Well, fcuk.

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.

By Anthony Gerace

LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH A FOUR-HOUR SET FROM MR SCRUFF, WHICH IS NOT ONLY LEGITIMATELY GREAT BUT ALSO CAN’T FAIL TO PUT A SMALL SMILE ON YOUR FACE WHICH, FRANKLY, FEELS LIKE IT MIGHT BE NECESSARY THIS WEEK!

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:  

By Aistė Stancikaitė

NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY THIS SET BY THE KLEPTONES FROM THIS YEAR’S GLASTONBURY? AND IF YOU ENJOYED THAT THEN WHY NOT ENJOY THIS ADDITIONAL SET OF THEIRS, ALSO FROM GLASTONBURY?

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.

By Emily Geirnaert

OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS SUPERB TWO-HOUR SELECTION BY LOVESHADOW WHICH CONTAINS SOME GENUINELY AMAZING STUFF THAT I HAD NEVER HEARD BEFORE AND WHICH I THINK YOU WILL VERY MUCH ENJOY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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!

By Don McCullin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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.

By Noah Kalina

KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS WITH SOME EXCELLENT TECHNO COURTESY OF JON HUSSEY! 

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:

By Xiangni Song

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).

By Hiroshi Sato

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A GORGEOUS END-OF-SUMMER LOUNGE AND 80s-TYPE SELECTION COMPILED BY BURNOUT SUMMER! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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!

By Molly Bounds

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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.

By Julie Tuyet Curtiss

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC WITH TYCHO’S SUNRISE SET FROM THIS YEAR’S BURNING MAN, WHICH AS IT DOES EACH YEAR MAKES ME BRIEFLY THINK THAT IT MIGHT BE QUITE NICE TO GO BEFORE I THINK A BIT MORE AND REALISE IT WOULD IN FACT BE DREADFUL! 

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:  

By Virginia Villacisna

OUR NEXT MUSICAL DELIGHT IS THE POSTHUMOUS ALBUM BY ONE OF MY FAVOURITE EVER BANDS, SPARKLEHORSE, WHICH IS SAD AND BEAUTIFUL AND VERY VERY GOOD! 

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.

By Jonas Örtemark

WE CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS FRANKLY-UNSEASONAL BUT STILL VERY GOOD SELECTION OF DISCO-Y-FUNKY-HOUSE-TYPE NUMBERS MIXED BY FLAMINGO PIER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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!

By Seth Armstrong

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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.

By Hagar Vardimon

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL OFFERINGS WITH THIS WONDERFUL SELECTION OF MID-90s D’N’B WHICH I PROMISE YOU IS LEGITIMATELY EXCELLENT AND NOT JUST AN EXERCISE IN NOSTALGIA, HONEST GUV!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED ABOUT HOW DOGS BECAME THIS WEEK’S BURNING CULTURE WARS ISSUE HERE IN THE UK, PT.1:  

By Laurie Simmons

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY A SELECTION OF TECHNO AND VAGUELY-AMBIENTY BITS AND ALSO SOME DOWNTEMPO BEATS IN A COMBINATION THAT DOESN’T SOUND LIKE IT OUGHT TO WORK BUT WHICH ACTUALLY IN FACT DOES, MIXED BY FORMER-EDITOR-PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED ABOUT HOW DOGS BECAME THIS WEEK’S BURNING CULTURE WARS ISSUE HERE IN THE UK, PT.2:      

• 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).
• Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers: Finally this week, a very fun little demo of a larger game in which you play a version of blackjack against a cast of antagonists as part of a vaguely-fantasy-themed ‘quest’ – this is a lot of fun, and tweaks the basic gameplay of ‘21’ in a series of interesting ways, with power-ups and special moves and all sorts of other clever additions. A genuinely enjoyable hour or so’s play, this, with a full game that you can eventually purchase if you feel so minded (and, if you like this sort of thing, there’s a much-shinier version of the same sort of thing – but this time based on poker rather than blackjack – available on Steam which I can heartily recommend).

By Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY AURA SAFARI AND SELF-DESCRIBES AS “A JOURNEY INTO ITALIAN UPTEMPO AND PEAK TIME HOUSE RECORDS FROM THE 90S” WHICH FRANKLY SHOULD BE MORE THAN ENOUGH TO RECOMMEND IT TO YOU!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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.
• Monster Fish Taxidermy: SO MANY TERRIFYING, MANY-TOOTHED B4STARDS OF THE DEEP HERE.
• 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!

By Kay Seohyung Lee

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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.

By Jeremy CSJ

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST PART OF THIS NEWSLETTER – OR INDEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU MAY FANCY SOUNDTRACKING, WE’RE NOT PRESCRIPTIVE ROUND HERE – WITH THIS EXCELLENT TWO-HOUR MIX OF TUNES AND STYLES COURTESY OF JED FROM LWSTD? 

THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY DO WITH A NAP , PT.1:  

By Guy Vording

ENJOY THE UNSEASONAL ENGLISH HEATWAVE WHILE IT LASTS WITH THIS SUPER AMAPIANO MIX BY DJ STOKS!

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.

By Tadaocern

SIT IN THE SUN AND PLAY THIS LOUD AND ENJOY THE VAGUELY-80s-ISH STYLINGS OF THIS MIX BY KING FU! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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!

By Ben Frost Is Dead

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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.

By Jocelyn Carmes

WE BEGIN WITH A MIX SPANNING JAZZ, R&B AND SOUL FROM TOM SPOONER AND HIS RELIABLY-EXCELLENT VINYL COLLECTION! 

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:  

By Keita Morimoto

NEXT, WHY NOT GIVE THIS EXCELLENT ALBUM BY FLOFILZ, WHICH I DISCOVERED THIS WEEK AND WHICH I HONESTLY RATHER LOVE, A TRY? IT’S SORT OF LO-FI JAZZ/LOUNGE BUT ACTUALLY GOOD, AND REMINDED ME A LOT OF DJ CAM’S FIRST ALBUM SHOULD THAT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU! 

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.

By Romain Bernini

THIS MIX, BY DJML, IS ENTITLED ‘A RAINY SUMMER’S DAY’ WHICH FEELS APPROPRIATE AND WHICH IS FULL OF SLIGHTLY-ETHEREAL AND GENTLE SOUNDS PERFECT FOR THE SLOW DESCENT INTO AUTUMNAL GREY AND THE INEVITABLE, UNENDING DAMPNESS OF THE COMING SIX MONTHS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

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!

By Michele Poirier Mozzone

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)!:

On the one hand, the mugshot is objectively very funny; on the other, he won’t go to jail and he might end up being President again, which is…less funny. Still, LOL AT THE FUNNY ORANGE MAN PHOTO!

Once again it is Friday and once again I have spent the past six hours typing feverishly with nary a pause for tea; once again, the quality of the output suggests that perhaps I should take a different approach to writing this thing, one which, you know, improves it.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably deserve better.

By Shay Semple

WAKE YOURSELF UP WITH THIS SUPERB HOUR-LONG SET OF *REASONABLY INTENSE* TECHNO MIXED BY DYLAN FOGERTY! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES PEOPLE WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO THE STUFF THAT MUSK DOES RATHER THAN WHAT HE SAYS, PT.1:  

By Motonori Uwasu

WE CONTINUE THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A THROWBACK TO 2003 AND WHAT I THINK IS THE ONLY SOUNDTRACK ALBUM TO A BOOK I HAVE EVER HEARD, IN THE SHAPE OF “I, LUCIFER” BY THE REAL TUESDAY WELD! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES PEOPLE WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO THE STUFF THAT MUSK DOES RATHER THAN WHAT HE SAYS, PT.2:      

• Sgt Prepper’s: I don’t, as a rule, like to mock particular lifestyle choices here – aside from the fact that it’s, well, mean, it would also feel a little like taking my slingshot out while still firmly ensconced inside my greenhouse (what do you mean ‘spending so much time online is an appalling waste of the mysterious gift of life granted to you by an unknown power’?) – but I will make an exception for preppers. LOOK LADS IF EVERYTHING GOES TO TITS AND SOCIETY COLLAPSES DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT A HANDFUL OF SCOUTING BADGES AND A LEATHERMAN IS GOING TO KEEP YOU SAFE?!?! Still, I am featuring this site because, well, LOOK AT THE NAME! That sort of punnery deserves celebrating, although I do slightly wonder at the fact that The Beatles’ lawyers have yet to clamp down on this (maybe Paul’s secretly planning for the apocalypse – although on reflection I think Ringo’s the more likely of the surviving members to have a well-appointed bunker somewhere in Herefordshire) – again, I know it’s mean to mock but, well, I couldn’t help but laugh at the image of the father and son enjoying some quality pre-apocalypse moments by the campfire about halfway down the Page (just below the various links taking you to cheery inventory items such as ‘three months of emergency food’ for a mere £557 – think of the lols you and your son will have as you hunker down and heat the rations!) – I very much get the feeling that the general vibe of the average visitor to this site is more ‘she took the kids, Dave, she took the fcuking kids; I love those kids, Dave’ than it is ‘let’s you and I spend a pleasing few hours catching, skinning and gutting a rabbit, son,  while we discuss The Facts of Life’.
• Knuckle Tattoos: Have you ever wondered what it might look like if you were to have a pair of four-letter words tattooed across your knuckles? OF COURSE YOU HAVE (personally I always quite fancied ‘FISH’ and ‘CHIP’, although I also have a personal soft spot for ‘CNUT’ and ‘EYES’) – and now you can visualise that thanks to this simple, single-function website, where you type in any 8 letters you like and watch as they get emblazoned across a pair of digital fists. Entirely pointless, just the way we like it.
• Crate: I know that I spend an awful lot of time complaining about how dreadful everything is and how the web is basically THE DEVIL (I don’t mean it, of course; the web is a neutral thing, it’s the PEOPLE who ruin everything), but I do genuinely believe that there is something wonderful and amazing about the fact that the past 20-odd years of human history have, thanks to the internet, led to an absolutely incredible shift in our understanding and acceptance of the fact that *other people’s brains work very, very differently to our own*. I appreciate that, fine, that possibly sounds a touch facile (facile? Me? FCUK OFF), but I don’t think it’s an overstatement to suggest that 30 years ago we simply didn’t have the same perspective on the fact that our brains are all wired ENTIRELY DIFFERENTLY and the way in which, as a result, we relate to and parse and file and manage information and thoughts and concepts is multivariate and infinitely-different; I think about that each and every time I come across a service like Crate, which is basically a knowledge-and-information-management interface for all the stuff you find online – it’s an Evernote-ish system, basically, which lets you tag and file everything you come across online into ‘crates’ (DO YOU SEE?!?!) which are arranged via theme and which you can refer back to and annotate and cross-reference, and which over time will apparently learn how you ‘think’ and as a result apply a degree of automated taxonomical wrangling to stuff as you browse…which, honestly, I personally can’t for a moment ever imagine needing or wanting but which I appreciate might, for a certain type of brain, be the most useful thing ever.
• Images of AI: I do love me a visual cliche, and there are few visual cliches more entrenched at present than the way in which ‘AI’ as a concept is represented by some sort of ‘person with visible circuitry’ or ‘brain that is also circuitboard’ picture – while obviously it’s in-part just sort of funny when you start to see this sort of lazy pattern in the wild, there are also more serious questions around the extent to which this sort of visual language can end up codifying certain concepts without really meaning to – which is why Deepmind (the Alphabet AI people) have worked to develop a selection of imagery to represent its AI work, imagery which (based on the examples I’ve seen, at least) feature NOT A SINGLE CYBERPERSON (and certainly no alluringly-sexy female-presenting ones) and instead use a more interesting selection of visual cues to represent the wider concept of machine intelligence. These are all available for free use (as far as I can tell), should you wish to illustrate your tedious and empty corporate ‘thought leadership’ content about AI with something marginally less stereotypical than usual. Oh, and there are video versions of these too should you so desire them – MERRY AI CHRISTMAS!
• Concert Archives: A BRILLIANT resource, this, which compiles photos and setlist and footage and audio from ALL OF THE GIGS IN THE WORLD! Well, ok, fine, not quite ‘all the gigs in the world’, but seemingly quite a few of them – search by bandname, location or venue and get an incredible array of user-captured images and audio from a dizzying array of artists covering a frankly insane timespan – there’s footage on here of gigs from the 90s ffs, which is slightly amazing to me. Want to get footage of Pat Benatar’s recent gig in St Louis? No, I can’t for a moment imagine that you do, but you can!
• The Wizard’s Guide to Statistics: I may have mentioned this before, but I am bad at maths; I know that it’s often painted as a lazy opinion to have of oneself, and that noone is ‘bad’ at maths so much as they are victims of poor teaching methods and mediocre schooling, but I promise you that beyond a certain degree of complexity I can literally *feel* my brain becoming smooth as I try and wrap it around concepts like ‘logorithmic scales’. Anyway, as a result of my double-figure-IQ number prowess or lack thereof I have always struggled slightly with statistics and probabilities and as such I was both charmed and hugely grateful for this excellent little webtoy which does an excellent job of teaching you stats from the ground up with a selection of simple interactive puzzles which talk you through, step-by-step, the BAFFLING WORLD OF FRACTIONAL PROBABILITIES. I can’t pretend that I don’t still feel incredibly thick when confronted with numbers, fine, but I at least now understand a bit more about exactly *how* I am failing to understand.
• Awful But Great: Twitter limps on, but the fact that they killed Tweetdeck this week (parenthetically, it’s remarkable that I have been using that product for over a decade, on a daily basis, and that I have found it personally and professionally incredibly useful, and that despite this and the fact that I am squarely in the middle of their target ‘power user’ market for it I would rather stick pins down my urethra than consider paying That Fcuking Man a single penny to continue doing being able to access it – truly, an astonishing bit of anti-brand-power there) means that I might finally be forced to bid a final farewell to ‘social media’ – still, accounts like this one make me think that maybe it’s worth sticking around a bit longer. A BRAND NEW COMEDY/MEME ACCOUNT, IN 2023!!! Whodathunkit? ‘Awful But Great’’s full title is ‘Awful Taste But Great Execution’, which should tell you everything you need to know about the content – there is some genuine gold on here, I promise.
• The Song Clock: Another fantastic bit of webwork by The Pudding, this time abandoning visual stats-based storytelling in favour of making a clock which will, when you load it up, play you a song featuring the current time in its title. Taking the songs from Spotify, there are nearly 9,000 potential tracks that could play over 1,440 minutes of a day, so bookmark this and check in every now and again to hear exactly how amazing, say, 9:28 by Daisha Macbride is (genuinely amazing how many people have released tracks named after very specific times of day – I do wonder what exactly happened at 9:28 one day in Daisha’s life to cause her to memorialise the moment in song).
• Robots: Watch the robots ‘dance’. Pick up the robots. Throw them around. Watch them get back up again. SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
• Uninhabitable Earth: DON’T WORRY NOT YET! But, er, soon! This is a nice (lol ‘nice’!) visualisation by German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost that collects data about imminent projected changes in climate worldwide (and related data around projected sea level rises, etc) and maps them on a globe which you can rotate and explore to get a picture of exactly where things are likely to get particularly ‘spicy’ over the coming years as we all start to realise that, hang on, this stuff is ACTUALLY HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. This is…sobering, not least because it’s the first series of projections I’ve seen which starkly points out quite how spectacularly fcuked Italy is going to be – I appreciate that for most of you this is of less import, but, well, I have something of an affection for the my mother country and whilst it’s a horrible, racist, bureaucratic sh1tshow full of some of the most irritating people on Earth (CIAO RAGA’!) I’d also prefer it to not become 50% uninhabitable by 2050, which does rather look like it might be SLIGHTLY on thecards.
• Online Safari TV: Neatly segueing from the last link (SEAMLESS!), here’s an opportunity to appreciate some of the planet’s natural bounty before we set fire to it all – SO MANY WEBCAMS! SO MANY CRITTERS ON CAMERA! Whether you want to spend your day admiring the albatrosses (albatri?) in New Zealand, or hedgehogs in Munsterland, all of your ‘spying on cute animals without their knowledge’ needs can be fulfilled at this link.
• Leonardo: I know it’s not really ‘cool’ to praise Google these days, but I can’t help but feel a deep and abiding affection towards the company for its ongoing commitment to producing high-quality, free webwork around the arts – Google’s Arts and Culture division is a rare example of a company really putting its heart and soul behind a non-commercial endeavour in a way that you can’t imagine, say, Meta doing (although based on an approach I received from them about 9 years ago they pay APPALLINGLY). This latest bit of work is no exception – an exploration of the life and work of Da Vinci, from sketches to designs to artworks to inventions, with a combination of wonderful scans and archives to explore, and some more interactive AI-enabled gubbins which let you do things like combine concepts from Leo’s notebooks to generate ENTIRELY NEW IDEAS AND IMAGES. This is just great, and far deeper than it need be.
• 16 Colors: This is an INCREDIBLE resource and community based around 16-bit style pixelart – if you’re of an age whereby you can remember the Amiga, then that’s basically the aesthetic here. Honestly, this is an amazing repository of a particular style of art and a genuine pleasure to spelunk around.
• Metazooa: Occupying the coveted ‘last miscellaneous link of the week’ slot is this cracking little game based around natural taxonomy – NO WAIT COME BACK! It is, I promise, genuinely fun – each day, your task is to guess the MYSTERY ANIMAL, by narrowing it down based on guesses as to its position amongst the various types of creature known to man. “The animal kingdom (Metazoa, in Greek) is full of our distant relatives… some more distant than others. This game is about finding out how similar any 2 species of animal are to each other. Your goal is to figure out today’s Mystery Animal in as few guesses as possible. Wrong guesses will narrow down the answer by taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) The more your guess has in common with the answer, the more you will learn about the Mystery Animal.” Honestly, this may seem incredibly difficult but you’ll get your head around it after a few guesses and will be busting out terms like ‘mustilidae’ before you can say ‘order of the species’

By Grace Brooks

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF 80s-INFLECTED TRACKS COMPILED BY BOGDAN RA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Pattern Up: The Instagram of art collective Pattern Up, which has been doing vaguely-AdBusters-esque schtick for a while now and whose work here collected gives you a feel for their general vibe – a bit ‘Fuct-by-way-of-Dazed’, but not terrible for it.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Butternut Collage

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Oh wow, turns out that when I take a week off my fingers sort of forget how to work and my brain gets gummed up and basically this is all a LOT harder than it normally is; apologies in advance for any appreciable drops in quality (lol) that you notice compared to the usual standards.

Anyway, HI! I’m back! It was, I have to admit, genuinely nice to be back in Italy for a a few days, not least as I was able to remember what ‘fruit’ is like (it’s nice, turns out, we should try selling it in our shops, could be revolutionary), and it was also lovely attending Naive Yearly last week (honestly, such an interesting event for anyone who cares about ‘making interesting, small stuff on the web’ and I can’t recommend it enough for next year – don’t worry, I am desperately antisocial and won’t try and talk to you, so don’t let my potential presence put you off in any way), and now I am back in London and, well, it’s currently a bit less lovely and I rather wish I was still in Cosmopolitan Europe tbh.

Still, I have sought to distract myself from the fact that all indicators suggest a country desperately trying to return itself to the 1980s in every way possible by writing a newsletterblogtypething, so the least you could do is be grateful ffs.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you know you’ve missed me, stop lying to yourselves.

By Ruth Shively

WE COMMENCE THIS WEEK WITH A MIX OF GENUINELY GREAT SONGS FROM THE PAST 60-ODD YEARS BY LIVERPUDLIAN ARTIST-POET-TYPE-PERSON ROY! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS HONESTLY FINDING IT QUITE HARD TO BE BACK IN ENGLAND AFTER SPENDING A MERE 72H IN A COUNTRY IN WHICH STUFF ACTUALLY WORKS AND WHERE PEOPLE SEEM GENERALLY LIKE THEY ARE NOT ON THE VERGE OF BURSTING INTO TEARS AT A MOMENT’S NOTICE, PT.1:  

By Alex Schaefer

NEXT UP HAVE WHAT I CAN ONLY CALL ‘SOME CRUNCHY AND ANGULAR BEATS’ (FOR WHICH DESCRIPTION I CAN ONLY APOLOGISE) BROUGHT TO YOU BY AUTECHRE! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS HONESTLY FINDING IT QUITE HARD TO BE BACK IN ENGLAND AFTER SPENDING A MERE 72H IN A COUNTRY IN WHICH STUFF ACTUALLY WORKS AND WHERE PEOPLE SEEM GENERALLY LIKE THEY ARE NOT ON THE VERGE OF BURSTING INTO TEARS AT A MOMENT’S NOTICE, PT.2:  

• The Supermind Ideator: I genuinely adore the name of this project, an little experiment into AI and concept development by MIT, which puts me in mind of the supercomputers from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (you may be the sort of person fortunate enough not to have a small part of their brain taken up by the fact that one of the computers which came after Deep Thought in the HHG2 mythos was ‘The Milliard Gargantubrain’ but, well, I am less lucky, sadly) – it’s not QUITE that ambitious in scope, I don’t think, but you can always try asking it the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything’ and seeing what happens. The Supermind Ideator (seriously, my internal voice is incapable of saying that without some Brian Blessed-style vibrato) is an intriguing beta product (you need to sign up for access, but it seems to be granted quickly and indiscriminately) which is designed to help you break problems down into sub-questions – you feed it a question you want to explore, or a problem you want to solve, and The Machine will do various sub-tasks, like breaking the problem down into sub-questions, say, or spinning up analogies for the problem, or the larger problems that your problem is a subset of…basically a bunch of early-stage critical thinking work which might be helpful in terms of recontextualising or reframing an initial question in a way that allows for better, deeper or smarter investigation. This is, I think, hugely interesting, and based on a cursory play this week could be genuinely useful as an early-stage tool when considering questions of planning and strategy (or just if you want a really high-level thinking companion to help you get out of Tony’s party tomorrow night).
• Europeana: OH GOD EUROPE HOW I MISS YOU AND YOUR SHONKY, CHARMLESS PUBLIC SECTOR WEBSITES FOR EU-FUNDED PROJECTS! No, really, I genuinely mean that – there’s something so joyless and dry about the way in which seemingly all digital things that the European Union has a hand in are presented which, perversely, I find really pleasing and which I now find myself nostalgic for in the post-Brexit horrorshow in which the UK now exists. Anyway, pathetic FBPE-style nostalgia aside, this is a GREAT resource – “The Europeana website provides cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, teachers, and researchers with access to Europe’s digital cultural heritage. Why? To inspire and inform fresh perspectives and open conversations about our history and culture. To share and enjoy our rich cultural heritage. To use it to create new things. We give you access to millions of items from providing institutions across Europe. Discover artworks, books, music, and videos on art, newspapers, archaeology, fashion, science, sport, and much more.” SO MUCH HISTORY! SO MUCH ART! SO MUCH FOOTAGE! Honestly, even if you can’t think of any reason why you might have need of footage of Dutch people playing street hockey in 1934 you should be glad that this archive exists – I promise you that there will be at least one thing that’s peculiarly-interesting in every search you do, so just chuck in some random keywords and see where you end up.
• Obaa Life: Yes, ok, fine, this is an NFT project, but it’s a genuinely-aesthetically-interesting one, and as such I feel justified in including it – from what I can tell (which, admittedly, isn’t a HUGE amount – I do wonder whether the whole NFT thing might have crashed and burned less spectacularly were it not for the fact that the language around it has been, and continues to be, so utterly cnuty and incomprehensible, although I suppose one might argue that said cnutiness and incomprehensibility is exactly befitting for a movement built on snake oil and lies) this is mint in which each ‘piece’ is a digital representation of some sort of monocellular organism, rendered in digital 3d; there’s some sort of guff about how “obaa is a collective organism: a dividual. she embodies multiplicity in the way she divides, merges, and harbors other beings. her translucent membrane serves as a lens, distorting and refracting creatures and microplastics as she engulfs them and spits them out.  obaa unfolds on multiple time scales, on the order of milliseconds and hundreds of years. each obaa is synced to a real world timezone, and changes throughout the day. every organism in obaa is mortal, with lifespans in the range of months to years” but, honestly, give a fcuk, I just really like the way in which the little…blobs? are rendered tbh.
• Stanza: I do love me a ‘preposterous business model that is never, ever going to work’ website, and Stanza is very much an ur-example of such a thing – would YOU pay £2.50 a month (admittedly not a high bar, fine, but just wait til you hear what you’re paying FOR) to have a digital assistant automatically put new episodes of TV shows that it thinks you might be into into your calendar so that you can rest assured you will NEVER MISS A NEW BIT OF CONTENT? Not only that, but it will do the same for televised sports games…er, that’s it actually, sorry. So, £2.50 a month, then? Honestly, I think I sort of admire the chutzpah here but, equally, who thought this was a viable idea? I would LOVE to see the business plan here, and the estimated market value – “well, everyone watches TV, and everyone likes certain shows, and everyone hates missing the shows they like…so yeah, I reckon the potential market is somewhere in the region of ~5bn people, so that’s a year 5 revenue projection of £130bn annually, yeah; you in?”. NB – based on my appalling track record of ‘picking winners’ in business, politics and indeed wider society over the past decade or so, we can be confident that you will all be signed up to Stanza by 2030 and I will be w4nking for pennies on a street corner somewhere.
• Dead Parents What Now?: This is a GREAT idea – but its US-centricity made me think that there has to be an angle here in other countries, or indeed for a central repository of ‘deadmumanddad’ info worldwide. Dead Parents What Now? (such a good url too) is a site whose sole purpose is to offer helpful, practical advice on what you have to do when your parent or parents die – who do you call? What do you have to do about finances? What’s the best way to keep the dealers/debt collectors off your case? Where to divest yourself of the three kilos of meth that you unexpectedly discovered in the shed? ALL THIS AND MORE! I just finished wrapping up my mum’s affairs in Rome, a mere 13 months after she shuffled off this mortal coil, and FCUK ME was that a long and slightly-baffling and entirely-frustrating experience; I can’t imagine it’s ever fun, and so a simple, one-stop-destination for all your deadmumanddad needs is a genuinely smart concept which I am slightly amazed no bank/insurer has done a content-led campaign around (fun, parental death-related TikToks! What’s not to love? God, I really am borderline unemployable these days, aren’t I?).
• Face Studio: Generate fake AI faces on-demand – a bit like thispersondoesnotexist, except you can specify the gender, age and ethnicity of the faces you’d like the machine to spit out and which therefore can be used to populate an entire fake corporate website with a credibly diverse and not-necessarily-beautiful (seriously, try generating ‘white men in their 40s’ and you get some surprisingly non-model-like results, it’s almost refreshing) cast of spoofed employees.
• The Week: On the one hand, this is sort-of an interesting idea; on the other, I think I would personally rather grate my shins rather than do anything of the sort, but I appreciate that there are people reading this whose approach to life might be more collaborative and hopeful than mine and so I share it in the spirit of ‘you do you (but, to repeat, I would literally rather die). The Week is a participatory group experience designed to facilitate thinking about and discussion around the climate emergency (I don’t like the phrase ‘the climate emergency’, turns out; I might see if ‘the planetary clusterfcuk’ catches on by way of alternative) – per the site, “Recently, it’s been hard not to notice how fast the climate is changing. Experts say it will get worse really rapidly. The Week is for those of us who want to know how this will affect us, in the next 10, 20 or 30 years and what we can do about it. Too often, this issue feels abstract and overwhelming. The Week is a way to engage this issue, for real, with our friends, family or colleagues. It doesn’t tell us what to do, but empowers us to make up our own minds. So that we can say down the line: I knew what I needed to know, I did what I need to do and I have no regrets…You get together 3 times, during a week (hence “The Week”). Every time you watch a 1 hour documentary film episode. And then the heart of the experience:  a guided conversation for 30 minutes (or more if you want) to make sense of it all.” So, basically, apocalypto book club! The site suggests you can do this with friends, family or colleagues – so if your idea of a good time is spending three nights a week watching something that explains how everything is banjaxed and then additional supplementary time having heartfelt conversations with other people about what the fcuk, exactly, we’re meant to do about it, then, well GET INVOLVED! I’ll be elsewhere, drinking to forget.
• Roggle: A very simple ‘game’ which I have to admit to playing far more of this week than I expected (or, frankly, than I can justify) – Roggle asks you to do one thing and one thing only: GUESS THE SEARCH TERMS USED TO GET THE RESULTS SHOWN ON SCREEN! I appreciate that for most of you this will likely sound as thrilling as watching paint dry – maybe less so – but if you’re anything like me and have therefore based a significant part of your personal and professional self-worth over the past couple of decades on being marginally less shi1t at Google than anyone else you know then you too will ADORE this.
• The Snellings Museum: Oh YES – this is practically perfect, and a labour of love, and the sort of thing that makes me want to point at big brands with HISTORY and HERITAGE and say “LOOK YOU LAZY FCUKS IF LOVELY SNELLINGS CAN DO AN ARCHIVE THEN YOU CAN TOO FFS!” Roy Snelling was a Norfolk man who set up a shop selling televisions in the area in the mid-20th Century – Snellings still exists as a business, but the Snellings Museum is a separate concern, a digital recreation of Roy’s archive of television kit and memorabilia which has been in storage since 2016 but which is faithfully reproduced here through photos of old stereo and hifi and TV equipment, all of it looking like it smells slightly of burning dust and the 1970s and, honestly, you will probably appreciate this more if you’ve a deep and abiding love for Cathode Ray Tube-based devices from 100 years ago but, regardless, it’s hard not to be charmed by both Roy’s story and the existence of the museum.
• The Sri Chinmoy Marathon: Do you think you’re HARD? Do you eat 10ks for breakfast? Do standard marathons no longer hold any joy for you? Do you look at people contemplating a sub 3h20 time for a single 26 mile track as, frankly, pathetic amateurs? No, of course you don’t, literally noone who fits that profile would ever conceive of sitting reading 8,000 words about ‘stuff on the internet’ when they could instead be doing their knees serious, tarmac-related damage! Still, if you happen to know anyone who is feeling all Alexander-ish about the world of distance running (no more worlds left to conquer, etc) then you might want to point them at this race, which starts in 12 days in Queens, NYC, and which takes place over a 52 day (yes, that’s right) stretch around a single block, with each participant looking do do an average of nearly 60 miles a day (SIXTY MILES A FCUKING DAY FFS) until they’ve done the full route of just under 5000k. You have 12 days to train and get yourselves to NYC – please, readers of Curios, one of you prove me wrong about your general fitness and physical prowess! But, er, don’t die! Or, if you do, please don’t hold me responsible.
• The League of Pigs: A YouTube channel featuring pigs, racing. The pigs are small, they are nimble, and the races are…significantly more compelling than you might expect them to be. No word from the organisers whether the threat of the loser being turned into sausages is what compels them to such speeds, but let’s hope not and just enjoy the spectacle.
• Retroflix: This is the latest in a long line of ‘sites that exist to give you a single portal via which to watch a whole bunch of old, out-of-copyright films from The Past’ (see also VoleFlix), Retroflix has a decent-looking selection which, based on a cursory examination, is a little lighter on ‘mad scifi and horror schlock’ and a bit heavier on ‘sub-Hitchcockian 50s thrillers’, and which might be pleasing for any of you looking to hide from modernity for a while via the medium of forgotten cinema.
• Tote Design: You might think that the website for a webdesign company would best be served by demonstrating the sort of clean, shiny, functional UX/UI that said company is capable of, and that it would probably make sense for it to present a clear sense of ‘what the agency has done’ and ‘how to get in touch with it should you want to book a commission’ – but you would be WRONG, as the correct sort of website is in fact exactly like this one, by Japanese design shop Tote Design, which is possibly the most-confusing and yet most-enjoyable examples of ‘hang on, no, sorry, wtf?’ webwork I have seen in ages and which is even better for the fact that it’s meant to be a shopfront.
• Insects: I don’t know who any of you are (oh, ok, fine, I know who a handful of you are, but I like to think that there are some of you who I don’t know, whose lives and hopes and dreams remain a mystery to me and who as such exist as nothing other than orbs of pure digital potential in my mind) and as such I have NO IDEA what some of you might be compelled to make with this MASSIVE dataset of a million or so high-resolution, annotated images of insects, but I hope that it is something odd. If nothing else there is no excuse for you not using pictures of random beetles on your next website’s 404 pages.
• Bandit: On the one hand, this might be a great idea; on the other, I have never been in a band (amazing that someone with my ELECTRIC PERSONAL MAGNETISM and uncanny ability to reach Grade 4 classical guitar wasn’t snapped up for the ‘charismatic frontman’ role when I was in my teens, really) and so I have no clue whether this app, which I have mentally described as ‘Tinder/Grindr for musicians’, is the sort of thing that might appeal to bandmates seeking the final, triangle-playing component in their world-beating skiffle covers outfit. Musicians sign up, complete their profile with their instruments, styles and location and whatever examples of their skills their care to share, and those seeking musos can scroll and swipe to their heart’s content. I guess this is simply a modern equivalent of those old ‘four piece seeks drummer (must be able to count)’ classifieds from the NME 50 years ago, so maybe THIS is the way you’ll find your musical soulmate.
• Sprites From Old Fighting Games: A GDrive containing collections of sprites from old 16-bit fighting games (think Final Fight, that sort of thing) – this came to me via Daniel Benneworth-Gray, who rightly pointed out that the folder full of ‘character on fire’ models would make a genuinely awesome design for a silk scarf, should any designers be reading this (er, designers with access to a silkscreen printing setup, specifically).
• Kiezcolours: Oh this is GREAT! Kiezcolours is a website which lets you select any area of Berlin on a map and which creates a small colour-based postcard for you based on the land usage of the area you’ve chosen – so the colours on your personal postcard, and the sizes of each colour field, will reflect whether the area you’ve selected contains more residential land, or parkland, or water, or whatever, and as such you can create a very personal little graphic that reflects the character of your neighbourhood. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH and immediately got to thinking about how you might tweak this for London – number of chicken shops in a certain area, perhaps, or the tube lines that run through it…honestly, this is such a beautiful idea from concept to mechanic to execution, and I adore it.
• Yarn: Via the lovely Lee Randall comes this super little site – type in any word or phrase and it will search an incredible archive of video for clips containing the terms you specified. This feels OLD, but it was new to me and it’s honestly quite magical – I just typed in ‘I wish I was dead’ on a whim, and I got a quite incredible clip of a man seemingly being beaten to death with a very large, very floppy, very heavy-looking rubber pen1s, which frankly is all the reason I need to recommend this pretty much unreservedly.
• New Word Order: An excellent game by Monkeon – your job here is to guess which of the three words or phrases or terms was used first, then second, then most recently. Compelling and surprising and frustrating in equal measure, my main takeaway from this is that many neologisms aren’t in fact as new as I thought (chiz chiz).
• LCD Please: “Papers, Please” is rightly-regarded as one of the best ‘games as art and political commentary’ pieces of the past decade or so – the game, if you’re not familiar with it, tells a series of poignant stories through the medium of you as the player processing people through the immigration and asylum system – and this anniversary edition reimagines it as an LCD Game And Watch title from the 1980s. The gameplay is necessarily simplified and streamlined, but it doesn’t lessen the impact of its message, and the recreation of the style and interface of the games its aping will be a Proustian moment for anyone who grew up in the 80s.
• How Many Cities Can You Name?: British cities, to be precise. That’s it. Name cities. You may not think that this sounds hugely compelling, and you’d probably be right, but despite that fact I have been stuck on 29 for ages and am now basically compelled to keep staring at this until I can think of a 30th (I am so, so embarrassingly bad at geography).
• The Uncolouring Book: Via last week’s b3ta, a lovely toy for the more visually-creative among you (this basically makes me feel like some sort of untermensch, but I appreciate that there are those of you for whom ‘the visual’ is a less confusing and terrifying concept and who will therefore probably enjoy this a lot more than I did) – The Uncolouring Book is a lovely little idea, which invites you to draw the lines around the colours (the reverse of a colouring book, DO YOU SEE?!?!) to create images – you get a splotch of colour or two, a rough prompt and some simple line-drawing tools to draw what you see; it’s like looking for shapes in clouds really (yes, I am sh1t at that too, why do you ask), and I think you might enjoy it.
• Clone-A-Lisa: Matt Round has done it again – can YOU create a passable clone of the Mona Lisa in just a minute? TRY IT AND SEE! This is very fun, despite how aggressively-sh1t I am at it.
• Wip3out In Your Browser: Wip3out was the game that made games cool. I don’t care what you say – prior to the PlayStation, and Sony’s insanely-aggressive marketing campaign that saw consoles fitted with copies of this game installed in the backrooms of actual nightclubs so that people boxed off their t1ts on pills could deal with those moments when it all ‘got a bit too much’ after the third dove and cling onto the controller while they attempted to process the pixels breaking across their field of vision, videogames were so uncool that you’d rarely find anyone admitting to actually enjoying them; after Wip3out, everything changed. People would spend 5 hours at the ‘afterparty’ (lol such a highfaluting name for something that literally means ‘sharing space with whichever dreadful people still have drugs and energy at 5am) entranced by the speed and the visuals and the soundtrack (the music here still fcuking BANGS, by the way) and it basically created the aesthetic for a specific type of ‘cool’ for a few years in the mid-90s (and made a whole generation of people, now in their 40s and 50s, fetishise the work of The Designer’s Republic to a degree that was probably unhealthy on reflection), and this is THE WHOLE GAME PLAYABLE IN YOUR BROWSER! Honestly, this is FCUKING AMAZING (and hard, so so so hard, especially if you don’t have a controller) and if you are Of A Certain Age then there’s a strong possibility you’ll just want to lock yourself in a room for 36h with this and a bag of questionable tablets engarved with various poorly-rendered designs. DRINK WATER (but not too much).

By Tania Font

I TEND NOT TO LIKE THE TERM ‘AMBIENT’ BUT I CAN’T THINK OF A BETTER ONE FOR THIS MIX WHICH IS BY DIMA SAFRONOV AND IS NOT ONLY GREAT AND SLOOOW AND VERY CHILLED BUT ALSO HAS THE INCREDIBLE TITLE ‘MIX TO LOWER THE FOAM IN A GLASS OF BEER’!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Loved Orleer: On the one hand, the advances being made in AI-generated video are coming thick and fast, and the latest versions of Runway let you produce some pretty-impressive stuff with a bit of work; on the other, this Insta account posting machine-created movies is fcuking HORRIBLE and as such I recommend it unreservedly.
• Tada Gaku: Glorious animations in watercolour – and other styles, if you scroll back a bit – done with a combination of techniques and demonstrating a beautiful eye for style and composition

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Nigel Van Wieck

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I had a genuinely-chastening professional experience this week which I will share with you because, well, it contains a LESSON of sorts. I was asked at short notice to record a podcast on Monday to talk about That Fcuking Man and the Twitter rebrand, and I said a happy ‘yes’ because, well, I’m a middle-aged white man and as such I not only love the sound of my own voice but feel it desperately important that as many people hear it as is humanly possible. Now, whenever I have recorded this particular podcast in the past it’s always been a down-the-line interview with the host which then gets chopped into the requisite pieces for inclusion; as such, I was blithely unconcerned about little things like ‘prep’ and ‘knowing what the fcuk I was talking about beyond the superficial’, because, well, I could always do pickups and stuff. Great!

Except they have changed the format, and instead of that what was now required was that I go to a room in Soho and sit with two actual other people and have a ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION on a range of issues that would then be lightly edited to make up the first half of the episode; oh, and the other people are ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALISTS who go on telly and stuff. So, er, turns out that if you just show up with only a vague. half-ar$ed idea of what you’re going to say you will very quickly find yourself quite out of your depth, and feel very embarrassed, and probably make quite a poor impression on people who, on reflection, you possibly ought to have tried a bit harder to impress.

So the lessons here are multiple: 1) DO YOUR FCUKING PREP YOU ARROGANT CNUT; 2) when you see people on telly being really funny and knowledgeable, chances are they have notes – MAKE SOME NOTES YOU ARROGANT CNUT; 3) maybe apply antiperspirant to your temples, because it turns out that this sort of embarrassment really does make sweat absolutely HOSE from your forehead and you will find this very, very embarrassing. Basically, it’s things like this that have led to me having the stellar ‘career’ that I have.

Anyway, I am off to Rome next week to sign a piece of paper (no, seriously, literally one – THANKS, ITALIAN BUREAUCRACY, ONCE AGAIN YOU AMAZE AND DELIGHT!) and so Web Curios will be off; I’ll be back in a fortnight, presuming I’m not dead of shame or anything else.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should listen to me lest you end up doing THIS every week for the rest of your days

By Kate Breakey

WE KICK OFF WITH A (RELATIVELY) NEW MIX BY DJ FOOD WHICH MAKES A WHOLE LOAD OF 70s/80s MUSIC SOUND GENUINELY GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH  WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE COSTA AD THEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE SAME AS PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THERE BEING NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR BANKING ADS, PT.1:  

By Stipan Tadic

WE NOW GO BACK TO 1996 AND ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MIXES OF THE TIME WHICH YOU CAN PROBABLY SKIP IF YOU’RE NOT INTO TECHNO BUT IF YOU ARE THEN YOU WILL ENJOY THIS – THIS IS BITTER & TWISTED MIXED BY MRS WOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH  WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE COSTA AD THEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE SAME AS PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THERE BEING NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR BANKING ADS, PT.2:  

• General Index: “General Index is a shapeshifting encyclopaedic project by Ill-Studio focusing on factual information from all of human knowledge gathered into a corpus of abstract ideas and practical things’”. So, er, that clears things up then. General Index is slightly-baffling initially, but does start to make sense once you click through a bit and land on the accompanying semi-explanatory site which delivers some context behind the dizzying, shifting taxonomy of everything that flashes across the homepage (it will make sense once you click the original link, I promise you). I like this a lot.
• EVIDENT Images of the Year 2023: Would you like to see some images of REALLY REALLY SMALL THINGS, all pretty and iridescent? GREAT! Some of the things that these people have managed to capture are insane – the individual scales on a butterfly’s wing, ffs! SO SMOL! – although best not speculate too hard about whether or not the red-backed salamander whose skull is so beautifully captured in cross-section is doing ok.
• Casehopper: A (theoretically) genuinely good and positive use of generative AI! No, really! Casehopper is a service designed to help legal practitioners dealing with immigration applications in the US accelerate the speed with which they process said applications, offering assistance with the doubtless-formulaic process of information compiling and submission. Basically you (the lawyer) feed in all the information you have into the system and it will knock out the required documentation required by law, all in the appropriate legalese – or at least that’s the promise, but obviously I have no way of verifying whether or not the outputs are decent or whether by using this service you’re effectively condemning your clients to a swift return to whence they cane via the cheery repatriation mechanisms of the famously-accommodating US immigration system. Still, this feels like…a Good Thing? I mean obviously we’d like in a world in which each individual’s immigration request was dealt with humanely by a real person, but given that almost the exact obverse of that seems to be true and that The System is already basically a gigantic and unpleasant bureaucratic meatgrinder then it sort of makes sense to attempt to play the system using a bit of light automation – if, of course, The Machine does the job properly, because the caveat to all of this is that a bad-but-quick solution makes everything worse so much faster. Let’s…let’s hope for the best, eh?
• Unspun Heroes: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is a project by my mate Simon, but I promise that even were it by someone who I hated and wished a painful death on I would probably still feature it because, well, it’s a GREAT idea and I wish I had thought of it (and the name tbh). Unspun Heroes is a music label which answers the single burning question which I imagine has been on your lips for YEARS (whether you have been aware of it or otherwise), to whit: “Is it possible to find under-appreciated albums and reissue them on vinyl?” – and thanks to Unspun Heoroes, the answer is now a loud and unequivocal “YES”. The site is both a place where writing about favourite underrated records lives, and will eventually become a place where you can buy said limited edition reissues of classic, underappreciated records on lovely environmentally-friendly (insofar as that’s possible) physical media. This is a great idea (damn you Simon) and a lovely thing for all those middle-aged men amongst you who think that a record collection is a substitute for having a personality.
• The BBC on Mastodon: How are you all getting on in the middle of the Great Social Media Revolution? Have you managed to stick it out on Threads/Bluesky/Post/T2/Mastdon? Are you enjoying the very 2023 experience of posting the same thing (with a small degree of platform-specific tweaking) to six different platforms and finding that noone cares on any of them? Isn’t it great? No it is not great, it is sh1t, and part of me does rather pity the poor people at the BBC who have been tasked with running the Corporation’s new presence in the Fediverse and who, I fear, will be Skeeting into the void rather. Still, this is A Good Thing and exactly the sort of thing the BBC *should* be experimenting with if you ask me, and as ever with the Beeb they are being very thoughtful about how they approach the whole thing: “This is an experiment – we will run it for 6 months and then decide whether and how to continue. We aim to learn how much value it has provided and how much work and cost is involved. Does it reach enough people for the effort we need to put in? Are there risks or benefits from the federated model, with no centralised rules or moderation and no filtering or sorting algorithms? We’re learning as we go, and we’ll write about what we discover in the hope that it might be useful for others. The BBC will continue its other social media activity in the usual places. Looking ahead, could we move beyond Mastodon to other ActivityPub applications for publishing content? And would this provide us with some insulation from the risks that might be created as other social media platforms continue to change and evolve? And will large, planet-scale social media platforms persist or are they gradually disappearing? What are the alternatives and what will we have in 10 years time?” Honestly, I am so so so glad that an organisation exists that can and will do this sort of thing, and I am happy to pay for it.
• Songwriters: A new bit of dataviz exploration by the Pudding, this latest example of their now-signature ‘TELL STORIES WITH NUMBERS AND SCROLLING’ style looks into the number of female songwriters involved in penning modern hit singles, and the oddity of the fact that, per their investigation and analysis, while half of the songs they analysed that made the Billboard Hot 100 top 5 had all-male songwriting teams, only one had an all-female songwriting team. This leads them down a rabbithole of enquiry that takes the reader on an interesting journey through songwriting trends and which while so doing does a decent job of gently explaining some of the innate sexism inherent in the way the music industry functions and moving onto the manner in which this data tells the story of men controlling women’s work and money and agency throughout the course of the past 70 years – as the site puts it: “Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence.” An excellent example of how to do BIG THEMES in a way that doesn’t feel preachy or heavy-handed (and, as always, just great data-led communications – these people really are consistently excellent).
• The Constitute Project: A project designed to let anyone compare the contents and composition of national constitutions worldwide: “New constitutions are written every year. The people who write these important documents need to read and analyze texts from other places. And citizens need to know, and to be able to understand, what’s in their countries’ foundational documents. Constitute offers access to the world’s constitutions so that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics—using an inviting, clean interface.” This is FAR more interesting than I’d expected – yes, fine, I am an ahistorical ignoramus, what of it – and I didn’t think I’d find myself spelunking through the previous iterations of the Italian constitution with quite such relish. It’s impossible not to feel a slight ‘fcuk me the weight of history’ moment when you look at some of the dates on this stuff (or, potentially, to think ‘hm, maybe it might not be a terrible idea for us to perhaps come up with something to maybe update the Magna Carta a bit?’).
• Design Spells: I don’t *think* this is actually anything to do with the occult, but, just in case, Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any hideous eldritch familiars which may manifest at the foot of your bed as a result of your use of this website. Design Spells is a newsletter – ALL OTHER NEWSLETTERS ARE FALSE GODS THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE TRUE NEWSLETTER AND THAT IS THIS ONE – which exists to highlight small, lovely, often inessential design features which you might otherwise have missed. From their description, “Do you remember the micro-interaction that made you smile? Or the Easter egg you stumbled upon in your favorite app? These design details might go unnoticed by many and have little impact on the metrics that today’s apps are optimized for. They probably won’t appear in any product roadmaps or company OKRs. Nevertheless, these details are not pointless. They infuse life, personality, and fun back into the web. They spark joy and reward those who find them with a sense of delight. They represent the last bastion of hope against the backdrop of a homogenous web. It is at the intersection of design and engineering where these details are made possible. It is here that the real magic happens.
  That’s why we started Design Spells — to celebrate and showcase the design details that feel like magic.” I am 100% a fan of this ethos – I will forever hold a candle for those sites that feature pointless-but-happymaking bits of UI or UX work, and personally think that anyone working on any deadly-dull bit of faceless corporate busywork make it their mission to include ONE incredibly-silly thing hidden somewhere no right-thinking person will ever click (I am 100% putting a secret ‘link to furry bongo’ on the next digital project I work on and that is a GUARANTEE).
• One-Take Video: A bunch of new AI-ish features introduced by Vimeo and being bundled together as their ‘One-Take Video’ offering – this might all be super-useful if you’re a creator, but as with loads of this stuff all I can see when I look at it is a bleak future for lots of people currently making a living as video editors and scriptwriters and the like; I can’t tell you the amount of old rope money I’ve earned from cobbling together half-ar$ed scripts for videos I know that noone will ever watch (as you can tell, I bring my a-game to that sort of work!) and now these b4stards are STEALING THE VERY FOOD FROM MY MOUTH by offering functionality like ‘automatic video scriptwriting’ (and a bunch of other stuff too, like teleprompting and AI-assisted topline video editing). This might be useful, but it has slightly-hamstrung my future earning potential and so THANKS FOR NOTHING VIMEO YOU FCUKS.
• Ratatan!: A Kickstarter! This one is a shoo-in – it’s for a new videogame created by the same team that developed cult hit Patapan! a few years ago and which is now seeking funding (and has in fact achieved its goal in a matter of days) to develop a brand-new esoteric-looking rhythm-based game in which, as far as I can tell, you play rhythm games to lead a cute army of critters against ANOTHER cute army of critters! The official blurb says: “Ratatan is diving onto the roguelike scene in this combination of rhythm and side-scroller action. Players can move to the groove alone or team up with friends in multiplayer mayhem suitable for up to four players!  Engage in huge melee brawls with more than 100 characters duking it out for supremacy. Defeat your enemies by riding the rhythm of Ratatan’s catchy, toe-tapping soundtrack in this delightful, heartfelt adventure!”, but all you really need to know is ‘CUTE-BUT-VIOLENT RHYTHM GAME WITH SLIGHTLY-MAD VISUALS’ and that should give you the general idea.
• Diarrhoeacoffee: ANOTHER KICKSTARTER! This one also already-funded, but…significantly sillier. This also feels like a bit of a cheat – it’s an LG project, and I wasn’t aware that Big Business used Kickstarter like this tbh – but also means that I don’t feel bad about making fun of it. The device being crowdfunded here is a whizzy new coffee machine which it seems LG is about to add to its range – the gimmick here is, in part, the fact that it can hold two coffee pods simultaneously which allows you to BLEND DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAFFEINATED BEVERAGE! I know – IT’S WHAT I HAVE DREAMED OF TOO! If that wasn’t enough, though, LG’s design team have obviously been worshipping at the church of the infamous(ly ineffectual) Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, because this coffee machine is a(n admittedly pretty cute-looking) tripod design in nice, reassuring, Baymax-style curved white plastic…which, unfortunately, deposits the coffee from a central nozzle in a manner that can only be described as ‘a bit like watching it take an unpleasantly-liquid bowel movement’. Look, I promise I’m not exaggerating – click the link and watch the promo video and try and get past the fact that it looks almost exactly like your coffeemaker is, effectively, browning into a demitasse for you. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE YOU CANNOT.
• Sch1zo.net: It’s important to caveat this link, I think – when you spend a lot of time online, you often come across sites and work by people who are somewhat…outside the norm, shall we say, and in such cases I always try and make sure that if I do feature the site in question I do so in a manner that doesn’t feel like I’m making fun of anyone or punching down (I have no idea whether I succeed in this endeavour, but I promise I do try). In this case the site’s creator, one Sebastian Prusak, openly mentions on the homepage that the work of creating and maintaining it is in some way part of his recovery from severe schizophrenia, and the content of the site reflects that – the bio section is (to me at least) incredibly poignant, but the real draw for me is the art – I have seen…a lot of ‘outsider’-type art websites, but it’s rare that I see anything so…interesting. The work itself is sort-of mathematical-geometric, with lots symbolic references, but the most fascinating thing to me is the navigation interface which seems to try and create an interlinked thematic map of Sebastian’s works, based on…criteria I don’t quite understand. I can’t quite explain why, but this really stayed with me this week and I think it’s quite remarkable.
• Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023: The winner’s announced on the 8th September, but while you wait for the STARS TO ALIGN (lol) for the lucky victor you can peruse the nominees on this webpage (or, if you’re able, pop to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to check out the exhibition that accompanies the contest). These are obviously FCUKING AMAZING if a *little*-too post-produced for my taste – it’s cheesy, true, but the Pandora pic is quite cool, though my personal pics for the win this year are the solar flare shots because WOW, frankly.
• The Sounds of Space: In fact, while looking at the images at the last link, why not accompany your wide-eyed appreciation of the majesty of the cosmos with this soundboard of THE ACTUAL SOUNDS OF SPACE? It’s not, fine, a hugely-compelling soundtrack, but there’s always the outside possibility that if you download the audio files and run them through a bunch of filters/enhancers you’ll be able to hear something TERRIFYING AND ALIEN.
• Woodward Draw: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this GREAT game in which you’re asked to come up with as many different four-letter words as possible simply by changing one letter at a time – the goal is to find all of the SPECIAL words which have been given a delightful pixelart illustration, and which you can ‘collect’ like some sort of mad, acquisitive;linguaphile. If you have a small kid who is into vocabulary, I reckon this is probably a good 30 mins in which the sticky-faced little treasures might just be quiet, should you be in the market for such a thing.

By Anastasia Samoylova

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY NOEMA AND FEELS LIKE A PERFECT ‘WATCH THE SUN COME UP AFTER SOMETHING OF A HECTIC FEW HOURS’ SELECTION, SHOULD THAT BE OF USE TO YOU THIS WEEKEND OR INDEED EVER! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• SeoulTribe: One for the K-Pop fan in your life (IS IT YOU?) who wants to branch out a bit from the Blackpinks of this world and spread their musical wings slightly (but not so much that they ever leave Korea), SeoulTribe is (was? I hope not, though the bio does rather suggest it might be on hiatus) a place where its creators shared recommendations of Korean music outside of the more mainstream/large-scale K-pop acts.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Marc Dennis

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

God, it’s been an awful week for bloviating cnuts, hasn’t it? SHUT UP NIGEL SHUT UP ELON SHUT UP AND FCUK OFF AND SHUT UP!

Sadly, though, they won’t do either of those things, and we will continue boosting and bolstering their utterances, however untrue or unhelpful they are – that’s simply just how things work here at the fag-end of temperate civilisation.

Otherwise it’s been a good week for everyone with stocks in energy companies and air conditioning units and, on balance, a bad week for literally everyone else (and, frankly, even those people aren’t going to outrun this, however well their portfolios perform).

Still, links! Links will make it better! CLICK THE PAIN AWAY!!!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and maybe we could all club together and buy a grand hotel in Cleethorpes in preparation for the apocalypse-induced ascent of the English coast to its new status as a sweltering summer holiday destination?

***TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

The Tiny Awards are over! We have a winner!

We received over 1500 votes across the nominated sites – thanks to everyone who voted, who shared the link and who said nice things – and the winner of the inaugural Tiny Awards 2023 is….*drumroll*…ROTATING SANDWICHES by Lauren Walker!

Congratulations to Lauren (and also, ahem, to me, who had the GREAT TASTE to feature the site when it launched last year), who is the proud recipient of $500 (thanks to ZINE) and the official Tiny Awards trophy which will be winging its way to her as soon as it’s finished!

BUT, there’s more! If you click here, you can see the full list of EVERY SINGLE nominated website – over 300 fun little homemade and whimsical web projects for you to explore and enjoy, and which is, honestly, at least a full rainy day’s worth of interesting and odd and cute.

Kristoffer and I have honestly been overwhelmed by the support and interest people have shown, and will definitely be doing this again next year (barring injury or death) – til then, though, THANKYOU TO EVERYONE who participated in any way, you are all wonderful and I love you immoderately and damply.

***END OF TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

By Paul Anthony Smith

THE MUSIC BEGINS IN IMMENSE STYLE THIS WEEK COURTESY OF A FOUR-HOUR MIX OF ITALO-DISCO AND SPACE FUNK AND, HONESTLY, YOU CAN ALMOST SMELL THE COCAINE! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO’S GOING TO EDINBURGH FOR FRINGE TO TRY AND CHECK OUT NATALIE PALAMIDES NEW SHOW AS IT IS EXCELLENT, PT.1:  

By Alessia Morellini

WE TRAVEL BACK IN TIME 25 YEARS NOW WITH THIS SUPERB ALBUM OF D’N’B REMIXES OF DUB WAR!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO’S GOING TO EDINBURGH FOR FRINGE TO TRY AND CHECK OUT NATALIE PALAMIDES NEW SHOW AS IT IS EXCELLENT, PT.2:      

• The Loose Ends Project: I can’t pretend that this didn’t make me a *touch* emo when I discovered it this week, but it’s broadly the good sort of emo, I think – it is SO SO SO LOVELY I MIGHT CRY (again). The Loose Ends project exists to take the knitting projects left unfinished by people who’ve died mid-knit and hand them over to skilled third parties who finish the work started by the deceased and then pass the finished article back to the person’s loved ones, giving them a final memento mori in, er, wool. Honestly, it’s impossible to think about this in any meaningful way without tearing up a bit (or at least it is if you’re me) – even better, it’s an international initiative and they welcome new volunteers, so if you’re a skilled knitter and perler and you fancy doing something genuinely wonderful for someone then you might want to consider signing up. I know I always say stuff like this and that by so doing I also slightly ruin the otherwise lovely projects I feature here, but this very much feels like something that is the PERFECT charity-type partnership for the right sort of brand (I HATE MYSELF AND I AM SORRY).
• South Pole Signage: Brought to you by the South Pole’s premier website brr.fyi (one of the Tiny Awards finalists, fwiw), this is a superb collection of mundane signage employed at the planet’s southernmost pole – which, fine, probably doesn’t SOUND compelling, but there is something so so interesting about the ways in which people have to think about their environment when somewhere hostile and remote and where collaboration and having to just sort of get on with stuff is hugely-important. To quote the post’s author: “I’ve always been fascinated by routine, mundane activities and infrastructure in extraordinary contexts. It’s why I’ve gleefully written about the everyday realities of life and how they play out in Antarctica – topics such as laundry, wastewater infrastructure, credit card fraud, voting, automated teller machines, mud, and doors. In the seven months I’ve been at the South Pole so far, I’ve kept up my fascination with the day-to-day tasks involved in keeping the station going. Yes, we’re at the actual, real-life South Pole. Yes, it’s -100°F outside. Yes, we’re isolated for 8 months straight. Yes, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and an extraordinary, novel set of circumstances. But also – We live here! And living in a place means that it will develop a certain rhythm. A certain set of norms, customs, fault lines, battle scars, inside jokes, remembrances. Day-to-day reminders of the folks who have left their mark on this place over the years.” This is glorious (as is the whole site tbh).
• Forum Games: I love this in ways that I don’t think I can adequately explain. Via last week’s B3ta comes this wonderful subsection on the GiffGaff community forums (for non-Anglos, GiffGaff is a provider of mobile telephony solutions) in which various users are running (and seem to have been running for YEARS) little ‘games’ in which they invite other users to do such ostensibly-tedious things as ‘count up to 200, and back to 0 again, using only prime numbers’ or ‘let’s all write the days of the week in order over and over again’ and, honestly, there are HUNDREDS of people ‘playing’ this stuff, just logging into the thread to type ‘13’ or ‘29’ or ‘TUESDAY’, and…I don’t know what to make of this, to be honest, whether it’s something deep and pure and beautiful or whether it’s basically the equivalent of caged chimps scrawling inchoate messages on the concrete floor whilst bemerding the gawping schoolkids. There are threads here that have been going for THREE AND A HALF YEARS ffs, demonstrating an unwavering commitment to The Bit. I honestly have no clue whatsoever you should do with the knowledge that this exists, but I like to imagine one of you will be having a moment of Damascene clarity and purpose right now.
• Sonic Cartoon Frames: Ignore the ‘Are you 18?’ Imgur disclaimer that pops up when you click the link – I can assure you that this is entirely SFW in every way (unless you have some sort of deep erotic attachment to the Sonic the Hedgehog universe, in which case I suggest you might want to perhaps address that) – because this is not bongo, it is instead an unfathomably-large collection of individual animation frames from the old Sonic cartoon series – there are over 2100 cells here, which I can’t imagine for a second any of you will have a use for but which I like to think will inspire at least one of you to train a local version of Stable Diffusion on this to create the greatest Sonic cartoon creation engine EVER (a boy can but dream).
• The AI Baby Generator: This is fabulously stupid and fcuked up – well DONE everyone! The AI Baby Generator helps you answer that age-old question – “were I to have children with that person over there, what would our kids potentially look like?” – via the medium of shonky AI imagework, letting you see exactly how hot the offspring of your union with literally anyone in the world could eventually become. This is, as you have probably worked out by now, a laughable grift being run by opportunistic shysters that is patently targeted at the VERY STUPID – sorry, but I refuse to believe that anyone with an IQ in treble figures is shelling out a tenner to receive a grand total of FIVE AI-generated images in return – but which is also probably going to end up taking a lot of money from the mad and delusional too; the fact that they explicitly offer ‘see what the spawn of the union between you and the celebrity who you have an increasingly-unhealthy parasocial crush on!’ as a service suggests that they have no qualms whatsoever pandering to the lonely stalkers of the world. Perhaps my favourite thing about this, though, is that the ‘Premium’ pricing tier (a bargain $27!) secures you not only some photos but ALSO ‘A 7-Page Future Child Personality Report’! That’s right – not only will they chuck in a few extra poorly-’shopped photos of your imaginary baby, they’ll also drop in some GPT-styled rubbish about how it’s almost certainly going to be an empathetic genius! This does feel a bit…grubby, doesn’t it?
• Climate Conflict: This is a sobering read – not, frankly, that we ought to need one, based on, you know, ALL THE BURNING. Still, if you’d like to take something of a deep-dive into the areas most likely to suffer significant political and social upheaval as a result of the rise in global temperatures and general fcukery of the coming years’ weather patterns, this is a useful resource – it provides a region-by-region overview of the relative threats facing each region (climate-related, economic, political) and focuses on Nigeria as a case study of some of the likely impacts of shifting climate on the socioeconomic fabric of the country. This is obviously quite miserable reading, but, equally, it’s quite important.
• The Rochambeau Club: Thanks to Alex for sending this to me – The Rochambeau Club is a fascinating fictional brand (it reminds me a bit of both skincare brand Vacation and the equally-fictitious US football team Asbury Park) representing an old-school US country club, the sort of place that (as a non-American) I imagine being the setting for an infinity of Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger shoots, where preppy teens stalk languidly across manicure lawns whilst blitzed off their tits on Adderall and Xanax (I have, perhaps, read more American campus novels than is strictly healthy) before one of them gets murdered as part of some sort of ritualistic cult practice (I have also read too much Ellis/Tartt) – except the funny thing here is that the Rochambeau Club doesn’t in fact exist at all, but does seem to be selling a natty (and pricey) line in wine, and loafers, and a few other things. As Alex said, “I wonder if the particular genius of Rochambeau is it lets people buy into the rich & preppy fantasy, but with the plausible deniability that you’re doing it ironically so you’re not a massive tory”, which seems like a reasonable explanation tbh.
• Illustration Chronicles: This is GREAT! Compiled by Dublin illustrator Philp Kennedy, “Illustration Chronicles explores a history of illustration through the images, illustrators and events of the past 175 years. Every few months the site picks a topic to explore. These topics inspire the types of work that get selected and once a piece has been chosen, the year it was made gets marked off the project timeline. Illustration is a fascinating subject and yet its history is rarely told. This project aims to champion the medium and bring some inspiration, insight and knowledge to readers everywhere.” Honestly, this is SUCH a rich archive, and so beautifully curated and explained – if you’ve ever enjoyed a visit to the London Cartoon Museum (and if you haven’t, why not?!) then you will absolutely adore this site.
• Artemis: Another in the near-infinite series of ‘we can automate the tedious business of engaging with your kids on an imaginative/emotional level!’ companies being facilitated by AI, Artemis exists to let parents automatically create illustrated bedtime stories for their kids based on a series of prompts – as you’d expect, this is built on an API meaning there’s a need to buy tokens to build the content and as such this could get expensive quite quickly; BUT, on the plus side, you’ve not had to spend any time thinking about how to bore your kid to sleep! Obviously I jest – even the childless like me are aware that sometimes, just SOMETIMES, parents don’t have the time or the energy to come up with a Disney-standard original story to accompany bedtime – but I find something particularly-distasteful about Artemis’ insistence that using its tools will ‘help build empathy in your little one’ which, honestly, sounds like emotionally-manipulative bullsh1t. Anyway, I think that this sort of thing serves mainly to illustrate the inherent limits in generative AI as a narrative tool – everything I have made with this is so bad that I would genuinely bet on myself to do better, and I basically hate children and wish I was dead, so.
• Public Photos: Do YOU take photos? Do YOU have an Apple account on which you store them? Do YOU wish that there was a really easy way to take all those photos and turn them into a public-facing webpage with basically no work at all? If the answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘yes’ then a) wow, I know my readership significantly better than I thought; and b) YOU ARE IN LUCK! There’s a waitlist to use the service, but, honestly, this couldn’t be simpler and is a potentially lovely alternative to chucking everything on Insta.
• First Versions: SUPERB PRODUCT HISTORY WEBSITE! Per it’s strapline, “Everything had a first version: here you can find it!” Want to learn about the first ever Singer sewing machine? OH GOOD! Want to be able to go through a dizzying archive of frands and products and see how they started? YES YOU DO! If you’ve any interest in the history of brands then this is a wonderful resource – it’s a VERY old school website, so perhaps lacks some of the user-friendly gubbins that a modern user might ideally expect, but, well, there’s a history of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and of Barbie, and of Tequila, and how many other sites can say that? NO FCUKERS, etc!
• Solar Grazing: I’ll be honest – there is one reason and one reason alone why I am featuring this website, and it’s not the subject matter. Solar Grazing, it turns out, is the practice of, er, grazing sheep near solar farms. “The American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA) was founded to promote grazing sheep on solar installations. ASGA members are developing best practices that support shepherds and solar developers to both effectively manage solar installations and create new agribusiness profits. We are a not for profit trade association founded for and managed by sheep farmers who became solar graziers. In our industry, we are facilitating research, best practices, and leading the way to co-location at solar arrays with solar grazing.” So there. Boring, isn’t it? I tell you what isn’t boring – the association’s logo, which I would honestly have on a tshirt tomorrow and which I would have on a poster, and which I genuinely and unironically love more than almost any other piece of design I’ve seen all year. TELL ME I AM WRONG, I DARE YOU.
• Faster Displays: Occasionally I stumble across website that represent industries so niche that you wonder whether you’re the only non-industry person to ever visit them (the last link being a case in point) – so it is with this INCREDIBLY nicely-designed website promoting a company that makes those cardboard Point Of Sale Units that you see erected at the end of a checkout lane (for example). And yes, I know, that’s what I thought, but, I promise, by the time you’ve finished scrolling this you’ll find yourself feeling unexpectedly-thrilled by the excellent deployment of corrugated cardboard that’s on display here.
• Recently Extinct Species: Presented without comment: “This website attempts to document the world’s many recently extinct (126ka–present), missing and rediscovered species and subspecies. An impossible task given that many of these have no doubt gone extinct without ever being recorded by science (termed “Dark extinctions”). While many others are so little known that there is scarcely anything to document now, and so in a secondary sense are lost as well. Luckily, it is possible for us to learn more about them through the discovery of (sub)fossil remains or (re)discovery of specimens in museums and private collections. This combined with increasingly sophisticated scientific methods of study, invariably driven by brilliant minds or technological advances, can help to recover these foregone species from the informational abyss. Most importantly, this ‘new’ information can hopefully help rediscover them as living populations. Different species have different life histories, and no single method of attempted capture/documentation can succeed for the entire gamut of living species which inhabit vastly different environments from snowy alps to peat bogs, and have greatly variable lifespans, life stages, traits and ecological niches. Developing idiosyncratic capture methods greatly increases our chances of success, and potentially offers us an extremely rare second chance to save them from extinction.” I recommend you go to the ‘animals’ section and just scroll down and read the topline taxonomy to get a scale of the dizzying extent of what we have done.
• Identifive: This is INFURIATING, mainly because I am so so so bad at it and I can’t quite explain why that is. Each day, your task is to find the single complete five-letter word hidden in the grid, wordsearch style – it can be forwards or backwards, vertically, horizontally or diagonally. You have a few opportunities to reduce the size of the grid to make the task easier, but know that that is CHEATING and that I think less of you as a result – honestly, I have sworn at this SO MUCH this week and you will too.
• SNES Party: Finally this week, a speculative one – I only found this this morning via Andy, and I wasn’t able to make it work for me in the cursory three minutes I spent fiddling with it at approximately 634am today; that said, Andy’s a thorough man, and if he’s linked to it then I expect it almost certainly DOES work, in which case WOW are you in luck – this site lets you load up one of an insane selection of old SNES Roms, and then share the link with upto four friends for EXCITING MULTIPLAYER FUN! So you could play Final Fight together, or Super BomberMan (I nearly failed my IB because of Super BomberMan – good times!) or any one of about 100 different titles; practically crack cocaine, this, if you can get it running.

By Richard Vergez

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY TOAKA AND WHILST I CAN’T REALLY ACCURATELY DESCRIBE ITS STYLE I CAN INFORM YOU THAT THE SOUNDCLOUD TAGS ON THIS ONE ARE ‘TROPICAL’ AND ‘BALEARIC’ AMONG OTHERS, AND THAT THOSE FEEL BROADLY ACCURATE AND I THINK YOU WILL LIKE IT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Stephanie H Shih: Excellent ceramic work which mimics non-ceramic objects – it’ll make sense when you click, I promise, and the execution’s far better than you’d expect; the used condom in particular is masterful (I am being wholly serious here).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Oleksander Shatokhin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: