cooler (ok, fine, this is very much ‘cool’ in the ‘late-90s XXXtreme!’ era sense, so there’s possibly a bit of a BRO DUDE AWESOME SWEARING IS EDGY vibe to it, but forgive them, they were young and it was the 90s) and, honestly, this feels like an object-lesson in how to sell a vision for something; what’s even better is that if you’ve played the title you know that this wasn’t in any way hyperbolic, and you really could do pretty much everything described in this document, however insane it sounds. Seriously, this really is quite a remarkable piece of writing – imagine how much fun it must have been to pull this together (as you sit there once again attempting to eke out three lines of copy about the transformative impact of a new car insurance product on consumers’ lives).
The Swift Tour: Given the acclaim it received on publication – justified, I must concede – it’s entirely possible you’ll all have read this already in the week since it was published; if not, though, this is the only thing you need to read about the Taylor Swift Concert Experience, which is not so much about the Taylor Swift Concert Experience as much as it is about The Whole Phenomenon of Taylor Swift and Being Young and Being A Woman and The Relationship Between Artist And Work And Audience (but also quite a lot about the Taylor Swift Concert Experience, to be fair). This really is very good indeed, and if I sound less than laudatory about it it’s only because I’m basically jealous of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s ability to sustain this level of writing over 8,000 words (which regular readers will be well aware I very much can’t). BONUS CONCERT WRITEUP: this is less stellar, but also excellent; Pete Paphides on the current Madonna tour.
We Are More Ghosts Than People: I wasn’t expecting to read a beautiful, moving essay all about Red Dead Redemption 2 in the Paris Review this year, but, well, here we are. Honestly, there is a real strand of emergent writing using the landscape of games to tell stories about their authors internal emotional landscapes which I am very much enjoying, and this is an excellent and moving example of that – it will helping you’ve played the game, but it’s by no means necessary for you to enjoy this gorgeous piece of writing by Hanif Abdurraqib.
Orwell: This is a BRILLIANT essay – honestly, I kept stopping as I was reading it to go and make notes and open other tabs, and there was one line that sent me into a 15 minute (admittedly quite stoned, fine) tailspin about the self-other distinction and the degree to which social media has affected the porosity of said distinction, and it left my brain properly fizzing with ideas – all about Orwell, which, yes, I know isn’t necessarily a topic you think you need to read another 4k words on but whom I promise you will learn loads from this piece (unless you’re some sort of mad Orwellian scholar). This looks both at his thinking and his life, analysing his work and his socialism and the persona we’ve created around him, and what we think we mean when we say ‘Orwellian’, and generally this is erudite and interesting and educative and just wonderful (also, I had no idea Eric Blair was such a massive cnut) – also, it contains this line which struck me as a far more accurate definition for the term ‘Orwellian’ than the one most commonly in use by the pundit class: “Orwell’s direct statements of principle always sound like he’s standing up to the man and stating ‘blatantly obvious’ truths that other people are too scared or too dim to voice” – I mean, that’s…familiar, right?
Ice Queen: Finally this week, a short story by Lisa Owens which is hands-down the best description I have ever read of being an English teenager at a school disco (girl teenager, in this instance, but wevs) – this is funny and well-observed and awkward and cringey and, crucially, warm and incredibly kind, and I promise you that you will be smiling by the end (obviously this may not be the case if your own personal memories of the school disco are particularly traumatic, but, well, I CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE). So so so so good.
I obviously have no idea who reads Web Curios, but it seems reasonable to assume that some of you are Jewish – I hope your families and friends and loved ones are ok. It’s less likely that any of you are Palestinians, I think, but in case any of you are then I hope the same for you too.
Beyond that I obviously have nothing useful or informed or helpful to say about a situation that is incredibly fcuking bleak, other than perhaps to remind everyone (and, as ever, myself) that sometimes it’s ok not to publicly opine about every fcuking thing because, per this excellent and ever-relevant Tweet, you are not a fcuking embassy.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you could probably do with some interesting links and internet ephemera to take the edge off so, well, here you are.
THE SECTION WHICH DOES WONDER WHETHER THIS MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE SOME SORT OF POST-TRUTH RUBICON (BUT RATHER HOPES IT ISN’T), PT.1:
Links: Our first site this week is so perfect, such an infinitely-wonderful example of EVERYTHING I LOVE ABOUT THE INTERNET, that I could frankly stop right here and declare Curios over and complete (but I am not in fact going to do that – sorry, but you think you get off that lightly?) – it is also OLD, and I am slightly amazed that I’ve not come across it before (turns out that the web is…quite big! Who knew?!). This is the personal website of one Justin Hall, which started in 1996 and has apparently was one of the first large-scale personal webprojects to gain any sort of significant traction, and is basically – Christ, I don’t really know how to explain it beyond the fact that it’s sort of someone’s entire brain and history just kind of laid out in rambling HTML. You can read something of a rundown of the project in this post, which offers a decent overview of the volume of…stuff on here: “In ‘94, the web was small enough that you could browse everything new over the weekend. So Justin set out to make his personal website site the ultimate curation project, to show the world what was possible on this weird new thing called “the Internet.” At its peak, links.net had 27,000 daily viewers, which at the time was (to my best guess) 1% of all web traffic (for context, Mr. Beast captures 1% of today’s traffic). But Justin didn’t just curate the Internet, he shared his whole self online. He influenced a group of writers that came to be known as “escribitionists.” The word is a cross between “scribe” and “exhibitionist” (Justin has no issues with nudity). His website contains an autobiography, family history, write-ups about his friends, poetry, essays… just about anything he could imagine, and it’s all linked together in an insane, choose-your-own-adventure HTML maze. There are 5,000 pages in there, and I’d guess near 2 million words.” Honestly, I lost a good couple of hours to this when I came across it via Kris, and I really recommend you just treat it like an old-school online rabbithole – just click and read, and see where it takes you, but this is part diary, part commentary on early internet culture, part some sort of weird outsider art project, part chronicle of the web that once was…best of all, though, the way the links sort of tumble through each other really does make it feel like you’re effectively clicking through someone’s actual brain, which, yes, fine, might not SOUND like fun but I can honestly assure you is fcuking WONDERFUL. The world would honestly be so much better if everyone had a website like this, and I mean that entirely sincerely.
Facecheck: Dodgy services which purport to find people online based on a single photo are nothing new, but Facecheck is the first of these that I’ve seen that does it for free – the idea here is that you upload an image of someone (can I recommend you just use a photo of yourself? as otherwise…well, otherwise it starts to get a bit creepy, and I’d prefer not to encourage any stalkers if at all possible) and the MAGICAL FACE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY searches a bunch of profiles and images from around the web to find other instances of what it thinks is that person. Ostensibly used to ‘check if someone is real’ or ‘find out if someone’s actually a massive crimmo on an Interpol list’, it’s almost-certain that the actual practical market for the tool is ‘help creepy men track unwitting women around the internet without their consent’ and, well, that obviously sucks. HOWEVER, I really do recommend you trying it out with a photo of yourself as a) it’s always useful to check whether someone has stolen your identity and is using your countenance to catfish single mothers in Utah; b) it opens up a genuinely-unsettling uncanny valley world of people who look incredibly similar to you BUT ALSO TOTALLY DIFFERENT, like weird half-siblings or discount-supermarket replicant versions of yourself, the Sindy to your Barbie, if you will (and I very much will).
The Rewind Pendant: I actually featured the parent company here *checks* almost exactly a year ago, but it’s worth re-upping because this is a nicely-creepy bit of tech which feels perfectly-Curios-dystopian. Rewind, lest you forget (AND NOONE EVER FORGETS, NOONE, EVER, THESE WORDS ARE ETCHED INTO YOUR MEMORIES) was a service that basically ‘records’ everything you do online so that there’s a permanent, searchable record of everything you’ve ever done (typed, watched, etc) – the Rewind Pendant offers the same sort of total recall, but specifically for your speech and conversations. Wear the pendant and it will record and transcribe EVERYTHING you say so that you can refer back to it at a later date and ensure that everyone who wrongs you is made in some small way to pay for the slights they have committed against your name (I mean, look, there are obviously other use cases – aides memoires, that sort of thing – but also you KNOW that the market for this sort of thing is, to quote past-Matt, “the sort of person who believes in the vital importance of ‘keeping the receipts’ for everything.” There are apparently safeguards in place that will prevent you from inadvertently recording the voices of every single other person who passes within a metre of you, but personally this strikes me as a privacy nightmare – not to mention a genuinely-unpleasant constant reminder of how horribly, stumblingly inarticulate we all in fact are in real life. Would you like all of your conversations EVER transcribed and made searchable, with every “um?” and “er” and half-finished sentence and idiotic joke and poorly-constructed analogy and off-colour anecdote that you realise halfway through isn’t landing but you’re too committed to to cut off halfway…WOULD YOU? I posit that you would NOT (but, equally, that perhaps I am *slightly* more self-conscious about this stuff than you are, or indeed than is healthy).
Inception: This website only does one thing, but it does it very well – click the link, scroll and get absolutely fcuked by the weird sense of vertigo induced by that whole ‘the floor is also the horizon and also the sky’ effect from the film Inception. I would quite like to see this playing on a high-res loop at one of those hideous Outernet screens at Tottenham Court Road, mainly as I have a fairly strong suspicion that it would cause people to actually fall over.
Giant 105: This is so so so lovely – the work of a Korean developer called Chanwoo, this is a gorgeous bit of scrolly webwork that tells a small, gentle story about a giant and a flower. The art style here is glorious, and the way the animation is built into the site is really very neat indeed. Chanwoo writes that they ‘wanted to create a picture book that could be read with just a scroll’, which is exactly what this is.
The Meta AI Avatars: I confess to not having paid particular attention to the announcement the other week that Meta had licensed a bunch of famouses voices and likenesses so that they could be turned into chatbots for billions of people to ‘interact’ with through Messenger – mainly because, if I’m honest, I don’t really know what I would say to the real Kendall Jenner, let alone her AI equivalent. If you’ve also been…less than whelmed by the idea and have let it rather pass you by, It’s worth taking the three minutes to watch this video which demonstrates exactly how they work and what they look like and…fcuk, it’s genuinely VERY WEIRD. I don’t know if I have the same ‘this is going to get lots of people hooked’ reaction that the presenter here demonstrates, but there’s undoubtedly something genuinely odd about this as a mode of interaction – the photorealistic Max Headroom-y avatars lolling their heads as you type to them, their baffling insistence that they are not in fact Kendall Jenner but your ‘ride or die bestie’ (I mean, what the fcuk does that even mean?) Billie, the attempt to get you to tell the AI your fears and problems…Actually, on reflection, I can imagine this being absolute catnip to a certain type of teenager with a certain type of parasocial obsession, so expect to lose your 13 year old son to a virtual relationship with a digital clone of Mr Beast. Sorry!
Texts From My Ex: Do you think that there is always TRUTH IN DATA? Do you believe that if you analyse enough information you’ll be able to scry some sort of hitherto-unknown clue that will help you make sense of the confusing mess that is LOVE? Well if so then you will adore this service, which offers you the ability to hand over the entire corpus of your messaging history with a significant other (or indeed anyone tbh) and let this AI toy ‘analyse’ it to determine exactly how and in what specific way you fcuked everything up. This is actually just a PR stunt for some dating app or another – I know, I was SHOCKED to find out that it wasn’t in fact a series piece of analytical software! – but there’s the kernel of an interesting idea here, particularly given the imminent advent of mass-market multimodal AI; the general ‘get AI to assess and comment on X/Y/Z dataset’ has a lot of potential for fun and frivolity imho – on which note, by the way, there’s an open source image-parsing model doing the rounds at the moment which might be useful for some of you to play with; if nothing else it means that someone can now use this to build the MAGIC ROASTING MIRROR which will assess your outfit and tell you why you look dreadful and which I think would be a genuinely fun thing to put in Westfield and then just film the reactions (but perhaps I am just mean).
Cambrian Explosion: I don’t think I will ever get bored of websites that simulate evolution, and this is no exception – pick a creature shape, set the terrain parameters and watch as the ungainly single-celled organisms flump and wobble across the screen in search of genetic supremacy.
The Museum of Everyday Life: My knowledge of Vermont in the US is limited to some vague guff about maple trees, pecans and the fictitious higher education institution of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but I now have a reason to visit – specifically to make a pilgrimage to The Museum of Everyday Life, an institution which offers “a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the minuscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms. We celebrate mundanity, and the mysterious delight embedded in the banal but beloved objects we touch everyday. In pursuit of this mission, some of the questions we ask ourselves are: What would it be like to imagine a museum filled, not with exotic objects, but with perfectly familiar ones? What would it look like to defy the commodity-based model of collection and display? And how might it be possible to create massive participatory collections of objects in a way that illuminates the back and forth dance, the essential, vibrant relationship between objects and people?” Ok, so it’s a physical museum which means that the website is more about essays and writing around the broad concepts of ‘the quotidian’, but there’s something so charming about the idea, and the ‘philosophy’ section of the site contains some genuinely-interesting pieces which feel quite appropriate for autumnal afternoons.
AI Text-to-Gif Maker: Do YOU want the ability to spin up gifs of whatever you like in just a few seconds, limited solely by your imagination? Are YOU relatively relaxed about whether the resulting outputs look like they’ve been made out of candlewax, by Helen Keller? If the answer to these questions is a resounding ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ respectively then WOW are you going to enjoy this – the first link is a HuggingFace instance that you can play with, but if that’s too slow or laggy then you might want to give this other version a try – what you get out of this is VERY potato-ey, but there’s something undeniably fun about seeing how badly The Machine mangles the concepts you feed it. I just tried to get an output for ‘batman wiping his bum’ and, well, it’s fair to say that the tech’s not quite there yet, but see how you get on.
Lethelink: This is very much a prototypical idea and, as far as I can tell, nothing more than some hacked-together code on Github at the moment, but I thought it an interesting idea and use-case for AI (if one that also, if I’m honest, made me feel incredibly sad inside) – Lethelink is “an interface to create grounding messages for people who suffer from anterograde amnesia, which a popular symptom of Alzheimer’s. The messages can be delivered to the person’s hearing aid on a schedule to prevent episodes of disorientation. Caregivers can use Lethelink to create nudges that ground their Patient in reality, remind them they are safe, and help them orient in time and space.” So basically this monitors someone’s heartrate, vital signs, location or any other dataset you care to think of, which monitoring can trigger specific, personalised messages and ‘reassuring content’ to assist in reassuring and calming a distressed or disoriented patient – which on the one hand is a smart and genuinely-useful-sounding idea, but on the other…Jesus, sorry, but there’s something so utterly bleak about the idea of a residential home full of the incraesingly-untethered from reality, all of them being gently reassured by voice messages in the spoofed voices of their loved ones who haven’t in fact come to visit for years…no, sorry, if I keep writing about this it’s going to make me start crying, next link please (I am, it’s fair to say, a touch ‘overtired’ this morning and as such am perhaps a touch more emotionally fragile than normal, sorry about that)!
Script Monkey: Given the furore this year over the Hollywood writers’ strike and AI and the associated questions about securing creative labour for the future it seems appropriate to feature ScriptMonkey this week – an AI-assisted screenwriting tool that will generate story outlines for you based on simple characters sketches and genre cues…OH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING! Not, to be clear, because it will produce anything decent, but because it writes genuinely-dreadful, tone-deaf dialogue, it doesn’t seem to be able to keep track of what’s happening meaning the continuity’s all over the shop, the plots are about as sharply-conceived as you’d expect from what is basically ‘Script Clippy’…seriously, this is HOURS of fun, and if you’re in an office when you happen to be reading this can I please strongly advise you to stop whatever you are currently doing (NOONE CARES YOUR JOB IS POINTLESS) and instead use this tool to spin up a screenplay featuring all your colleagues which you can then spend the rest of the day acting out? Seriously, this really is GLORIOUSLY terrible (but, equally, it does sort-of-technically work, so for the right brand you might be able to have some ‘we got AI to script our next ad lol’ using this.
4k Rivers: Photos of rivers. Really, really beautiful photos of rivers! “An ongoing series of vibrant river and delta images from North America and other parts of the world. The images are constructed using high-resolution elevation data.” RIVERS!
Unfcuk Twitter: Lol, jk! You can’t unfcuk it! It’s beyond unfcuking! Still, if you’re still committed to Twitter, clinging on by your fingernails until That Fcuking Man finally renders it entirely unusable by, I don’t know, deciding arbitrarily to stop anyone who isn’t a BlueTick from posting vowels, then you might find this Chrome extension useful – it undoes some of the more egregious changes to the platform (not least the logo!) including the hideous ‘removing the text from links’ thing which has proven itself to be a fcuking anti-masterstroke since last weekend’s events (YES ELON YES WHY DON’T YOU JUST FILL OUR INFORMATIONAL WATER TABLE WITH P1SS??), and based on my usage of it this week it also seems to make the whole site run marginally less badly. It increasingly feels like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but we persist.
Banchan Art: An interesting idea, this, for artists who do commissions and buyers looking to commission work – basically Banchan is a place for people to put their work and manage their sales, and for buyers to browse, but with an interesting community-owned ethos behind it which I think might appeal to a lot of you. For those of you who Make Stuff On Demand, it might be worth checking out and signing up.
Dashtoons: There have been a lot of people over the past week or so getting quite upset about AI-generated comics and how they are basically soulless and miserable and stealing work from the mouths of artists, and I do broadly agree – AI can’t do scripts, and its compositions are banal (but, of course, this is the worst it will ever bezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) – but at the same time I did think that this site, which lets you basically spin up panel comics with AI assistance for character creation and composition, might be useful. While you’re not going to use it to create anything artistically-astonishing, I can 100% see how it could be helpful for storyboarding or blocking out a narrative, or for spending several hours creating an incredibly-detailed and VERY PETTY anime-style retelling of all your friends’ secret beefs (you decide).
The Magnum Collection: This is quite a cool little promo stunt for Squarespace, which is somewhat undermined by the fact that Squarespace makes websites that almost universally look like dogsh1t (yes, I am aware, please do not feel that you have to inform me about the glassiness of my current dwelling) – still, the broad premise is nice, and there’s some excellent photography to enjoy. Squarespace partnered with Magnum Photo Agency to give a bunch of famous photographers (the budget for this must have been pretty big, I don’t imagine that Steve McCurry gets out of bed for pennies) a single roll of film to shoot however they saw fit; each of those rolls then got turned into a website by Squarespace which ‘embodies the work’ or somesuch guff; the websites are also available as template options for Squarespace customers which is a nice link back to product and purchase. Except, well, as previously mentioned, the websites are all just a bit…crap.
Microsoft Comic Chat: Did you know that there was, back in the DISTANT PAST of the web, there was a Microsoft IRC client that let you chat to people via the medium of infinitely-customisable comic strips, like a sort of proto-bitmoji? I BET YOU DID NOT! “Microsoft Comic Chat (later renamed to Microsoft Chat) is an sublime IRC client developed by Microsoft during their glorious golden age back in 1996, which provides an equally humourous and useful way of chatting that no other program to date has ever replicated. Unlike every other IRC client, where communication is done purely in text form, Comic Chat allows you to assume an avatar and use it to chat in the form of an ongoing comic strip. Every line you say can be punctuated with specific emotions/poses, allowing you to both express yourself in a clearer manner, or alternatively, to inject humour into conversations in a way that is scarcely possible to do via just text alone.” This page both looks back at the magic of Comic Chat and also gives you tips on how you can still use it if you can be bothered to jump through some technical hoops; whilst, ok, it’s all a bit fiddly and oldschool, can you imagine how much better your friendships would all be if they were conducted exclusively via the medium of 90s-web-aesthetic comic strips? YES, AND IT IS GLORIOUS!
THE SECTION WHICH DOES WONDER WHETHER THIS MIGHT TURN OUT TO BE SOME SORT OF POST-TRUTH RUBICON (BUT RATHER HOPES IT ISN’T), PT.2:
JD In The Metaverse: I do enjoy those occasional moments in 2023 when you get reminded of that frothy, idiotic period a year or so ago when a surprising number of people who you’d think ought to have known better were suckered into paying significant amounts of cash for…a really crap level in a sub-Roblox digital sandbox that a grand total of, at best, 60 actual real people would ever experience – and here’s another one! This is Jack Daniel’s demonstrating that someone at ‘metaverse platform’ Spatial really saw them coming, with this IMMERSIVE EXHIBITION which…oh, fcuk it, seeing as someone evidently SLAVED over this copy I will here reproduce it in full: “Jack Honey Art, Beats + Lyrics welcomes you to “The Verse”, an immersive VR experience that celebrates visionary artists and musicians that push the urban art culture forward. This out-of-this-world exhibition showcases incredible urban artwork, iconic photo collections, a larger-than-life musical concert, and a bar where you can actually order Jack Honey to be delivered right to your door.” Which, of course, translates into an empty, soulless virtual space – which, if you’re a connoisseur of these dreadful things as I by now sadly am, you will notice is VERY SIMILAR to the empty, soulless virtual spaces created for all the other brands on the Spatial platform, because it turns out that there are only a set number of off-the-shelf metaverses and, well, people are lazy – which is weirdly incredibly lo-res and, er, doesn’t seem to load properly! Special mention too to the ‘art gallery’ on level 2, which seems to be almost entirely broken – excellent quality control, everyone! I really, really hope that the people involved with this have had to have some very specific, very pointed conversations about budget and impact – how many bottles of JD Honey do you think were ordered through this? I think…three!
The Journey: Staying with pointlessly-shiny websites that don’t really make any sense, here’s a GLORIOUS example of ‘budgets? PAH! We work in luxe, darling, and budgets are things that the little people have to worry about!’ as an ethos. LVMH is apparently a VERY INNOVATIVE COMPANY in lots of different ways – while you might think that the best way to learn about that innovation might be to, I don’t know, read the business’ annual report, or to look through its portfolio of companies, or to listen to a talk with their head of innovation, you are WRONG! The best way, it turns out, is to access ‘The Journey’, a text-lite and VERY gnomic website which itself is just a portal to a bunch of equally-confusing and similarly-gnomic other websites! I love this so much – the fact that it uses copy like ‘navigate through LVMH’s new innovation territories and opens windows into the Group’s possible futures!’, which means literally nothing! The fact that it’s not really clear why you would want to click on anything! The fact that for some reason all of these innovative concepts are presented as strange, mirrored rectangles in some sort of strange space desert! The assumption that I have either the time, or the patience, to spend a few hours parsing whatever the fcuk LVMH thinks this all means! Well done EVERYONE, this is very special indeed.
The Working Class History Map: Working Class History is a project dedicated to surfacing the stories of ‘ordinary’ people from around the world who have shaped the communities or environments in which they have lived; to quote the project’s ‘About’ page, “History isn’t made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people. It is our struggles which have shaped our world, and any improvement in our conditions has been won by years of often violent conflict and sacrifice. WCH is dedicated to all those who have struggled in the past for a better world, and who continue to do so now. To help record and popularise our grassroots, people’s history, as opposed to the top-down accounts of most history books.” The project has recently launched a new map interface, which you can use to find stories from specific places to dive into – for example, looking at Italy I have just learned of “ Tommaso Pesci, an innocent farmer who was murdered by fascists two days previously. His funeral procession was led by a column of the Arditi del Popolo, Italy’s first militant anti-fascist group, who marched armed with knives, bayonets and walking sticks. The killing prompted in response the first action of the Arditi outside Rome, who successfully prevented fascists from entering Viterbo for three days.” You could lose days to this.
Vedeo: AI video continues to be, well, a bit shonky, but IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET BETTER AND EVENTUALLY IT WILL BE GOOD ENOUGH. Vedeo is a website that collects examples of AI-generated video and animation, submitted by creators and enthusiasts, and is a decent place to bookmark if you’re interested in keeping track of the tech’s development and spotting the exact point at which it flips from ‘no, everyone in this video looks like they are made of fuzzy felt, I feel incredibly discomfited by their teeth’ to ‘I am literally never hiring another video editor again’.
Wikiloc:Do YOU love the great outdoors? If you’re reading this it seems…unlikely, tbh, but I suppose it’s possible that some of you might spend SOME time away from screens every now and again – anyway, if you’re the sort of person who has ‘kit’ and owns dubbin wax then you might find Wikiloc useful, a site which collects information about walking trails and hikes across the world, and makes them available for anyone to search and download and access via an app. This has been going for 17 YEARS, which feels frankly remarkable and made me feel warm and fuzzy in an unexpected, healthy, bosky sort of way.
IKEA Instructions For Anything: A cute little AI toy on HuggingFace – type in anything you like and The Machine will generate a cute little illustration in the style of IKEA self-assembly furniture instructions (I promise this will make sense once you click the link). I particularly enjoyed giving it things like “pointless office drudgery”, which would make a truly EXCELLENT motivational poster imho.
International Pet Photographer of the Year: I’ve just noticed that this site has the surprisingly-aggressive banner legend ‘UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT’ running across the top of the homepage, which makes me wonder whether there is some sort of dark beef underpinning the change, whether the previous conveners were found to be taking kickbacks from ambitious Borzoi snappers or something. ANYWAY, we will probably never know, so best to focus instead on the photos of the LOVELY ANIMALS – these are obviously great photos, but I can’t help but also find them…incredibly, endearingly gauche, in the same way as those staged studio portraits that your friends get of them and their partner and their kids, and that you have to smile at and pretend to like while all the while wondering what the everliving fcuk happened to their sense of aesthetics (fortunately the friends in question don’t read Curios – or at least I really hope that they don’t, otherwise this is going to get quite awkward). I strongly recommend that you click into the ‘creative’ category for some truly wonderful staging and post-production, including one portrait of a dog that looks almost EXACTLY like someone’s run it through a ‘make this photo look like a pencil drawing’ filter from a seaside arcade photobooth (also, there is one particular dog on that page who you know will never forgive their owner – you’ll know the one when you see it).
Wildlife Photographer of the Year: MORE CRITTERS! These are obviously all sorts of amazing – the winning photo, which you may already have seen elsewhere, is particularly gorgeous this year – but my personal favourite is the one of the mollusc…well, *squirting* (although special mention also to the genuinely-unhinged shot of the people bothering the dead snakes, which is…Jesus). NB – there are a reasonable number of pics in here of animals that are wounded or dead or dying, so, you know, caveat emptor and all that.
We Are Learning: Ostensibly this is a platform that lets you create animated CG training videos using a bunch of pre-rendered avatars who you can give scripts to and who will ‘act’ out vignettes and scenarios to make training more ‘engaging’ – but, honestly, give a fcuk. The appeal of this, to me at least, is the ability to use it to bring the terrible scripts spat out by that AI script generator that I linked to earlier to life – THINK OF THE BRILLIANTLY-TERRIBLE THINGS YOU CAN MAKE! You need to pay to get full access, but there’s a free tier which is worth playing around with (but only for frivolous purposes, please).
Cocoa Press: I don’t imagine that many of you are domestic confectioners – still, in the unlikely event that one of my vanishingly-small readership is in the habit of making elaborate sculptures from criolla in their spare time then BOY do I have the toy for you! Cocoa Press is basically a 3d printer for chocolate – for the low, low (ok, not actually that low at all, but, come on, YOU CAN 3D PRINT CHOCOLATE FFS!) price of $1500 you can get a machine with which you can create, I don’t know, A SCALE MODEL OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS OUT OF CHOCOLATE! A BUST OF YOUR OWN FACE, OUT OF CHOCOLATE! A FULL-BODY-CAST OF YOURSELF THAT YOU CAN EAT IN SOME SORT OF BIZARRELY-SEXUAL CANNIBALISTIC RITUAL…OUT OF CHOCOLATE! Can one of you please get one of these and let me know how you get on? Thanks!
The Good Song Club: Many years ago, in the halcyon days of circa 2010 when everything was NEW and SHINY and HOPEFUL (or, more accurately, we were stupid and naive and blind to what was already happening) there was an excellent if short-lived website called This Is My Jam, which basically worked as a single-idea social network; anyone with a profile was able to have a single song up on there at any given time, the idea being that you will always have a particular obsessional favourite track of the moment, and that the site was a place to share and celebrate your current obsessions and where you’d go to share your new ones…anyway, it was lovely but sadly doesn’t exist anymore (because nothing pure ever lasts), but I was reminded of it by this site, which exists solely to share links to good songs on YouTube. I like this – more of these VERY SPECIFIC single-use networks, please.
The Birdsong Visualiser: This makes SUCH lovely artworks, honestly – you need to jump through a couple of hoops to produce the images, but it’s pretty easy and the outputs really are gorgeous in a slightly-70s-design kind of way. The idea here is that the software works to produce a visualisation of different audiofiles of birdsongs, which render as sort of negative-orange explosions…wow, I really am making a pig’s ear of this – just rest assured that that you’ll get something genuinely cool looking if you follow the instructions.
Paper Toys: Specifically, SPOOKY PAPER TOYS! This is a frankly mental collection of print-out-and-cut-and-fold-and-keep model instructions, running the gamut from ‘spooky houses’ to ‘shrunken heads’ to, er, ‘spooky biplanes’ (it does feel like a *bit* of license has been taken around the ‘spookiness’ of some of these, but given the generosity in making them all free to download it seems somewhat churlish to complain). The papercraft candelabras are genuinely cool-looking, in particular, and would grace ANY table – there is a lot of really cool stuff here if you and your friends/family/flatmates feel like spending an evening with the scissors and the pritt stick.
Hummingbirds: “Published between 1849 and 1887, English ornithologist John Gould’s monumental work depicts and describes all the known species of hummingbirds at the time—comprising 418 lithographic plates and information on 537 species.” THERE ARE SO MANY PRETTY ILLUSTRATIONS OF VERY SMALL BIRDS HERE. No idea what you might do with them, but I’m sure you’ll think of something.
Google’s History: I know it’s not cool, and I know that it is Just Another Fcuking Business, and that at heart it’s motivated by the pursuit of profit and shareholder value just like every other soulless capitalist enterprise, but I must confess to still having a soft spot for Google as a business – there’s something about the brand that will always remind me of those early days surfing the web (YES, IT WAS JUST LIKE SURFING, WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT?) and the endless possibilities afforded by the textbox and the places it might take you, limited only by your own imagination (and possibly your own fear and embarrassment about what you might find and how you might feel about it), and, well, I know that everything’s adverts and sales funnels here in 2023, but I still feel that old nostalgia. Which, perhaps, is why I enjoyed this rather pretty but of scrollytelling, which takes you through the evolution of the company’s search offering from the mid-90s to the present day. If nothing else it’s just really stylishly-built, and a reminder that the Google design team really has been consistently excellent for a long time now.
Observable Radio: I don’t quite know what this is, but I think it might be something that some of you find appealing – it self-describes as ‘a found footage anthology podcast of retro and analogue horror’, and the blurb reads as follows: “Late at night, from an isolated satellite communications installation, an unnamed Observer secretly broadcasts a bizarre transmission to a nearby facility. In the wake of a global communications disruption following a near-miss with a comet, he has begun to detect mysterious signals from other worlds. With no one but an isolated colleague that he can trust, he shares a series of seemingly impossible signals, unsure of what to do next…” This sounds pleasingly-weird, if you’re in the market for something seasonally-spooky to feed into your lugholes.
The Museum of Youth Culture: I am slightly embarrassed that I had no idea that this existed – still, I do now, and I think I might pop down there this afternoon and have a look. For those of you not able to hop on the tube to Shaftsbury Avenue and visit in person, though, you might enjoy the Museum’s website – here’s the blurb: “Museum of Youth Culture is a new emerging museum dedicated to the styles, sounds and social movements innovated by young people over the last 100 years. Championing the impact of youth on modern society, the Museum of Youth Culture is formed from the archives of YOUTH CLUB, a non-profit Heritage Lottery & Arts Council Funded collection incorporating photographs, ephemera, objects and oral histories celebrating our shared youth culture history. From the bomb-site Bicycle racers in post-war 1940s London, to the Acid House ravers of 1980s Northern England, the Museum of Youth Culture empowers the extraordinary everyday stories of growing up in Britain. Throughout the pandemic the Museum has received thousands of submissions from the general public through a highly successful online campaign, ‘Grown Up in Britain’ inviting the public to submit their own photographs showing us what it was like growing up across the country and challenging traditional stereotypes about young people.” You can also get to the Subculture Archives from the homepage, which is an INSANE resource of cultural ephemera from the past 60-odd years of UK youth movements and which I imagine might be of use to quite a few of you – you have to apply for access, and there may be a fee for commercial use, but I think it might be worth it.
Wol: We still don’t have a compelling use-case for AR, but while we wait for one to emerge why not amuse yourself with this in-no-way-necessary but still oddly-touching experience by Niantic, which lets you interact with a small, digital owl which appears on your table or floor via the magic of your phone, and with which you can ACTUALLY TALK thanks to the magic of voice recognition – I mean, fine, Wol wil likely bore the everliving sh1t out of you with their warblings about THE FOREST and THE REDWOODS, but it’s kind-of cool to play with for 5 minutes and made me think that there is, potentially, a market for this sort of thing once the whole ‘conversational’ element gets up to speed; it’s not hard to imagine some sort of unholy crossover between this and the Meta AI avatar stuff, in which a 3-inch tall Kardashian homunculus squats on your kitchen floor and tells you you look fabulous (I mean, that sounds hideous, obviously, but I am sure you can think of something less overtly-unsettling).
The Worst SubReddits: Or, specifically, the most fcuked-up – I think it’s important to point out that there are some links in here to things that are GENUINELY AWFUL, and in the main I wouldn’t recommend clicking on any of them, but also that scrolling through and reading the descriptions (and the occasionally horrified reactions of other posters who did not heed the advice and did, in fact, click) is kind-of horribly compelling and a nice, bracing jolt of ‘wow, the human zoo is a genuinely repellant spectacle and perhaps it would be for the best if we just let the rising seas take us”. I don’t know which of the examples here listed gave me the biggest ‘OH GOD I KNOW I SHOULDN’T CLICK BUT THERE IS SOME SORT OF HORRIBLE, LEMMING-LIKE COMPULSION FORCING MY FINGERS’ feeling, but it was probably one of the ones relating to the seemingly-not-uncommon-as-you-might-think fetish for self-castration; but, er, PICK YOUR OWN! NB – I am not joking when I say that you really, really don’t want to click most of the links in this thread.
The GoodEnough Guestbook: Finally this week, a small-but-lovely webtoy by a group of software developers in Minnsesota, who’ve set up this webpage so that anyone who visits can send them a message – draw whatever you fancy, and it will be MAGICALLY sent to their Tiny Printer and, er, printed. You can see a gallery of messages that others have sent, but I just love the idea of there being this small device in a corner of their office that every now and again whirrs with a missive from a stranger somewhere miles away, and I honestly think that this should become a general part of life – I would very much like to be able to send ANYONE a small sketch or message that will be printed on a very small roll of paper and possibly stuck to a ‘wall of messages from strangers’ that grows over time. SO PURE AND CHARMING, which isn’t something I feel we’ve had much of a chance to say this week.
Cybergems: Incredibly strong aesthetic snippets from the early internet – this is a TROVE of gorgeous, horrible, appallingly-resized gifs and jpegs and like a very specific time machine, and I love it.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
Alice Zhang: A designer who’s running a project on her Insta page where she’s designing a different poster each day for 100 days – there’s some really nice work here across a range of styles and aesthetics which is worth delving into.
Milwaukee Public Library: A rare example of a public institution that is GOOD at social media, I am never going to visit the Milwaukee Public Library but I am very glad that it exists.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
The Pope On Climate: Despite my Italian ancestry and the fact that I have been baptised and had communion and all that jazz, I’m not – and I’m aware that this may shock some of you – a hugely-committed Catholic (but, to be clear, they are My Team when it comes to religion – there is no God, the Catholic church is a largely-corrupt instutution and we will all die alone, but if I’m going to pick a flavour of Christianity to ‘support’ I am obviously going to choose the one with the frocks and the pomp and the ceremony and the PROPERLY batsh1t beliefs and the implied cannibalism, not the frankly THIN SIMULACRUM OF FAITH that is protestantism – just, er, don’t mention all the terrible stuff), and as such I don’t spend a huge amount of time reading Papal encyclicals, but I made an exception for this one as I was genuinely curious to see how the Vatican articulated its position on the climate crisis – this is a surprisingly fascinating read, and I genuinely recommend it; partly because you don’t generally get to consume this sort of copy any more, partly because of the way it wrangles science and faith together in its second hald, and partly because it’s nice to hope just for a second that this sort of statement might make an iota of difference.
Taxes: No! Wait! Come back! I promise that despite the less-than-promising premise, this piece – Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books writing about tax, the history of the concept, its current implementation in the UK, the political theory that underpins redistributive theories…honestly, this really is interesting, and it will force you to think about what we pay tax for, and who should pay it, and how perhaps we might think about reimagining tax for a fairer and more equitable future (yes, ok, lol, but a boy can dream).
Where We’re At With AI Right Now: Our semi-regular check in with Ethan Mollick, who continues to be essential reading for anyone wanting to do anything practical and, you know, actually useful with generative AI – here he gives a decent overview of the current state of the tools and what you can use them for, with a focus on the new multimodal stuff which has just come to GPT4, and as ever he’s clear and helpful about the practical ways you can actually, you know, make this stuff useful. Tangentially-related is this piece, about how various companies are using LLMs to write RFPs and pitch documents – which, if you’re yet to think about it, really is an excellent use-case; literally noone in the world gives a flying fcuk about the prose quality of public sector procurement documents, and if you’ve ever suffered the pain of having to complete one then you will also know how appealing the prospect of just handing the drudgery over to The Machine is. Oh, and while we’re doing ‘practical AI bits and pieces’, this is a really interesting academic paper looking at some of the practical use-cases of machine vision and which takes you through a pretty exhaustive list of theoretical things you can do with multimodal AI and how GPT4 fares at a set of tasks; again, super-useful if you want to think about how you can actually make this stuff useful.
Rest vs West: SUPERB bit of reporting by Rest of World here, where they profile a selection of tech companies who are dominating their respective sectors and which aren’t from North America or Europe: “What is the most widely used social media platform in Vietnam? Not Facebook or TikTok — it’s Zalo, with an impressive 87% adoption rate. And what was one of the earliest online food delivery platforms? That would be Talabat, launched by a group of Kuwaiti students in Cairo, in 2004. That’s three years before the iPhone came to market. If these names surprise you, they shouldn’t. Startup ecosystems outside the West have been churning out billion-dollar tech companies and radically innovative products for years. But their achievements are rarely celebrated or known here in the U.S. Today, not only are entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires, Lagos, and Jakarta building businesses that create huge economic opportunity and value, they’re also competing directly with Silicon Valley for users and growth in these markets. And they’re winning. Our 2023 annual list is devoted to 40 trailblazing companies that, in their own ways, beat the West. Some of them won by market combat: Years of bruising competition led to lucrative acquisitions by their Western rivals, or acquisitions of the Westerner’s local assets. A few just dominate their sector outright.” So many interesting businesses in here, some of which you will obviously have heard of but many more of which were totally new to me and which offer a fascinating insight into markets and sectors about which I knew (and, frankly, still know) the square root of fcuk all.
AI and Stereotypes: While we’re doing Rest of World, this is another interesting piece by them which looks at how various text-to-image systems are encoded with specific visual stereotypes around specific nationalities – it’s not a whole novel area of enquiry, fine, but the analysis is well done and well-presented, and it’s a useful reminder of the fact that (as I’m sure you all know) THIS STUFF REFLECTS THE SYSTEMS THAT BUILT IT! Long-term readers will of course recall that we covered this exact topic here on Web Curios a whole two-and-a-half-years-ago in this post by Shardcore – SEE YOU FCUKERS IF YOU JUST CLICK ALL THE LINKS AND READ EVERYTHING YOU WILL BASICALLY KNOW THE FUTURE.
The Average Chinese City: I found this so interesting, in part because it gives a window into a China that I personally rarely think about but which is the lived reality for literally hundreds of millions of people – lives in unremarkable urban centres which straddle the boundaries between rural and urban living. “Some of the top headlines coming out of China this year have trumpeted its struggling economic situation, as the nation emerges out of zero-covid: property sales have been falling, local governments are collectively in the red by trillions of dollars, and youth unemployment is at a record high or 21.3% (and you need to work only an hour per week to be considered employed). With extremely poor job outcomes and a home price-to-income ratio as high as 35:1, Xi Jinping’s urging for today’s youth to “ask for hardship” is hardly comforting. After a summer trip, ChinaTalk editor Irene gives us a first-person window into a small city in northwestern China, Baoji.”
STOP IT BRANDS: Ok, fine, that’s not the title the subs gave it – still, it’s very much the sentiment of a piece which asks the question ‘if every single brand is now doing that weird Twitter memetically-deep-fried post-Duolingo-and-SteakUmms schtick on social media, does that mean that it is in fact horrible and played-out and should stop?’, and answers it with a resounding YES. I think, honestly, the only good thing about the risible joke that is my ‘career’ is that I no longer have to have serious conversations with actual adults about what tone of voice a brand of batteries ought to have on the internet – if that is still what your professional reality looks or feels like, might I gently suggest that, on balance, perhaps it’s better just to be unemployed?
Myst: For a certain generation of people – specifically, people who are middle-aged and had wealthy enough families that meant that they had a decently-specced home PC in the 90s – the videogame Myst is a sort of Proustian artefact, the mere mention of the name taking them back to an era of massive beige CRT monitors and AOL cds; if that’s you then you’ll very much enjoy this piece looking at the design and ludic principles that underpinned the game and which made it peculiar and particular and so uniquely-immersive.
The Man Who Invented Fantasy: This is SO interesting, and was entirely new to me – I had no idea whatsoever that the genre we broadly know as ‘fantasy’ nowadays (you know the idea – epics! worldbuilding! magic/majick/magyk! an occasionally-troubling amount of implicit racism! Characters with names like ‘Tharg, son of Thargandia’!) was basically an entirely-confected one, developed by one Lester del Rey who saw the obsessional devotion applied to Tolkien and, not unreasonably, thought ‘wow, if we keep churning out stuff about wizards and little green pointy-eared guys, and women in improbably-skimpy armour sets then we’ll basically have these nerds in the palm of our hands forever and we can afford all the smoked-glass tables and cocaine paraphernalia our hearts desire!’ (it was the 70s, after all). Reading this made me think that someone at Penguin or Doubleday is going to eventually just ‘embrace the Omegaverse’ (if you know, you know, and if you don’t then…frankly, if you don’t then you’re lucky) and make an awful lot of money as a result.
The Kabul Intercontinental: This is a superb piece of journalism published by Swiss paper NZZ – it profiles the people who are currently trying to run the Kabul Intercontinental, a relic of Afghanistan’s more glamorous past currently being used by the ruling Taliban as an administrative centre, canteen, hospitality centre…interviewing various people involved in the running of the place, the piece speaks with Taliban and non-Taliban alike to paint a picture of a strange, twilighty-feeling world where noone quite trusts anyone else despite the smiles and the bonhomie. Honestly, this really is very good indeed and one of the most human-feeling pieces coming out of Kabul I’ve read in years.
SBF: I’ve been weirdly uninvested in the FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried story (other than the stuff about the polycule, mainly because it once again proved to me that my thesis about the polyamorous – to whit, that they are almost NEVER people who you would actually want to bone – is correct), but this is a particularly-excellent review of the new Michael Lewis profile of the man, which is scathing both about Bankman-Fried and about the extent to which Lewis was apparently charmed by him. Having gotten through the Musk biography – sadly I can’t link you to my review as it’s print-only (HOW QUAINT IN 2023!), but I can happily inform you that it contains the following description of Musk of which I am personally quite proud: “someone incapable of breathing without Tweeting, who is already not so much open as prolapsed?” – which is equally tainted by a feeling that the author admires their subject more than is seemly. it seems oddly common for these biographers to be…weirdly unquestioning about their subjects. Is this normal?
The Morality of Gossip: You may not think that you want to read an actual academic text which explores the extent to which the act of gossiping can and should be considered a morally deleterious act – but you are WRONG, because this is genuinely brilliant and entertaining and is exactly the sort of philosophy I most enjoy, ostensibly-fluffy but knotty at heart.
The Complete List of Bingo Calls: I have no idea where I found this, but it was published on the Mecca Bingo website a few years ago and I was THRILLED to learn a selection of less-heralded bingo calls – everyone knows ‘88 – two fat ladies’, fine, but were you aware that ‘30’ is traditionally known as ‘dirty gertie’, or that ‘64’ is upsettingly rhymed with ‘red raw’ (I really don’t think I want to know the etymology of that particular one)? YOU WERE NOT DO NOT LIE TO ME.
Trapped In A Veil: I’ve been reading my way through the Booker longlist over the past few months, and ‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray is one of my personal favourites so far (fwiw, my other picks are ‘If I Survive You’ and ‘In Ascension’, should you care) – this is the LRB’s review of the Bee Sting, which also encompasses reflections on his earlier works, and, while I think that I enjoyed the novel significantly more than the reviewer did, it’s a brilliant bit of analysis of form and style and thematics which also has the benefit of being very readable.
More Than Meets The Eye: I appreciate that it’s vanishingly-unlikely that any of you woke up this morning thinking ‘you know what I’d really like to read today? Several thousand words of unlikely socialist-inflected nostalgic analysis of the Transformers cartoon series of the 1980s’, but, seriously, you are in for a TREAT. Ok, fine, it helps if you’re a middle-aged man who was obsessed to the point of single-minded devotion with Optimus Prime et al, but even if not this is a warm and evocative bit of nostalgia that covers a surprising amount of ground considering that, at heart, it’s basically about some animated advertisements for plastic tat from 40-odd years ago.
Remember Kony 2012?: I was talking with someone the other week about watershed moments – in that specific instance we were discussing the point at which UK culture shifted from that 00s-era ‘aggressive, angry, hypersexualised vulgarity’ to the slightly-more inclusive and sensitive landscape of today (in case you’re interested, I put it at Dapper Laughs sombre poloneck Newsnight appearance), but I wonder whether Kony2012 was in its own way a watershed moment too, the death-knell of the idea that going viral was in any way ‘good’. Do you remember Kony2012? IT WAS A FCUKING WEIRD TIME, basically, and this piece takes us right back there, recapping the frenzy and then, more interestingly, securing an interview with the guy behind Invisible Children, the one who famously had that naked breakdown in LA when the gaze of the world became too much…I think it’s fair to say that he still has issues, and I’m not 100% certain that the reporter’s wholly responsible in the way they write this up if I’m honest with you, but it really is a quite incredible mental time machine to a very different era.
Influencer Boxing: A great piece in GQ, looking at how KSI and the rest are ‘disrupting’ boxing – or, depending on your point of view, how we’ve basically reinvented cockfighting but instead of specially-reared fowl we’re howling for the blood of seventh-tier entertainers and internet personalities. There is something very funny – if sort-of depressingly irresponsible – about some of the vignettes in here where the promoters brainstorm new boxing formats; while I generally have no interest in sports in which pituitary meatheads hit each other, I would totally watch a puglistic Royal Rumble (but, you know, guiltily).
Pilar: I loved this article – David Coggins writes in Esquire about the magazine’s relationship with Hemingway, and specifically about how Hemingway was able to parlay that relationship into his beloved boat, Pilar – you don’t have to like, or indeed have any affection for, Hemingway to enjoy this article, which paints a picture of an era to which literally anyone who gets paid for words would give their kidney to return to (fine, we’re not all Hemingway, but the per-word rates quoted in here! Oh me oh my!).
Long Distance: Finally this week, a story from the Paris Review – it was published in 2014, but I stumbled across it this week and it is SO GOOD; specifically, it has that very specific quality I get from reading South American Spanish prose in translation, a sort of lightness to it which I absolutely adore. I promise you that this really is excellent and 100% worth your time.
Trains! Misogyny! Hateful rhetoric about immigration! The risible lolfest that is Liberal Democrat Party Conference! Unauthorised tree surgery! WHAT A WEEK!
There, that’s you all caught up with the stuff in the ‘real’ world! Now it’s time to focus on the weird internet ephemera, of which there is a BUMPER CROP – which is fortunate because Web Curios is off next week and so fcuk knows what you’d have done without this jam-packed dose of linky munificence.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably found the concept of Laurence Fox opining on the ‘fcukability’ or otherwise of anyone else as risible as I did.
THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER IT WOULD IN FACT BE MORALLY ACCEPTABLE TO JUST CULL EVERYONE INVOLVED WITH THE CURRENT INCARNATION OF THE TORY PARTY, INCLUDING THE WIDER UK MEDIA SYSTEM THAT PROPS THEM UP, BECAUSE IT’S BECOMING INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT THEY ARE ALL DREADFUL CNUTS WITH LITERALLY NO REDEEMING FEATURES WHATSOEVER AND, Y’KNOW, THERE ARE SOME PRETTY STRONG UTILITARIAN ARGUMENTS WE COULD DEPLOY IF PRESSED, PT.1:
Wikipedia Search-by-Vibes: I can’t help but love a wonky, slightly-orthogonal search mechanic (WHO DOESN’T, RIGHT KIDS? Eh? Oh), and this is a near-perfect example by Lee Butterman, who’s built a way of navigating Wikipedia which eschews all the normal, traditionally ‘click a hyperlink’ or ‘search for keywords’ techniques and which instead uses natural language stuff (look, there’s a more technical explanation which you can find here should you so desire, but know that I tried to read and understand it and, well, I failed) to let you search for, I don’t know, ‘those trees with the leaves that are a bit pointy but also rounded’ and return you a bunch of results from the Wikidepths. SUCH a brilliant idea, and a nice example of the eventual endpoint of all this AI stuff, where The Machine will eventually be able to make sense of whatever garbled, half-baked request we feed it and we’re able to sit back and just feed on peeled grapes while reclining like late-period Romans (that’s definitely how it’s all going to work out).
Another Text-To-Video Toy: Yes, ok, fine, I know that these are no longer new and shiny, but I’m always interested to compare the pace of change of the various tools in this space – this one’s called ‘Genmo’, and it’s in-browser, and it’s free (or at least you can play around with it a bit without having to fork out initial cash for ‘credits’) and while you won’t be using this to create all your video from hereon in, a) it’s not bad, considering it took ~10s to generate this; b) honestly, most of the video you create for your job and your clients is pointless and doesn’t need to exist, so why not just sack it all off, replace the ‘content’ with AI-generated footage of cats or whatever, and call it all quits? I appreciate that ‘link 2’ is a bit early in the week to start with the whole ‘your job in advermarketingpr is a pointless joke and you should stop doing it’ but, well, I am feeling it VERY STRONGLY this week and thought you might want a Friday afternoon fillip.
Historica: This is a genuinely-interesting project which, as far as I can tell, is fruit of collaboration between a bunch of historians and a few technologists across Europe, and which is interested in looking at how generative AI tools and techniques can be applied to the study of history, and specifically the creation of AI-augmented historical maps. This site itself is…a bit dense, fine, and VERY WORDY, but there’s a lot of interesting thinking and writing on there about some of the ways in which they have used generative models to help generate visual representations of THE PASSAGE OF TIME, and if you’re interested in AI, history, teaching or any vague combination of those things then you may find this stimulating.
The Snapchat Agency Adventure: Snap is having something of a trying period, with various stories appearing over the past week or so suggesting user numbers are dropping, and the company culling its enterprise AR team a couple of days ago…but that’s ok, because it’s going to persuade agencies to pay it FCUKTONNES OF MONEY via the medium of, er, a game! And not just ANY game, but ‘a game designed to show you how Snapchat can help your clients reach their audience and drive results’, which I think we can all agree is just what the troubled company needs to get people spending big with them again! This is actually a reasonably-diverting 15 minute experience, although it suffers slightly from being built in a top-down, vaguely-16-bit style which means you spend more time than you might necessarily want to having ‘conversations’ with various avatars representing Snap staff who tell you helpful things like ‘we have a large and growing audience of 750 million a month!’ while they loop through three frames of minimalist animation. Still, there are a few pleasing minigames in there which will help use up some of those empty hours between birth and death which you might otherwise have to fill with ‘work’.
The Coca Cola Record Store Experience: What do you think of when you think of ‘Coca Cola’? Sticky brown sugarwater? Incredibly-expensive endorsement deals? Vending machines? Those weirdos who seem to exist solely on Diet Coke, to the exclusion of all other liquids (I say this as someone who probably gets through in the region of 20 cups of tea a day, but WHAT IS THAT DOING TO YOUR INSIDES?!)? NO YOU THINK OF NONE OF THOSE THINGS YOU INSTEAD THINK OF CRATE-DIGGING IN AN UNDERGROUND RECORD STORE! Or at least that’s what Coke *wants* you to think of, judging by this ‘interactive digital experience’ in which you’re plonked into a 3d CG representation of a dimly-lit vinyl emporium and invited to wander around it, collecting digital tchotchkes representing various expressions of the Coca Cola Brand Experience (so miserable, so sad!) – but not just that! Oh no! You can also find a selection of records in the ‘store’ by various artists which you can then ‘listen’ to in a dedicated ‘room’, and by so doing you can ‘unlock’ some special artist-related content…on the one hand, this is pretty-slickly-made (as you’d expect from one of the world’s largest and richest brands), but on the other there’s something a bit…thin about the experiences you unlock, and I remain slightly baffled as to exactly what I would get from this were I a fan of (to cite but one of the artists involved) Cat Burns (other than, obviously, a near-irresistible desire to waterboard myself with Coke).
Staring Contest: I really like this – a neat little toy by Google, as part of its Arts & Culture Lab, by longstanding Web Curios favourite Pippin Barr – click the link and you’re presented with a different artwork each day (I think), representing an individual who is presented to you in close-up detail; your job as the viewer is to STAY AWAKE, which you can do by clicking your mouse to keep your ‘digital eyelids’ (I promise it will make more sense when you click the link) open. This is obviously a bit of a silly, one-note gag, but it also does a good job of forcing you to engage with the work, and because it’s Google the works are presented in super-high-res and as such the whole ‘stare into the subject’s eyes while clicking manically’ thing does actually make you engage with each piece in a way you mightn’t have done otherwise. This is fun and silly and a really strong example of how interaction design can have interesting impacts on how information is communicated and absorbed (he said, like the boring pseud he is).
The City of Praxis: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a plutocrat in possession of vast fortune must be in want of a vaguely-libertarian citystate built to exactly their specifications in which they can live out the rest of their violently-wealthy days unfettered by the tedious concerns of the lumpenproletariat! Or at least that’s how it fcuking seems, judging by the speed with which all these fcuking cnuts start imagining their own ‘NEW TECH UTOPIA CITIES’ as soon as they get to nine figures in their bank accounts – and so it is with the fantastically-named CITY OF PRAXIS (in my head it is called ‘CITY OF HUBRIS’ fwiw), which self-describes as ‘A greenfield development designed to support those tackling the world’s hardest problems’ (also, I like the implied positioning here that these MEGABRAINS, these violently-rich altruists, DESERVE a special city all of their own because of the vital work they are doing delivering hockey-stick returns and 10x shareholder growth). This is still very much at the blueprints stage, but the site claims that the collective behind the project is in ‘the final stages of site selection’ to determine where exactly in the Mediterranean they are going to establish this utopia for the brightest and best – and if you would like to be one of them you can apply here; they stop short of asking for your net worth, but it does rather feel implied, but there’s a…reasonably-strong implication in the literature that they’re only interested in you if you can bring a few million to the table, as the model for Praxis is built on ‘ten thousand members with an average lifetime value of $2+ million collectively represent $20+ billion in city value.’ Details as to who has signed up so far are limited, but intriguingly the site mentions ‘a former G7 Prime Minister’ and ‘a former EU Prime Minister’ and I would not be surprised if the grinning face of Mr Tony Blair was somehow involved in this. You can read a bit more about the project in this excellent piece in the equally-excellent The Fence Magazine – I doubt that this is ever going to happen, but I hope that its failure is spectacular and visible from space.
Spill: As The Great Social Fragmentation engendered by That Fcuking Man’s slow evisceration of Twitter continues, so new spaces to hang out online continue to crop up – the latest to cross my field of vision is Spill (main link here) which is a Twitter-esque product built by ex-Twitter staffers and which is designed for, and aimed at, the Black community specifically. The main link takes you to their ‘about and onboarding’ document, which is done as a Google presentation and is…actually really good, giving you a clear illustration of what the platform is, how it works, some notes on language and general vibe…honestly, it struck me as a really smart and simple way of quickly getting people onboard with what you are trying to do and significantly quicker and easier than spinning up and maintaining a website. I confess to not having tried Spill, mainly because a) I am a misanthrope and don’t actually feel the need to join any more fcuking communities, please leave me alone; and b) I am a white, middle-aged man and didn’t feel that I would necessarily have a lot to contribute to the app, but it looks like a decent new entrant into the ‘granular alternatives to Twitter’ landscape should you be in the market for one.
Post Crossing: I am slightly astonished that I have apparently never featured this before, but I suppose I should just be pleased at how that illustrates the wide-ranging and near-infinite majesty of the web rather than letting my failure to be across EVERY SINGLE FCUKING WEBSITE IN THE WORLD irk me (except obviously that is exactly what I am going to do) – anyway, my inadequacies aside, Post Crossing is a LOVELY web project which exists to encourage strangers to send postcards to each other – there’s a simple mechanic which matches people, and all you have to do is request an address from the site, pick a card, write a message and pay the postage and VWALLAH! You are now part of an international network of strangers all sending messages to each other via the magic of the postal service. I love this so so so much and am going to pop out and do my first missive this afternoon (someone is going to be SO EXCITED to get that postcard of a goose being fois-grased!) – honestly, I don’t think there is any pleasure quite like getting a (nice, to be clear) message from a total stranger, and I STRONGLY recommend you get involved with this as it is lovely and pure and you may end up with a nice new friend as a result (although based on a cursory bit of research, it is very likely that that friend will be in Germany – MAN do Germans love postcards, turns out).
The Nature TTL Photographer of the Year: ANOTHER EXCELLENT SELECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF CRITTERS! As ever, these are all wonderful – as far as I can tell, they’re also all reasonably-happy pictures (no obvious animal death on display, basically) so you can click safe in the knowledge that it’s all cuteness and light and no PETA-style horrors; my personal favourite of these is the gorgeous shot of the caterpillars chowing their way through a leaf, but please feel free to pick your own.
1FF: I am fascinated by this (and thanks to Rishi for sending it my way) – it’s another example, along with the previously-mentioned King’s League, of how it feels like we’re on the cusp of some sort of new breakout mass sporting format based around football, but equally like noone quite knows what that might look like or how it might in fact work. 1FF is…it’s an entirely-fictitious, entirely-CG-and-AI generated football league, in which a bunch of (again, entirely-fictitious and entirely-virtual) teams compete in computer-generated matches to contest a league title; the gimmick here is that ‘fans’ can invest in individual teams and players by buying stakes, which stakes translate to votes on crucial decisions on which players to sign, or in the case of the players which teams to sign for…There’s an element of this I can imagine really taking off, that taps into the modern phenomenon of people supporting individual players rather than teams, and the idea of kids being able to materially affect the ‘career’ of one of these ‘players’ is something I can conceive of as being appealing, but at present it all feels a bit…thin. I haven’t delved in too deeply – there’s a weirdly crypto-ish vibe which puts me off, although perhaps that’s unfair – but I am honestly fascinated to see how (if) this evolves – if nothing else the fact that they have seemingly got their very own proprietary CG match engine simulating all this is pretty impressive and suggests to some reasonably-deep pockets. The team names are AWFUL, though – South London United FC is SO ‘Pro Evo’ it hurts.
Fat Bear Week: It’s FAT BEAR WEEK AGAIN! You should, by now, what to do – at the time of writing, voting in the first bracket is yet to open, but hopefully by the time I hit ‘send’ on this fcuker you’ll be able to click and decide whether you think ‘910 Yearling’ or ‘806 Spring Cub’ is the chonkiest.
All Of The PixeL Art: OH GOD THIS IS SUCH AN INCREDIBLE RESOURCE! Japan’s Maeda Design Studio has made this incredible collection of pixel art assets available for anyone to download and make use of – the description is so charming I might cry: “DOTOWN is a site where you can download coarse dots. Rough dots refer to pixel art that uses the lowest possible resolution to create the ultimate abstract expression. Despite being abstracted, the coarse dots are packed with information and have achieved a “reverse evolution (=ultimate abstraction)” in game graphics.They have a slightly empty atmosphere and have a “Maeda design feel”. Rough dots have been a symbol of this, and even today, rough dots appear everywhere, including on the Maeda Design Office’s website and membership page. All of us at Maeda Design Studio would be happy if you could use these coarse dots for a variety of things, including websites, banners, flyers, and even embroidery!” No, seriously, literally crying a bit (I am tired), IT IS SO PURE.
Castrooms: This does, I concede, feel VERY 2020, but there’s no reason why some of you might not still find this useful – Castrooms is a bit of software designed for DJs or indeed anyone doing live performances to a virtual audience, and which presents everyone listening to / watching said performance as a massive WALL OF AUDIENCE in front of the performer so as to give them a better sense of presence and feedback when putting on a show. This is a really good idea, which is eerily similar to technology that The Pleasance Theatre were experimenting with during lockdown, which makes me wonder whether it’s in any way connected – anyway, if you do stuff that involves ‘streaming comedy or music or theatre or whatever to a reasonable audience’ and you would like to deepen the connection between perform and said audience then, well, HERE HAVE THIS.
Songwritings: I stumbled across this earlier this week on Twitter and I LOVE IT – this is an occasional newsletter by two people who I think work in advermarketingPR (but don’t hold it against them, they seem nice) and who every now and again collaborate to make a song. Nick Asbury writes words, and Kate van den Borgh sets them to music, and they share the resulting songs and thoughts about the creative process each time they make something, and the latest one is genuinely really rather beautiful and made me want to hear more.
An Auction of Stuff from Tron: I saw Tron at the Cinema with my mum in Swindon in the early-80s, and it honestly changed my life – not in the sense that it motivated me to pursue a career in, say, programming or graphic design (lol career!), but in the sense that it was the first time that I realised that I would probably be happier inside a machine than outside, and that perhaps this whole ‘meat’ thing was a mistake. You may or may not have any sort of personal connection to the original film, but you will almost certainly be vaguely aware of its incredibly strong sense of style and aesthetic and the neon and the costumes and the light cycles and the mad Jai Alai-variant game that they play…SUCH A GREAT FILM! Anyway, this links you to a bunch of stuff currently for sale online – lots have between 1-3 weeks left to run, as far as I can tell and so you have PLENTY OF TIME to peruse them and work out what you’re going to spend your kids’ nonexistent inheritance on. Concept art, frames from the film…there is SO MUCH wonderful material here, and there’s a lot of stuff where the starting bid is $0, so it’s entirely possible that you might be able to get your hands on something without having to sell a kidney to do so.
THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER IT WOULD IN FACT BE MORALLY ACCEPTABLE TO JUST CULL EVERYONE INVOLVED WITH THE CURRENT INCARNATION OF THE TORY PARTY, INCLUDING THE WIDER UK MEDIA SYSTEM THAT ENABLES THEM, BECAUSE IT’S BECOMING INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT THEY ARE ALL DREADFUL CNUTS WITH LITERALLY NO REDEEMING FEATURES WHATSOEVER AND, Y’KNOW, THERE ARE SOME PRETTY STRONG UTILITARIAN ARGUMENTS WE COULD DEPLOY IF PRESSED, PT.2:
Bloom: Audio erotica has been a thing for a few years now – pretty sure I’ve featured at least one company making SEXY PODCASTS for you to enjoy here in the past – but that’s almost certainly set to explode thanks to the INFINITE CONTENT FLYWHEEL allowed by generative AI; which is exactly where Bloom comes in. The platform promises to offer a range of SPICY CONTENT augmented by AI chatbots which reflect the personalities and kinks and desires of the most popular characters from the platforms stories, which will let you talk filth to whichever hunk you prefer (and, eventually, let you ‘talk’ to them with AI voice simulation, although I don’t think that that’s live yet) – I confess to not having spent much time with this, partly because, well, I don’t personally feel the need to listen to audiobongo, but also because the site is pretty heavily paygated (you only get a couple of stories to listen to for free, and any chat beyond the third interaction needs ‘credits’) and it’s also (unsurprisingly) VERY much focused at the heterosexual woman market and I don’t personally really want to listen to some breathless discussion of how ‘she tasted the nectar of his forbidden hardness’. You, though, might be DESPERATE for exactly this sort of content – I neither know nor care about your proclivities! – and so, you know, ENJOY.
The StayCay: Another link which is SO 2020 (this one via Rina), The StayCay is a gorgeous example of ‘building an online ‘space’ using freely-available and non-obvious tools’, specifically in this case doing so via Google Sheets – there was a spate of people creating ‘hangout’-type environments during the pandemic using the ‘shared documents’ functionality of the GSuite, but I think this is by far the most involved and well-realised and thought out, although I am personally saddened by the fact that it’s basically all about how cool crypto is which rather lessens its whimsical appeal in my eyes. Still, this really is a proper labour of love and it’s really pleasing to explore and see the care that’s gone into designing, making and maintaining this shared space. I STRONGLY BELIEVE that every single company should create one of these spaces as a sort of unmonitored digital hangout for staff, and if any of you would like to pay me loads of money to do a really half-ar$ed job of setting such a thing up for you then, well, YOU KNOW WHERE I AM.
The Tomb of Rameses I: Do you want to explore the inside of the tomb of one of Ancient Egypt’s rulers? Would you like to do so without suffering the horrors of international air travel and the attentions of 10million artefact-peddlers attempting to sell you a pewter model of the Great Pyramid? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is a rather wonderful project which has photographed the interior of the Tomb of Rameses I and made it available to navigate via a Google StreetView-esque interface, complete with all sorts of explanatory annotations – you can either choose the guided tour or to ‘freely explore’ the temple, and while the latter is best for actually learning stuff there’s something genuinely cool and slightly-Indiana-Jones-y about the ability to navigate the tomb’s tunnels and the torchlight effect the software applies to your field of vision. The only thing that could make this better, to my mind, would be some sort of ‘OH GOD THERE’S A MUMMY’-style Easter Egg, but I concede that that’s possibly not the historically-accurate vibe that the creators were going for.
Stay In Shrek’s Swamp: I wouldn’t normally link to something which is literally just ‘a PR stunt by Airbnb’, but I’ll make an exception for this specific promo because, well, IT’S SHREK!!! WHO DOESN’T LOVE SHREK?!?! NO FCUKER, etc! As part of its semi-regular ‘let’s mock up a location from a popular entertainment property and make it available as a very short-term let, and by so doing rinse the PR!’ activity, Airbnb has created a version of Shrek’s Swamp somewhere in Scotland, which will be made available to rent for a limited period in this Autumn/Winter – booking opens on 13 October, so I suggest you bookmark this now and set a reminder, because otherwise this will be 100% booked out by the sort of weirdos who want to use this as an opportunity to film disturbingly-well-located Shrek-related bongo (look, it’s a disgusting concept and I am sorry for raising it but, also, that is EXACTLY what will happen).
Sent You A Song: I have long thought that there’s a missing…thing (sorry, this is very inarticulate but we have run out of milk and it’s 903am and I am currently torn between needing to keep caffeinated if I am ever going to finish this thing and knowing that if I take 10m to run to the shop my ability to finish this even vaguely on time will be utterly banjaxed, and you don’t actually need this internal monologue digression, do you?) in modernity when it comes to cute and pleasing ways to share music with people – you can send a link, fine, but it lacks a certain poetry. Sent You A Song is a lovely little project which attempts to make sharing music with an individual a bit special again – what I particularly like about this is that by using the site to share a track, you add your selection and accompanying message both to the site’s homepage and the accompanying playlist, which makes the whole thing a lovely accumulation of songs that mean something to people, and which they have wanted to share with others. The trail of messages is a beautiful touch – it looks like this has been most popular in Brasil to date, based on the fact most of the messages are in Portuguese, and the music that people have sent is wonderfully-eclectic. Basically this is GREAT.
FontGuessr: I think this might be the hardest game I have ever featured on Curios – NO OF COURSE I CAN’T GUESS WHAT THE FCUKING FONT IS, WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM SOME SORT OF TYPOGRAPHICAL RAINMAN?! Ahem. Anyway, those of you who are actual designers and typographers might find this significantly more fun and less challenging than I do.
Has Your Book Been Scraped?: You may have seen a whole bunch of authors online getting understandably upset this week at the discovery that their works have apparently been ingested into OpenAI’s training corpus for its LLMs – The Athletic first ran this story early in the year, but it’s been resurrected by the fact that they have now released a search engine which lets anyone check whether their works have been included in the Books3 dataset (which is what speculation suggests has been used to train GPTx) and as such whether they form part of the training data for the current most popular LLM. The main link takes you to the search engine, but you can read more about it The Atlantic’s project here – the question that remains, though, is to what extent can any of these authors expect to have any sort of legal redress against OpenAI and others, and how might the various lawsuits currently being engaged work in practice? Obviously the answer is ‘lol noone knows this is literally unprecedented’, but if you’re interested in delving into some of the likely legal arguments then you could do worse than read this rundown which does a neat job of explaining why ‘fair use’ is a very slippery idea, and why it might turn out that there’s a perfectly compelling argument that OpenAI might make to suggest that at best authors might be entitled to a couple of quid and a pat on the head (briefly: I can totally see a legally-sound argument to suggest that the best equivalence to what we are talking about here is someone ingesting an author’s entire body of work and then using that body of work to inform their own subsequent thinking and writing and doing – and there is no way in hell that we would suggest that the ‘someone’ here owes anything to the author in question other than the RRP of their body of work).
Mused: It’s fair to say that museums in the UK don’t always do the very best digital work, often through no fault of their own – I know what public sector digital procurement is like, and I know what ‘attempting to get funding for anything’ is like, and I know that there is often a…disconnect between the digital abilities and inclinations of staff at the more operational end of the pyramid and those at the top who tend to be a bit more…traditional, let’s say – so I don’t want to be mean about this new effort by the V&A… Mused is aimed at 10-14 year olds (placing me quite firmly outside its target demographic, so feel free to take everything I say from hereon in as the ramblings of an old and out-of-touch moron who doesn’t understand d1ck) – so why make it a website? How many 10-14 year olds visit websites? It’s obviously intended to frame the V&A’s exhibits and work in the context of kid-friendly concepts like gaming, film and music – so why’s it all so static? Ach, I feel bad writing this stuff so I will stop, but it feels like a huge missed opportunity – still, if you have a 10-14 year old person in your life who you think might like a quiz about Minecraft delivered by one of the UK’s national museums then, well, IT’S THEIR CHRISTMAS COME EARLY!
Heste Nettet: I think that this is one of my favourite stories of the week, possibly the year, possibly the decade. I stumbled across this while doing a bunch of reading around AI and stuff (such is the misery of my ‘professional’ existence) – while so doing I happened to read this Bloomberg newsletter, which included this astonishing fact about Danish language AI development: because there’s a relatively-msall quantity of Danish on the web, and a relatively small number of sources, a significant part of the training corpus for Danish-language LLMs comes from Heste Nettet, a Danish forum which over the past decades has basically become a sort of universal catch-all platform for conversations about literally every aspect of Danish life (as forums are often wont to do) – except the forum was originally designed to be about horses, and horse ownership, and as a result there’s an awful lot of equine content in the training data, which means that “There is definitely a horse bias…If you want to know something about horses, it’s definitely in there.” I LOVE THIS SO SO SO MUCH, in particular the idea (completely untested, but I am going to presume that it’s true) that the long arc of conversation with AI in Danish will ALWAYS tend towards horses: “Yes, that’s nice Dave, and I am sure that you do want to know more about the document you’ve just fed me to ingest and summarise – but wouldn’t you like to know more about optimal forelock length?” Anyway, the original link takes you to the Danish forum in question which, I concede, probably isn’t hugely compelling to you, but I love this story so so so much and I hope it has pleased you to the same degree.
Hearts and Minds: Also via Giuseppe, this is an excellent piece of datavisualisation (bizarrely a bit of CSR work by the IKEA Foundation) which demonstrates how attitudes towards immigration have changed across Europe over the past few years – and which pleasingly demonstrates how in general people are significantly more pro-immigration than might be thought based on some of the vile media and political rhetoric being spewed at the moment. This covers 10 countries in Europe, including the UK, and the data’s from the ODI and as such pretty unimpeachable.
Be A Bee: Non-Anglos amongst you may be aware of Ricola, a Swiss company which for nearly a century has been manufacturing sweets flavoured with Swiss herbs – I don’t think they sell them in the UK, but I have very strong flashback memories of these things being foisted on me as a kid by well-meaning elderly Italian relatives and realising at a young age that it turns out that I really don’t like the taste of Jaegermeister (they really do taste of Jaeger, I promise). Anyway, this is an international promo site which is designed both to promote the sweets and the brand’s partnership with a doubtless-incredibly-famous Korean person (sorry, I don’t recognise the face/name – is it a BTS person?) – it’s a game in which you’re a bee, and you’re tasked with flying around some alpine meadows and collecting herbs or somesuch, but, honestly, it is SO RELAXING that if you’re anything like me you’ll spend 10 minutes just sort of flying around and enjoying the apian splendour of it all. Mobile-only, but this really is very nicely done indeed and I’m not joking about the ‘soothing’ thing.
National Populations As Joy Division Album Graphs: A horrible descriptor which almost certainly means nothing to you, so click the link and get enlightened (these are glorious, honestly, and some of them would look rather nice as posters I think).
Gorgeous PixelArt Cars: The link actually takes you to the Twitter account of a games studio called ‘Etherfield’, but at the moment they seem to be posting nothing but really beautiful little 8-bit representations of old cars – if you’ve ever wanted a pixel representation of 1978 Toyota Celica (and, honestly, which of us can say they haven’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then this will be your paradise, your Elysian Fields, your happy place.
The Tenth Watch: If you’re the sort of person who has been online for A LONG TIME then you will also be the sort of person who knows about the legendary history of the pitch drop when it comes to online video streaming and its use in pioneering the idea of a webcam feed waiting for SOMETHING to happen – now the University of Queensland in Australia is running a livestream of its 10th pitch drop experiment (the last one fell in April 2014), so if you would like to stare blankly at a video feed in the hope that something, anything will happen then, well, ENJOY!
Sun Terraces: I really like this – a collaborative Dutch project which seeks to map all the places in the Netherlands where there’s a bit of public space that gets the sun – whether that’s a pub garden or a public park, this is just a superb and really useful resource that feels like it should be trivial to replicate pretty much anywhere (or at least, anywhere where everyone has the same sort of general spirit of commuty as the Dutch, which perhaps isn’t as common as one might wish). Conversely, if you’d rather avoid the sun while travelling, then this is a similar tool which tells you which side of the train you ought to sit on to prevent getting blinded – I don’t know why I love these things so much but I really do.
Bihrmann: Kris described this as ‘possibly the perfect personal website’ and I don’t know that I can disagree with his assessment – I have no idea whatsoever who this belongs to what it is for or why it exists, or indeed what most of the content it hosts is about, but I am slightly in love with the aesthetic and the maximalist nature of the endeavour. MORE OF THE CONFUSING AND LARGELY-POINTLESS-SEEMING WEB, PLEASE!
Planet Destroyer: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is this SUPERB clicker game which I have had open in a tab all week and which I can confirm is incredibly cathartic – there are few things more satisfying when having A Professional Moment than clicking frantically on a little CG planet and watching it blow up (no, that’s totally normal, I don’t know what you mean).
Hallowe’en 2023: Because I appreciate that some of you like doing the whole ‘it’s autumn! Let’s make everything orange and cinnamon-tasting!’ thing.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
Unicorn Colour Theory: “Transmutation of thought into touchable color. Colorbending is about encouraging connection thru touch, and the joy that color brings!” Does that description speak to you? No, of course it doesn’t, it’s utter gibberish! Still, if you’ve ever wanted to see someone make art with ‘liquid crayons’ (no, me neither, but apparently they are a thing) then this is very much the Insta feed for you.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
Let Them East Oysters: We start the longreads this week with what I have to warn you is a relatively-chewy bit of writing – Lorna Finlayson in the LRB writes about animal rights and applied ethics more generally (while the ostensible focus of the piece is on the animal rights question, the piece is really a LOT broader than that) as she considers two new(ish) books on the subject by Peter Singer (see Curios passim) and Martha Nussbaum, and OH GOD IS THIS INTERESTING. Ok, fine, I perhaps have a slight bias towards this stuff as it maps onto a significant proportion of my MSc, but these are also objectively fascinating questions – how ought we behave? How do we decide? And how much of a theoretical fcuk ought we give about anything else while so doing? – that Finlayson analyses with intelligence and humour (honestly, you forget quite how…funny some of the discussion around ethics can be, silly as that probably sounds). The central questions here revolve around utilitarianism vs deontology, the question of ‘speciesism’, self-actualisation and ‘higher goods’ and all sorts of other thorny stuff – I personally think that Finlayson slightly-traduces some of Singer’s arguments in the piece, or at least doesn’t present them entirely fairly, but overall this is a WONDERFUL bit of writing about some hard fundamental questions about How We Should Be that I promise you really is worth taking the time to think through.
The Fateful 90s: For about the first third of this essay I was in awe at its analysis and dissection of a lot of 90s political and economic thinking, and how it shaped Where We Are Now – and then it goes quite weirdly right-wing in ways I don’t agree with towards the end. That said, regardless of the extent to which I don’t agree with some of the intensely-Republican (and frankly quite racist-feeling) assertions made towards the article’s coda, the way it presents economic theory and the rise of the web and the broken promises of much of the early-to-mid-90s political (and social, and technological) rhetoric of the US is really interesting (particularly if you’re old enough to remember it the first time round).
What Makes Elon Tick?: So I read the biography and wrote it up for work – SPOILER ALERT: it is a very, very dull book which is written very badly and which seems to take almost everything Musk says at face value without at any point asking any really interesting or challenging questions, and which really doesn’t pay enough attention to the people who for the past couple of decades have been Musk’s influencers and what looking at them might tell us about him. This, though, is not about the biography – in the Guardian, David Runciman writes about his experience of following all the same people as Elon does on Twitter, and what that might tell us about the man and his worldview – obviously this is an…unsifficiant mechanism by which to GET INSIDE ELON’S HEAD, but I promise you that the conclusions drawn in this piece are significantly more interesting and trenchant than those Isaacson gets to after 620-fcuking-pages.
The Sam Altman Profile: My appetite for profiles of ‘great men’ (particularly ‘great men of technology’) is VERY small right now, but I reluctantly read this profile of OpenAI’s Sam Altman in case it contained any VITAL INSIGHTS – it doesn’t really, unless you count ‘wow, this person really has incredibly shallow points of view when it comes to the really hard questions’ and ‘this person probably shouldn’t be determining the future path of R&D in this incredibly morally and intellectually complex field, and yet, well, HERE WE ARE!’, but I appreciate that I have spent a LOT more time reading about this man and this fcuking industry than you probably have (this isn’t some sort of brag, to be clear, more a sad cry for help) and as such you my find this a bit more enlightening. Altman comes across as a bit of a d1ck, but only in that nonspecific sort of ‘smooth-faced, monied Thielian protege’ fashion rather than anything more pointy – but, honestly, can we PLEASE have a different type of guy (non gender-specific, for avoidance of doubt) in charge of stuff in the future, please? I am very, very bored of this flavour of man. BONUS LINK: if you’re not familiar with the TESCREAL acronym detailing the broad belief systems underpinning the current AI movement which mean we should be very fcuking sceptical of the Altman position, this is a very good overview.
GPT Goes Multimodal: Or at least it will do soon – this is the OpenAI announcement of its forthcoming GPT update (in the next month or so, apparently), which will let you interact with its models via text-to-voice and, more excitedly, introduce image analysis to the Beta of GPT4 (this stuff will only be for the paying few, at least initially, although it will come to Bing soon enough too) – this is already available on Bard, but given how much better the OpenAI LLM is than the current Google one I’m expecting this to be a significant upgrade. If you’d like an idea of What This Means, you might find this post detailing an early user’s experiences useful in terms of outlining what’s possible – and if you’d like something genuinely mindblowing, this ‘sketch-to-website’ demo is pretty mad. I know that there are quite good reasons for this, but I am moderately-annoyed that OpenAI is nerfing the tech from providing assessments or analyses of images of people – I REALLY like the idea of making a ‘roast me’ mirror, which they won’t let me do the BAST4RDS.
Welcome To The AI Infinistream: Or, “How AI is enabling Chinese livestreams to create digital avatars of them which can shill tat 24/7 for that sweet, sweet affiliate revenue’ – welcome to the future in which we all have digital versions of ourselves who we set to slave earning pennies in the affiliate mines! I appreciate that livestream shopping is very much not a Western phenomenon, but I am slightly curious as to whether people will still have an appetite for watching infinite QVC when the presenters are AIs – if they do, I am probably going to downgrade my position on humanity stocks from ‘HOLD’ to ‘SELL’.
Zuckerberg on AI: Yes, I know that I said that I didn’t care about FOUNDERS AND THEIR VISIONS, and that I didn’t really want to read anymore profiles of tech people, but this relatively-rare interview with Zuckerberg in The Verge, which focuses on Meta’s AI announcements from this week and What They Mean, is more interesting than most, mainly because it offers a clear picture of how Zuckerberg sees generative AI fitting into the Facestagram ecosystem and the broader metaverse bet (don’t laugh!) – there’s also a bit in there about AI and training data that really made me laugh from a ‘wow, you really have been media trained haven’t you Mark?’ perspective. Basically this won’t tell you anything startling, but I think it’s useful to read it if you want to (or, worse, need to) have a point of view of Meta’s current position in the AI race/bunfight.
Confessions of an AI Writer: Vauhini Vara writes for WIRED on their experience of writing with AI – Vara wrote one of the earliest published ‘cowritten with an AI’ pieces in 2021, and this article looks at how her feelings about ‘collaboration’ with AI have changed, and the extent to which as the tech has improved over the past two years its creative outputs have become…less interesting. I’ve touched on this in this newsletter a lot over the past year or so, but I think it’s visible to anyone who’s been paying attention to this space at all over the past few years – as with anything relating to DATA, the more you have the more your results tend to the middle of the bell curve, and the more smoothed and homogenous they become, and I think we’re only about a year or so away from a reasonably-noisy ‘make AI weird again’ movement (feel free to point and laugh at how wrong I was about this in 2024, by the way).
Monkey Laundering: LOL AT THE NFTs! You will have seen the article doing the rounds over the past few weeks which claims that NFTs have lost 95% of their value – inspired by that story, Ed Zitron pens a decent summary of ‘where we are now with the racist monkey jpegs’ which feels like it should serve as a neat summary coda to the whole movement. I still believe that there’s something interesting in the concept of a DAO, which Zitron very much doesn’t, but otherwise this is an enjoyable read (although perhaps less so if you’re That One Guy in a group of friends who dropped £10k on a Logan Paul gif in 2020 and is feeling a bit sheepish three years on).
The World of TikDoxing: Another ‘wow the future is weird and I am not sure I like it’ link (is there any other sort in Web Curios?) – did you know that there’s a new ‘thing’ on the platform where people are demonstrating their ‘OSINT Chops’ by identifying strangers in the background of online content and using a bunch of available tools such as facial recognition database PimEyes (see Curios passim) to find out their real identities, and document their skill in the search in their very own TikTok vids? No, I didn’t either, but now I do and it feels…somehow not ok that TikTok claims that this is totally fine and legitimate content to post, although on the flipside I suppose there’s technically nothing ‘wrong’ happening here, nothing illegal, and this is just another example of social mores butting up hard against new tech and noone really quite knowing what we’re meant to do about anything. Someone really, really ought to write a Digital Debrett’s for kids to get given when they are 10, to educate them about what, honestly, it really isn’t cool to do to people online – actually that’s not a wholly terrible idea, is it?
The Airbnb Detective: This was SO much more interesting than I expected it to be – a profile of Airbnb’s Naba Banerjee, who’s the person responsible for helping Airbnb develop the tech that lets it identify people who are planning to host a party in their hosts’’ apartment, and how exactly they went about developing the tech. I appreciate that some of you might read this and think ‘SHE IS A COP HOW DARE YOU CELEBRATE HER’ which, you know, fine, but this is more of a ‘wow that’s a really interesting account of the technical and practical challenges involved in solving a specific problem’ than it is a ‘GO AIRBNB PROTECT THE LANDLORDS’ piece fwiw.
Masterclass Is Fcuked: I’d totally forgotten about the existence of Masterclass until I read this piece – in case you have too, let me refresh your memory. Masterclass is the training platform that was ubiquitous during lockdown and which offers the opportunity to learn specific skills from VERY FAMOUS EXPERTS – so, I don’t know, direction with Martin Scorsese, say, or fisting with the C0ck Destroyers (tbh I don’t think either of these were ever offered, but you get the gist) – for a fee. You may have wondered how the economics of this work – turns out, according to this article, they really don’t! This contains some astonishing details of insane profligacy, not least the detail about how they literally built a whole apartment set for Natalie Portman to deliver her ‘acting’ Masterclass on – I don’t think I will ever cease to be amazed at the way in which our current business model for so many things appears to be ‘throw an awful lot of money at people who at no point have demonstrated that they know what to do with it, and watch as they come up with interesting and innovative ways to p1ss it all away’.
LARPing and Violent Extremism: Ok, this is neither a longread nor particularly fresh, but I came across it this week and it made me laugh SO MUCH – did you know that the FBI produced a small guide a few months back to help its agents distinguish between ACTUAL TERRORISTS and, er, people enjoying a nice live action roleplay session? Would you like to read it? YOU’RE WELCOME! Honestly, this is proper beyond parody stuff.
Domain Names: A lovely Rest of World article looking at the tiny nations whose internet domains earn them big money – you’ll already know about the Christmas Islands and Tuvalu, but I hadn’t previously considered where .ai domains are registered – turns out it’s Anguilla, which now receives ⅓ of its entire monthly budget from revenues from domain names. This is lovely, and includes a rundown of all the tiny places making reasonable bank from urls.
Why Does Everyone Swear So Much In The Witcher 3?: Ok, you’ll need to be either really into videogame development or a big fan of the Witcher 3 to really get the most out of this, but if you tick either of those boxes then you will adore this piece in Eurogamer which takes a surprisingly deep dive into the process that led to the game’s wonderful collection of profane incidental dialogue.
Moving Beaches: Did you know that there is a massive international market in sand, and that loads of the beaches we think are natural aren’t in fact natural at all? This is a super-interesting read about something to which I have given literally NO thought (to whit, if you need sand, where do you get it from? And is all sand the same?) but which is a genuinely fascinating topic (and particularly-relevant for a variety of depressing environmental reasons).
Murdoch: There will be a lot written about Rupert Murdoch and his empire in the wake of his stepping back from NewsCorp, but I found this article by Conrad Black in Unherd (sorry, but) particularly interesting – not because it’s revealing, because it’s not, or because it’s well-written, because it’s not, but because of the insight it gives into the banality of thought of the very, very rich. Black’s observations on his old media rival are bland to the point of risibility, but contain the odd standout line – such as the frankly mad statement that “I’ve never had the impression that he is much interested in politics, other than in how they affect him, or culture, or hobbies”, which does rather make one wonder exactly what Conrad Black thinks ‘politics’ is all about.
Painting With AI: I thought this was a lovely piece in the New York Times, which acts as an interesting counterpoint to the earlier article about co-creating prose with The Machine – in this, contemporary US painter David Salle ‘collaborates’ with a specially-trained AI to generate a new work in his style, with the process documented throughout with images and commentary, explaining how the artist worked alongside the software to define and refine its outputs; I find this sort of Centaur-process-type-investigation-stuff (god I’m such a writer!) absolutely fascinating, regardless of the eventual quality of the outputs achieved, and this is no exception.
The Accidental Art of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater: I have, it’s fair to say, a reasonably high tolerance for stuff that might reasonably be considered ‘a load of pretentious spaff’ – that said, this article tested even my patience. That said, I also absolutely loved it, so see what you think. Jeremy Klemin writes about the obscure subculture that exists within the fandom of classic skateboarding videogame series Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, specifically around the concept of ‘improvisational’ play in which a player tries to achieve super-long combos while eschewing the ‘optimal’ routes set out by the level designers and by so doing achieves a weird, balletic state of ‘flow’ within the gamespace…look, there’s no way around it, this really is HYPERW4NKY but it’s also so so interesting if you’re curious about ideas of space and place and movement in virtual worlds, and how Borges relates to a Playstation2-era classic (so so so w4nky, honestly).
Watches: A little while ago my friend Paul arranged for us to go on a tour around Hatton Garden, specifically some of the locations rendered infamous by the gold heist that took place a few years back – it’s still a genuinely odd part of London, one of those weird ‘cities within a city’ (see also: the inns of court, every single London university, all the big markets) where you can see some genuinely weird stuff (and an awful lot of men looking INCREDIBLY furtive – selling – and an awful lot of other men looking very deliberately conspicuous – guarding). This is a BRILLIANT profile of the watch trade in Hatton Garden – the people, the patter, the prices – and frankly I now want someone to do a (good, though) film set in this exact milieu (but noone tell Guy Ritchie, please).
The Last Nazis: Ordinarily ‘GQ Magazine writes about Nazi hunters’ isn’t the sort of thing I’d bother to read or link to, but this is a wonderful, sensitive and far-more-restrained-than-expected piece of writing by Tom Lamont, who profiles the German officials engaged in seeking to track down the last remaining people who can be proven to have had practical, personal involvement in the Holocaust and bring them to some sort of justice. This is, honestly, such a brilliant article which raises all the right questions about responsibility and where it can reasonably be said to end, the likely limits of personal knowledge, and what we are doing when we pursue justice. So much of this deals with the mechanics and logistics of horror, the very practical ‘banality of evil’ – it reminded me a lot of Amis’s novel ‘The Zone of Interest’, whose characters are in the main Nazis engaged in the administration of a concentration camp, and which features a line which kept coming back to me as I read this; I paraphrase slightly, but there’s a certain scene in which two Nazi officers are walking to some evening function at the Governor’s mansion overlooking the camp, seeing the billowing smoke from the chimneys, and one says to the other “You know, Hans, without the proper context I can see how this might look entirely reprehensible”.
Ballard: I have always loved Ballard’s writing, ever since I was a teen, and personally-speaking I’ve always thought of him as rather a great prose stylist; turns out my opinion isn’t necessarily universally-held, but it’s defended nicely here by Tom McCarthy who writes persuasively about all the idiosyncratic qualities that made his works and the way he wrote them great. There’s a certain thematic callback here to the ‘writing with AI’ piece and the data-led bellcurve, should you wish to perceive it.
Homesick Chernobyl: I thought this essay – about Chernobyl and home and place and memory and addiction and coming home – was absolutely beautiful, and I think you will too.
I Remember Arthur: This is all about suicide, basically, which may or may not determine whether you want to read it – for those that do, though, it’s by Kevin Sampsell and it’s about his friend Arthur who killed himself, and reflections on why that was and how that feels, and this took me quite a long time to read because I had to stop at various points to basically void myself with tears but, that small caveat aside, I think it is wonderful.
Man Called Fran: Finally this week, a short story about plumbing. I promise you that this is PERFECT and frankly it ought to win awards. PLEASE READ THIS..
I was going to try and write the intro in the style of Russell Brand this week as a sort of ‘topical’ riff, but then I realised that a) that wouldn’t actually be funny in the slightest given the horrible stuff he’s alleged to have done; and b) that the rest of Curios is already written in a style that might best be described as ‘somewhat overdone’ and that you probably didn’t need me doing a tuppeny-gorblimey act on top of all the garbage that is to come. You should be grateful, really – think how much WORSE this could have been!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you shouldn’t EVER trust ANYONE who wears trousers that tight.
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOUR FIRST RESPONSE TO THE BRAND STUFF IS ‘YES, BUT HOW CAN I USE THIS TO FCUK THE BBC?’ THEN YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, PT.1:
The Artificial Client: Those of you who work in advermarketingpr (or associated, adjacent, similarly-made-up ‘jobs’) will be aware of the unique and particular pain that comes from having ideas that you have SLAVED over (or, more likely, come up with in one of the endless, airless ‘brainstorms’ that constitute the risible pantomime that is ‘agency life’) considered, assessed and then finally dismissed out of hand by some double-figure-IQ-moron who’s spent the whole presentation staring at their phone and wouldn’t know decent creative if it bit them on the ar$e – it’s GREAT, isn’t it? Still, I appreciate that not all of you are lucky enough to have experienced this particular joy – but worry not! Now everyone can have their creative babies eviscerated before their very eyes thanks to this fun little AI-based toy/game thing, created by Dentsu in Amsterdam – click the link, choose the client persona you’d like to have analysing your work, upload the document you’d like critiqued and GO! There are three different critical viewpoints you can access – the ‘ruthless critic’, the ‘confused creative’ and the ‘idealistic dreamer’ – and they will happily analyse your UI design, your identity design or your TVC script in SECONDS to tell you exactly what is wrong with it, and even if you don’t happen to have a suitable bit of work to hand you can get the site to generate something for you which will then be eviscerated by the digital peanut gallery. This is obviously a silly toy, but it’s fun and nicely-made, and has a pleasing degree of polish to it, and whilst you OBVIOUSLY shouldn’t take any notice of anything that these AI personas tell you (no, you ARE a talented creative! Don’t listen to them!) it’s a decent reminder of the way in which you can use LLMs to critique and analyse written work and elicit feedback.
AI De Bono: Speaking of creativity – SEAMLESS! – you will all OBVIOUSLY be aware of Edward de Bono and his collection of multicoloured hats as a series of tools to develop creative ideas (in the unlikely event that you’re not – WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIVES?! – you can learn about the theory here); if it’s a technique that you use as part of the creative process, you might find this digital prototype thing useful. Matt Webb has been playing around with generative AI and has created this website which features a selection of rooms, each corresponding to one of de Bono’s different hats (you know what? I am sure it’s a decent theory and I am sure it makes all sorts of sense and can be genuinely helpful, but, equally, I really can’t get past the fcuking hats) and as such to a different technique for developing and interrogating ideas. Each room gives you the chance to talk through your thinking with a different AI interlocutor, each embodying a different way of thinking about ideas, which you can navigate between using the arrows in the bottom-right – so the Yellow room will give you positive feedback, the Blue room will interrogate the presentation of the idea, the White room is all about gathering facts…you get the idea. This is, at heart, just a selection of different conversations with a pre-prompted LLM, but, again, I think there’s something interesting about using the conversational interface as a means of interrogating one’s thinking.
Prices: Ok, this is…quite niche, and is only likely to be of practical use to you if you’re currently living in Austria – are any of you currently living in Austria? – but I really really like the thinking behind the project and figure that it might be something that could inspire similar projects elsewhere. You can read a full rundown of what this is and why it exists here but, in summary, inflation in Austria is, muchlike in the rest of Europe, going somewhat mental, and as such food prices are a real concern for many people. In response to this, the Austrian government committed to maintaining a database tracking food prices at different supermarkets across various product categories, to help citizens keep track of changing costs and to guard against price gouging by retailers…but they kept saying it was too hard, and would take too long, to do in any meaningful way. So one Mario Zechner decided to take matters into his own hands, and used all the various supermarket website APIs to set up his own price tracking website for literally every single grocery item sold by all the shops, and in so doing discovered that multiple retailers were colluding when it came to price rises, that they were taking advantage of ‘shrinkflation’ to screw consumers while raising prices, and a whole load of other stuff besides – which was picked up by the press, and let to an apparent shift in pricing behaviour by the supermarkets when the story was taken up by the Austrian competition authority. Which is, fine not HUGELY exciting as a story, but it is A VERY GOOD THING, and a lovely example of how nothing is ever as expensive, slow and complex as government (and specifically government digital departments) like to make out it is. Can someone do this in the UK, please? I know I ask this every week, but this one really is a good cause.
Collage Diffusion: Ok, ok, this is admittedly a *bit* crap, but I really like the potential inherent in the tech – it’s basically a layered AI image generator, which lets you create…er…layers within an image, making for a slightly more reactive and easy-to-control creative process – giving you a far greater degree of granular control over the individual elements within a composition (you don’t actually need me to explain this to you, do you? Er, sorry). Except this is running off a model that’s a couple of generations old, it feels like, and so everything you produce with it looks a *bit* like a potato, but this feels like it’s a feature that will end up coming to the other platforms sooner rather than later. Oh, and seeing as we’re on AI image generation, here’s the announcement about DallE-3 that’s launching in a few weeks’ time – the main takeaways here are the fact that it looks a whole load shinier, it can seemingly generate readable text, it has been guardrail hard to stop you creating images of famous people (BOO) or images ‘in the style of’ living artists (A Good Thing), and it’s apparently going to be easier to tweak individual elements within a generated image thanks to the interface being integrated with GPT. So that’s nice.
The History of Ukraine: It’s astonishing to think the war in Ukraine has been going on for 18 months now, and that it might well continue for at least as long again. This site is a celebration of the country’s history, presenting the events that have shaped Ukraine over the course of human history in a rather lovely timeline, focusing in particular on ‘previously unknown and unpublished findings about Ukraine that are not found in textbooks or Wikipedia. All materials on the website are the result of years of research in European archives, letters, and newspapers that were long ignored by “old school” historians.The value of these materials is that they prove that Ukraine has always been a full-fledged subject of European political relations. They also highlight Ukraine’s image as a victorious country with a rich history, culture, and achievements, which disproves the propagandistic narratives of our neighbor and the imposed image of a suffering country.” This is a gorgeous piece of webdesign.
We’re Safety Now Haven’t We: It’s rare that I find cause to celebrate the communications efforts of a national health and safety executive, but I think we should ALL applaud the work being done by the US’s Consumer Product Safety Commission in guardian the safety of North Americans via the medium of song. Yes, that’s right, while your BORING and DULL and STAID government communicates to you via tedious leaflets and yawnsome public information films, over in the US the CPSC has instead decided to communicate its ‘keep safe, don’t die!’ messaging via the medium of an entire album’s worth of safety-focused bangers – honestly, I am not joking, these songs are…quite good! From the oldschool hip-hop of ‘Protect Yo Noggin’, a paean to the importance of wearing a helmet when on a bike or scooter, to the remarkably-polished pop of ‘Going Off Like Fireworks’ (unsurprisingly all about the importance of not shooting yourself in the face with a Roman Candle), there’s a full record’s worth of safety-related bangers to enjoy, and which you can download if you like so that you can listen to them ALL THE TIME. This is just brilliant, from the upsetting name to the copy on the Page (“Death by firework is bad”) and I applaud everyone involved in its creation.
Punta: What do we think about ‘digital nomads’ these days? Are we pro? It does rather feel like it’s slightly less socially acceptable in 2023 to sit in a hammock on a Caribbean beach, getting paid 10x the national average wage to phone in a content calendar while you’re waited on hand and foot by the local service economy, but, equally, it seems like there’s still a significant number of people for whom the lifestyle continues to be aspirational and appealing. If you happen to be one of them, you might find this app useful – Punta sells itself as a ‘digital nomad hub’, which basically lets anyone self-styling themselves as such set up a profile on which they can share details of the sort of work they do, their travel plans, connect with and message other likeminded folk, and generally BUILD COMMUNITY (or, inevitably, attempt to use the app as some sort of unofficial Tinder analogue). Which I’m sure sounds lovely, but all I can think of as I type this is of how perfect this seemingly is for anyone who wants to stalk, rob and potentially murder digital nomads – so, er, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE GUYS.
The Ig-Nobel Awards 2023: I missed this last week, meaning I am LATE with this link and I am SORRY. Still, if you’ve not already had your fill of the annual ‘the most stupid academic research conducted in the past 12 months’ rundown, click the link and revel in the beautiful, pointless wonder of the pursuit of esoteric knowledge as embodied by these 10 projects – my personal favourite, and which I really don’t think received enough attention, is the work which ‘used cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.’ WHY?!?!?! WHAT POSSIBLE BENEFIT COULD THERE BE TO KNOWING THAT?! Infuriatingly, the actual research paper in question here is behind a paywall, meaning that I am currently unable to find out what the answer is to the question which I can tell is going to cause me no end of low-grade psychic pain for the remainder of the day.
Tamashell: A website which catalogues the multifarious different Tamagotchi designs that have appeared over the decades since the battery-operated ‘pets’ first appeared on the market – obviously this will mainly appeal to any of you with an obsessive fixation on 90s electronic toy design and will, perhaps, not *quite* grab the rest of you as much, but I find the endeavour generally heartwarming and particularly enjoyed this, from the ‘About’ page: “I decided to create this website after finding that while the internet was chock full of images of Tamagotchis, there really wasn’t a single source where I could find all of the different designs in once place. Understanding that there are hundreds of different shell designs released in different regions all over the world, I knew this would be a significant undertaking, but I also knew that it was a worthwhile endeavor in order to share information not easily attained elsewhere.” YES IT IS A WORTHWHILE ENDEAVOUR! THIS IS WHAT THE WEB IS FOR!
Twilly: Inexplicable-but-shiny-luxe-videogame-corner! We’re back in the world of luxury goods websites, this time with Hermes and this rather pleasing little (mobile-only) webgame, in which you inexplicably play as…a piece of ribbon, which is equally-inexplicably blowing around the streets of New York – guide the ribbon as it travels through the nicely-rendered 3d cityscape, collect some stuff, get a score, don’t win a prize! This is totally pointless and I have no idea exactly who it’s aimed at or how the doubtless-brilliant minds behind it think it’s going to help them flog more perfume – as ever with these things, tbh, can someone who works in the industry maybe explain the ROI of this stuff to me please? – but it is VERY pretty (the moving subway trains are a nice touch) and a pleasing 3 minute distraction from whatever horrible things are happening in your day-to-day life.
Ramen Haus: Do you remember Rotating Sandwiches? OF COURSE YOU DO IT WON THE TINY AWARD IT IS NOW WORLD-FAMOUS FFS! Anyway, this is like that, except instead of rotating sandwiches you are instead presented with photographs of bowls of ramen, also spinning gently in the digital non-breeze.
SwipeWipe: This is a nice idea, and a potentially-useful tool to encourage you to declutter your phone’s camera roll. SwipeWipe is an app that introduces a Tinder-like interface to your photos – you get presented with them one at a time, and made to choose whether to swipe right to keep them or swipe left to delete them forever, forcing you to determine whether or not they SPARK JOY or not. Which seems like a nice little gimmick, but immediately made me think of a dark extension to this where every day your phone presents you with a pair of contacts, or apps, or files, and you are forced to choose which to keep and which to delete FOREVER, which I think would introduce a neat element of fear and jeopardy into the otherwise-mundane daily interaction with your device.
MSCHF x Reebok: On the one hand., I am slightly surprised that this is (afaict) the first big-name brand to collaborate with MSCHF on something; on the other, I am slightly surprised that they have done this as, to my mind at least, it rather cheapens their brand (but then again, what do I know? They are lauded as some of the most creative digital stunt people around at the moment, and I write an overlong newsletter to an audience of what I am fairly certain is tens of people, so perhaps I should just wind my neck in tbh). Anyway, MSCHF have partnered with Reebok to release a special edition of the company’s legendary ‘Pump’ trainer which instead of the traditional single pump (which as anyone who has ever actually seen a pair of the shoes in the wild can attest, makes literally NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER to the shoe’s fit) instead has NINE OF THE FCUKERS, meaning you can literally inflate any part of the shoe’s interior to your exact specifications and (probably) jump ten foot in the air or something. These look VERY silly, but in a knowing enough way that they will inevitably become fashion must-haves amongst a particular coterie of dreadful fashion cnuts.
Sh1trentals: OH YES. This is a great idea – although obviously it would be a nightmare to run and administer, for which reason I can’t imagine it’ll be a going concern for that long. Sh1tRentals is a website for renters to share information and details about bad rental properties and bad landlords, to help guard against exploitation and price gouging and generally, well, sh1tty behaviour on the part of the rentier class. To quote the site’s fouonder, “This website is about giving power back to renters. As a renter, landlords and real estate agents have access to so much information about you, but you don’t get that same level of transparency from them. Real estate agents often provide photos of properties that are years out of date, and don’t tell you what it’s like to actually live there. You don’t get to enter into a new rental knowing how difficult it might be for you to request basic repairs to be completed. This website is here to help. It will always be free, and there will be no ability for landlords or real estate agents to pay for reviews to be removed. Do your part to help your fellow renters by writing an anonymous review of your rental property or real estate agency. At this stage, I’ll be reviewing each submission each night and uploading the submissions to the page, so if you don’t see your review immediately, don’t stress!” As far as I can tell this is an Australian thing, and I am unsure whether they are accepting international submissions, but, well, if you have a landlord you need to warn the world about why not slag them off with impunity on this site?
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOUR FIRST RESPONSE TO THE BRAND STUFF IS ‘YES, BUT HOW CAN I USE THIS TO FCUK THE BBC?’ THEN YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, PT.2:
Stained Glass: I’ve always thought that I’d quite like to spend a few days making stained glass – getting high off the lead fumes, maybe illuminating some manuscripts in my spare time…sadly I am yet to receive the call from the Abbot (that’s how it works, right?), and so I’m having to make do with this digital version, which is very pleasing indeed and which lets you click to create your own variegated glass masterpieces, and which I highly recommend you use with the volume up as the sound of breaking/snapping glass that accompanies your every click here is just *delicious*. This is very, very therapeutic, so maybe save this for Monday morning when you might need it a bit more.
The Vulgar Wave: This is a couple of months old now, but it did the rounds again this week in the wake of the Brand stuff and the reevaluation it seemed to spark amongst the British media of the 00s and the very particular way in which popular culture manifested itself across media for a good five years or so – specifically, the way it was characterised by prurient sexuality and a sort of general grubbiness. The link takes you to a Twitter thread which pulls together various examples of The Way Things Were Then and WOW do some of these hit differently at a distance of 15 years or so – any of you who aren’t from the UK really should take a moment to enjoy this selection of clips from TV shows, old adverts and the odd music video, which really give you a feel for the prevailing mood of the era. This is a hell of a selection which runs the gamut from accepted classics of the genre (Rebecca Loos masturbates a pig to happy completion on English TV!) to deep cuts (an advert featuring an unpleasantly-sexualised talking boiler!) and gives a pleasingly-lumpy picture of the odd cultural topography of The Past (and, possibly, a clue as to why the generations that grew up during and immediately after this period are perhaps a touch more censorious than their forebears).
All The Poe: This is a great resource – all Edgar Allen Poe, all in once place, pulled together by one Joshua Maldin, who writes: “This is a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, some 130 pieces, presented with optimized legibility and no ads or trackers.” What more could you possibly want? If nothing else this site looks sufficiently sober that you could probably get away with spending a significant chunk of the day just reading Poe short stories in the office without anyone realising.
Couture To The Max: What were YOU doing at 7? I expect you can’t remember, what with it being a fcuking AGE ago (so OLD, so decrepit, so close to death!), but I’d hazard a rough guess that it probably involved a bit of school, a bit of playing, and an obsessional interest in something like dinosaurs or Polly Pocket – which, frankly, demonstrates exactly the sort of crippling lack of ambition and long-term goal setting which has seen you end up where you are. Contrast yourself with Max Alexander, who at the tender age of not-even-8 has already, er, established himself as an actual fashion designer and had a runway show in LA. This is Max’s website, which I am sharing with you because…well, in all honesty, because there’s something sort of wildly-sinister about the whole thing. I mean, just read this: “Max Alexander was born in 2016 in Los Angeles, California to a Canadian father and American mother. He graduated from Little Dolphins by the Sea, an arts-based preschool, in 2021. During his time there, he was heavily influenced by the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Yayoi Kusama, Frida Kahlo and Alexander Calder. Max announced to his family in 2020 that he was a dress maker. Encouraged by his mother, also an artist, Max began designing, draping and sewing, and launched his Couture to the Max label in 2021.” I mean, fine, it is of course entirely possible that Max is an intensely-precocious genius and that he really WAS influenced by the luminaries there named; it’s, er, at least *equally* possible, though, that his parent(s) have seen an opportunity here and have grabbed it hard with both hands while their eyes do that creepy Scrooge McDuck dollar signs thing. The quote from People Magazine – “Boy, 7, Who Says He Was Gucci in a Past Life” – doesn’t *scream* ‘normal child’, and if you scroll down to the bottom and see Max’s designs you may be…confused as to the adulation being apparently bestowed upon him. Still, whatever is going on here I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that poor Max is the driving force behind it, and as such let us wish him well in his pursuit of couture glory (and in the inevitable, messy process of divorcing his family which I predict will kick off around 2029).
Antique Book Patterns: Via Kottke, these are lovely – a Flickr album, compiled by the University of Bergen in Norway, which compiles the patterned endpages of a selection of books published between 1890-1930. Which, fine, you might not immediately think of as being a gorgeous aesthetic treasure trove, but you would be WRONG because that is exactly what it is. SO much excellent design inspiration in here for any of you who are interested in that sort of thing.
Simulation: This is interesting – you remember that ‘AI Showrunner’ from a few months ago, that software which purported to let anyone spin up an entire AI-generated episode of a TV show based on a few simple parameters? OF COURSE YOU DO! Well the company behind the tech has been doing some press this week, which is how I stumbled across its website, and WOW is this simultaneously very scifi and also very creepy and pretty unbelievable! The pitch the company’s making is effectively that it can create AI ‘agents’ which can operate with a degree of autonomy within a defined virtual environment – so you can effectively set up your sandbox, invent your principal players, wind them up and watch them go. “At Simulation Inc, we’re redefining the contours of existence, conjuring a universe where the line between the physical and the virtual blurs into oblivion. Our mission, as audacious as it is intriguing, is to birth a new kind of life: the world’s first genuinely intelligent AI virtual beings. Each one, a mirror of the human psyche, navigating the tumultuous seas of emotions and experiences in a digital cosmos of our creation.” Exactly how The Simulation think that that is going to magically going to result in compelling narratives that people actually want to watch is, at present, unclear, but it’s worth watching the videos on the website landing page to get a feel for the madly-overblown way they talk about the simulated agents and their ‘freedom’ to act independent of direction – scroll down to the bottom of the Page to discover the three formats that the company is apparently working on right now, which run the gamut from, er, space scifi to space cowboy scifi to ‘planet of the apes, basically’ scifi, and sigh quietly as you realise that we are apparently condemned to consume the same media forever (just AI-generated and, probably, worse).
Nuclear War Simulator: Have you ever wanted to run an incredibly-detailed simulation of what exactly would happen if the people with access to the nuclear buttons all simultaneously decided to say ‘oh, fcuk it, we’re all screwed anyway, we may as well use these fcuking warheads’ and set them racing across the skies? GREAT! Nuclear War Simulator lets you do exactly that – it’s a PROPER piece of software and as such requires a download, but once you’ve installed it you have SO MUCH POWER at your fingertips! “Nuclear war simulator is a detailed realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the questions: what will happen if Russia and the United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals? What will happen to the population of a country in a nuclear war? What will happen to me and my family? You can design warheads, missiles, and carriers, place them on the map and execute attack plans to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what the consequences are. Using a high-resolution population density map and realistic weapons effects like blast, heat, and radiation you can make an estimate of how many people will die in a conflict. Individual humans can be placed on the map, travel, and take shelter to analyze the effects and estimate injuries and survival probability.” You might argue that this is all a bit macabre – and you’d probably be right, but, be honest, who hasn’t wanted to make the massed ranks of the world’s populations run for cover, like ants from the glare of a magnifying glass, as terrifying thermonuclear death rains from the skies? NO FCUKER, etc!
Are You A Voicecel?: No, you are not, because it is a made-up concept that doesn’t exist! Still, if you are a man and want another reason to feel slightly-inadequate then why not upload a clip of yourself speaking to this website which will apparently then analyse your voice and tell you whether or not it is ‘squeaky and unaesthetic’. This has obviously been made by some very confused young men and as such one probably shouldn’t point and laugh but, well, LOL! LADS HAVE YOU EVER ACTUALLY HEARD FAMED INTERNATIONAL SEX SYMBOL DAVID BECKHAM SPEAK? Anyway, try it out for yourself and see if you too can attain the exalted status of ‘certified chad’ based on, er, having a deep voice. Dear God I am SO GLAD I am not a teenager in 2023.
The Metamorphosis: Or, specifically, ‘a not particularly good attempt at creating a short film based on Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ using text-to-video AI tools’ – this is obviously a complete mess because, well, the tech is nowhere near good enough to produce anything other than a hideous, inchoate mass of indeterminate shapes, but at the same time there’s the odd frame here and there among the five minute runtime that hints at some sort of potentially-interesting aesthetic and stylistic possibilities beginning to be thrown up by these systems – quite a few of the shots have a very distinct ‘cut scene from a late-90s PC game’ feel to them which I find oddly appealing.
RailCams: Do you like trains? Do you like trains A LOT? Frankly if the answer is ‘yes’ then it’s entirely possible that you’ll already be aware of this site which is an INSANELY comprehensive directory of train-related webcams from around the world, over 450 of them to be precise. Want to watch freight trains slowly moving backwards and forwards just outside Zurich? OF COURSE YOU DO! Want to spend a bit of time checking out what’s happening on the platforms at Riomaggiore in Italy? I MEAN, YES! My word, then, is there a set of train-based treats in store for you.
Unusual Internet: I really like this – Unusual Internet is a site that collects examples of less-than-typical user interfaces, displaying them in a manner that itself is somewhat unusual: “The interfaces of most websites follow the same design principles over and over again. In short, websites tend to look the same. The interfaces are simplified, the design is standardised. We rarely come across provocative or unusual interfaces. Designers should experiment more and try something new. Out of the comfort zone and into the unusual. To achieve this, the »Unusual Internet« course took a close look at UI elements (buttons, typography, scrolling, etc.). Students experimented with these elements on a weekly basis. A selection of the experiments can be seen here.” There are some lovely examples buried in here – you have to click around a bit, but there are a few wonderful examples of interesting and unusual webdesign to explore (including this one, which is my personal favourite I think).
Interpreted: Ooh, I really like this – an art project which combines the analogue and the digital to rather beautiful effect, with artist Jonny Scholes creating woven tapestries depicting an entire day’s news as interpreted by an AI: “Drawing on a decade of experience as a software developer, Scholes has created an automated program which continually reviews all news articles as they are published around the world. An AI tool is employed to create a single image that represents each day. Using generative art techniques, the days are collected into months, and incorporated into a unique tapestry design. The result is autonomously sent off to be woven and eventually delivered by post to Jonny Scholes’ studio.” The resulting tapestries, which you can see on the site, have a wonderfully deep-fried quality which links them back to the digital materials that were the starting point for their creation, and there’s something rather beautiful about the oddly-70s-ish aesthetic contrasted with the modernity of the tech at play here. Some of the work’s available for sale, should anyone fancy saying thanks for a decade of words and links by buying me a lovely tapestry gift.
Timelineify: Listen to an artist’s catalogue in chronological order thanks to this Spotify tool – NO, YOU’RE WELCOME!
Learn To Code With LinkedIn: We are, thankfully, now at a distance of a decade from the boom in ‘LEARN TO CODE!’ exhortations, and people are now a little more realistic about the employment prospects available to you as a result of your being able to code some basic HTML and Java – what with the imminent AI-ifinication of a significant proportion of the bottom end of the dev market it’s perhaps not QUITE the career silver bullet you might have been sold back in the day, but, equally, having a basic working knowledge of How Some Of This Stuff Works is genuinely useful (I say that as someone who can’t write a fcuking line, by the way, but who can just about understand the principles behind it). Should you have decided that NOW IS THE TIME for you to finally master the Dark Arts (not THOSE ones ffs) then you could do worse than check out this selection of free learning resources available of the world’s worst social network – this is available til mid-December, so there’s plenty of time for you to give it a go.
A Trillion Tiny Little Poems: This is rather lovely. The developer describes it as such: “a trillion / quite tiny / little poems generates untold billions of quite tiny little poems in a miniature haiku format of 4 then 3 then 4 syllables…or at least it tries too but sometimes the source poems get their meter completely wrong for reasons i am simply unable to explain (reason/explanation: i am quite poor at poems)…rather than a trillion tiny poems there’s only 5,268,024, but maybe 5,268,024 is the secret definition of a quite tiny little trillion or somethging, maybe, perhaps, possibly. anyway occassionally it blurts out something surprisingly beautiful though more often as not it just churns out rubbish” Many of these are gibberish, but that makes the occasional glimpse of meaning that crops up even more special – I just got this, and may now get it tattooed somewhere intimate: “some poems were / bleak roses / quite the relief”
The British Seaside Simulator: Published just too late to make last week’s Curios, this is the latest bit of silliness from Matt Round who has coded a web EXPERIENCE that lets you enjoy the peculiar purgatory that is the British seaside – specifically, the British seaside as experienced from the inside of a slightly-too-warm estate car in which you are having a desultory ‘picnic’ (limp, sweaty cheese sandwiches on wholemeal bread) as the horizontal rain beats across your windscreen and the sound of a provincial radio DJ whimpers tinnily into your ears. This is really beautifully-observed (the radio stations in particular are a lovely touch), although it’s so intensely well-realised that you might find it…a bit depressing tbh.
Fridge Floppers: Move the fridge. That’s it. No more, no less. MOVE THE FRIDGE! This is a very enjoyable little puzzle game which has a pleasingly-kinetic feel to the controls and movement.
Pacman The Roguelike: What might Pacman look like were it designed now, and had all the needless bells and whistles of the modern triple-A game experience grafted onto its basic gameplay? It might look a little like this tbh – a really smart play on the traditional Pacman which adds pointless joke mechanics like ‘companions’ and ‘crafting’ and ‘levelling’ which initially feels like a simple gag but which you realise as you play actually creates a pretty interesting new play experience whilst also working on some level as SATIRE. This is far better than it needs to be, and a really fun way of killing 30 minutes before you can get to the pub/back on the pipe (delete per your personal preferences).
Connections: You know the Only Connect ‘wall’ game which the NYT ripped off earlier this year? YES YOU DO STOP LYING TO ME! This website lets you make your own, bespoke versions of the game to share with friends – select your categories, select your words, and then share the link with anyone you fancy to see whether they’re smart enough to crack your doubtless-fiendish conundra. If any of you fancy making one of these and sharing it with me, I can chuck it in next week’s Curios for THE COMMUNITY to test themselves against.
A Little Game Called Mario: This is an interesting idea – a collaborative project to create a fan-made Mario-a-like game, with the twist that the code repo is open which means anyone can go in and tweak the gameplay, level design, etc, making the whole thing a massively-collaborative endeavour. The resulting title is a messy combination of trad Mario mechanics and a lot of VERY HARD platforming bits (and, bizarrely, a level that appears to have been inspired by Dance Dance Revolution) including quite a lot of bullet-hell-style bits; basically this is an exercise in level design sadism and experimental, barely-functional mechanics, but it’s fascinating to see how the different people across the community approach level creation. There are LOADS of different examples of creative design in here, so it’s worth having a bit of an explore and a play with a range of different levels to get a feel for it.
Ad Nauseam: Finally this week, via Rosie & Faris, comes this rather fun little platformer themed around working in an ad agency. SHOOT THE CLIENT! DODGE THE FEEDBACK! SEE IF YOU CAN LEAVE THE OFFICE BEFORE MIDNIGHT DURING A PITCH WEEK! This is rather good, and you should 100% dedicate 20m or so to trying to complete it.
Falling Down The Internet Hole: A *delicious* Tumblr compiling links to sites with a particular, vaguely-old-school, often Geocities-ish aesthetic – this really is a portal to some top-notch web vibes and some EXCELLENT odd internet, I highly recommend giving this one a click.
Obscure Videogames: Sharing screenshots and gifs and marketing materials from old games you might not have heard of – there is some GOLD in here, but if nothing else I urge you all to click and scroll down just far enough so you can enjoy the truly majestic 16-bit graphical representation of a wrestler ripping their leotard off which, honestly, is practically erotic.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
Supinatra: Impressive-if-creepy-and-a-bit-body-horror-y makeup and accessory design by Russian artist Maria Luneva (via Blort).
Surface of Wikipedia: Created to act as a sort of a negative impression of the storied ‘Depths of Wikipedia’, this Insta account instead celebrates the incredibly mundane on Wikipedia – you will be genuinely amazed at some of the things documented here that apparently have Wikipedia pages (the concept of ‘something’, for example – WHY DOES THAT NEED A WIKIPEDIA PAGE?), and this is another in the long, long list of reasons why Wikipedians are, honestly, some of the most magically-peculiar people on the planet.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
Leftwing Britain: Lol, ok, not quite, but this is genuinely interesting information which was published this week as part of the annual publication of the British Social Attitudes survey, now in its 40th year, which tracks public opinion on a range of issues, and which this year threw up some interesting data on how exactly the British think of poverty, opportunity, social mobility and the role of the state and the individual. This is a really good piece of analysis by Sam Freedman, who looks at the numbers and the surprising conclusions that it’s possible to draw from them – to whit, that people in the UK are increasingly likely to believe that state intervention to reduce income inequalities is A Good Thing, and that there is a parallel rise in the numbers of people who believe that greater public spending and state intervention would be of benefit to the country – there’s SO much interesting stuff here digging into where people sit on a left-right spectrum, and how that varies by age, and how the numbers perhaps don’t look quite as one might expect, and why that might be, and why (fingers crossed, eh?) the Tory party lurching further to the right after its hopefully-inevitable electoral defeat next year will see it fcuk itself even further into the sun from an electability perspective. This is interesting AND useful, and to to be honest if you find this interesting you could do worse than check out the whole report here.
The Noughties: I know a couple of people who have slept with Russell Brand – I am aware that they are not in an exclusive club – and while there was never any indication from them that they had anything other than a splendid time in the man’s company, I can’t say that this weekend’s revelations came as a huge shock to me. What has been interesting is the speed with which the media has rushed to condemn the prevailing culture of the rough 2004-12 era (see the link to ‘Vulgar Britain’ earlier on), and the number of pieces that have sprung up all doing the same hand-wringing bit, often from people who I remember full well being very much ‘of the establishment’ at the time and who I don’t recall being anywhere near so censorious when they were enjoying the gak back in 2006. Anyway, the main link here is to Zoe Williams in the Guardian, who is very good on the broad era but who, oddly, fails to mention the Guardian’s own role in elevating that sort of culture by giving Brand a column for years when he was at the height of his ‘jellied eels and fingering and Proust, oh my!’; schtick; if you’re in the market for more, then Sarah Ditum (yes, I know, but) in Unherd (yes, I know, but) is also good on the prevailing culture of the time; and this thread by Caspar Salmon does a good job of deconstructing the relationship between Brand and laddism and how both evolved as a reaction to the perceived ‘threat’ to traditional masculinity posed by the rise of (at least the appearance of) feminism in the popular culture of the 90s. I had a genuinely odd (and not wholly pleasant) moment this weekend, when I saw this story about Noel Fielding and Pixie Geldof from 2007 doing the rounds and I realised that it was entirely plausible that the story was placed by the PR agency where I was working at the time – it didn’t feel…great, I must say. This tweet by Rob Palk resonated with me quite a lot.
GPT and Jobs: Another week, another link to Ethan Mollick’s newsletter (it really is excellent, I offer no apologies) – in this post, Mollick looks at new research from Harvard University and Boston Consulting Group (which this week inked a deal with Anthropic to integrate Claude into its service offerings, and which, it’s fair to say, has something of a vested interest in making this stuff look like THE BEST POSSIBLE FUTURE) which seems to show that workers using LLMs as part of their workflows are faster, more efficient and (in the main) produce ‘higher quality’ work (as assessed by human peers) than those working without LLMs (as ever with this stuff, this is just ONE study; also, the effects, as seems to regularly be the case, are most pronounced when it comes to less-competent workers). Which may or may not interest you, fine, but I’ve been having to do a bit of work around the whole ‘how can we use this stuff to make more money?’ question and there really is some baseline practical stuff that you can implement which I reckon can shave 10% off general admin time for most bullsh1t white collar jobs like yours and mine. Anyway, this is worth bookmarking for next time you need to have an argument with IT about unblocking GPT from your machine.
Simulating HIstory With GPT: I enjoyed this a lot – another piece examining some of the ways in which LLMs can be integrated into teaching practice in interesting and creative ways, here Benjamin Breen describes some of the ways in which he’s used GPT in his classes to get students to engage critically with the study of history, and to help get them used to research and fact-checking in ways that are possibly more creatively-engaging than your traditional classroom methods. To quote Breen: “I’m envisioning an assignment in which my students will simulate the experience of being sold flawed copper by Ea-nāṣir, a real-life shady copper merchant in Mesopotamia circa 1750 BCE (one who, in recent years, has unexpectedly become a meme online). Crucially, this is not just about role-playing as an angry customer of Ea-nāṣir — or as the man himself, which is also an option. As illuminating as the simulations can be, the real benefit of the assignment is in what follows. First, students will print out and annotate the transcript of their simulation (which runs for twenty “turns,” or conversational beats) and carefully read through it with red pens to spot potential factual errors. They will then conduct their own research to correct those errors. They’ll then write their findings up as bullet points and feed this back into ChatGPT in a new, individualized and hopefully improved version of the prompt that they develop themselves. This doesn’t just teach them historical research and fact-checking — it also helps them develop skills for working directly with generative AI that I suspect will be valuable in future job markets.” I think this is such a clever way of using an LLM, and the sort of thing that might useful be adapted for all sorts of similar purposes in other industries or areas of study.
How To Make Those Spiral Image Things Using AI: Yes, I know that you’re BORED of the visual trick already, but be aware that normies probably haven’t seen it yet and as such there’s probably some decent mileage to be made in being the first to adapt this for a billboard or print campaign (for a brand with the right logo, this could look rather cool I think). Anyway, this article contains an explanation as to how it works and how you can do it yourself, along with a link to an external site that can help you knock an image together – and here’s another one, should you want one.
Your Car Talks To You: This is a piece looking at how integrating natural language tech into self-driving cars lets the vehicles communicate what they are doing any why in simple, easy-to-parse language, helping us better understand what the machine is ‘thinking’ at any given time, and offering an easily-comprehensible rationale for each driving decision it takes – which is interesting from the point of view of cars, fine, but also struck me as a neat illustration of the most exciting power of LLMs, specifically their ability to act as near-universal translation tools. There’s something genuinely exciting about the imminent arrival of multimodal AI which will let us start to attempt to get The Machine to explain the world to, and the things that we will be able to build on top of that tech – the ability to analyse video and audio using conversational interfaces is going to be transformational, I think.
Bard Updates: Bard is by a long way the least-good of the big name LLMs, but it does have one or two things going for it (multilanguage support and the ability to analyse/read images, specifically) – and now it’s been given a host of updates, including the ability to plug into your personal Google Suite and ‘analyse’ your information and data, so that you can ask it questions about your email inbox, say, or get it to find, collate and summarise specific types of file from your GDrive. Except, per this New York Times review which is an exquisitely-embarrassing read from start to finish, it doesn’t actually seem to work properly, or indeed at all. Still, early days and it’s worth looking at the updated feature list as it gives a decent indication of the broad direction of travel of this stuff and the sorts of things that will be coming to the next versions of GPT et al soon.
China, AI and Student Labour: I know I’ve featured multiple pieces in recent months which look at the human labour that sits behind China’s AI efforts, but I make no apologies for including another one – this is Rest of World’s take, which focuses in particular on the way in which AI companies are effectively co-opting the country’s students to do the tedious, repetitive data-labelling tasks required to train LLMs, GANs and other generative AI systems, and is a convenient reminder of the fact that each and every one of these systems is on some level built on the labour of people who it’s likely were being paid somewhere in the region of the square root of fcuk-all for their time.
The Female Reciters of Clubhouse: This is SO interesting, and one of those fascinating stories about technology finding a specific, niche use that its creators almost certainly never envisaged. Lockdown-era darling Clubhouse (you remember Clubhouse, don’t you? “We’ve reinvented phonecalls and broadcast radio; yes, that’s right, we’re now worth $10bn”) limps along, having recently announced its latest pivot to audio messaging a few short weeks ago, but has unexpectedly found itself being used by a nascent community of young Muslim women who are using the platform as a place to recite the verse of the Qur’an in a safe space and with a woman-only audience.
Being 13 (and a Girl): I have recent found myself wondering whether my generation (I am ‘young GenX’, whatever that means) is the first which hasn’t found itself hitting middle-age and wishing it was young again – I currently look at How Things Are and How Things Seem To Be Going and, honestly, I would rather eat my own face than be 17 right now, but I imagine that had I been 43 in 1997 I might have felt rather differently and have bitten your hand off were you to offer me the chance to go back to my youth. This superb New York Times piece looks at the experience of being a teenage girl in New York in 2023 – the author, Jessica Bennett, spent a year recording the lives and feelings and emotions of a coterie of 13 year old girls, who shared their thoughts with her via diaries and voicenotes each week, and whose lives are here presented as a patchwork view of ‘what it is like to be young right now’. OBVIOUSLY this is not in any way representative of The Whole World, and New York is not America, let alone the rest of the world, but at the same time it’s hard to imagine that the experiences of any other 13 year old girls in the West being significantly different, and as such this feels like a decent snapshot of a certain facet of youth experience here at the fag end of modernity. I can’t speak for you, but, honestly, I can’t pretend that the vast majority of this sounds anything other than intensely miserable. Poor the kids.
2Girls1Bottle: This has been widely shared this week, with a degree of reverence that, personally, I think feels a *touch* out of place – still, see what YOU think. This is a profile of TikTok ‘creators’ Mixie and Munchie in The Face, two London women who’ve built a following on the app by posting videos of themselves making cocktails, silently, in fast food joints. Which, you know, is fine! It’s a bit! First rule of social media – find a thing, stick to it, double down, know your niche! Content 101! Except, well, this piece goes on to treat the schtick with the wide-eyed reverence of someone frotting themselves senseless over the Abramovich show (about which I am similarly unimpressed fwiw), featuring analysis like: “In a video posted on 11th July 2023, Mixie rolls fake ice cubes like dice on the table. She holds one up, beauty guru-style, using the inside of her palm to pull focus like Jeffree Star or NikkieTutorials might. There are no numbers on the ice cubes, but the gesture is clear: these are the winning “dice”. It’s a bizarrely soothing experience, like watching someone divining the future from chicken bones in an internet age. For another video, they go pastoral. Munchie grinds an Oreo in a pestle and mortar then sprinkles the dust into a medium-sized pot of what appears to be dirt. Daintily, she digs into the biscuit-dust and pseudo-soil, then eats it. It has the same appeal as being a child and creating a potion, or actually eating earth in your garden.” Do you…do you maybe think that we’re possibly analysing stuff on the web TOO MUCH? When I was at college, some friends of mine and I became briefly obsessed with the idea of cucumbers as a symbol of…something or other (I forget what, exactly) and for a month or so took to placing them EVERYWHERE as a sort of running gag (that didn’t work because no fcuker noticed them, but webs) – I don’t think that would have warranted a deep-dive critical analysis, and I personally don’t think this stuff does either. Maybe, just maybe, we should stop attempting to deconstruct everything kids do on the web? Maybe they’re just fcuking around? MAYBE IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MEAN ANYTHING AT ALL AND THE JOKE IS IN FACT ON YOU, THE FACE!
Fictional Brands: Such an interesting article looking at the practice of creating fictional brands for film and TV shows – so, for example, ‘Duff’ on the Simpson’s, or the 50s-inspired faux-products in Wes Anderson’s latest film.
Weather Influencers: Another piece from Rest of World, this one looking at the growing number of hyperlocal weather ‘influencers’ in India, who are bringing a centuries-old practice of predicting rainfall for their village and its immediate environs into the 21st century thanks to smartphones and readily-available weather data. I think I want a name for this sort of thing – the very ‘first novel in the Sprawl Trilogy’ low-rent Gibsonian vibe of centuries-old customs married to modern tech means, like someone doing the I-Ching using an app on their smartwatch.
Ernie Barnes: A profile of an artist whose work you’ll recognise even if you don’t know their name – Ernie Barnes painted The Sugar Shack, one of the most iconic (sorry) and widely-reproduced pieces of North American Black art of the 20th Century, and this profile looks at his life and work and the way in which his approach to both the practice and sale of art enabled the distribution of his works through affordable backchannels to African American households the length and breadth of the States. Also, he was a pro basketball player! Some people are just too talented, it’s most unfair.
The Fake IPL: This is a CRAZY story – did you know that there’s a lucrative Russian gambling market that works by effectively running fake cricket games, 24/7, and running rigged books on them? This is honestly jaw-dropping – the scale of the operations described is insane, as is the general principal of ‘setting up an entirely-faked cricket league purely for the purposes of being able to run a book on it’, and even if you broadly disapprove of, you know, the crime and the people trafficking and the gambling, you sort-of have to admire the chutzpah and the sheer ambition on display here.
Who Deserves To Eat At Noma?: Yes, I know, you read all the ‘what it’s like to eat at the world’s best restaurant’ pieces 15 years ago when they were first published – BUT, Noma is going to close soon and it will never exist again, and it’s always nice to read someone’s account of eating – and not totally enjoying – a meal that I am never going to be able to experience. I liked this essay a lot, despite the general sense of (self-?)loathing exhibited by the author throughout.
The Berkeley Hotel Hostage: A piece from 20 years ago, all about Douglas Adams and his writers’ block, and how he was once cured of it by basically being kidnapped and kept in a hotel by his publishers’ until he’d finally delivered what he owed them, but also about the weird horror of being captured (kidnapped, again, to an extent) by one’s own success.
Soft Spotted Animal: A beautiful essay about the body and obsession and pathologies and control and loss and picking at yourself until there are holes all over you. Horrible and wonderful and sad, this, by Ellie Eberlee.
Index of Porosity: ANOTHER beautiful essay (really, though, this is A Good Week for high-quality prose) about music and death and love and AIDS and funerals and memory; I want to describe this as ‘crisp and elegant’, though I have no fcuking idea as to why.
All My Fathers: Heredity, generations, ancestry and family, wrapped up in recollections of three generations of men that preceded her by Lee Reilly.
La Dolce Vita: Tanya Bush spends a summer in Italy, working in an agriturismo where each week a group of North American tourists descent to learn to cook, or to play at learning to cook, and to eat – Bush is employed both as kitchen help and as bulwark between the Italian host/organisers and the tourists, and the piece recounts her increasingly-bleak experience as the Summer passes and the atmosphere becomes more oppressive…I didn’t think I’d hugely enjoyed this when I finished it, but it’s stuck with me all week – personally I think it works a lot better if you read it as a slightly-oblique horror story, but see what you think.
On Silence: Finally this week, it seems apposite to finish with this essay by Ella Bassist which looks back at her life and the way men have repeatedly treated her and the Me Too moment and what happened, and didn’t happen, next. It is brilliant, but bleak: “In learning how to write about sh1tty (and litigious) men, now I know to say, “I remember this happened, and that, in my opinion, it happened like this.” I know to acknowledge the possibility that what happened, happened only to me. I also know that only two of us were there, that one of us gets to be believed, and that no matter what I say, someone else can say I’m lying and sue me for libel.”
HI EVERYONE HI HAPPY FRIDAY! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I am trying to stay positive before I have to spend a portion of the weekend reading Elon Fcuking Musk’s fcuking biography (there are strong professional reasons why this is necessary; I am not *that* sort of masochist) – how are YOU? What is going on in YOUR world?
Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to tell me – we don’t have that sort of relationship, after all – but this is the sort of ‘caring interaction’ I am increasingly informed is required if you want to ‘grow your newslettering community’. Am I doing it right?
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if any of you have any JUICY INFORMATION as to exactly how many people the BP guy was boning then I am ALL EARS.
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Chat2024: I was previously pretty relaxed about next year’s US elections – and tbh I’m still relaxed, it’s not my fcuking problem and we’re all going to die anyway so, well, wevs! – but over the course of the past month or so I have become…somewhat more concerned that several tens of millions of people are going to do something incredibly stupid (again). Still, we’re still at the ‘let’s pretend it’s going to be anything other than a miserable contest between two nonagenarians’ stage of things, which means that there are multiple candidates vying for attention and airtime and with THOUGHTS AND VIEWPOINTS that you might want to consider (if you’re a North American, at least) – and now, thanks to the MAGIC OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY, there’s a simple and easy way of doing so…VIA THE MEDIUM OF AI! Chat2024 is a PR/marketing project by a company called Delphi, which it may not surprise you to learn wants to sell you DIGITAL CLONES of yourself, and it basically lets you ‘interrogate’ all of the potential candidates for the 2024 sh1tshow in one fell swoop. Type in your questions, and you’ll get a selection of different answers from the ‘candidates’ (or more accurately the chatbots based on their policies) which, so the press release almost-inevitably says, will help voters make up their own minds without having to do anything so difficult as, I don’t know, read a manifesto, or pay attention to what it is that these people say. This is fascinating, in part on a technical level and in part in terms of What It All Means – there’s limited detail on the site about exactly how the makers have built the models, other than some vague ‘trained on material such as speeches’, but I presume it’s a standard ‘we ripped everything we can find that these people have ever said and trained a model on each of them’ thing, and the Q&A feature…works reasonably well, as far as I can tell (and there are certainly reasonable guardrails in place that mean it’s so far prevented me from getting any of them to say anything reprehensible), and as a quick way of getting a rough overview of differences of opinion and perspective on various issues this is…maybe good? – there are even ‘citations’ to where it’s pulling certain positions from, to give you a vague sense of confidence that it’s not lying to you. Then again, I obviously don’t know the first thing about the granular detail of the DeSantis campaign’s fiscal policy objectives and so I would have no fcuking idea if ths DeSantisBot (for example) was wildly misrepresenting the man’s ideas – and while there are bits of the bots’ output that are referenced, there’s also quite a lot of stuff that isn’t…I don’t quite know how I feel about this, to be honest. On the one hand, maybe this is a really useful new way of letting people engage with policy and quickly and simply find out what their potential representatives think about stuff; on the other, I can’t help but feel that the propensity of the current generation of LLMs to just, well, *make sh1t up* possibly presents one or two not-insignificant problems for this tech and perhaps is maybe a reason why people relying on this stuff for information is, generally, still A Very Bad Idea. I suppose the main thing that sprung to mind when I found this was ‘fcuk, it’s actually going to be reasonably trivial for ANYONE to spin up something like this come about May 2024, which means there is going to be SO MUCH MAD STUFF being created around the eventual candidates campaigns’, which feels…a bit troubling. Anyway, that’s all by very long-winded way of saying that anyone who fancied making something like this for the inevitable 2024 UK General Election would fcuking CLEAN UP, coverage-wise, so get on it.
Stable Audio: After Google and Meta’s efforts in the ‘text to audio’ space (see Curios passim), this week Open Source AI people Stable Diffusion have got in on the act, releasing their Stable Audio product to the world – and it’s good! Really good! It’s been slightly hugged-to-death by the internet in its first 72h of life, so you might need to wait a bit to make it work properly, but once you get access it’s as magical as previous iterations of this tech, with the added advantage that it lets you specify the duration of output of your generations, meaning you can make upto 2mins (I think) of completely royalties-free instrumental music for whatever purposes you can conceive of – AND this model can apparently do drum’n’bass and slightly-trickier forms of composition, which the Google and Meta models I previously tried haven’t quite managed to achieve. Nothing you generate here is going to be bothering the charts, I don’t think, but, as previously repeated ad nauseum, you really never need to pay a stock music library for painfully-generic backing tracks ever again. I really think there’s something fun that could be built with these things at this point – I would quite like the chance to have a sort of four-track AI studio that let me play around with layering different AI-generated elements to…well, to almost-certainly cacophonous and horrible effect, but it would be a nice toy to mess around with. CAN ONE OF YOU FOR ONCE MAKE THE THINGS THAT I REQUEST, PLEASE? It feels like the least you could do. Oh, BONUS STABLE AUDIO CONTENT: here’s a little guide to audio prompting, should you desire one.
River: I LOVE THIS IT IS WONDERFUL. Also, I can’t *really* explain or describe it very well, so you’re just going to have to trust me a bit here. ‘River’ is a project by Max Bittker (whose work it turns out I’ve featured a few times on here in the past) which effectively acts as a sort of…visual connections scrapbook thingy? Oh, ok, fine, even by my standards that’s a risibly-lazy attempt at communication – let’s try again. River presents you with a series of images upon loading – click on any image that appeals to you and the images will reload, with the new pictures being morelike the one you just clicked…and so you go, clicking and following whatever aesthetic thread you choose, creating a personal, never-to-be-repeated journey through a visual landscape being generated just for you. I can’t stress what a glorious way of navigating images this is, and how lovely the way you tweak and refine the images you’re presented with – there’s a section in Michael Ende’s ‘The Neverending Story’ (which, by the way, you owe it to your inner child to read; if you have only ever seen the film, know that you only know half the story and that the book starts to get good once the film ends) in which Bastian, the ‘hero’, wonders through a palace of rooms of seemingly infinite doors, each door chosen taking him to yet more doors which are in small ways thematically linked to, and inspired by, the doors that came before…well basically it feels like that HYPERSPECIFIC thing, but in online form. It is BEAUTIFUL and, honestly, were it not for a strange and frankly misplaced sense of duty towards YOU, mysterious and unknown reader, I would stop typing right now and just click this for a few hours. It really is that wonderful.
All AI, All The Time: This is the video channel of one Darragh Walsh, a ‘content creator’ who has been doing the YouTube thing for a while now (instructional videos – nothing particularly interesting or novel, but equally nothing nefarious or grifty, just another kid attempting to mAkE a LiViNg In ThE cOnTeNt MiNeS) but who at some point in the past few months has pivoted to making ALL of their content using AI – the scripts, the videos and the voice overs on every single video on this channel are the product of a suite of largely-free tools combined to MAKE CONTENT with approximately 10% of the effort. You can read a Twitter thread here in which Darragh explains their thinking and methodology – these vids aren’t doing great numbers on release (a few k views, in general), but I assume that the play here is long-tail utility and building up a bulk catalogue of content which will produce a regular stream of residual revenue, and, well, I suppose…fair play, Darragh? I mean, the content is terrible, but then again so much of the rest of YouTube is too…Actually, no, sorry, I don’t mean to be mean to Darragh who I am sure is a nice person, but THIS IS HORRIBLE. This is what people were talking about a few months ago when they started to get a bit worried about ‘a flood of useless, junky, AI-generated dreck flooding the web’, and it’s coming to YouTube (see also: this channel creating entirely AI-generated ‘animations’ about history – they are TERRIBLE, but I did find the thumbnails with their single-word captions (“BRUTALITY”! “URINE”! Inexplicably, “CONSOLE”!) strangely amusing) and I am reasonably confident that there are going to be literally tens of thousands of kids in bedrooms across the world spending a not-insignificant portion of their afternoons and evenings churning this sort of stuff out in the hope of winning some sort of minor algorithmically-mandated payout lottery. Which is nice.
OpinionGPT: One of the (many, tedious) WE ARE DOOMED prophecies that I have been wanging on about for a while now around AI is the whole ‘everyone will have their own virtual assistant in their pocket which they can consult on whatever they fancy, and the whole ‘open source’ thing means that it is actually going to be a pretty trivial matter to have an assistant which espouses whatever weird, fringe, mad set of beliefs you like best and which presents a very specific and doctored version of ‘truth’ in response to any questions’ thing – neatly illustrated here by this project, which lets you ask questions of a bunch of different LLMs which have been tweaked and trained so as to make them espouse quite clearly-distinct political viewpoints. From the homepage: “ What happens if you tune a model only on texts written by politically left-leaning persons? Or only on texts written by right-leaning persons? Only on texts by men, or only on texts by women? Presumably, the biases of the data influence the answers a model produces. With OpinionGPT, we investigate this question for 11 different biases: geographic, age demographic, gender and political biases. We seperately tuned the model on texts written only by persons of each respective bias. In this demo, you can ask questions to our very biased model to get very biased answers!” This is SUCH an interesting project (by the Humboldt University in Berlin, in case you care) and a perfect example of how odd things are quite possibly going to get in the next few years.
Coca Cola’s Y-3000 Cam: Coke was the first big brand to publicly jump on the AI bandwagon thanks to horrible, dead-inside management consultancy Bain, and I am going to go out on a limb and assume that this activation is the fruit of that agreement and the OpenAI collab. Coca Cola is releasing a BRAND NEW FLAVOUR OF SUGARWATER, DESIGNED BY AI!!!! Which is obviously HUGELY exciting (although, er, haven’t we done this before?) – in case you’re curious, “it tasted like all the red soda flavors got together and threw a party. Cherry, strawberry, raspberry, generic “fruit punch” – those were the tastes I sensed most”, so, er, now you know! – and is accompanied by an AI digital experience! Click the link (mobile-only) and take a photo of anything you fancy; hit a button and watch in AWE as whatever you snapped gets magically transformed into a FUTURISTIC and MAGICAL scene thanks to the POWER OF AI! What that actually means in practice is that your photo will have some of the surfaces swapped out with vaguely-shiny and reflective materials (THE FUTURE) and there will be a slight sheen to it, and, basically, it will look almost exactly like every other AI-doctored or generated image you’ll have seen over the past few months. This is VERY underwhelming considering the violent amount of money that’s been spent on it, and I am honestly slightly disappointed that ‘light visual style transfer’ is the most interesting thing that the combined intellectual might of a bunch of management consultants and a bunch of advermarketingprdrones has managed to envision. Also – and perhaps this is the root of my dismay – HOW DID THEY MISS THE OPPORTUNITY TO BOOK BUSTED FOR THE PRODUCT LAUNCH!?!?! Amateurs, these people, I tell you.
AI-Augmented Blogging: This is quite tricky to explain (I say that far more often than is probably reasonable, don’t I?; shall I…shall I just *try harder* and *write better*? Let’s give it a go!) but basically it’s an experimental bit of webwork that asks ‘what would it be like if stuff written online also included generative AI elements which enabled the reader to engage with and interrogate the text using textual AI interfaces?’ – so for example, as you read the linked blogpost, you will find areas in which you can ask questions of an LLM, to engage with the themes raised in the piece; there’s something hugely interesting in the questions this raises around reader and author and intent, and when I found this this week I got a very real frisson (get me with my fancy words) of excitement because it feels very much like there is *something* interesting here (although, fine, I am not smart enough to work out exactly what that is or what shape it might be; you think about it for a while, it’s 8am and I am already getting a bit fatigued of brain and finger).
The Open Audiobook Collection: Or, to give it its full name, The Project Gutenburg Open Audiobook Collection – this is a wonderful initiative and a superb resource which I literally can’t find anything bad to say about at all. I mean, look, you can’t really criticise this, can you? “Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.” So click the ‘browse collection’ button (or just click here) and browse the INSANE archive of old titles – finding something you ACTUALLY want to listen to might be tricky, fine, but why not take a punt on something curious-sounding, like “The Glory of the Trenches” by one Coningsby Dawson (oh, ok, maybe not that one), or some improving Plato, or maybe some Jack London short stories…I am very glad this exists.
Roma Testimonies: The persecution of the Roma during the Second World War is something that often gets forgotten amidst all the other horrors – this is an archive maintained by the Czech Academy of Sciences and which collects testimonies of people from the Roma and Sinti communities who suffered at the hands of the Nazis in WWII. From the site: “The experience of the Roma and Sinti during World War II is still a neglected topic, although the consequences of the wartime genocide and persecution are still felt by Roma communities today. Moreover, even in the few publications about the Roma and Sinti Holocaust, the perspective taken from documents written during the war by the state administration and police forces often prevails. On the contrary, the key idea of our project is to convey to the widest possible readership the testimony of the Roma and Sinti themselves and thus their personal and irreplaceable experience of the Second World War. We hope that the Testimonies of Roma and Sinti project will contribute to greater awareness of their genocide and will be an irreplaceable source of information for researchers, relatives of the victims, or anyone else interested in this important topic.” You can search the archive by birthdate, place of birth or name, should you be interested in looking for specific individuals or locations, or you can just browse the testimonies – this is obviously…affecting, but it’s an incredible piece of historical archiving and an important collection.
Fish Letters: Who wouldn’t like to receive a heartfelt digital message from a friend or loved-one in the shape of a fish? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Mikimoto is a Japanese company which was, according to the cursory Google I did when I found this site, the originator of cultured pearls and the first company in the world to produce them commercially – I have literally NO IDEA why they created this bit of digital marketing, but you can use it to send anyone you like a message (via email, or a shareable link) which will be presented in the shape of a fish made of words. If you have some really, really bad news to deliver to someone today, or a tough conversation to get through, why not soften the blow by communicating it via the medium of an inexplicably-piscine piece of digital communication? It will DEFINITELY make it all better. “Yes, fine, I understand you’re upset Philip, but at least I took the time to deliver the “I don’t love you any more” message via whimsical digital billet doux!”
Poised: One of the many terrible things about The Era Of Digital Work is the degree to which so much of what we are all forced to do professionally these days exists in a feedback vacuum – there are few things more soul-destroying than doing an already-pointless presentation to an audience of dead-eyed morons, other than doing so via Teams or Zoom and as such having no fcuking idea exactly how badly your schtick is going down. So THANK FCUK FOR POISE, then, an AI-powered (obvs) product which basically (as far as I can tell from an admittedly pretty casual glance at the site) monitors your performance on calls and offers you DIRECT AND REALTIME encouragement and feedback on how you’re doing with little popups that tell you that you need to be more assertive, or that remind you that you really should try not to say “er…” so much when you present. This sounds, to be clear, HORRIFIC – if you’re the sort of nervous person who struggles with presenting or confidence in the workplace, I am not totally convinced that being constantly monitored and assessed by a nameless, faceless AI judge is going to make you perform better but perhaps you feel differently. Personally this feels like the sort of thing that might tip someone over the edge, professionally-speaking, but then again my ‘career’ is a joke so what do I know? That was rhetorical fwiw.
Slingshot: This is entirely-frivolous and none of you need it in your lives, but at the same time there is something genuinely pleasing about both the idea and the execution here. Slingshot is a new app which exists solely to give you an easy and fast way of sharing photos with your friends – you open the app, you select a friend from your contacts list, you ‘pull back’ on the screen to take a picture and then let go to ‘fire’ it to your friend. Yes, a totally pointless gestural interface but SUCH a fun one, and frankly we need more of this sort of design ethos in our lives.
Iskarioto: A Twitter account sharing short AI-generated animations, via Rene’s ever-excellent links roundup – your appetite for this stuff will track closely with your tolerance for/interest in the AI art aesthetic and the current state of this tech, but in general there’s an interesting mix of styles and techniques here which make it worth a follow.
Shot Glasses: The Wikipedia entry about shot glasses this week taught me that there is in fact no global standard to what constitutes ‘a shot’, and that as such the capaciousness of shot glasses varies wildly from country-to-country, and that this is why you should never, ever get into a situation where you’re being challenged to down nonspecific spirits in Bulgaria – SERIOUSLY GUYS WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?!
The Url Poetry Club: A new project by Kris, The URL Poetry Club sits neatly at the intersection of three of my loves – prose, verse and LINKS – and is a glorious little website creating short poems from links and words; the resulting works function both as bits of verse to be read, but also as verse-in-digital-space, if that makes any sort of sense at all…I love the way that this makes one think of the connections built through linking sites to each other, and how the act of this selection and curation and arrangement itself builds new networks of meaning – attempting to communicate this stuff inevitably makes me feel like I might turn myself inside-out with embarrassment and pretension, but, well, it’s nice to try and be sincere every now and again. I love this, and I would quite like to encourage more people to think about the web and links and ideas in this sort of way. If that makes sense. Which it might, I concede, not.
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The Terrible Ads of LinkedIn: I really, really hate LinkedIn – I also (this is a bit of a tangential rant, but if you’ll indulge me for just a moment) REALLY hate the current spate of articles suggesting the fact that young people are now using it makes it in some way ‘cool’. GYAC YOU FCUKING IDIOTS WHY DO YOU THINK YOUNGER PEOPLE ARE USING LINKEDIN NOW IS IT DO YOU THINK BECAUSE THEY ARE COMING TO AN AGE WHERE HAVING A PROFESSIONAL PROFILE ON THE WORLD’S ONLY BUSINESS-FOCUSED SOCIAL NETWORK IS NECESSARY? WOULD YOU HAVE WRITTEN PIECES 30 YEARS AGO SUGGESTING THAT CVs ARE SOMEHOW COOL BECAUSE 21 YEAR OLDS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY ARE WRITING THEM? YOU WOULD NOT, WOULD YOU? FCUK’S SAKE. Ah, that feels better. Anyway, this is by way of poor-quality introduction to the fact that you can now peruse the LinkedIn ad library and MY GOD is it a soul-destroying cavalcade of poor-quality grift and low-rent copy, and, in a weird way, it’s sort of uplifting – whatever terrible, pointless drudgery you’re engaged in today as part of your quotidian attempt not to die of exposure or starvation, console yourself with the fact that at least you’re not brokering LinkedIn Brand Partnership deals between a manufacturer of industrial endoscopy machines and a Daily Good News inspirational updates Page (no, really, that is a thing). There but for the grace of God go we all.
That Guy: Ordinarily I don’t tend to do ‘this week’s viral trend’ content on Curios – mainly because, er, I tend not to be aware of it, what with not being on Instagram and largely eschewing TikTok – but this, which came via Anne-Helen Petersen, amused me enough to make an exception. TikTok recently released a new filter which gives people facial hair, which has led to loads of women trying on themselves and realising that, with said face-fuzz, they end up looking like ‘A Certain Type of Guy’ – this link takes you to an Insta reel which compiles a bunch of TiKToks of women embodying Types of Guy and, honestly, some of these are perfectly observed – “I look like I have a podcast” is, well, perfect.
Meltdown Flags: It’s not exactly a controversial position to suggest that perhaps the planet’s large bodies of ice are melting perhaps a touch faster than we might in an ideal world wish them to – or at least it shouldn’t be, yet, well, here we all are! As part of the increasingly-futile-seeming attempts by individuals and organisations worldwide to make people take notice of What Is Going On, Melting Flags is a project designed to raise awareness of the fact that so many countries are going to be in not-insignificant trouble as a result of rising sea levels – specifically, it’s “a climate data initiative that visualizes the effects of global glacier retreat by reducing the amount of white in the flags of countries with glaciers.” This is a really neat bit of design and visualisation which does an excellent job of conveying the differential impacts of glacial retreat, and which will almost certainly have no effect whatsoever on anything (sorry, but, well, it’s true, isn’t it?).
Mind Window: The name here strikes me as oddly-sinister (I don’t know why, but it puts me in mind of the sort of terrible invention that would be spoken of by deep-voiced scientists in a pulpy 50s scifi movie – “We must activate the Mind Window, or Planet Terra is lost!”, that sort of thing) but I am really curious about the project. This has been going since 2020, apparently, and is a research project designed and undertaken by the University of Arizona – from their description: “Do you ever wonder if there is some rhyme or reason to how you think? How often are your thoughts focused on troubling topics, the past, the future, or memories and imaginative thinking? Mind Window helps you to track the way that you uniquely think and discover how these patterns of thought may affect your well-being. Mind Window is part of a scientific research project to develop a large international database of thoughts in daily life. The purpose of this app is to identify patterns of thinking by asking questions about user’s thoughts at random moments throughout their day-to-day life.” There is limited information on the site about what, if anything, the collected data to date has told the researchers, but I am very much into the idea of a worldwide project that seeks to find out whether, for example, everyone actually feels the same specific sense of dread and ennui at around 17:37 on a Sunday.
The News Clock: The Pudding’s ‘Clocks Team’ (this is now canon – there is a Pudding Clocks Team) continues to ship at an impressive rate; this latest project is a clock which uses news headlines featuring the time to, well, tell the time; so right now it’s ‘Apple Watch Series 09 is official’ and ‘Who Will Succeed Mitt Romney? 04 Candidates’ o’clock. This is less fun than the previous two iterations (personally the YouTube clock is my favourite so far), but I applaud the commitment to the project now do the Stock Market clock, please (actually that isn’t a wholly-terrible idea, you know).
Neptune In Space: My note for this in the GDoc where I store my links each week (one day I will share that magic with you – ONE DAY) reads, simply, ‘bafflingspacedesignthing’ and, well, I’m not sure I can improve on that to be honest. A project by designer Callie Mc (whose personal website is very pleasing too), this self-describes as “an explorative design lab translated across time and space orbiting curiosity and discovery”, which, honestly, tells you pretty much nothing – it’s an interesting exploration of design ideas and themes and how combining them creates rules and forms that create aesthetic sense (or at least that’s what I think it is – you might think something completely different, which is fine but also WRONG), and it’s also just sort-of baffling, which I like.
The Iconographic Encyclopaedia: I had before this week never heard of The Iconographic Encyclopaedia, but now I know that “In 1844, German publisher Johann Georg Heck started compiling his illustrated encyclopedia, covering wide range of subjects from astronomy to zoology”, and that “Published between 1849 and 1851, the 10-part collection comprised 500 steel engraved plates containing more than 13,000 illustrations and more than 1.6 million words of detailed descriptions” (and now you do too). This website lets you explore all the illustrations and diagrams as well as the copy, arranged by theme, and it’s genuinely fascinating to browse through and see exactly how wrong we were about everything just 180 short years ago.
Video Translation: You may have seen videos of this tech doing the rounds this week, but I can’t stress enough quite how incredible this is and how much it will make you go ‘no, hang on, that might in fact be actual magic’ when you see it in action. This is a new product by Heygen Labs which basically takes any video you give it and creates a version in any language you care to mention – but it does so in YOUR voice, and it adds decent lipyncing, meaning that to the casual viewer it looks as though you’re speaking, say, German, in your natural voice, like it was the most normal thing in the world. Honestly, I don’t think I can overstate quite how insane this is – the speed and the quality is quite remarkable, not least because this would have been entirely impossible about a year or so ago.
Planta: I like plants, I really do, but I am so bad at keeping them alive that it feels rather like they don’t like me very much to the extent that they would rather suicide themselves than spend another minute in my company (I refuse to countenance the idea that it’s my incompetence or neglect that’s killing them, no siree) – if you, like me, are more brown-than-green-fingered (I am sure I have used that phrase before, and it hasn’t gotten any less unpleasantly-faecal sounding since last time, has it? Sorry!) then you might find this app, which offers help and guidance on all aspects of plant husbandry, from indoor houseplants to allotment-type vegetables – it identifies plants, helps you monitor light levels, gives you reminders to water the fcuking things, and, basically, if you can’t keep a peony alive with this then there’s no hope for you and you might as well just patio over the whole fcuking garden.
Bike Index: It’s entirely plausible that this site will be common knowledge to all of you who own bikes, but in case not…Bike Index purports to be the world’s largest bike registration site/portal, on which you can sign up and record the details of your velocipede in the hope that when it inevitably gets nicked in three months’ time you can alert the users here and get people to look out for it; the idea being that if you see a bike for sale you can quickly check the reg against the database here collected and see if it has in fact been unlawfully-liberated from its owner. It’s not entirely clear to me what happens then – is the idea that you politely inform the vendor that they are in fact dealing in stolen goods, and that they thank you fulsomely for the intel and alert the local constabulary post-haste, and then arrange swift repatriation of the bike in question to its rightful owner? Because, honestly, that seems a *touch* fanciful, but I guess I admire the optimism here. Anyway, this is an international endeavour and is the very acme of A Good And Nice Idea, so I encourage you all to sign up your bikes and never buy one from the nice bloke down the market without first running the serial number through this site.
Modern Serial: It feels very much like I have featured this before, but a cursory flick through the archive suggests it’s new to me, and so perhaps it will be new to you too. Modern Serial is a smart way of making classic texts episodic via email (in much the same way as the ‘Dracula Via Email’ project from a few years back – was it a lockdown thing? It feels like a lockdown thing – which gave readers the Bram Stoker novel as a series of email updates) – sign up, pick a book, pick a delivery cadence and ENJOY as a new section of classic fiction ends up in your inbox in regular, bitesize chunks. This is SUCH a good idea, and I wonder whether it could be extended to, well, anything – I quite like the idea of being able to learn like this, being sent small bits of learning around a subject area on a regular basis, accumulating over time; the selection of books here is limited to out-of-copyright works, but that encompasses some wonderful material and in general this is a really rather wonderful idea, executed superbly.
Organic Maps: Ooh, this is potentially super-useful for all of you middle-aged dads who dream of getting on a bike and just fcuking off for a few weeks with nothing but a rucksack, some suitably fit friends and a route featuring a lot of remote pubs for company; Organic Maps is a “a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, and cyclists based on top of crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap data. It is a privacy-focused, open-source fork of Maps.me app (previously known as MapsWithMe), maintained by the same people who created MapsWithMe in 2011. Organic Maps is one of a few applications nowadays that supports 100% of features without an active Internet connection. Install Organic Maps, download maps, throw away your SIM card (by the way, your operator constantly tracks you), and go for a weeklong trip on a single battery charge without any byte sent to the network.” Hugely useful for all your off-network travel needs
Trickle: Ooh, this is potentially really useful – Trickle harnesses THE POWER OF AI to help you make sense of, and organise, your screenshots. You upload your screenshots to the site, it analyses them using…some AI (not sure what it’s using here, does Bard have an API that would let them use that?) and annotates them based on what it ‘sees’ in the image, creating a bunch of metadata and tags associated to each screenshot, making them searchable and, well, useful. Genuinely potentially helpful to anyone who spends a lot of time working (specifically, designing) on their phone, this is also a really interesting glimpse into all the fun things that are coming down the line with truly multimodal AI in the next few months.
Pika: Another text-to-video app, offering an alternative to RunwayML – this is, like Runway, incredibly shonky at present, but you can very much see glimpses of how crazy this is going to get in ~1 year’s time. Annoyingly it uses the Midjourney ‘Discord-as-a-command-interface’ model, which personally makes me never want to touch it again, but it’s definitely worth a play if you’re interested in seeing how it stacks up against the best-in-class (or just if you want to make some really unsettling, melty-faced short films).
EmojiGen: Yes, I know, emoji generators are OLD HAT and SO 2020, but this is a NEW VARIANT, powered by AI, and it is ACE. Type in whatever you want it to generate an emoji of, and it will deliver, creating a small, C&Pable graphic for you to drop into whatever conversation you’re currently having on whatever platform you prefer (I presume that this is built on the DallE API or an open source GAN, with a pre-prompt of ‘an emoji of’ or something similar). There’s a selection of examples that people have generated on the homepage – I particularly enjoyed the very wholesome result for ‘threesome’ – but I encourage you to play around and make your own, as this is FUN.
FAU’s Roman Boats: OK, so this isn’t the MOST compelling site I’ve linked to this week, but it made me laugh SO MUCH and as such I must share it with you, so that you can inevitably click the link and not understand what the fcuk it was that I found so amusing about what is, on the face of it, a pretty dry website detailing the efforts of one Professor Dreyer of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Nurenburg to build a working replica of a roman boat (he is now apparently ‘investigating how ancient bread ovens worked or how accurately Roman catapults could shoot’ – I have to say, Professor Dreyer sounds like a lot of fun). I’ll give you a clue – scroll down and observe the AMAZING offer to buy your very own small replica Roman boat. Honestly, I don’t know why I find this so funny but there are literal tears streaming down my face as I write this. Perhaps I am overtired.
The Small Web: I am increasingly convinced that there is a COMING TREND towards people rediscovering the joy of sharing odd and obscure links to weird little webprojects, presaged by that fcuking Guardian piece the other week and supported by things like this, which I am seeing start to crop up more and more and which feels like it’s coalescing into…something of a movement, maybe? Not quite sure where I’m going with this tbh, but when Kris and I did the Tiny Awards earlier this year we both got a sense that there was a real appetite for things that broke the quotidian drudgery of the functional web of 2023 and helped people find the unexpected online; so it is with this project, by alternative search engine people Kagi, which is basically ‘stumbleupon, but for posts on personal websites’, and which lets you effectively hop from blog to blog like it’s 2002 and you have just discovered the concept of the webring. This is gorgeous, and another place you could legitimately lose hours to as you hopped from essay to diary to project page to photodump, all the while exploring the tiny, home-carved corners of the vast infinity of cyberspace that people have decided to call home. I promise, by the way, that when everyone and their fcuking dog is doing ‘updates of interesting stuff they found on the web’ I will not get all miserable and salty and “I FOUND THE CONCH YOU CNUTS” (I will totally do that, apologies in advance).
Strange Flowers: Not in fact a Tumblr! Noone cares! Via the wonderful Nag comes this superb blogtypething, whose raison d’etre is to…hang on, it’s worth reproducing the ‘about’ page in full because it is unusually joyful and explains perfectly what this is all about. Strange Flowers is “a cabinet of human curiosities, a celebration of some of the most eccentric, extravagant and extraordinary personalities of the last 200-odd years. It is a product of the blogger’s obsession with history’s footnotes, paragons of vivid individuality who elevated the craft of selfhood to an art. Because often it wasn’t what they left behind, but how they lived that was their real masterpiece. They might be difficult, ridiculous, contrary – even tragic – but never, ever dull. Strange Flowers constitutes an alternative universe Who’s Who, a pantheon of ill-deserved obscurity which roams the worlds of literature, art, science, aristocracy and bohemia, low life and high society. Unique and fearless, some of these rare blooms emerge from the shadows of history as unsung influences on our lives, others served as inspiration for fictional characters that became better known than their models. Some may have travelled under the banner of Dandyism, Dadaism or Decadence, but this is an account of individuals, not movements, and most of our subjects were avant-garde without a garde to be avant. More interesting are the elective affinities, private connections, the bequest of tastes and sensibilities from one esoteric nature to another. Some squandered early promise and slid into squalor and ignominy. Others lived and worked in eremitic isolation, finding scant recognition only after death. Whatever their fate, Strange Flowers aims to celebrate the individual by remembering those who, having inherited the basic materials of existence bequeathed to us all, fashioned them into something heroically, wilfully odd, and often sublime.” This really feels like it should be a book, or a documentary series, or a podcast, as well as this superb blog – there is SO MUCH amazing and interesting stuff in here about so many incredible people.
Tenement Town: Also via the Nag (THANKYOU) comes this website (I have checked the source code and this isn’t a Tumblr either, chiz chiz – standards here really are slipping, and I am SORRY) which collects and presents old and forgotten stories of the people who lived in Edinburgh in years past, when the social and economic profile of the city was…different, and this is a lovely urban history passion project. To quote its creator, “I’m Diarmid Mogg. I’m interested in the stories of ordinary people who lived their lives in the places where we live today, and I spend a lot of time writing about them, mostly using stories I find in old newspapers. The newspaper archives contain a lot of interesting scraps of information about the people who were here before us, and about the places they lived, and I often search the old papers for mention of the addresses of tenements that have caught my eye to see what stories I can find. Tenement Town takes a look behind the doors I pass every day, and offers glimpses of the lives that were lived over the centuries in the places Edinburgh’s citizens still call home.” Super-interesting, particularly for those of you who live in, or haved lived in, Edinburgh.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
The London Night Cafe: This is a great idea – recently opened in Whitechapel, the London Night Cafe is a place that offers a nocturnal space for people who want somewhere to work or just hang out late at night without having to be in a bar, club or other booze-related establishment; it’s open overnight and you pay just over £8 for the privilege of being able to sit somewhere and work, or read, or think – tickets are on sale in advance, they do events on some evenings, Thursdays are phone-free spaces…generally this seems like A Good Thing, and if you’re a London insomniac or the sort of person who a) can only work at night and b) can only work in a place that isn’t their actual house, then this could prove very useful indeed.
Sofy Guerrero: Guerrero does watercolour illustrations, near-photorealistic, of translucent plastic objects (and other things too, fine, but it’s the translucent plastic objects that I particularly enjoy here), and they are excellent.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
Get A Rabbit: We begin this week’s longreads with John Lanchester on typically-excellent form in the LRB, ostensibly reviewing three books about data and statistics but in fact taking the reader on a fascinating journey through some of the ways in which the modern world’s (understandable, and mostly-helpful) obsession with quantification and data and analysis have had interesting, unexpected and often unintended and unwanted consequences, and all the reasons why unlimited data and statistics and the analysis thereof are not necessarily enough to protect from Bad Outcomes. I think Lanchester’s a better essayist than novelist, personally (that said, this is one of my favourite ever novels and I have read it two-dozen times and I cannot recommend it highly enough to each of you, especially if you enjoy food and cooking), and this is a wonderful example of what makes him so good – this sweeping essay takes you from Maoist statism through the racism of 19th-and-early-20th Century North America, to modern football, to a clear-eyed takedown of the current UK taxation system and throughout manages to be entertaining, educational and occasionally even funny. This really is superb.
Thinking DNA: There was a point about halfway through this essay – which starts out as a summary of the life and work of Barbara McClintock, a woman who spend her career studying the genetic makeup of corn in Iowa and who is the most interesting scientist I had never, ever heard of, and which ends up as a series of questions and provocations about what cellular biology can teach us about how LITERALLY EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD FUNCTIONS – when I started getting that weird fizzing feeling in the back of my head that pops up every now and again when I am reading something properly stimulating and curious and exciting; honestly, this is truly fascinating and thought-provoking (at least for me, a man for whom biology is a terrifying and mostly-closed book). Here, this should give you a feeling for it – I promise you that this is SO thought-provoking, you really won’t regret reading it even if you (like me) tend to find Hard Science a bit much: “Take our brains, for example, with their neurons. For Levin, the use of electricity to carry information is not exclusive to brains. That’s not a philosophical stance, so much as an empirical one. Bioelectricity, as McClintock noted, is a pervasive phenomenon across kingdoms of life. “The unique computational capabilities of bioelectric circuits likely enabled the evolution of nervous systems, as specialized adaptations of the ancient ability of all cell networks to process electrical information as pre-neural networks,” Levin writes. The brain’s special feature is not the ability to store or spread information, but its speed. Let’s recall the old saw: “Plants are just very slow animals.” And then consider that it might be actually true.”
Artist Datasets: This is really interesting, and touches on stuff that I had never thought about before reading this. It’s easiest just to quote the opening paras here, as they do an excellent job of framing the premise of the piece: “In 2018, artist Anna Ridler spent three months taking 10,000 photographs of tulips. From purchasing each tulip to manually writing every image label, Ridler made physical the laborious, painstaking process of deliberate dataset creation. She eventually used these photographs to produce downstream generative artwork—but the Myriad (Tulips) dataset is a work of art in its own right. Ridler describes the process of dataset creation as craftwork: “repetitive, time-consuming…but necessary in order to produce something beautiful.” When I look at Myriad (Tulips) today, I’m struck by the prescience of Ridler’s work. Debates on AI and art have intensified over the past year. An increasing subset of artists are rightfully angry that their work is being used to train AI systems that will compete against them. A growing mountain of lawsuits, strikes, and congressional hearings speak to the anxiety rippling through creative industries. Previously in Reboot, Amanda Wong discussed the complicated visual aesthetics of AI art, concluding that we must “actively shape [the] meaningful production, creation, and consumption” of AI art. I want to pick up where Wong left off by focusing on the meaningful production of datasets.” This covers all sorts of fascinating questions about taxonomy and selection and bias and representation, and fractional representation of the whole, and feels like the sort of thing that could usefully be read by anyone with an interest in how we use large swathes of information or data, and how we decide what data or information we use in the first place.
Roblox: Ordinarily I wouldn’t put ‘a bunch of feature updates by a videogame’ into the longreads here, but I will make an exception for this because I think it’s worth taking a moment to think about how massive this is potentially going to be. There’s a bunch of stuff included in the link, but the big takeaway from Roblox’s latest set of announcements is the introduction of AI-enhanced creative tools, which will let anyone who wants to build something on the platform create assets out of thin air based on conversational prompts – so, for example, create an empty world and then ask The Machine to generate character sprites and scenery and objects based on your prompts, and then use prompts to establish relationships between objects, and and and and…I think what’s most interesting about this is the feeling of crossing a (small, but still) Rubicon in terms of adoption and acceptance; if you consider how many kids worldwide use Roblox, and how comfortable they are going to become (and how quickly) with generative AI as part of their creative apparatus, you get a small idea of what things might end up looking like in 15-20 years when the same kids are adults building the world for real.
Your Waiter Is Not Your Extra: Or, “another charming example of all the ways in which the creation of a culture in which Everything Is Content has led to a bunch of weird situations in which people find themselves becoming Content against their will, and of how we are still at the stage of attempting to work out what exactly the social mores around all this stuff are because right now it’s all a bit of a mess” – this article in the WSJ looks at the very modern phenomenon of kids in the US (but this is obviously a worldwide thing) filming their HILARIOUS SKITS for TikTok at restaurants and fast food outlets, and by so doing rendering unwitting extras of the people working there who perhaps are less keen on being background material or, worse, reactive mooks for whatever viral CHALLENGE is keeping the children occupied this hour. We can’t be too far from there being a movement to start teaching kids ‘camera etiquette’ from the age of about 7 (I might start it tbh).
Trench Foot Burning Man: For a variety of annoying reasons – mainly associated with the fact that, for reasons known only to them, my girlfriend’s internet provider, 3, classifies The Internet Archive as ‘adult material’ and won’t let me access it; this despite the fact that it didn’t have a problem with the ACTUAL BONGO link in last week’s Curios ffs – I am unable to give you an unpaywalled version of this, but I encourage you to attempt to find it on the Wayback Machine because, honestly, this is one of the purest hatereads you will experience all year. This is an ‘oral history’ of some of the world’s most annoying people – West Coast US tech industry people! Wellness nonces! THE ‘SPIRITUALLY AWARE’! – talking to you about how INTENSE it was at THE PLAYA this year, and, honestly, reading this confirmed to me my long-standing belief that I can never visit Burning Man because I would commit A Bad Crime, perhaps two, within moments of arrival.
Selling Tennis: This is a GREAT read, particularly for those of you who work in advermarketingpr and have strong opinions about things like BRANDS and BRAND EQUITY and THE HISTORY OF ADVERTISING (please, if you don’t mind, keep those opinions to yourselves), telling the story of how tennis became US advertisers’ sport of choice in the 70s and 80s, and how Virginia Slims made tabs and racquets strangely-comfortable bedfellows through its sponsorship of its very own women’s tennis tournament. This is FASCINATING, honestly, and for all those aforementioned BRAND-HEADS there is all sorts of useful stuff you can take from it – for the less business-sick amongst you, though, this is just a fascinating throwback to a very different era (also, as an aside you do forget what a weirdly…sleazy time that was).
Tiny TVs: A small but objectively-hilarious piece of writing in which an American who is strangely-obsessed with the property-based UK TV show ‘Escape to the Country’ and, specifically, how many of the houses in it have, to American eyes at least, incredibly small and sh1t TVs. That’s literally all this is about, fine, but I personally found her increasing indignation at the refusal of the British middle-classes to have a 90-inch digital funscreen on every single vertical flat surface in their home an enjoyable read.
Ignore The Fans: Or, to give you the full title of the piece, “I am begging TV shows to ignore fans” – specifically, this relates to the character of Che Diaz on the SATC revival show “And Just Like That”, and all the reasons why said character is sort of the apogee of bad fan-reactive creative output. I have never watched AJLT (fortunately I was at university during the heyday of SATC, meaning I’ve not really seen much of that either) but there’s been enough DISCOURSE about it across its two seasons to date that I am aware of the character, the criticisms of it and the way in which said criticisms have bled through in terms of the responses of the actors and writers making the show – that said, even if you’re coming at this entirely cold, the piece does a good job of explaining its premise and then detailing exactly why a project which takes its fans’ opinions too seriously will almost always lead to Bad Art. A really good piece of meta-media-criticism, this, by a newsletter with the best name I have seen all year (“All The Heterosexual Nonsense I Was Forced To Endure”)
The Influencercation: Or, “How To Take Your Grift On Holiday!” You can’t move right now for people with newsletters (OTHER newsletters, less good ones) talking about ‘community’ and how ‘energised’ they feel by their readers – rest assured that I NEVER think of you fcuks as a ‘community’, and I am largely oblivious to your presence, as it should be – which, honestly, strikes me as just another twist on the parasocial grift that is ‘getting people to pay you money for your mostly-banal observations about life’ (GYAC, literally EVERYONE doing this stuff pivots to ‘life coaching’ at some point or another – ALL of them). This piece is about the NEXT LEVEL version of this – specifically, charging your ‘community’ to go on holiday with you! There is, it turns out, a company that will, for a cut of the total income from the grifter’s audience, arrange an entire ‘community getaway’ for you and your fandom; you pick whether you want, say, a cruise, or some sort of ayurvedic self-harm retreat (probably) and they arrange the whole thing for you; you, meanwhile, cobble together some sort of events programme and prepare to think of the money every time one of your readers attempts to become your actual, IRL friend. I honestly find this sort of thing…quite uncomfortable, but I concede that it might just be because I am a miserable misanthropist who is the very opposite of a ‘joiner’.
The Alien Mummies: The recently-launched tech title 404 Media continues to deliver decent stories in its first few weeks; this is a good overview of the slightly-less-exciting reality behind this week’s ‘MEXICAN ALIEN MUMMIES’ story, which, you may be surprised to learn, is possibly not quite as clear-cut as the enthusiastic man talking wildly about ALIEN DNA might initially have suggested.
The Pen1s Enlargement SubReddit: On the one hand, there is obviously nothing funny about men who are riddled with insecurity about the dimensions of their junk; on the other, there is something very, very funny indeed about the communities of interest that spring up around this insecurity. This piece takes you inside the /r/gettingbigger community and WHAT a place it is – even if you don’t want to read an article which is mainly about men attaching weights to themselves in an attempt to scare up another 3cm, I cannot encourage you enough to click the link and scroll down enough to see the images of the devices that these people are using. Male readers of Curios – HOW DESPERATE AND MAD WOULD YOU HAVE TO BE TO PUT THAT NEAR YOUR COCK?! (please do not write to me and tell me, this was another rhetorical one).
Bernie Taupin: I really didn’t expect to enjoy this anywhere near as much as I did, but this profile of long-time Elton John lyricist Bernie Taupin is a joy from start to finish – it’s funny, candid, contains some great stories, and presents Taupin as a man who has had a genuinely great life, for which you don’t begrudge him one iota. Honestly, this really is a tremendous, fun read.
Dolls: A really interesting look at the community of enthusiasts that make up the world of the ball-jointed doll fandom; you will have seen these things online at some point, and I have definitely linked to at least one of the creators named in here before, but there’s something fascinating about this profile of the people who make, and buy, these ultra-poseable, highly-stylised and entirely-bespoke creations, which is made more compelling by a genuinely unusual tone and style to the piece (which is by one Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, who absolutely wins ‘best name of the whole week’).
Old Smells: There’s a *bit* of ‘old man mourns the passing of time’ about this piece, fine, but given I am an increasingly old man I think I can probably let this slide. A lovely piece of writing about how some smells from the past are simply gone forever, and the often very good reasons why; this both a good essay and a useful reminder to pay attention to things before they stop existing, or change without warning.
Teeth: I have, I am ashamed to admit, horrific teeth; wonky, stained from years of incredibly-strong tea (I honestly shudder to think of what colour my insides are; some sort of deep tannic mahogany, no doubt) and fags and spliffs, exacerbated by unusually-porous enamel; if you didn’t already know, or hadn’t heard me speak, a cursory glance at the dental graveyard in my gob would confirm my English-ness in a heartbeat. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed this piece so much – a long look at the veneers industry, and how perhaps getting your teeth filed down to tiny nubbins and replaced with blindingly-white facsmiles may not in fact be a great idea in the medium-to-long-term. If you have veneers, maybe don’t read this; if you don’t, then do and thank your lucky stars that you don’t have veneers.
Building The Torment Nexus: If you are aware of the ‘building the Torment Nexus’ meme then this will mean very little to you; if you are, then a) congratulations, you too are WASTING YOUR LIFE!; b) you will very much enjoy this bit of writing (annoyingly it’s a Mastodon thread, but I can’t seem to find a way of unrolling Mastodon so, well, this is what you’re getting), which is a not-particularly-subtle bit of satire about every single tech company in the world (and one in particular).
I Have No Tongue: An upfront warning about this one – it describes a lot of very unpleasant medical procedures, and what it is like to experience them, and if you are squeamish then you might struggle with it (I had to stop at various points because it got Too Much for me, I am unashamed to admit); oh, it’s also by someone who has terminal cancer, so, you know, bear that in mind. That said, it’s quite an incredible piece of writing – it’s rare to find someone writing so clearly about such a horrible experience, and doing with clean prose like this is particularly remarkable. I personally found it an incredibly hard read, in the main because the authorial experience replicated many of the same things that my mother experienced in the last year of her life and which I couldn’t talk to her about because, well, she couldn’t talk and it seemed somewhat cruel to ask her to use the little energy she had to write on a tiny whiteboard about exactly HOW it all felt awful, but notwithstanding that difficulty I also thought it was beautiful and sad and one of the bravest things I have read in a long, long time.
Irene: I don’t really want to tell you too much about this real-life story, but it is JOYFUL AND HEARTWARMING, and I promise will give you a small glow which will totally compensate for some of the unremitting body horror of the last one. This is, broadly, about the impressions we make on people that we will never know, and the joy of piecing together a story, and how wonderful it is sometimes when the web works in the way it feels, in an idealised world, it should.
Oxygen: A short sobriety story, about trying to replace drug use with oxygenation treatment; this is slight but I enjoyed it very much indeed.
Frisbee: Finally this week, a piece by Thomas Morris which I GUARANTEE will induce real and powerful feelings of nostalgia for the last carefree Summer of your youth, and the friends you had when you were 17, and the feeling of infinite possibility that you can never identify until you know that you will probably never feel it again – this is about being young, and also, a bit, about Ultimate Frisbee, and it is so, so, so lovely. I promise you, you will not regret reading this – it is utterly pure, in the best way.
On the one hand, he is a terrorist and as such probably *ought* to be incarcerated; on the other, it’s hard not to cheer a little bit for a prison break so perfectly-filmic in its execution; I’m putting a quiet tenner on Ezra Miller to play Daniel Khalife in the inevitable 2024 Apple TV adaptation.
Anyway, how are you? How has your week been? Have YOU achieved anything as impressive as Daniel? No, I didn’t think so – still, there’s two days left, though, so FOCUS FFS. I have had something of a trying morning writing this as a result of being a *bit* tired and hungover; I went to see Fesshole Live last night which was a lot of fun and which I very much recommend should it ever come to your neck of the woods, but which left me with the overriding impression that there is something terribly wrong with the nation’s bowel health – YOU SHOULD NOT ALL BE SH1TTING YOURSELVES WITH SUCH REGULARITY, PEOPLE OF ENGLAND! IT IS NOT NORMAL!
(I promise that that’s the last reference to inadvertent bowel movements in this week’s newsletter. Sorry.)
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and if any of you would like to unburden yourself of something that’s weighing heavily on your conscience then feel free to tell me EVERYTHING.
THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY DO WITH A NAP , PT.1:
DJ Phonetic: Older readers of an Anglo persuasion are probably familiar with puerile (but very funny) ‘comic for adults’ Viz (for those of you fortunate enough not to have spent your formative years consuming the swill that passes for English popular culture: Viz is a long-running magazine in the UK which can best be described as ‘in the style of a classic postwar comic strip for children, but featuring characters who are more likely to carry their outsize testicles around in a wheelbarrow (no, really) than they are to play conkers’; there, you’re all caught up) which for several years in the 90s and possibly beyond featured a character called ‘Ravey Davey Gravy’ who was so addled by pills and techno that they heard repetitive beats wherever they went and as such would find themselves doing the ‘big fish, little fish’ thing in all sorts of unlikely places (it’s better in print, honest). Which is by way of a SEAMLESS intro to this wonderful link, found via Andy, which proves that literally ANYTHING can be a beat – even, er, the historically significant utterances of great men and women from history! DJ Phonetic is a really neatly-made webtoy which describes itself as ‘a beatbox with historical speech’ – taking audio of significant speeches from significant individuals from US history, and using software to identify and isolate specific phonemes from said speeches and letting you use them to make beats with. So you can create a nice, skittering little number from the words of JFK, or something more sinuous out of Richard Nixon’s forked-tongued utterances; clicking different words in the speech transcript selects different elements of the speech to integrate into the loop, meaning each sample lets you make a huge range of different sounds. Honestly, this is LOTS of fun to play around with and made me really want a version of this that uses Hansard records and ParliamentTV archives to spin up something comparable from the UK Parliamentary record. Who wouldn’t want to make some drum’n’bass out of the speechifying of Michael Fabricant? NO FCUKER, etc!
Our TR2 Remake: Frame-by-frame community remakes of iconic (sorry) films are a long-running internet ‘thing’ (most recently seen as part of MSCHF’s crowdsourced reimagining of The Bee Movie (they’re now doing John Wick, fyi)), but now they are getting the AI treatment – this project is looking for artists to bring the MAGIC OF GENERATIVE AI to bear on the James Cameron classic, with the film being split into 50 segments and a different artist being assigned to bring each to life using what will almost inevitably end up being a variety of different custom-trained versions of Stable Diffusion and some animation software. As far as I can tell they are currently short by about 20 artists, so feel free to share this with everyone you know so that humanity can one day get the vaguely-flat-looking remake of a 30-year-old classic film that we doubtless deserve.
HyundAI: Where ARE all the AI-enabled advermarketingPR projects? Are you not all including at least one AI-juiced idea in every single pitch? WHY ARE YOU NOT MILKING THE ZEITGEIST DRY?!? Well, if this latest bit of digital promo from Hyundai is anything to go by, it’s because it’s still quite hard to make anything public facing and safe out of this tech without it also being fundamentally tedious and underwhelming and, well, just a bit sh1t. This website exists to promote some new SUV or another – because it’s really important that you have a vehicle the size of a small tank to do the school run and go to the garden centre! – and lets YOU, the lucky user, use THE MAGIC OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE to explore the CREATIVE AND ARTISTIC WORLD of, er, ‘the all-new Hyundai Santa Fe’. The user experience involves you either being asked to select from a series of adjectives to generate your own magical image of, er, a big car, or alternatively lets you input whatever esoteric, imaginative prompt you can think of to generate your magical, fantastical vehicular ‘art’ – except, not unreasonably, there are some pretty hefty guardrails in place to stop you attempting to make anything too ‘brand unsafe’, meaning that my request for an image that invoked ‘a meaty landscape of bone and viscera’ was unceremoniously rejected. So effectively you’re forced into ‘imagining’ only the anodyne and dull, and the resulting images are about as exciting as you’d expect them to be based on this sort of policing – there’s also something odd about the outputs and the way there only seem to be about a dozen different positions that the car ends up in, which makes me wonder whether the ‘AI’ here is being applied only to the backgrounds. Basically this is…pretty sh1t tbh (I apologise to the team involved, should any of them happen to stumble across this ‘review’, but they can console themselves with the fact that they are probably all young and have exciting careers before them whereas I am not, and am reasonably convinced that I might be entirely unemployable by 2025 at the very latest), but at the very least means that the bar for ‘branded uses of generative AI’ work is still snake-belly-low.
Vispunk: I am struggling slightly to see the name of this company as anything other than ‘Vi Spunk’, but that small issue aside this looks like a decently-useful tool for any of you who want a bunch of reasonably-powerful AI-enabled image manipiulation tools but who have neither the budget nor the inclination to pay Adobe whatever insane licensing fee they are currently asking for their Creative Suite and all the fun Firefly AI tools that it now comes bundled with. Vispunk (could you not change that ‘s’ to a ‘z’? Please? Just for me?) is basically a composite image generator, which combines a few different elements into one – you can sketch out rough shapes, ask the AI to ‘imagine’ them as specific elements and then drag and drop those onto a canvas. As ever, this stuff is FAR easier to understand if you just click the link and play around with it – I don’t think this is professional quality by any means, but as a way of producing quick-and-dirty mockups of stuff it strikes me as pretty useful (and also it doesn’t need you to log into anything to use it, which is no small thing for these AI toys).
Keplar: I’ve looked at this site several times this week, and each time I am left thinking ‘no, hang on, I must have got the wrong end of the stick here, this CAN’T be what I think it is, that’s just too mad and stupid and noone in their right mind would ever pay for this service, let alone make actual business decisions based on the ‘insights’ it delivers’ – AND YET. Keplar is very much a nascent idea – the ‘company’ is a homepage and a ‘sign me up for more info’ form and, as far as I can tell, nothing else at present – but WHAT an idea it is! AI-POWERED VIRTUAL CUSTOMERS ON WHICH TO TEST YOUR PRODUCTS AND CONTENT! Yes, that’s right – why risk going to market with a product or packaging or social assets without first using an army of apparently-AI-enabled ‘virtual customers’ to test said products and content first? As far as I can tell, the idea here is that you will use Keplar to spin up a test audience of ‘people’ (not people) with specific interests, desires and preferences (presumably to replicate your target customer segment) and then present them with content or imagery or branding and see how they ‘react’ and whether they ‘like’ it. “So, which tagline have we gone with for the new soda range? How did the focus groups react?” “Well, turns out we couldn’t actually afford in-person focus-grouping, but the coterie of 10,000 virtual consumers we tested it on went WILD for ‘Wet In Your Face’ and so that’s what we’re going with!” I am so, so fascinated by this, in a slightly-appalled way.
Stock Music: Well that didn’t take long – a few short months on from the Google ‘text-to-music’ generation toy we have our first ‘sorry, musicians, but your chance to make money from composing stock sounds for the corporate market is pretty much over’ website. Stock Music is made by some art studio in Amsterdam, and lets you select from about 20-odd musical ‘types’ or styles, from podcast soundtrack to d’n’b, pick a duration and then get The Machine to spin you up some ORIGINAL AURAL CONTENT which, based on my brief plays with the site, will be utterly unmemorable, utterly inoffensive and definitely no worse than something you’d have to pay a few quid to license. This is, on the one hand, very convenient indeed; on the other, of course, it does feel like another nail being loudly hammered into the coffin of ‘the ability to make anything resembling a living from ‘creative’ endeavours’. Were I more musically talented (or indeed at all musically talented) I think I would have quite a lot of fun getting this to spit out a selection of different anodyne compositions and then challenge myself to remix them into something passably-listenable; there’s a halfway-interesting project in that idea somewhere should any of you fancy doing anything with it.
Map Of The Best (Restaurants): The concept of ‘best’ restaurants is contentious and questionable – one person’s Michelin star is another’s overpriced affront to human decency, after all, and the whole idea is fraught with politics and DISCOURSE, as the recent Vittles debate amply demonstrated – but, in general, more resources to help you find decent scran are A Good Thing, and this is an EXCELLENT example of the genre. A labour of love by…some anonymous coder (thanks, anonymous coder!) which has taken a bunch of data from various restaurant rating organisations (Michelin, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, etc) and mapped it, offering a global rundown of 757 (at the time of writing) different highly-rated eateries for you to peruse at your leisure. You can filter the results by source or price, so you can ensure that you’re not being tempted by the £600-a-head Mayfair w4nkpits, and this is SUCH a useful resource for anyone even halfway restaurant-curious to add to their research repertoire when travelling.
Colorword: Oh I LOVE this idea! The execution here doesn’t quite work – he said, churlishly, of a website that has kindly been made by a total stranger – but I really like the concept behind it. Taking the vaguely-synesthesiac premise of ‘what colour would you ascribe to words or ideas?’, this site serves up a selection of words and asks visitors to pick a colour from the RGB palette that they feel best embodies it. What colour is ‘hope’? ‘Jealousy’? The number 7? You pick the colour you feel is most emblematic of whatever concept you’re fed, and then get presented with an aggregate image representing the most popular choices, a sort of collective Rorshach-y inkblot of chromatic meaning, and I would LOVE to see an exhibition based around this idea somewhere.
The Glitch Gallery: This, though, really SHOULD be a gallery show – there is some gorgeous imagery in here, the result of software fcuking up and going wrong in interesting and aesthetically-appealing ways. From the blurb: “Imagine yourself implementing a raytracer, generating a scatter plot, or developing a geometric algorithm, and BAM!!! It all blows up in your face! All you get is a colorful flurry, or a mess of abstract shapes. You could react to this by throwing your hands in the air, cursing the gods of linear algebra, and frustratedly starting to look for the bug. Alternatively, take a screenshot, and celebrate that unexpected beauty! These moments are often a really interesting case of “unintentional art” – a collaboration between a human, a computational system, and raw entropy!” This is made and maintained by one blinry, whose website features LOADS of cool little projects which I highly recommend you checking out.
Regrub: Italy has a slightly-odd relationship with American-style fast food; on the one hand, when you have pizza you don’t really need other forms of ‘food to eat one-handed on the go’; on the other, the fetishisation of US culture, or at least certain aspects of it, specifically the brash and shiny and LOUD ones (thanks Silvio! WHAT A LEGACY YOU LEFT!!), and McDonald’s weird inability to penetrate the market – certainly in the 80s at least – meant that there was a weird degree of reverence attached to the idea of the burger-in-wax-paper, and some genuinely odd and shonky local chains that tried and largely failed to capture that ‘diners and letterman jackets’ vibe but with an oddly southern European twist (I still remember the aberration that was the ‘Burghy’ experience). Anyway, that’s by way of needless, nostalgic preamble to the introduction of this link, which is to the homepage of a NEW Italian burger chain which I am featuring solely because I love its website and branding SO MUCH – this is the second fast food restaurant website I’ve featured this year, oddly enough, and the second with this sort of aesthetic. Is this a TREND? I don’t care – it’s so nice to see a site that doesn’t feel…flat, and which is generally just sort of silly and fun. MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING PLEASE.
Postcard Past: A site collecting present-day photographic recreations of scenes from old postcards, which neatly contrast the stylised presentation of the often-future-seeming architecture depicted in postcards of the 50s and 60s with the reality of today. To quote the project’s curator, “I’m interested in economic, social, and urban history, and what we learn about them when we compare these highly edited, aspirational bits of old ephemera and the built environment of today. Stories about the rise-and-fall of entire industries, institutional discrimination, and the destruction of public transit systems. Racism, as well as resiliency and creativity in the face of that racism. Immigration, real estate booms, and disinvestment. Too many parking lots, so many collapsed banks, tons of financial crime. Civil rights progress. Advances in engineering. Pandemics. Leaps forward in medical care. Privatization of public goods. Secularization. Adaptive reuse.” This is a genuinely interesting bit of social history and a fascinating archive to get lost in.
How Cold Is That Library?: A Google sheet collecting impressions and notes on the relative temperatures of various libraries around the world, presumably compiled by a collection of scholars with an incredibly sensitive internal thermostat. This is VERY comprehensive – there are a dozen listings for London alone, from the British Library to the Lambeth Palace Library, but if you choose to travel further afield then there’s data here for centres of learning and knowledge as far afield as Montevideo. You need never be too cold or too hot while studying EVER AGAIN – it’s possible that this is the most useful link that has EVER been in Web Curios, for which you are of course all welcome.
Figures In The Sky: This is interesting; this site looks at the different ways in which different civilisations across human history have mapped the stars, and the various constellations and groupings that have been identified by peoples from the Mayans to the Maori, and through a series of star maps demonstrates the differing emphasis placed on the various celestial bodies by people past and contemporary; this is a really lovely bit of webwork by Nadieh Bremer.
Dial A Pilot: Are you a nervous flyer? You shouldn’t be – after all, it’s not the flying that kills you, it’s the ground. Still, it’s not unreasonable to feel *slightly* trepidatious at the idea of spending several hours in a gigantic, many-ton metal tube which is held aloft by what may as well be magic (yes, I know that technically it’s ‘physics’ but, honestly, noone has ever managed to explain it in ways that sound anything other than utterly fantastical), and if you or anyone you know is getting the fantods at the idea of air travel then perhaps they might benefit from this rather wonderful little service which offers a dedicated service which puts nervous flyers in touch with actual, real-life pilots who can chat to them and offer reassuring words of counsel to take the edge off the terror slightly (“No, no, there’s literally no chance of surviving, whatever the reassuring little infographic leaflet tells you; yes, you can actually have your innards sucked out of you by the vacuum flush” – that sort of thing, presumably). This is such a good idea, and, seemingly, not a PR stunt for anything, which frankly feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.
Level To Explain: Horrible title (and slightly-clunky interface) aside, this is a really nice idea – ok, yes, fine, it’s just a bunch of pre-prompts and GPT API access, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fun little toy. Level To Explain (SUCH A BAD NAME, JESUS) basically ‘explains’ anything you ask it to, to the degree of complexity you specify, in as many words as you need – so, for example, you could ask it to explain nuclear fission in words comprehensible to, say, a GCSE level student, in 500 words or less. It will also do stylistic tweaks, spitting out copy in the style of a magazine article, say, or blogpost – while this is obviously built on generative AI and therefore NOTHING it says can be trusted, it’s also a not-terrible example of exactly the sort of text-wranging work that these machines are best at.
THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY DO WITH A NAP, PT.2:
Vita Kara: I remain resolutely immune to the charms of TikTok as a platform – I think, fundamentally, my problem with it is that at heart it’s just TV with very low production values and, well, I don’t like telly – but I found myself properly charmed by this account in which LA artist Vita Kara does a repeated ‘bit’ in which she creates increasingly-elaborate setups to fool the viewer. Every video begins with the line ‘the craziest thing about being creative…’ and each video features some sort of trompe l’oeil-type reveal in which one or more parts of the scene in shot reveals itself to not in fact be what you think it is. Which, fine, is an admittedly ham-fisted attempt to explain what the fcuk is going on here, but I promise you the channel is both funny and charming when you get into it (no, really, it is).
Wavacity: Do YOU want an in-browser bit of audio-editing software that lets you clip and fiddle and tweak and layer to your heart’s content, all for free? OF COURSE YOU DO! I was playing with this a bit this week and it reminded me how much *fun* audio editing can be, and how easy it is to make stupid-but-amusing things just by cutting and pasting and clipping – the interface here isn’t *hugely* user friendly, fine, but if you’ve ever used any audio editing software before then it should all be reasonably familiar, and there’s a not-terrible help function on the site should you get stuck. I think I might spend this afternoon using this to take audio from those people who insist on leaving me fcuking Whatsapp voicenotes (SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WANT TO LISTEN TO YOU SPEAK AT ME FOR TWO MINUTES UNINTERRUPTED AND WHAT EXACTLY IS IT ABOUT MY REFUSAL TO SPEAK ON THE PHONE THAT LEADS YOU TO BELIEVE THAT I CONSIDER THIS AN ACCEPTABLE ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION?! Ahem) and chop it up into spoofed murder confessions, and I advise you to do the same (they deserve it).
Spoon Planet: Do YOU like spoons? HOW MUCH DO YOU LIKE THEM, EH? Not, I would guess, as much as the person or people (but I rather hope it’s ‘person’ singular, because, well, I’m all about monomaniacal obsession – oh, hang on, I just checked and it is in fact the responsibility of ‘The Spoon Collectors of Southern California, which is just BEAUTIFUL) behind this website, which claims to be the single largest collection of sterling silver spoons on the internet (and, honestly, I am not about to undertake the exhaustive research required to verify or debunk this claim). SO MANY SPOONS! I love this immoderately, in part because of the subject matter (SPOONS!) but also because of the very strong ‘person in their dotage who disapproves of your lifestyle’ tone of much of the copy (I particularly enjoyed the “There is NO charge and there is NO registration required. Furthermore there are no big display ads to distract you” declaration on the homepage; are…are there other, less scrupulous spoon-based sites elsewhere on the internet that DO charge, and which demand a quid to access their ladle-related content goldmine?). Please do take the time to click into the ‘exhibits’ list – there really are an absolute fcuktonne of different types of spoon here, to be fair, and you may well discover a hitherto-unimagined passion to fill in all those empty, vacant hours between birth and death.
Ephemeral P2P Hosting: I can’t quite think of a practical use for this right now (look, I went to bet at 1 and I wasn’t wholly sober and I have been up since 6am and typing for two hours straight and I AM NOT AT MY BEST ON FRIDAY MORNINGS OK? I AM SORRY) but there *has* to be something fun you can do with this – this site lets you create your very own ‘webpage that only exists if someone is looking at it RIGHT NOW’ page, which, frankly, feels a bit like magic. For example, I made this Page – I will keep it open in a tab for the rest of the day, so anyone clicking the link should find it visible, but as of tomorrow (or whenever I remember to close my tabs) it will VANISH FOREVER (probably, unless one of you decides to keep the tab open and preserve the mystery). I don’t for a second pretend to understand how this works, beyond vague hand-waving about ‘peer to peer stuff’, but there’s got to be a fun art toy project thing that you can cobble together from the broad principle behind this. COME ON GET TO IT.
Bird Photographer of the Year 2023: SO MUCH AVIAN SPLENDOUR! So many special, feathery friends! The winning picture this year is ASTONISHING (although I do wonder about the immediate aftermath and whether or not the falcon was swiftly ingested by a royally-p1ssed-off pelican mere seconds after the shutter snapped), but my personal favourite is ‘Urban Paradise’ by Xiaoke Wang which feels like a particularly-perfect combination of hard lines and natural chaos.
Cocoon Toy: ‘Etsy vendors selling weird sh1t’ is hardly a new or unheralded phenomenon, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen something that makes me do quite this much of a double take and a ‘hang on, sorry, *what*?’ as the work of Cocoon Toy, a Ukrainian (I think) creator who makes…what are these? Like something that the Jim Henson Creature Workshop might churn out if the brief was ‘The Clangers (but body horror)’, perhaps – these initially look cute-weird, but a closer look at the selection reveals some…troubling details, like the exposed brains and the, er, weirdly-clitoral nature of some of the creature details. I have no idea which of you is going to click this link and start a whole new collection, but I bet at least one of you does (do send me a photo of your cute little vagina dentata monster in situ!).
The Acid Generator: Via the reliably-excellent curation of Things Magazine comes this in-browser synthtoy – yes, fine, there are a LOT of these online, but it’s rare to come across one that makes the lovely, squelchy 303-ish sounds of the classic acid era; if you, like me, ever spent more time than was strictly necessary gurning in dark, low-ceilinged rooms while the Liberator DJs played songs that sounded quite a lot like filing cabinets falling over in an air raid shelter while the sirens blared (it was great, honest) then this will probably bring back some (fractured, strobe-addled) memories.
Global Forest Watch: With each Summer bringing news of more forest fires across Europe (and, er, everywhere else tbh), you might not necessarily want to spend time exploring a map showing how the world’s forest cover has changed over the past few decades – still, on the offchance that you DO fancy looking at data that shows quite how comprehensively we’re managing to denude the planet then this is probably the perfect website for you; the standard view shows you where forest cover has increased and decreased worldwide, but there are a bunch of other data layers and filters that you can apply so you can track the impact of industry on tree coverage and see how, for example, the presence of the palm oil industry correlates to the removal of forests. It’s…not a *hugely* cheering picture, if I’m honest.
Unsung Heroes of Illustration: This is a LOVELY YouTube channel, which has been going for seven years – it’s run by one Pete Beard, who uses it to showcase the work of illustrators and cartoonists from the mid-19th to early-20th Century. “I had always thought that many illustrators from the past got nothing like the attention they deserved so I decided to make some videos about a few of these almost forgotten talents. The unsung heroes series was originally intended to be about illustrators from what’s known as the golden age of illustration. But I soon realised that meant ignoring many early 20th century illustrators who strictly speaking didn’t fit that description. So I compromised and ended up with parameters of those born between 1850 and 1910. There are also videos about individual illustrators who are personal favourites of mine, mostly but not exclusively from the early 20th century. And there are a range of others on various aspects of illustration, such as children’s books, advertising, art deco or a certain historical period. If it’s illustration then it has my interest. And I very much hope it has yours, too.” This is SO interesting – if you’re a visual artist or historian then you’ll inevitably get more out of it, but even if not there’s so much fascinating material in these videos about culture and history and STUFF.
Loch Ness Sightings: I don’t know about you, but I was shocked – SHOCKED, I tell you! – that the recent weekend spent ‘hunting for the loch ness monster’ did not in fact yield the incontrovertible proof of the sea beast’s existence that many had hoped for; still, just because nothing was found doesn’t mean that nothing is there, and it certainly won’t stop tourists from flocking to the area to buy violently overpriced shortbread and some poorly-made, sweatshop-crafted stuffed ‘Nessie’ toys, and to lie about having seen a monster in the water. This website is, apparently THE MOST OFFICIAL tracker of all the various sightings of the mythical beast, and it’s kept very up-to-date – there’s a sighting as recently as 23 August, although to be fair ‘sighting’ is perhaps a generous description for ‘man on loch ness monster hunt claims to have seen some shapes’. There are, though, a bunch of other sightings which have been augmented with PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE, and frankly after looking through some of these I am pretty much convinced of the existence of some sort of Plesiosaur-esque creature in the highland depths.
The Whoa API: An API that lets you pull in audio of every single time Keanu Reeves has said ‘Woah!’ in one of his films, meaning that it is now entirely feasible to build a website which has a different ‘Woah!’ sound effect for each button you click – please God can one of you working on something horrible and soul-destroying and corporate please sneak this functionality in under the radar? Because, honestly, who wouldn’t want a bit of Reeves blaring out of their speakers while they attempt to, I don’t know, commission a bit of monumental masonry? NO FCUKER, etc!
TokTik: !!WARNING CLICKING THIS LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO ACTUAL BONGO!! With that caveat out of the way, here’s something I am slightly-astonished has taken this long to stumble across my field of vision – it’s TikTok, but for bongo! I think I’ve mentioned this before here, but I’ve never personally been into pr0n (and yes, I am well aware of the ‘no, officer, you must believe me!’, ‘methinks he doth protest too much’ nature of that particular statement) and as such I have given this only the most cursory of glances, but my observations (should you desire them) are as follows: a) this is VERY heteromalegaze centric; b) I don’t think there’s currently any sort of recommendation algorithm or similar built in, so the ‘TikTok for bongo’ idea is superficial at best; and c) I am…confused by the existence of a separate tab on the site for ‘funny’ content (but, per my earlier statement, I am far from a connoisseur of this sort of material, so perhaps this is just What The Kids Are Into these days). Still, I quite like the idea that this will eventually develop into some sort of all-knowing sexual analysis tool that will be able to divine your deepest kinks before even you become aware of them; if it starts feeding you pegging videos within the first 5 minutes then, well, maybe you should just go with it!
Ridella: Reader Dylan Kapoor sent me this, a fun little daily game which offers you a series of clues which all point to a single word – try and guess the word with as few clue prompts as possible. Who knew that people were still making Wordle-esque knockoffs in 2023? THANKYOU DYLAN KAPOOR – I have enjoyed adding this to my daily ‘links Matt has to deal with before the day can actually start’ runthrough (current time to complete each day: 83 minutes and rising).
Additional: Apparently this was until recently part of the New York Times’ selection of small games, but was discontinued in the past week or so – anyway, someone’s created their own knockoff version (nice to see someone ripping off the NYT rather than the other way round for a change!) meaning that you can continue playing what is basically the ‘Numbers’ round from Countdown as a daily game in your browser. There are five puzzles of increasing complexity each day and I have just had to close the tab housing the game as I have been stuck on the hardest one all morning and if I don’t just accept defeat then I will never finish this fcuking newsletter.
Mr Platformer: Finally this week, a VERY old-school platformer in the Atari2600 visual style by Terry Cavanagh, the man behind the iconically IMPOSSIBLE retro-platformer VVVVVV – this starts simple but then gets HARD and OH MY GOD when I say HARD do I mean incredibly, frustratingly, brilliantly, compellingly difficult. You will HATE this but you will also play it far, far more than you will probably expect to – you’re welcome.
Code RGB: Another link from Things Magazine, this is the Insta account ot digital artist Chris Barber, who makes rather beautiful images from code; there’s something really unique about Barber’s style (and I say this as someone who has seen a LOT of generative art over the years – this doesn’t quite look like anyone else’s work, which is rarer than you might think in this field).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
Mouth Full of Sardines: Yes, fine, not actually a Tumblr – still, this site deserves SPECIAL PRAISE for being ahead of the game when it comes to the trendiness of tinned fish; it’s been going since 2010, as far as I can tell, and is the personal project of a person who REALLY likes sardines and who seems to have made it their life’s work to review as many different varieties of the fcuking things as possible. I very much enjoyed this – in particular, the section in the FAQ where the author sternly denies have any links to ‘big sardine’ (and in fact the whole tone of the FAQ, which is…VERY SERIOUS; this person doesn’t take their oily fish lightly, as evidenced by sentences such as “I only rate sardines straight from the tin. I eat half at tin by itself, and I eat the other half with saltines. Some tins are better alone and others would be better cooked in a dish. I point this out in my reviews. Rating sardines with other foods would not give the sardines a fair rating.” THIS IS NOT A FRIVOLOUS ENDEAVOUR!).
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
The End of Social Media: Yes, I know, you’ve read this headline before, too many times; a fair observation, fine, but this is a decent overview by Sean Bonner, someone who’s been around the web a while and who has been a part of enough digital (and non-digital) ‘scenes’ that have been and gone to know when something is dying. The post-Elonification of Twitter has seen too many of these pieces, but I thought this was short and pithy and did a decent job of capturing some of the reasons why this does very much feel like the end of an era – this paragraph in particular felt…true, although I appreciate it is nothing more than anecdote: “ I talked to my son about this and he bluntly said there’s nothing appealing about any of these sites, it’s just people trying to push sh1t on him and he doesn’t see any reason to ever spend time there. No one sees his posts anyway. He’d much rather hang out in a voice chat with a few of his friends. Thinking back to my own childhood and how much time I spent on the phone and how exciting 3-way calling was and even the introduction of Party Lines (though I was never allowed to try them) I can’t really argue with his logic.” ‘Disintermediated communications’ does rather feel like a coming thing for 2024, imho – although for all I know you’re all on Threads resurrecting the utopian social media dreams of Arab Spring-era Twitter (I wouldn’t know; unless it becomes absolutely essential for ‘keeping track of the web’ there is no way in fcuking hell I am signing up for that piece of sh1t).
What OpenAI Really Wants: Or, alternatively, the latest slightly-breathless bit of AltmanHagiography! OK, maybe I’m being a *bit* unfair – this WIRED piece isn’t totally uncritical, after all – but I am starting to get slightly irritated at the amount of air that’s being given to all this AGI chat. GYAC guys (shout out to the Popbitch heads!) THIS IS ALL A DISTRACTION FROM THE ACTUAL, REAL WORLD STUFF THAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW! Still, this is an entertaining read which does a decent job of telling the history if OpenAI, its early years and its ‘breakthrough’ moment and the invention of Transformer technology, and how, basically, the people working there still don’t really understand how the systems they make do the stuff that they do.
Preparing for a GenAI Future: I’m currently doing a bit of work for some agency group looking at ‘how they should integrate generative AI into their businesses’, and inbetween sawing at my wrists at the pointless, miserable horror of it all (YOU TOO CAN HIRE ME TO CONSULT FOR YOU!) I’ve been trying to articulate exactly what is possible and how it makes sense for knowledge economy businesses to think about this tech and what it might do for them – this piece in the Harvard Business Review is a pretty good overview of some useful principles to bear in mind around generative AI (or at least its current incarnation), specifically the fact that, actually, the main benefits are less in terms of ‘creativity’ and far more in terms of ‘the incredibly boring stuff that actually makes up a violent amount of the working day’. This is practical, pragmatic and a tiny bit boring – but it’s also broadly accurate, which isn’t necessarily something you can say about a lot of the rest of ‘101 ways in which AI will transform your business NOW!’ bullsh1t floating around the web right now (I can only IMAGINE the sort of stuff people are saying on LinkedIn – there’s a reason I only log on there once a week in order to once again set the torched remnants of my professional credibility alight via the medium of ‘posting a link to Curios’).
AI and the Dr Doolittle Challenge: This is a genuinely fun bit of academic wonkery which pleased me no end – will AI help us finally TALK TO THE ANIMALS in the style of Eddie Murphy (or, fine, in the style of Hugh Lofting’s 1920 creation)? The question, it turns out, is complicated, not least in terms of the questions around context, intent and interpretation – I mean, read this and then understand that you have NEVER adequately considered the complexities of interspecies communication: “While worms definitely secret chemicals to communicate, we do not know if they ‘talk back’ by secreting chemicals, and if not, what would be considered a response? Can a body turn of 30 degrees be considered a response? There are also many technical challenges. For instance, we will have to determine what are the relevant temporal timescales; would we need to measure secretions every 5 seconds or every hour? These are difficult questions that will remain difficult even if AI Doctor Dolittle’s computational power would improve substantially.” Honestly, this is SO interesting (in particular if you’ve any background in, or knowledge of, philosophy of language) and I would 100% go to a lecture on this exact topic.
What Makes A Website Cool: One of several links filched from Kris this week, this is a lovely little piece asking what might be considered to make a website ‘cool’, and how we might think about designing and building more digital things that embody that most ineffable of qualities. I am 100% behind this – I think that’s what appealed to me most about that Italian burger company site I linked to earlier, the fact that it’s…just *cool*, for reasons I can’t adequately describe. Can we all make a secret pact, please? That for the next year or so we will do everything in our power to smuggle small packets of ‘cool’ into whatever godawful work we’re forced to do by capitalism/the bank/societal expectations (delete as applicable)? Not everything has to be joyless and boring and functional, after all.
GenZ’s Domestic Sex Block: I’ve had a longstanding theory – with no scientific basis whatsoever, to be clear – that the fact that Italians tend to go to University in the same cities they grew up in (and the fact that, up until the tertiary education system was reformed a few years back, that it was entirely possible to spend literally DECADES doing a single undergraduate degree – this is, I promise, a genuine fact) is one of the reasons for the country’s famously-low birth rate: you stay living at home, meaning you’re stuck under the watchful eye of your (probably Catholic and reasonably strict) parents, meaning you can’t bone with the reckless abandon you might wish, meaning when you DO finally move out and get your own place at the age of 30something you are too busy making up for lost time to want to get burdened with progeny. Which is by way of long-winded and only-tangentially-relevant introduction to this link, which suggests that GenZ is struggling to get laid because they all still live at home and their parents rather cramp their sexual style; I am including this partly because, well, it made me laugh in a slightly cruel and unfair way, but also because it struck me as a) plausibly true; and b) the sort of bullsh1t ‘insight’ that you could reasonably build a whole campaign around for the right brand (yes, ok, I can’t immediately think of what that brand might be, but I trust you’ll be able to fill in the blanks).
CringeTok: Specifically, a ‘creator’ (still hate that word, why isn’t there a decent alternative?) whose whole thing is going back through embarrassing stuff they posted on social media a decade ago when they were a kid and using that as MATERIAL for some ‘relatable TikTok content’- this is interesting to me less because of the person in question (although some of the stuff is genuinely amusing, and once again made me forever grateful that I had my most embarrassing years (aside from the current ones, obvs) away from the web and that literally NO traces exist of my life between about 8 and 26) and more because of the broader idea that we’re now in an era in which people can literally look back at different stages of their online lives, like tree rings or layers of compacted rubbish, and track their evolution and development – it feels like there is something in this, although once again I’m in no way able to adequately articulate how (yes, I know, but in my defence did I mention I only got 5 hours of slightly-iffy sleep?).
Where Do Fonts Come From?:Another of those ‘crikey, this industry which from the outside looks incredibly tedious is in fact significantly more interesting and indeed cutthroat than I might have imagined!’ pieces, this time looking at the MAD world of fonts (oh, ok, fine, ‘MAD’ is perhaps hyperbolic, but it’s still pretty interesting); there’s basically a monopoly in fontland, and one company owns most of the fonts and as such makes most of the money, and as you read this you’ll find yourself getting slowly annoyed at the realisation that this is yet another industry which has been effectively dominated by a single player to the detriment of designers – this feels like something that should be ‘disruptable’, no?
Overnourished: This is…not a hugely comfortable read if you’re a meat eater, but it’s a timely one given the stories all over the news as I type about chicken farming standards and the general inhumanity of the poultry industry; this piece, by Arianne Shahvisi for the LRB, takes us from battery chicken production to water pollution via Ayn Rand (it makes sense, promise); I honestly had no idea that mass-rearing of chickens could be directly linked to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, but, seemingly, it sort-of can.
Rotten Tomatoes: This is a really interesting article – partly as a story of how Rotten Tomatoes, the film ratings site, evolved and grew and eventually became *the* metric by which Hollywood judged its critical successes and failures, and subsequently projected its box office, but also as a story of the unintended and unexpected ways in which systems can unwittingly impact and shape the world around them, and how something as simple as ‘hey, let’s just aggregate review scores so people can easily get an appreciation of the general critical reception of a particular film!’ turns into ‘ok, so the entire US filmmaking industrial complex is now irrationally fixated on the scores listed on this website that it now dictates release schedules and promotional work, and as a result it’s become such a commercially-significant part of the film marketing process that it’s effectively ceased to adequately fulfil the function for which it was originally intended’.
The Modern Concert Experience: This is SO interesting to me – I have never been a ‘big gig’ person, and the idea of going to see someone at a 70k capacity venue really doesn’t appeal at all, but it’s fascinating to read about the changing habits and mores of those who do attend the MegaTour concerts by your Taylors or Beyonces and how the ritual around the gig-going experience is developing in the era of streaming video and ‘everything as content for your personal brand’, and the rise in importance of the shared/communal experience (as delivered via your device) – after all, if you didn’t have the iconic Taylor/Beyonce experience, as mandated by the FYP, did you really go to the gig at all?
Carlos Alcaraz: This is a GREAT bit of interactive scrollytelling (do we still say that? I fcuking hope not, it really is a godawful aberration of a word) by ESPN, breaking down the particular brilliance of Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz – I am far from being a tennis fan, and so I can’t really vouch for the quality of the analysis of the man’s game here presented, but I am very much a fan of pointlessly-whizzy websites that do fun things with parallax and this is definitely an excellent example of the genre – there’s some really nice use of on-court data throughout which really brings the piece to life and helps illustrate some of the more technical details about Alcaraz’s technique for people like me who can barely lift a racquet.
American Oligarchy: This is a very odd story. I had no idea that famed US stock picker Warren Buffett had progeny, nor indeed that his male heir, Howard Buffett, is, seemingly, the very definition of a ‘failson’ – this piece looks at Buffett Junior’s life and, specifically, the ways in which he, his money and his frankly creepy obsession with law enforcement has shaped the town of Decatur in Illinois. Honestly, this will start off feeling a little bit dry but I promise that you will get sucked in by the end – what would YOU do were you born into unimaginable wealth and never had to work a day in your life? I pretty much guarantee that it’s unlikely that you’d spend quite as much time fcuking around with a small town’s police department as this plutocratic weirdo seems to have done.
Assault Rifles: I appreciate that you may not think you’re interested in the mechanical and technical differences between the AK47 and the M16 rifles, but I promise you that this is LOADS more interesting than you would expect an article containing the words ‘firing mechanism’ and ‘large-gauge rounds’ to be – this covers design, manufacture, the Vietnam war, pragmatism, cartoons, communications and the importance of focusing on the practical rather than the perfect, and I would imagine that there will be at least seven of you who can use this to draw all sorts of preposterous ‘strategic conclusions’ on LinkedIn (you’re welcome! You dreadful, dreadful people!).
The TikTok Exodus: When Silvio took over commercial TV in 1980s Italy, the airwaves were filled with gameshows and football and a by-modern-standards-unconscionable-number-of-BREASTS, the Italianate translation of the Reaganite dream – and because of its geographical proximity and the strength of Italian TV signals, Albanians got to see it all, as they were able to pick up most Italian channels on their own TV sets. As a result, Italy was seen as the promised land of milk and honey (and BREASTS) and the country saw a wave of Albanian immigration as people flocked to try and get a piece of the lovely capitalist pie. Times change, but the principles are constant; now instead of ‘Italian TV’ it’s ‘TikToks by Albanians in the UK flexing about their lifestyles’, but the result – a tide of people wanting to leave a poor country in search of a better life in what is portrayed to them as a far richer one – is largely the same.
A Writer Attends The Frankfurt Book Fair: My friend Jay published a book recently – CONGRATULATIONS JAY! – and whilst I’m obviously hugely impressed and in awe of the achievement, I also can’t help but think that it all looks like SO much hard work and effort for frankly uncertain reward, and that the publishing industry looks absolutely HORRIBLE from the outside. That impression was rather reinforced by this (very funny, if also quite miserable) article by Lydia Stryck, who against all better advice goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair to attempt to flog her novel directly to publishers there – it does not, you may be unsurprised to know, go entirely to plan. This is savage – POOR THE AUTHORS.
Werner Herzog: Brent Katz writes about getting Werner Herzog to record the audio book version of his forthcoming volume of AI-penned poetry; I make no apologies for the fact that I adore hearing about Werner Herzog and all of his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, and I would have paid actual cashmoney to have been in the room while he recorded a poem written entirely in binary.
Forming An Edge: I think I have mentioned the ‘Scope of Work’ newsletter here before – it’s about making and manufacturing, and is honestly one of the most consistently and unexpectedly fascinating things I read. This piece is a perfect example of why I love it – it’s about knives and knife sharpening, and how knife sharpening works, and different techniques and ways of honing a blade to an edge, and it’s interesting and informative and packed with knowledge, and it’s just a genuine pleasure to read (and will make you want to get your knives sharpened).
Death Row D&D: Finally this week, a beautiful piece of writing from The Marshall Project (I’ve featured essays from it at various points over the years; it’s a project that works to promote journalism about the US criminal justice system) about playing dungeons and dragons in prison – specifically on death row – and the way in which roleplaying can act as a small consolation to people waiting to die. This really is gorgeous, and very sad, and it has stayed with me all week.
It’s odd how, despite the fact that my life (and I presume yours – I doubt any school-age kids are reading this and, if you are, STOP IT IT IS NOT FOR YOU) has long-since decoupled itself from the rhythms of the scholastic calendar, I can’t help but feel a vague sense of loss at the start of September – yes, Keats, fine, I’m sure for YOU it’s all ‘mist’ and ‘fruitfulness’, but here it’s ‘six months of largely-horizontal rain’ and ‘that part of the year when the slugs start appearing unbidden through my girlfriend’s floorboards’ (don’t ask) and ‘oh Christ soon people are going to start talking about the fcuking John Lewis Christmas advert and once again I will have to resist the urge to do the ‘down and not across’ thing’.
ANYWAY HAPPY SEPTEMBER WHITE RABBITS WHITE RABBITS!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I would pinch you and punch you if I could only reach.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT TO THE GUARDIAN THAT I AM RIGHT HERE FFS AND MY RATES ARE VERY REASONABLE, PT.1:
Bland: An unhelpfully-named business/url to kick off with here – IT IS NOT BLAND IT IS VERY INTERESTING AND COMPELLING THANKYOU VERY MUCH – but then again I suppose that if I were the people behind a company that seems, at least at first glance, to be a genuine boon for scammers and criminals and (less law-breakingly, but, morally, about on the same level) telemarketers then perhaps I too would try and deflect attention from it by hiding behind the webaddress equivalent of a giant beige tarpaulin. Anyway, Bland! A genuinely-impressive and almost-entirely-evil (oh, ok, fine, ‘evil’ is probably a stretch, but I don’t think it’s ‘good’ by any means) concept which, basically, lets anyone set up an AI-enabled, fully-voiced robocalling system for, based on the pricing here laid out, about 5p a call! It’s not clear whether this is just a one-way broadcast offering or whether there’s currently any voice recognition, pseudo-interactive layer to this (I think there isn’t, but that there inevitably will be as soon as the tech can handle it), but, regardless, this will let anyone who can be bothered to pony up the cash set up an autocalling system for…well, for whatever they want, which, inevitably, is going to mean that the barrier to entry for phonescamming will end up resting no more than a couple of millimetres above floor level. It’s stuff like this that is going to render the phonecall utterly obsolete, isn’t it?
Some Impressive XR Stuff: I continue to be…underwhelmed by AR/VR/XR stuff, in the main – I am still yet to see anything from it that compels me to strap 2 lbs worth of plastic, metal and glass to my face, or to observe the world through my phonescreen – but that’s possibly because most of the stuff that I’ve seen over the past year or so has been related to tHe MeTaVeRsE and as such has had the sad, Zuckerbergian patina of ‘LinkedIn, but all around you’ that all of the Meta Horizon stuff carries with it like a faint whiff of mildew. This clip lurched across my field of vision on Twitter this week, though, and made me momentarily curious again – it’s by some VR outfit called Sidekick, which as far as I can tell is a developer community for people making experimental software in the space (although details are a bit sketchy tbh, so I might have got that wrong), and while the stuff they’re demonstrating is…ok, a bit *functional* (it’s more ‘virtual entertainment spaces and SCREENS IN VR’ than it is ‘LOOK AT THE AMAZING SPACE DINOSAUR DIORAMA THAT YOU CAN EXPERIENCE VIA THE MAGIC OF HEADSET-BASED GRAPHICS’, so, er temper your expectations), it’s also really very impressive; I think watching this was the first time I really got a sense for how multiple screens and things might usefully work in virtual space, and how this might be appealing for both working and entertainment purposes. That said, there was also a significant part of me that is so utterly broken by the internet that all it could think of when watching this clip was ‘god, the goon cave stuff emerging from this sort of tech is going to be deeply, deeply troubling’ which is a sentence that a) I wish I had never had cause to type; and b) I sort-of hope you don’t really understand (if you don’t, and if you feel compelled to google ‘goon cave’, know that you probably oughtn’t do it on a professional device).
Singify: As I type this, Radio 4 is running with a story about how Warner has signed THE FIRST AI ARTIST EVER, which is, as is par for the course with much mainstream discussion of ‘slightly fringe tech stuff’, a depressingly PR-led take which completely erases Hatsune Miku from history – JUSTICE FOR HATSUNE MIKU! JUSTICE FOR THE VOCALOIDS! Still, it’s something of a sign of the times here, as is the ease with which you can use a tool like Singify (seamless!) to quickly spin up AI-enabled cover versions of any song you can think of by a whole raft of AI-spoofed artists – you basically select the vocal model you’d like to use (from what seems like a reasonably wide-ranging selection on the site – they tend to skew ‘contemporary internet’, so there’s Lil’ Peep and Bieber and Grande, but no (for the sake of argument) GG Allin, then feed in a song (either an MP3 or a link to the YouTube vide of your choice), hit a button and AS IF BY MAGIC you’ll be given a version of the track with the vocals magically replaced by the artist of your choosing. This is, obviously, incapable of producing anything even remotely listenable – or at least it was for me; perhaps it was my choice of the Morgan Freeman voice model singing Britney’s ‘Toxic’ that was the problem – but it’s bleakly compelling, and (with my regular ‘this is the worst it’s ever going to be’ refrain) it feels like it’s going to be ‘good enough’ pretty quickly; at the moment, though, the best use-case I can think of is for creating ‘comedy’ cover versions, or, for those of you with children, for trolling your kids by ruining whatever their favourite songs are by refusing to play the originals and instead ONLY allowing the AI-generated, Mickey Mouse-voiced alternatives on the stereo.
Text To Sing: More AI music ‘fun’ here, this is a Hugging Face-hosted demo which offers a tantalising glimpse of something very fun just around the corner; it basically lets you rewrite songs with new lyrics, and creates new versions of the track with your new masterful wordplay inserted in lieu of the originals. Because it’s just a proof-of-concept there is a finite list of songs you can play with in this demo, but there’s something slightly-magical about the way this works; just get a vague feel for the rhythm and meter of the lyrics and then type whatever rubbish you can think of that vaguely fits, and then hit the button (and wait a bit – Hugging Face continues to be…quite…slow) and listen in awe as your composition is magically tweaked to fit the melody, and your lyrical genius is laid bare. This is, of course, very shonky and doesn’t sound great – but, again, you can absolutely see the potential here for quickly and easily editing audio like this. If any of you fancy using this to write a jingle for Web Curios then, well, that would be nice (but also, perhaps you should find better things to do with your life).
Pictures of Paintings: This project is a lot…stranger than I initially thought when I discovered it, but in a pleasing way. Pictures of Paintings is ostensibly just AN Other ‘digital art gallery that you can wander through in your browser’ site, displaying pictures of a variety of world-famous works by Monet and others…except as you look, you might realise that the paintings don’t look quite as you might remember them, and they are collected from all sorts of different galleries rather than representing the collection of a single institution. That’s because the person behind the site – one Yaz Ashmawi, whose personal site I also rather like fwiw – has built it from photographs that he has personally taken of each of the works in question, photos that he’s in each case manipulated and digitally altered, in some cases significantly while in others imperceptibly. To quote Yaz himself, “It’s been built by taking photographs of innumerous frames and paintings and gallery spaces. By swapping them all around with one another and sorting them out I’ve created this unique collection here. I’ve done my best to organise things into coherent sets and rooms for you in order to the showcase these art pieces appropriately. Beware however! I’ve held nothing back with regards to the edits. This project has originated from my own personal love of recreating and re-interpreting of the work of others, and is the result of many hundreds of hours of editing the paintings in these collections. They’re all retouched. In some cases, they vary significantly from their original appearance.” I LOVE THIS – there’s something really interesting about the idea and execution here, the idea of personal curation and tweaking of the works and their placing in a personal virtual space to reimagine and recontextualise them – and it’s a genuinely nice website to wander around for 15 minutes, exploring the themes Yaz has pulled together and seeing the ways, big and small, he’s fiddled with the works.
AI Stickers: Do YOU want the power to create digital stickers using THE MAGIC OF AI? No, probably not, because (unless I am massively misreading my tiny readership’s demographic profile) none of you are 12. Still, should you feel unaccountably YOUNG for a moment you can try out this fun service (mobile-only – on which, by the way, MOBILE ONLY SITES ARE SH1T STOP MAKING MOBILE-ONLY SITES PLEASE) which works with Midjourney to spin up cutesy little sticker graphics for use on all your socials based on whatever prompt you feed it (and, I presume, some sort of hacked-together pseudo-API access under the hood).
Dream Football Jobs: I confess that the concept of a ‘dream job’ is one utterly alien to me (see also: dreams) – I don’t know about you, but I tend to find that as soon as any financial remuneration is introduced to a process or practice, all the joy is magically leached from it and it becomes NO FUN AT ALL, and that all the jobs that I have ever done which have involved any field that might reasonably be considered from the outside to be ‘fun’ or ‘cool’ are in fact about as far as its possible to be from ‘fun’ and involve dealing with the genuinely borderline-sociopathic (hello, the art world!) or actually turn out to be intensely, tediously mechanical and process-y (hello, videogames!). Still, I concede that there may be some of you reading this who have not yet been ground down to worrying smoothness by LIFE and who might still approach the future with wide-eyed hope and the belief that things CAN get better – in which case (and, er, presuming you like football) this website might be the start of a whole new exciting chapter in your professional career. Getting a (non-playing) job in the football industry is not easy – roles in-house at clubs tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, and there’s no real guide to what the wider ecosystem around the sport might look like, careers-wise – and so this website, effectively a careers portal for the European football industry, is a great place for anyone who’s interested in pursuing a career in the sport to get a feel for the sorts of roles that are out there. At present there are gigs being advertised working for EA Sports in Sweden, Norwich City FC, Sports Interactive (the people who make Football Manager) and, glamorously, to be a content manager at Benfica in Portugal. Know anyone who wants to move to Lisbon and make TikToks of footballers?
Subconscious: Another week, another new tool which seeks to help with the ORGANISING OF THOUGHTS AND INFORMATION; this, though, feels…very ambitious. Rather than being a sort of personal taxonomical note-taking system a la Evernote or similar, Subconscious is a (still very beta) project which, er, is trying to create what I think can best be described as ‘an internet of ideas’. It doesn’t exist yet, but from what I can glean from the website and having a bit of a poke around the Discord, there’s a BIG CONCEPT here about the creation of a conceptual network of open notes, created by anyone and hyperlinked to develop what might best be understood as a sort of universal knowledge graph (yes, I know, and I’m sorry) – it’s not totally clear how this would practically work, but there’s something quite interesting about the idea of a system that allows for the open linking and concatenation of ideas and concepts in much the same way as you have within Wikipedia, but across the whole web. I appreciate that nothing I have written here really explains what this wants to be – LOOK THIS IS QUITE HARD TO TRY AND EXPLAIN BASED ON LIMITED SOURCE INFORMATION – but if you’re interested in broad concepts of information wrangling and tagging and linking then you could do worse than sign up for updates to this; aside from anything else, the associated newsletter contains quite a lot of interesting writing about how we think and how we organise ideas, should you be in the market for such stuff.
The TikTok Effect House: I always forget that TikTok has its own AR tech, like Snap’s but, well, different – now, much like as with Snap’s, anyone can make AR lenses using the TikTok tech thanks to the platform’s ‘Effects House’. This is, based on a cursory poke, actually pretty powerful stuff (broadly comparable with the Snap lens tech, from what I can tell) and the tools available to make stuff look generally user-friendly with a decent degree of hand-holding and explanation as to how they work and how you might deploy them. If you want to experiment with building AR lenses and layers this looks like an interesting place to do so, and has the added benefit of the fact that you’re doing so on a platform that people actually use (yes, I know that the data says that KIDS ALL USE SNAP, but, well, I remain skeptical).
Wandrer: I LOVE THIS! Such a great use of Strava integration (the ONLY good use of Strava, imho – YOU ARE NOT ‘KING OF THE ROAD’, TONY, YOU ARE A MIDDLE-AGED MAN FROM SYDENHAM AND YOU LOOK RIDICULOUS IN THAT LYCRA!) to make exploring the bits of your neighbourhood that you don’t know FUN and EXCITING! Basically Wandrer rewards you for exploring the area around you – it’s basically a map app that tracks where you go over time (hence the Strava integration) and which incentivises you to travel down roads you’ve never visited, around neighbourhoods you’ve never seen (much like in videogames), thereby turning your daily walk/cycle/jog/limp into an exploratory journey of discovery and giving you a real sense of accomplishment as your increased curiosity is mapped across your local area and you can see your EXERCISE TENDRILS OF DISCOVERY spreading across the map. This is lovely, a really nice bit of pseudo-gamification, and it feels like something that you could borrow and tweak for all sorts of fun purposes should you be so minded.
Fancy Parking: As a non-driver I am still frankly amazed that people I know can drive cars (and, in some cases, that they are allowed to – I am sure this applies to every single person currently alive, but there are a few friends of mine who I am very much convinced should not be given license to command a several-tonne wheeled death machine), and even more when they can do stuff that, to my untrained eyes at least, looks like physics-based witchcraft. As a result I felt a strong degree of empathy with this site, which exists to celebrate the craft of what the site’s creator likes to call ‘fancy parking’ – that is, the practice of parking your car in such a way that when you leave the parking spot you can just drive straight out, no reversing, like some sort of car park Fonz. Anyway, this is a website dedicated, specifically, to the act of parking in reverse – no, really, you’re WELCOME!
Pair Up: This is an interesting idea – Pair Up is a virtual meeting place for anyone seeking another mind to bounce creative stuff off, from just asking for feedback to collaborating on projects, effectively like a dating app for people who work in design or UX. “A place for creatives to find and offer their time to others with the goal of sharing, learning and problem solving with each other,” runs the blurb, promising that there are 100s of creative professionals worldwide signed up and waiting to collaborate and work alongside YOU. Create a profile, confirm what you’re working on and what your skills are, and use the site to post requests for help or to discuss projects or simply to browse other people who you might find it interesting or useful to collaborate with – this is in beta but already seems pretty well-populated, and there are people on there from across Europe already, so this could be worth a look should you be feeling creatively solitary.
Cliquart: A lovely little site by Philippe Caron from Canada, where he explores concepts around generative art; it’s not been going long, I don’t think, but there is some gorgeous work on there (I am personally a sucker for this sort of highly-mathematical type of work, but the aesthetics here are gorgeous too, even if you don’t particularly care for the high concept) and there are a couple of interesting pieces of writing on the site about how his process works and how he thinks about generative art and the intersection between maths and visuals – this is very much worth a click and explore.
Copy Magazine: I didn’t, I confess, have ‘high fashion publishing’ high up on my list of ‘industries set to be fcuked to the point of shattering by the advent of generative AI’, but, having seen Copy Magazine, I am on the verge of revising my opinion. Oh, ok, fine, the fashion crowd isn’t going anywhere JUST yet, and there are obviously some not-insignificant questions as to what the fcuk the POINT of an AI-generated fashion magazine in fact is, but, at the same time, the aesthetic here is…actually pretty much on-point, and it’s interesting quite how ‘right’ much of the imagery looks in terms of fitting in with the prevailing aesthetic of the glossy advertising pamphlets that masquerade as ‘magazines’ in this particular industry. You can’t see the whole magazine on the site – it is, though, on sale as a physical artefact from all the usual online retailers of glossy, limited edition style publications, should you wish to see it up close and personal.
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT TO THE GUARDIAN THAT I AM RIGHT HERE FFS AND MY RATES ARE VERY REASONABLE, PT.2:
Magic Circle Enquiry: A reader writes! Tiz Cree got in touch this week to share this link and (very politely) request its inclusion in this week’s Curios – in their words, “We are conducting a Public enquiry created by artists to understand the underlying meaning of art and its role in the world and contribute to our collective understanding of art. This poll is all about getting a pluralist perspective on art, and we would forever appreciate your help sharing it in the newsletter (I will forever appreciate it) The poll is short and anonymous, and it will only take a few minutes to complete. The experience is presented as a chatbot asking playful and reflective questions to explore the infinite perspectives of art, its oddities and dilemmas using elements of storytelling and visual novels. The chatbot and the results will be presented in the international event Mind the Gap: Designing residencies for everyone – London Conference 2023. The experiment is not seeking truths but thoughts, perspectives and desires. Some questions may seem subjective and ambiguous; it’s by design.” This is a) really very quick and not particularly onerous, and so will cost you nothing; b) just a nice, pleasing way of gathering data which I think more people could try and replicate. Tizz said that the results will eventually be published online in some sort of fashion, and ‘students from UCL will make something with the results’, so I’ll share any updates as and when I receive them – in the meantime, though, take a moment and do Tizz a favour (imagine that there is some sort of WEB CURIOS COMMUNITY (there isn’t) and that by doing this you’re contributing to it in some sort of small-but-meaningful way).
Deck Gallery: I have expended more words than is probably strictly necessary on these digital pages explaining my particular and deep-seated disdain for the term ‘deck’ when applied to slides; I don’t know why it riles me so, although I think at its root is the possibly unfair belief that the term is used solely to mask the fact that, when it comes down to it, a significant proportion of time spend in the ‘creative’ industries is spent MAKING FCUKING POWERPOINTS and if that fact became widely known the pipeline of eager young things wanting to get into advermarketingpr would dry up almost entirely (“no, no, you’ll spend your days making DECKS; nothing like boring old PowerPoints, FAR more exciting. Now fcuk off to Pret, there’s a good kid”). Anyway, for those of you whose reaction to the prospect of making another 70-slide aberration for an audience of semi-interested morons is less ‘kill me now’ and more ‘where do I sign?’, here’s an EXCITING RESOURCE compiled by a produce designer by the name of Muharrem, who writes “Time and again, I found myself lost in endless searches for deck design inspiration. Realising there wasn’t a dedicated hub for this niche, I decided to create one. This platform is a curated collection for those, like me, who seek that perfect deck design spark. If you’ve crafted a deck that you’re proud of, I’d love to spotlight it here.”Now, I have all the visual and design acuity of a spleen, and so I couldn’t really tell you how amazing the designs here collected are – but they seem nice, so perhaps take a look and see for yourself if anything grabs you.
Flagfinder: I don’t know why you might need a website that lets you search the world’s flags based on keywords – stripes! Stars! Union jacks! Birds! Colours! – but, well, in case you do, here’s one!
Brain Explorer: I don’t know if any of you have read the ‘About’ section of Web Curios (you should, I took literally SECONDS over that copy) but there’s a reference in there to one of the principal preoccupations of this newsletterblogtypething being ‘the unrelenting horror of being made of meat’, and I very much felt that horror again when I came across this frankly-incredible website which lets you EXPLORE THE BRAIN in a variety of different CG cross-sections, and which will give you all sorts of details about what specific bits of your mind-meat are for and what they are meant to do. I can’t pretend that I understand much about what this is attempting to tell me, but that’s not really the point – I am just slightly awed (and not a little disgusted and freaked out) by the fact that I can look at an accurate representation of the thing that is allowing me to be aware of the fact that I am looking at an accurate representation of it (if you see what I mean).
The List of Graphs:You think you know graphs? PAH! Your pies, your bars and your lines – the stuff of AMATEURS! Here we deal solely in Horton Graphs, Moser Graphs and the mysterious Tutte’s Fragment – and a couple of dozen other types of graph whose functions are, honestly, a complete mystery to me (honestly, what the everliving fcuk is this meant to mean? “The Robertson graph is not a vertex-transitive graph and its full automorphism group is isomorphic to the dihedral group of order 24, the group of symmetries of a regular dodecagon, including both rotations and reflections.” – no, life is TOO SHORT) but which look really, really cool, like mad spirographs of DATA. Please can one of you try dropping a casual ‘and of course, we could always visualise this using a Dyck graph’ in a meeting next week and see if anyone challenges you or whether, as I believe is significantly more likely, people just nod blankly in assent? Thanks!
Crab Tales Magazine: Do YOU write short stories with a uniquely-crustacean bent? Do YOU struggle to find a home for your fictional tales of cancrine love and lust and pain and woe? Well STRUGGLE NO MORE! This is, as far as I can tell, a real thing, and it is SEEKING SUBMISSIONS! “Crab Tales is a speculative fiction magazine for flash fiction stories about crabs. We are brand new, so we are currently accepting submissions for our first issue!” I have no more information than this but, well, what more could you possibly want? I expect at least one of you to submit something to this, and I will be VERY DISAPPOINTED in you if you don’t.
Vases: Via Kristoffer comes this lovely webtoy which lets you create wireframe vases using a series of different sliders to affect the height, shape, curvature, etc – I know you might not think that this SOUNDS fun, but I promise you that you will lose more time than you might expect trying to make something that you might actually want to have in your home. Part of me wishes that it were possible to export the resulting wireframe as a 3d model, as it would be lovely to be able to 3d print the resulting designs to render them real, but this is very soothing and incredibly pleasing nonetheless.
Wingnut Toons: This is why the web is wonderful, and why it’s important to preserve it, and why I love it, and, to a small extent, why Web Curios exists. Wingnut Toons is a site that was first created, according to its footer, nearly exactly 26 years ago, on 22 August 1997, by someone known only as ‘Ronn’, and it is…God, it’s amazing, it’s like a time capsule and and a psychological profile all in one. The site’s contents aren’t hugely compelling, fine (unless of course you’ve long been in the market for an exhaustive-if-poorly-designed compendium of every single Hannah Barbera or Scooby Do cartoon ever created), but I genuinely adore every single aspect of it; the design, the ‘legal disclaimer’ copy at the foot of the homepage, the fact that, because of the fact that this will have been built in Dreamweaver or something similar, all of this will have been coded pretty manually and it will have taken MONTHS to compile and arrange, the fact that it is such a huge labour of love for such a vanishingly-niche concern…(Eh? What? Oh), the sense of someone realising that the web was a place where you had infinite space to explore and share your passions, and that you could ‘own’ that place and make it your own, and that there was a whole world of other people, and their ‘places’, to discover…honestly, I find stuff like this almost unbearably poignant and perfect and compelling and boring and sad and beautiful, which is, basically, LIFE. Yes, that’s right, I have just drawn a poorly-considered connection between ‘a hobbyist website about old cartoons’ and ‘the mystery of existence’ – the only way is up, I suppose.
Tiny Desk Korea: NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk Concerts’ has been one of the breakout musical content formats of the recent internet era; now they’re launching a separate offshoot of which focuses exclusively on music from Korea. It’s VERY new and so there are only a handful of performances on there, and it’s aimed at a Korean audience as far as I can tell (and so there’s no subtitling of the inter-song chat), but I’ve been listening to the latest performance by an artist called ‘Sunwoojunga’ this morning as I type, and her voice is gorgeous even if I obviously have no idea what her vaguely jazz-lounge-inflected tracks are in fact about. If you’re into Korean music, or if you’d like to see some brilliantly talented artists you may not have heard of from the other side of the world (to me; obviously I have no idea where YOU might be, but this is my newsletter, not yours and so MY EXPERIENCE IS THE ONLY ONE THAT COUNTS) then this is definitely worth bookmarking.
The YouTube Video Clock: Hot on the heels of last week’s Song Clock, the Pudding’s Clock Team (not sure if they do in fact have a dedicated ‘clock’ team, but I like to think so) have spun out this variant, which rather than pulling a song whose title features the current time, instead pulls a YouTube video fragment which references the time of day. This is very smart, and pleasingly-batsh1t; the juxtaposition of content and tone and style you get subjected to minute-to-minute is quite dizzying, and elevates this slightly – I could totally see this as a gallery installation, and not a terrible one. 9:34am was just flagged to me with a video about ‘the execution of Irma Grese’, which was a somewhat dark turn from the cheery YouTuber who just a minute earlier was excitedly informing me that it was in fact 9:33am – it’s this sort of breakneck shift from minute-to-minute that really makes this perfect, imho.
Numbers: A website listing lots of numbers along with facts about what is special about each. You need to be significantly more comfortable with maths than I am to understand what most of these mean – seriously, can some explain “3780 is a highly abundant number”? Is that…good? – but there are some lovely little numerical factoids in here which even someone as mathematically-illiterate as me found pleasing. Did you know that 8420 is the number of symmetric ways to fold a strip of 20 stamps? NO YOU DIDN’T STOP LYING.
Stick Figures In Peril: Via Caitlin comes this superb Flickr album which offers up the most comprehensive selection of stick figures in peril that you will ever see, ever. In case you’re not 100% sure what I’m talking about here, picture a standard ‘warning’ sign from wherever you live – the sort of thing that advises against particular types of activity, like ‘flying your kite near the power lines’ or ‘putting your hand in the meatgrinder’ – and then imagine hundreds of them from across the globe, a seemingly-neverending parade of nervous stick figures in peril, types of peril so varied that you couldn’t possibly conceive of them all (seriously, just a few rows down is one warning against…getting your leg ripped off by some sort of very specialised ski resort machinery? You cannot BEGIN to imagine the variety of potential injuries that you’re going to see here presented). This is GREAT, although I am yet to find my personal favourite example of the genre (it’s the expression on the face that really makes it for me).
You Say Potato, I Say Fcuk You: Winner of the coveted ‘Web Curios Best URL Of 2023 (So Far)’ award (prizeless, I’m sorry to say), I don’t really know how to describe this site because, well, I don’t really understand what it is or why it exists. Ok, that’s not strictly true – it is in fact a long-running (15 years!) webproject by artist Clara Bahlsen, to which people contribute photos they have taken of various anthropomorphised objects; these are presented on the site, and you can pick through everything and filter the images to see commonalities of theme and design that emerge…as to why the cursor is a potato, though, I am fcuking baffled.
The Lunar Codex: We have a reasonably-rich history of lobbing our art into space in the hope that it will persuade anyone who finds it that we are worth engaging with rather than crushing under the stiletto heel of an alien spaceboot, and the Lunar Codex is the latest attempt to create some sort of lasting artistic legacy for our species in the stars (or, specifically, on the moon). The first part of the project happened last year, but the main bit of it kicks off later in 2023 – to quote the site, the Lunar Codex is “the first significant placement of contemporary arts on the Moon in over fifty years. While focused on visual art, the Lunar Codex also includes a substantial collection of contemporary books, stories, poetry, essays, music, films, and more. Some have called the Lunar Codex a “time machine to the future.” Others have called it the “ultimate anthology,” and referred to it as a “museum on the Moon.” At its essence, the Lunar Codex is a set of time capsules, a message-in-a-bottle to future generations. This website, LunarCodex.com, is the Earth-bound documentation of the project. It details the NASA programs that made it possible, the rockets and lunar landers we launched and landed with, and our time capsules – put together with off-the-shelf and cutting-edge archival technology, and unique technology developed during the project for color and audio preservation and reconstruction. More importantly, this website provides a manifest of the journey – a record of the art, writing, music, and film, that the project has curated and collected – and the contemporary creative artists whose works are celebrated and preserved in the Lunar Codex. Every piece of human creativity in our time capsules is traceable through the manifests.” I LOVE THIS – apart from anything else, there’s a truly global feel to the curation with artists from over 150 nations represented across painting, sculpture, music and letters, and there’s something beautiful and simultaneously hopeful/hopeless about the endeavour which I find personally rather affecting.
Devlin McGregor Pharmaceuticals: Do you remember the TV series (and subsequent film) The Fugitive, about a man on the run from the police, framed for a murder he didn’t commit? No, of course not, it’s OLD and you are all YOUNG and THRUSTING and DIGITAL (and also I think most of you are from the UK, and I think it was very much a US phenomenon). Anyway, the film version of the story involved the following plot point, according to Wikipedia: “Kimble’s wife is killed in an attempt on Kimble’s own life (rather than during a robbery attempt, as in the TV series) as the result of a conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company called Devlin MacGregor, by which the one-armed man is employed” – this website is a terrifyingly-thorough and very real-seeming corporate online presence for that specific fictitious company, and as far as I can tell it’s been made by someone…for fun. WHY? For some reason I find the existence of this site…troubling, though I couldn’t for the life of me explain why that is.
Space Invaders Worldwide: Having said a few dozen links back that I didn’t really ‘get’ AR, here I am closing out the miscellanea with a link to an AR app. SOME CONSISTENCY MATT FFS! Yeah, well, BE GRATEFUL because this is actually quite fun, and uses Google’s StreetView-based spatialAI t let you shoot spaceships out of the sky over London (or whichever city you happen to find yourself in, presuming it’s one of the 100 or so that have been properly mapped by the tech). This is…quite fun, and actually really impressive from the point of view of integrating the real-world with the CG visuals, but it does rather suffer from the problem inherent to all AR games, to whit: you look a total tit when playing it, waving your phone around pointed skywards like you’re trying to ward off a hex. Still, this is the best ludic use of AR I’ve seen since Pokemon Go (and that didn’t really need the AR anyway, so doesn’t really count tbh), and you could do worse than give it a try.
Real Footage: This Tumblr collects screencaps of content from the corners of the internet obsessed with the paranormal and the SPOOKY, and WOW are there some special comments and headlines here immortalised. I particularly enjoyed the story from the person who SWORE DOWN that they saw their dead grandmother’s corpse emerge from the mouth of an octopus, but frankly there is a lot to love in here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
My Hand On Yours: Also via Kristoffer, this one – the Insta feed accompanying the art project of the same name, in which the artist (whose name I couldn’t find) explores ideas of contact and intimacy and online life, making available a digital rendering of their hand which anyone can use to create an image of it ‘touching’ them in some way; this Insta feed collects user-submitted images to the project, so you can see people ‘interacting’ with this digital hand in all sorts of ways; having it rest over theirs, petting their dog, working their mouse, stroking their face…this is odd and strangely beautiful, and you can participate by visiting the project’s main site here and having a play.
Sh1t Men: Not in the way you might immediately think – poor the men! – this Insta account collects images of poorly-drawn humanoid figures on roads. Click the link and find ALL your misshapen traffic men needs catered for! Some of these are so half-ar$ed that they are practically art.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
Uncertainty and Climate Change: Apologies for once again leading on a longread which focuses on the climate emergency; on the other hand, though, it is…well it is an *emergency*, so perhaps we all ought to be focusing on it a little more? Anyway, this is an excellent (if quite chewy in places – or at least for me, due the extent to which it centres around questions of probability; those of you less maths-handicapped than me might find it a breeze) article by Geoff Mann in the LRB, about the models we are currently employing to work out What Should Be Done as regards mitigating the effects of our existence, and the reasons why statistical probability is an imperfect tool when trying to formulate courses of action in this specific situation. This isn’t by any stretch a ‘hopeless’ piece so much as it is a sensible one, and it helped me think through quite a lot of questions about ‘how predictive models work’ and ‘what we are trying to achieve when we think of the future through the lens of probabilities’ – you can get a feel for the overall tenor of the piece from this extract, but it really is worth reading for any of you with an interest in stats or prediction or, you know, THE FATE OF THE FCUKING PLANET: “increasing or decreasing the complexity of the models provides no answer to the fundamental question of how we can calculate anything at all when there are so many known unknowns, to say nothing of the ‘unknown unknowns’. You can’t solve an equation in which one of the key parameters is undefined: there is no meaningful solution to 2 x we’re-not-sure. One way to deal with this uncertainty is to choose a value or ‘point estimate’ that accords with common wisdom or the modeller’s best guess. But many dynamics have a range of possible outcomes, and the uncertainties are often so extreme that this practice is difficult to justify. Take, for example, the rate of economic growth. Setting aside the fact that different regions will continue to experience growth at very different rates, ‘expert’ estimates of the average annual global growth rate range between 0.5 per cent and 3.5 per cent across the next 75 years. You could simply pick, say, a figure of 2 per cent and run the model, but that will drastically narrow the usefulness of the results. An alternative might be to run it multiple times using a range of values then average the results, but that’s to assume all the values are equally probable, which is highly unlikely. The struggle is to find a sweet spot between illusory exactitude and unhelpful handwaving.” BONUS ORTHOGONALLY-RELATED CONTENT!: this is a piece that’s ostensibly about ‘futures thinking’ and the inherent limitations of the discipline and the models it employs, and while it’s not exactly an overlapping text it does cover some similar ground in terms of the way it thinks of prediction as a science (or, more accurately, ‘art’).
The End of the Googleverse: Ryan Broderick writes for The Verge about the end of an era (or at least the potential beginning of the end of an era) – the sociocultural dominance of Google and the power of ‘search’ to shape society. This is a really good read that not only does a decent job of charting the company’s rise and development, but also of examining the question of the extent to which Google really can be said to have meaningfully shaped large parts of the web and online culture (and, as an extension, offline culture and human behaviour/thought) – something which Google has always been at pains to deny (after all, as a quoted Googler says somewhere in the piece, search is downstream of culture), but which, as Ryan persuasively argues, is possibly a simplistic reading of the extent to which ‘thinking of the world as something that can be indexed and ranked and retrieved; was a fundamental change in the way we conceived of things. This is generally great, but a particular treat for those of you who can still remember The Before Times, and who know what an AltaVista is.
The Anything Tool: Another excellent explainer about ‘How GPT Works’, which does a really good job of taking the reader through the basics of the tech, the ways in which the launch of ChatGPT was transformative, and which (most importantly, to my mind) does a really good job of explaining how and why the most interesting things you can do with these tools involve their ability to effectively draw ‘conceptual’ (the wrong word, but bear with me) links between disparate bits of data, and how multimodal generative AI is likely to be really interesting from the point of view of innovative use-cases. It also scores points (from me at least) by effectively ending by comparing the tech to spreadsheets, which is a comparison I am increasingly fond of and which is helpful in countering a lot of the ‘CREATIVE MAGIC’ snake oil you will doubtless be getting bombarded with on the daily.
AI Images: Not a longread so much as a (series of) longwatch(es), this is an incredible resource for anyone who REALLY wants to get into the science (and maths) behind generative AI for image creation. Honestly, if you are serious about learning about this stuff – not just making stuff, but BUILDING stuff, or thinking about how it gets built – then this is fcuking GOLD DUST: “Critical Topics: AI Images was an undergraduate class delivered for Bradley University in Spring 2023. It was an overview of the emerging contexts of AI art making tools that connected media studies and histories of new media art, with data ethics and critical data studies. Through this multidisciplinary lens, we examined current events and debates in AI and generative art, with students thinking critically about these tools as they learned to use them. They were encouraged to make work that reflected the context and longer history of these tools. As a final project, students collected 500-1000 of their own images, cleaning them to create a unique, personalized dataset. Then, using RunwayML, they extended StyleGAN2’s training data with their datasets to create a custom generative model. Along the way, we discussed the politics of image assembly and archives, the human labor of datasets and content moderation, and more. The course included interviews with AI artists from a variety of perspectives. Students responded to each with short essays highlighting the diversity of thoughts and opinions about what AI art means, how it is made, and the ethics that surround it. This website collects all of the asynchronous video lectures, alongside works referenced in the lectures. Guest lectures and artist talks are also archived, with permission.”
Immersive Himalayan Cultural Heritage (With AI): I very much enjoyed this – it’s the first in what I hope will be a series of essays in which Mrinali Singha explains the work she’s doing with various bits of AI-enabled worldbuilding kit to try and create an interactive avatar who can be used to embody the qualities and life experiences and ‘personality’ of a ‘typical’ Himalayan farmer – this is the first in a planned diary detailing her process and practice, the tools she’s using it how it all works, and I am fascinated to see how it comes together; there’s something really interesting about the marriage of this sort of hi-tec kit and the very old-school, semi-anthropological nature of Singha’s artistic practice – in her words, she’s ‘an artist and creative technologist from Himachal Pradesh in the Western Himalayan region of India” and has “been actively exploring immersive technologies and experimental methods for cultural preservation and engagement in the region…writing this piece with the hope of sharing some of the excitement in the field of creative technology and to make it accessible for cultural archivists to perhaps try out with their own projects.’ So interesting, and a tiny glimpse of the potential applications of this sort of avatar-ish tech.
How Midjourney Reads a Mugshot: Eryk Salvaggio fed That Fcuking Man’s mugshot to Midjourney’s ‘describe’ function to see what prompts emerged – the resulting article, explaining what The Machine said and trying to parse *why* it said it, is a genuinely interesting read, and one of the more involved explorations of how and why certain tags work the way they do within latent space (with the obvious caveat that, of course, NOONE ACTUALLY KNOWS!). I particularly enjoyed the closing thoughts about algorithmic hauntology and his concept of ‘seance as politics’ inherent in the creation and classification of this sort of digital imagery.
Carbon Offsets: You may find this a surprising revelation, but I can be…quite a cynical person – I KNOW, RIGHT? As part of this charming persona (so tired, so tired of myself) I have for years rejected the concept of ‘carbon credits’ out of hand as being an obvious con designed to allow brands, businesses and individuals to keep behaving exactly as they please, just as long as they can afford to throw enough money at a system that DEFINITELY mitigates the cost of their actions; this article in Vox actually does the proper journalistic work of trying to work out if, and if so to what extent, they actually do what they purport to do in terms of ‘offsetting’ the carbon cost of your actions. You may be surprised to learn that the answer is IT’S COMPLICATED – whilst it’s possible that my blanket derision of the whole idea as ‘an obvious scam, you rubes’ has been a bit harsh, it’s also quite clear from the piece that there is, at best, something of a lack of clarity over the exact validity of how credits are calculated, and how offsets can be meaningfully assessed, and there is obviously a LOT of ‘creative accounting’ happening here from an environmental perspective, designed to make the system look as effective as possible whilst at the same time making it very difficult to meaningfully interrogate. Read the piece and come to your own conclusions – personally, though, I find it hard to disagree with this perspective: “if it is so difficult to explain that carbon credits have integrity, it’s equally hard to feel much confidence that these abstract instruments are shifting the climate dial.”
What Happened In 2012?: If you listen to a particular type of person, certainly in the UK, you may well get the impression that 2012 was the high point of human civilisation (“THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE ‘LYMPICS!”, they will moan, weeping openly in reminiscence, “WHEN ALL OF BRITAIN SIMULTANEOUSLY ORGASMED IN RED, WHITE AND BLUE AND WE ALL CAME TOGETHER REGARDLESS OF COLOUR OR CREED!”) – according to this piece, though, 2012 was also a year in which A LOT OF WEIRD STUFF STARTED HAPPENING. I really enjoyed this (although part of me does wonder whether you could basically pick ANY year with enough data around it and find a bunch of datapoints that shift markedly from that point on), although it does rather feel like there is a single answer to the question of ‘what happened?’ and that is, basically, ‘2012 was sort of the tipping point for the modern internet and a significant majority of the Western world suddenly, thanks to smartphones and high-quality, high-bandwidth connectivity, started spending LOADS more time on it than they did previously’ – it’s…fascinating and not a little worrying to look at all the things that changed pretty much as a direct result of this shift (and not necessarily for the better, it may surprise you to know).
Dynamic Shops: Matt Webb’s thoughts are always worth reading, and this – on his recent experience of ‘dynamic shopfronts’ in a service station – is no exception; this is SUCH an interesting series of observations and questions around retail and physical space and the time it takes to innovate and and and. This isn’t super-long, but it will make you think about LOADS of things (and, for once, none of them are unpleasant!).
The Met Museum in Roblox: This is that rarest of things – a ‘metaverse’-y activation that doesn’t absolutely stink! Yes, ok, fine, it’s videogames rather than ‘the metaverse’ (although I maintain that they are basically the same thing tbh), but it’s still a really smart bit of work by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which has partnered with Roblox to create a really fun way to persuade kids to engage with the museum’s contents. Visitors to the Met can download a new app, which directs them around the exhibits using AR, and encourages them to scan specific items using their phones, which unlocks both new information about the artefacts AND (and this is the cool bit) gives you an ACTUAL BIT OF DIGITAL CLOTHING YOU CAN USE IN-GAME! This, honestly, is SUCH a nice idea and a really smart execution, and I am genuinely impressed – in particular when you compare it to the British Museum’s latest forays into this space, which apparently involve ‘NFT collectibles and a dedicated space in The Sandbox’ (although on the plus side, at least noone’s going to want to steal those! Eh? Eh? Jesus, tough crowd).
The Broken Promise of NFTs: I don’t know if you paid enough attention to the frothy NFT art bubble of 2021 to remember that one of the promises inherent to the boom was that the tech guaranteed that artists could derive income from ongoing sales of their work thanks to the MAGIC OF ON-CHAIN TECHNOLOGY, and that the smart contracts built into the NFT meant that the original creator of the jpeg would get a cut of any future sale price that said jpeg fetched on the secondary market…did you? Do you remember? Well, no matter, because, er, they scrapped that! Yeah, actually, turns out that artists who sold an NFT now WON’T in fact get any crypto kickbacks if said work inexplicably sells again – thereby neatly removing literally the only reason I can think of that anyone might still look halfway-favourably on the medium. This isn’t a longread – sorry! – but I thought it worth flagging as the final nail in the racistmonkeys.jpeg coffin.
How VICE Became a Saudi Propaganda Machine: In 2001 I was doing my MSc at the LSE, and I was friends with a Canadian guy on my course called Chris Camp – he’s now a violently rich corporate lawyer somewhere, I think, but back in the day he was…significantly less straight-laced, and I spent quite a lot of time doing drugs with him and his cousin and, occasionally, another Canadian kid called Chris who used to work for VICE back in Montreal when it really was an underground concern, and who used to tell all these wonderful stories about how MAD AND GONZO it all was (but, mainly, about the industrial quantities of blow that everyone would apparently get through). Anyway, that’s by way of preamble to this piece in Novara by Simon Childs (himself ex-Editor of VICE UK’s News section) which details the extent to which what remains of the former enfant terrible of Western lifestyle media is now basically a sponcon factory for Saudi Arabia and the extent to which that is impacting on editorial (insofar as it still exists). On the one hand, this is a sad footnote in the decline of a genuine media phenomenon of the early-21stC; on the other, it’s also just another story of how, in the end, everyone becomes fat and bald and sells out (HI CHRIS CAMP, IF YOU GOOGLE YOURSELF!).
Exploring Exif: OK, fine, this is QUITE technical, and I appreciate that most of you didn’t wake up this morning thinking ‘you know what, I would LOVE to read several thousand words detailing the exact sorts of metadata that gets attached to photographs and what you might do with that data if you were so minded’ (although if you did then please do let me know as I would like to celebrate this small act of psychic connection in some way), but, well, here we are. Read this, look at all the FRANKLY INSANELY GRANULAR data that your phone collects each time you snap a pic, and then start thinking about how you can use this for FUN PURPOSES. If nothing else, I quite like the idea of a ‘phonecam top trumps’ game where you and a mate upload photos and try and beat each others specific data values but, well, as you can tell from that p1ss-poor idea I am neither a game designer or in fact any sort of creative whatsoever, and I am sure you can do MUCH better.
Everything In Cooking Videos Now: I very much enjoyed this NYT piece on the evolution of the cooking video in the age of TikTok; if nothing else it’s a really good primer on the preferred visual language of the day when it comes to food (and, frankly, video more generally) – in particular, the breakdowns of the different prevailing styles employed were fascinating, not least the note about a 33s video employing over 40 different shots, which is frankly insane.
The Fan-Made Spiderverse: I genuinely had no idea that fan-made Spiderman films were such a big deal, but, according to this piece (also NYT) they very much are – to the extent that a recent crowdfunded example of the genre ended up with a six-figure budget. The article looks at the controversy around that specific film, but that’s the least-interesting bit of it (the controversy: the guy who made it said Bad Things On The Internet in the past, basically; oh, and there’s a bit of ‘it’s not a fanfilm if you raised six figures to make it’ gatekeeping, but, as I said, not that interesting per se); far more curious is the wider SpiderFanVerse ecosystem that exists on YouTube and that this alludes to, and that you can find yourself stumbling into via a few hyperlinks in the piece and which OH MY GOD IT’S SO PURE. Honestly, I don’t think you will find anything this weekend as perfect and lovely as the YouTube rabbithole of ‘kids from all over the world making shonky-but-heartfelt superhero films and putting them on the internet’.
An Oral History of Cyberdog: When I was a child and used to go clubbing, my genre of preference was psytrance (literally the least cool flavour of techno in the world, there, beloved of white people with dreads and dogs on strings, the Israelis and the people of Oxford, and, seemingly, NOONE ELSE) and I had a couple of ‘outfits’ that I would wear (I am once again infinitely grateful for the fact that this predated ubiquitous digital photography by several years), one of which included a tshirt from famed purveyor of silly-looking rave outfits in Camden Town, Cyberdog (I thought it made me look INCREDIBLY COOL; in fact, it made me look like a special needs person being indulged by their carers); about 15 years later, I did a one-person immersive theatre thing called ‘You Once Said Yes’, one part of which saw me dancing for five solid minutes on one of the in-store podiums there (stone cold sober, at approximately 3pm on a Friday afternoon – still get slight cold sweats at the memory tbh); all this is to say that this is a shop that MEANS SOMETHING to me, which is why this profile in Time Out made me so happily nostalgic – there will be some of you who will feel much the same way (I hope; please tell me that I’m not the only person who liked psytrance and overlarge trousers).
Juggalos: Every few years you get a piece cropping up about ‘The Gathering of the Juggalos’, the annual get together of Insane Clown Posse fans which basically sounds like Reading Festival, if Reading Festival were exclusively attended by the people who work the itinerant fairgrounds of North America – this is another, but is distinguished by the fact that the author here, Micco Caporale, is themselves a (new-ish) Juggalo and so writes from the perspective of a semi-insider rather than an observer. All the classic ICP tropes are here – Outsiders! Faygo! Tolerance! A surprisingly-progressive attitude to race and gender! – but it’s an unusually comprehensive and warm picture; I think I would enjoy the Gathering a lot more than I would Burning Man tbh, based on this piece (although I think I would find the people TERRIFYING).
How They Tried To Kill Me: It’s not often you read someone dispassionately recounting how they were the subject of attempted murder by poisoning by the Russian secret services (mostly because, well, they’re dead), but that’s exactly what Elena Kostyuchenko does in this remarkable piece. Kostyuchenko was a journalist at Novaya Gazeta, a Russian paper, when war broke out; the paper’s critical stance of the invasion led to its being closed down shortly after war broke out, by Kostyuchenko went to Mariupol to follow the story anyway, and then ended up in Germany seeking refuge and safety from Russia. And then she was poisoned. This is properly terrifying, mad John Le Carre’ stuff, except, you know, real – the bravery here recounted, and in writing this followup piece detailing her experience, is astonishing.
Roddick:I wonder whether there’s something about two-person sports that means they produce the best writing – boxing, famously, has inspired some classic prose from some incredible figures, as has bullfighting (not, I appreciate, a ‘sport’ per se, and not technically ‘two person’, but, well, you get what I mean, right?), as has tennis – this portrait of 90s US tennis star Andy Roddick is up there with the best sports profiles I’ve ever read, and I say that as someone with a vanishingly tiny interest in the sport. Seriously, this almost made me cry – ok, fine, I am somewhat emotionally vulnerable these days but, honestly, it is GLORIOUS and you will come away thinking that Andy Roddick may be your new favourite sportsperson.
Daddy Issues: Finally this week, an interview between Robert Kazandijan and Gabriel Krauze in Huck Magazine, about masculinity and fatherhood; Krauze wrote the Booker-longlisted ‘Who They Was’ a few years back (which, if you haven’t read it, is astonishing and one of the best debuts I have ever read) and this transcribed chat covers his and Kazandijan’s thoughts on fatherhood and masculinity and growing up, and…look, I don’t really understand why this is, but I have, as a general rule, very little interest in ‘man’ things, in the concept of ‘masculinity’ or in interrogating it particularly hard (I presume this is as a result of being brought up by a single woman, or because my dad, bless him, has all the emotional openness and availability of a whelk – pretty sure he doesn’t read this, although, er, if he does, SORRY DAD BUT YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE) although it might just be basic incuriosity on my part), and I am never going to have kids and so don’t have any big feelings on fatherhood, and yet this moved me more than I could ever have expected and in ways I can’t quite explain. You really don’t need to be a ‘man’ to read or enjoy this, by the way.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK ARE ALL LIFTED FROM THE GOOD MUSIC NEWSLETTER WHICH REALLY IS GREAT IF YOU WANT REGULAR, NEW, OBSCURE TUNES IN YOUR INBOX)!:
