It does rather feel that The Onion ought to create a version of their ‘another mass shooting’ story for banking crises, doesn’t it? ““We don’t understand how the invisible hand failed to sort our mess out!”, screams only industry still holding faith in the invisible hand”, or perhaps something, you know, better.

Meanwhile it’s been another LONG AND BUSY WEEK when it comes to having the future fired at our faces at point-blank range, and, if I’m honest, I felt myself getting a little pre-emptively weary of all the inevitable, poor-quality, derivative and barely-functional ‘guides to harnessing GPT4 for YOUR business!’ writeups that are going to be appearing all over the place (a not insignificant number of which I expect I am going to end up writing for various people because, well, a boy’s got to eat).

I’m off to gird my loins in preparation for all that horror, and to get all my gubbins together for a brief trip back to Rome next week (I need to go to sign a piece of paper – literally ONE piece of paper. God love a bureaucracy, eh?), and so I will leave you with the words and the links and some sort of vague, nonspecific good wishes for the weekend.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and when I’ve finally got round to hooking up the GPT API to this newsletter then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be free.

By Jess Allen

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH SOME MODERN CLASSICAL GUITAR MUSIC BY JONATHAN BOCKELMANN WHICH I REALLY DO RECOMMEND EVEN IF THE IDEA OF LISTENING TO SOMETHING DESCRIBED BY ME AS ‘MODERN CLASSICAL GUITAR MUSIC’ MAKES YOUR TEETH ITCH! 

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN APOLOGISES FOR THE SLIGHTLY-AI-HEAVY OPENING SECTION BUT WHICH WOULD GENTLY SUGGEST THAT IT’S PROBABLY NOT A TERRIBLE IDEA FOR YOU TO START LEARNING WHAT THE FUCK THIS STUFF DOES NOW GIVEN IT’S INCREASINGLY IMPOSSIBLE TO OSTRICH YOUR WAY OUY OF THIS SH1T HOWEVER MUCH YOU MIGHT IN FACT WANT TO, PT.1:  

By Alex Schaeffer

NEXT UP, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING, IS THE FULL AND STILL UTTERLY SUPERB DJ FOOD & DK ‘NOW LISTEN’ MIX FOR SOLID STEEL!

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN APOLOGISES FOR THE SLIGHTLY-AI-HEAVY OPENING SECTION BUT WHICH WOULD GENTLY SUGGEST THAT IT’S PROBABLY NOT A TERRIBLE IDEA FOR YOU TO START LEARNING WHAT THE FUCK THIS STUFF DOES NOW GIVEN IT’S INCREASINGLY IMPOSSIBLE TO OSTRICH YOUR WAY OUY OF THIS SH1T HOWEVER MUCH YOU MIGHT IN FACT WANT TO, PT.2:      

• The Statue of Liberty Tour: Despite having been to New York several times I’ve never been up the Statue of Liberty (or, to be honest, ever paid particular attention to it – I am in many respects a terrible tourist), and so I rather enjoyed this Google Street View tour of its innards, including the unpleasantly-claustrophic ladder that takes you up to the viewing platform in the torch’s flame. A combination of the fact that all the shots involved in this were taken on something of a grey day and the fact that what you’re basically looking at is quite a lot of internal infrastructure and some rickety steps means that the main purpose of this, to my mind, is to ensure that you never waste the time it would take to do this in person. Still, LIBERTY!
• Google Trends Realtime: I think that this is a new feature – at least, it’s new to me and my solipsism means it must therefore by definition be new to you too. Google Trends now offers you what it calls a ‘realtime’ view of trending searches in your location, which isn’t really realtime but instead “highlight stories that are trending across Google surfaces within the last 24 hours, and are updated in real time. These stories are a collection of Knowledge Graph topics, Search interest, trending YouTube videos and/or Google News articles detected by our algorithms.” Which is both just curious from the point of view of ‘what is the nation REALLY THINKING ABOUT right now? (clue: stuff on the telly, almost inevitably) and potentially-useful should you still be in the invidious position of having to chase trends for content-click-clout.
• Metanumbers: Do YOU want to know more about numbers? Would you like the ability to plug in any numer about which you were curious into a website and at the click of a button know EVERYTHING about it? No, I can’t for a second imagine that you do, and yet nonetheless I present METANUMBERS (it’s not in all-caps, but it does rather feel like it should be), a website which will literally give you the inside-leg measurement of any nine-digit figure you care to name if you ask it nicely (obviously it won’t do that – numbers don’t have legs, inside or otherwise). Want to know if something’s a prime? Want to know its factorials? Want to know if it’s a fibonacci or a perfect number? WELL YOU’RE IN LUCK! I don’t, honestly, have an idea at all of what you might use this for, but I am pleased it exists.
• The Eliot-Hale Letters: Oh God this is lovely – I confess that I did a small weep reading these earlier this week, not because they are sad per se and more because there’s something so beautiful, timeless and yet so so so…old-fashioned, about the relationship contained in this correspondence record. Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher and the longtime muse and confidante of TS Eliot, who over the course of nearly 30 years and over 1100 letters conducted the most extraordinary epistolic relationship with her and whose correspondence is a wonderful mixture of the mundane, the sublime and the ridiculousness that only writers of love letters can occasionally attain. Honestly, you can dip in at any point and just start reading and it’s WONDERFUL – gossipy and banal and personal and urbane, and far more interesting and entertaining than any collection of old letters between two people you don’t and will never know have any right to be.
• How To D&D: Given the boom in interest in tabletop roleplaying games and the decline in social unacceptability of pastimes like Dungeons & Dragons, it seems plausible that some of you might be in the market for learning more about how to plan campaigns and all that jazz. This YouTube channel by one JP Coovert might be useful, should the above apply to you – Coovert takes viewers through how to draw maps, how to plan encounters, how to create dungeons and balance campaigns and and and and. If you or your kids are looking to get into ‘the scene’ (upsettingly my use of that word has just made me wonder about the venn diagram overlap beween D&D and swinging, which wasn’t something I particularly needed my subconscious to throw at me at 8:57am) then there’s loads of potentially useful stuff here for you.
• The Last Of Us Intro Creator: Did you enjoy the mushroomzombies? Apparently it’s very good, though I obviously wouldn’t know. Still, I always appreciate one of those ‘insert some new overlay text onto a video’ toys, and this one – which lets you create your own version of the show’s opening titles, replacing the names of Pedro Pascal and all the other actors who the internet hasn’t chosen to creepily fetishise and whose names are therefore unknown to me with whichever copy you choose. Which means you can probably use this to make some sort of wry commentary about your office politics or the APOCALYPTIC NATURE OF WORK or that sort of thing.
• Radio Free Fediverse: Is it bad that I find the term ‘fediverse’ almost immediately repellent? I don’t know why, but it very much gives me what I believe kids call ‘the ick’. Which is a shame really, because perhaps I would really enjoy migrating my entire online presence over to a series of small, federated communities. This project – Radio Free Fediverse – is emblematic of the ‘vibe’ (sorry) of the wider community; the idea is that it’s a 24/7 ‘live’ stream of programming co-curated and created by a loose-knit community of people from across Mastodon (and other) non-federated platforms, with a layer of interesting thinking about rights, attribution, ownership, etc. “our mate gabe from @owncast@fosstodon.org really wanted a 24/7 feed of fedi artists video, audio, anything. Given we have both tried to do video and podcast formats with sustainability of content and buy-in issues, here is a pivot as a ‘simplified’ reboot of fediverse today radio by @controlfreak@hackers.town. radio free fedi is open licensed artists AND copyright using artists who have awesomely granted consent for inclusion in this project. You can too! With this 24/7 radio model we hope to be more sustainable being open for submissions and in promoting our sound creating fedizens. There is behind the scenes work to keep clean data and avoid super long tracks or audio anomalies, and select a few tracks with reasonable run times from albums if the artist does not recommended specifics. Also station programming and editing spoken pieces and voice assets. Outside of a reasonable sound quality, length, and picking a number of indicative tracks from albums, and quick check for good fediquette, genre is wide open. It’s not about the “list” or a “curator” it’s about the artists and hopefully fun.” Ok, fine, it’s QUITE ‘knit your own internet’, but I personally quite like that.
• Windrush 75: A Kickstarter campaign seeking to raise money for an exhibition of photography by Jim Grover, who in 2018 held an exhibition at the OXO Gallery in London telling the stories of the Windrush generation; as Jim writes, “2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the arrival of SS Windrush and I am determined to create and exhibit a new photo-story to mark and celebrate this important milestone.  I continue to be passionate about the ‘Windrush generation’, what they have contributed to this country, and their invaluable legacy. I am currently immersed in taking new photographs and conducting new interviews, here in south London where so many of the ‘Windrush generation’ settled, and I know I have some wonderful new stories to share, including how the 2nd and 3rd generations are taking the legacy forwards.” I heard about this as I went to the original show 5 years ago and received an email from Jim telling me about the campaign – he is a superb photographer, and this campaign is just a few hundred quid short of meeting its goal, so if you can spare a tenner this is a decent cause and will be an excellent exhibition.
• Blue Soup: I think it’s important, as we await the now-inevitable dehumanising of almost all writing and white-collar doing, to celebrate the wonder of humanity as and when we can – to which end, let me introduce you to this truly WONDERFUL Twitter thread which I think has been oddly ignored this week (in fairness, there’s been a lot going on) despite its being a pretty much perfect example of the sort of ‘a community comes together to solve a kooky mystery’-style content which we all by now know the internet loves. Dr Elinne Becket is a biologist who recently threw out some old soup that had gone off in her fridge – as she did so, she noticed that, for reasons she simply couldn’t begin to fathom, that the old soup had turned bright blue, WHY WAS THE SOUP BLUE? Now whilst you or I would, in all likelihood, give a cursory Google or two before forgetting the whole thing, Dr Becket is a SCIENTIST and in possession of equipment, curiosity and a community – which is how this Twitter thread, in which a bunch of different biologists around the world, spend several works collaboratively working to isolate the bacteria which caused the blue soup to bloom. Honestly, this is SO PURE and SO WONDERFUL and even if you don’t understand the first thing about biology and are made fundamentally uncomfortable by the concept of petri dishes and the very words ‘agar agar’ you will be charmed by the journey here.
• Ampersand Games: Another Kickstarter! And another D&D-related thing, should any of you be in the market for it – Ampersand Games is crowdfunding to bring their ‘My First Roleplaying Game’-type product to market, offering a stripped down, ruleset-light entry pathway into the TTRPG world for parents and younger kids for whom the prospect of sitting down with a Bible-thick rulebook and some chonky modifier tables has all the appeal and allure of an evening’s light c’n’b torture (NB – if that last phrase doesn’t mean anything to you, DO NOT GOOGLE IT). “For both experienced and first-time GameMasters, we’ve reduced the burden of preparation and game management by creating standalone, all-in-one-box Adventures:  instead of buying multiple rulebooks, figurines, and dice, each ScreenBox Adventure contains everything you need to play, all contained in a box that ingeniously unfolds to become the GameMaster’s Screen! While the general idea and gameplay spirit will be very familiar to experienced players of RPGs, the new innovations we’ve integrated are a unique, charming, and refreshing take, specifically designed to make it easy for parents to GM for their kids.” It’s just over ⅓ funded with just under three weeks to go, so it’s a bit touch and go as to whether it’ll make the cut, but it seems like a nice idea and I can imagine for certain parents and kids it could be quite a lot of fun.
• LoFi Air Traffic Control: This feels OLD, but I don’t think I’ve seen it before – pick a city in the US (one that has an airport, obvs) and listen in to a feed from their air traffic control tower, overlaid over lofi beats as a sort of ASMR sleep aid (I presume). This really shouldn’t be a pleasant listen, but weirdly really does work (if you recall, something similar was done years ago using scanned police radio frequencies from various US cities) – which, if you consider the nerve-shredding stress and responsibility of actually being an air traffic controller is sort-of weirdly ironic.
• Barnaby Dixon: I personally think that the art of puppeteering peaked with the headless dancing monsters sequence in Labyrinth, but am willing to concede that that’s more to do with my critical appreciation of the medium having ossified in 1986 rather than because of any lack of technical progress. Baqrnaby Dixon, whose YouTube channel this link is to, is a staggeringly talented young puppeteer whose creations move with an almost-uncanny organic fluidity and whose work really does remind me of the very best of the Henson Creature Workshop.
• A Digital Poem: I found this via Kristoffer, and it’s not really clear what its title is or even what IT is, but I am going to describe it as a short piece of digital poetry, each word or phrase in verse linked to a small piece of content and which builds and coalesces over the course of the work to build a feeling of…oh, I don’t know, you’ll make your own interpretations, but to me this felt a bit like a meditation on our changing relationship with the digital, from discovery to disillusionment, and I found it more affecting that I expected.
• The Underground Radio Directory: Oh this is GREAT! “Underground Radio Directory aims to bring together the best in underground net radio stations from across the globe. URD collates all the stations into one listenable place allowing you to discover new stations, listen to your favourites and explore the world of net radio.” Currently I’m listening to some rather weird ambient being broadcast by Internet Public Radio in Guadalajara, which is basically magical and pleases me no end. This feels VERY oldschool, in the nicest of ways, and given the number of stations linked to from the site you could basically work through one a week for the rest of the year if you wanted a curious aural project (which, fine, I appreciate you might not).
• (we)bsite: “(we)bsite is a living collection of internet dreams from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet. What do you want from the internet? Please share your dreams, hopes, and invocations with us and Write a letter. The only personal data we collect from you is where you leave your fingerprint as you interact with the letters  (pick a color that you identify with). You’ll find other visitors’ fingers scattered throughout the letters they’ve touched.What does it mean to leave our presence on the websites we visit? Can we feel the presence of those who have been here before?” Honestly, this is so so so nice – I encourage you to take a moment and read some of the things that people have written and left as memories and observations, and to add your own. There’s something particularly lovely about the light-touch traces that previous visitors leave on the site, the ‘fingerprints’ showing which letters have been picked up and read; I would enjoy more sites trying to build in this idea of accretion or wear-over-time (but, er, I appreciate it’s probably not top of mind for, say, Ocado).
• Submissive Thanos: Presented here without comment, and available to purchase for the low, low price of $633. I am astonished that this has gone viral enough to have ended up on my radar and yet simultaneously remains unpurchased – what is WRONG with you, horny pop culture fetishists of the internet? To be clear: this link is technically totally SFW, but I would not blame your IT department and any colleagues who might happen to see it open on your desktop for looking at you somewhat askance.
• BongoBranding: Whilst one of the side effects of being as, ahem, ‘plugged in’ to the web as I am is that I always feel a bit sad when forced to admit ignorance of particular online themes or tropes, I confess to feeling nothing but pride at having had very little idea as to what the fcuk this thread is talking about. Apparently there are a bunch of bongo ‘review’ sites that exist to rank and rate the various scud portals littering the web – and according to this thread, which breaks down in quite astonishing detail the sheer number of the fcuking things that exist, they all apparently have character-led brands, with…little horny cartoon mascots, who all seem to weirdly form part of the same bongo-driven extended cartoon universe? WHAT? Why does the world of w4nking need…vaguely-cutesy little character mascots? Why are said mascots oddly-cheery little geek dudes? And why do some of them appear to be basically kids? This is very, very weird, and also sort-of-fascinating, but also, mainly, really really weird.
• Little Room: A small, pixelart room, which you can keep open in a tab all day and check in on every now and again – as the day passes, so the characters in the room change and move around depending on what time it is. I know I keep banging on about this, but it doesn’t seem outwith the bounds of possibility that one might add a light conversational layer to this and the bones of some sort of emergent plot that you could explore thanks to GPT4…but failing that, it’s just a cute little fishbowl-diorama to drop into every now and again if you’re curious.
• Idyll: Oh this is SO LOVELY! It requires a download, but I promise you that if the description appeals to you even a little that you will adore this and you should install if forthwith. “Somewhere out on the oceans of the internet, an island resides. Best enjoyed after a long day away, Idyll is a small social world designed around kinder forms of online conversation and connection. Wander around a gentle pastoral island, strike up small conversations with other passing players, and even toss out small letters into the wide open blue oceans of the internet.” This isn’t really a game so much as a sort of asynchronous social experience-slash-meditative art journey, but I promise that the small moments of connection it enables you to feel with anonymous strangers half a world away are oddly-affecting.
• MystFPS: Classic point-and-click adventure Myst gets reimagined as a shooting gallery – this is probably only worth a couple of tries tbh, but you’ve all got so much time on your hands now that the AI is doing all your PPTs for you that you may even want to stretch it to 20 minutes.
• Banshees: The Game: Not in fact an official, licensed tie-in – this is instead a little show-off project made by digital agency Cogs & Marvel which basically reskins Pacman and adds some filmlols by making you play the part of the one Irish bloke who’s decided he no longer wants to be mates with the other Irish bloke (can you tell I’ve not seen the film?). For some reason you have to collect fingers (I imagine that this is plot-relevant). There are IRISH LOLS! This is actually rather nicely done, and significantly better than it in fact needs to be, so WELL DONE digital agencypeople!

By Natalia Gonzales Martin

THE LAST OF THE MIXES THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF WHAT I AM GOING TO TERM ‘FUNKY BEATS’ (SORRY) PUT TOGETHER BY E-PRIME! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• David Szauder: AI art; whilst I decried the obviousness of the ‘Midjourney’ aesthetic up top, and whilst this does very much fall into that broad ballpark of ‘stuff that very much looks like AI art and you would never quite mistake for anything generated by human hand’, I quite like the general area that Szauder’s mining with his creations. As an aside, I know that this is a long-running trope of mine but has anyone else noticed quite how much The Machines fetishise that blue/orange (TEAL – thankyou Ambrose) colour combination? It is EVERYWHERE again.
• IamthisisI: More AI art! This is very much on the ‘horror’ end of the spectrum (insofar as it’s possible to make The Machine spit out anything truly upsetting – this guy’s using a variety of tools, including some custom-trained Stable Diffusion models, so he has a bit more ability to do blood and guts than the rest of us), and whilst it’s a *bit* schlocky there are some quite nice examples of style in here (and, again, the whole project is a good example of why you really need AI+Photoshop to make the really good stuff).
• MrDiv: Via my friend Tom comes this Insta feed, all weird clips from nonexistent liminal horror films. Whilst very much not like Scarfolk at all, there is a certain Scarfolk-y vibe to the whole thing imho.
• Little Bubby Child: An Instagram comic strip that mines the weird hinterland between King of the Hill and Deliverance, these small drawings (occasionally animations) and captions are all very much of the “Mye Paw done say I could shoot them ornery crows” variety, but, well, funnier than that, and the humour here seems to be kind rather than mean and, generally, it doesn’t *feel* like a horrible project so much as one done with a degree of familiarity and affection (obviously I reserve the right to change this opinion if it transpires that the person behind them is some sort of appalling class snob).
• The Ghostly Archive: Did you know that there’s a custom whereby people leave recipes on their gravestones? I, personally, did not, and as such was delighted to come across this Insta feed in which its owner finds recipes written on headstones and then makes them to see whether or not said recipe deserved immortalising on memorial marble. Can YOU think of any meal you’re so proud of creating that you’d want the recipe displayed alongside your mortal remains? WHAT WOULD IT BE?!?!? I am now slightly obsessed with the idea of demanding that my eventual resting place include some sort of permanent record of the recipe for ‘Matty’s Cheesy Chips’ or something similarly awful. Anyway, I think that this would make a genuinely half-decent travel/history/local interest show, should any TV producers be reading this and desperate for a poorly-conceived nubbin of a concept.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Heesoo Kim

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Do you feel UNDER THREAT? Do you feel like your sovereignty and security is being compromised by a bunch of poor fcuks so desperate to escape their current circumstances that they’re willing to risk life and limb to end up in THIS fcuking country? Do you believe that a certain BBC sports presenter shouldn’t have opinions about the rightness or wrongness of particular aspects of government policy?

If the answer to any of the above questions is ‘yes’, then please fcuk off and stop reading my newsletter (if the answer is instead ‘Matt, what the fcuk are you talking about, can you please stop with the increasingly-provincial UKcentric intro copy please?’ then you can stay, but I can’t promise it’ll get any less navelgazey). For the rest of you, though, WELCOME BACK! It’s so nice to see you! How’s it going?

Oh. Sorry to hear it. Still, maybe the links will help.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you a

By Jessica Brilli

WE BEGIN THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS EXCELLENT PLAYLIST OF REASONABLY-NEW UK RAP AND GRIME COMPILED BY JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STELLAR PIECE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS AND SHAKE THEM WARMLY AND FIRMLY BY THE HAND, PT.1:  

By Gordo Hart

NEXT, WHY NOT PRETEND TO BE COOLER THAN YOU IN FACT ARE WITH THIS PLAYLIST OF REASONABLY NEW MUSIC FROM THE NEW YORK UNDERGROUND! 

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STELLAR PIECE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS AND SHAKE THEM WARMLY AND FIRMLY BY THE HAND, PT.2:  

• Kaonavi Project Town: Another Japanese site, but this one is significantly less esoteric than the last – “Kaonavi envisions a future where everyone can play an active role in society , based on the purpose of implementing technology in “work” and changing the specifications of society from the power of individuals . So what does the future look like? How to work and live with individuality? The Kaonavi Town Project visualizes such questions and curiosity about the future as a town through an in-house workshop”. What this effectively means is the creation of a massive LEGO diorama (built by Japan’s very own accredited LEGO master, no less – I had no idea that such things existed, by the way, but apparently there are a small numbers of LEGO-certified professional builders who are recognised by the brand for their excellence in miniature construction, and I can’t tell you how much that pleases me) which kids can use as a way of exploring concepts around planning and society and social responsibility, and there’s even an associated OTHER website that lets you explore said diorama in more detail (but which is all in Japanese and thus is sadly utterly incomprehensible to me). I think this is such a smart didactic technique, and it feels like something from which inspiration could be drawn for lots of other forms of lightly-educational activity.
• Notes Art: A gallery of sketches drawn by one Chris Silverman on his iPhone, using the most basic of built-in drawing tools rather than anything more arty – it’s almost annoying how good these are, but I am choosing to feel admiration and awe at Mr Silverman’s skills rather than a burning sense of injustice that I was in a different building when the artistic talent was being handed out. This has been going for about 18 months, and, aside from the obvious skill and creativity on display here, I am very much a fan of that sort of dedication.
• Heatmap: A BRAND NEW news organisation, dedicated to covering issues pertaining to the climate crisis. Interesting both from the point of view of media – I wouldn’t, personally, have imagined that there was too much money in running a publishing venture focused exclusively on an issue that the past few decades have shown we are more than happy to pretend simply doesn’t exist – and content, this is worth adding to your media lists should you operate in this space (or worth bookmarking if you’re simply interested in charting the apocalypse).
• Rotating Sandwiches: This feels very much like a Matt Round project, but somehow doesn’t appear to be one – have you ever wanted a website which offers one thing and one thing only, to whit: a selection of high-res 3d scans of sandwiches, rotating on themselves? No, you probably haven’t, have you, but that’s probably only because you lacked the imagination to conceive of such a marvellous entity – I guarantee that once you click you will come to appreciate the majesty. These are really high-quality scans, so well done whoever it is who’s taken the time to get a really faithful 3d representation of a classic reuben and whatever the fcuk that…thing about halfway down the page is meant to be.
• North of the Border: Whether or not you’re someone who ‘gets’ ASMR, one of the nice things about the web has been learning that it’s a pretty universal human joy to watch someone performing a task with great concentration and skill. So it is with this YouTube channel, in which a very talented North American guy shows you how he makes some quite astonishingly detailed models of pop-culture figures – the stuff he makes is very much on the geeky end of the spectrum, but the quality of the work (and the intensely-soothing nature of watching anyone sculpt clay, frankly) means that these are a pleasure to watch whether or not you particularly care to see what a ‘realistic’ version of the alien from Lilo&Stitch would look like (‘grotesque’, should you be curious).
• Unclogging Drains: I recently had to get the drains unblocked (more fascinating dispatches from my personal life as and when!), and there was something weirdly-compelling about seeing this bloke wielding what was basically a nine-foot plunger with uncommon élan (less-compelling was the £50 bill for what was literally 17 seconds of (doubtless highly-skilled) wiggling) – after all, who doesn’t want to see persistent blockages being cleared? NO FCUKER, etc! This is the TikTok account of a guy whose job is literally clearing blockages in drains and gutters, and is basically a neverending feed of streaming water and decaying leaf mulch (there may well be slightly more faecal surprises lurking elsewhere in the feed, but I am yet to spot any) and the general sense of warm satisfaction of things being fixed. Low-stakes, and all the better for it.
• Href Place: YOU HAVE UNTIL 12th MARCH 2023 TO ENJOY THIS LINK! Or, more accurately, to engage with the project it’s promoting – the website will continue to exist, but you won’t be able to get involved. Vidya Giri writes: “as someone who is fond of making sketches of natural landscapes and sharing links, i thought it would be fun to illustrate digital landscapes (aka websites) and send them on to others as a way of sharing/showcasing various parts and lands of the internet! from this online space, i wanted to invite friends and internet strangers to sign up to receive an href postcard from me in the physical mail! based on your form submission, i will send you postcard that contains a recommended link along with an illustration of the website. in addition, you can recommend me a cool link and i will illustrate these into postcards too!” Links! On postcards! Sent to you in the mail! This sounds, frankly, perfect – there’s something so wonderfully silly about sending people handwritten urls that it almost becomes entirely sensible again, and I encourage all of you to click the link and sign up to the project because, honestly, who doesn’t like receiving postcards?
• The World Nature Photography Awards: MORE PHOTOS OF ANIMALS! Another week, another photo award – obviously the crocodile shot at the top of the page is the one that’s garnered all the attention, but my personal pick of the bunch is the incredibly dapper-looking Lesser Antillean Iguana (do you think it has an inferiority complex)?
• Dumb Password Rules: There are a few things that can be relied upon to shake one’s faith in humanity and one’s belief in the fundamental ability of our species to solve problems and strive towards the greater good – the replies to any of Elon Musk’s tweets (in fact, any trending topic on Twitter), the Daily Mail, string cheese, any pub on a Saturday or Sunday during the fcuking Six Nations – but few are so indicative of our propensity to make everything a bit sh1t as a bad website password system. Is there anything more annoying than being asked to create a password for something and then having to try nine separate ones because at each juncture the site you’re trying to use sees fit to add another condition that your password must meet before it can be considered valid (caps! Special characters! Numbers! Iambic fcuking pentameter!)? I put it to you that there is not – and you can prove it to yourself by perusing this excellent collection of websites whose password systems are so annoying, so bone-headed, that they act as cautionary notes to UX designers the world over. SO MANY IDIOTIC DESIGN CHOICES HERE – also, this is a convenient shortlist should any of you be hackers looking for easy sites to gain access to, so feel free to share your ill-gotten proceeds with me once you’re done.
• Clarity: There have been a variety of platforms over the past few years – particularly post-2016 – which have sought to create an analytical layer over media overage of the news to enable readers to get a sense of partisan bias and polarisation around particular stories; Clarity is yet another, and whilst it’s not perfect it’s an interesting attempt to contextualise how certain news stories are being treated and who’s driving coverage of them. The site picks the biggest news stories of the day and then analyses their coverage across a range of news websites, specifically analysing their prominence on-Page to determine the weight being given to each story from the left and right-wing press respectively. This only covers stuff of interest to the US, but I would be really interested to see what this showed us about news in the UK – if nothing else, it’s a useful way of seeing at a glance which stories are being pushed (or, depending on your perspective, suppressed) by which publishers.
• NDA Buzz: These are, I think, actually available for sale – NDAs in pill form! Obviously not ACTUALLY legally binding, I presume that this is a riff on the fact that NDAs really aren’t worth the paper they are written on – this is a project by interactive design studio Hoax, which features pills filled with powder made from powdered rice paper, on which had previously been printed a standard NDA contract, which pills are designed to be ingested by all parties involved in the contract. VERY silly, but, equally, I would very much enjoy buying a bunch of these and then forcing everyone I worked with to solemnly ingest one with me as part of some sort of stiltedly-ceremonial ritual (possibly involving a minor act of bloodletting, just to up the ante a bit).
• LGBTQ+ VR Museum: This looks great – it’s a piece of work that’s created to work as an installation, and so the only thing available at the URL is some details about the exhibit and some trailers, but it looks like a fascinating project and experience. The LGBTQ+ VR Museum is (as the name might suggest) a virtual reality museum of queer history, melding significant milestones such as the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic with personal anecdotes and recollections from the wider community, the trailers give the impression of an interactive exhibition that really understands the medium it’s built in. If you’re working on anything relating to queer history and have a space you’re looking to fill, this is very much worth a look and potentially a booking.
• Doorknobs: A 24 year old digital art project! This is a work from 1999, which is frankly mindboggling – never mind that it’s not exactly the most thrilling of webpages, FEEL THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY ON YOUR MOUSE FINGER! “I photographed every door or drawer knob, handle, or latch I touched from the time I awoke on Thursday, June 3rd, until I went to bed on Friday, June 4th, 1999.” See the doorknobs! Enjoy the doorknobs! Revel in the analysis of the doorknobs! Practically-perfect internet.
• The Phrontistery: I’m slightly astonished that this hasn’t wandered across my field of vision before now, but this is SUCH a great website for lovers of the English language: “Welcome to the Phrontistery! Since 1996, I have compiled word lists and language resources to spread the joy of the English language in all its variety through time and space. A phrontistery (from the Greek phrontistes ‘thinker’) is meant to be a thinking-place for reflection and intellectual stimulation. I invite you to explore the various site features relating to language and lexicography, find that half-remembered rare or obscure word you’ve been looking for, or to read and explore essays on language, linguistics, and culture. Have a look around, and enjoy!” There is so, so much to enjoy here, but if nothing else may I encourage you to have a spelunk around the obscure words list – I was just educated as to the existence of ‘gelicide’ (death by cold) as a term, which pleased me no end, and you will definitely find at least one new term with which to annoy the fcuk out of friends and colleagues.
• Free Vector Memes: All the memes! In vector form! For free! To do with what you will! “Introducing powerful Meme vectors! Remix, tweak and change colors to your heart’s content – all licensed under GNU General Public License with no copyright infringement intended. Unleash the creative beast within you!”  If nothing else you now have absolutely no excuse for putting a vectorised version of wojak on your company’s 404 page.
• Phylopic: Do you want a free repository of images of a frankly incredible variety of ‘animals, plants and other lifeforms’ in black and white silhouette? OF COURSE YOU DO! Honestly, you have no idea how amazingly comprehensive this is – you want a silhouette of a banded anteater (as opposed to a regular, non-banded one)? GREAT! How about a lesser flying phalanger? EVEN BETTER! Honestly, this has silhouettes of animals so obscure I am half-convinced the site owners have just made them up.
• Sumplete: This annoyed me this week – a bunch of people uncritically wrote this up as ‘GPT INVENTED AN ENTIRELY NEW GAME OMG!’, based on this blogpost by its co-creator where they explain that they asked ChatGPT to come up with an idea for a word game, and the code for it, and it magically WORKED! Which is impressive, until you bother to do a bit of supplementary research and discover that what The Machine has in fact done is dug up the code for an already-existing game that’s available on the Play Store. Which, obviously, is unsurprising, given that the software is merely drawing from things it’s seen before – it doesn’t ‘understand’! It can’t ‘think’! Any ‘originality’ it is capable of is accidental! Anyway, just putting this here because we are going to see a LOT of ‘AI invented XX!’ stuff in the coming months and it’s important to retain some healthy scepticism.
• Cinemashle: Can you guess the films that have been mashed together, based on the AI-generated images you’re presented with? 5 guesses each time, a different pair of films to identify each day – this is quite fun, and when you guess correctly you get a bonus AI-imagined script snippet for the nonexistent film as an additional treat.
• The Videogame Sound Effects Quiz: How many of these samples from videogames can you identity? Listen to the clip, guess the game it’s taken from, and know that if you can get more than about 5 of these you have made…questionable use of the mysterious gift of life granted you by an unknown force. This is SO HARD, and, honestly, I think anyone who manages to get above 40 on this (there are 60 in total) ought to have some sort of nerd shrine built to them (and anyone who gets 60 probably needs some sort of intervention to pry the controller from their hands and wash between the skin folds).
• Rogule: Another daily puzzle, this one letting you play through a small roguelike dungeon every 24h. Can you survive? Will the monsters defeat you? Erm, probably not to be honest – as pointed out by Rob at B3ta, from whence I have shamefully filched this link, this does seem to be rather easy to win. Still, consider it another distraction to add onto the pre-work routine stack.
• Big Sad Fall Assistants: This is FUN, but also requires a slightly greater degree of hand/eye coordination than I’m honestly comfortable with, meaning I am embarrassingly unskilled at it – still, it’s enjoyable to play even if I can’t get past the third level (so ashamed). The game’s simple – move your pair of robots left and right between the buildings to catch the office workers hurling themselves from the windows and bounce them right back to their desks again (there’s a light ‘oh the horrors of late-period capitalism!’ tone to the whole thing, should you care about the framing) – but rendered slightly more complex by the fact you need to move both robots at once, which lends it a slight ‘pat your head, rub your belly’ quality (or at least it does for me – perhaps you’re less of a malcoordinated mess than I am); this is fun, and could probably work as a keyboard-sharing two-player game if there’s anyone who you’d feel comfortable being that proximate with.
• Lander: This is very, very simple – land the lunar module! How hard can it be?! – but I guarantee that you will be cursing it, and yourself, when you’re 15 minutes late for dinner/bed/that person off Grindr who’s been cuffed to your bedpost for about an hour now (delete per your lifestyle choices) because you decided to have JUST ONE MORE GO. This is insanely moreish and very fun (and not a little infuriating too, like all the best games).
• Gourdlets: Finally this week, a genuinely soothing digital toy – Gourdlets is a playable demo for a forthcoming game which answers the question “what if SimCity but pixelart and with literally no challenge to it at all?” – your job is just to build whatever small village-type setup you choose, with no worries about budgets or disasters or making things work. Your creation will be populated by small, cute, bloblike creatures (called, one presumes, Gourdlets) who will arrive in your village by train at regular intervals, and who will proceed to wander around your town, enter your buildings, sit on your benches, barbecue on your fires…honestly, this is possibly the most soothing thing I have seen all year, and if you’re feeling in any way stressed or overwhelmed or, honestly, like you’d rather stick pins in your eyes and ears and genitals than spend another second thinking about customer journey profiles, or audience personas, or the importance of strategy in the modern agency landscape (lol!), then click this link and let the pain melt away. This is practically therapy, I tell you.

By Glen Baxter

THIS WEEK’S FINAL MUSICAL OFFERING IS COMPILED BY THE PHENOMENAL HANDCLAP BAND AND IS A WONDERFUL SELECTION OF WHAT I WOULD PROBABLY CALL ‘FUNKY 70sISH AND PSYCHEDELIA AND THE ODD BIT OF UNEXPECTED HOUSE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Gigtapes: Oddities from old VHS videotapes found at US thrift stores and boot sales – this tends towards the ‘odd, old-time curio’ rather than the ‘cursed’, but that’s no bad thing to my mind. If you want a great source of slightly-grainy clips of moderately-surreal local access cable programming from the 1980s and 90s then this will be PERFECT for you (and if you don’t, WHY NOT FFS?).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Maud Madsen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH THIS WEEK MAINLY COME FROM RENE WALTER’S EXCELLENT GOOD MUSIC NEWSLETTER!)!:

You know what the only thing worse than being governed by absolute cnuts? Being governed by stupid cnuts.

Why is it that every time a tranche of texts belonging to the powerful get released they only serve to demonstrate what total and utter fcuking intellectual pygmies said powerful are? It happened with the Musktexts last year, when we got to see exactly how craven and fellatory the world’s billionaire classes are capable of being with each other, and it’s happening again here in the UK with the release of the Hancock Whatsapps, which surely must mark the point at which Miss Coladangelo awakes from the deep hypnosis that can be the only explanation for her apparent infatuation with that chinless moron and runs for the fcuking hills.

BUT! You’re not here for this! In fact, depending on where you are reading this from there’s every chance that the preceding two paragraphs will have meant nothing to you whatsoever Which, frankly sets you up perfectly for the rest of the week’s newsletter, which as a result of minor sleep deprivation is possibly even lighter than usual on thematic consistency and internal coherence. Apologies in advance and all that.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if anyone wants to read 100,000 of my What

By Penny Slinger

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A TRIP BACK IN TIME, COURTESY OF LAURENT GARNIER AND HIS CLASSIC (IF YOU’RE OLD) X-MIX 2!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN TRAIN AN LLM ON THE HANCOCK TEXTS AND FINALLY BE DONE WITH THE REPELLENT LITTLE MEATSACK’S PHYSICAL EMBODIMENT, PT.1:  

By Jana Brike

OUR NEXT MIX IS A PLEASINGLY-SQUELCHY SELECTION OF ECLECTIC BEATS MIXED BY LEENA! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER WE CAN TRAIN AN LLM ON THE HANCOCK TEXTS AND FINALLY BE DONE WITH THE REPELLENT LITTLE MEATSACK’S PHYSICAL EMBODIMENT, PT.2:      

• The AI Chapbook Gallery: This is an interesting collection of AI projects created by students as part of their course on new media art: “The 18 chapbooks presented below were developed in Spring 2023 by first-year undergraduates from the CMU School of Art in an introductory new-media art studio course taught by Professor Golan Levin. One of the units in this course is concerned with the artistic use of “AI” tools for generating images and text. In order to prompt students to experiment with these tools and develop an understanding of the “grain” of this medium, students were asked to use tools including ChatGPT and Midjourney to generate illustrated chapbooks. These artist books were then physically produced through Lulu.com, an online print-on-demand service.” It’s really interesting to see the different directions the various students chose to go in with these projects, and the range of outputs, and, oddly, the weird similarities that begin to emerge when you look at selections of AI art like this for long enough. This won’t change your mind about how good or otherwise this stuff is, but it’s really interesting to see the ways it’s been manipulated – personally I very much enjoyed the Alien Playboy magazine, but there’s loads of interesting work in here.
• RadioGPT: After the Spotify AI DJ announcement last week, here comes another indication that perhaps Ken Bruce is getting out at the right time (I appreciate that for any of you reading this outside of the UK – or indeed any of you under the age of about 40 tbh – the name Ken Bruce will mean less than nothing but, well, as should have become self-evident by now, I don’t really write this for anyone other than myself anymore) – this is productised AI radio! “RadioGPTTM harnesses the power of GPT-3 — the technology that powers ChatGPT — as well as Futuri’s AI-driven story discovery and social content system, TopicPulse, to create content that’s tailored for local markets, 24/7. Then, that’s paired with the AI voice technology to bring that content to life!” So what this is offering is a full-service automated radio service, with the ability to pull in regionalised content from a variety of sources and use it to produce a ‘seamless’, 24/7 stream of programming…As with all this stuff, I can’t imagine for a second that this will sound anything other than a bit sh1t right now, but, equally, that in about a year this sort of thing will be getting used for the graveyard shift on radio stations worldwide and people will barely notice.
• The AIAAC Repository: Admittedly a less-than-catchy name, but a super-useful resource if you’re keeping an eye on the current AI explosion and whether or not it’s, broadly speaking, working out well for us all. “AIAAIC is an independent, non-partisan, public interest initiative founded on the belief that AI, algorithms, and automation, and the organisations and individuals involved in their design, development, and deployment, must be transparent and honest about their aims and how they go about pursuing them. AIAAIC believes that everyone should know when they are using or being assessed, nudged, instructed or coerced by an AI, algorithmic, or automation system, understand what the system is trying to achieve and how it works, appreciate its impact, and be able to make informed decisions based on clear, concise, accurate, accessible, and timely information. AIAAIC’s mission is to make AI, algorithms, and automation transparent and open.” The whole website’s interesting, but the link here takes you to the page from which you can access their rolling database of AI ‘incidents’ – or, less euphemistically, times when fcukups have occurred as a result of the use of AI systems. So, for example, you can learn about the massive transport chaos caused in China recently as a result of a GPT-penned news alert falsely claiming that traffic restrictions had been released, and a host of other things besides!
• MarioGPT: You may have seen (or you may not; I concede that it’s possible that you have better things to do than spend every single waking hour plugged into the web like some sort of latterday Alex DeLarge) the academic paper the other week which showed how researchers had managed to cobble together a system that generated playable Super Mario Bros. levels at the touch of a button – well now they’ve chucked the code up on HuggingFace, meaning you too can experience the joy of attempting to navigate a machine-generated hellscape of Koopas and blocks. This is interesting more in a ‘look what we will one day be able to do’ way rather than a ‘wow, this is incredible RIGHT NOW’ sense – the levels created (in my limited experience, at least) are only playable about half the time, and they’re not…fun, exactly, but it’s another window into a future in which the tedious business of level designedgets outsourced to The Machine.
• TalkToChatGPT: This is quite amazing, in a slightly-hacky sort of way – this is a Chrome extension which gives you a speech-based interface for GPT, so you can talk to it out loud as though it was some sort of AlexaPlus-style voice assistant. It can speak in multiple languages, meaning you can set it up to work in Italian or French or German should you wish to use it to practice your linguistic skills, and if you’re skilled (and, frankly, worryingly-obsessional enough) it would in theory be totally possible to plug this into a model and create some sort of rudimentary android-type thing…Oh God, this is totally being used in sexbots already, isn’t it? Oh.
• Alice: A website where Alice falls down the screen. Why is Alice falling? I haven’t got the faintest idea, but I very much like the design of this and the playful interactions the website sets up for you. A PLEA – can any of you reading this who make websites please make a concerted effort to include more weird and pointless and fun stuff in your work this year, please? We’ve got a limited amount of time before the vast majority of digital design work gets homogenised to paste by The Machines, so before that happens I’d like some more esotericism and whimsy. Please.
• Emulait: An early contender for my favourite product and product name of the year, this – Emulait is a BRILLIANT idea and one of the nicest bits of design I’ve seen in a long time. Starting from the central theory that it might make bottlefeeding babies a more pleasant and natural-seeming experience if the bottle were morelike a breast, Emulait (launching later this year) will offer a range of bottles for infant feeding which are designed in a range of shapes which mimic, well, breasts, in a variety of different sizes, with nipples which also match the design of their human equivalents. These look SO INCREDIBLY COOL – honestly, they are genuinely rather beautiful – and they are even planning to offer a service whereby you can scan your own breast and get a bottle crafted based on its shape. Obviously I don’t possess breasts and am unlikely to ever find myself in the market for baby weaning materials, and as such appreciate that my opinion on this as a product is probably worthless – but, for what it’s worth, I think this is super-cool and very fun, and whilst I might have one or two doubts about exactly how necessary any of it is I am very glad that it nonetheless exists.
• Mememorph: Can you think of anything more HILARIOUS than communicating with everyone you know via the medium of famous visual memes in which you’ve swapped out the face of, say, Scumbag Steve or Success Kid of Toasting Leonardo with your own? NO OF COURSE YOU CAN’T THAT WOULD BE HILARIOUS! Ahem. Let me be clear that I am not endorsing this in any way – they want to charge you $7 to get a bunch of poorly-AI-rendered ‘Your Face Here!’ pictures ffs! – but it’s worth clicking the link to see exactly how shonky the resulting images look. It’s interesting (or at least I found it interesting; you may, of course, choose to disagree) that there were lots of these memes which I simply didn’t recognise without the famous face attached to them, which is curious in terms of exactly what we are recognising when we see these things. Anyway, this is a terrible, grifty piece of sh1t which is definitely not worth any money at all; equally, though, I can’t help but think it would be quite funny to start communicating with friends and acquaintances using only me-centric memes.
• Playdough Surgery: Have you ever wanted to learn about exactly how surgery works, but have always been put off by all the blood and viscera and tendons and meat and gristle? Playdough Surgery is here to help! This is a YouTube channel which posts occasional videos showing specific surguicakl procedures being undertaken on plasticine (and occasionally felt) models so that you can see all the cuts and stitches and incisions and tweaks without any of the associated unpleasantness. These are both really, really impressive and significantly cuter than they really have any right to be – look at the little smiling hernia! Look at its little face! – and is the sort of thing which, who knows, might inspire your four year old to get into medical school and earn enough money to keep you in your dotage. Fingers crossed.
• The Maskverse: I would LOVE to know how many of these things they have sold – should anyone have any vague idea about this, or how I might go about finding out, please do let me know. The Maskverse is an EXCITING NEW CONTENT PLATFORM which accompanies The Masked Singer in the US, and which allows SUPERFANS of the show to…er…buy an NFT associated with it, in exchange for the ability to watch ‘exclusive content’, vote on who they think will be eliminated each week (votes which have no material affect on anything), and EARN POINTS (there is no detail as to exactly what one might do with points once earned, but, well, who cares?? POINTS!!!) – but WHY?! Honestly, I think this might be the sh1ttest and most pointless attempt yet to ‘make NFTs a thing’ – why in the name of shuddering fcuk your average TV watcher in bumfcuk Nevada is going to want to ‘connect their Web3 wallet’ to this website in exchange for the square root of fcuk all is beyond me. Still, once again I offer my sincerest congratulations to whoever it was who managed to sell this concept to the network at what I presume was the height of the mad frothiness of the NFT bubble – you absolutely SCAMMED these morons, congratulations!
• Feeeed: This looks like a smart and useful addition to your app roster (if you’re on iOS, at least – us poor Android users are once again an afterthought, chiz chiz). Feeeeeeeeeeed (sorry, but I can’t be bothered to pay attention to the exact number of vowels I’m meant to use here) is a smart product which basically acts as an RSS feeder on your phone, but which basically lets you pull in any website you like as a feed, including email newsletters and subReddits; think of it as Google Reader (sob!) but still alive and on your mobile.
• Texts: Still not live yet but accepting signups for beta testing, Texts is a service which promises to fix one of the greatest annoyances of the modern age – to whit, the fact that there are approximately 300 separate communications platforms which are in common usage and as a result we are now expected to maintain friendships and contacts across Whatsapp and Insta and Twitter and Discord and SMS and Snap and TikTok and Email (personal AND work) and Telegram and Signal and, don’t fcuking know, Ello and Peach and and and and oh god so tired. Text, when it launches, promises to consolidate all of these messages into one universal inbox, which, frankly, sounds heavenly.
• Books On Graphic Design: A selection of recommended books on the art and craft of design, selected and compiled by Theo Van Burden: “Books on graphic design (and typography) is an independent selection of books on graphic design and typography, curated by designer Theo van Beurden. Each book has been individually selected and manually added to the list, which is subject to change. Books are occasionally added or removed. Under the motto “don’t judge a book by its cover”, the format focuses on the title, author, publisher and volume of the books.” This is, to be clear, just a bunch of links to books about graphic design, but there’s something very pleasing about the, well, design and look and feel of the whole project.
• The Next Thing To Do: I love this – The Next Thing To Do is a…narrative? Story? Poem? Whatever, it’s a series of thoughts, statements, ideas, all structured around questions of capital and labour and property and self, and presented as a series of nested, drop-down declarations – honestly, there’s something about this bullet-style structure that I find rather beautiful when applied to prose writing, and this, I think, is a gorgeous example of this specific genre of writing. It reminds me a lot of RishI Dastidar’s super Saffron Jack, written with a not-dissimilar structural approach and another strong recommendation if you enjoyed this piece.
• Revolutionary Papers: “Revolutionary Papers is an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South. It includes over forty university-based researchers, as well as editors, archivists, and movement organizers from around the world. The initiative looks at the way that periodicals—including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, and newsletters—played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies and art practises. Operating as forums for critique and debate under conditions of intense repression, periodicals facilitated processes of decolonization during colonialism and after the formal end of empire, into the neo-colonial era. Revolutionary Papers traces the ways that periodicals supported social, political and cultural reconstruction amidst colonial destruction, building alternative networks that circulated new political ideas and dared to imagine worlds after empire.” This is a very academic collection, but for anyone interested in the history of leftist thought and ideas, and the way in which they were presented and articulated globally throughout the 20th Century, this is a potentially-invaluable resource.
• The Gagwriter: The link here takes you to a Reddit post, which at first glance might be a bit baffling. What IS that device? What is it for? How does it work? LET ME ENLIGHTEN YOU! The Gagwriter is a prototypical device which lets the user type using their mouth – the interface is basically a dildo which has been modified with buttons and levers and suchlike so as to enable anyone to place their mouth around it and, with a combination of tongue and lips and jaw, type as normal. Yes, I know what you’’re thinking – WHERE CAN I GET ONE? Sadly this is a one-person hobby project and as such doesn’t appear to be commercially available anywhere, but the creator of this frankly magnificent device has apparently made the blueprints and build instructions available for download on this site; sadly the site wants me to register, and, if I’m honest, I am not about to had over my email address to anyone who refers to me as “a naughty bunny” on their landing page, so I’ve not been able to check whether or not the instructions are legitimate or even workable. Still, I like to imagine that at least one of you will be fearless and curious enough to click through and embark upon a DIY project for the ages. Just IMAGINE turning up on your first day at a new job with one of these – ”But you said I could bring my own keyboard”. An astonishing example of human creative ingenuity, engineering chops and, frankly, deviance.
• Plagiarism for Profit: Found via last week’s B3ta, this is a great game which challenges you to replicate the slightly-crap MS Paint drawings it presents you with – the closer you manage to get to rendering the perfect poorly-drawn penguin, for example, the more points you get. Surprisingly fun, to the extent that I caught myself doing that weird ‘tip of the tongue sticking out of the corner of the mouth’ thing people sometimes do when they are REALLY concentrating on something.
• Super Star Trek 25th: This is cute – a VERY OLD Star Trek game from the late-80s, reskinned with the graphics from a later Star Trek game from the mid-90s, playable in your browser. It’s more a pleasant relic than something you’re likely to spend hours playing, but it amused me for 10 minutes or so and I’ll take what I can get these days tbh.
• Doom3 In Your Browser: It can only be a matter of weeks before someone’s got Doom Eternal running on an Apple Watch, surely? Doom3 – the one that noone really liked because of the fact that it had a really annoying mechanic whereby you couldn’t hold a torch AND shoot at the same time,making the whole game an exercise in frustrating, dark death – was at the time of its release a PC-meltingly high-spec title, which makes it all the more remarkable to see it running in your browser at a reasonable clip. Partly just a really impressive bit of coding, partly a fun way to kill an hour while you wait for the weekend to start, and partly a reminder of that weird period in game design where everything looked like it had been put through a filter the colour of slightly-stewed tea and everything was VERY SERIOUS.
• WebGamer: If Doom3 isn’t enough for you – YOU INGRATES FFS! – then try this site, which offers you a portal to a bunch of reasonably-fancy browsergames; a few of them you will have seen in here before (the Slow Roads driving experience, for example) but others are ALL NEW and, frankly, if you can’t find something to distract you in this collection then you should probably just accept the fact that you’re terminally bored and just do some fcuking work for a change.

By Michael Dumontier

IN THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK, DRIFT OFF WITH THIS PERFECTLY-SELECTED PICK OF VAGUELY-SPACEY PSYCHEDELIC-ISH FUNK COMPILED BY KIM & BURAN! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Farine Furniture: I don’t *quite* understand what is going on here, or what the criteria for inclusion on this feed are – as far as I can tell, it’s dedicated to bread (and occasionally butter sculptures, and occasionally cake) that looks a bit like furniture, or other stuff? Look, I appreciate that this is a frankly pitiful description, but you click the link and then come back here and tell me how the fcuk YOU would communicate its contents.
• Many Worlds Vision: This was sent to me by its creator, Claudia – the feed depicts dreams she has had, as visualised by AI, along with some words about said nocturnal hallucination…ordinarily, let’s be honest, listening to other people talk about their dreams is approximately as fun as a bit of light trepanning, but this is actually rather nice; I think it’s the genuinely surreal air that the juxtaposition of words and images create which makes the feed work, but this is pleasingly curious in a way that I wasn’t expecting it to be. Claudia is also involved in the very good Dense Discovery newsletter, which has nothing to do with dreams but which is a good weekly roundup of words and links about design and semi-related matters and which you could do worse than checking out.
• Avery Portraits: I’m including this not because I think the work here featured is particularly special – it’s not, to my mind – but more because of the fact that person behind it recently had to fess up to the images not in fact being photos at all – they are (of COURSE) AI-generated. There’s no suggestion that the artist was attempting to hide this, more that they hadn’t made it explicitly clear – but, to go back to the deepfakes point way back up top, this is another example of quite how easy it’s increasingly going to be to pull the wool over people’s eyes.
• My Girl With A Pearl: This is SUCH a good piece of museum/gallery comms – the museum which usually houses Vermeer’s ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ has loaned it to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for their big Vermeer show; while the painting’s elsewhere, the gallery is showcasing a variety of ‘interpretations’ of the original on this Insta feed, with submissions collected from creatives and artists all around the world. Playful and fun and a brilliant way of drawing attention to the museum even when the most famous piece from its collection is elsewhere.
• Life Imitates AI Art: Images of things that look like AI fcukups but which are in fact real. You know how a couple of years ago there was a real glut of stuff being described as ‘cursed’? Like that basically. These will make you feel *funny*.
• Regret Counter: An Insta feed sharing people’s phone notes about the deviant stuff they got up to on a night out. Skews VERY NYC/Brooklyn, to my mind, and there’s a very strong whiff of “I’m MAD, me!” about many of these lists of substances ingested and CRAZY things done, and, look, there is literally NOTHING less cool in the world than taking an obsessive list of every drink you drink and drug you take – but, er, that said, I am now an OLD MAN and as such there was something quite pleasing about living vicariously through lists like “1 Dexie, Two pizzas, 1xbottle Moet, 2 beers, 2gs Ket, 400ml codeine” and knowing that the hangover is someone else’s.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Rose Barberat

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

below because it slaps so hard) it is pleasingly sleazy and odd and the video’s weird and a bit unsettling and features Amanda Lepore which is recommendation enough of itself. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT I LOVE YOU BYE!

TURNIPS! TURNIPS FOR ALL!

It would be funny were it not so spleen-fcukingly enraging, wouldn’t it? Still, it meant the Star could do a funny frontpage again so that’s ok.

Aside from anything else, Therese, when was the last time you ate a turnip? They are FCUKING DISGUSTING. Has anyone done that hilarious thing where they share an image and the pricelist for the Portcullis House canteen as a WITTY JUXTAPOSITION of the reality for these awful cnuts and that which maintains for the rest of us?

Anyway, enough of the root vegetable chat! There are links to click, words to read (or, more likely, skim over with gritted teeth while you’re trying to work out whether to click or not), music to listen to and pictures to look at – WHO NEEDS FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES WHEN WE HAVE THE WEB?!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I didn’t have ‘the return of scurvy as a medical concern’ on my “UK 2023” bingo card and yet, well, here we are!

By Mark Gleason

THIS WEEK’S AUDIO ACCOMPANIMENTS BEGIN WITH A GENUINELY SUPERB MIX OF BRAZILIAN POST-PUNK AND NEW WAVE BY ANDY CUMMINGS! 

THE SECTION WHICH, A YEAR ON FROM THE START OF THE UKRAINE WAR, THINKS IT’S WORTH DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION TO THE AP WAR CRIMES TRACKER FOR THE CONFLICT , PT.1:

By Cecilia Bonilla

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE NEXT SECTION WITH THIS HOUSE MIX BY TIM ANDRESEN? THERE IS NO GOOD REASON! 

THE SECTION WHICH, A YEAR ON FROM THE START OF THE UKRAINE WAR, THINKS IT’S WORTH DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION TO THE AP WAR CRIMES TRACKER FOR THE CONFLICT , PT.2:    

• Towns: Go on, admit it, you’d forgotten about Web3, hadn’t you? WELL IT HASN’T FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOU! The latest evolution in ‘The future of the web is transactional an on-chain’ appears to be this – Towns, a new platform which has been set up by people previously involved in Clubhouse (so you know it’s good!) and which is seeking (I presume) to capitalise on the general feeling that social media is in something of a flux and there is a bit of a platform reconfiguration going on, and that people might be in the market for somewhere new to congregate. Which, I get it, makes sense and is in general all well and good. The bit where I quite quickly start to lose interest and, frankly, the will to live, though, is when it gets into the practical details of how it’s all meant to work and the idea of being able to buy and sell communities on the chain and…no, sorry, NOONE NEEDS OR WANTS THIS. Aside from anything else, the idea of communities as tradeable commodities does to my mind rather miss the point of what a ‘community’ is meant to be (on or offline) besides just sounding like an invitation for miscreants to build up, I don’t know, an engaged community of well-off middle-class stereo enthusiasts and then sell it to one of their crypto grifter mates so that said community can be grifted into penury. I do not like this at all, basically, but am comforted by the fact that this strikes me as having approximately the same chance of any other Web3cryptoproject of MAKING IT in 2023 (to whit, approximately nil).
• Smithsonian Roulette: Are YOU on Mastodon these days? Would you like an account to follow over there which posts random curiosities from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum? MAYBE YOU WOULD. Thankyou to John Horner for sending me the first on-Mastodon Curio in the 11 years I’ve been writing this thing; consider this your Blue Plaque.
• Dimensions: Another ‘Jesus, have I really not featured this on here before? FFS Matt!’ link – but a wonderful one. Have you ever wanted an objective resource to determine how big everything is? YES YOU HAVE AND HERE IT IS! “Dimensions.com is an ongoing reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.com is a global platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.” This is simultaneously sort-of insane and equally, I presume, very useful – if you’re a designer who deals in real-world measurements then you’re probably familiar with this resource already, but, for the rest of you, welcome to the rest of your life, in which you will never again have to take ill-informed guesses as to the standard size of an army cot mattress, or the exact measurements of Blofeld from James Bond.
• SwissGL Demos: A collection of small, hypnotic and very pretty coding demos which I don’t really understand the purpose of but whose existence I am gladdened by. The Spectrogram one in particular is rather fun.
• Contact Sheets: A very rare link to Pinterest here, courtesy of Daniel Benneworth-Gray who over the years has spent time compiling this board of old contact sheets from photoshoots of the past. There are some great images here – classics you’ll have seen before, including iconic (sorry) shots of Ali and others, but also images of people you might be less familiar with, such as painter Chuck Close. It’s fascinating to see the different ways in which people approach the camera, and as a resource for learning about what makes a ‘good’ shot (and, interestingly, the difference between a photo that is merely ‘good’ and one that is ‘great’).
• The World Dataviz Prize 2023: How long has David McCandless been doing Information Is Beautiful? However long it is, it’s fair to say that McCandless has single-handedly been responsible for the elevation of datavisualisation to a near-fetish over the course of the past ten years or so, and that the increased interest in the skill (and its evolution thanks to evolutions in digital design and interactivity) has seen the quality of work in the field improve significantly. This link takes you to this year’s crop of nominees for the annual BEST DATAVIZ IN THE WORLD prize, and as you’d expect there are some wonderful and very smart examples. Personally speaking I find the almost-calligraphic design of this example particularly pleasing, but you will doubtless find your own favourites.
• Spy Balloon Simulator: Were you disappointed that it wasn’t space aliens? I confess to being a little let down by the fact that we weren’t being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences (although maybe, just maybe…), but found some solace in this website which lets anyone who might want to simulate the flight of a massive spy balloon do exactly that. Turns out that getting a balloon to end up where you want it to is…hard, frankly – but if you’d like to track some actual, real-life amateur high-altitude balloon launches (and, frankly, who doesn’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then you can also do so here. Web Curios – topical, thrilling, balloon-related content, right in your inbox. Do you get this from those cnuts on Substack? Do you fcuk.
• Verdant Futures: This made me very happy – I don’t quite know what to do with it, but I am glad that this exists and wanted to share it with you. As far as I can tell, Verdant Futures is a small collective of people based in the South West who are running a bunch of interconnected businesses and community initiatives centred around books and literature. “Verdant Futures is a Social Enterprise – an organisation that applies commercial strategies to improve peoples’ financial, social and environmental well-being. It is also a hybrid digital and physical business – a must have in today’s connected world. We sell our goods online around the world, using re-commerce strategies, while also giving our customers a high-quality retail experience through our shops and services.” So they fund their projects to rescue books through the British Book Rescue Scheme through other initiatives like selling books by the yard, they run charitable projects…this seems like an incontrovertibly Good Thing, frankly, and should any of you be based in the South West (Bath, specifically), perhaps it’s something you might be interested in getting involved in?
• Formula Generator: You may not think that all this newfangled AI stuff is for you; you may have no truck with the idea of making machines imagine Boschean horrors, or making them compose villanelles about honey-roast ham. This, though, this is PRACTICAL, it is USEFUL and if you’re still struggling to think of ways in which all this natural language AI stuff is going to change the world then maybe it will help you understand in some small way. This is a plugin for Google Sheets which lets you ask it, in normal people words, to create formulas for anything you like – AND THEN IT DOES IT! “I want to multiply all those things in that column (but not the ones that are Prime Numbers) by all the things in that row over there” – stuff like that. I am sure that for those of you who are less cack-handed with the spreadsheets than I am this won’t be quite as magical, but it’s less about that and more about what this shows in terms of use-cases. MAGIC, I TELL YOU.
• AIBert: This is an interesting idea, though I am unsure as to whether anyone will want or like it enough to shell out for a monthly fee. AIBert is basically ‘all the AI gubbins, in WhatsApp’ – you add it as a contact and you can use it either as ChatGPT or as Midjourney, sending it prompts and getting results in return. Which, fine, is literally just a bundling exercise and you could do exactly the same without paying by just using two separate services rather than one, but where’s the fun in that? I wonder how long this will keep working before its API access gets throttled or all the bits of string holding it together start to erode, but I am impressed with the entrepreneurial chutzpah involved in cobbling it together. Lol at the idea that someone would pay $27 a month, though.
• Memo: I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but when I went to international school at 15 I was suddenly surrounded by wealthy people who had largely been the product of an international education, meaning that they all spoke that very specific and peculiar brand of teenage English that you can only learn by spending your entire childhood speaking the language with non-native speakers whilst at the same time being taught almost exclusively by North Americans and consuming North American, and which basically means that everyone sounds like a super-successful Swedish music producer but with the vocabulary of a wannabe valleygirl (it was 1995, after all). Anyway, that’s by way of not-particularly-illuminating intro to Memo, a language learning app which promises to teach you the tongue of your choice via the medium of memes and YouTube videos – you listen and are asked to repeat phrases from pop culture, TV, films, sports, memetic hits of yesteryear…I am not 100% certain exactly how useful it will be to you to be able to say “Damn Daniel, back again with the X” in French, but, well, maybe it will be the breakthrough you need. Also from what I can tell there’s no suggestion that this app features an appallingly-horny cartoon owl as its mascot, so perhaps that detail will swing it for you.
• Eel Rents: So it turns out that between the 10th and 17th Centuries in the UK, property owners would on occasion charge rent in eels. As in, you (the tenant) would be required to pay a fixed sum of serpentine sea creatures to your landlord in exchange for continued use of the property. I have MANY QUESTIONS – did the eels need to be delivered alive? Were they all delivered on one day – EEL DAY! – or were they handed over as and when they showed up? Was there some sort of minimum quality or size threshold that needed to be reached for the eels to be considered viable? Sadly this website doesn’t tell you any of that, but it does confirm that Geoffrey de Mandeville of Chippenham received 1500 of the things in 1086 and for that we can ALL be grateful. Via the wonderful Blort, this one.
• Lucy Ives: Absolutely one of the best-designed personal portfolio homepages I have seen in ages, Lucy Ives is a writer of novels and short stories and essays, and this site collects various writings and information on her books and, honestly, I fcuking LOVE the way this looks and is laid out; like a series of oldschool Macintosh dialogue boxes (but, er, loads better than that, honest).
• Experiments in AI Video: A short Twitter thread showing off some of the work people have been doing using Runway ML, the AI-powered video editing tool I featured in here…last week? Christ, I have no concept of time anymore. Anyway, these are quite amazing – shonky, fine, but also astonishing when you take a moment to think of how good this is going to get in 12 months. The bits where the software takes an assembly of cardboard boxes and turns it into a cityscape with various building styles applied is…honestly, just astonishing.
• Soft White Underbelly: Soft White Underbelly is a YouTube channel featuring “interviews and portraits of the human condition by photographer Mark Laita”, and whilst you might not be interested in every single subject on display here there is a staggering breadth and range of people who Laita has spoken with and whose stories he shares here. From bounty hunters to former drug addicts, a trans child and their father to people who spend their lives hopping freight trains across the US, these are beautifully shot and generally (from the handful I’ve seen at least) sensitively handled and pleasingly-unsensationalist. If nothing else it’s an interesting look at how to apply a very specific style and tone to a video series (but, also, there are some FASCINATING people on here).
• Togetherdraw: Collaborative drawing on an infinite scrolling canvas – every simultaneous visitor to this URL gets the opportunity to scrawl and draw to their heart’s content, with the caveat that the canvas on which you draw is slowly and inexorably vanishing at the top of the screen. Pleasingly ephemeral, and there’s something particularly nice about the ‘feel’ of the brushes here (try it, I promise you’ll see what I mean). Also, on the couple of occasions I’ve tried this when someone else has been online, all the strangers have been pleasant and I haven’t seen anyone write anything horrible. Which, I appreciate, shouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy, but we are where we are.
• Date Your Cat: This is too soon for me (RIP Bowsks), but if you’ve ever wanted to go on a slightly-surreal and conversationally-unsatisfying ‘date’ with a CG animated cat, whose ‘personality’ is powered by some sort of rudimentary text AI then HERE YOU GO! This is funny, in a slightly-shonky way, but I also worry that we’re about to enter an era in which every single brand with a ‘personality’ feels the need to create a similar interactive avatar as the natural language guide to their website, like a sort of Clippy on neuroenhancing drugs, and it will be horrid. Or brilliant, it’s very hard to tell anymore.
• WTTR: I don’t know why I find this super-minimalist weather website thing so appealing, but I do. Add the name of anywhere you like after the slash to receive ASCII-ish weather predictions for the coming week; not only is this really nicely done (lightweight code, clear graphics, etc) but it is also 100% faster and more user friendly than any of the useless fcuking weather services that my sh1tty phone insists on defaulting to, so MANY THUMBS UP to this, it is great.
• Wood Wide Web: I LOVE THIS. “As part of the Poetry Games  exhibition at the National Poetry Library, Playing Poetry and Phoenix Cinema & Art Centre launched a commission to invite two artists to explore the intersection of poetic writing and game-making. Artists Mariana Marangoni and Rianna Suen collaborated over the course of two months, developing a joint practice looking at digital literacy, online communities and ecopoetics…Out of the commission, Marangoni and Suen, along with sound designer Mikey Parsons, developed a new game affectionally called Wood Wide Web. Part idyllic walking sim, part cottage-commodore-core pixel art generator, Wood Wide Web invites the player to tend to a digital world, planting seeds by writing poetic texts, which grow into trees and in turn spread to become entire forests.” Honestly, this is so beautiful and pure – just wander round and play with it, type away and see what your words become, enjoy the clues and the mystery.
• Mr Global 2023: You may have enjoyed the BAFTAs (also, if you’ve not read it, this is a superb bit of writing by Stuart Heritage on That Moment); you may be waiting for the Oscars. Know, however, that thebiggest day of awards season has already been and gone, with the annual Mr Global male beauty pageant – BUT FEAR NOT BECAUSE HERE ARE THE PHOTOS! As per every year, My Global requires participants to wear ‘typical national dress’ of their nation as one part of the pageantry, and once again the costumes do not disappoint. Come for the deep-as-the-Marianas-Trench eyes and the smouldering gazes; stay for the frankly insane spectacle of genuinely beautiful men wearing genuinely appalling outfits. WHY IS BELGIUM A GIMPWOLF? WHY IS CHILE COSPLAYING AS ELSA FROM FROZEN? WHY ARE THE COMPETITION ORGANISERS INCAPABLE OF SPELLING ‘THE NETHERLANDS’ CORRECTLY? So many questions, none of which will likely be answered by this link – still, these are VERY BEAUTIFUL BOYS, so enjoy their cheekbones (and, honestly, pity the poor guy from the Philippines who you feel must have been mercilessly ribbed by everyone else because…oh God, seriously, just click the link and GAWP). Also, hang on, WHY IS THERE NO MR UK? OR MR ITALY? Should anyone from Mr Global chance upon this, know that I am available next year and can probably fill both roles for the price of one. A
• AI Taboo: A fun little game – can you force the AI into saying specific words based on the questions you ask it? Very easy at the lowest difficulty, but troublingly-impossible (for me at least) when you whack it up to ‘hard’ (YOU try getting GPT to say ‘paucity’, go on).
• Clickwords: Finally this week, I know that you all probably have your morning word game routines worked out by now, but let me present this new variant for your consideration – I promise it has fcuk all to do with Wordle (other than the fact that you get a new puzzle each day). Instead, the setup is a bit like Scrabble; you’re given a board with a selection of letters already placed on it, and over the course of the game you’re given 60 tiles, three at a time, with which to form words on the small board and score as many points as possible. Simple but surprisingly deep when you get into it, this is annoyingly addictive and has added an additional 10 minutes to my daily ‘time it takes Matt to stop fcuking around on the web and do some actual, paid work’ (currently standing at 130 minutes, fact fans).

By Sukhy Hullait

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS CRACKING SELECTION OF AMBIENT AND DISCO AND FUNK AND ALL-ROUND ECLECTICISM BY STELLA Z! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• CreepMart: Another ‘we’ve found an interesting vector in latent space, now let’s mine the fcuk out of it!’ AI art account, this time exploring the interesting world of imaginary kids toys from a sinister, machine-imagined past. Again, these appeal to me less because of the details on the individual images (although some of them are very good) and more because of the aesthetic space they all inhabit.
• All Things Fungi: Because who doesn’t love a little bit of mycology? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Lil Hugy: Sent to me by my friend Gill, with the line ‘This person should be Adidas’ creative director’ and, well, she’s right. I don’t know who Hugy is, or why they are, or what the significance of a person in a vinyl bear’s head wearing streetwear might be, but this ‘goes hard’ as I believe the kids say (don’t worry, I am cringing even more than you are at that last line; I am going to leave it intact, though, because otherwise I will never learn).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Jesse Homer French

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I can’t help but feel a slight sense of disappointment at the fact that we haven’t, it turns out, been visited by extraterrestrial forces beyond our ken (or, if we have, we’re as ignorant of it as ever) – mainly because I was quite looking forward to the inevitable pitched battles between the inevitable Cult of the UFO and the growing Cult of the AI to determine which was the TRUE SAVIOUR and which the FALSE GOD.

Anyway, as you all doubtless know, that is a false dichotomy – there is only one true saviour, and it is Web Curios, delivered via your weekly linky sacrament.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably confess.

By Geoff McFetridge

WE SOUNDTRACK THE INITIAL SECTIONS OF THIS WEEK’S WEB CURIOS WITH THIS WONDERFUL TWO-HOUR SELECTION OF BEATS BY J-DILLA!

THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.1:  

By Alex Prager

YOUR SECOND MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY TOM SPOONER AND IT COVERS FUNK, PUNK, JAZZ AND DISCO AND IT IS EXCELLENT WEEKEND FODDER!

THE SECTION WHICH MADE THE MISTAKE OF WATCHING QUESTION TIME LAST NIGHT AND IS STILL GENTLY VIBRATING WITH FURY, PT.2:  

• Bondee: Another appwebsitegamething which will not be the metaverse but which offers some sort of vague directional nod about what that nebulous idea might one day coalesce into! Bondee is described by users as “Habbo meets MSN”, which if you’re about 5 years younger than me will probably scratch all sorts of Proustian itches – the idea is that the platform enables users to socialise in virtual space, with its (mostly young) users congregating there to socialise. “Bondee combines a nostalgic, early-2000s format with social-networking elements. Users’ digital avatars can socialize with each other on the home page — lounging in a chair, petting a cat, standing around — or leave their friends notes if they’re offline. Hop over to a friend’s virtual room, and the same can be done there. Beyond that, a player can engage in activities —  from sailing the virtual ocean and collecting limited edition items to entering a private chat with a friend’s avatar and going “party mode” together.”  – there’s nothing about this that is unique per se, but it’s an interesting alternative to the Roblox hegemony when it comes to young people and virtual worlds. This probably isn’t for you – although, you know, I’m not judging, much, probably – but it might be worth being aware of if you’ve either got kids, or if you’re just generally interested in how ‘digital third spaces’ (if you’ll allow me) are evolving.
• Lighthouse: So obviously The Metaverse is going SWIMMINGLY – even the FT saw fit to give the concept a kicking yesterday, which honestly felt a bit like smacking a sad-eyed puppy at this point – and noone really believes that we’re all going to be hanging out in immersive digital environments together anytime soon, but, nonetheless, people are continuing to build stuff and play around with what the broad idea of ‘metaversality’ (this isn’t a word, I know, but allow me this brief moment of linguistic creativity) might mean, and now there is a way to explore some of those spaces yourself. Lighthouse is effectively trying to build a ‘search’ layer for whatever the metaverse currently is – as far as I can tell, this currently means that it acts as a sort of central directory / portal to a bunch of 3d experiences that various people have made and which you can access via the website, with the added ability to search for specific themes and features you might be particularly into and find ‘metaverses’ (honestly, even writing that word feels…wrong in 2023) that fit your needs. I have had a bit of a play around with this and it’s an interesting attempt to try and bring some order to an incredibly-fragmented ‘scene’ – you can get links to various different environments on various different platforms (Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, etc), and whilst they’re all…largely underwhelming tbh, or at least they are when accessed via my increasingly-emphysemic laptop, there are also far, far more of these things than I honestly expected and they do appear to be getting some use. Admittedly by a maximum of approximately three people at a time, but still. Basically this is a decent jumping off point if you’re after a vague ‘state of all this stuff’ overview, but it’s unlikely to convince you that you REALLY need to open an office in Decentraland anytime soon.
• Monocle: Is AR ever really going to become a thing? Are we ever going to finally arrive at the weird and glorious future promised by videogames in which we have an always-on-heads-up-display which tells us everything we could possibly need to know about the world around us and even more besides? Fcuk knows, is the short answer, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone’s clamouring to have MORE information density applied to their field of vision at present, so maybe not anytime soon, Anyway, ignore my doomsaying – Monocle is a fun little piece of kit which combines a tiny, lightweight camera, an equally tiny,OLED display that lets you basically hack together any sort of simple Google Glass-type kit you can imagine, from the simple ‘show me my emails on a screen in my eyeline’ to more complex and weighty stuff like moving images and more complex data overlays and, ok, fine, this is HUGELY geeky and not a little techy, and frankly my ability to do anything with stuff like this begins and ends with this writeup, but if you’re a shed-tinkering inventor or the sort of person who just happens to own a soldering iron then you might find this an interesting and fun project to play around with.
• Better On Paper: A simultaneously lovely and generous project, this – Better On Paper is a project which presents a bunch of digitised photographs, shot on film and made available for free printing should you like any of them. That’s literally it – here are some gorgeous photos taken in the now-antique analogue style, and if you like them and want to print them on high-quality paper then you can and they will be yours to keep forever. Not only is this just A Nice Thing To Do – thankyou, Korean photographer and artist and designer Seungmee Lee! – but it’s also something that feels very much like it could be appropriated for a campaign or just a bit of fan service for the right brand or organisation.
• Underwater Photographer of the Year 2023: Fish! And crustacea, and single-cell aquatic organisms, and all sorts of other amazing and terrifying and frankly deeply sinister denizens of the wet, all captured here for your delectation. These will either make you sign up for diving lessons immediately, or alternatively you’ll never want to dip your head below the waterline ever again – although, honestly, how could you possibly be scared of the seas when they contain these adorable little guys? Just, er, ignore all the sharks.
• The Revenant: It seems that over the past couple of decades we’ve switched from a situation where the concept of ‘running a marathon’ was something that most right-thinking people wouldn’t even countenance to one whereby literally every fcuker over the age of 30 seems to blitheley decide to ‘get into running’ and start collecting marathon medals as though they were parking tickets. As a result, ‘just’ doing marathons isn’t really that impressive anymore, and people are exploring increasingly extreme variations on the theme (I once worked with someone, briefly, whose ‘thing’ was doing the Marathon des Sables ‘for fun’, which is just fcuking insane)  – if you’ve done the marathon, the ultramarathon, the hypermarathon, the back-to-back-hypermarathon, the insane US ‘backyard ultra’ and you’re still hungry for more, then maybe, just maybe, you’re ready for The Revenant. Taking place in New Zealand in January 2024, the Revenant is “around 200km & 16,000m-ish of vertical ascent. Unsupported individual or two person team Ultra Adventure Run. Map and compass only. No watches allowed. You have 60 hours to complete the challenge if you can tell the time.” So, to be clear, you’re running…what, 6 marathons, plus a 16k ascent, in 2.5 days? Yeah, sounds reasonable. I am…reasonably certain that the total number of people likely to read Web Curios AND be of suitable physical and psychological stock to complete a challenge like this is literally zero, but I would love one of you to prove me wrong.
• Melodice: This is a lovely idea – Melodice is a website which provides music to soundtrack your boardgaming. Select your game of choice from the (incredibly comprehensive) dropdown list and get playlist of musical accompaniments designed to heighten your experience and add ATMOSPHERE and TENSION. I have no idea whatsoever why their selected choice of music to accompany a game of Monopoly would be the music to SimCity3000, but, weirdly, I think it sort of fits.
• Better Search: Seeing as Google and Bing seem hell-bent on ‘improving’ their products with the introduction of unasked for AI gubbins, you might want to find alternative portals to use. This is a very simple search tool which lets you run searches against 4 websites and 4 websites only – Reddit, Twitter, Stack Overflow and Github – and which allows you to specify the content type you want to source (pdf, ppt. Zip. docx) as well as a date range for the search; obviously you can do all this with Google, but it requires you to remember the search string commands and this is basically just easy and quick and if nothing else it’s worth bookmarking this as your go-to Reddit search engine because, honestly, everyone needs one of those.
• Mathijs Hanenkamp: This is the portfolio site of Dutch photographer Mathijs Hanenkamp – his photography is excellent, but I’m featuring this because I genuinely adore the way his site is designed and the UI and UX and the general look and feel of the whole thing is, to my mind, just about perfect and such a wonderful way of displaying his work.
• Welcome To My Home: Not *my* home, you understand, but the digital, online ‘home’ of Phoemela Ballaran, which is a small digital space featuring some poems, some music, a collection of images of stones Phoemela has collected and some stories associated with them, and a link to her ‘garden’ where anyone can leave her a message…this is lovely, a gorgeous, homespun corner of personal web, carved out of the ether, and the older I get the more I think everyone should have something like this somewhere that just…exists in digital space as a refuge or home for its maker. Which, I appreciate, is possibly a BIT w4nky, but, well, it’s my blognewslettertypething and I’ll be w4nky if I want to.
• McCheapest: This is interesting. As you will all doubtless know, the Economist has for years been using the McDonald’s Big Mac as a global price tracker, with the relative price of the uniform product in various countries worldwide being used as a proxy measure of economic performance and relative wealth; I didn’t, however, realise that the price of the sandwich varies wildly within the US, until I found this website which tracks the price across North America and records the differentiation. I was slightly surprised to see that the most expensive Big Mac (a whopping $8.09) was in Massachusetts rather than New York or LA, whereas the cheapskates among you should get to Oklahoma where you can ‘enjoy’ your meal for a mere $3.49.
• The Owl Job: This is really interesting – The Owl Job is a set of instructions and directions on how to set up your own sightless escape room (that is, an escape room suitable to be played by the visually impaired), which I appreciate isn’t something I imagine that many of you are going to be minded to get involved with but which are a surprisingly interesting series of ways of thinking about design and interactivity for a wide and diverse audience which may be of use even if you’re not planning on turning your living room into a playcentre for the RNIB.
• All The Excel Formulas: Look, I appreciate that this is very much on the ‘;boring and functional’ end of the link spectrum, but while we wait for AI to automate the tedious (and, frankly, borderline-incomprehensible) stuff like pivot tables and the like it might be useful to have this master list of Excel formulas to hand. Maybe.
• Special Flushing Waterfront: Take a lightly-interactive tour along Flushing Creek, a waterway that flows northward through the borough of Queens in New York City. This is “an interactive virtual walking tour and public archive project where participants are able to co-create documentation of this body of water and its surrounding area in Queens, NY” – local residents were invited to submit memories, photographs, notes, thoughts, poetry and whatever else they felt like contributing to the project, which contributions were then integrated into the digital experience. There’s something surprisingly pleasant and even meditative about taking a virtual stroll along a NYC canal and browsing notes on what it means to local residents, and I would absolutely love to see something similar about some of the UK’s waterways (it feels like this ought to exist in some form already tbh – anyone?).
• MacOS9: Another one of those old ‘emulate an old Mac OS in your browser and pretend it’s 1994 and Apple’s still horribly uncool!’ web experiences – except this one has the BRILLIANT added benefit of the machine’s virtual hard drive containing a bunch of actual, playable games from the mid-90s, including the all-time-classic LucasArts point-and-click Indiana Jones game – honestly, this is BRILLIANT and frankly there’s enough in here to keep you occupied til the clocks change again.
• All Of The Fast And The Furious Films At Once: I confess to not having really ever engaged with the FF franchise – I’m not, as a rule, particularly interested in either musclecars or musclemen, and given most of mine are dead I am not hugely interested in films that fetishise the concept of ‘family’ as their central premise, and Vin Diesel really does look (to quote Robin Williams on Schwartzenegger) a condom full of walnuts – but I am vaguely aware of the fact that there is a new one coming out at some point soon. If you want to refresh your memory of the franchise to date (WHY?!?!?! It is literally all cars and explosions and homoeroticism, and muscular men shouting the word FAMILY! at each other while dealing with the aforementioned explosions and homoeroticism!) then what better way to do it than by watching them as presented on this site – that is, all playing in very small windows simultaneously. Utter gibberish, but I sort-of imagine that that’s the case even if you watch them sequentially (also, always nice to be reminded of the fact that copyright law simply doesn’t apply if you just make the offending content really, really small).
• Peter Marshall: The Flickr page of Peter Marshall, whose photography of fading England is not only wonderful in terms of subject matter but SO beautifully-lit that I quite want to own vast swathes of it. If you like photos of old seaside resorts and abandoned scrapyards and old caffs then this is basically catnip.
• The Garden Photography Awards: As I type this, I am looking into my girlfriend’s garden and watching a fox; the fox, in turn, is watching me, while it pointedly defecates in the middle of the lawn. Thankfully the photographs in this year’s Garden Photography Awards don’t, at least as far as I’ve seen, contain ANY photographs of sh1tting foxes (there is a ‘pets’ category, but I am really confident that there won’t be any vulpine scat on display), instead choosing to focus on the beautiful flora visible in the UK’s gardens. I am literally the opposite of green fingered (…brown fingered? No, definitely not that, that sounds AWFUL), but even I was struck by how glorious the gardens here are; should you want to feel inadequate about your own poorly-tended patch of scrubland, click here!
• The World’s Biggest D1ckpic: To be clear, this link is ENTIRELY safe for work, I promise – whilst, yes, this is technically the world’s biggest d1ckpic, it’s a cartoony illustration rather than a high-res photograph, and falls very much under the heading of ‘comedy peen’ rather than ‘troubling and threatening throbber’. As explained in this article, “Almost a year in the making, the image has an area of 102,040,171,200,000 pixels — 290 times larger than the current record holder. At one pixel per inch, it would wrap around the Earth 2.7 times. If printed out at 15 DPI, a fairly common setting for large billboards, the image would be as tall as 16,408 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. If 3D-printed, the image could (hypothetically) be used to bat the International Space Station out of orbit.” This has been created with a lot of love (and a hope that it will end up in the Guinness Book Of Records) – you can scroll along the dong, keeping your eye out for Easter Eggs and gags, and see whether you have the patience to work your way all the way down its shaft (although if you want the full image you’ll need access to specialist software to view it, given that the file is somewhere in the region of 250TB in size). This is…this is almost perfect – pointless, silly, childish, and yet a weirdly-impressive technical feat. Well done, mysterious and anonymous creator!
• Bases Loaded: A GREAT little game, this, which is basically a weird cross between Vampire Survivors and Baseball and Arkanoid, and which I know won’t make any sense based on that description but which I promise you that you will enjoy a lot and which will make the afternoon pass more quickly than it otherwise might.
• Dire Decks: By the same developer, ANOTHER very nicely-made pixelartish game, this time a deck builder-cum-shootemup where you pick different cards to shoot down the invading armies of space aliens. Challenging, but in a very pleasing ‘one more go’ sort of fashion, and immensely satisfying once you start getting the measure of its rhythms.
• Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around: Finally this week, a game you need to download but which I highly recommend you play around with – it basically takes the ‘ghost’ concept familiar from racing games, where a previous player’s performance on a particular track is used as your opponent in subsequent races, and updates it for an AI age to create an experience where you play with AI-controlled NPCs whose behaviour has been trained by other players, playing the same game as you. Which, I appreciate, is a dog’s dinner of a description – here, try this: “Summer Friends Don’t Stick Around is a “forever-time” multiplayer game. The goal of this game’s creation was to immortalize players and give others a chance to play with them “in spirit” even after they are no longer with us. In the “Remember Me” mode, players can train a neural network to capture their play style. The output is a data model that can be shared with friends and family. Your playstyle is essentially encoded in the data model.” This is SO interesting, and there’s honestly something quite uncanny and arresting about the…recognisably human playstyles that emerge as a result of the training. This feels exciting and cusp-y, like there’s a VERY good idea in here which is going get expanded upon massively by a big-name title before too long.

By Joelle Jones

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Kite Observer: Photos of massive cargo ships at sea. Nothing else, just ships, but I promise you they are REALLY, REALLY BIG (fine, there are occasional non-cargo ships too, but, mainly, it’s just MASSIVE FLOATING HUNKS OF METAL).
• Cat Music Videos: Music videos for popular songs, made from stitched together clips of cats from the internet. Which, yes, I appreciate sounds almost exactly like something from approximately 2007, but that is not a bad thing because everything then was still pure and the rot had yet to really set in.
• New Ireland In Colour: Another in my occasional series of ‘creators who’ve found a really fertile bit of latent space and are just mining it mercilessly and the results are GREAT’ accounts – this is by one Hugh Mulhern, and is a selection of images depicting an imagined pseudo-post-apocalyptic Ireland between 2035 and 2070. These are SO GOOD – if you can imagine Transmetropolitan transposed to County Cork then you’re halfway there.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Raysa Fontana

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hello everyone! HELLO!

One on the one hand it was fun this week watching Google’s PR fcukup with the whole ‘your AI search engine’s a liar LOL’ story; on the other, I can’t help but think that none of the serious coverage of this I have read in the media has spent quite enough time thinking through the potential consequences of what AI-led search might mean and that, given our previous experiences over the past 15 years with ‘letting technologies we don’t fully understand and haven’t fully evaluated the potential impact of loose on our society without doing anything even halfway-resembling proper, meaningful user testing because that’s what investors want and caution be fcuked!’, we might want to perhaps employ a bit more caution rather than ploughing straight ahead with the whole ‘let the black box tell me what it thinks is true, despite the fact that neither I nor indeed anyone else currently alive has any idea by which mechanisms it arrives at those evaluations’ thing.

Christ, sorry, we’re only at the beginning of this fcuking thing and I’ve already done one of those horrible nested paragraphs that seems to go on forever like some sort of hideous mobius strip of badly-crafted prose.

ANYWAY. I hope you’re all well and having fun, and that you enjoy this week’s Curios; I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably start looking up old editions of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to use as some sort of gold standard of truth in the coming veracitypocalypse.

By Alfonso Gonzales Jr.

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S EDITION WITH THIS PLEASINGLY-ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO MIX BY JOACHIM SPIETH!

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.1:

By Mercedes Helnwein

NOW WE HAVE A PLAYLIST WHICH IF I’M HONEST I FOUND MORE FRIGHTENING THAN ANYTHING ELSE, BUT WHOSE WEIRD COMBINATION OF GABBER, HYPERPOP AND DNB IS WEIRDLY-COMPELLING! 

THE SECTION WHICH OBVIOUSLY CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO BUT WHICH IS JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS LINK TO DONATE TO RELIEF EFFORTS IN SYRIA/TURKEY HERE, PT.2:      

• Photobooth Dot Net: Do YOU want access to the web’s premiere resource for all things related to the little kiosks you use to get passport photos? OH GOOD! This is a genuinely-charming and very oldschool little site, run by a proper enthusiast who, as far as I can tell, seems to spend a reasonable amount of time wandering the world and checking out different examples of photobooth tech (and, frankly, why the fcuk not?). This is partly just an interesting overview of the history of the things and the various baroque differences in style and tech that they have employed, but it’s also got a search feature which means that you can, should you desire, find EVERY SINGLE PHOTOBOOTH IN THE WORLD (ok, fine, this probably isn’t strictly true, but) and plot your future travel plans accordingly based on whether or not you’ll able to enjoy some booth-based analogue photo fun. There are worse ways to plan an itinerary tbh.
• Cloudwatching: A meditative little webart project where any user who lands on the page can participate, either by designing their own ‘cloud’ using a rudimentary Paint-style interface or by sitting and watching as the clouds created by other anonymous webmongs glide past over a background of cerulean blue. Admittedly the slightly contemplative and gentle nature of the experience can be jarred somewhat by the occasional cloud in the shape of phrases like, er, “I Eat Kids”, but generally this is a supremely gentle way of spending 5 minutes staring at a screen.
• Shortest Lives: This is a really interesting project, but it’s probably worth pointing out at the top that it’s about miscarriage and as such, depending on your personal experience and circumstance, you might want to skip reading this one. Shortlist lives is an initiative being developed in the Netherlands – specifically at the UZ Gent hospital, at least initially – which is designed to give parents who suffer miscarriage a tangible, personal memory of their child via the medium of a 3d render of their heartbeat. “Shortest Lives originated from An-Sofie’s personal experience. In 2017 she became the godmother of Lily, the stillborn daughter of her cousin. By experiencing the loss up close, she saw how parents are left behind in a great void. What started as a project for Lily’s parents has, thanks to the support of UZ Gent and Berrefonds, grown into an opportunity to support other parents as well. Shortest Lives is an initiative that wants to give parents a powerful reminder of their child. Based on an ultrasound, it is possible to make the heartbeat of a stillborn child audible again. This heartbeat is then visualized in a unique way.” I think this is rather beautiful, personally, and I like idea that it’s something which could in theory be extended to all parents who have access to ultrasound data, wherever they are – I equally appreciate that everyone’s experiences with miscarriage are personal and different and that you might not agree.
• Calculating Devices: This is a YouTube channel whose sole raison d’etre is to explain and ‘review’ various obscure or antique counting devices. Have you ever wondered how the ancient Hittite method of enumerating things differed from that popular with Mesopotamians c.Hammurabi? No, probably not, but that is why we are here – TO LEARN (and to fill all these empty hours between birth and death with CONTENT). This is, honestly, significantly more interesting than it has any right to be, not least because if you’re moderately innumerate like I am it actually provides some useful insights into how one my helpfully go about conceptualising the concept of ‘numbers’ and thereby better deal with them (I’m…I’m not selling this, am I? FFS).
• The Aircade: I am always amazed and slightly-appalled at recruitment-focused PR efforts for the military and the various different ways that different nations’ various branches of the armed forces vie to attract the best and brightest cannon fodder into their ranks. This website is one part of the US Airforce’s efforts to entice the youth into the whole ‘death by plane’ business (I presume they spunked the rest of the budget on the recent Top Gun film which from what I could tell was effectively a two-hour recruitment ad for the airforce which people astonishingly paid to watch) via the medium of a series of genuinely really rather good games – honestly, I wanted to hate this but unfortunately all the stuff you can do here (from the in-browser elements to the downloadable AR-enabled ‘Command The Stack’ game) are annoyingly really quite fun and super-polished, as I suppose I should have expected from an institution whose annual budget is probably something comparable to the GDP of the UK. Whilst I find the very existence of this website and the associated content somewhat…icky, I have to grudgingly applaud the fact that it’s all very nicely made indeed.
• Crewmap: I can’t quite work out whether this is a genuinely smart idea for the new age of remote/hybrid working, or some sort of dreadful parody of ‘modern working life’ – YOU DECIDE! Crewmap is a platform which exists to help create bonds between colleagues and coworkers – the idea being that in a working world in which many of us see our colleagues on screens for 90% of the time, and where we don’t necessarily enjoy the same opportunities for smalltalk and socialising and general, fluffy ‘getting to know you’ chat as we might once have done whilst sharing corporate meatspace, you might want to find other ways of getting to know the other humans who are doing the same largely-pointless, soul-destroying job as you are. Basically the platform lets you set up quizzes and questionnaires about your likes, your interests and your hobbies, share them with your team members, and then get told who has what in common based on everyone’s answers – which…sounds like it might be fine in theory, but I can’t quite help get the feeling that this could quite quickly get awkward – in part because of the fact it feels, I don’t know, just a bit *too* close to the sort of thing that people associate with dating apps, and partly because I can envisage a scenario in which people end up feeling isolated rather than connected when they realise that none of their teammates like the same things that they do (“Noone else ticked the self-fisting box? I QUIT!”, etc). Still, maybe I am wrong and this is a genius idea, in which case YOU ARE WELCOME!
• Read Jpeg: I LOVE THIS. Honestly, I can’t explain how much this pleased me when I came across it (I think via Kristoffer again, but I couldn’t swear by it) – I think it’s because it feels zine-y in a way that always appeals to me. Read Jpeg is a newsletter that is just a stream of images that link out to places: “Curated streams on contemporary culture. Image essays. Subject matter varies. No text. Just images. Click–throughs for surprise. Mailed irregularly by the zip.” Really, this is practically-perfect – odd, esoteric, aesthetically (in)coherent and consistently surprising – you can go back through past editions to get a feel of how this works, but given how much of newsletterland is SERIOUS and BUSINESS and about KEEPING AHEAD it’s nice to see one that is pure vibes.
• Petswitch: I have a special place in my heart for websites which do one thing and one thing only, and which do that thing practically-perfectly; Petswitch is not such a website. It does, admittedly, do only one thing – to whit, taking your face and ‘swapping’ it with the face of any animal you choose to offer it an image of – but it does it in a way that is frankly quite shonky and a bit ‘phoned it and I promise you that when I found it this morning and had a quick play with turning myself into a sad-faced dog I lost it for a full two minutes (it was just after 6am and I was tired, in my defence). This is, to be clear, not very good at all, but it is VERY FUNNY and I confidently predict that you will all know at least one person who will be driven absolutely mental if you start sending them one of these a day featuring them combined with a series of different critters.
• WikiShootMe: Simultaneously interesting and really not interesting at all (sometimes I like to think this is the exact liminal space which Curios occupies and that’s perhaps why no cnut reads it), WikiShootMe is “a tool to show Wikidata items, Wikipedia articles, and Commons images with coordinates, all on the same map” – so basically you can look up anywhere in the world and see ALL THE STUFF that Wikipedia has on the area, on a map! From places of interest to images of the local area, it’s a surprisingly-detailed look at a particular geographical space which leads you (or at least it did me) to look slightly differently at where you are and what surrounds you and what is and isn’t significant about it.
• The List of Stews: An actual Wikipedia entry this time, both tasty AND seasonally-appropriate! Given it continues to be so chilly here that I seriously contemplate buying a pair of fingerless gloves to type today’s Curios in, it feels like this encyclopaedic list of international stewed dishes might come in handy – from Peruvian chicken to the (apologies to any Flemish readers) frankly-repellent sounding horsemeat stew with gingerbread(!!!!) of the Northern European lowlands, there is everything you could want here (presuming your ambitions tend towards ‘the consumption of largely-brown, largely-meat-based meals).
• OpnSouls: Do you ever feel like your friendships are stuck in a rut, that you don’t really talk anymore? Is your groupchat moribund? FEAR NOT! OpnSouls is an app which promises to reinvigorate your friendships by, er, sending your group of mates a question each day which you all have to answer. “Every day, you will receive a new question that is designed to spark meaningful conversations and help you learn more about your friends. You can share your own answer and see how your friends have responded, leaving comments and replies along the way.” Depending on what you and your friends are like this will either be HILARIOUS or the sort of thing that will see you all blocking each other on every single platform going within a month.
• Poline: I have to confess upfront here that I really don’t understand how this works or what it really is – that said, my total confusion as to its exact utility and purpose is part of the reason it appeals so much. As far as I can tell, Poline is a palette-creation tool – beyond that, though, well…Let me give the the website’s own descriptor text and see if you can make head or tail of it: “”poline” is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes. It is an indispensable tool for the modern generative sorcerer, and a delight for the eye.” GREAT! So, er, one for all you generative sorcerors, then – erm, could one of you possibly explain to me what the fcuk is going on here, should you have a second?
• WTFDoesThisCompanyDo: Balls, this is a GPT-ish thing and should be uptop, but, well, I can’t be bothered to scroll back and add it in. Sorry. ANYWAY, this is a genuinely fun application of the tech – plug in any website url you like and the tech attempts to give you a description of what the company actually does based on the copy on the homepage. What this is useful for, I’ve found, is for gently pointing out to people that the copy on their website is meaningless dogsh1t, as evidenced by the fact that not even a machine trained on the entire corpus of the web can make sense of it – honestly, this is particularly good for agencies and I strongly advise you to pick your own favourite ‘disruiptive creative studio’ and see whether or not the machine can work out that what they do is ‘make videos to sell petfood’.
• CandyCoated: I feel I ought to explain that I stumbled across this site via this article rather than through any sort of personal interest (not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with being into this stuff!) – that out of the way, let’s all enjoy browsing through the esoteric world of hand-made, bespoke, inflatable rubber fetishwear! Have you ever wondered where people whose idea of a perfect sexy time is, say, being inside a space hopper while someone attempts to tug them off from the outside, find an appropriately-modified space hopper? WELL WONDER NO MORE! Personally speaking it was the combination whale toy-slash-dildo that gave me greatest pause, but you will all find something to love here.
• Manifesturbation: It seems that every few years someone reinvents the basic lie at the heart of new age classic ‘The Secret’ – to whit, that you can basically get the universe to give you what your heart desires simply by following a few simple instructions. There was the original, there was Cosmic Ordering, there has been the modern reframing of it as ‘manifesting’, and now…now we have this. I feel compelled to point out that this link was a reader submission (I am sworn to secrecy), and that there’s a very slight possibility that your employer might not massively enjoy you clicking on the link whilst on their dime…and now let’s dive in! What would you say if I were to tell you that there was a way of securing EXACT SUMS OF MONEY through no activity or effort whatsoever other than having a VERY MINDFUL W4NK? I imagine what you say is “fcuk off Matt, I am not a moron and I was not born yesterday, this is obviously rubbish, what are you trying to sell me?” – but, seemingly, there are others for whom the answer would instead be “SIGN ME UP FOR CASHW4NKS!” And it is for these people who Manifesturbation exists – people who, in exchange for the secret of how to “co-create your life through juicy, lit-up pleasure instead of to-do lists, overwhelm, stress and struggle” are willing to fork out a (NON-REFUNDABLE) $200. Yes, that’s right, for a mere two hundred quid you too can have someone tell you ‘facts’ about how if you just finger yourself properly you’ll be granted your heart’s financial desires (except, er, the small print is keen to point out that there are no guarantees here). This is, let’s be clear, a quite astonishing grift and the sort of thing that I feel no compunction whatsoever being mean about because whoever is doing this (my girlfriend pointed out that they also do a podcast about their sex lives which is quite famous, which I guess figures) is, I feel comfortable saying, making this all up and peddling snake oil (also, please watch the testimonial videos – those people do not look like the most discerning of consumers, is all I’m saying here). Still, MANIFESTURBATION! What a fcuking world we live in.
• Order Automatica: Finally this week, a palette-cleansing card-battling game which will hopefully clear your mind from the last link and which is a really pleasing pixel-y looking timewaster which you can happily while away a few hours with.

By Deon S’Souza

LAST OF THE MIXTAPES THIS WEEK IS THIS LOUNGEY CRACKER FROM LOUIS LARGO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS ONCE AGAIN EMPTY! POOR TUMBLRS! 

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Typewriter Artist: Anatol Knotek makes art from an old typewriter, typography and, occasionally, coloured ribbons. This is minimal and beautiful and feels like the art style of a campaign that’s just begging to be commissioned.
• Models Architecture: This Insta account really should be named ‘Architectural Models’, but I will forgive them the confusing reversal because there is something SO SO LOVELY about architects’ models and dioramas, and there’s some superb work here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By David Fullarton

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Have you had good weeks? I suppose the answer to that will depend on how much Shell stock you all own – LOL! – but I sincerely hope that regardless of your portfolio performance – LOL! – you’re all feeling relatively content and not too burnt out from another week of staggering cognitive dissonance (my personal favourite this week was English football’s continued ability to spend more than every single other league in Europe, combined, whilst the actual English economy continues to limp emphysemically towards what we’re continually assured are the bright lights of ‘eventual recovery’ but which, let’s be honest, is as likely to be ‘the glow emitted by the bonfire of what remains of our hopes and dreams for the future’).

Anyway, I have a lunch to get to and probably ought to wear something other than my Curios pants if I want to avoid the unpleasant stares and increasingly-anxious tannoy announcements – I hope you are all doing WONDERFULLY and that this week’s collection of, er, ‘things on the internet’ manages to distract you momentarily from all the other stuff.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and YOU are special to me in ways you can only dream of (but would probably prefer not to).

By Paul Davis

WE START THE WEEK IN REASONABLY UPBEAT FASHION, COURTESY OF THIS MIX OF FUNKY HOUSE BY DOC MARTIN! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.1:  

By Spencer Ostrander

LET’S GO BACK TO THE LATE-90s NOW WITH THIS SUPERB DJ KRUSH MIX! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.2:          

• The Sindhu Sesh Remix Competition: One of the nicest musical finds of last year was my discovery of the Sindhu Sesh musical universe (I like to imagine it like Marvel, but a bit more ‘provincial pub, scampi basket and cheap cocaine hoofed in an outside lavatory’ than ‘multibillion dollar interconnected film franchise behemoth), as evidenced by Pete and Bas, whose single ‘Mr Worldwide’ I featured here last Summer. Anway, there’s now a competition running to find the best remix featuring Pete and Bas’s unique vocal stylings – if you’re any sort of musician. I can’t encourage you strongly enough to download the vocal tracks and go WILD – the winning entry will be featured on their next single and will get all the kudos you’d expect for adding some terrifying 180bpm beats to their already slightly fighty vocals.
• Calligrapher: A little AI handwriting tool, which I don’t think serves any purpose at all beyond the aesthetic – what’s hugely impressive about this (to my ignorant mind, at least) is that it really is generating the writing on the fly each time. In an era in which it’s hard not to obsess about our imminent obsolescence in the face of increased machine competence, it’s good to know that their handwriting’s fcuking terrible too.
• The Official UFO App: Or, to give it its official title, ‘Enigma Labs’ – either way, if you’ve been waiting for a way to tell the world about all the times the silver, saucer-eyed aliens have seen fit to choose YOU for a probing then this is very much the app for you. Admittedly it’s not fully launched yet, but there’s an iOS beta that you can sign up for (I like the fact that they are prioritising iPhone users, as though aliens are design status slags and have a preference for showing themselves to people who worship at the churches of Ive and Jobs) and the app will eventually provide anyone worldwide with the opportunity to upload details of alien sightings along with supporting evidence, which will then be analysed by the app’s ML code to determine whether or not it’s a real sighting or a hoax (should…should we be asking questions as to how they’re benchmarking that?). “Enigma is the most trusted, frictionless place to report a sighting and the largest queryable UAP database in the world. Our platform continues to run machine learning on over 270k citizen and military reports across every country, awarding every sighting an anomaly score based on multivariate models. We are building tools for everyone to deconflict sightings with identifiable variables , glean insights, and connect to other people with similar sighting stories.” I am almost tempted to get an iPhone, just to access the incredible community I can already tell will coalesce around this.

• Housr: This is a smart idea – Housr is an app which is seeking to DISRUPT (yes, I know, but bear with me) the student rental housing market, making it simpler for landlords to list properties for students to rent, and for students to find suitable housing, and housemates, and deal with deposits and contracts and all the tedious and frankly complicated stuff that Iargely ignored (which is perhaps why my second year of university saw me living in a flat that might charitably have been disguised as ‘squalid’, and with a sofa which gave my friend Paul what looked suspiciously like chemical burns). This, honestly, strikes me as an uncomplicatedly smart business concept – it’s currently only running in Manchester, I think, but will expand over the coming year.
• A Man Sitting On A Couch Looking At Something: I LOVE THIS. Another wonderful webartprojectthing via Naive Weekly (there are a few in here this week, and this is your semi-regular reminder to sign up if you’re into this sort of thing), this is by Fred Wordie who, for a week last year, set up a camera pointing at his sofa and got software to surveil him via said camera, with the machine seeking to interpret his movements and positions into recognisable actions. The resulting site is a strange, dissociated selection of what the machine ‘saw’ each time it ‘looked’ – a man sitting on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa with a bottle in his mouth…this shouldn’t be as affecting as it is, and yet the dissociated fragments of life that pop out here and the ambiguity in how one might interpret the rather bald descriptions, make this something really rather wonderful and unsettling. If nothing else, there’s definitely an ad campaign in the broad theme of this (apologies to Fred if this sullies the otherwise pure nature of your art! Sorry man!).
• The Doorstep: Also via Naive comes this lovely, small web project – a digital shoe rack, where Azlen Elsa is inviting people to submit photos of their shoes for inclusion. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?? Unless, of course, Azlen has an unannounced shoe fetish, but let’s presume that that’s not the case here.
• Catch Cameras: Via Dan – thanks Dan! – comes this site, selling cameras, which briefly transported me back to a simpler time a decade or so ago when ‘The Hipster’ was still a thing. Catch is selling small film cameras – with real film! Actual, physical film! That you need to get developed! – which are beautifully-designed (if you think that the absolute apogee of compact camera design was the 1970s) and to me feel oddly reminiscent of the Olden Days when Instagram’s logo was still designed to look like a physical photography device, and Hipstagram was still a thing…anyway, this is basically charging you £60 for a nice-looking point-and-shoot film device, but if you’ve decided that 2023 is the year you get more ‘mindful’ about your photography practice then a) fcuk off and don’t come back; b) this may tick a box or two. There is something particularly funny about how the shop page features actual instructions on how to go about getting the film processed, to the point that they actually feel the need to write ‘Google ‘film development’’ (and by ‘funny’ I mean ‘horribly, cruelly ageing’).
• FatMap: I have never been skiing. Or snowboarding. Or snowshoeing, or wingsuitgliding, or ice-climbing, or any mountainous pursuits, really. In part because skiing was always a bit pricey, a bit because I am almost certain to return with fewer functioning knees than is ordinarily considered ideal. If you, though, are more Snow Brave than I am and don’t mind either the cold or the possibility of spending several months in traction as doctors attempt to reconstruct the shredded remnants of your cruciate and meniscus, then you might enjoy FatMap, which, seemingly, is like Strava but for mountainous sports (on reflection, if you’re into this sort of stuff then you quite possibly know about this anyway, but fcukit) and which contains all sorts of interesting information about slopes and gradients and snowfall, as well as allowing you to conduct a silent vendetta against all those people who are better at falling down the side of a mountain than you are (it’s just gravity ffs, stop showing off).
• Seeing Theory: This is a really great piece of interactive explanation from Brown University in the US – it’s an explanation of probability and statistics that is delivered with such wonderful visual and interactive flair that even someone as fundamentally incapable of grasping numerical concepts as I am can emerge with a half-coherent explanation as to how some of this stuff works (ok, quarter-coherent). There’s nothing in here that’s particularly new on its own, but it’s just a superb example of how to use coding and interactivity to help introduce and explain complex concepts; it does feel like brands and businesses, particularly ones in complicated industries, don’t really have any excuse for not using more tools like this in their communications.
• All The Superbowl Ads: It’s nearly that time of the year again, when two teams of pituitary meatheads spend four hours hitting each other while several hundred million spectators continue working on their long-term ‘Mission Diabetes’ project – oh, and a bunch of people in advermarketingpr spend far too much time analysing the adverts. This is YouTube’s SUPERBOWL AD CENTRE, which you might want to bookmark should you decide you want to have an opinion on who ‘won’ the ad breaks this year. FWIW (and I have only bothered to watch a handful) I get a rather weird feeling from Snap’s promo, like it’s been dropped in here via a timewarp from the past, when we all thought more positively about the digital future and ‘AR donuts’ felt like a fun toy rather than something to gaze at hungrily.
• Lighthouse Friends: I confess that in the early weeks of this year I have been feeling somewhat…unmoored, and I have found myself wishing on occasion that I felt strongly or passionately enough about…well, about anything, really, to want to devote myself to it with wholehearted abandon. Basically I want to feel about…well, anything really, the same way that the person behind this website feels about the lighthouses of North America. THEY HAVE VISITED ALL OF THEM (well the ones in the US at least) and taken pictures! You can read their notes on EVERY SINGLE ONE! Just imagine caring so much about something that you’re motivated to embark upon a project so wonderfully, perfectly pointless/meaningful (delete per your perspective) as this! Anyway, lighthouses! Do…do I need therapy?
• Illustrated People: This is not only a great photoproject but an ad campaign waiting to happen, and given this is apparently 10 years old I’m slightly amazed that it hasn’t been used already. Thomas Mailaender used a UV lamp to ‘burn’ temporary images onto his subject’s skin, photographing the impressions before they faded, creating permanent mementos of the vanishingly ephemeral – honestly, if you’re after some creative inspiration for any campaigns relating to summer holidays and the like, this feels PERFECT.
• Growing: This is just GLORIOUS – Growing is a digital poem, created by Olly Bromham, which creates a cascade of words across your browser window, each linking to a Wikipedia entry; I have no idea at all how the program is choosing the vocabulary, but the words chosen are FABULOUS, all crunchy and chewy and delightful to speak aloud, and their procession across the page creates a deliciously sonorous composition which doesn’t make any sense at all but which creates a sort of…texture, if that makes sense, that I find almost perfectly-pleasing. Also, it has just taught me that picrocarmine means “A stain made from picric acid and indigo carmine”, which is just lovely.
• Squeaky Clean Toys: Can I have a quick show of hands, please – how many of you would buy a, er, ‘pre-loved’ sextoy? Well, thankfully I can’t see any of you and so have no idea which of you are more…relaxed than others when it comes to dildosharing, but presuming that at least one of you put your hand up then YOU’RE WELCOME! In fairness, these people do give the impression that they know what they’re doing – they clearly state that most toys can’t in fact be recycled, and they have lots of information about porous vs non-porous materials, and there are obvious environmental benefits to handing down your Bad Dragon from generation to generation rather than simply leaving future humans with the puzzle of the Anthropocene Dildolayer to unravel – but, equally, WHO WANTS A PRE-LOVED SEXTOY?!?! Anyway, er, this exists.
• Back Scratching Simulator: It’s not, fine, a HUGELY accurate simulation of scratching someone’s back, but it IS a fun little game which caused my brain to ache in pleasing and unusual ways. How quickly can you press the right key combinations and get that itch scratched?
• Gaming Like It’s 1927; Last up in the ‘miscellaneous links’ section, a wonderful collection of small games, all created as part of the recent ‘Gaming Like It’s 1927’ GameJam, which saw designers invited to come up with quick-and-dirty game prototypes (some digital, some not) based on works from 1927 which have recently entered the public domain in the US. So there’s a Tempest clone taking visual inspiration from the works of Salvador Dali, another which takes place in a feline-themed version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, one based on the writings of AA Milne…I’ve only tried a handful of the 20 games linked to from here, and they’re very much on the ‘unpolished and experimental’ end of the spectrum, but there’s some brilliant creativity on display here throughout.

By Steve Seeley

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX IS THIS CRACKER BY DJ BIRCH WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE LOOSELY AS BEING ‘ECLECTICALLY GLOBAL’ BUT WHICH I PROMISE IS REALLY GOOD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY ONCE AGAIN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Jonathan Hoefler: Another to file under ‘finding a promising area of latent space and just digging right into it’, Jonathan Hoelfer’s Insta feed shares images of imaginary gadgets and devices dreamt up by AI, all of which have a sort-of pleasingly baroque aesthetic to them, as though Steampunk managed to magically get less irritating.
• Adam Cole: Cole is an artist working with digital media and AI, and I came across him because of his work Kiss/Crash; his Insta feed is a pleasingly-unsettling parade of odd machine imaginings, which if you like the same sort of stuff I do you will probably enjoy quite a lot.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Michael Sowa

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hi everyone! Hi! How are you!

You know what, I feel…alright this week! The sun is shining, the heating is on, the days are getting longer and I have done my tax return – it’s all going to be ok!

(On the subject of tax, by the way, a brief note on the Nadhim Zahawi thing – the funniest thing about all this, to my mind at least, is the fact that Zahawi has for the past 5-6 years or so been the biggest government lickspittle going. I am one of those tedious people who listens to the Today programme every morning, and as such I can say with reasonable confidence that there is noone who has done more of the 8:10am ‘meatshield to defend whatever awful sh1t the Tories have done now’ interviews than the self-described ‘King of An*l’ (thanks, Popbitch!) – on that basis, him STILL getting sacked as a result of his dodgy tax affairs, despite having spent much of the past decade orally bum-spelunking a succession of Prime Ministers, is even funnier (til you remember that he’s still a multi-millionaire and I am going to have to turn the heating off again shortly if I want to be able to buy new pants at any point in 2023).

Anyway. It’s lovely to see you all. Thanks for being here.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I am, on reflection, quite proud of ‘orally bum-spelunking’ as a turn of phrase.

By Brendan Burton

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A BRAND NEW MIX OF TWOSTEP AND NUKG BY OPPIDAN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO GABBER MARGINALIA, PT.1:  

By Natalia Gonzalez Martin  

NEXT UP, A PLAYLIST FEATURING A BUNCH OF TRACKS FROM ABOUT 2003-2009 WHICH IT WAS RECENTLY POINTED OUT TO ME IS AN ERA WHICH HAS LEFT A WEIRDLY SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT DIGITAL FOOTPRINT, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO GABBER MARGINALIA, PT.2:  

• The Top Escape Rooms Project: I appreciate that Escape Rooms are perhaps a bit 2012, a bit ‘hipsters are still a thing’, a bit ‘craft beer’ – but, equally, they can be fun if done well and in the right company, and, look, it’s not like things have improved immeasurably since their heyday so perhaps just GIVE THEM A CHANCE OK? Ahem. Anyway, I was until this week unaware of the fact that there exists an international organisation dedicated not only to celebrating escape rooms but also to ranking them, and that each year they compile a list of what they consider to be the BEST experiences in the world – but there does, and they do, and here it is. “The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the very best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the experience of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world. We serve escape room owners and designers by publicly recognizing their achievements, and we serve our fellow enthusiasts by providing an international bucket list of the best rooms to play.” There are only two UK-based room in this year’s selection of the best 100 (Macclesfield and Margate, in case you were interested), which is a shame, but there are LOADS around Europe – if you’re that way inclined, you could make this the basis of a frankly brilliant series of weekend breaks to some excellent destinations.
• Lileks: It was slightly odd discovering this site – it felt hugely familiar, but I think that that’s because it’s had a few VIRAL HITS over the years and as such I recognise some of the content (specifically, I think this was the host of one of the original ‘man, food in 1970s America really was quite spectacularly vile, wasn’t it?’ recipe card roundup posts) – but also like I had found some sort of spiritual kin in some small way. THIS HAS BEEN GOING FOR 26 YEARS FFS!!! There’s a sort of general lean towards ‘slightly weird US ephemera from the 50s-70s’, but it’s probably best to let the site’s owner introduce it: “What is this thing? Simple: The anteroom of the internet’s most diverse, idiosyncratic, and individually curated pop-culture museum. Note: that’s the last time I’ll use “curated.” It’s pretentious. But it’s true! I am pretentious. Also, this site is a one-man effort, assembled over two decades, its innumerable sub-sites gathered together under general, vague rubrics.It’s not some idle project, occasionally updated. The Bleat, a blog that’s celebrating its 25th year, contains a M-F essay, some piece of old commercial ephemera, a rotating feature on everything from cliffhanger serials to old radio to main street America to the ads of the 1930s or 1970s, and a link to the daily site update. And that’s just the blog. Scroll down for the total enormity. I hope you enjoy the site. Twenty-six years, and counting.” I cannot stress enough how much I love this – a proper, sprawling, 2.5-decade-long accretion of links and words and pictures, all mapping a vague sense of ‘what one person has found interesting enough to share online since 1997’ – but if you’re after a way in, why not try this wonderful series of posts analysing the particular art style of one Art Frahm, an artist whose work seemingly consisted solely of cheesecake postcard illustrations of 1950s women whose pants have inexplicably just fallen around their ankles (no, really).
• Ivory for Mastodon: Are any of you actually using Mastodon? How’s it working out for you? I tried, honestly I did, but all the reasons it didn’t stick for me in 2017 or whenever are still very much true, and now there’s this added barrier of my being old and tired and jaded and increasingly of the opinion that when Twitter finally dies I think I will probably just not do social networks anymore (I reserve the right to completely change my mind on this should something infinitely new and shiny and exciting and (please god, please god) solely text-based take off in the next year or so, obvs). Still, if you’re finding that Mastodon is scratching your Elon-free Twitter itch then you may enjoy this app – an (iOS-only at the moment, I think) mobile app for it, called Ivory, which I have been informed by a bunch of people whose opinions I tend to broadly trust is Very Good as far as these things go. Obviously I haven’t tried it myself re a) Mastodon; and b) Apple, but, with the usual caveats, this may well be worth a look.
• How Far Does 5kg of CO2 Get You?: This is an interesting little data experiment which asks ‘if you limited yourself to only emitting 5kg of CO2, how far could you travel in a variety of different European countries?’ (and yes, fine, I appreciate that that is a potentially niche definition of the term ‘interesting’, but I AM INTERESTED OK? ffs). Distances vary from country to country for various reasons:  “an electric train in Sweden can travel further than an electric bike, due to the greater carbon footprint per individuals of manufacturing the bike and the very low footprint of traveling by train almost exclusively powered by renewables. In Poland and Cyprus, carbon intensity is so high that driving a diesel car may be less detrimental than driving an electric car. From Paris, France, driving a SUV you can barely get out of town (21 km) whereas a small electric car would drive you 3 times further to the beautiful wine cellars of Bourgogne (77km).” It feels like there’s something in this – a travel calculator for low-carbon weekends, for example, that spits out suggestions and travel plans and booking assistance, all-in-one, for example (but you will DEFINITELY come up with better ones – or at least I hope you do, because that was frankly sh1t and I like to think that you’re all significantly less useless than I am).
• Kutt: You know how everyone makes bets, right? I mean just small ones, between friends, in a fun, ‘no money involved’, non-binding, bragging rights sort of way, the sort of throwaway remark in the pub which you laugh about and then which, in the main, everyone forgets or which, at most, involves someone having to shave an eyebrow or perform some sort of worryingly-biological forfeit should they lose. Well imagine THAT, but instead of everything being for fun and for lols you instead plug the bet into an app and pledge ACTUAL MONEY which will get automatically transferred to the winner upon said bet’s completion – doesn’t that sound better? Well, er, no, actually it doesn’t, it sounds like it could lead to all sorts of issues – but that’s not stopping new startup Kutt, which confidently claims to be a “sports and social gaming platform that allows friends and strangers to use their knowledge of sports, politics, and pop culture to compete against each other in a variety of competitions.” Set your own odds! Ensure people pay up! BET UNLIMITED AMOUNTS! There is literally no way at all that this app could possibly be a bad and ruinous idea, oh no sirree – any journalists out there looking for a nice, easy new tech-led scare story really could do worse than apply a bit of scrutiny to this, because it looks…dangerous. An app which is promising to let anyone run a book on anything, that they can offer to anyone, with no loss limit? HMMM.
• Protected Planet: “Protected Planet is the authoritative source of data on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). It exists due to the extensive efforts of governments and other stakeholders to map, monitor and report data on protected areas and OECMs. Through the Protected Planet website, users can explore the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), World Database on OECMs, Global Database on Protected Area Management Effectiveness (GD-PAME), and a wealth of associated information. Protected Planet enables a spectrum of users to access data for information-based decision making, policy development, and business and conservation planning. Businesses in a range of sectors including mining, oil and gas, and finance use the WDPA and associated databases to identify the biodiversity risks and opportunities of a given project.” Whilst this is primarily of use and interest to people working in conservation (or, alternatively, in industries which are very much the opposite of conservation but which need to pay attention to it), it’s also just generally fascinating to browse around the world and see where the largest concentration of protected areas is – who knew Estonia was such a hotbed of natural conservation? EVERYONE TO TALLINN!
• Study Hall: This is an interesting idea, and something that feels very much like ‘the shape of things to come’. YouTube recently launched this new educational initiative which, in partnership with Arizona State University, will make actual proper college (University)-level courses available on the platform, courses which will be valid for actual, proper college (university) credits. There’s a fee, but it is SMALL compared to what you would pay through other institutions, and it’s hard to see this as anything other than A Good Thing, democratising access to education and creating a genuinely new path into the college (University) system for people who might otherwise have struggled to access it. It’s interesting that online education hasn’t really progressed that much since the early boom days of the Khan Academy and other such early-web-2 poster children, but perhaps this integration of online resources and the creation of truly transferable remote syllabi will accelerate change from hereon in.
• Anne of Green Gables: I can’t pretend that Anne of Green Gables ever meant anything to me growing up, but I’m aware that for some of you it was probably a SEMINAL CHILDHOOD TEXT and the mere mention of its title unlocks some sort of Proustian memorytrain within you. It is for YOU, then (yes YOU), that I present this website which offers a properly-deep exploration of the original manuscript drafted by LM Montgomery with notes and annotations and explanations – there’s something lovely about the fact that the site allows you to read the whole book should you so choose, presenting the digitised manuscript pages alongside the more readable text (the digitisation also let you explore old photographs and features all sorts of pleasing additional bits of information about the author, her family, the cultural milieu in which she was writing, etc), and, honestly, this is pretty much perfect as a way of presenting a manuscript imho.
• Roast Dating: I remain staggered that there hasn’t been more made of the way AI (specifically text AI) is going to mess with dating – or, frankly, that I haven’t found more services springing up that offer to let the machine Cyrano your way into someone’s pants (again, journalists, this one is a total open goal for mid-markets and right-wing broadsheets). Still, here’s one! Roast is a FULL SUITE of AI tools which promises to punch up your profile pics and improve your pulling power, based on what the company claims is analysis of THOUSANDS of dating profiles to determine how best to be successful on the apps (the answer, I think, as has been repeatedly proven, is to be very, very good-looking) – whilst I firmly believe that this is total and utter post-PUA bullsh1t, I will (quietly, reluctantly) applaud the way they are positioning this as ‘using science and data to improve your chances’ rather than ‘just outsource the emotional labour of attempting to get to know another human being to determine whether or not you might be emotionally compatible to a machine’, which, to be clear, is exactly what this is. If Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and the rest aren’t already working on in-app tools to detect AI-generated copy in messages then I would be amazed.
• Plastic Free: I go slightly annoyed by the copy on this site, which seems to be doing its best to obscure what the actual fcuk this is meant to be. “We are an army of experts — material scientists, system changers, innovators, impact measurers, creators, builders, artisans — united in a shared mission to ignite and inspire the world to turn off the plastic tap.” WELL BULLY FOR YOU. This is particularly irritating, because what this ACTUALLY seems to be is in fact quite useful – basically this site aggregates all sorts of news and science updates about ways in which designers and manufacturers and makers around the world are creating things in less-plastic-reliant ways. So, for example, you can find information on new materials  being developed to create soles for shoes without plastics, or new grasses being engineered which it is hoped will be able to replace nylons in time – it’s all very much on the consumer-y end of things, and if I’m being cynical it strikes me that this is basically a one-stop-shop for the next time you need to spend six minutes filling in the ‘CSR Ideas’ portion of the pitch, but, equally, there’s loads of information in here which could be put to good use (although, admittedly, probably not by any of us advermarketingprcunts).
• SuperBad: Via the ever-charming Naive comes this entirely-baffling web project. I have no idea whatsoever is going on here, or what the point of it is (should there be one), or who made it, and I can’t categorically promise you that it doesn’t potentially lead somewhere terrible and wrong (but, er, it probably doesn’t) – SuperBad is…look, it’s an incomprehensible mess, frankly, of lo-fi webart and partial html and broken links and dead ends and non-sequiturs and it is BRILLIANT and baffling and utterly mystifying, and I spent a good 40 minutes clicking and playing and didn’t even come close to scrying what this was for or where the edge of it are, or whether it even HAS edges, and honestly this might be my favourite thing of the week.
• Time My Meeting: Would you like a handy tool with which to demonstrate exactly what a futile waste of time the vast majority of your work meetings are? YOU’RE WELCOME! Start the timer on this website when you’re meeting kicks off, stop it when it ends, and you’ll be able to tell people ‘well, that meeting was longer than the inaugural time taken to complete the marathon in the modern olympiad!’, and your colleagues will all hate you just that little bit more. Which is almost certainly what you were hoping to get out of Curios today, so, well, you’re welcome again!
• The Pr0nhub 2022 Year in Review: I have long contended that Pr0nhub’s annual data drop about the content consumption habits of visitors to its site is THE most interesting and revealing document published each year about Where We Are as a species (‘nowhere good’, is the generalised answer). I am a little late to this this time around, but I was glad to find that the drop doesn’t disappoint – you will of course fund your own nuggets of interesting in here, but, personally-speaking, I am most curious about the rise of ‘hentai’ as a popular category around the world (why are we increasingly masturbating to cartoons? WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT US?), curious about the rise in popularity of trans-related content (this doesn’t strike me as a particularly positive thing when it comes to seeing trans people as people rather than sexual curios), and utterly baffled as to why so many people in Australia were searching for ‘two vagina sex’ (can any Australians explain this, please?). This is the Big Data we really deserve.
• This Is Not Word: Make beautiful patterns with words as you type. This is a small, frivolous toything, but I would really really like the ability to activate this mode in GDocs (should anyone from Google be reading this and feel like acceding to the unreasonable demands of some webmong).
• It’s Funny How The Knight Moves: This made me feel quite stupid quite quickly, but is equally the sort of thing that I imagine many of you (the ‘shape rotators’ amongst you, to exhume a now-already-antediluvian-feeling conversation from about a year ago) will find scratches a very particular brain-itch in quite a pleasing fashion. Can YOU make the knight touch every square on the board that doesn’t see it either put in check by the queen or taking the queen? Maybe you can, but fcuk me was it beyond my limited intellectual capabilities.
• UFO Clicker: A clicker game that only lasts about 15 minutes rather than taking over your life like some sort of low-level meth! This involves hoovering up tiny little humans with spaceships, and is very satisfying indeed should you be in the market for something to waste away the working day.
• Chronophoto: Ooh, this is fun and VERY addictive. You get shown a series of photos, and the game is to guess exactly when each was taken – this is great, and aside from anything else is a very good way of learning about subtle aesthetic differences between eras that are largely thought of as culturally/aesthetically homogenous (cf ‘the 90s’).
• Die In The Dungeon: Final link of the miscellanea this week and WOW is it a good one – Die In The Dungeon is the demo of a forthcoming full game, playable in-browser, in which you seek to get your little warrior frog creature through 25 levels of fighting monsters with dice. Which, fine, may not sound like fun, but I have played the SH1T out of this this week, in a way which I haven’t done with one of these since the Vampire Survivors demo a year or so back (and that ended up being one of the biggest games of 2022) and which possibly indicates that this one is a bit special. Give it a go, I promise it’s LOADS of fun (also, the frog is very cute) – drag the dice onto the grid to play, you’ll pick it up as you go along.

By Maisie Cowell

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF SLIGHTLY-LOUNGEY ELECTRO MIXED BY THE QUITE-FANTASTICALLY-NAMED LOVE APE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Anonymous Photo Project: Found photos, basically – but good ones. “In 2017 when filmmaker lee shulman bought a random box of vintage slides he fell completely in love with the people and stories he discovered in these unique windows in to our past lives. Collecting and preserving unique colour slides from the last 70 years, the project was  born out of a desire to preserve this collective memory and give a second life to the people often forgotten in these timeless moments captured in stunning kodachrome colour.” These are great, and you can find more (and more information) at this website.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Shusaku Takaoka

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Jesus, it’s COLD, isn’t it? Did I used to put up with this every January? Fcuk knows how. Basically I haven’t felt temperatures like this for two years and I DO NOT LIKE IT.

I am running a bit late today – possibly due to the icy cold making it increasingly hard for me to move my fingers to type – and as such will keep the intro to a minimum (you could at least pretend to be sad ffs), but not before saying thanks to all of you who wrote nice things about the cat last week, it was very much appreciated.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope you feel levelled up.

By Julie Hrudova

THE MIXES THIS WEEK BEGIN WITH 45 MINUTES OF PLEASING SOUL SOUNDS FROM THE VINYL COLLECTION OF TOM SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR KATY, DESPITE THE SIGNET RING, PT.1:

By Carla Cascale Alimbau

NEXT UP, ENJOY A SELECTION OF BRAND NEW GRIME TRACKS MIXED BY JI! 

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY FEELS A BIT SORRY FOR KATY, DESPITE THE SIGNET RING, PT.2:  

• Slums: Maths made beautiful. Slums is a gorgeous little bit of webart – a series of procedurally-generated alienfutureurban landscapes which you can watch grow and develop in your browser. Odd, shadowy spacecraft glide past and the slums and the buildings and the towers grow up as you watch, gradually obscuring the sky until you hit any key and begin an entirely new seed. There’s some gentle audio here too – this very much falls under the heading of ‘oddly-meditative digital experiences which I would totally sit and zone out to in a gallery given half the chance (especially if they have the heating on)’, and I think it would benefit from being thrown onto the biggest screen you have access to.
• Written In Stone: I was not aware that people ‘signed’ pavements, but it turns out that they do – Written In Stone is a site which collects images of pavements from the US which have been stamped with the seal of the companies that laid them. Which, yes, fine, isn’t exactly a description to get the blood racing; equally, though, I quite like the idea that these (presumably) small, family-owned businesses are in a minor way forever immortalised in a city’s fabric, and it made me wonder whether there are more ways in which cities could work to permanently commemorate the people who build and maintain them in (there are, lots).
• Tame: You’d think that after…how long is it since Tinder changed the way in which people date? A decade? Jesus, I just checked and it’s 11 years, MY GOD! Anyway, you’d think that after 11 years we’d have largely exhausted all the variants on the simple ‘use technology to find local people to put inside you’ premise, but here we are in 2023 and STILL we are seeing new variations on the theme (perhaps unsurprisingly, seeing as Tinder appears to have ushered in a world in which dating doesn’t really exist anymore, having been supplanted by the new, less-immediately-exciting-sounding hobby of ‘sitting alone in one’s room having a series of desultory conversations which all eventually peter out without ever actually seeing your interlocutor in the flesh’. 2023’s first new entrant into the market is Tame, whose BIG GIMMICK is that you can only have one conversation on the app at a time, meaning that rather than spreading your attention marmite-thin among 20-odd potential suitors you instead (so the thinking goes) go DEEP with one person and really get to know them; if you want to stop talking to them, you have to actively break the connection AND TELL THEM WHY, which, honestly, sounds fcuking BRUTAL but is, the app suggests, intended to stop people just ghosting each other and instead think more seriously about who they are talking to and why. Interestingly, once you’ve broken a chat you can NEVER match with that person ever again, which gives the whole thing an interestingly-high-stakes dynamic – WHAT IF THIS PERSON IS THE ONE??? Anyway, I don’t imagine for a second that this will take off in a big way, but it’s interesting to look at the ways in which people are attempting to de-Tinderify (yes, that is the accepted term) the process of finding someone to see out the apocalypse with.
• DateForce: A website that is simultaneously a joke and also…real? DateForce is the answer to the question that, as far as I know, noone had ever previously wanted the answer to – to whit, ‘what would it look like if someone developed CRM software but for your dating life?’. It would, it turns out, look like this – a system to log your dates, set followup actions and, the site promises, eventually to be able to analyse the data you collect for forecasting purposes! Whilst on the one hand this is utterly sociopathic behaviour (look, sorry, but it is), it’s also the sort of thing I can imagine finding useful if you’re one of those terrifyingly-Alpha American people who go on five dates a night and need to keep track of which suitor was which. Still, just to remind you, there was someone who went a bit viral a decade or so ago when they revealed that they kept an ongoing spreadsheet of their friendships, ranking them based on a series of qualities including attractiveness, wealth, usefulness and the like – that person was Milo Yiannopoulos, and you don’t really want to be like him, do you?
• Ruas Do Genero: The second website in the past year or so which analyses the naming of streets within a city; this project looks at the number of streets in Porto which are named after men compared to those named after women (you may not be wholly surprised to learn there is a disparity between the two), who these people were, and what the choice of streets tells you about relative gender roles in Portugal over the past couple of centuries. There’s some nice, light scrolly webwork on display, but more generally it’s just interesting to see how history and economics and politics (and gender politics) leave their mark on a city’s streets.
• Wobble Clock: I know that pretty much every week here I feature a link followed by a desperate plea for someone to ‘make this for London’ or ‘make this for me’ (you may be interested to learn, by the way, that the total number of times anyone has ever gotten in touch to say ‘yes, Matt, we heard your plea and we WILL make that thing that you requested!’ is zero. You fcuks), but this time I really mean it. PLEASE will someone make this for me? The Wobble Clock is a clock whose hands have a quite delicious degree of tensility, and watching it move is possibly one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had all year (it’s early, but I’m already confident it’ll be hard to beat). Seriously, click the link and get mesmerised by the lovely, springy passing of time.
• Make Your Own Electric Bike: Have you started the year with GRAND PLANS? Perhaps you’re considering finally doing something with that patch of scrubland at the end of the garden? Maybe you’re finally going to learn to code (TOO LATE)? Or are you desperately seeking some sort of meaningful endeavour for 2023, something to help you fill in the increasingly-chilly hours between birth and death, something to confer a bit of STRUCTURE and give you a GOAL, a reason to get up in the morning (do you think, maybe, that I am projecting a touch here? I think possibly I am)? If so, then do I have the 2023 project for you – BUILD YOUR OWN ELECTRIC BIKE OUT OF PLYWOOD (and a few other components)!! This link is actually a couple of years old, but I’ve no reason to think that anything described here will be out of date – it’s a series of detailed instructions, compiled by the nice-seeming Evie Bee, which if followed will result in you eventually having a rather gorgeous, minimal-but-functional wooden velocipede powered by an electric motor. Honestly, if you have a shed and a seemingly-infinite number of grey weekends stretching ahead of you (and, fine, a degree of practical competence of which I can only dream. And maybe a bandsaw, and a jigsaw, and definitely a workbench) then this could be the kickstart your year needs (the initial link is pt1 of the guide, by the way; you can find pt2 here).
• Summer Afternoon: This is small, a bit pointless and utterly lovely – a bit of experimental coding by a certain Vicente, developed to practice their WebGL skills, which lets you wander around a small seaside village and explore what’s going on. Ok, fine, there’s not LOADS happening, but the aesthetic of the place here is just gorgeous, and the overall art style employed is lovely, and, whilst it is A N Other ‘virtual space within which to move an avatar’, it’s also SUCH a nice antidote to the spate of miserable, soulless corporate ‘metaverses’ of which we’ve seen far too many in the past 12 months. If you’re going to make me wander round a 3d environment for no good reason, can you at least make it a pleasingly-cute one like this? Thanks.
• Bloggy Garden: Oh this is cute! “This is a garden of RSS feeds from a variety of sources. It’s updated every couple of days. Each feed is represented by its own shrub. To see just one feed at a time, click one of the moving shrubs. Enjoy exploring!” Serendipitous random discovery with a pleasingly-whimsical facade, pretty much a perfect website (based on the largely-arbitrary criteria I have just invented).
• Magnetic Games: A YouTube channel dedicated to featuring magnets doing cool stuff – you may not think magnets are particularly interesting, but there was a programme on Radio4 yesterday afternoon that explored the science behind magnetism and which basically explained that they are effectively magic, so, actually, you are wrong (you can listen to the show here if you’re interested – it stuck in my mind not only because it was genuinely interesting, but also because it made repeated reference to the ICP song ‘Miracles’, for obvious reasons, and I can’t stress enough how pleasing it is to know that Insane Clown Posse are known to the serious folk over at Broadcasting House). Anyway, this is FULL of great videos of magnetic putty and ferrofluids and generally silly experiments, and if you have any sense of childlike wonder left within the shrivelled husk you call a self then you will enjoy this a lot I think.
• Inegy: This is interesting, if incomplete – Inegy offers you a tool to see how your investment in a particular stock would have performed had you acted based on a set of specific rules. So, for example, if you had bought stock in company X every time it’s popularity on Reddit fell, or if you sold it when it trended up on Google, how would your £100 have fared? This FASCINATES me, and I rather like the idea of a system that would let me play a theoretical competitive game of ‘imaginary plutocrat’ with an investment portfolio and a series of ‘if x, then y’ rules. The gaps here are in the stocks tracked – it’s a VERY partial selection, which makes this less compelling than it might otherwise be – but there’s the faint idea of something genuinely interesting in this which might be worth playing around with.
• The Dog Photography Awards: I am not really a dog person, sorry; I know, I know, man’s best friend, etc, but, well, they smell, and they need taking for walks, and, fundamentally, cats are better. Still, even I can appreciate the majesty of some of the hounds captured in this year’s selection of winners at the Dog Photography Awards (although personally speaking I am disappointed by the lack of Afghans). BONUS DOGS! This is a newsletter post compiling all of the top dogs of 2022, and whilst I wouldn’t ordinarily feature something quite so Hallmark, I equally appreciate that it’s January and it’s miserable and cold, and you could probably do with something to take the edge off.
• The Floppy Museum: All of the information you could EVER possibly want about the history of the floppy disc, hosted on a website which is running off a 286 PC booted from…a floppy disc! Recursive and silly, but also sort of amazing that you can run a functional website on 40 year old tech like that.
• Odeuropa: There are many reasons why Brexit was a fcuking stupid and miserable thing to do, but one of the things that genuinely saddens me more than almost anything else is the fact that in one idiotic swoop the UK removed itself from significant swathes of European scientific collaboration – which means that, as far as I can tell, we have no input into Odeuropa, “a European research project which bundles expertise in sensory mining and olfactory heritage…While museums are slowly discovering the power of multi-sensory presentations, we lack the scientific standards, tools, and data to effectively identify, consolidate, and promote the wide-ranging role scents and smelling have in our cultural heritage. For these reasons, olfactory heritage remains severely under-valued as a resource in both tangible and intangible cultural heritage contexts. Fortunately, some key prerequisites for addressing this problem are already in place. In recent years, European cultural heritage institutions have invested heavily in large-scale digitisation: we now hold a wealth of object, text and image data which can now be analysed using sophisticated computer science techniques. What remains missing is a broader awareness of the wealth of historical olfactory descriptions, experiences and memories contained within them. We recognize this as both a challenge and an opportunity. Odeuropa will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to cultural heritage text and image datasets spanning four centuries of European history, to identify and trace how ‘smell’ was expressed in different languages, with what places it was associated, what kinds of events and practices it characterised, and to what emotions it was linked.” Ok, so the website isn’t exactly thrilling (it is, er, an academic research project, after all), but this is SO interesting; I had honestly never even considered scent and smell as historical concepts worthy of study, but on reflection it makes all sorts of sense – if I happened to work for any luxe/perfume-y brands, I would be trying (and, inevitably, failing) to get them involved with this.
• Nudl: Did you know that one of the most important things that a child can do to promote their healthy, positive development into adulthood is…keeping a diary? No, of course you didn’t, because that statement is patently stupid and wrong, and yet it’s exactly the line being punted by spectacularly-bougie stationery startup Nudl, which is trying to trick parents into buying a monthly diaries for their offspring (in case you’re interested, a whole year’s worth of diaries for a single child will set you back a cool £160ish, which feels…a lot). Why would you do this? WELL LET NUDL TELL YOU!: writing a diary (sorry, ‘journaling’, excuse me while I grind my teeth into nothingness in miserable frustration), provides kids with a “boost in mindfulness, memory and communication skills), scientific studies have also shown that reflection and journaling can lead to better sleep, more self-confidence, a stronger immune system and a higher IQ.” Hang on, what? A stronger immune system? Has…has this claim been fact-checked at all? Anyone interested in buying one of these for their family, please get in touch as I have some magic beans you may also be interested in.
• MegaSociety: There are many, many spectacularly-embarrassing memories from my childhood that I have, for the most part, managed to stuff into a dusty, back-of-mind oubliette and which generally don’t escape – this site, though, sadly reminded me of that time when I was five and I decided I wanted to apply to Mensa (you cannot imagine the horrible hot flushes of shame I am currently experiencing, trust me; I was almost certainly exactly as awful a small child as that small vignette makes me out to be). I didn’t go through with the application for some reason – possibly because I wasn’t the sort of five year old who actually wanted to sit an hour-long assessment featuring logic puzzles in their spare time) – but was reminded of Mensa when I stumbled across the official home of the MEGASOCIETY (my caps), the world’s ULTRA-HIGH IQ SOCIETY! “The Mega Society is a high IQ society open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level on a test of general intelligence credibly claimed to be able to discriminate at that level…The Society exists to facilitate interaction among its members and to assist them in gaining access to resources to accomplish their individual purposes” (that last line – a touch sinister, no?). If you’re interested in becoming a member (I won’t ask what ‘individual purposes’ you are pursuing) then you will have to take this test and then send your results to the Mega Society for marking – please do click the test link and have a look at the questions because they are HORRIBLE and made me feel like I have an IQ in double figures, and I would like you to feel the same way (also, if you click the link and realise that you can do all of the questions without breaking a sweat, please don’t tell me).
• Write Max A Letter: A website that lets you write a letter to one Max Bittker. I don’t know who Max is, or why they might want to hear from you, but in case you fancy sending a small digital postcard to someone who otherwise has no idea you exist then, well, ENJOY!
• 10 Typos: This is good fun – each day you’re tasked with identifying the 10 typos in the presented text as quickly as possible, which is both mildly-diverting and also excellent training should you want to start a short-lived career as a proofreader.
• Hamster Invaders: Another silly little project by Matt Round – Space Invaders! With cartoon hamsters! And featuring the Hamster Dance song by the Cuban Brothers from back in the day! This is fun, even if that song makes me slightly queasy due to some associated memories from Those Times.
• Grow Golf: This week’s final miscellaneous link is this rather fun golf game – see how many balls you can sink whilst at the same time cultivating a small garden. Look, I appreciate that that description will make no sense whatsoever, but I promise that the game is both intuitive and significantly more fun than that cack-penned writeup might suggest.

By Nigel van Wieck

 LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, ENJOY THIS SELECTION OF “JAPANESE AND ASIA SELECTION FUSION, AMBIENT, SYNTH POP, JAZZ AND OBSCURE DISCO” MIXED BY THE FANTASTICALLY-NAMED BASTER JAZZSTER! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

•  Nude Robot: Impressive CG animation with a decently body-horror-ish theme (although that might just be my impression – regardless, there’s something unpleasantly…rubber/meat-y about a lot of this, which in case you’re wondering is very much intended as a compliment).
• The Visual Dome: One of the interesting things about AI image generation is that odd sensation of finding a particular ‘place’ in latent space; a semi-coherent aesthetic that feels new and familiar at the same time, and which is defined enough to explore within. Which is exactly what The Visual Dome is – an Insta account (and, obvs, associated NFT sale – but let’s ignore that side of it) which posts images of a vaguely Wes Anderson-y 50s-ish retrofuture, which all inhabit the same sort of broad vibe…It feels like there is an interesting project somewhere in defining an AI aesthetic for a particular brand, but in general I am just sort of fascinated by projects like these that explore the margins of a visual style.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Martha Rosler

AND NOW, (A SLIGHTLY CURTAILED SELECTION OF) MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

NEW YEAR NEW YOU! You look great and I love what you’ve done with your hair/wardrobe/septum piercing/new gym regimen!

I, though, remain sadly unaltered, despite the benefit of a month’s absence and a whole three weeks spent not really looking at the internet AT ALL (what did I learn? That without the internet I spend more time than is healthy looking inwards and that that is not a good idea, frankly). BUT NOW I AM BACK AND SO IS WEB CURIOS!

I hope that you all had wonderful festive periods, that you managed to rest and relax, and that you are approaching 2023 with vim and vigour and no little spunk, with a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye, and that the glimmering in the distance is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel rather than an oncoming train hurtling towards you at weighty speed.

2022 managed to squeeze in one final death for me, sadly, with our cat passing away at the end of the year, so this first edition of Curios of the year is dedicated to Lebowski, who was excellent and will be missed.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I hope at least one of you has made it a new year’s resolution to ‘click all the links in 2023’.

This was Lebowski, RIP

WE KICK OFF 2023’S SELECTION OF MIXES WITH THIS STAGGERING COLLECTION OF OLD AUTECHRE RARITIES THAT THEY APPARENTLY FOUND DOWN THE BACK OF THE SOFA THE OTHER WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.1:  

By Tommi Parrish

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS LOVELY UPTEMPO MIX OF UNRELEASED NUKG AND TWOSTEP BY XANDER!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE REST OF THE YEAR CONTAINS SIGNIFICANTLY LESS CHAT ABOUT THE ROYAL FAMILY THAN THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS HAVE, PT.2:  

• Colours of Africa: This comes via Anjali Ramachandran’s newsletter and is a gorgeous bit of work by Google’s Arts and Culture team. 60 different artists from across the continent share their work on this site, which you can browse using a lovely colour-based kaleidoscope-style interface which lets you select works by country or colour or artist, and which presents a gorgeous means of exploring varied works in a way that’s significantly more playful and interesting than a standard list of names or works. There’s something rather lovely about the way in which the interface affects the browsing experience, should you care about these little UX flourishes; if you don’t, though, it’s still fascinating to browse through the works and to see the diversity of style and medium on display – a salutary reminder that ‘Africa’ is a VERY BIG continent which contains a LOT of different people and cultures and referring to it monolithically isn’t always hugely helpful or sensible.
• ESPN’s Year in Review: Would YOU like to look back at the past 12 months of SPORTS (as seen from the point of view of North America, which therefore means ‘baseball, basketball, hockey and American football (and some athletics, and maybe a couple of other things, and, if we remember that we have a sizeable hispanic population that quite likes it, maybe some ‘soccer’) via the medium of a lovely scrolly audiovisual smorgasbord of photos and video and writings? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Even given that I am not a particularly enthusiastic consumer of SPORTING MOMENTS – let alone the SPORTING MOMENTS featuring the sort of pituitary meatheads so beloved of the American armchair fan – this is a really impressive piece of archival webwork, pulling together SO MUCH STUFF in one place that it’s rather dizzying. If you have any interest in whether the Bills managed to pull of a third quarter reverse on the Cardinals at the bottom of the seventh down (I am exaggerating my lack of knowledge here, but only very slightly) then you will ADORE this, but even if you’re just a casual sports fan you’ll find loads of great material in here (but probably nothing to convince you that baseball is a proper sport that’s worth watching) (and before you anglos get smug, I would say the same about cricket).
• Close-Up Photographer of the Year: Astonishingly it would seem that this is a photo competition I have NEVER featured in here before – I feel like I have failed in some way. Still, it’s a particularly good one, and the winners here collected of this fourth edition of the contest are pretty spectacular – my personal favourite here is the ‘Gordian Worm Knot’, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own favourites.
• What Is Missing?: “We are witnessing the 6th mass extinctionin the history of the planet.By 2100 50% of all species may face extinction.” So begins the admittedly not very cheery intro to this website, which invites visitors to share memories of the nature they grew up with in order to highlight all that we are losing as we capitalism ourselves into a species-wide early grave. “What Is Missing? is a multi-sited memorial created by Maya Lin to raise awareness through science-based artworks about the present sixth mass extinction of species, connect this loss of species to habitat degradation and loss, and emphasize that by protecting and restoring habitat, we can both reduce carbon emissions and protect species.“ This project has been ongoing for nearly 15 years, but this website is new(ish) and is…well, it’s incredibly fcuking sad if I’m honest, but also rather beautiful.
• The Westminster Accounts: A very UK-centric link, this one, but for all those of you currently freezing your fingers off (WHY IS IT SO COLD AND HOW DID I FORGET SO QUICKLY WHAT WINTERS ARE LIKE IN THIS FCUKING COUNTRY?) in lovely second world England (or Scotland, or Wales), here’s a nice piece of investigative work by media outlet Tortoise (and, fine, Sky News too)  which has gone through all the records of payments received by MPs to create this searchable record of how much cash they have each trousered over the past year. Some of the numbers are astonishing – although my own personal favourite unpopular opinion is that you would see a lot less of this sort of thing if you simply paid politicians more. Look, I know that they already earn a relatively high salary – but, equally, would YOU take a job which paid you 85k a year but which also required you to work approximately 100h weeks, which was basically ALL meetings, where you were literally responsible for the lives and wellbeing of tens of thousands (at least) of people, where you were subjected to intense scrutiny at all times, where you had relatively limited agency and freedom to act as you consider best, and where (and this is the crucial bit, I think) literally EVERYONE (or as close as makes not difference) thinks you’re a cnut and wishes you specific and probably quite physical harm? I posit that you would NOT – unless you were some sort of sociopath, which one might argue is why we’re in this mess. Anyway, if you happen to have a Tory for a local MP and want to put an exact figure on how much you hate them and want them to lose their seat, you will enjoy this.
• URL Animations: I think it’s fair to say that 2023 doesn’t look like it’s going to be a year full of lols, or at least not for those of us who still have to do things like ‘eat’ or ‘pay for a roof over our heads’, so I think it behooves us all to introduce small notes of levity and gaiety wherever we can. It’s in this spirit that I present this link, which offers you a bunch of code which can give you URLs that ANIMATE! Yes, fine, I appreciate that a web address which looks like a shark’s fin swimming up and down your address bar isn’t likely to raise much of a smile when you’re into your fifth month of applying for the final jobs left on the content farm, but, well, it’s all I’ve got right now.
• Leaving: A website that exists solely to tell you how many people are on it at any given moment, and when said people leave again. Which is obviously largely pointless, but equally feels like the sort of thing (and I know I have said this before, which means that either noone reads this stuff or alternatively that noone listens to my BRILLIANT SUGGESTIONS – both are equally likely, tbh) that you could have a bit of fun with on a brand site, with special content that only unlocks when a specific number of people are on a specific page at one time, etc etc. If 420 people are on the Rizla website at 1620 in the afternoon then they all win a free pack of skins, that sort of thing (but, er, less sh1t, obvs).
• Atlas of Blobs: Well this is LOVELY – thankyou to Max Lieberman (and others) who have pulled it together – the website presents a collection of blob-like animations, which have been given names and personalities and descriptions, and it’s honestly quite beautiful just to scroll through and see the works and the prose that the visuals have inspired, and the extent to which movement and form can afford personality to even the least anthropomorphisable of objects. “For this project, Atlas of Blobs, I asked ten artists, designers, researchers, and visual thinkers to pick one of the blob forms I’ve made and write a text to name and describe it. I should say from the start that I have a sort of blob obsession. It’s one of my favourite forms and one I keep coming back to in my daily sketches, over and over again. Blobs are living, organic, and slightly absurd forms modelled on nature. They are always moving—responding, getting larger or smaller, adapting, swimming—and it’s this constant adjusting and redefining of space that gives them their lifelike quality.” I like to think that this is the sort of thing that AI is a long way from producing, but then the more I think about it the more I start to think that actually that’s really not true at all.
• The Dog API: Do YOU want to integrate more canine-related facts into your website or digital project? OH GOOD! “The Dog API provides information on over 340 dog breeds, 20 breed groups, and fun facts. Our data is accurate and constantly updated. Easily integrate this information into your own website or application with our user-friendly API.” If you are going to be involved in building any sort of website this year, regardless of what it’s ostensibly about, you owe it to yourselves (and the rest of the world, and, frankly ME) to include some sort of hidden Dog Facts lookup service as an Easter egg (please someone, do this – in fact, can we make ‘totally unrelated and slightly-whimsical Easter Eggs in otherwise incredibly fcuking dull corporate websites’ a thing in 2023, please? Can we? Can we?).
• Everyday Photo: A bit of a happy/sad project, this one – you may recall Noah Kalina from The Olden Days of the web; he was one of the first people (the first?) to popularise the whole ‘take a photo of yourself each day and make a timelapse video over a year’ thing, and he’s created this website to store each and every photo he’s taken over the course of this now two-decade-plus-long project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Noah would also like to make some cash out of the past 23 years worth of artmaking, and as such he’s also selling the images of his own face as NFTs, just like it was 2021 all over again! I have no idea what the market is for a series of datestamped pictures of one man’s fairly-expressionless face, but if you have a particularly special day from the past 23 years that you think would be best commemorated by an NFT of a photograph of an unsmiling, moderately-internet-famous stranger, then this will be the best thing you see all day.
• Mutalk: I have a fairly strong suspicion that this isn’t in fact real and is some sort of elaborate troll – except I think it’s been featured at CES, which would suggest that someone somewhere thinks that this is a thing that real people will actually one day want to buy. I’m going to say that that is…never going to happen, but why don’t you click the link and see what YOU think? Would you want to buy something which I can only describe as a muzzle, to mask your shouted expletives as you, I don’t know, play Fortnite on one of those 5g enabled stretches of the tube? Are you so worried about people overhearing your SUPER-CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS CHAT that you would be willing to wear something that looks, in all honesty, like a piece of fetishwear in order to keep your conversations secret? In which case you probably want to sign up to the waitlist for this pronto (you absolute weirdo).
• Adopt A Drain: This is sort-of brilliant, but also, on some level, something of an indictment of Californian public services. Would you like to ADOPT A DRAIN in San Francisco? Would you like to become responsible for its maintenance and ensuring it’s not blocked by leaves, mud, or the corpses of San Francisco’s homeless population? Whilst this may sound like an onerous and thankless task, know that by adopting you get to NAME THE DRAIN, which is why there is currently one named ‘Willows Dirty Furby Hole’ and another called ‘Heklina’s Spit Roasting Room’ (I haven’t had time to check, but I would be astonished if there wasn’t one simply called ‘Drussy’). Over 6,000 city residents have apparently signed up to this programme so far, which is LOADS; can we do this in London, please? The names alone would make it worthwhile.
• BirdBuddy: I appreciate that the variety of birds one sees in UK cities isn’t necessarily vast, but if you happen to live somewhere more ornithologically-diverse then you might be interested in this snazzy birdfeeder which features sensors and a camera and some light IoT integration which means it can take pictures of each avian visitor and send it to your phone, telling you what sort of bird it (thinks it) is – which, honestly, is GREAT! If you look at the website you can get a feel for the sort of slightly-confused bird selfies you’ll get sent, and there’s a pleasing feature whereby you can add a bunch of different people to the alerts so that the whole family or household can enjoy the day-to-day comings and goings of whatever feathered friends (or, if we’re honest, thieving squirrels) you happen to have attracted.
• Shift Happens: This is a website built to promote a forthcoming book all about computer keyboards, which if we’re honest is a…pretty niche concern, but which is enlivened by the fact that the website is all EXCITING and INTERACTIVE and generally COOL. You can see a 3d model of the book that takes you inside it and shows you the wonderful production values! You can play a small game where you attempt to remember where all the keys on a keyboard sit! You can try typing with different types and configurations of keyboards! Look, fine, this may not sound like the most groundbreaking or revolutionary interactive functionality, but if you consider that this is – to reiterate – a VERY NICHE book about a VERY NICHE topic, all this interactive gubbins helps make it visible and interesting to a whole new set of audiences (to whit, people who like webspaff), and it feels like a nice little case study about the return of the playful web (if you’re the sort of poor s0d who has to think about things like that for a living).
• The Dunmow Flitch Trials: I’m slightly astonished that I have been alive 43 years and had, until now, failed to learn about the Dunmow Flitch trials – an ancient custom which takes place each year since the early-12th Century and which works as follows: “The Dunmow Flitch Trials exist to award a flitch of bacon to married couples from anywhere in the world, if they can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in ‘twelvemonth and a day’, they have ‘not wisht themselves unmarried again’. A reference to The Dunmow Flitch can even be found in The Wife of Bath’s Tale within Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales.” A flitch, by the way, is an Olde Worlde term for a ‘side’ of bacon – so effectively you can win a lot of meat for being happily married, which sounds like a great deal and something to aspire to. The next Trials take place next year, but that just means you have a lot of time to make sure your marriage is in cracking shape so that you and your spouse can quite literally BRING HOME THE BACON. Honestly, please can one of you compete in this next year, it sounds GREAT.
• Genuary: “GENUARY is an artificially generated month of time where we build code that makes beautiful things…Over the 744 hours of January, for every 24 hours there will be one prompt for your code art. You don’t have to follow the prompt exactly. Or even at all. But, y’know, we put effort into this. You can use any language, framework or medium, on any planet.” So there – this is obviously already halfway done, but if you’re a generative artist it might still be fun to participate, and if you’re interested you can see galleries of each day’s works collected here. Fwiw there is some really beautiful stuff buried in here should you have a spare 10 mins to go spelunking around.
• Sleepagotchi: Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you think that the best and most obvious solution to said trouble is to attempt to gamify your sleep and earn virtual rewards for going to bed on time? ARE YOU SEVEN?!?!?! Ahem. Sleepagotchi is currently in beta and there is a waiting list, suggesting my skepticism as to its efficacy isn’t universal – look, I appreciate that a large part of accepted wisdom around sleeping well is about routines and ‘good patterns’, and if it takes a CG dinosaur offering you small CG badges to help you make those routines stick then, honestly, who am I to judge? It’s interesting to see this second wave of gamification mechanics start to take off, though – this feels very much like the sort of thing that might have been pitched circa 2009, when the first wave of Jane Mcgonigal hype was very much in the ascendancy and we were all a little less cynical about how game mechanics and dark patterns and rewards could be used to manipulate us.
• Literary Britain: A personal project by…someone, who has quite reasonably chosen not to make their name public but who is undertaking an EXCELLENT labour of love by mapping literary references and people and works across the UK; so you can navigate around the map and learn about what particular literary works are from which places, and, honestly, if you’ve any interest in English literary history then you will really like this a lot. I just happened to click on the only entry for Swindon, where I grew up, and it gave me The Thistle Hotel, which, and I quote, “As the ‘Wiltshire Hotel’, was the place where Stephen Fry was arrested for credit card fraud at the age of eighteen.” WHAT A PLACE! WHAT HERITAGE!
• Diffudle: I know I said last year that we would have NO MORE WORDLE CLONES in Curios – but, well, this isn’t really a Wordle clone so I think it’s ok. Diffudle asks you one simple question – what prompt generated the day’s AI-generated image, and it’s surprisingly fun. Basically builds on Damjanski’s ‘Win the NFT by guessing the prompt used to create it’ game from last year, which you all OBVIOUSLY remember.
• That Lonesome Valley: I didn’t honestly think that the first videogame I would play this year would be one liberally inspired by Brokeback Mountain and which involves you playing a city kid whose helping out on a ranch and who may or may not be able to inveigle your way into the handsome local’s dungarees by the end of your stay, nor indeed that I would play said game all the way through to the end, but, well, here we are. This is by ‘veteran’ explorer of gay life through games Robert Yang, and it’s surprisingly fun (even for someone whose tediously straight nature means he’s not hugely motivated by the prospect of seeing pixellated cowboy junk).
• Joe Danger: This week’s last general purpose link is a corker – not one but TWO old-school mobile games, themed around Joe Danger (which means NOTHING to me, but may be something that resonates with those of you less methuselan than I) and which are now playable either in-browser or on your phone and, honestly, just smoothbrain your way through the rest of the day with the clicking and the jumping and the zooming and the lantern-jawed stunting, go on.

By Maxime Ballesteros

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, HERE’S A BEAUTIFUL SELECTION OF ICILY-SMOOTH LOUNGE-ISH NUMBER SELECTED BY MOJO AND WHICH IS PERFECT FOR A COLD WINTER’S DAY IMHO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Beesip: All of the bee-related imagery you could possibly wish for!  God they’re sexy little fcukers, aren’t they?
• Bernie Kaminski: Bernie Kaminski makes papier mache objects (but, like, really GOOD ones), and if you’re anything like me you will feel a small, covetous stab at his paper-and-paste Le Creuset.
• NYC Slice: I have to say that I have never understood the particular appeal of New York’s pizza slice joints – oily cardboard with terrible plastic non-mozzarella is my PIPING HOT TAKE – but I am willing to appreciate that others hold the NYC Slice in high reverence (they are wrong, but wevs). This Insta account documents NYC’s pie shops one slice at a time – this may well make you hungry, fine, but it will also make you appreciate pizza that doesn’t look like a fatberg in waiting.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Roma Auskalnyte

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: