I had a genuinely unsettling experience last night; I was at some sort of PR event thing (it’s organised by a friend of mine, attendance was an act of solidarity rather than an endorsement of an industry I fundamentally despise, honest guv) and it turned out that an unsettling number of people in attendance had at one point or another worked with me at various points in my unsuccessful and peripatetic joke of a ‘career’, and so I ended up standing there while various people I know to varying degrees exchanged ‘amusing’ anecdotes about my professional (mis)demeanour(s) while I stood there feeling not unlike Hugh Grant in that bit in Four Weddings when he gets seated at a wedding table with all his ex girlfriends.

Anyway, hi to anyone I saw yesterday and, also, fcuk you.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and one day (ONE DAY) people will stop going on about that fcuking email I sent that time.

By Piero Percoco

WE KICK OFF WITH A MIX OF WHAT FORMER EDITOR PAUL DESCRIBES AS ‘AMBIENT, DUB AND FOUND AUDIO’, AND WHO AM I TO ARGUE? NO FCUKER, ETC! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHAT SORT OF SOCIOPATH YOU HAVE TO BE IN ORDER TO SCALE THE DIZZY HEIGHTS OF THE SUN’S SHOWBIZ HIERARCHY, PT.1:  

By Alicia Savage

OUR NEXT MIX SEES US RETURN TO THE WELCOMING ARMS OF TOM ‘DAPWEARER’ SPOONER AND HIS RELIABLY-EXCELLENT SELECTION OF OLD SOUL AND FUNK ON VINYL! 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHAT SORT OF SOCIOPATH YOU HAVE TO BE IN ORDER TO SCALE THE DIZZY HEIGHTS OF THE SUN’S SHOWBIZ HIERARCHY, PT.2:      

• Printernet: This doesn’t feel like a new idea, but let’s not worry about that – let us instead glory in the wonderful marriage of analogue and digital that is embodied in Printernet, a service which lets you pull together a collection of ONLINE WORDS and have them printed out and delivered to you as an actual magazine – you can select up to five ‘content blocks’ which will be compiled, printed, bound and mailed to you at your request, all for $10. Which, fine, is possibly quite a lot of cash for what is effectively a printing service, but I very much like the ethos behind it and the idea of taking the online offline, and, honestly, I’m almost tempted to set up a ‘print on demand’ service for people to get old editions of Curios in magazine format (because, honestly, what could be more wonderfully, blissfully pointless than a newsletter full of links WHICH YOU CAN’T CLICK ON? Art, I tell you, art!). Via Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s newsletter, which is very good.
• Sweden Sans: Sweden has its own font! You may have been aware of this already, but I confess to being momentarily thrilled by this discovery – it sent me down a small, momentary rabbithole and made me wonder whether every nation on Earth has its own national typeface, and if so whether these are collected anywhere, and what they might all look like (Guatemala: pleasingly rounded; Tajikistan: aggressive serifs; that sort of thing), and whether or not we should, if these don’t already exist, host some sort of international typography design contest…also I’m intrigued as to the usage rights here, and whether there’s some sort of smallprint buried on the site somewhere which suggests that by using Sweden’s font you’re effectively granting ownership of whatever you write to the Swedish state…If anyone can shed any light on the whole ‘typefaces for countries’ thing, please do let me know.
• Is This How You Feel?: It does feel rather like all the Bad Climate Stuff is happening rather faster than we anticipated – I’ll be honest, I was expecting to have long since shuffled from this mortal coil by the time the whole ‘the earth is basically now just a red-hot fiery space marble’ thing kicked off, and yet here we are in July 2023 with everything looking quite a lot like this might be the beginning of the end (or, more accurately, the end of the beginning) – which makes this link particularly timely. This project is by one Joe Duggan, and is a few years old now – in Joe’s words, “From 2014 to 2015 I approached the world’s leading climate scientists and asked them to respond to one simple question: How does climate change make you feel? Their responses were truly moving. 5 years since the project launched – as Australia burns and floods simultaneously and meaningful global action on climate change appears to be painfully slow if not, totally non-existent, we are revisiting the original contributors and asking them the same question once more.’ITHYF 5′ is a collection of these letters.” The letters here collected, from scientists talking about how they feel about their work, and its meaning, and its possible impact, are heartbreaking – even more so when you realise that you’re looking back at statements written several years ago, and that in the intervening years we have, collectively, achieved what feels very much like the square root of fcuk all when it comes to ameliorating the climate mess.
• Texts From My Ex: This very much feels like A Bad Idea – still, that’s never stopped us before and is unlikely to do so now! Texts From My Ex is a service which will analyse any conversation thread you feed it (you can, if you’re feeling particularly security-agnostic, give it access to your WhatsApp account, or, more sensibly, you can just feed it the text) and determine the ‘health’ of the relationship embodied in the chat, with the basic premise that it can give you an assessment of how you and your significant other (wife, husband, colleague, gimp) communicate and relate to each other. This is a promo gimmick for a dating app, as far as I can tell, but the premise here feels like something that people might actually be interested in, given the current focus on analysing every single aspect of one’s relationships for ‘toxicity’ and ‘boundaries’ and oh god please can everyone stop talking like an airport self-help book it makes me want to die.
• The Graphic Design Archives: “The Graphic Design Archive (GDA) at Rochester Institute of Technology documents and preserves the work of significant American graphic designers active from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as selected contemporary designers working in the modernist traditions. The GDA is a collection maintained within the Cary Graphic Arts Collection and supports all areas of design education at RIT as well as research by scholars from around the world. While many of the GDA collections represent the complete surviving work of a particular designer, some are smaller sample collections that document a portion of a designer’s career. The collections contain original source materials documenting the designers’ working lives, and include such unique items as original artwork, sketchbooks, sculptures, architectural models, reliefs, and printed samples (tear sheets, proofs and sample issues of publications). In addition, many of the archives includes photographs and slides, as well as audio tapes and film.” This is a SUPERB archive for anyone interested in the history and practice of design.
• Tiler: A fun little webapptoything built by Deepak Gulati and based on the Internet Archive’s record of an old catalogue of ceramic tiles, this lets you create a vast array of different tiled and tesselated patterns from the classic designs from the 1800s. If you’re interested you can read more about the project here, but otherwise it’s just a really enjoyable tool to fiddle with and make pleasingly-geometric patterns.
• Uranienborg: Roald Amundsen, as you all doubtless know, was a Norwegian arctic explorer and all-round action man who lived in the late-19th and early-20th century and is something of a Norwegian national hero – this website is all about the house he lived in, which is now a museum but which those of you unable to make the pilgrimage to scandiland can explore via the medium of this site, which lets you see a detailed 3d scan of the property and explore its various rooms and learn the stories behind Amundsen’s life – I appreciate that not everyone will derive intense satisfaction from the ability to explore a three-dimensional model of the toilet of a 19thC Norwegian house in which a renowned explorer once defecated, but for those few souls who have been waiting their whole life for such an opportunity then, well, YOU’RE WELCOME.
• The Perpetual Stew Club: This is, I appreciate, Very New York (specifically, Very Brooklyn), but I am charmed by the fact that this is happening (and also Annie Raewerda who’s responsible makes a bunch of internet stuff I really like and so I’m happy to pimp her projects). This is a small website alerting people who live in New York to the fact that Annie has been cooking the same pot of stew for (at the time of writing) 43 days now, and that if they want to try some they can come to one of her weekly stew evenings where she doles out the slop and people can bring their own ingredients to contribute to the forevermeal. The concept of ‘perpetual stew’ is not a new one, but there’s something very NOW about the idea of this sort of frugal, communal eating project (or, again, perhaps it’s just VERY NEW YORK) which I very much enjoy. This feels very much like the sort of thing Vittles might end up replicating in London (and I mean that in a nice, non-snarky way).
• Blackout: Digital toys that help you create blackout poems are not new per se, but reader Thom Wong sent me this variant on the theme which rather appealed to me; each time you visit the page you’re presented with one of nearly 10,000,000 excerpts from Project Gutenberg which you can then turn into your very own little pome by exposing a selection of words. Simple, but there’s something pleasing about the fact that each reload gives you the chance to create something utterly unique.
• Enigma: Cards on the table here – I do not understand this AT ALL and as such I can’t adequately assess whether it actually does what I think it’s meant to do or whether it’s just an elaborate and nicely-designed hoax. Still, those of you with a better understanding of cryptography might be able to enlighten me as to whether this is a Real Thing or not – this is (apparently) a working model of the Enigma machine, famously used by The Bad People in WWII to hide their nefarious communications from The Good People. This model seems to be a working digital representation of the encryption mechanism, showing you in detail how the cryptographic mechanism functioned – but, as stated, the lack of anything resembling an ELI5 narrative for idiots means that I’m left staring at the graphics on the page like an orangutan attempting to master binary. Maybe you’ll fare better. Still, it LOOKS nice.
• Dudel: A lovely little creative apptoy, this – every day the app gives you a different shape which you can use as an inspirational canvas on which to draw. This is based on the basic principle that we all see shapes and patterns in everything, much in the same way as we see shapes in clouds, and can function either as a soothing quotidian creative exercise OR as some sort of long-running Rorschach test whereby you can undertake an ongoing assessment of your own mental health (if you find yourself turning the shapes into corpses three days in a row, seek help!).
• Reflect: Many years ago I briefly became obsessed with Evernote- which, you may have heard, is going through something of a time right now – until I realised that, actually, I don’t actually care that much about ordering and sorting the vast piles of crap in my head after all. Still, if you are someone who wishes that they had all of their memories, their thoughts, the weird little lists that they make on the back of receipts, their dreams and their brainfarts all linked and annotated and interconnected then you may find that Reflect is the perfect solution for you – as is the law in mid-2023, it obviously has an AI LAYER (fcuk knows why, if I’m honest, but I think there’s a vague ‘turn your scattered thoughts into coherent prose via the magic of GPT’ thing built in here), but the main sell here is the annotated infodump and the whole ‘extension of your brain’ thing – it’s priced at $10 a month, which you may or may not think is worth paying for what’s basically just a fancy digital filing cabinet for your extended brain.
• World of Playing Cards: Have you ever lain awake at night dreaming feverishly of a future in which you can have every single piece of information about the historty of playing cards at your fingertips? REJOICE FOR THAT FUTURE IS HERE! World of Playing Cards is a pleasingly-old-school site which has obviously been aroujnd for a while and which seemingly exists for no other purpose than to afford the curious and the obsessive an opportunity to glory in the wonderful ludic history of suits and face cards and jokers and the like. This is, honestly, GREAT – the section of ‘playing cards from around the world’ is a partciular highlight – although I confess to being a bit disappointed that there doesn’t appear to be a section dedicated to the ‘exotic’ playing cards which every 1980s schoolchild purchased on trips to The Continent (if you claim otherwise, know that I know you are lying).
• Rail Cow Girl: In a week strangely replete with Norwegian links, this is the YouTube channel of a train driver who films her beautiful, relaxing, picturesque journeys across Norway, though snowfields and past fjords, encompassing some stunning scenery. This is basically the pinnacle of ‘slow TV (or at least I presume it is – these videos are LONG, and as a result I’ve only seen bits of them and so can’t totally guarantee that it doesn’t all get a bit ‘Aliens’ around the three-hour mark).
• You Are Atlas: I always say this, but I am SUCH a sucker for sites that track the number of people currently visiting them and which alter their content accordingly in reaction – You Are Atlas is very silly and totally pointless (just how we like it) – it tells you how many people are currently on the site, and tells you that if noone is there  the sky will fall (the site’s visitors are Atlas, holding up the sky – DO YOU SEE?). To date, the sky has fallen 352 times – keep this webpage open forever and ensure that it NEVER FALLS AGAIN.
• James Yawn’s Rockets: A wonderful example of monomaniacal online weirdness, this – James Yawn has been maintaining this website for YEARS, on which he documents his enthusiasm for, and adventures in, home-made rocketry. James apparently specialises in making propellant from sugar, which sounds, frankly, insane and like the sort of thing that were you to attempt it in London might get you in not insignificant trouble with The Authorities, but which you can probably get away with if you like in, say, North Dakota and your nearest neighbour is approximately 60 miles to the West. Anway, if you’d like to experiment with blowing things up – and, quite possibly, yourself, and your neighbours – then you will ADORE this. NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for injury or criminal charges resulting from your use of this website, or indeed for any lists that you might end up finding yourself on as a result of manufacturing 300 kilos of sucrose-based rocket propellant in your kitchen.
• Fudge: Tetris, but backwards! Yes, I know that that makes no sense whatsoever but I promise that as soon as you start playing it will all fall into place (lol).
• Snip It: This is a fun little game, knocked up as part of an AI games jam – explore inside different classic paintings, clipping away elements to see what lies within, and behind, the different canvases. This is imaginative and really nicely made, considering it was hacked together in a couple of days, and it’s a good example of some of the ways in which generative AI can be used to accelerate the development of things like this (and, creatively, how the idea of ‘imagining outside the frame’ can be used for ludic purposes). BONUS AI ART GAME: this is a version of 2048 which uses AI-generated image assets; derivative, but, again, a nice example of how this makes reasonable-quality in-game artwork available to all (mobile only, FYI).
• All of the Flash Games: Look, this is a truly incredible resource and it contains basically every Flash game ever made, and if you spent any time on Newgrounds or similar in the early-00s then this is basically like time travel. You will get NOTHING ELSE done today if you click on this link – but, look, your job’s pointless and we’re all dying, so who the fcuk cares, eh? BONUS FLASH ARCHIVE: more games here!
• Big Ben: Finally this week, Matt Round has created something genuinely brilliant – a word game which thanks to its ingenious construction presents you with an entirely different puzzle depending on the exact time, to the second, that you land on the site. This is so, so smart – the almost-infinite replayability, the simple game mechanics, the nice touches like the day/night cycle in the background…honestly, Matt is SO GOOD at these things, and I am always slightly baffled that he’s not permanently assailed by agencycunts like you (and, ok, like me) begging him to make cool things for their dreadful clients (to be clear, I have no idea whether Matt would actually take these commissions – so, er, sorry Matt if you are now inundated with requests for stuff that you would rather eat your own face than build). This is GREAT, and incredibly addictive.

By Christopher Burk 

 YOUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SUPREMELY-CURATED SELECTION OF OLD GROOVES AND LOUNGE AND PSYCHEDELIA MIXED BY AL USHER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Manuel Alvares Diestro: Via the excellent Things Magazine comes the Insta feed of photographer Manuel Alvares Diestro, whose imagery focuses (mostly) on high-rise and urban architecture in incongruous locations. You may not think that sounds like your sort of thing, but you are wrong.
• Toon Joosen: Cut-out, collage-y art with a strong focus on the interplay between image and text, this is excellent work.
• Gregory Climer: Gregory Climer makes textile-based art which features imagery drawn from gay porn; I never thought that I would want a quilt embroidered with a low-res pixellated image of a leather daddy, and yet, well, now I find that that is EXACTLY what I want.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Philip Lindeman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hi! I’m back! Has…has anything been happening? Did I miss anything?

LOL JK! Sadly I missed NOTHING – one of the side effects of being an occasional pseudo-journalist (not this, to be clear – I promise you I am under no illusions as to what THIS is, and it’s certainly not journalism) is that holidays don’t really exist – and they certainly don’t when your beat happens to be ‘social media’ and when That Fcuking Man and Adam Mosseri combine to drop two of the biggest stories of the year in a week when ordinarily I should have been catatonic with drink and sun and souvlaki. So it is that my planned ‘take two weeks largely offline’ ended up instead being ‘spend a week fighting Twitter’s rate limit (and my own very strong desire to fcuk it all into the sun and just ignore the whole horrible mess) to try and keep up with the news’ – still, I FILED COPY AND THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS.

Anyway, I am back now and have once again plugged myself into The Feeds in order to bring you – yes, YOU! – some INTERESTING AND ECLECTIC CONTENT.

YOU DON’T GET THIS ON THREADS. Which, presumably, is why it has 10m+ users and Web Curios…doesn’t. Perhaps I should take notes.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and next time if you ask nicely I’ll send you a postcard.

***TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

While I was away, the shortlist for the Tiny Awards was announced – you have until Monday to vote, if you haven’t already, so please take a moment to visit the website, check out the nominations (a genuinely lovely selection of projects, chosen by our esteemed selection committee, and which I think present a beautiful cross-section of what the web can be when it’s small and non-commercial and personal and playful and FUN). Vote! Share the URL! Tell your friends!

The winner will be announced by Matt Klein over at ZINE next week – after which we’ll put a link to all the entries up on the website, so you can enjoy the 300+ sites that were submitted. Thanks again to everyone who’s shown an interest and who’s participated in any way – it has been so, so heartening seeing people’s enthusiasm, and it’s hugely appreciated.

***END OF TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

By Henrietta Harris

OUR FIRST PLAYLIST OF THE WEEK IS A LOVELY SELECTION OF TRACKS PULLED TOGETHER AS PART OF THE MARKETING FOR CHUCK TINGLE’S NEW NOVEL ‘CAMP DAMASCUS’, AND WHILE I WOULDN’T ORDINARILY LINK TO PROMO STUFF I WILL MAKE AN EXCEPTION FOR THIS BECAUSE CHUCK CONTINUES TO BE ONE OF MY FAVOURITE ONLINE PEOPLE AND ALSO BECAUSE I AM A SUCKER FOR THE WHOLE ‘SOUNDTRACKS FOR CHARACTERS FROM NOVELS’ THING WHICH IS GOING ON HERE, AND ALSO BECAUSE I JUST REALLY LIKE THIS PARTICULAR SET OF SONGS! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY FCUKING HOPES THAT THE SUN GETS TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS, PT.1:  

By Tajette O’Halloran

NEXT, ENJOY THIS TECH-HOUSE SET SENT INTO ME BY READER RAF – THANKS RAF! – WHICH IS A PERFECT INTRO TO YOUR WEEKEND! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY FCUKING HOPES THAT THE SUN GETS TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS, PT.2:      

• XAi: I am loathe to give That Fcuking Man any more of the publicity he so desperately craves, but on the other hand this initiative does claim to have as its ultimate aim ‘to understand the true nature of the universe’, so it feels like we should probably pay at least a bit of attention. What is XAi? Noone really knows yet, or at least not until the press conference happening on Spaces later on today – still, what we can say for certain is that there are no women involved (‘ONLY MEN CAN POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE TRUE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE’ is 100% something I can imagine That Fcuking Man thinking on some fairly ingrained level), and that, based on his previous burblings about the dangers of ‘woke’ AI and his recent charming decisions to amplify the beliefs and viewpoints of such charmers as Carlson, Tate et al, there’s a pretty strong likelihood that what we’re going to end up with is a chatbot that seeks to ‘understand the universe’ by ‘just asking questions!’ about, say, the right of trans people to exist, or why George Soros might in fact be the devil. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE, etc etc.
• Love The Work More: Now that Cannes is once again done and dusted for the year, it’s time to look back over the runners and riders and winners and losers to see which of the work can be mined for ‘inspiration’ (lol) – except to access the full list of winners and the work, you need paid access to the Lions site. Or at least you used to need that – thanks to this site, anyone can now get the list of winners and details of what the fcuk they did for free! Which is obviously genuinely useful if this is the sort of thing you have to do for a living (I am so, so sorry), although I personally have a fairly strong belief that if all you’re looking at for inspiration for your advermarketingprbollocks is other advermarketingprbollocks then your work will be intensely mediocre at best. Still, if you’ve ever wanted the ability to go back and see all the people who won a bronze lion in 2002, or to see whether or not you can lift a 20 year old bit of creative wholesale two decades later (you can, trust me) then this will be PERFECT. A quick aside – was there anyone who *didn’t* win a Bronze Lion this year? It certainly doesn’t fcuking look like it (I mean, obviously *I* didn’t, but hey ho).
• The Labyrinth Locator: I have mentioned here before that I have something of a ‘thing’ for mazes and labyrinths (and also that one of my favourite ever novels is about a man who designs them for a living – it’s called ‘Larry’s Party’ and it’s by Carol Shields and I recommend it unreservedly), and this website gave me a genuine frisson of joy when I stumbled across it this week – you can search by city, by country, by geographical radius…basically you have no excuse whatsoever for not using this every time you go on holiday to find the nearest maze to your destination and going and enjoying it (NB – obviously you don’t have to listen to my mild hectoring on this subject, but I promise you that MAZES ARE ACE).
• HyperMegaTech: I try not to feature too many sites that are just tryingto flog you a thing, but I’ll make an exception for this because it looks very cool indeed and I think quite a few of you might be into it. HyperMegaTech is a company that makes handheld consoles, and their latest versions, launching in a few months, look GREAT – they’re designed to look a bit like an original Gameboy but with a colour display and better graphics, and the consoles cost the frankly insane amount of £49, and come pre-loaded with a bunch of classic, licensed games (you can get a Capcom version which comes with SFII, Mega Man and a load of other games from their catalogue, or a Taito version which does the same but for, er, Taito) and which you can buy additional cartridges for to further bolster your collection…look, obviously this might be a massive con and I offer the usual ‘caveat emptor’, but it looks GREAT.
• Cosmos: I’m not 100% certain that anyone particularly *needs* a site/app which can best be described as ‘Pinterest, but with a minimal aesthetic and a generally ‘cool’ vibe, designed for designers and visual creatives to moodboard with’, but, well, here it is anyway! This isn’t publicly available yet, but you can sign up to the waitlist should you be so minded.
• Molecule of the Month: A PERFECT CURIO! Well, near-perfect – a perfect Curio would probably feature fewer people from Eton, but still. Molecule of the Month is a site which has been apparently going for YEARS – it self-describes as “one of the longest running chemistry webpages on the internet. Each month since January 1996 a new molecule has been added to the list on this page. The links will take you to a page at one of the Web sites at a University Chemistry Department or commercial site in the UK, the US, or anywhere in the world, where useful (and hopefully entertaining!), information can be found about a particularly interesting molecule.” I am honestly FASCINATED by this – the longevity! The fact that it appears to be an almost-entirely UK-based endeavour! The inexplicable popularity of the site amongst current Eton students, who seem to be contributing a disproportionate number of the molecules and links here! Anyway, this month’s featured molecule is White Phosphorous (nasty) nominated by one Roderick Edmonds of, yes, Eton (special shoutout to his collegemate from a few months ago, by the way, the fabulously-named Henry Goss-Custard), but take a moment to scroll back through time all the way to 1996 and marvel at the fact that this has just kept on going and going and going. Why? I HAVE NO FCUKING CLUE, but it pleases me a great deal.
• RedditSpeak: Plug in any subReddit you care to name and listen as this site reads out the posts to you one by one. So, for example, you can keep this open in a tab and have it read you every single ‘AITA’ post while you work – or (and I am ashamed to say that this is exactly what I ended up doing with it) you can just plug in your favourite bongo sub and enjoy the explicit descriptions being read out in a joyless robotic monotone, which I personally found very, very funny indeed (NOT IN A SEXY WAY).
• CloneDub: This is interesting – can’t vouch for how well it works, but the concept is a fascinating one. CloneDub lets you take any audio recording in English and turn it into an audio recording in a number of other languages, but keeping the vocal style and intonation of the original. So, for example, YouTubers might use this to quickly create a translated audiotrack for their content which keeps the style and inflections of their native speech, or you could Cyrano your CEO into being fluent in Hindi. This feels like it could be used for some fun things if you’re marginally more imaginative than I am.
• The Realtime Air Pollution Map: You may not want to spend too much time looking at this – after all, there’s enough other stuff to worry about, amirite? – but should you fancy staring through yet another porthole into the terrifying apocalyptic future that increasingly seems to await us as we continue to blow past environmental targets with the sort of breezy abandon that increasingly smacks of a collective deathwish then you might enjoy this site, which offers you a near-realtime overview of air quality around the world. On the plus side, London’s looking pretty good this morning! On the minus side, you REALLY don’t want to be on Sanli Street in Hefei right now (or indeed pretty much anywhere in South East Asia tbh).
• Visible Earth: WOW. I am slightly amazed that I hadn’t linked this before, but WHAT a resource this is – consider it a small antidote to the last envirohorror link. Visible Earth is “a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet”, and it is wonderful – it turns out if you zoom out far enough, everything looks sort-of ok!
• The Drone Photo Awards 2023: I have included this for a few years now, and I find that I am getting an increasing sense of ennui around drone work in general – so much of this stuff is so compositionally-similar that it very much blends into one uniform style, and nowhere is that more evident in the ‘Weddings’ category which does rather feel like one big cliche made JPEG (also lol at the fact that one of the wedding images in the ‘commended’ category is titled ‘Heaven’s Gate’ – er, guys, you…you do know the connotation there, don’t you?). Still, there are still some interesting shots in here if you dig around the categories – in particular the ‘Abstract’ shots are rather beautiful, although, if you dig in, often for rather miserable reasons.
• Bavet: This is the website for a chain of pasta restaurants in Belgium, and not the sort of thing I would normally bother featuring were it not for the fact that the branding is so insanely EXTRA and I genuinely love the fact that they lean into it so hard, from the copy to the site itself. I am very, very far away from being the target market for this sort of place (about two decades away, to be exact), but it’s refreshing to see a brand that feels fun in a way that isn’t moodboarded and focus grouped to fcuk (I am going to feel very, very silly if one of you emails me from Belgium to explain that, in fact, that is exactly what this in fact is).
• TwitterGPT: Thanks Alex for sending this my way – plug in any user’s Twitter handle and this site will give you a GPT-juiced description of WHO THEY REALLY ARE. This is more funny than anything else – although it absolutely nails me inside a paragraph, which is a bit dispiriting: “this individual is likely involved in the field of web curation or content aggregation. They frequently mention and promote a newsletter called “Web Curios,” which suggests a professional interest in curating and sharing interesting online content. Additionally, they express a need for a holiday, indicating a potential career in a demanding industry.” WELL QUITE.
• Goblin Bet: You will, of course, be familiar with SaltyBet, the now-legendary site that spawned the AutoBattler game genre and which has been going for years and which lets visitors bet fictional currency on the outcome of an infinite series of character battles between superheroes and game protagonists – well this is that, but with a vague fantasy bent. So if you’ve ever wanted to put 50 imaginary quid on the outcome of a CPU vs CPU fight between (as is happening at the time of writing) a vampire and an adult brass dragon (and, let’s be honest, which of us hasn’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then this will be pleasing in the extreme. I’ll be honest, I expected to bounce off this immediately but then found myself 15 minutes later becoming surprisingly invested in whether or not I’d make back by losses by putting a longshot 100 on a kobold, so be warned (also, I think that might be the geekiest thing I have written here in some time and I really hope my girlfriend doesn’t bother reading this week’s issue).
• The Zone: This is really interesting – the Zone is a lightweight TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) which you can play either in-person or through the website, and which is based on the premise that most of the players will die and as such frees you to engage with the scenarios and material in a freer way than you might otherwise – you’re not playing to win, after all, so go wild with your imaginations. The web interface is particularly impressive, to my mind, and allows for some pretty sophisticated online play, and the scenarios are plentiful, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to roleplay (NOT LIKE THAT) but who doesn’t always have time for a full campaign session, this could be a pleasing addition to your personal panoply of games.
• Yeti Upsetti: If you’re Of An Age, you will have fond memories of Ski Free, a game that came bundled with old versions of Windows in which you played a tiny skier who competed on a downhill course and who would, if you played for too long, inevitably get devoured by a yeti whose clutches it was impossible to escape (you can play that here, should you so wish – and you do, I promise you). This version lets you play as the yeti – try and devour as many skiers as possible before you die of hunger. This is VERY SATISFYING, not least the animation as the yeti chomps down on yet another Salomon-clad home counties dweller.
• Windows Defender: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is this BRILLIANTLY-designed game in the style of Vampire Survivors – I’m not going to try and explain it as I’d only make a pig’s ear of the attempt, but it’s simple and fun and so, so nicely put together, to the point that I’d almost describe it as ‘elegant’. This is 10 minutes of genuine, no-brain fun and it will CLEANSE YOUR SOUL, I promise.

By Mia Risberg

WE CLOSE OUT THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF DISCO AND FUNK AND LATIN TUNES COMPILED BY DOM WILLIAMS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Ipikan: Thanks to Andrea for sending this my way – Ipikan is a French craftsperson who makes embroidery, often of anatomical things. So if you’ve ever wanted a beautifully-made bit of cross stitch of an anatomically correct human heart – and which of us hasn’t? – then this will very much scratch an itch for you.
• Atelier Simon Weisse: As far as I can tell, this is the Insta feed of a special effects studio which has most recently been engaged by Wes Anderson to make miniatures and dioramas for his latest self-indulgent pastel opus (sorry, but) – if you’d like to see a bunch of REALLY impressive model trains and canyons and markets and all sorts of other things (and you do, these are amazing and scratch that very particular miniaturists’ itch) then you will very much enjoy this.
• Who Shot Duncan?: As previously mentioned, my pop culture knowledge is patchy at best, but I am pretty sure that Duncan Killick isn’t in fact a celebrity (yet) – but that doesn’t stop him running his Insta account as though he is. Duncan photoshopped into headlines, Duncan being papped, Duncan launching a celebrity fragrance…it’s all here. I imagine that this is significantly funnier if you know Duncan in person, but it’s still gently amusing even for strangers (or maybe just me), and his commitment to the bit is genuinely laudable.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Karlis Rekevics

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO!

I am always reminded around this time of year of that time approximately nine years ago, when I was still working at Hill+Knowlton and Web Curios was (remarkably) published on the company’s actual, proper corporate website, and I chose to open a late-June edition with a riff about how I was alone in the office because all of my colleagues were either necking pills in a field in Somerset or snorting cocaine off the tanned midriffs of Central European hookers on the Croisette. I then went for something of a ‘long’ lunch with a mate, during which I received a phonecall from the company’s global head of digital in the US who had received…some complaints, and who was informing me that a) that week’s edition of Web Curios was sadly nuked from the web; and b) I should probably sober up, as there was an ‘awkward conversation’ in my future.  MEMORIES!

Anyway, how are you all? Have you had your fill of grim disaster bongo? Have you worked out exactly which of your internal organs you’re going to sell first to keep up with the repayments? Have you w4nked yourself dry after winning some leonine statuettes? DID YOU BRING THE DRUGS?!?!?!

Frankly I don’t care about the answers to any of those questions, as I am off on holiday for a couple of weeks and Web Curios is OFFICIALLY OFF DUTY until mid-July. Take care of yourselves, try not to die (but, if you must, do so cleanly), and don’t forget about me while I’m gone YOU FCUKS.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you’re at Glastonbury PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN FFS.

***A SMALL TINY AWARDS UPDATE***

Thanks so much to everyone who nominated a site – we were slightly overwhelmed by the volume and quality of entries, and I got a bit emo about it tbqhwy. The selection panel is currently whittling down the entries, and the final nominations for the public vote will be announced in a week or so on the website – check back there, or follow Kristoffer’s newsletter, or just wait til I’m back and I’ll tell you then; voting will be open for ages, so there’s no rush. THANKS AGAIN TO EVERYONE WHO HAS GIVEN EVEN THE MOST CURSORY OF FCUKS ABOUT THIS SMALL ENDEAVOUR, IT IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

By Philipp Keel

WE BEGIN WITH A RARE ANDREW WEATHERALL BOOTLEG OF SOME MID-90S HIPHOP, WHICH I APPRECIATE IS A CONCATENATION OF WORDS WHICH MAY WELL MEAN NOTHING TO YOUNGER READERS BUT WHICH I I PROMISE MEANS THAT THIS IS WORTH CLICKING ON!

THE SECTION WHICH IS ALREADY BRACED FOR THE GRIM INEVITABILITY OF THE ‘SUBMARINE SON’ NETFLIX SIX-PARTER COMING IN 2024, PT.1:  

By Chad Wright

YOUR NEXT MIX IS THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF SUPREMELY-SUMMERY HOUSE-Y SOUNDS MIXED BY LABEL8! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS ALREADY BRACED FOR THE GRIM INEVITABILITY OF THE ‘SUBMARINE SON’ NETFLIX SIX-PARTER COMING IN 2024, PT.2:    

• The Whale Carbon Project: It feels uncontroversial to point out that a significant proportion of the industries that exist around carbon storage, carbon capture and carbon offsetting are at heart massive lies, designed to provide large corporations with the fig leaf of environmental responsibility whilst at the same time enabling them to continue merrily with the sort of business practices that are slowly fcuking us into the sun, environmentally speaking – still, I couldn’t help but fall slightly in love with this website/initiative which is, insofar as I can tell, trying to convince us that we can store excess carbon in, er, whales. Oh, ok, fine, it’s not *quite* that mad – but it does, if I’m reading this right, suggest that businesses should be able to claim some sort of carbon offsets by, er, helping to protect the plankton-hoovering undersea mammals. “Blue carbon is the carbon captured by marine and coastal ecosystems, and is an essential component to slowing the impact of climate change. Whales play a key ecological role in the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but they have so far been largely overlooked by blue carbon and biodiversity initiatives.There are currently few incentives for industries to take measures to avoid harming whales. The Whale Carbon Plus Project is developing methodology based on remotely sensed images to quantify the contribution of whales to carbon sequestration and ecosystem resilience of the open ocean, and compensate ocean stakeholders that actively protect them.” Is this a thing? It feels…honestly, it feels like total bullsh1t, but I am obviously a know-nothing bozo when it comes to science and am willing to concede that I quite possibly don’t know what I’m talking about (on the offchance that any of you understand this stuff, er, can someone explain it to me please?).

• Wikihouse: With the news this week that the simple act of ‘not being homeless’ in the UK is set to start costing upwards of three million pounds a day (I exaggerate, but only slightly) I can imagine that for some of you the possibility of building your own home, mortgage free, might seem rather more appealing than spending the rest of your in hock to the bank. Wikihouse is a really interesting initiative designed to help people who want to build their own home in a manner that’s affordable, sustainable and modular, and which offers all the guidance you need to get started. “WikiHouse is a manufactured building system for houses (actually, it can be used for many kinds of small building). It uses structural timber (usually plywood) sheets which are cut to 0.1mm precision, and assembled into basic building blocks, which can be delivered to site, then rapidly and accurately assembled by almost anyone, even if they don’t have traditional construction skills. Unlike some other manufactured building systems, WikiHouse is not produced in a large multi-million pound factory. WikiHouse parts can be digitally fabricated using a 4’x8′ CNC machine. This means that parts can be manufactured by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in local micro-factories, that can be set up for a fraction of the cost. In fact, thousands already exist. Timber panels, e.g. plywood, are the perfect material for fabricating WikiHouse. Plywood is stronger and less sensitive to humidity variations than traditional sawn timber, and it is lighter than bricks, concrete and steel. This is translated into a much faster fabrication, more rapid assembly on site without heavy lifting equipment, and appealing internal finishing.” Such a good idea, this, which feels like it ought to be better known than it currently is.
• Sh1t British Pics: OH GOD THIS IS GOOD. A Twitter account – a BRAND NEW Twitter account! Fresh ish on a dying platform! – which exists solely to share terrible images of British cultral history culled from the Getty Images archives. So you’ll find gems like ‘the boyband Blue opening an exhibit at Madame Tussauds’, say, or, more specifically, ‘Eastenders’ Gus and his girlfriend are denied entry to the Brit Awards afterparty at Movida in London (2006)’. This is AMAZING, and mines very much the same sort of vein of low-culture English weirdness that you’ll find in the similarly-wonderful Daytime Snaps run by my friend Nick – fine, you’ll have to be British to really get the most out of this, but you’ll forgive me the occasional anglocentric link because, well, LOOK HOW SH1T EVERYTHING IS HERE LET ME AT THE VERY LEAST OCCASIONALLY ROLL AROUND IN THE FILTH. Also, can you believe that “Stelios Haji-Ioannou Launches Easy Pizza – Press Conference (2004)” is a thing that a) happened; and b) demanded a photocall? Madness.
• Sentr: Do any of you play in a Sunday League football team? Or perhaps you’re of an age where instead you spend your weekends driving your offspring to take part in matches where you and a selection of other parents spend a happy 90 minutes screaming spittle-flecked imprecations against the poor fcuker who’s giving up their free time to watch your Bambi-legged progeny flail across the grass in pursuit of the ball. Either way, if you take your weekend agonistic entertainment TOO SERIOUSLY then you may well adore this new company which basically lets you keep REALLY ACCURATE STATS about your Sunday league team so that you can once and for all prove WITH STATS that Fat Tony actually improves the team’s performance by an average 0.3pts a game when you stick him out on the right wing and basically ignore him. On the one hand, this is pretty cool and a smart idea – on the other, it does equally feel like the sort of thing that will lead at least one member of the side to start thinking of themselves as some sort of stats/data genius and producing FBRef-style  pizza charts to demonstrate why it is actually vital that they play a traditional trequartista role (and never track back).
• Show Your Stripes: Whilst the idea of visualising climate change as a series of strips of colour along a timeline (look, click the link, you’ll see what I mean – what do you mean ‘ffs Matt your descriptions are a fcuking joke’?) isn’t new, I think this website is; created by the University of Reading, this site lets you pick any country you like and see exactly how scary the ‘everything’s getting hotter!’ trend looks for that specific place. These are…troubling, frankly – I just went and looked up Italy and the way all the lines go maroon after about 2013 did rather look like Bad News – so if you’d rather not have a bracing dose of climatehorror today then perhaps skip this one.
• Bagel Reviews: On the one hand, I can’t imagine that there are two many of you who are desperate for a small website which exists solely to review the various bagels available in various places in the US; on the other, for all I know I might have a sizeable and VERY HUNGRY American readership for whom this will be an invaluable resource.
• WebPills: Another website collecting examples of notable and high-quality webdesign, these collated by one Ludovic Losco (fabulous name, by the way). This has some really nice work on it – again, most of which I’ve not seen before – and as an inspiration source it’s very good indeed.
• Counter Forms: I love the design of this site SO MUCH. “Counter Forms is a platform that champions emerging, discursive, antipodean type designers. Driven by typographic research, education and advocacy, we publish original typefaces and texts towards a more accessible, diverse and equitable future.”  The homepage is arranged as a series of notes-in-windows, a bit like digital post-it notes, and there’s something particularly charming about the way the interface design makes the content feel…fluid and personalisable in a way.
• Trashfiles: SO MUCH HIGH CONCEPT! “A captivating user-generated archive meticulously documents the presence of discarded items across the globe. This collection not only provides visitors with a thought-provoking experience, encouraging them to contemplate the impact of our actions on the environment, but also serves as a wellspring of digital assets for artists and designers seeking to craft works centered around ecological themes.” This is simultaneously fascinating and depressing – basically anyone is invited to take a LIDAR scan of discarded packaging materials that they find and upload it to the site, creating this ongoing digital record of the physical detritus with which we’re slowly (and, increasingly, quickly) suffocating ourselves and the planet.
• AI-Enabled Webscraping: Yes, I know, it’s a VERY BORING heading – but, equally, this is potentially very useful and so I shan’t apologise for it (SO THERE). This site’s called ‘Kadoa’ (no, me neither) and it basically lets you perform reasonably-complicated web scraping tasks with no coding required, all thanks to the MAGIC AND POWER OF AI. Which, if you’ve an idea for anything that leverages publicly available data at scale, could be really useful.
• Zelda Builds: I imagine that either you or someone you know is currently obsessed with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and, specifically, the crafting system which means that you can literally build gyrocopters and laser cannons and, astonishingly, rudimentary computational devices in-game (I think, parenthetically, that I find ‘how other people play videogames’ one of the best and most interesting ways of really understanding that OTHER PEOPLE’S BRAINS WORK DIFFERENTLY – I simply do not think, or play games, like this, and I can’t help but feel a vague sense of intellectual inadequacy when I see this sort of thing) – if so, then you or they will LOVE this website which basically collects all sorts of examples of the frankly-INSANE stuff that people are creating, along with rudimentary instructions as to how to build them, and, honestly, it’s making me want to buy a Switch.
• The Big Picture Competition 2023: The annual Big Picture photo context rolls around again, and this year’s crop of winning entries is typically strong – my personal favourite from the category winners is the woman and the wombat because, honestly, YOUR HEART IT MELTS.
• Noramoji: A VERY SPECIFIC website, this, which exists to do one thing and one thing only – collect examples of the typography used in the signage of Japanese shops, and render them usable as digital fonts. Would YOU like to remake your website entirely in kanji that replicates the exact styling of a small ramen cafe in Okinawa? GREAT!
• The News Minimalist: I do think that there’s a really interesting coming trend in AI-enabled assistants that, for example, each morning do a sweep of the web and present a tailored roundup to you based on your interests and in a style (written or visual) that you’ve previously specified – basically RSS with knobs on. I see the News Minimalist as being part of that vision of the future – it’s a smart idea, which is designed to create a newsfeed including only ‘the most significant’ stories, delivered in summary with no visual clutter, using GPT4 to analyse a range of stories, grade them for significance and then produce the summaries you see on-site. There are obvious questions about the methodology and the ability of an LLM to meaningfully gauge ‘significance’, but the principle here is really interesting and it struck me as a smart and imaginative use of the tech.
• Design Archives: This is an AWESOME resource – basically this is all the graphic design stuff on the Internet Archive, in one place, searchable and browsable and just THERE, waiting for you to access it and magically become some sort of Le Corbusier (NB – it is vanishingly unlikely that you will become Le Corbusier as a result of this link).
• A Field of Flowers: Ok, it’s not a field so much as a website – MUST YOU BE SO LITERAL?! – but, still, it’s lovely and there are LOTS of flowers. I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to Kristoffer’s vision of the web as a garden, and stuff like this feels like a pleasing evocation of that concept.
• Crossbows and Catapults: I confess to letting out a genuine squeal of pleasure and exitement when I discovered this last weekend – to people of a certain vintage, Crossbows and Catapults was THE most incredible board game in the world, practically a real-life videogame in which you BUILT AN ACTUAL CASTLE and then spent a frantic 3 minutes SMASHING IT TO FCUKERY with ACTUAL CROSSBOWS and ACTUAL CATAPULTS and, seriously, in an era in which the Atari2600 was still considered a pretty cool piece of tech and we had to pretend that Manic Miner was fun, this was pretty much the exciting thing in the world. I never had a copy – POOR DEPRIVED MATT – but now I can banish the disappointment and resentment I feel towards my poor, dead mother for depriving me of the sweet, plastic-y siege playset by backing this (already massively overfunded) Kickstarter, which promises to once again welcome me into the world of plastic ramparts and satisfyingly-sprung crossbows and ballistas. Seriously, if you’re not familiar with the original game then click the link and be AMAZED (if you are, I imagine you’ll long since have given the campaign all your money).
• The Rear of the Year Quiz: To the non-Brits amongst you, the concept of a country having a long-running national award given to the pleasingly-callipgyian celebrity of the year might seem…a bit weird? To those of us, though, who have grown up on this sceptered isle and fondly remember the weirdly-asexual photoshoots that saw famouses of the calibre of Carole Vorderman and Daniel Radcliffe (no, really) smiling coquettishly over their shoulders as they displayed their prize-winning buttocks, though, this quiz – which challenges you to remember who won each year – will be a pleasing trip down memory lane (also, if any of you get all of these right then you have a series of problems and I strongly suspect that you might be on some sort of official register).
• The Great When?: A brilliant little game, this, made by Monkeon: “There’s loads of archive footage of London uploaded to YouTube. We’ll play you a random one, starting at a random moment. Your challenge? Guess what year it is.” Aside from anything else it’s a useful reminder that it is nearly impossible to tell the late-80s from the mid-90s, which feels…weird, but possibly speaks to the sort of horrible national stasis that we went through in the fag-end years of the last great Tory horrorshow.
• Blood In Baldur’s Gate: Last up among the miscellania this week is this tie-in game to promote the forthcoming launch of the Baldur’s Gate 3 videogame; this is a light, browser-based detective game with a neat twist, whereby the narrative that develops over time (it’s been running a few days, with new plot developments dropping every 24h) being in large part determined by player votes on where to go and what to do as you (the player and character) investigate a mysterious murder. This feels a bit like the Fallen London games, vibe-wise, and I very much like the way it builds community into the gameplay- really interesting series of mechanics here which I think could usefully be tweaked and lifted for other stuff, should you be so minded.

By Dana Powell

LAST UP THIS WEEK WE HAVE A WHOLE NEW ALBUM FROM WEB CURIOS FAVOURITE OLOFF WHICH I GENUINELY THINK IS A GREAT-IF-WONKY-RECORD AND WHICH I WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU ALL TO HAVE A LISTEN TO BECAUSE IT IS UNLIKELY THAT YOU WILL HEAR ANYTHING ELSE LIKE IT TODAY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Fire Hydrants of Europe: You…you don’t really need me to describe this for you, do you? Please note, this features EXCLUSIVELY European hydrants, so any of you filthy perverts looking for the South American variants will have to look elsewhere to fulfil your dark fetishistic desires.
• The AI Experiment: I am, in the main, now entirely bored of AI art styles (there are occasional exceptions, but it feels like there’s too much stylisation baked into the current models which means I can’t see beyond the Midjourney-ness, if you see what I mean), but I quite enjoy this Insta account which creates fantastical historical pictures of grizzled old prospectors standing outside a sepia-tinted Castle Greyskull (for example). You could literally RUIN a child’s conception of truth and falsehood with stuff like this, which I would imagine is exactly what is quietly happening to pliable young minds the world over (which is a nice thought, isn’t it?).
• High School High: Examples of excellent design and typography from oldschool US high school yearbooks, mainly from the 70s and 80s. SO MUCH GOOD MATERIAL.
• Rohit Roygre: Rohit Roygre is a man who is giving up fizzy drinks, and is posting daily updates as to his progress to TikTok (and then reposting them on this Insta, because why not?). You may not think that your life will be improved by a nondescript South Asian man posting a video each day in which he proudly proclaims ‘No fizzy!’, but I promise you that it really will.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Sebastian Bieniek

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It has, it’s fair to say, been something of a trying week for stumpy-fingered populists.

More than enough ink has been spilt on That Fcuking Man and the parties and the lies (and my thoughts on him remain unchanged); a similar amount continues to be spaffed on That Other Fcuking Man and whether or not he’ll end up governing from jail; and yet, because of the packed nature of the week’s news schedule, it feels like Silvio’s been rather ignored. Which, given that his CV includes (deep breath) cruise ship singing, an improbable and incredibly-murkily-financed property empire (it’s interesting to note that when Nanni Moretti made the film ‘Il Caimano’, an oddly-familiar tale about a Northern Italian property magnate who pivoted to media and then politics, all the while backed by a lot of money from organised crime, writs from Silvio there came a-none!), the literal transformation of an entire country’s media landscape and, as a result, its relationship to money and capital and consumerism and STUFF (not to mention sex), the football clubs, the whole ‘managing to get elected not once but three fcuking times’ thing (there’s a strong argument to suggest that Italians are the most masochistic of all the European nations, until one looks closer to home and realises that the English remain unbeatable), the rampant tax evasion and collusion with some incredibly unsavoury parties over the years, the friendship with Putin, the whole period where he seemingly spent every single European summit making gags about how he really didn’t want to fcuk Angela Merkel, the rampant libido (and the hookers, and the underage hookers, and the mistresses and the affairs and the open promotion to cabinet positions of attractive TV presenters for fairly transparent reasons), the messianic delusions, the constant feeling that everyone was laughing at Italy BECAUSE THEY WERE…Oh, Silvio, what you gave us!

In the main this week, though, I was sad that he outlived my mum, because she fcuking hated that cnut.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, e spero che Silvio venga inculato dal diavolo giornalmente.

By Klaus Kremmerz

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A MIX THAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘ADHD HARDCORE’, AND WHICH I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY TOO MUCH ABOUT OTHER THAN SUGGESTING YOU GIVE IT A TRY AND TURN IT UP LOUD AND DON’T BE SCARED AND JUST SORT OF TRY AND LEAN INTO THE GENERAL, TERRIFYING INSANITY OF THE WHOLE THING, AND WHICH WHILST NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL ‘GOOD’ EXACTLY IS CERTAINLY INTERESTING AND WILL DEFINITELY WAKE YOU FROM WHATEVER TORPOR YOU MIGHT CURRENTLY BE AFFLICTED WITH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED THAT NOONE’S YET SEEN FIT TO MAKE AI SILVIO, PT.1:  

By Melody Tuttle

NEXT WE HAVE SOME D’N’B WITH THIS EXCELLENT EP BY ANAIS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED THAT NOONE’S YET SEEN FIT TO MAKE AI SILVIO, PT.2:    

• Chicken Orb: With everything continuing to get, well, significantly more expensive, perhaps its time that we all became a bit more self-sufficient when it comes to our food? With that in mind, let me present to you THE CHICKEN ORB! Have you ever thought ‘you know, I’d really like to have a chicken but I just don’t know whether their foraging and general behaviour is compatible with my lovely urban garden’? WELL FEAR NO MORE! The chicken orb is, basically, a Zorb for fowl – you basically lob the bird into the spherical cage and it can wonder round freely, but it means you can more easily confine it to a certain bit of garden without the need for complex enclosures and runs, and you can also avoid chasing the s0dding thing round the garden when you want to wring its neck/put it back in its coop (delete as applicable). To be honest, I can’t really imagine any of you having a desperate desire for one of these, but I was just so charmed by the idea of this that I couldn’t help but include it. OH GOD, I just had a vision of recreating that game from old-school ITV staple Gladiators but with chickens – that is streaming content GOLD, I tell you, and I will franchise that idea to you for a cursory fee. Form a queue.
• The Brian Butterfield Diet Soundboard: Even by the standards of Web Curios (ha! Standards! lol!) this feels like…something of a niche gag, but, equally, it both made me laugh and reminded me of a reasonably-amusing sketch and so into the newsletter it goes (just in case you ever wanted a window into the…rigorous selection process undertaken round here). Peter Serafinowicz is not *just* The Tick and a recurring character in The Cornetto Trilogy, he’s also a very funny writer who briefly had his own sketch show back in the day, one of which sketches featured a character called Brian Butterfield who had a very particular diet that he was trying to sell you. A touch of Mr Creosote about this, but not in a bad way – I genuinely hope that there is at least one of you who remembers this fondly and who gets a good hour or so’s amusement out of blasting the phrase ‘PORK CYLINDERS’ from your speakers at nosebleed volume to the increasing bemusement of friends, lovers and colleagues alike – the site also features a link to the sketch on YouTube, so you can at least make some sort of vague sense of this if you’re so inclined.
• Privateer: One of the side effects of writing this rubbish for over a decade now is that you end up learning things about yourself and your obsessions – for example, I have reaslised that I have a real bee in my bonnet over the whole concept of ‘space junk’, and have over the years spent more time than was perhaps strictly necessary writing here about how if we’re not careful we’re going to wall ourselves into our own atmosphere with a mile-thick layer of discarded metal (this is hyperbole, before anyone with a significantly-better grasp of physics feels the need to explain to me why this is not in fact possible). Anyway, it seems I am not the only person who feels this way, as a bunch of rich and famous Silicon Valley types, including Steve Wozniak, have set up Privateer, which is, seemingly, a company whose mission is to work to clean up the Earth’s orbit and get rid of some of the defunct satellites, forgotten ‘we sent X to space!’ marketing stunts from the early-2010s and other junk (or, at the very least, to map and track it to make it easier to avoid). This is really interesting, and sensible-sounding, and obviously super-scifi, but, if I’m totally honest, the main reason I am linking to it is because their main corporate sponsor is watchmaker Omega and halfway down the Privateer homepage is what is, honestly, the most insanely-cheesy ad-photo I have ever seen, just slap-bang in the middle of their ‘we’re a serious company doing serious business’ pitch. Oh, and they are based in Hawa’ii, too, for which I am sure their are excellent spacefaring reasons but which also makes it sound like a *bit* of a cushy gig.
• The CopyPasta DB: I saw something floating about the web this week, inspired by the Reddit protests, that made the point about the utter ephemerality of online culture and the fact that, if you’re, say, 35 or below then a lot of the places you spent your youth online, the things that you read and watched and made and experienced, simply don’t exist anymore, and how weird that is in terms of a sense of how one came to be oneself (I am mangling this somewhat, but hopefully you get the general point) – anyway, that came to mind again when looking at the CopyPastaDB, ‘the web’s largest archive of copypasta material’, or at least so it claims and I have no reason to doubt it. Obviously you all already know this, but just in case: “A copypasta is a block of text that is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites. The block of text is not necessarily written to become a copypasta. However, the text is usually of a viral or outrageous nature, often with comical undertones. This makes them extremely appealing to copy and paste.” Longform textmemes, basically, which were often initially based around horror fiction but which now have come to encompass everything from repurposes Reddit edgelordery to a *lot* of weird Tumblr stuff. This is, basically, VERY VERY ONLINE, and hence simultaneously really interesting and also excruciatingly-embarrassing to its very core, and I love it.
• Ooakfinder: This is an interesting idea. Etsy has for a few years now felt like its rather strayed from its ‘artisanal makers and individual craftspeople’ ethos to become a bit more like what eBay ended up being – to whit, a place packed with stuff that’s actually mass-produced and being sold by larger retailers in a way that presents them as being much smaller than they in fact are’. If you’d like to try and ensure that whatever you’re thinking of buying from Etsy (or elsewhere – this seems to work with most retail sites as far as I can tell) is in fact an original piece or whether it’s ripped off from someone else, or being sold in multiple other locations online, then this site will do EXACTLY that – it’s basically just cobbling together a bunch of reverse image search stuff under the hood, but it’s no less clever or useful for that.
• Felicity Ingram: I tend not to feature fashion photography on here, not least because I don’t know the first thing about either of those two topics, but I’ll make an exception for this site which is the personal portfolio of one Felicity Ingram whose work is just GORGEOUS and whose site is such a wonderful showcase for her pictures. This is such beautiful photography and webwork, honestly.
• Slow Jamastan: I tend to be…wary of people who seem intent on setting up their own countries – they tend towards libertarianism, in my experience, and libertarians tend to, not to put too fine a point on it, be either cnuts, or morons, or a uniquely-unpleasant combination of the two. That said, Slow Jamastan – a sovereign nation apparently founded in late 2021 – doesn’t seem to bear any of the hallmarks of a mad libertarian horrorshow (in the main I can tell this because a) noone seems to be talking about crypto; and b) nowhere on the website do they talk about age of consent laws, another troubling obsession of the ‘let’s start our own nation and do what we like!’ obsessives); instead, Slow Jamastan’s politics are described as “Dictatorship (on most days – sometimes The Sultan passes the suggestion box around)” which, you know, sounds ok! This is obviously a gag, but also…not a gag, based on the amount of effort and thought that has gone into the site, and, honestly, given the past week’s activities on both sides of the Atlantic I can sort of see why running away to a micronation and battening down the hatches might seem appealing.
• RajShahi Gosford: The Facebook Page of an Indian restaurant in New South Wales, Australia. Their use of memes is…astonishing, frankly, and the sort of thing I would honestly like to see at least one of you pitching as a sincere ‘strategic pivot’ to one of your more staid clients in banking or FS. This came via Garbage Day, which I imagine you are all subscribed to but which if not you really ought to be.
• Blend: On the one hand, this new shopping app (based in the UK, and found via Martin Bryant’s rather good newsletter about new-stage UK startups) which effectively purports to be ‘TikTok, but for clothes!’ sounds like it could be very smart and with some clever tech under the hood; on the other, in an era in which everyone is fcuked for money and the world continues to buckle under the weight of all the pointless crap we insist on buying and shipping around the world before depositing it in landfill to not decay over a period of centuries…well, is creating the ultimate, addictive, infinite-swiping fast-fashion portal really a responsible thing to do? God, I know, I sound po-faced and prissy as all fcuk, but, equally, IF WE DON’T STOP CONSUMING LIKE THIS WE REALLY ARE GOING TO BE VERY VERY VERY SCREWED INDEED. Still, lovely interface and IT KNOWS WHAT I WANT so envirofears be damned!
• Hillside: This is rather lovely. Hillside was an experimental architectural project from the 60s, which was built in Montreal and still stands today – per Wikipedia, “HABITAT 67, or simply Habitat, is a housing complex at Cité du Havre, on the Saint Lawrence River, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie. It originated in his master’s thesis at the School of Architecture at McGill University and then an amended version was built for Expo 67, a World’s Fair held from April to October 1967. Habitat 67 is considered an architectural landmark and a recognized building in Montreal.” The link takes you to a site where you can download an interactive walkthtrough of the architect’s original vision for the project, designed in the latest iteration of the Unreal Engine with all of the high-end photorealism that delivers; I sadly don’t have the requisite kit to do anything with this, but the demo video looks gorgeous and I do love the use of this high-end digital rendering software to explore imagined spaces and counterfactual urban scenarios; in general, this is just a really nice way of bringing Safdie’s original vision to life.
• CPUMade: I’m slightly amazed that I haven’t seen more of these – CPUMade is a tshirt design site which is – yes, that’s right, you guessed it! – AI POWERED! Create your designs using…some GAN, it’s not a particularly amazing version, and then put them on tshirts which you can either get printed on demand and shipped to you OR which you can make available on the site for others to buy, at which point you get a small kickback. The likelihood, to my mind, of anyone ever buying an AI-designed tshirt based on someone else’s prompt-tickling is vanishingly small, but on the other hand there’s a limited amount for you to lose in spending three minutes creating some vaguely-threatening tees and hoping some moron coughs up for them.
• Landing Love: Examples of nice webdesign from all over the internet. That’s literally it – but whoever curates this has a good eye (or, at the very least, similar taste in webwork to me) and as such this is a great resource for design inspiration or some light plagiarism (also, loads of these were totally new to me, which, I promise, is no mean feat).
• Click Bath: Do you feel STRESSED? Enervated? Like Ren from Ren & Stimpy when he gets all het up and his eyes get all bloodshot and he starts twitching and fitting? Hm, maybe lay off the cheap cocaine for a few weeks, eh? If, though, you can’t blame your jitteriness on several grammes of poorly-cut pub gak (or perhaps even if you can) then you might enjoy Click Bath, a site which exists solely to provide you with a soothing sound bath (at some point in the last year or so I learned what a ‘sound bath’ is and I am genuinely angry that I have to carry that phrase in my head) – click either of the panels on-screen to produce a soothing sound which you can tweak the tone and pitch of depending on where exactly you tap. Your appetite for this will probably be closely linked to your enjoyment of incense and your ability to perform an adequate downward dog.
• Pick Your Paranoia: Make your own ‘This Is Fine’ cartoon, with the addition of one of a selection of very modern paranoias – from climate change to El*n Fcuking M*sk, to guns to AI – which you can then save and share through whatever channels you see fit. Will it make the bad things go away? No, no it won’t, but laughing bleakly about it makes it better, right? Right?
• Read Something Wonderful: This is a lovely idea – Read Something Wonderful is maintaining an archive of links to excellent pieces of longform writing, with the overarching premise that the best writing isn’t always the newest, and that someone should probably be preserving links to classic journalism or essays. The site’s very simple – there’s no tagging by topic, for example – but if you’re happy to be guided by the editorial team and just read ‘something interesting’, regardless of theme, then this is a great place to bookmark and dip back into when you’re at an online loose end.
• The Cloud Appreciation Society: Do you like clouds? NOT AS MUCH AS THESE PEOPLE DO! Still, if you’ve ever wanted to get access to a genuinely enormous collection of photographs of your cumulocirrus, your nimbus, your stratocumulus (these may not in fact be actual, accurately-named types of cloud, for which apologies), along with cloud-inspired poetry and art, and cloud NEWS and cloud FACTS, then this will be some sort of dream come true – there is also a shop on the site, and I genuinely wish I could drive so that I had an excuse to buy the ‘I Brake For Clouds’ bumber sticker. I love this with an almost sinful degree of passion.
• Wooden Cocks: As I regularly say in Curios, I genuinely have no idea who any of the people reading this are, or where you are, or what you’re into (apart from, to at least some degree, overlong newsletters) – which means that I am genuinely curious to know whether there will be one of you who, on seeing this link and clicking it and discovering that there is an auction taking place in Brighton next week at which will be sold (and I quote) “ELEVEN CARVED WOODEN PHALLUS, 33CMS LARGEST”,will think “AT LAST!” and bid to take them home. To be clear, you don’t need to tell me (and I really don’t want to know) – it’s just that I find the idea vaguely pleasing. Anyway, the lack of detail on this auction page is possibly my favourite thing about it – are the phalluses (phalli?) old? New? Suspiciously-worn? Notched? Unless you bid we will never know.
• Connections: On the one hand, the NYT’s games section has apparently just stolen the ‘Wall’ section from much-loved, super-geeky UK TV show ‘Only Connect’, which is pretty sh1tty behaviour; on the other, this is such a good game and, much like Only Connect, you will feel like some sort of intellectual colossus if you complete one (or at least you will if you’re me).
• Grimace’s Birthday: This is rather fun, by global obesity-peddlers McDonald’s – it’s an in-browser Gameboy game, in which you play as noone’s favourite fast food mascot Grimace as you skateboard around some pleasingly-16-bit-ish levels, grinding and jumping and collecting milkshakes and, honestly, this is pretty good (I have a strange feeling that they might also have produced a limited run of actual GBA cartridges for this too, although equally I might be imagining that and, honestly, I’m running a touch late this morning and don’t have time to check – wow, that was both an admission of slapdash practice AND a tedious sentence none of you wanted or needed to read – GO ME!).
• The Capcom Retro Games Archive: Capcom were my favourite ever client in videogames – fine, I had to promote some occasionally-shonky titles (noone remembers MotoGP05 with any fondness, and sadly noone remembers by accompanying PR triumph either – but I will always know that there was only one person for the Daily Sport headline ‘Bikers Have Bigger Cocks’, and that that person was ME!) but equally they were such fun to work with and let me basically do whatever I liked (possibly overstepped the mark with the Heather Mills thing for Bionic Commando, but, well, they were Different Times), and so I was charmed to see that this week they have launched Captown, a little digital museum featuring art and design and tributes to some of their best and most-loved titles…AND the Capcom Retro Games Archive, to which I have here linked, which lets you play a bunch of classic titles in-browser. Final Fight! SFII! Mega Man and Mega Man II! Oh me oh my! Honestly, this is your afternoon sorted (and, once you realise how incredibly fcuking hard these are, possibly the rest of your weekend too).

By Sanya Kantarovski

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS SUBLIME SELECTION BY NEIL DIABLO THAT YOU COULD PROBABLY DESCRIBE AS ‘CHILLOUT’ BUT WHICH IS LOADS BETTER THAN THAT MAKES IT SOUND AND IS BASICALLY THE DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE OF THE FIRST MIX SHOULD YOU NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Amy Goodchild: Amy Goodchild is an artist working with procedural generation; her Insta feed is a lovely selection of her work which is mathematical and precise and geometric and also very, very human, in a way that this sort of stuff doesn’t always land. This is beautiful.
• Daisuke Kajima: Incredible, dense drawings of dizzingly-angled urban environments, rendered in simple lines – this stuff is wonderful.
• Books On Maps: You might need to speak Italian to get the most from this, but it’s a lovely idea – the account posts shots of pages in books referring to a particular place, alongside shots of that place. Simple, but there’s something lovely about seeing the physcial reality of the narrative suggestion. This comes from Pietro Minto’s weekly newsletter, which is in Italian but which is easily machine-translatable and is always full of interesting stuff.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Jake Kennedy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It’s ok, everyone, you can stop worrying about the killer future AIs – RISHI AND JOE ARE SORTING IT!

Of course, as any fule kno, the main reason you should stop worrying about the killer future AIs is because they’re significantly less of a problem than non-killer present AIs, which are currently being wrangled by usual dreadful suspects in order to ‘maximise shareholder value’ and ‘deliver productivity gains’ and ‘optimise output delivery’, and all those other familiar phrases that mean ‘fcuk you, the worker, with a variety of interestingly-shaped and insufficiently-sharpened knives’.

Before we dive into this week’s exciting selection of links and the perennially-disappointing words that accompany them, let me take a moment to once again plug THE TINY AWARDS!

Thanks to everyone who’s shared the url and written about this so far – nominations are open for at least another week, so if you know of a lovely, home-made, artisanal, whimsical, fun, cute, playful, silly, pointless, joyful, troubling or sinister website that YOU feel deserves to win a small award, a small cash prize and a small, hand-carved trophy then PLEASE TELL US ABOUT IT!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and at least one of you is someone who I met on Wednesday evening and who was really kind about Curios and to whom I don’t think I was sufficiently grateful, so THANKYOU LOVELY TALL PERSON WHOSE NAME I HAVE UNACCOUNTABLY FORGOTTEN!

By Todd Alcott

YOUR FIRST MUSICAL OFFERING THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS INSANELY-COMPREHENSIVE PLAYLIST BASED ON JAMES BALDWIN’S RECORD COLLECTION AND WHICH IS A SUPERB SELECTION OF BLUES AND JAZZ AND GOSPEL AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER STUFF! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T HELP THAT APPLE’S VISION OF THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE ONE IN WHICH YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TELL WHETHER SOMEONE IS QUIETLY WATCHING BONGO, WHICH FEELS A BIT ODD TBH, PT.1:  

By Sanjay Suchak

NEXT UP WE HAVE SOMETHING FROM LITERALLY 13 YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS DOING THE PR FOR STREET FIGHTER IV AND MADE THIS HAPPEN! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T HELP THAT APPLE’S VISION OF THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE ONE IN WHICH YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO TELL WHETHER SOMEONE IS QUIETLY WATCHING BONGO, WHICH FEELS A BIT ODD TBH, PT.2:  

• Migration Search: Via Giuseppe’s newsletter comes this interesting piece of datawork; Mohamad Waked has analysed search data from countries that are among the top sources of migrants worldwide to draw inferences about the gap between the dreams of those fleeing their homes to seek a better life and the often stark reality of what happens to them when they leave; the discrepancy between the places that, based on search data, people want to go, vs the places where they eventually end up, is not a little heartbreaking. I find work like this, that digs into search in interesting and vaguely-oblique ways, properly fascinating; oh, and this also feels like it is ripe for being the basis of some BIG STRATEGIC WORK, for the right client – it’s PURE INSIGHT, after all.
• Close-Up Photographer of the Year: ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE! Surely there can be no more niche categories of photography to celebrate? Still, this is a particularly good one – there are various categories within the overall award, but I’ve chosen to highlight the ‘minimal’ selection because, well, they’re just rather elegant and so well-composed; personally-speaking my favourites are either the out-of-focus Roth-esque abstract (you’ll see what I mean) or what I am convinced is the sexiest seal that has ever been captured on film (again, you will see what I mean; I don’t use the word ‘sexy’ lightly but, well, PHEW) (to be clear, I do not in fact find seals or any other aquatic mammals ‘sexy’).
• Black Screen Videos: One of the things that is genuinely dispiriting about working in advermarketingpr (only one, mind) is the experience that every single one of us has had of making a thing for a client, a thing that involves lots of painful wrangling and approvals and ‘creative discussion’ and multi-layered sign-off processes that serve only to bevel away the edges of any remaining idiosyncracies that ‘thing’ might once have had, and putting that thing out into the world and finding that literally noone cares (mainly, in my experience, because the ‘thing’ is a pointless piece of branded content that noone in their right mind would ever choose to experience). This link is for all of YOU, the ones who’ve spent 5+ figures of client money on videos whose viewcount even now hovers in the mid-100s (and that’s with the ad spend) – here is a video that pretty much features nothing but vidoes of a black screen an no audio, for hours and hours at a time, videos which have, collectively, TENS OF MILLIONS ON VIEWS. Feel good about your work yet? To be clear, these videos do serve some sort of purpose – people use them as a way of ensuring their computer keeps running, say, or to be able to clean a laptop – but, objectively, I find this very funny and suggest that any of you who are still having to make branded content for social media just send your clients this link and tell them that it’s all pointless and we should just, you know, stop.
• WebAmp: WinAmp, but in a browser! Hang on, what do you MEAN you don’t know what WinAmp was? ARE YOU BUT CHILDREN? WinAmp, for those of you younger than about 40, was how you used to listen to CDs (oh ffs) and eventually MP3s back in The Olden Times, with ACTUAL SKUOMORPHIC BUTTONS TO CLICK ON and designed to look both like an oldschool tape deck (oh ffs, again) and a graphic equaliser and a mixing desk, and, honestly, I didn’t quite realise how nostalgic I was for this specific era of digital music and interface design but, turns out, the answer is ‘quite nostalgic’. I remain convinced, by the way, that anyone using AI to create a modern-day equivalent of the WinAmp music visualiser thingy could probably get some decent numbers out of it, so, er, go on, do it.
• Sex Education: Given this week’s news that the UK is absolutely riddled with the clap (although I don’t for a second imagine that YOU, dear UK-based reader, is anything other than squeaky-clean of mucus memrane) (to be clear, I don’t ‘imagine’ you at all) (I should probably leave this now, shouldn’t I), it feels timely to share this excellent YouTube playlist featuring 8 reasonably-newly-uploaded sex education videos from The Past. One them is even all about VD and how not to get it, and features around the 12:45 mark an actor playing a sailor who looks so much like notorious South London comedian Arthur Smith that I had to pause it to check it wasn’t in fact him. These are ACE – partly, obviously, because anything talking about sex from The Old Times is slightly-ridiculous (despite the obvious biological evidence to the contrary, it is a simple fact of life that people in The Past didn’t really fcuk), and partly because they are so perfectly ripe for sampling and splicing and remixing – you could make something like THIS, for example.
• A Digital Wall: I can’t say I really understand what is going on here in any meaningful way – it’s a webpage! On it are what look like bricks! Each brick is a link to a resource or video about bricklaying or cement! Each time you click a brick and visit a link, that brick disappears, never to return! Yeah, I mean I have literally no idea what is going on here but there’s something really nice about the way the site deconstructs itself as you explore it, and I could probably construct some really clunky metaphor about the wall vanishing as you learn more (but I shan’t, as you don’t deserve to be treated so shabbily).
• Turing Trains: This actually made my brain ache as I tried to make sense of it, which suggests that I have probably not been taking it as easy as I might want to (or, perhaps more simply, that I’ve not gotten any better at formal logic since I last failed to adequately grasp it back in 1997. Basically this is a website all about designing computational systems based on simple train track layouts, using points as a means of creating a binary 0/1 differential via which you can create rudimentary programs – the site explains the principle and then lets you play around with various different configurations to learn how it all works and let you eventually mess around with your own designs (if you’re significantly smarter than me, at least). Beautifully, all of these layouts can be constructed in real life using iconic wooden model train brand Duplo (other, less expensive train sets are I believe also available), which has put me in mind of a wonderful analogue computer built entirely via a vast, snaking children’s trainset. Seriously, wouldn’t that be cool? YES IT WOULD.
• Painfinder: A smart little GPT hack, this – Painfinder is trained on a bunch of complaints by people across a range of different professions (it’s unclear where those are sourced from, but it’s not hard to imagine that a bit of light Reddit scraping could get you a decent corpus, for example), and uses natural language wrangling to let you ask it questions like ‘what are the things that haberdashers find MOST annoying about their job and wish they could improve?’; The Machine then spits out a bunch of suggestions for things that you might reasonably try and innovate around in that space, based on the pain points identified (painfinder, DO YOU SEE?). This is simple and, I’m almost entirely certain, probably not going to unlock a billion-dollar business idea, but, equally, it’s not a bad way of exploring a specific professional category and it’s a smart use of an LLM to do some mid-weight research lifting.
• Beautiful QR Codes: Someone on Reddit got Stable Diffusion to redesign QR codes to make them artworks (or at least that’s what I think they did – annoyingly OP at no point in this Reddit thread explains how they achieved the effect), and, remarkably, said QR codes still work, opening up the possibility of creating functional AND aesthetically-pleasing meatspace>digital pointers. This is really smart, and you will 100% see these in a significant (and, eventually, annoying) number of ‘trend’ presentations over the next few weeks.
• Murat Erdem: I don’t think that anyone reading this is in Turkey, but, on the offchance, could any of you please explain to me who Murat Erdem is and what, exactly, is going on in these videos? Because from what I can tell, this TikTok channel consists solely of a man with a moustache that can only be described as ‘luxuriant’, hair that can only be described as ‘coiffed’ and a line in open-necked shirts that can only be described as ‘powerfully erotic’, basically just sort of gazing at you with the sort of unabashed sexuality only usually deployed by professional courtesans. Perhaps it’s best not to know what’s going on here – just look into Murat’s eyes and enjoy.
• Giftwrap AI: This is a GREAT idea. Have someone to buy a gift for who you don’t like enough to bother thinking about? Ask AI for suggestions! Don’t want them to know that your selection process was so utterly half-ar$ed? Buy from GiftwrapAI, which will use some sort of AI magic to select an appropriate gift but then send it in a hand-wrapped package with a handwritten note to make it look like you give more of a sh1t about the recipient than you in fact do! This is perfectly-horrible, and feels oddly indicative of The Now – not least because the ‘AI’ is total fcuking bollocks (I told it I wanted a gift for my girlfriend who likes cats and high-end fashion, and it suggested some whiskey tumblers and a scrimshaw set – so I’ll let you know in August whether or not it managed to tap into her deepest unknown desires or whether I am in fact now the owner of some unwanted drinking paraphernalia and a broken relationship).
• Kingly: I stumbled across this old webcomic this week, and got gradually sucked in. Kingly is about, well, a king – a stupid, childish king, and the people who live in his court and exist to facilitate his existence. It starts slowly and you’ll need a dozen or so strips to get into the rhythm of it, but there’s something pleasing about the running gags and the callbacks and there are occasionally some really sharp gags, and there’s something bleakly funny about the clueless boy-king and the very real misery of their subjects. Which, I appreciate, sounds like the most miserable comic ever, but, well, TRUST ME HAVE I EVER LET YOU DOWN?
• The Crowbox: You’ve seen The Crow, right? Classic 90s film, awesome soundtrack, massively goth, features a LOT of crows? GREAT! I don’t know about you, but my main takeaway from that film (other than a brief and ill-fated desire to own a latex trenchcoat) was that it would be massively, immensely cool to have a corvid army at your command (fine, also quite smelly and a bit raucous, but omelettes/eggs, right?) – and so, THE CROWBOX! Ok, fine, it doesn’t specifically promise you a corvid army, but what it DOES do is give you the opportunity to attempt to train the famously-smart avians to do things (not, again, necessarily ‘your bidding’, before you get visions of them, I don’t know, fcuking off to Tesco to pick up milk and skins). Here’s the blurb: “The CrowBox is an experimentation platform designed to autonomously train corvids (the family of birds crows belong to). So far we’ve trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they found on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to work with wild corvids and see if we can get them to learn to use the box, then to optimize the training protocol to see how quickly they can learn from each other. That’s where you come in. Different corvids learn at different speeds and in different ways, and the only way to figure out the best way to teach them is experimentation. The more people try different things the faster we’ll all figure out how to work cooperatively with crows. Once we’ve got the system optimized for teaching coin collection we can move to seeing how flexibly they can learn *other* tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue. The idea isn’t to get rich off found coins – we want to change the world through learning how to cooperate with other species.” Honestly, how much do you love the vision of a future in which man and crow exist happily and in near-symbiotic harmony? Basically this is a skinner box for reinforcement behaviour – you’re training the birds to associate (in the first instance) the depositing of coins with the release of food – so this could be of interest to any of you who like to think about how best to manipulate the minds of others as well as anyone who just wants to hang out with crows a bit.
• CityGuessr: ANOTHER DAILY GUESSING GAME! This one asks you to work out what city is being shown on a zoomed-in section of map; you can get various helpful clues and hints in exchange for lowering your eventual victory score, but I am personally so appalling at geography that I have been able to get a grand total of none of these since I found the site last weekend, even with all the clues. DON’T LAUGH IT’S REALLY HARD.
• Mineplacer: A really nice riff on the classic Minesweeper game – here you’re tasked with placing the mines in the right place on the grid based on the warnings around them (a task which is far easier to get your head around if you read the description on the website rather than the frankly crappy attempt at explanation you just got from me).
• The Array Game: The ultimate clicker game. There is no artifice, no pretence, no window dressing. Just make the numbers go up. And up. And up. There’s something almost scary about this – like, it’s not even trying to be fun, so why have I had it open in a tab all week and why have I stopped typing at least a dozen times this morning to switch back to it and do some more clicking? It feels…quite weird to have certain sensitive dopamine-producing corners of your brain tickled so obviously, and it does rather feel that someone somewhere is laughing at us stupid monkeys. Click. Click. Click. Click.

By Falk Gernegroß

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY UNIVERSAL CAVE AND IS A GENUINELY GREAT SELECTION OF 70s SOFT ROCK AND LOUNGE-TYPE SOUNDS AND, I PROMISE, THIS IS PERFECT SUMMER AFTERNOON MUSIC!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Banana Bruiser: Pictures made by bruising bananas. Will, if nothing else, make you want to go and send messages to the future in your local supermarket (now I have written that I *really* want to start bruising ‘don’t trust Alan’ onto every single bunch in Tesco).
• Miniatua: Via Andy comes this excellent Insta feed curated by a modelmaker who creates the most amazingly detailed minatures of old computing systems and office equipment and, oddly, a tiny, tiny dartboard. This will scratch that very particular part of your brain which enjoys the tiny and perfectly-formed, and possibly make you consider miniaturism.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Sally Kindberg

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

One of the side effects of writing Curios (other than a generally unhealthy posture and attitude towards my fellow man, RSI, chronically-stained teeth as a result of approximately seventeen daily litres of very strong tea and a complete inability to ever really ‘switch off’ to any meaningful degree) is that, despite having a media diet that might reasonably be described as ‘omnivorous’, there tend to be whole swathes of pop culture to which I am basically entirely blind.

Which means that occasionally there are weeks like this one in which multiple stories break which are totally mysterious to me and which leave me feeling like some sort of informational Helen Keller. Why are Holly and Phil fighting? Why is it bad that Taylor Swift is dating that man (and how is it possible that, much like the musical output of Rita Ora, I have never, ever knowingly heard a song by The 1975?) Why is it the law that every single newspaper article this week needed to make reference to Succession, and can it stop now? SO MANY QUESTIONS!

Do YOU have questions? If they are mainly around ‘what exciting links and treats has Matt prepared for us this week’ then, well, YOU ARE IN LUCK!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I personally don’t think that anyone who refers to themselves as ‘Matty’ should be trusted, ever.

By Maysey Craddock

WE KICK OFF THE MUSICAL BITS THIS WEEK WITH THIS LONG-AND-WORTH-EVERY-MINUTE MIX OF BEATS BY SUNJU HARGUN!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE SCHOFIELD THING BUT WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR ANYONE USING THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY MAKE EQUIVALENCES BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALITY AND PAEDOPHILIA BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE ARE FCUKING CNUTS, PT.1:  

By Romina Bassu

EASE YOURSELF INTO THE NEXT HEFTY SLICE OF LINKS WITH THIS HOUR-LONG SELECTION OF AMBIENT WHICH I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘HAPPILY SHIMMERY’, COMPILED BY FERGUS! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE SCHOFIELD THING BUT WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR ANYONE USING THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY MAKE EQUIVALENCES BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALITY AND PAEDOPHILIA BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE ARE FCUKING CNUTS, PT.2:      

• Lost Books: This is presented more as a conceptual curiosity than as a recommendation – I am in the middle of a bunch of decent novels written by real people at the moment (general point – in the unlikely event anyone ever reads this sh1t and thinks “ooh, the person responsible for this SPARKLING and in-no-way overwrought prose is exactly the sort who I want recommending fiction to me!”, feel free to email me and ask for reccs as I will happily oblige) and so didn’t really have the appetite to fork out actual cashmoney for one of these. BUT! The idea is…interesting. I stumbled across the ‘Lost Books’ collection via this Newsweek piece which profiled the man behind them, one Tim Boucher, who over the past year or so has used a selection of AI tools to create over 100 ‘novels’, also AI illustrated, which are all available to purchase for around £3 a pop from this website. Boucher’s fairly sanguine about the limitations of his work – they are short (around 2-5k words, so ‘novel’ feels like a stretch) and rather than being recognisable formal exercises in story writing they tend to be interlinked fragments or vignettes from a broadly-imagined world (this to get around inherent limitations in the ‘memory’ of LLMs which prevent them from holding concepts such as ‘characters’ and ‘motivation’ over extended periods of creation), and Boucher says he’s earned $2k over the past year. Which, to be clear, is not a lot! And is definitely, on a pay-per-hour basis, not worth the amount of time it’s taken him to make all these! It is, though, really interesting that there *is* a market for this stuff, however, small, and his notes on the worldbuilding aspect of what he is doing here were interesting to me in terms of how these sorts of tools, whilst obviously a long way off being able to create anything that a discerning reader might actually want to consume, could actually be really rather helpful in doing some of the gruntwork of fleshing out the corners and edges of an imagined environment or scenario.
• Bottell: What are the sort of tasks and topic expertise you’d be willing to outsource to a faceless, anonymous machine’intelligence’? Diet? Exercise? Reading material? Training regime? How about ‘the care of your children’?  ARE YOU FCUKING INSANE WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!? Nonetheless, that is EXACTLY what new business Bottell is offering – an offer which, I feel reasonably-confident predicting, will not end up with this business being a household name anytime soon (can you imagine the sort of insurance you would have to have for this sort of thing? Especially in the US? Er, guys, you do…you do *have* insurance, right? Created, allegedly, by two parents (I don’t know why, but I am…skeptical here) the blurb on the site literally says (I paraphrase): “we relied on Google search for parenting advice, but it was so unreliable and hard to know who to trust…thank God for ChatGPT!” I mean, yes, LOL at the idea that you believe the hallucinatory LLM to be *more* trustworthy than the search engine, but wevs. This is obviously a very silly, very bad, very doomed idea, but, also, it’s slightly depressing that someone somewhere thinks that there are enough stupid people out there who would pay $5 a month for what is literally a GPT3.5 API call with two lines of prompt baked in. That said, given the insane amount of parent-focused research and literature and video that, say, P&G has in its vaults, I would be amazed if one of the Proctoids (for example) is currently working on the Pampers equivalent of this.
• MagicFlow: Do you DO productivity? Are you the sort of person who has a Pomodoro clock on the go at all times, who chunks their day into 15m segments to better optimise the GOLDEN HOURS OF MENTAL FLOW? Do you optimise and track and WANT TO IMPROVE wherever possible? Wow. What’s that…what’s that like? I don’t think I’ve felt any real ambition for personal betterment since about age 13 when I briefly started doing situps in my room at home (it lasted a week after I saw no notable improvement and decided, honestly, that heroin chic was probably here to stay and I could forego the sixpack), but I appreciate that not everyone is so content to limp towards the grave as I am and that some of you might want to LIVE YOUR BEST WORKING LIVES. For you, then, comes MAGICFLOW (whose creator actually got in touch with me as part of their PR efforts and who I hope really doesn’t regret so doing as a result of this pseudo-writeup), an app designed (in the main at least) for the coders amongst you and which offers you the chance to analyse your productivity and output to work out what is distracting you and how you can best organise yourself to WORK BETTER WORK HARDER WORK STRONGER! This does, my slight reticence aside, look like it tracks an impressive amount of detail and might be helpful in determining when and how you work best. Equally, though, do you REALLY want to be able to crunch code more efficiently? Maybe, you know, just…be slow! Be inefficient! Because, honestly, it really doesn’t matter. Was…was this the writeup you were looking for?
• Metaphor: This is interesting if not-entirely-successful; Metaphor is a natural language search engine (no idea what it’s built on, maybe DDG or something?) which invites you to structure your queries differently to attempt to surface better results. This is VERY bare bones, and won’t in any way replace whatever your regular search solution is but it does, based on my cursory playing this week, offer some interesting results – I tried to get it to throw up a load of interesting linky sites and it gave me some genuinely good ones, including a few properly obsecure sources I never see cited anywhere; however, it didn’t surface Web Curios and as such I can’t in all conscience recommend it to you. Sorry.
• Anti-scraping SiteText: I don’t, if I’m honest, have a whole load of confidence in the fact that this will make a blind bit of difference, but I suppose it can’t hurt to try. This is the attempt to create a standard bit of code that webdevs can install on sites, much like the classic robots.txt that’s used to instruct crawlers for Google and the like not to scrape the site for info or whatever – this, the code’s creators hope, will become an accepted standard way of indicating to whatever the next iteration of the OpenAI feeder bots looks like that you don’t want them to ingest your work to feed The Machines. Except, well, the code’s creators also admit that there’s obviously no way to compel said scrapers to comply with the request, so it’s all basically at the mercies of the scrapercreators…but, well, we live in hope, eh? It seems fairly obvious that any and all sites with any serious desire not to be subsumed into the Great Content Blob of 2023 should probably implement this and cross their fingers.
• Free Weed Books: What do YOU do when you smoke weed? Me, mainly I offer overpriced strategic consultancy services (lol, jk!), but I know that others like to read or play videogames or engage in an increasingly-paranoid exploration of The Dark Cabal That Really Rules The World, or sometimes draw or write or doodle…Free Weed Books is an online resource that lets you download and print a bunch of what can charitably be described as ‘kids colouring books for very stoned adults’, which will give you things to colour in and prompts to write about and games to play and effectively bills itself as a JOURNAL FOR YOUR LIFE which, objectively, I find very, very funny – imagine that you die at some ripe old age, and you bequeath your secret collected diaries and journals to family and friends who solemnly open them, only to find…a bunch of sticky, jam-smeared colouring books full of gnomic utterances like “PR, The Musical – script idea!” and “shorts for ducks”. I am now slightly regretful that I will never breed and will therefore never be able to disappoint my progeny in this manner.
• The 8-Track Tape Store: This bills itself as the world’s largest collection of 8-track tapes for sale, and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc! The physical shop is based in California, but they ship internationally should you be in the unlikely position of having an 8-track tape player and nothing to listen on it.
• Sightful: We’re on the cusp of another big moment for AR, in which people once again try and persuade us that it’s a technology whose time has come – and, in fairness, Snap continue to produce some really cool stuff using the tech, and there’s no doubt that Appple’s new headset will raise the profile of mixed reality stuff to a huge degree and make it all feel ‘cool’ again in a way that it hasn’t for a few years, but…but, well, I still don’t REALLY see the point tbh. Which is a shame for this new laptop brand which looks both SUPER sci-fi and also HUGELY pointless – but, honestly, so scifi! Imagine, if you will, that your regular laptop has not just the one screen but an INFINITY of them, all hovering around the space in your field of vision, all arrangeable however you like and customisable and…doesn’t that sound horrid and overwhelming? Still, HERE IT IS! “A 100-inch Screen In Your Backpack!”, screams the blurb, not bothering to ask whether a 100-inch screen is TOO BIG (it is) – you also need to wear the accompanying AR glasses to see the aforementioned virtual AR screen, but that does have the benefit of privacy. I honestly can’t conceive of a situation in which this makes any practical sense – for a start I imagine the processing power required to keep this 100-inch virtual AR monitor going with multiple apps means performance is utterly banjaxed beyond a certain point – but for those of you who’ve always dreamed of being able to carry your Goon Cave with you wherever you go then this is probably some sort of sticky vision of paradise.
• Milky Way Photographer of the Year: On the one hand, these are astonishing images of the majesty and unknowable wonder of the infinite vastness of the cosmos; on the other, they are SO filtered and HDR’d and generally post-produced that, if I’m honest, they’ve started to take on the general aesthetic cast of AI-generated imagery to me. I wonder if that’s going to be a side-effect of the Midjourney boom – that a certain style of very-digitally-altered photography is going to become less appealing due to its ostensible similarity of machine-created images? Or maybe I’ve just been aesthetically poisoned, it’s possible.
• Supertape: Oooh, this looks like a great idea for musicians. Supertape is basically a new, simple, website tool for people who make music – the idea is that it functions a bit like a more flexible LinkTree or similar, with the aesthetics and personalisability of a website but the automation and centralisation of a linkcollector. You create the site using Supertape, plug in all the other bits of your MUSICAL EMPIRE (YouTube, Bandcamp, Spotify, merch platforms, socials, etc), and thanks to MAGICAL INTERNET PIPES, each time you update one of those your central Supertape will automatically pull said update into its CMS and neatly rework the frontpage to reflect it. This is currently free and in beta, and it looks like a really useful product imho.
• Terrible Terms: A superb collection of examples of the worst possible ways in which one might design a ‘Terms and Conditions’ consent page online. Some of these are genuinely evil, and I wonder whether there are circumstances in which you might be able to get away with actually using them on a real website – you know how certain videogames in the past used to have code that rendered them unplayable if users couldn’t pass copy protection? Something like that, but for online services. Like, I don’t know, as a means of guarding against bot activity, or as a more-annoying Captcha? Obviously this is a terrible idea, but I now really want to see one of these in the wild somewhere.
• Community ModerAItion: Obviously you probably wouldn’t trust this in real life, yet, but it’s another canary in the coalmine for What Is Coming Soon. This is called MadLad and is an AI-powered community management bot for Discord; you can train it on the specific rules and guidelines for your channel, set its conversational tone and various other guardrails per your wants, and then let it loose to answer user questions and filter content and, presumably, wield the banhammer when necessary…The pricing here looks punchy, frankly, for something which as per most of this stuff at the moment is just sellotaped together from API parts and has no moat whatsoever, but, equally, if you consider that for most games companies these days ‘Discord Moderator and Community Manager’ is a proper job with a proper salary you can see the commercial value in spending $30 a month rather than $3000 a month…AND THAT’S HOW THE JOBS APOCALYPSE HAPPENS, KIDS! THANKS, THE MARKET! THANKS, CAPITALISM! Sorry.
• Food Photos of the Year 2023: The annual Pink Lady-sponsored awards have rolled round again (I wouldn’t normally mention the sponsor, but in this case feel compelled to because of the slight ridiculousness of the idea that an apple can sponsor anything) and here collected are a dizzying number of photos of food and people enjoying food and the process of preparing food and, look, a lot of these are really really great but (again) an awful lot are also SO post-produced as to look like CG, and there are approximately 20% of these which, honestly, are in terms of lighting and composition and framing and subject literally EXACTLY the sort of stuff that I see dozens of times a day now made by machine and, seriously, if you can look at this and think ‘yes, the future of photography as a discipline is definitely rosy!’ then, well, you’re a more optimistic person than I am (which, I concede, is not that hard).
• Adel Faure’s ASCII Website: I don’t know who Adel Faure is, but I adore their website which is all in ASCII and contains ASCII art and pixel art and tools for making your own, and some ASCII games, and, honestly, is just lovely and generous and overall a pleasing place to spend 10 minutes clicking around.
• APPARLE: A truly horrible name (seriously, try saying that word out loud and then spend a few seconds spitting to get rid of the odd-but-inescapable feeling of having a mouth full of cotton wool) for a fun little game – guess the retail price of the pictured garment, in USD, in as few guesses as possible. Each guess gives you a new tidbit of information, and you’re told whether your last try was too high or two low…yes, ok, fine, this *is* technically a Wordle variant but let’s pretend I hadn’t promised to never include one ever again and just move on.
• Ice Cream Van Simulator: A very small, very simple game in which you have to sell ice cream to kids – kids who get VERY ANGRY and a bit murderous if you get their order wrong. This is about 5m worth of fun, max, but those five minutes are very much leavened by the fact you can run over the children; fine, it screws your high score, but GOD the satisfaction.
• Setris: This requires a download, fine, but it is VERY GOOD – after last week’s Tetris-y game from Matt Round comes this variant on the old classic, in which the bricks turn to sand as they land and you need to match colours rather than make straight lines…it takes a couple of minutes to get your head round the mechanic, but I promise you that it becomes second nature after a few goes and quickly becomes genuinely fun as you work out strategies.
• Slide To Unlock: Finally this week, if you are yet to try the most brilliantly-frustrating mobile UX game EVER devised then, well, TRY IT NOW. Mobile only, and you will HATE this (but also quietly love it and wish that you had thought if it; SO clever).

By Dani Orchard

 OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS DISCO-ISH SET MIXED BY DJ CRAZY P WHICH I ENJOYED DESPITE GENERALLY NOT REALLY GIVING ANYTHING RESEMBLING A SH1T ABOUT DISCO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Horsegiirl420: I don’t personally find ‘person DJs whilst wearing a mask’ a particularly compelling proposition, but the success of Dangermouse, Marshmello and, now, Horsegiirl420, suggests that I am in a minority. There’s a backstory to this in which the person behind the mask is some sort of society ‘it’ girl, but, honestly, who cares? It’s someone DJing who is cosplaying as Paris Hilton cosplaying as a horse, what’s not to love?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Maud Madsen

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE WELCOME TO WEB CURIOS IT IS FRIDAY HOW ARE YOU?

Oh. Sorry. Still, for those of us in the UK it’s yet another three-day weekend (as I believe it is for those of you residing in North America), so hopefully the illusion of freedom will cure at least a bit of what ails you.

I’m off to Brighton for the rest of the day, so will leave you with this week’s crop of words and links and pictures and music and wish you a genuinely wonderful weekend. Have fun, and try not to die if you can help it (but, if you must, do so SPECTACULARLY).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably go to the pub RIGHT NOW.

By Albert Reyes

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS BY JOE MUGGS AND IS A PERFECT BALEARIC ACCOMPANIMENT TO WHAT MIGHT IF WE’RE LUCKY ACTUALLY BE A SUNNY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY REMIND YOU ALL TO PUT ON SOME SUNSCREEN THIS WEEKEND, PT.1:  

By Jaehoon Choi

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THIS NEXT SECTION WITH AN EXCELLENT SELECTION OF WHAT I AM RELIABLY-INFORMED IS A MIX OF DARK BREAKS AND DIRTY FUNK?  

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY REMIND YOU ALL TO PUT ON SOME SUNSCREEN THIS WEEKEND, PT.2:    

• You, In Data Breaches: A nice little interactive explainer about data breaches and the sale of personal information online, which uses your email address and public records from places like HaveIBeenPwned? to give you a neatly-personalised overview of the sorts of datapoints about YOU that might currently be floating around the web’s dark marketplaces. Presuming you’re not a total infosec moron this shouldn’t be particular news to you – but, er, CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS, KIDS! – but the way it uses personalisation to communicate what’s otherwise a slightly-dry bunch of information in marginally-more-engaging fashion is a nice touch, and the whole thing’s a decent bit of educational explainer work by ABC Australia.
• Absolut NFTs: I know, I know, NFTs? What is this, 2021? Still, this sparked momentary interest in me, not because I think it’s anything resembling a good project but because various business commenters have been gently talking up web3 and NFTs again, in the wake of Nike’s Swoosh project doing better-than-expected numbers for its first digital sneaker drop (fwiw, I think this is a classic case of it being very, very important that you don’t use one of the largest and best-loved brands in the world as any sort of representative case study for the general appeal of this sort of sh1t), and so I thought I’d take a look at Absolut’s latest foray into the world of digital lies and snake oil. Unsurprisingly, it’s a mess! Specifically, it’s effectively a collaborative limited-edition merch drop, in conjunction with Italian designer Seletti, who has designed a…a lamp? Is it a lamp? Fcuk knows, honestly…anyway, they have designed something in conjunctgion with Absolut, and there are a limited number of these real-life things that you can get hold of…but to do so, first you need to mint an NFT of a digital version of one! And then redeem that digital version for the IRL one! WHY?!?! WHY DO I NEED TO DO THIS?!?! WHY THE DIGITAL STEP?!?!? Once again, an NFT-related activation that serves to prove, in the main, that there is STILL no use case whatsoever for a link to a jpeg, however much Ethereum you tell people it’s worth.
• QR Draw: Create a QR code in the image of any photo you choose – this is, I think, possibly about 15 years old, but it’s FINALLY RELEVANT now that we live in an age in which people know what QR codes are and, occasionally, even scan them. If nothing else I reckon some QR codes designed up using the right people’s faces, stuck up in public places, guerilla-style, would get pretty decent traction. Depending on whose fizzog you choose to use and where you choose to put these, I think you could have rather a lot of fun – or, depending on how evil you’re feeling, run a very efficient phishing scam.
• Motion Design Principles: Oh this is SUCH a good site – an interactive explainer with beautiful scrolling animations and, as you’d expect, stellar motion design, which gives you a comprehensive (well, comprehensive for me at least; those of you who are less visually-inept may find it a bit thin) overview of why motion design is an integral part of overall webdesign, and how you can use specific techniques to direct users’ attention and gaze, and how specific effects and bits of motion elicit particular feelings, and how those can and should be used to communicate more effectively online…this is stellar, and SUCH an appealing piece of design work in and of itself. Built by Zajno, a digital studio in California who are obviously very, very good at what they do.
• The New Photoshop Stuff: So this is a demo video by Adobe showing off all the new stuff that is coming to photoshop (NO CAPITAL ‘P’! NO ‘™’! FCUK YOU ADOBE YOU APPALLING CNUTS! FEEL THE FORCE OF MY IMPOTENT RAGE!) imminently, and which is, as with so much of this stuff, borderline-magical. Or at least it looks borderline magical in the demo – basically this integrates all the fancier GAN image-AI techniques (autofill, autoreplace, that sort of thing) directly into the photoshop product, so you can (for example) replace my horrible, tired eyes that look like two p1ssholes in snow with some far more appealing peepers in a couple of clicks and a few keystrokes. The theory here is dizzying, although in reality it’s probably going to look a little more like this example than the hyper-polished demo suggests. Oh, and while we’re doing mad AI editing stuff, this is another impressive demo demonstrating how simple it is to swap out one person for another – although it’s depressing that as ever with this stuff it features nearly-naked women (ffs, developermen, can you maybe not?), for which my curatorial apologies.
• AI, Adverts and Hyperpersonalisation: I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but about 5 or 6 years ago a friend of mine asked me to do a panel at some marketing conference in London about creativity and digital technology; I shared a stage with people from Twitter and Google and I made myself very, very unpopular by basically telling the assembled audience of generic media w4nkers that there would come a point in the not-too-distant future where the lowest tier of ad creation would be automated to the point of rendering about 60% of them otiose – the machines would smash together an infinite number of creative variables (copy and image) and automatically A/B test them to fcuk, and determine the most effective creative, and buy the inventory, all without needing more than one or two actual people’s involvement. And lo! IT IS BASICALLY HERE!  Click the link and watch the (admittedly slightly annoying) TikTok hustle guy demonstrate how AI can be used to create literally millions of hypertargeted, hyperpersonalised ads with limited effort – and know that, whilst they look crap now and probably wouldn’t work, THAT THESE ARE THE SH1TTEST THAT THEY WILL EVER BE. If you can look at this and not think ‘hm, I don’t foresee great career prospects for the people who design and make the sort of crap, low-margin, high-volume ads like this’ then, well, you’re either a moron or VERY optimistic – but, either way, I strongly believe you are wrong.
• AInsights: ‘Insight’ – the very WORST word in agencyland! So meaningless! So traduced! So vapid! Still, if your job involves having to come up with spurious REVELATORY TRUTHS which you can then deploy to sell more plastic tat to people who by now should know better, you will know the particular tedious pain of having to read seventythreemillion vaguely disparate sources about a sector or industry and cobble them into a coherent six-slide upfront before the ‘creative’ people get to talk. This website – called, upsettingly, ‘Glasp’ – offers you help with that. This is, I promise, actually quite interesting – feed it a bunch of sources and it will basically make connections between them, draw parallels, extrapolate links and generally attempt to create a plausible narrative. Whilst it’s unlikely to deliver the KILLER INSIGHT (sorry) that will lead to you being garlanded with laurels and paraded through the streets like a victorious Caesar, it’s a useful way of testing theories and getting some initial light thinking done, and it’s the sort of tool that I can imagine being particularly useful to junior planners or strategists as a way of helping them think about stuff.
• Mind Video: Another SUPER SCIFI link, this time technology which literally reconstitutes video imagery from brainscans and offers the tantalising possibility of being able to watch other people’s dreams (we’re only about a decade from Strange Days FINALLY being a reality, which, on reflection, perhaps isn’t the cause for celebration I might have initially thought). This is dry and technical but also, frankly, utterly amazing and another ‘crikey, I did not think of this as a potential use-case for GANs’ thing that, I find, is helpful in maintaining a sense of wonder and positivity about all this moderately-terrifying AI progress.
• Search Gizmos: As previously discussed here, search is currently a bit broken – Google’s gone to sh1t, the new Bing is, despite all the AI gubbins, still as sh1t as it ever was (you can have all the conversational features you like, but if the search product the bot is using is as fundamentally second-tier as Bing is it’s unlikely to deliver many real benefits), and we’re still waiting to see whether AI integration will make a meaningful, positive difference to the way search in general functions (I am…unconvinced, personally, but then again I am a know-nothing bozo with a spectacularly-unpopular internet newsletter and Google is, well, a bit more successful than me, so perhaps I should just listen to Sunder). In the meantime, you might find this website (compiled by Tara Calishain) helpful – it contains a bunch of useful tools and tips and tricks to make Google work better, and to search Wikipedia more effectively, and links to all sorts of other useful search tools, and frankly this is probably the most useful link in this week’s Curios and YOU ARE WELCOME!
• Design Life Cycle: This is interesting: “Designlife-cycle.com is a work-in-progress project by design undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis – Department of Design.  Designers and consumers should have quick access to full information about the full life-cycle and embedded energy of common design materials and products. Without having this information at our fingertips, efforts toward sustainability are seriously hampered, if not an outright sham.  What are the things we use every day made of? Where do the materials that make it up come from, and what steps do they undergo in their processing to become the things we use?  How are they disassembled and recycled, and where do the materials go after use? How much energy is involved in this process at every step of the way, not just when we plug something into the wall to charge it?” This contains a LOAD of student work, looking at individual products and how they are made and what the externalities of that making are, and where the waste goes…in part just fascinating about modern manufacturing and capitalism in general, in part a bit of a worrying environmental reminder about just how terrible all this relentless consumption tends to be for the planet, this is also a useful place for product / category research, should you ever be in the market for it.
• Vacation With An Artist: This is odd. Vacation With An Artist is an initiative that in theory lets anyone book a ‘holiday’ with an artist somewhere in the world – you pay a fee for their time, for the use of their space and for materials, and for the duration of the experience you will effectively be apprenticed to them, learning their practice and craft and (so the blurb goes) developing your own skills unto the bargain. You obviously still have to stump up for travel, food and accommodation, but there are some genuinely interesting people who you can go and stay with if you’re so inclined (part of me wants to just go and hang out with bespoke cobblers Deborah and James, wherever in London they might be – they just look nice, don’t they?). My only slight cautionary note is based on the fact that the majority of artists I’ve met in my life aren’t *necessarily* the most garrulous people in the world, and I’m not 100% certain that they’d be able to maintain the requisite veneer of sociability, but that might say more about the calibre of person I associate with than artists in general. I am now slightly obsessed with the idea of spending 4 days in Catania learning how to restore wood – there are some really cool-sounding things on here, it’s worth having an explore.
• Kenny Logins: A password generator which uses the lyric book of 1980s American rocker Kenny Loggins, the man whose vocals soundtracked Top Gun amongst other things, as its source material. A single-note gag, but a pretty good one.
• Sunstream: THIS IS SO SO SO BEAUTIFUL. “Sun Stream is a digital clock in the form of a 24-hour song that shifts based on the amount of a visitor’s “available light.” Loosely inspired by the concept of Circadian Rhythms, 14 sun positions are mapped to 14 audio loops. Additional sound layers are generated in real time, while bells softly mark the passage of hours.” I can’t stress enough how much I think this sort of design – temporal, environmental and reactive – feels underexplored, and a hugely-fertile area to think about in terms of creative work. But, er, please don’t fcuking ruin it by using it to sell orange juice or something.
• Warms: This is rather lovely; it looks a bit like a ‘Life’ cellular simulation, but it isn’t one – instead, draw linear shapes and watch as they then animate, based on rules derived from their length and the curve and direction of the lines. Simple but really rather lovely.
• Doom In Teletext: You’ll need to be technically-minded to make this work, but if you’d ever asked yourself ‘I wonder if it is technically possible to make Doom run on ancient UK text information service Teletext’ then you will be thrilled to know that the answer is “YES YOU CAN!”.
• Puzzlemoji: Can you communicate the title of a film using only three emoji, in such a way that a GPT can correctly guess the movie in question? Yes, you probably can, you are after all smarter than The Machine (still, just), but that doesn’t stop this daily puzzler from being pleasingly-fun.
• TimeGuessr: Ooh, this is a good one – guess the geographical location AND the year in which a bunch of famous photos were taken. This is really addictive, I warn you.
• DayBrix: The latest game from Matt Round over at Vole, this is DEFINITELY NOT Tetris, and DEFINITELY DOESN’T draw any inspiration from it whatsoever – it is, fine, a game in which blocks fall from the top of the screen and you, the player, is tasked with arranging them into lines, but it is DEFINITELY NOT Tetris. It is DayBrix, and it is a lot of fun (even though I am really, really sh1t at it) – there’s a daily challenge, and an arcade mode, and the music in particular is far, far better than it needs to be.
• Screwball Scramble: OH MY GOD THIS IS A HIT OF PURE UNCUT NOSTALGIA RIGHT INTO MY VEINS! Screwball Scramble, for the uninitiated, was a motorised game released in the 1980s in which you had to get a ballbearing across a bunch of different obstacles, each controlled in its own way with a level or slider or button; the game required concentration and patience and skill, all the sorts of things that kids naturally lack, and as such was both INSANELY FRUSTRATING but also the coolest thing in the world re it basically being an IRL version of something like Marble Madness. And now it’s BACK, rendered in genuinely-gorgeous CG which really LOOKS like the cheap plastic that the original was made from, and which neatly recreates the insane anger you will feel as your ball caroms off the penultimate obstacle and you’re forced to restart the whole thing. I promise you that you have NO IDEA of the effort of will it’s currently taking for me not to sack off the rest of this and just play this for the rest of the morning (SEE MY STAKHANOVITE DEDICATION AND MARVEL!).

By Jérôme Masi

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS CRACKING CROSS-GENRE MIX OF SUNSHINE-APPROPRIATE BANK HOLIDAY BANGERS BY SAIGE SOUNDS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Airplane Facts With Max: Max is an airline mechanic, who makes videos on his Insta feed about planes that aren’t really about planes at all. Max’s delivery is VERY deadpan, which makes these videos 100% funnier than they would otherwise be.
• Barry Webb: Barry takes macro photographs of very small things – these are GORGEOUS, particularly if you’re a mycology fan (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc etc).
• Cooking For Bae: Bad food, photographed badly. You know what you’re getting with this, fine, but WOW is there some stellar content on here. There’s one shot of a battered sausage, chips and mushy peas which contains foodstuffs of a colour I have genuinely never witnessed before.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Dolf Kruger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

I went to Alton Towers yesterday. It was BRILLIANT – honestly, pro-tip, a midweek April/May visit outside of school holidays is ideal, 10m queue times and minimal hordes – but as a result now feel like I have been trampled by several herds of variously-sized ruminants (things nooone tells you about getting old – your body will ache as though you have done ACTUAL EXERCISE if you spend a day being thrown around by rollercoasters).

Which is by way of excuse for the brusque intro this week – I am off to get into a bath full of Epsom Salts and to self-medicate the pain away. I’ll leave you with these words and links – a particularly good crop this week, even if I do say so myself (that’s the links – the words, sadly, are by this point probably irredeemable).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably haven’t been on a rollercoaster for ages and, honestly, that is a real shame.

By Barbara Kruger

LET’S START THIS WEEK OFF, MUSICALLY-SPEAKING, WITH THIS EXCELLENT AND ECLECTIC MIX OF EXCELLENT TRACKS, SPANNING AMBIENT AND ELECTRONICA AND MORE BESIDES, COMPILED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU WERE IN ANY WAY SURPRISED BY SOME OF THE RHETORIC BEING PEDDLED ONSTAGE AT THE NATIONAL CONSERVATISM EVENT YOU POSSIBLY HAVEN’T REALLY BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO ANYTHING FOR ABOUT 8 YEARS, PT.1:  

By Thibaut Grevet

THE DESCRIPTION FOR THIS MIX DESCRIBES IT AS A ‘HANGOVER SET’, WHICH I THINK DESCRIBES IT PERFECTLY – THIS IS BY FREDFADES, MIXED LIVE IN MUNICH LAST MONTH, AND IT IS VERY GOOD INDEED! 

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU WERE IN ANY WAY SURPRISED BY SOME OF THE RHETORIC BEING PEDDLED ONSTAGE AT THE NATIONAL CONSERVATISM EVENT YOU POSSIBLY HAVEN’T REALLY BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO ANYTHING FOR ABOUT 8 YEARS, PT.2:    

• The Archive Stumbler: The Internet Archive is an amazing resource, but it’s also massive and unwieldy and, frankly, a bit of a horror to navigate; this project aims to make it a bit easier to spelunk through the archives. Users can either input the root url of any collection they wish to explore and then hit the ‘Go See Something’ button to be taken to a random file from said collection, or (and this is where the majority of the joy of this comes in) just hit the ‘Click Here’ button to let the site choose a collection for you at random to go investigating in. This is the purest, cleanest hit of historiconlinephemera that you will ever have – you could spend DAYS on this site, wandering through obscure corners of digital collections ranging from archived TV shows to old emulated Flash games to now-defunct news sites…this is basically a digital archaeologists’ dream, and an almost-perfect way to waste a LOT of time while sitting at a computer (which, obviously, is what we all most definitely need to do more of here in 2023).
• Telly: I appreciate that this has been in the Real News a bit and as such is possibly not *quite* a Curio, but, on the flipside, it’s also a genuinely odd product and concept that I am fascinated to see whether it takes off. Telly, for those of you who have somehow missed the advertising blitz, is a new company which sells television sets – except it doesn’t sell them, choosing instead to give the hardware away FOR FREE in exchange for equipping each set with an unremovable, full-width bar at the bottom of the main display which will be used to serve the users with HIGHLY TARGETED PREMIUM ADVERTISING MESSAGES at all times. So you can get a nice, big HD telly – but, on the flipside, it will NEVER STOP screaming at you (visually at least) to BUY MORE THINGS. Oh, and it’s equipped with a built-in camera and AI voice assistant – while there’s obviously no suggestion whatsoever that the camera will be spying on you and sending data about what you’re doing back to the advertisers so that they can better target you with the BUY MORE THINGS screaming (or indeed that they’ll be listening in to your conversations), I also feel like this is exactly the sort of product where ‘actually, we DO in fact spy on you, sorry!’ might end up being buried somewhere in the small print. I just wonder what the market for this is, given the fact that TVs have, as far as I can tell, been one of the few things that have been getting consistently-cheaper for years, and that literally every single ‘get free stuff in exchange for watching LOADS OF ADS’ business I have come across in the past decade or so has fundamentally failed miserably (except social media, fine, but that’s about being willing to put up with ads in exchange for connections with people, which imho is a totally different proposition). Anyway, it’s entirely possible that in 50 years we’ll have a Telly(™) in every home, advertising at us all, 24/7, in perpetuity (“A TELLY IN EVERY ROOM! BE ADVERTISED AT WHILE YOU DEFECATE!” Oh God).
• The Quantum Archive: As previously stated, I am quite keen that Web Curios doesn’t make fun of individuals. Companies, yes; brands, yes; agencies, God yes, but individual people (unless they’re obviously awful) I try not to kick. So it’s in the spirit of gentle, curious support that I present to you The Quantum Archive, the online home of one Peter Vis and one of the more…singular websites I’ve come across in a while. Mr Vis has been maintaining this for a LONG time, and as far as I can tell it’s just a collection of things that he considers important or interesting, knowledge that he basically just wants to share with the world. So here you can find his writings on IT and, er, how to land a plane, and a review of a remote control dinosaur, and a bunch of instructions on how to repair old electronics…there is a LOT in here, and there’s something about the endeavour here that I think is weirdly charming and pleasingly-bloody-minded; you rather get the feeling that Mr Vis is very much convinced of the vital utility of these pages, even if the rest of us haven’t quite caught up yet, and I wish him many further years of steadfast knowledge accumulation and dissemination.
• QQL: A quick warning here – yes, ok, this is an NFT art project. BUT! You can generate nice bits of semi-abstract, procedural art and download it without getting involved in any of that stupid ‘minting’ business, and you don’t need a Metamask wallet, and at no point does the website seem to be trying to steal your immortal soul, and so on that basis I think I can feel justified including it. It was also sent in by a reader, and, what can I say, I am a sucker for a reader submission. Writes the mysterious CT1: “It´s a crypto generative art project that I liked a lot. The artists set up the algorithm and the users can play with the algorithm and if they like the output they can mint the piece.” Which, basically, is it – fiddle with some parameters and generate an art! I quite enjoyed the outputs of this, I must say, and the fact that, yes, YOU CAN JUST RIGHT-CLICK AND SAVE IT makes it, I think, entirely acceptable, despite the NFTness of the thing.
• The MTV Basement Tapes: WOW. If you’d always hoped to find the ultimate motherlode of forgotten US unsigned bands from the 80s but were starting to despair (be hornest, who hasn’t?!) then DESPAIR NO MORE! This is a YouTube channel collecting seemingly every single band that ever appeared on MTV’s ‘Basement Tapes’ slot, a mid-80s competition that the channel ran to discover the best unsigned bands from across the country. To quote the channel’s description, “The seminal “American Idol”-styled music video competition that showcased unsigned (and sometimes signed — MTV was incompetent) bands, “Basement Tapes” ran from March, 1983 to January, 1989. The series sprang out of MTV’s desire to “handle” the increasing load of “unsigned” (meaning not-major-label) clips that were being sent to the network each month. They originally debuted those in general rotation, starting with “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” by Blotto — the first unsigned act ever shown on MTV — on their first day of broadcasting in August, 1981, but now the artists had to earn it. That’s where we came in. The audience got to vote on who would get rotation, along with other prizes. Meanwhile, MTV got our 50 cents a vote for mistakenly thinking our tastes mattered. “Basement Tapes” featured 350 clips competing for our votes during the course of its 6-year run. One month, over 100 thousand votes were cast.” I can’t pretend that this is all ‘hidden gem’-quality material, but there’s an undeniable time-traveling charm to the songs and the performances, and I imagine that there’s probably quite a lot of ‘before they were famous’-spotting to be done in the assorted vids.
• Lobby Facts: I think I occasionally bore you with ‘reminiscences from Matt’s life’ – indulge me for another second or two as I flash back to those few inglorious years spent as a junior lobbyist in the early-00s, working out of a townhouse in Victoria and realising quite quickly that I probably wasn’t compatible, long-term, with an industry where I’d be working with the sort of person who grew up with posters of Thatcher or Kinnock on their walls. I  think I lasted just over two years in that gig, which is miraculous really considering that after just 3 weeks in the job I drunkenly told my boss that I thought lobbying was a disgustingly corrupt industry that everyone ought to be broadly ashamed of working in (whilst, yes, that didn’t prevent me from trousering the cheques for longer than I ought have done, in my defence I was legitimately terrible at the job and did literally no work whatsoever for about 8 months of that time – that was the job at which I first learned that it was perfectly possible to order home-delivery weed off the internet, something which, on reflection, probably hasn’t been a hugely-positive influence on the rest of my life). Which is by way of longwinded and unnecessary preamble to this link, which is a searchable register of lobbying companies currently operating in Brussels, detailing their clients and the number of Commission passes they have, and generally lifting the lid on the intentionally-murky world of ‘cash for access’ at the great gravy buffet that is the EC (and I say this as a committed Europhile – the Brussels lobbying industry is GROSS). “LobbyFacts empowers journalists, activists, and researchers to search, sort, filter, and analyse data from the official EU Transparency Register, tracking lobbyists and their influence at the EU level over time. Use the search functions below to get the answers to these questions and more. Who are the biggest lobby spenders?                   Which lobby consultancies are working for which corporate interests? Are companies spending more on lobbying than last year? Who is lobbying on the latest EU hot topic?” – this is genuinely useful, if the sort of thing that will leave you feeling a bit grubby.
• LinkedInGPT: Via Giuseppe, a bit of code that will automatically generated LinkedIn posts for you – the smart thing here is that rather than just spitting out some generic business pabulum, this script will instead pick a trending paper from ‘Papers With Code’ and generate an opinion piece for you about it. This is a) a Github repository, so you’ll need to be able to do a bit of light codewrangling to make it work; and b) only really useful if your professional connections are likely to be impressed by wafer-thin ‘analysis’ of very specific code-related research, but it’s an interesting proof-of-concept and a useful reminder that, while it has ALWAYS been true that everyone who takes LinkedIn seriously is basically the worst sort of human being in the world (look, I don’t make the rules, it’s just TRUE), it is very important that you assume that 99% of everything you see on there will have been AI-generated by the end of the year because, honestly, it probably will be.
• Conquered by Clippy: Long-term readers will be aware that Web Curios is a big fan of Chuck Tingle, inventor of the Tingleverse and the ur-creator of the ‘person has intimate experience with anthropomorphised object or concept, in a manner which might initially seem a bit weird and skeezy but which in fact reveals itself to be an empowering exploration of diversity and the multifaceted nature of love’ – this…this is not a Chuck Tingle book. It is, though, very much a short book about a woman having a sexual encounter with an anthropomorphised  version of Microsoft’s famous and much-loved digital assistant of Times Past, and it is part of a wider series which includes such titles as “Taken by the Tetris Blocks”, and “Invaded by the iWatch” and…look, I think we all know that these are going to be terrible, borderline unreadable, and probably not anywhere near as funny as you might hope  but, well, tell me you’re not tempted? NOONE NEED EVER KNOW.
• Ambient Garden: THIS IS SO LOVELY! A gorgeous bit of digital creation and a perfect Tiny Website (more on this concept in a few weeks), “Ambient.Garden is a music composition laid out in space. Moving through the space is moving through the music. The autopilot is a suggested path through the music, and can be disabled to freely explore. Each tree links to the source code of its generative sound. This code can be experimented with to move deeper into the sound.” You can either set this on ‘autopilot’, just letting it ‘walk’ you through the landscape as you experience the sounds ‘planted’ by the developer, or you can click to move in whichever direction you desire and see what musical landscapes result…honestly, this is just gorgeous.
• Stupid Food: This subReddit may be massively famous but I only really spent any time checking it out this week and MY GOD is there some horror in here. Basically this collates a bunch of dreadful TikTok food stuff (on which more later, by the way) and sub-Chef Club recipes and other dreadful abominations starring violent quantities of meat and cheese (seriously, based on this type of content I genuinely fear for the gut health of North America – what are your BOWELS like, Americans? What do you do for fibre? For roughage? Are you even AWARE of All Bran?) – you will feel very sick, but you won’t be able to stop looking.
• Just Burps: It’s not big and it’s not clever, but, well, it can’t ALL be cutting-edge tech developments and serious discussions about theories of knowledge, can it?
• Unrelated Words: This is a great game (but which is also a bit hard to explain) – each day you are presented with two words, and your task is to build a ‘bridge’ of other words that connect them – with the caveat that each word you suggest has to be at least 25%-related to either the preceding or following word, as determined by word vectors. So the homepage gives the example of connecting ‘puppy’ with ‘bank’ through the words puppy>bark>tree>branch>bank – DO YOU SEE? Honestly, this is a fun, chewy puzzler that could be a nice addition to your morning pre-work timewasting routine should you feel able to fit another one in.
• The Green New Deal Simulator: Finally this week, a simple-yet-engaging game built by super-studio MolleIndustria to help communicate the complexities of the challenge facing NOrth America as it attempts to meet its 2050 emissions goals. The interface is pared-back and card-based; with you trying to balance deploying policy inititatives with managing the economy and unemployment, deploying cards in various US regions to build nuclear plants or power lines, all the while trying to keep within budget as the timer ticks down towards THE BAD DEADLINE. NGL, I have played this three times now and I have at no point been able to ‘win’, but doubtless you will do better (and of COURSE the elected representatives in the US who are charged with sorting this out in real life can be relied upon to approach these issues with the sort of collegiate, collaborative equanimity that characterises all their interactions – it’s all going to be fine!).

By Paul Davis

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY DAVE HARKS AND IT IS BRIGHT AND SPARKLY AND FEELS LIKE EXACTLY THE SORT OF THING THAT WOULD BE THE PERFECT ACCOMPANIMENT TO A WARM AND SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING WITH ALL THE WINDOWS FLUNG OPEN (SHAME, THEN, THAT IT IS CURRENTLY 945AM ON FRIDAY MORNING AND I ONCE AGAIN SIT BENEATH A SKY THE COLOUR OF GRAPHITE)! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Marble Maniki: Satisfying CG animations – you know the type of thing, slicing and fitting and pleasingly-looping – which are genuinely mesmerising and which almost stole my attention away just now so BE WARNED.
• Bicycle, The Band: I don’t really want to tell you too much about this – just…just trust me and click the link and watch some of the videos. I promise you, you will be CHARMED (also, some of the musicianship here is genuinely great).
• Alex Micu: I don’t know Alex, but he seems nice on Twitter and I really like his photos; he’s available for commissions, I think, so in case any of you have a need and like his style then you might want to get in touch. Regardless, his shots of London (and other places) are, to my mind, beautiful.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Frances Waite

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO!

Well, we have a new king, but more importantly we have NEW KNOWLEDGE – specifically, we learned that there is literally NOTHING that the UK is hornier for, sexually or electorally, than a middle-aged woman carrying a ceremonial sword. Were it possible for an entire nation to undergo psychotherapy I would be strongly advocating for it right now.

I have errands to run, and you have an absolute FCUKTONNE of words and links to click through (you…you will click, right?), so let’s get started shall we (Jesus, I appear to have taken to writing this upfront in the sort of stern, authoritarian, vaguely-schoolmistressy tone that I imagine Penny Mordaunt to speak in – I can only imagine the tumescence this is causing)?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t have to be embarrassed, we’re all friends here.

PS – there’s a chance there won’t be a Curios next week, so on the offchance that there isn’t then don’t worry, I am probably not dead. Although I might be. Consider me in an exciting state of Schrodinger-ian uncertainty between now and the next edition!

By Ralph Gibson

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A THROWBACK TO ONE OF MY FAVOURITE ALBUMS OF THE MID-90s WHICH I HOPE YOU TOO WILL ENJOY – FUNKUNGFUSION! 

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES THAT THERE IS ONLY ONE NEWS STORY THAT COUNTS THIS WEEK AND THAT THIS IS IT, PT.1:  

By Rose Barberat

NEXT UP, THIS TRULY FANTASTIC TWO-HOUR DISCO AND FUNK MIX WHICH I PROMISE YOU WILL MAKE YOU GENUINELY HAPPY!

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES THAT THERE IS ONLY ONE NEWS STORY THAT COUNTS THIS WEEK AND THAT THIS IS IT, PT.2:          

• Raybot: The news that Achewood was back with all new content sent certain sections of the web into happy paroxysms – there was also some fear that Chris Onstad was using AI to help him write the new strips, but instead Onstad is doing something far more interesting (to my mind, at least) by feeding his writings to The Machine and using the corpus to create an interactive digital avatar for Ray, one of the main Achewood characters. You can interact with Ray at the main link here, asking him questions about anything you like to which he will respond in pretty decent Ray-ish prose (if you know Achewood then this will obviously work better for you – if you don’t, well, MORE FOOL YOU); I am quietly excited about the possibilities of stuff like this as we move towards the ‘everyone has their own personal AI that they have trained to be whatever they need it to’ inevitable future.
• Narrative Debris: OH GOD I LOVE THIS. A gorgeous artwork exploring a very specific place, Narrative Debris is…oh, look, let me just use Tricia Enns own words here, as they will be better than mine. “This work currently revolves around the Quartier des Spectacles neighbourhood in Montreal. A neighbourhood close to the St. Laurence River and thus the arrival point to the land and later the city for many groups of people such as: Iroquoians, French explorers, Chinese, Jewish and Portuguese immigrants to name a few1. The area continues, to this day, to be a tapestry of stories, but that plurality has been threatened by recent development. How do we share, propagate, and celebrate the many stories held within such a small area?” Through a guided walk available on Soundcloud which she created but anyone can take, and a hand-drawn map of the area she’s detailing which is marked and annotated with the things she and others have seen and experienced on said walk, Emms is building a picture of a neighbourhood from sounds and memories and experiences, and this site is a tiny digital diorama of the people and memories that make up the place. Honestly, this is practically-perfect in every way and I adore it immoderately.
• Bring Back YouTube Annotations: OLD internet people like me (and, quite possibly, like you – WHO ARE YOU?) will remember the glorious (oh, ok, that’s hyperbolic; it was of course merely FINE) era of YouTube annotations which allowed creative an enterprising people to create all sorts of surprisingly-deep interactive experiences by cobbling together videos through embedded annotations and hyperlinks – YouTube killed that a few years ago, thereby sadly breaking all those projects, but now there’s this Chrome extension which will apparently restore the functionality and let you once again enjoy all the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-style videos that you remember so well from that brief period circa 2011 when they were very much in vogue.
• Star Trek Bridges: Do YOU like Star Trek? Do YOU secretly make the small ‘whoosh’ noise that the doors in the TV show make whenever you approach an automatic doorway? Did you harbor illicit erotic thoughts about Spock/Sulu/Uhura/Riker/Troy/Worf? Do you know the difference between a ‘Trekkie’ and a ‘Trekker’ (apparently it’s something to do with whether you can actually speak Klingon)? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then this website will probably render you almost painfully-tumescent – it lets you ‘explore’ CG representations of the Bridge of a whole bunch of different spaceships from the Star Trek universe (don’t ask me what they are, I am neither a Trekkie nor a Trekker) via a really, really horrible web interface which does an excellent job of aping the horrible UI you’d imagine a starship operating system from the 1960s would have.
• Squirrelcam: Technically this is a camera in a bird’s nest, but for some reason the birds have been evicted by some squirrels which have just given birth in there – apparently squirrels spend about 10 weeks suckling their young, so bookmark this and check in daily for the next couple of months to see lovely, cute tree rats growing and thriving.  Beautifully there is a chat window on the site which seems to be full of Belgian rodent enthusiasts all typing “I LOVE SQUIRRELS!” which is, honestly, very cute.
• This Website Will Self Destruct: One of two websites this week which I am re-featuring (breaking a self-imposed rule – THE STANDARDS ARE SLIPPING!) – This Website Will Self Desctruct celebrated its third birthday this week, which is slightly astonishing considering its whole thing is that it will disappear if noone submits a message via the contact form for 24h. What that means, of course, is that there are hundreds if not thousands of anonymous messages from strangers buried in the site’s backend, and you can explore them by clicking ‘Read a message’ at the bottom of the page. Honestly, I lost about 20 minutes to this earlier in the week – I am a total sucker for anonymous memoryholes like this, and there is something almost infinitely poignant about seeing all the people who express their own feelings of sadness and loneliness and happiness and fear via the medium of messages that will in almost all cases never be read by anyone, ever. I know that I am a bit fixated on this stuff, but I would honestly sit in a gallery watching these come up forever.
• Listen To Wikipedia: Our second reappearing link of the week is this one – PROPERLY old, this, maybe even ten years, but still wonderful and worth re-upping because I think they recently updated the code to improve the sounds and include edits from Wikis in non-English languages, making the pleasing plinky cacoophony less sparse than it previously was. Oh, hang on, I haven’t explained what this actually is – it makes a sound every time an edit is made to Wikipedia. There.
• Goblin Tools: This is an interesting idea, and if you are (or know someone who is) neurodivergent then you may find it a useful collection of helpful tools. “goblin.tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. Most tools will use AI technologies in the back-end to achieve their goals. Currently this includes OpenAI’s models. As the tools and backend improve, the intent is to move to an open source alternative.” So there’s one that checks copy for tonal implications that might not be obvious to people with certain conditions, for example, and another which tells you how long you might usually expect a certain task to take – this strikes me as a smart use of OpenAI tech and, in general, A Good Thing, and the sort of thing which could usefully be worked into other sites and services without too much hassle.
• The Index: This is interesting: “The Index is a curated online gallery with the best design studios, designers, type foundries, and other creatives worldwide. We aim to publish a handful of submissions per week, both on the website and featured in the weekly newsletter. We also post and promote on Instagram and Twitter. We strongly believe in quality over quantity, hence our relatively slow growth approach.” There’s something perhaps *slightly* grifty about their insistence on charging $25 per submission – with no guarantee that submissions will make it onto the list, of course – but I equally admire the bloody-mindedness of the enterprise. There are currently 48 studios on there, with a reasonable geographic spread, so should you be looking for vetted design partners then this is worth bookmarking I think.
• Condiment Packets: Have you ever held a small sachet of ketchup or mayonnaise in your hand and marveled at the elegance and simplicity of its design and the almost supernatural allure of the branding and logo work? No, of course you haven’t, you’re not a mad obsessive with an inexplicable fetish for the world’s most-polluting byproduct of late-period capitalism (or at least I presume you’re not; as previously discussed, though, I have no fcuking idea who you are. WHO ARE YOU?). That said, SOMEONE is definitely that sort of mad obsessive, or at least I presume they are given the obvious time and effort that goes into maintaining The Condiment Packet Gallery, which has, according to its ‘About’ page, been going for 20 years. Annoyingly I found myself getting weirdly into this, to the point where I found myself looking up exactly what is in the mysterious ‘Salsa Golf’ marketed by Hellman’s in Argentina, so don’t for a second presume you’ll be immune to the mysterious allure of the condiment collection.
• Theoretical Puppets: I am slightly upset that I don’t appear to have featured this already in here, as it is SO GOOD. Have you ever wanted a YouTube channel that explains some pretty knotty concepts, from philosophy and sociology and more, via the medium of cuddly, friendly-looking puppet representations of such BIG THINKERS as Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault (A joke: “what do you know about sociology?” “Foucault”)? OF COURSE YOU HAVE AND HERE IT IS! Honestly, there are dozens of vids on the channel and they are CHARMING, and, more importantly, actually pretty good educational tools. If you want to have the principles of postmodernism explained to you by a felt mannequin with a hand up its backside then, once again, WEB CURIOS PROVIDES!
• Philosophy Bro: Tangentially-related to the last link. Philosophy Bro is, fine, a single-note gag but it’s one that I find quite funny – it’s philosophy! But written in the style of a slightly-stoned fraternity guy! Your appetite for this will be determined in part by your familiarity with the original material and in part by how funny you find schtick like this: “What if I told you that for $5, you could buy a life-saving vaccine for a child? Sure, he’s far away, but we already agreed: who gives a sh1t, right? It’ll still save his life, and it only costs you not having a fifth drink at the bar on a Thursday. Remember that $300 bar receipt you posted with the caption “just another Thursday night wearing matching plaid with my bros, we’re special and impressive and are the ACTUAL six dudes with the biggest d1cks, unlike all you OTHER overconfidences of bros who think that, well guess what, it’s us?” What you were really saying was “I routinely pass up the chance to save two dozen lives with science so that I can black out and pretend that I like myself for a night.” That’s fcuked up, bro.” Anyway, it makes ME laugh and that’s what counts.
• Chat Jams: An AI playlist creator for Spotify – give it a prose description of the sort of playlist you’d like it to make and it will do the rest. This isn’t the first of these that I’ve seen, but it’s definitely the one that works best; it’s managed to produce reasonable selections based on prompts as esoteric as ‘music to crank to’ and ‘incel sounds’ (look, it’s just where my mind ended up, ok?), and the option to demand that it select only ‘deep cuts’ is a nice addition.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanac: To quote the site, this book “is a compilation of 11 talks by the legendary vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. In it, he draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of business, finance, history, philosophy, physics, and ethics to introduce the mental models that underpin his rigorous approach to life, learning, and decision-making—all delivered with his trademark irreverence and rhetorical flair.” Which, frankly, I don’t really care about either way – but the website is SO SHINY, and interested me because, based on the little I know of the publishing industry, dropping a massive wedge on a shiny bit of webwork doesn’t tent to tally with the economics of selling books (I wonder whether the famously-plutocratic Mr  Munger is paying for this himself). Basically if you’re an author I suggest you bookmark this and send it to your publishing house with a naive “was thinking about something like this for the promo for my next…?”, just for the lols.
• Mr Ranedeer: I have mentioned quite often here, I think, that I don’t think ‘prompt engineering’ is going to be a thing for very long – still, it’s occasionally interesting and impressive to see some of the ways in which people are effectively locking LLMs to fulfil specific roles and functions (it feels to me a bit like hypnotism) – this is one such case, which you can try for yourself on whichever AI text platform you prefer. Input the code as a text prompt and the machine will find itself in the persona of ‘Mr Ranedeer’, an AI Tutor who can be used to plan and deliver lessons on any topic you can imagine, along with tests to gauge your progress as you learn. You can modify the bot’s speech style, the learning style that best fits yours, the degree of subject depth the model will go into…as with all this stuff it works best with maths/qual-type stuff and less well with abstract and arty things, but having had a bit of a play with it it really is quite impressive; there’s something really, really interesting about the idea of treating these systems as programmable and where you can end up as a result.
• AI Drumloops: On the one hand, if you’re any sort of skilled beatmaker whatsoever then everything produced by this machine will sound like utter dogsh1t (and, as an aside, if you’re into this stuff then can I recommend the YouTube channel of Jon Wayne who is an INSANELY talented producer and who makes genuinely great instructional vids detailing his processes); on the other, if you’re not then there’s something vaguely-magical about the fact that you have an infinity of machine-generated rhythms at your fingertips. Whilst you wouldn’t necessarily use anything here fresh out of the machine, I can imagine it being a not-totally-useless jumping off point.
• GIPPR: I find myself increasingly feeling like some sort of mad Cassandra when it comes to AI stuff – I don’t mean to doomsay, really I don’t, but at the same time I feel very strongly that there are some very, very iffy things coming our way as a result of this tech that people really aren’t thinking about quite hard enough. There’s the jobs thing, of course, but also the fact that if (per Google’s leaked documents from this week, of which more later) we accept that the future of this stuff is open source, and that it’s only going to get smaller and lighter and more agile, to the point where anyone will be able to have their own personal LLM, trained in whatever way they prefer, weighted to their tastes and running locally on their phone, that we will eventually end up at a point where it’s utterly conceivable that anyone could have their own personal bespoke AI that they use as a personal assistant AND WHICH OFFERS A VERSION OF THE ‘TRUTH’ THAT IS ENTIRELY ITS OWN. So, for example, take GIPPR – a proof-of-concept, fine, and a bit of marketing for the company behind it, but also a working GPT-anaologue which has been trained and weighted to offer the Republican viewpoint on any question you care to ask it. Was the last US election result legitimate? THERE ARE DOUBTS, says GIPPR! Is President Trump a liar? PEOPLE SAY A LOT OF THINGS ABOUT HIM, says GIPPR, but “I believe that President Trump is honest and has the best interest of the country in mind. The media has a history of twisting and manipulating his words in an attempt to demonize him and his policies.” You…you can see how this might end up being problematic, right?
• A Selection of AI Cinema Experiments: Presuming you’re not yet bored of watching people’s experiments in making “Film X, but in the style of Wes Anderson!” videos using Midjourney et al, Rene from Good Internet has helpfully compiled a bunch of them on this page.
• Polish Pixels: This is ACE – an archive of old Polish videogames, covering a range of platforms including the Spectrum, C64 and Amiga, which aren’t playable on-site but which in many cases link to in-browser playable versions elsewhere on the web. I would love to know a little more about the history behind some of these titles, whether they were legitimate products of the local industry or bedroom-created hobbyist hacks, but this is a properly-fascinating bit of games history and contains all sorts of titles that I would LOVE to have played – I mean, look at this one; what the fcuk is going on?
• Cavern Sweeper: This is basically Minesweeper but with some small gameplay knobs on – you’re clearing monsters, not mines, with different monsters having different danger profiles which subtly alter the basic gameplay mechanic. A decent 20-minute timekiller, this.
• Moderator Mayhem: This is rather good – it’s a broadly ‘educational’ title, but I promise it’s more fun than that makes it sound (you can read more about the game’s genesis and the thinking behind it here, should you so desire). You play the part of a poor office drone tasked with making moderation decisions for a website – you’re told the rules, you’re told what to do, and then you’re left to get on with the obviously-impossible task of accuratelty assessing a growing pile of questionable content against the clock. Now what I’ve typed doesn’t, I’ll admit, *sound* in any way fun, but in a vaguely ‘Papers, Please’-esque way it manages to make something ostensibly tedious into a reasonably-compelling gameplay loop (and makes you feel really, really sorry for anyone who has to do this for a living).
• Sine Rider: Finally this week, a game that is genuinely GREAT FUN but which also made me think about certain aspects of GCSE maths for the first time in about…fcuk, 28 years, for which I do not thank it. Sine Rider is a bit like Line Rider (remember that?) except to complete the levels you need to do some gentle maths based around trigonometry and quadratics and stuff. I promise you that this really is ACE, and not too mathsy, and if at any point you find yourself struggling then consider this an excellent opportunity to experiment with the tuition capabilities of Mr Ranedeer from a few links ago (or, er, just Google the answers, noone will ever know).

By Matthew Hansel

LET’S FINISH UP THE MIXES WITH THIS INCREDIBLY SUNNY SELECTION OF LATINISH GROOVES COMPILED BY MATTY S!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Amiguitos de la Oscuridad: I am not 100% certain what this is about or why it exists, but I am genuinely happy that I stumbled across this Insta feed which as far as I can tell exists solely to showcase small papercraft models of bats (also, the title is SO CUTE – if you are not in some small way charmed by the idea of ‘little darkness friends’ then frankly you’re dead inside).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Danny Galieote

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HAPPY FORELOCK-TUGGING HOLIDAY!

I once worked at Buckingham Palace, you know (apologies if I’ve bored you with this before) – they used to advertise Summer jobs in the Guardian back in the day (THE IRONY), and as a result I spent two genuinely-enjoyable months working in the gift shop and the ticket office (you can read more about that experience here, in a now-classic example of Muir juvenilia – it’s good to see that, er, my prose has ‘evolved’ in the 22 years since I wrote that!) – perhaps I would have been better-disposed towards old sausage fingers, old jug-ears, had I been allowed to meet him when he came to visit one day, instead of unceremoniously having my shifts rearranged so that I was not in fact working because, to quote my boss (the fabulously-named Nigel Dickman, who I really hope Googles himself and finds this – NIGEL, YOU WERE A COLOSSAL W4NKER AND EVERYONE HATED YOU, AND YOU ARE STILL THE BEST EXAMPLE OF NOMINATIVE DETERMINISM I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED) “we can’t be sure you won’t do something stupid” (he was, in his defence, right).

My only other familial connection to the royal family comes from the fact that my dad was a contemporary of the soon-to-be-king’s at University – apparently he was ‘notably stupid’, but maybe he was just being BITTER AND REPUBLICAN.

Which is all by way of unnecessarily long-winded preamble to this week’s CELEBRATORY SOUVENIR CORONATION NATIONALISM DIVINE RIGHT JAMBOREE CURIOS! I promise you that there are EXACTLY enough links contained in the following emailnewsletterblogtypething to distract you until the whole disgusting orgy of unmerited wealth and tone-deaf pageantry is over and we can go back to wishing they’d just hurry up and sell Buckingham Palace to Peter Thiel or something.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and they will be first up against the wall come the revolution (fingers crossed, eh?).

By Austin Harris

TOM SPOONER KICKS OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A MIX OF OLD BLUES AND RELATED SOUNDS, MIXED FOR 45 DAY!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ADVISE ANY OF YOU WHO EVER VISIT BUCKINGHAM PALACE TO PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT ALL THE MEN IN THE PORTRAITS – EVERY SINGLE ONE – DRESS TO THE LEFT, PT.1:  

By Ada Zielinska

WE GO BACK TO THE 90s NOW WITH THIS CLASSIC PIECE OF INDUSTRIAL D’N’B WHICH I RECALLED THIS WEEK AND HAVE BEEN ENJOYING REVISITING – PANACEA’S LOW-PROFILE DARKNESS! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ADVISE ANY OF YOU WHO EVER VISIT BUCKINGHAM PALACE TO PAY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT ALL THE MEN IN THE PORTRAITS – EVERY SINGLE ONE – DRESS TO THE LEFT, PT.2:  

• 90s Malls & Stores: As the title suggests, this is a link to Americana – still, the 90s aesthetic is the 90s aesthetic, wherever in the world you might have been at the time, and so this frankly incredible motherlode of imagery, I seem to recall reading all found in a single place and uploaded to Imgur as a bit of social history, will resonate with your if you’re a certain age, wherever you are from. There are about 100 photos in here, of empty retail outlets in what are presumably suburban shopping centres, racks of pristine baggy beige suits of the sort popular only for an approximate 3-year period in North America…honestly, you could train a GAN just on these and you’d be able to create an entirely-convincing everlasting video of liminal mallspace. Which tbh feels like an undergraduate art project just WAITING to happen.
• The Roger: I wouldn’t normally bother including the website shilling Roger Federer’s exclusive range of high-end designer trainers, but there was something about the design of this site that tickled me (quite aside from the fact that, however much of an all-time athletic great you are, there is literally no way in which ‘The Roger’ isn’t a risible name to give to anything, footwear or otherwise) – I think it’s the way that the site features no borders, meaning that you’re presented with an INFINITY OF THE ROGER whichever direction you scroll in, or perhaps the way that there obviously aren’t enough trainers to fill THE INFINITY OF THE ROGER and so some bits are just filled in with some bland inspirational quotes or some slightly-inexplicable looping CG gifs of abstract shapes in motion, all in soothing millennial tones. Why? WHY NOT, THIS IS THE ROGER!
• WikiScroll: I nicked this from B3ta if I recall correctly (THANKS ROB!), and seeing as I’m admitting that I may as well admit that I am nicking the following observation too – to whit, that this infinitely-scrolling version of Wikipedia (the more you scroll, the more INTERESTING FACTS you will be exposed to) is, as things stand, significantly more interesting than Twitter’s current incarnation and, even better, significantly less full of people who want to pay the world’s richest man a monthly stipend. Honestly, this is SO SO FUN, and proof, if ever any were needed, that EVERYTHING is interesting (apart, let’s be honest, from advermarketingpr).
• Memogram: This is a bit hard to explain, but I’ll do my best (this usually presages some sort of horrific prose car crash, so apologies in advance for whatever mangled explanation I attempt to foist on you from hereon in). Memogram (via Nag, I think) is a project by Swiss designer Jamy Herrmann (and I think it was their graduation project, and as such is a couple of years old now) which basically adds a small frictional layer to the photographic process – her prototypical Memograp app and device lets users take a photo as normal with their phone, but rather than the image being immediately displayed on the screen, instead the image is interpreted by machine which seeks to determine what the picture is of; that description is then printed out on a tiny printer, along with a code which will allow the user to access the actual image shot at a later date. I LOVE THIS AND I WANT IT IN REAL LIFE – there was another project a few months back that did something vaguely-similar in terms of using machine vision to interpret a photographic image in terms of prompts and then recreate what had been ‘seen’ using a text-to-image generator, and this feels in a similar space; there’s a lot of really interesting stuff to be explored at the intersection of vision and language and the chinese whispers effect of shifting from one to another and back again, and I particularly like the delayed gratification of the ‘you’ll get your photos when I say so’ aspect of the project. There is SO much that springs to mind here – if nothing else, I would love to see a photobooth where rather than providing me with a photo of myself, I instead get a poem written by The Machine based on its interpretation of what it thinks I look like (for example), but that’s a frankly banal idea and I’m sure you can do better. COME ON, DO BETTER FFS.
• The Wayback Wanderer: A Twitter project (not sure how many times I’m going to be able to type that sentence, which is in itself a miserable thing to type) which, in its own words, “Generates videos of old web pages and media files archived by the Wayback Machine. Posts every 3 hours (except Sundays)”. Have you ever wanted to see a selection of animated gifs displaying how web pages of the past used to work? No, of course not, but who’s to say that that’s not exactly what your life has been missing all these years? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Eat The Invaders: Not, sadly, some sort of sci-fi call to action in which the people of Earth are asked to band together to protect us from some sort of extraterrestrial takeover by bravely committing to repel the invaders with nothing but the might of our jaws, molars and gastric juices, but instead a US-based campaign which aims to tackle the problem of invasive species across North America by, er, encouraging people to eat them. Here you will find recipes and cooking instructions for all sorts of species that are deemed ‘nuisances’ by people who know about this sort of thing – so if you’ve ever wanted to know how best to prepare an armored catfish, say, or what you might do with the several-dozen river rat corpses that you just happen to be in possession of then, well, you’re in luck! There’s a whole load of stuff here that isn’t specifically animal-related, so even the non carnivores amongst you can find useful things here should you feel like going full forager, and whilst many of the species here listen won’t crop up in your Home Counties garden (I appreciate there probably aren’t too many wild pigs running riot in Kent) you might find some useful foraging tips (or, just maybe, this is the time when you finally do something about those fcuking squirrels and eat the evidence).
• All Of The US TV Memorabilia: This is a BIG auction – if there was a TV show made in the US at some point in the past 100 years, chances are there’s something from said show available to buy at this auction taking place in the next month or so. You want, er, literally half the set of the sitcom ‘Cheers!’? YOU GOT IT! You want an actual jukebox from Beverley Hills 90210? GREAT! As you might imagine, a lot of this stuff isn’t cheap – still, what price sitting at the same place as Norm and Cliff and the guys? So what if your wife doesn’t understand? There’s a lot of this that has what I believe the kids call ‘strong divorced man energy’, to my mind at least, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to browse.
• The Landscape of Biomedical Research: On the one hand, unless you’re specifically involved in the field of biomedical research you’re unlikely to get a HUGE amount out of this beyond the very superficial; on the other, I am an absolute sucker for these datavisualisation exercises which offer a zoomed-out picture of an entire field and the sub-areas that comprise it, and this is no exception. This is a dizzying and weirdly-beautiful exercise in mapping the different topic areas covered by biomedicine, and demonstrating how the overall locus of the discipline has shifted and changed over the years – in particular, it’s an interesting way of exploring the preoccupations of science over time (as evidenced by everything published in 2020/21, for example).
• The Anti-Subscription Software Catalogue: Do you need to use software products for creative ends? Do you want to perhaps not have to pay the eye-gouging sums requested of you by the robber barons at Adobe, etc? “This website is a catalogue of non-subscription, free, open-source, and one-time fee software — which can provide relief from monopolized and financialized platforms. Why? The subscription cost can rise at any time, implement region-based barriers, and use deceptive design interactions to entice with tiered features. Say no to creative rent! Just A-S-C instead.” It’s either that or get a cracked version of Creative Suite off the darkweb, and this is LOADS less illegal.
• Melton Barker: This is a WONDERFUL piece of weird history – in the 20thC in North America, a gentleman called Melton Barker travelled the country, getting small local communities to stump up for the production of a film in which they would star. “From the late 1930s into the early 1970s, Dallas native, Melton Barker and his company, Melton Barker Juvenile Productions, traveled all over the country – from Texas and New Mexico to North Carolina and Indiana – filming local children acting, singing, and dancing in two-reel films that Barker titled The Kidnappers Foil.” The script was always the same, the films were identical other than the protagonists and the location of the shoot, and, from what I’ve been able to glean, Barker wasn’t a crook or a conman and seemingly didn’t make a mint fleecing anyone – the monies he took in covered the cost of the production and of his crew, but it seems that in the main he was motivated by a desire to bring THE MAGIC OF FILMMAKING to the people. There’s something fascinating, to my mind at least, about ‘The Kidnappers Foil’ as some sort of cinematic ‘3’33”’, infinitely reinterpretable by an infinite number of casts, and I quite like the idea of trying to create something similar for a modern audience, a single scripted short that is made and remade and by everyone in their own way as part of a collective global filmmaking project…it would end up being Steamed Hams, or the Bee Movie, wouldn’t it? Although I personally would lobby HARD for a dramatic rendition of ‘How Is Babby Formed?’.
• Klack: Have your paymasters unreasonably demanded that you start coming back to the office on the regular rather than sitting happily in your pants at home? Do you use a Mac? GREAT! Ensure that you are never invited back in to an open-plan coworking environment ever again by installing Klack on your machine, which will make your otherwise-silent, state-of-the-art Apple-designed input device make the same sort of clacketty-clacking sound of a heavy mechanical keyboard. You’ll be back home in your scanties in no time at all.
• Lollyphile: I appreciate that the name of this website doesn’t *scream* ‘reputable’, but let me assure you that it’s ‘lolly’ in the ‘Chupa Chups’ sense rather than in the unpleasant and not-entirely-ok hentai fashion. Lollyphile is a purveyor of gourmet lollipops, which may not sound that exciting until you take a look at the flavours and realise that now, finally, you can access the inevitable taste-sensation that is the ‘Blue Cheese and Honey’ lollipop, or even the ‘Mixed Charcuterie’ tasting pack that includes those and some bacon-flavoured suckers just like it’s 2011 all over again. They deliver internationally, so if you want to play a really expensive prank on your children (or, alternatively, if you want to spend upwards of £20 finding out exactly how vile a cheese-flavoured lollipop actually is for yourself) then GO FOR YOUR LIFE.
• Trains: I love this. As far as I can work out, the person behind this site lives in a place where they can see a LOT of trains pass by from their window; using a camera and (I think) a Raspberry Pi or similar, they’ve created a setup where the system automatically clocks when a train is coming into shot and proceeds to take photos of its whole length, automatically stitching them together and posting them to this site, which then becomes an automated record of every single train that passes by each day. You can see them either as the stitched, full-length trains, or alternatively as animated gifs of their passing, and I genuinely love the fact that I can click this link and see dozens of gifs of trains passing a window a whole world away, practically in realtime, Pointless and magical and perfect.
• Walking Japan: Pretend it’s the early days of lockdown one all over again with this ‘walk around Japan’ simulator – select a place and lean back and relax, as you get taken on a first-person walking tour of Osaka or Fukushima or Nara, all accompanied by a soundtrack of (frankly pretty generic) lofi hiphop. This is genuinely rather nice, not least because it’s not just Tokyo and as such is a bit more aesthetically varied than much of the ‘walk Japan’ stuff you tend to see often is.
• Classical Music Only: This is interesting – the companion site to a popular YouTube channel (you can, I imagine, guess its subject), this provides a really useful way of exploring the classical genre via a selection of curated and guided recommendations put together by the community that has built up around the channel over the years – the site itself is about 6 years old, but as far as I can tell the YT channel’s been going for a decade and is pretty big in the classical space. As a means of spelunking around in the not-hugely-welcoming world of ‘proper music for adults’ (as I still can’t help but think of classical music as a genre, pathetically enough) this is genuinely useful, and there are SO many different playlists and genre introductions to explore should you want a more guided way into the field.
• EyeCandy: This is SO USEFUL – EyeCandy is a website that offers you practical visual references to all the different camerawork tricks that directors employ and which you will have seen around but may not know the names of. You want examples of dolly shots? Of crash-zooms, of transition rolls, and of about 50 other different techniques I’ve never heard of? GREAT! This is a truly wonderful repository of stuff, and has the added benefit of being presented as sort of infinite scroll collage of gifs, which means you can really immerse yourself in the visuals if you so desire. Honestly, next time you’re working on cutting together an entirely pointless and skullfcukingly-tedious agency promo, why not spend a bit of time scouring this and suggesting ‘helpful’ creative techniques the poor editor might want to incorporate to ‘liven it up a bit’? They’ll thank you, promise.
• Notes On Love: This is, as ever, one of several links lifted from Naive this week – Notes On Love is just beautiful and to be honest I think you should just click the link and read the words and see how you feel. I could watch this all day, and honestly it’s all I can do right now (it’s 9:50am, for those wondering) not to just abandon this edition of Curio halfway and float in the emo of it all.
• The Museum of Screens: OH GOD THIS IS THE BEST DIGITAL MUSEUM I HAVE EVER SEEN! I don’t really want to overexplain this as it’s TOO LOVELY, but know that a) it’s arranged in the manner of a first person shooter, as though that FPS was rendered in ASCII; b) it’s an homage to browser games; you wander through the museum and you can look at exhibits to learn more about them, and in each case you can click through and play the games featured; c) but, honestly, it’s so much more than that – please do just click and explore and wander around, and see what you find. I can’t stress how utterly lovely this is, and how much better it is than every single metaverse gallery experience I have seen in the past couple of years (except YOURS – yours was great, obvs).
• Sweet: A browser-based platform game which I *think* is a promo toy to peddle some Canadian sweets, but, honestly, who cares? Bounce and collect coins and let this momentarily distract you from the fact that we’re once again going to miss an opportunity to off a Royal parasite (in fact, a whole nest of them) this weekend.
• Air Garden: Finally this week, a pleasingly-gentle clicker game with a light graphical layer – grow plants! Pop bubbles! Clean the air! Make everything better! Ah, if only it were that simple. Still, this is fun and diverting and will give you something to nervously fiddle with as you listen to your partner pledge allegiance to the crown and you contemplate whether to leave them or whether to murder and then leave them.

By Thomas Schostock

OUR FINAL MIX OF THIS WEEK IS THIS VAGUELY-BALEARIC SELECTION BY SIBSON WHICH IS PERFECT FOR A BANK HOLIDAY ALBEIT IDEALLY ONE THAT’S SUNNIER THAN OURS IS LIKELY TO BE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• The Monterey Bay Aquarium: I appreciate that other aquariums are available, but, well, I went to Monterey Bay when I was small and my dad lived in San Francisco, and they let me pet a starfish and as such it will always have a special place in my heart. This is the Aquarium’s Insta feed, and frankly I’d be including this even were it not for the spurious personal connection due to the fact they post images like this (best comment on that, by the way, is 100% “Reminds me, I should call him”).
• Jadikan: Whilst on the one hand there’s nothing new per se about long-exposure light photography, the work here is rather lovely and (I personally think) a little more creatively interesting than I tend to see; the graffiti-style stuff in particular is lovely imho.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Dana Stirling

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: