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HELLO AGAIN CONGRATULATIONS ON NOT BEING DEAD!

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

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

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

By Kevin Horan

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

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

The Encyclopaedia Automatica: Have you noticed it yet? The gradual erosion of information integrity slowly beginning at the edges of our field of vision, the slow creep of words and images that look at first, cursory glance like they make perfect sense but which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be merely sense-shaped? WELCOME TO THE CONTENTPOCALYPSE! Oh, ok, fine, I am once again being a bit hyperbolic and a touch alarmist – equally, though, stuff like this seems to be happening more and more often and it doesn’t feel like a positive development. Still, let’s ignore the pollution of our information ecosystem and instead explore the world of experimental AI content generation, courtesy of the Encyclopaedia Automatica, an interesting project which looks to build a parallel Wikipedia as a joint man/machine effort – the idea being that it combines the direction and guidance of a human editor with the magical ability to spaff out infinite copy of an LLM. So anyone can create an article, spin it up with GPT and then use prompts to tweak it to ‘perfection’ – change the tone, add more depth, etc etc – and the whole thing is basically an art experiment project to scope the limits of utility of an LLM as a knowledgebase. As you’d expect, the articles in here (of which there are a surprising number) have the classic GPT-generated flavour of *feeling* like they are telling you something but leaving you post-reading feeling oddly empty and more stupid than you were before you started, which, one might argue, isn’t exactly the ideal reaction to a knowledge Wiki, and there’s part of me that worries slightly that this gets big enough that the…less-critically-aware just start using it as a Wikipedia alternative. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to spend a happy five minutes cajoling a machine to imagine the history of, I don’t know, the pessary, then you will enjoy this very much.

The Grannies: I am SO happy that this is now online – this is a documentary film (presented on a neat little website) which was presented as part of the Now Play This festival at Somerset House in London a few years back, and is all about the experience of a group of friends playing Red Dead Redemption multiplayer together and discovering the weird, liminal, broken spaces that exist at the edges of the game maps, where the normal rules of the digital environment stop applying and everything becomes surreal and slightly dreamy…Honestly, I appreciate that what I have describes sounds…less-than-compelling, but if you have any interest in games, the idea of digital ‘spaces’ as being meaningful in some way, or just of travelogues in general, this really is lovely – sit with it for 30 minutes, I promise that you will enjoy it more than you expect.

Fun AI Video Manipulation Stuff: If you are ANXIOUS TO LEARN about the new OpenAI text-to-video model Sora (what is WRONG with you?!) then you might want to skip to the longreads section – this is instead some experimental tech from TikTok, which looks like allowing for impressively-granular degrees of control when applying animation layers to static images. Click the link and see for yourselves (no really, do, it’s super-impressive) – basically though, this lets you select ‘areas’ of an image to animate, which then enables you to create specific, guided movements, in a way which is presumably easier to control and limit than simple prompting. I have been slightly astonished at the pace of development of this sort of tech, and in much the same way that ‘low-end logo monkey’ is sadly not really a job anymore I am pretty confident that ‘low-end video editor’ is equally going the way of the dodo in ~24m or so.

SecondSoul: I am not, it may surprise you to learn, a particularly committed theologian, but a decade or so of Catholic school, the whole ‘being half Italian and spending a lot of time in Rome’ thing and a potentially-ill-advised bargain made with the devil aged 17 means that I have a passing acquaintance with the concept of the ‘soul’ – and I am pretty sure that there’s no way in which it’s compatible with a company whose strapline is, and I quote, “Monetize your community with your AI clone”. Just take a moment to read that back again – MONETISE YOUR COMMUNITY WITH YOUR AI CLONE. God, it just SCREAMS soul, doesn’t it? Anyway, this is a terrible company with a terrible product that, God willing, will die on its ar$e – it’s also, I think, a precursor of Things To Come. The idea, as you may have been smart enough to work out for yourselves (well DONE!), is that using this platform you can create bots of yourself, which you can then deploy on Telegram, to ‘interact with your community’ – the idea being that people will pay actual cashmoney to chat with your AI avatar, while you kick back on a beach somewhere raking it in from the passive income. Which, obviously, LOL, but also I can 100% see this sort of thing taking off amongst kids who need a new hustlehope to cling to now that the ‘creator economy’ bubble has finally been revealed to be a gigantic lie.

Open Souls: Seeing as we’re on ‘souls’, I can’t quite tell how sincere this is, but, well, it’s the Twitter account of “a group of insane devs who truly believe they can give AI souls”. There’s a Discord you can join, should you be so inclined – I only found this at about 643am this morning and as such haven’t had a chance to dig around, but if any of you know ANYTHING about this I would love to learn more.

Put Your Voice To Work: Following on from the ‘create a digital slave and make it toil for you!’ link above, this is another service along vaguely-similar lines – London-based ElevenLabs, which has managed to maintain its industry-leading position in AI voicecloning over the past year or so, is now offering you the opportunity to create and monetise your own AI v/o artist – create a clone of your dulcet tones and you can make the model available for others to use, getting a cut of the fee every time they do so. On the one hand, this is probably a no-brainer for anyone currently making a living from voiceover work – I mean, you may as well, right?; on the other, it does rather feel like a naked attempt to get a lot of pro-quality training material for the model (cynical, moi?), and I have…significant doubts about the likely demand/supply ratio for voice models and the resulting monetisation opportunities that will in fact result. Still, LET’S ALL MAKE DIGITAL SLAVES OF OURSELVES!

Pint Prices: It’s slightly terrifying how quickly Londoners have become inured to the now-insane prices in pubs – “ninetythree quid and a pint of plasma for a half of overcarbonated p1ss that tastes, inexplicably, of grapefruit? Make it two, barkeep!” – but should you wish to attempt to FIGHT BACK against the madness then this website, which maps the price of a pint across the capital, might be useful. I can’t vouch for how up-to-date this is, or how accurate, but it might be useful.

Lovely Interactions: This is SUCH a nice piece of webwork, and a really lovely calling card for the digital agency in question (Off Brand, apparently) – basically it’s a little game where you have to identify five different types of interaction that you, the user, can undertake with the site, and for each one you find you’re rewarded with a really satisfying little animation and sound effect; this is very simple but SO nicely-made, and communicates the joy of a nice piece of UX/UI really effectively.

Barasol: This feels a *bit* like a site that was hacked together as part of some sort of joke, a digital response to ‘what would happen if you created a website that offered the opportunity to explore some incredibly bargain-basement travel options?’, but, equally, I think there’s something potentially quite fun about where it might take you (or, alternatively, something potentially INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS) – Barasol does a very simple thing, namely running searches for flights on Ryanair AND the cheapest available Airbnbs in a given location, thereby offering you the cheapest possible travel options to any given destination. Which, on the one hand, GREAT! But on the other, if you have ever a) travelled Ryanair; or b) stayed in a cheap, sketchy Airbnb then you will know that the potential for this to go very sideways very quickly is…not-insignificant (I have stayed in two spectacular Airbnbs, fwiw – one which was, quite literally, a poorly-converted garage made of breeze blocks which had a hotplate, a tiny fridge and, inexplicably, a shiny black plastic toilet; the other was literally a windowless basement accessed via a floor hatch in the owner’s actual flat. Let me know if you want details of either!).

Frame: I’ve been amused to read the reports of early Apple Vision Pro adopters taking the devices back this week upon realising that they don’t actually need or want a massive, heavy, face-mounted home cinema rig – still, I remain convinced that some sort of augmented glasses-type revolution is coming in the not-too-distant future, and stuff like this rather reinforces that. Frame is, basically, a revamped Google Glass – the specs, available for pre-order and apparently shipping in April, look a lot like the Snap Specs from a few years back, and will feature a combination of different AI tech to enable image recognition, realtime translation, chat with an AI assistant, and all the other stuff that three years ago would have sounded impossibly scifi and which we’re now just all sort of like ‘wevs’ about (genuinely mad, that, by the way). I am skeptical about the user experience with these – and indeed for the company’s ability to make the featureset available without a not-insignificant additional subscription to the various AI services that you’re using (OpenAI, Whisper, etc) – that said, I think these are also open source-ish, meaning that enterprising enthusiasts will have rehacked them within minutes of receipt so that they are instead running a homebrew version of LLAMA trained on 4chan or something. I don’t think I can stress enough how deeply, deeply weird everything is going to get when everyone has their own AI stack embedded in their wearables – AND NOONE KNOWS WHAT THAT IS OR WHAT IT CAN DO OR WHAT IT IS TELLING THEM. Anyway, if you want to look like a colossal pr1ck come April and have everyone in your life treat you with immense suspicion every time you wear the damn things then, er, preorders are open!

Somnivexillology: I don’t dream. Or rather, I probably do but I don’t remember them – thanks to decades of weed abuse I basically fall into a coma, and whatever weird pirouettes my subconscious chooses to undertake while I’m passed out remain forever mysterious to me (apart from rare occasions when I have to go cold turkey, at which point my sleep becomes like some of the more overwrought bits of Fantasia). Which is by way of unwanted, unasked for and largely-uninteresting preamble to this subReddit which features people sharing examples of flags that they have seen in their dreams. Personally the idea that people not only dream with vivid enough specificity to conjure up recognisable flags, but also that they can remember them upon waking, boggles me entirely, but for all I know you’re all similarly occupied at night and your dreamscapes are neverending parades of ships’ masts fluttering colourful standards as far as the eye can see. Anyway, you can read a load of anecdotes about these dreams, along with seeing illustrations of the imagined flags in question – if you want a flavour for the vibe here, this is pretty illustrative: “I had a dream where there was a new Hotel Transylvania movie but where Vlad Dracula managed to get Vampire Transylvania as smth like Liechtenstein mixed with Kosovo and with Moldova and it was named Vampire Kingdom of Transylvania, it was a semi-constitutional monarchy with Vlad Dracula as the king” – SERIOUSLY THOUGH, WHO DREAMS LIKE THIS?!?! Is it…is it all of you? Am I missing out?

Have A Good Today: Everything is hard and – not to be a downer, but it’s important to be honest and I like to think of myself as a Realistic Friend – it’s not going to get any easier. Which is why I think it’s important that every single person reading this, all thirteen of you, click this link and make this site your new homepage, because I guarantee that, while it won’t actually make anything better, being confronted with a small, slightly-garish animated gif wishing you a good day every morning will slightly take the edge off The Fear. If noting else it will give you a GREAT collection of graphics for the next time you decide to cosplay as a grandmother on the internet.

Panorama: This is a nice idea – it’s a bit slow and a bit clunky, but at least one of you can definitely steal this idea as pitch-filler. Panorama is a Google Maps/text-to-image mashup, which basically lets you use AI to modify Google Streetview in interesting visual fashion. Reimagine the street on which you grew up as a dystopian hellhole (I grew up in Swindon, no reimagining necessary lolzzzzzzzzzz), see what the view from atop Christ the Redeemer would look like were Rio underwater, turn Manhattan into a Barbs’ paradise, etc etc etc – there are a million-and-one different ways you could use this for campaigns, so I won’t insult you by suggesting any (do your own work ffs).

Arvind Sanjeev: I came across the site of Arvind Sanjeev via his prototypical design for an AI synthesiser – which you can see here, it looks LOVELY and is (another) great example of the fun things that you can do when you combine generative AI with physical creation (WHY AREN’T MORE PEOPLE PLAYING WITH THIS STUFF WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL?!?) – and I am linking to it because a) they make loads of really interesting stuff and it’s worth having a poke around the site as there’s some really smart thinking on display; and b) I al SO IN LOVE with the minimalist photo on the homepage and the way it changes as you scroll in and out (try it, honestly, it is beautiful and I lost a couple of minutes to just zooming in and out on it just now). Oh, actually, while we’re doing ‘personal websites that I think are gorgeous’, here’s another one by Rauno Freiberg which is equally-gorgeous.

VIRL: Whilst I’m obviously a desperately cynical and jaded creature who long since lost the ability to feel anything approximating ‘joy’, I confess to continuing to feel a genuine sense of thrilled curiosity at all the different, interesting, terrifying things that we are on the cusp of being able to do thanks to The Machine – witness, for example, the theory behind VIRL, which builds on some of the work from last year around creating AI ‘agents’ and letting them loose in a simulated environment, to see how they would pursue goals and develop social bonds, etc. This is now all open source – you can get the code here, which means that ANYONE can now start to spin up their own modeled simulations USING ACTUAL REAL WORLD CITY DATA, which is frankly insane. It’s a bit hard to get your head around, but, basically, imagine that there’s a rough ‘digital twin’ of the world being created, using actual map data and images tagged to locations, to create a digital environment which tracks the real one – now into this world, anyone can drop AI agents, give them specific motivations or goals, AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS. Honestly, just typing this stuff is giving me proper, brainfizzing futureoddshocks – I can’t stress enough quite how astonishing the potential and theory here is, and if you can be bothered to wade through the *slightly*-techy explanations on the site then you will start to get a glimpse of some really quite astonishing potential just around the corner (and some obviously-terrifying implications, fine, but let’s not dwell on that right now).

Lina: Do you believe it’s possible to scry the very depths of someone’s soul based on a half-ar$ed doodle? Do you think that the best way to REALLY understand someone is to pay incredibly close attention to the stuff they scribble in the margins? Are you happy to entrust that INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT analysis to The Machine? Er, great! Lina sells itself as an AI art therapy app, and will basically tell you your personality problems to seven decimal places based on its ‘analysis’ of one of your drawings. This is, honestly, almost impressive – total b0llocks, marketed as ‘insight’, with in-app purchases! Based on this I am slightly amazed that noone’s attempted to launch a ‘Phrenology, but AI!’ startup (I am willing to sell this AMAZING CONCEPT for a low six-figure sum, form an orderly queue).

The Tearing Curtain: Without a shadow of a doubt the most satisfying bit of code I have seen in YEARS. Honestly, click the link and play with the curtain – it will make you feel like a cat faced with a particularly-wiggly piece of string (trust me, that will make sense, promise). I strongly believe that ALL websites ought to have something like this hidden on them somewhere as a gentle stress reliever.

By F Scott Hess

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

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

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

By Amy Sherald

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

WebCam Tears: Videos of people crying to webcams. Absolute, 100% pure digital ART, this one.

Pog-A-Day: This is now-defunct, and hasn’t been updated for about 7 years, but, well, WHAT A LEGACY! SO MANY POGS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The World in 10 Years: On the one hand, all attempts at predicting the future are doomed to failure and ridicule – on the other, if you restrict your futuregazing to the short-ish term, you might occasionally hit upon something accidentally-prescient. In that spirit, then, have this FASCINATING bit of work pulled together by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, which last November asked 300-odd people in government or civil service or academia or the private sector for their thoughts about the likely shape of the world in a decade’s time – it, er, may not wholly surprise you to learn that the projections aren’t wholly rosy! It’s a lot more interesting than that, though, promise – although it’s a *bit* US-Centric for my tastes, and I think that skews some of the projections here (I don’t, for example, think that anyone in the world outside of some VERY optimistic people in San Francisco think that America is going to be the global tech leader in 10 years time), there’s a lot of really interesting speculative thinking (and only a very small bit of it is about AI, promise). This came via Sentiers, by Patrick Tanguay, which continues to be a superb resource for smart, interesting thinking about potential futures and systems.

AI and Planned Economies: NO WAIT COME BACK I PROMISE THIS IS INTERESTING! Erm, ok, fine, it’s an academic paper and it’s also QUITE dry, but I promise that the questions it asks around computerised central economic planning, and how we might possibly expect AI to impact the discipline, are fascinating – it is VERY TECHNICAL in places, and I confess to skipping over the sections that contain equations, but there’s a load of fascinating sections which address the potentially-unknowable ways in which AI might choose to administer an economy if granted autonomy and a clear directive. Can…can anyone hear the sound of the paperclip machine firing up?

Hello Sora: So overnight OpenAI announced it’s forthcoming text-to-video model – it’s not in the wild yet, so all we have to go on is their blurb and the obviously-cherrypicked examples of the model’s outputs, but it’s safe to say that based on these and the general spec (vids up to a minute long, style transfer, animate stills, etc etc) that the people at Runway and the rest are probably feeling a bit assailed right now. It’s worth taking the time to read through the various capabilities they outline on the page and looking at the sample vids embedded throughout – obviously all of this needs to be heavily caveated with ‘don’t believe the hype, or at least don’t wholly believe it’, but there are some hugely-impressive outputs on display here, not least in terms of the ability to maintain object permanence and to deliver reasonably-lifelike human movement. It’s impossible to tell whether we can expect the improvements to continue arriving at pace with text-to-video, but the difference in quality between this and what was being churned out by Runway even as recently as ~3m ago is startling, and if it continues like this then MY GOD is YouTube going to be absolutely ruined in a couple of years. BONUS TTV CONTENT: this is a decent enough overview of the current state of the market (as of yesterday, at least), pulled together by the awful cnuts at A16Z.

Preferable Future Habitats: As a general rule I don’t find AI-imagined futurescapes particularly interesting or worthy of scrutiny, but I was amazed by how…incredibly soothing I found this visual essay, in which Pascal Wicht explores some urban design and architecture ideas using Midjourney…I don’t know exactly why, but the combination of visuals and words here is soothing to an exceptional degree, maybe because some of the urban imagery imagined by The Machine in this piece is oddly reminiscent of an area of Rome near where I lived, and there’s something lovely and conversational about the way Wicht talks you through his thinking and what each image prompted him to consider in terms of design and planning.

Pluralistic AIs: Yes, ok, fine, it’s an academic paper but I promise that it’s a (mostly) readable one, and it’s pretty short, and the questions it raises – about a new way of thinking about AI alignment more connected to the concept of ‘pluralism’ in political thinking. Here’s a summary – this, honestly, is a really interesting series of potential principles of setting guidelines around model performance: “In this piece, we propose a roadmap to pluralistic alignment, specifically using language models as a test bed. We identify and formalize three possible ways to define and operationalize pluralism in AI systems: 1) Overton pluralistic models that present a spectrum of reasonable responses; 2) Steerably pluralistic models that can steer to reflect certain perspectives; and 3) Distributionally pluralistic models that are well-calibrated to a given population in distribution.”

AI Is Coming And Noone Cares: Last year the artist Fred Wordie launched a project called ‘Dear AI’ (which I featured in Curios, as it happens), a piece of ‘design fiction’ which presented “a ‘speculative’ company that allowed users to generate personal letters and send them as faux handwritten cards. It told of a near ‘future’ where Generative AI would further erode what it means to be human. Like many of my Design Fiction work, I chose to place it in front of the public as if real, with little context” (I, er, didn’t clock it was a spoof – I AM A MORON AND I AM SORRY). Wordie expected it to elicit a wave of commentary about dehumanisation and the insertion of the machine into personal relationships…and it didn’t (except from me, obvs). Instead, people are using it (and occasionally complaining to Fred that it doesn’t work properly) – because, it turns out, NOONE ACTUALLY VALUES THE PERSONAL AT ALL. I can’t stress enough how important this ‘insight’ is, and how much it ought to inform your own personal perspective on the likelihood of The Machine eating everyone’s jobs.

Nozick and the Hedonism Machine: Robert Nozick was very much one of the Bad Old Guys when I was doing political theory – seriously, have a read of his thinking about intergenerational responsibility if you want a chilling example if very smart selfishness – and it was nice to be reminded of the fcuker’s name this week in this piece, all about the question of whether, given the opportunity, we would strap ourselves into The Machine were it able to gift us a sensory experience indistinguishable from real life. Nozick famously argued that we would not – that there is a specific value that we ascribe to ‘real’ experience which a simulation cannot replicate – but this article does a decent job of presenting some decent counterarguments; I don’t know about you, but based on some light observation of ‘how the world seems to be going’ I’m personally betting against ol’Bobby on this one.

Why Social Is Dead: Yes, I know, you have read enough ‘social media is dead!!!111eleventy’ articles to last you a lifetime. I KNOW. That said, I can recommend adding this one to your repertoire – it makes the standard arguments, but I really like the way it couches them in market-based terms, specifically when it comes to the ‘over time, everything becomes broadcast media’ trend – this is a nice, cogent and eminently-sensical explanation: “Social as a model works when people have about as much to offer as they want to receive along a given axis. But no trait is distributed uniformly; there are are outliers in the nice-to-look-at, nice-to-listen-to, nice-to-read, nice-to-get-stock-tips from axes, there’s a population that can offer a respectable performance with these traits, and there’s a substantial majority with below-mean performance. So, over time, most platforms end up with a more consolidated list of suppliers and a dispersed set of consumers.” Basically speaking, you could subtitle this ‘why statistical distribution and probability mean that the creator economy was always a total fcuking lie’. If you want a more-anecdotal, less swivel-eyed-rationalist (sorry, but it’s true) take, you could read this piece in Dazed instead, which basically tells the same story via a series of personal anecdotes – the same point applies, though.

Evidence Maximalism: Or, “how the infinite quantity of information now available to anyone about anything has turned every single person on earth into one of those weirdos with the photowalls and the red string”, or “with enough datapoints you can prove literally anything”. The whole piece is good – Charlie Warzel is always readable – but the central premise is neatly encapsulated as follows: “all of the information online—news, research, historical documents, opinions—has conditioned people to treat everything as evidence that directly supports their ideological positions on any subject. He calls it the era of “evidence maximalism.” It’s how we argue online now, and why it’s harder than ever to build a shared reality.”

Noone’s Reading Anymore: This week’s ‘man, this really has been EVERYWHERE’ essay is from Slate, and is basically a teacher bemoaning the fact that none of his students appear capable of, or willing to, read anything longer than two pages of text in a critical or close manner – obviously I’m not a teacher (lol thank God) and I can’ only speak to my own experience, but IT’S NOT JUST KIDS, IS IT? I can’t tell you the amount of times in the past few years when I have done work for people and had them complain that the output runs to several pages of text – LOOK YOU FCUKING MORONS SOME THINGS SIMPLY AREN’T PARTICULARLY COMMUNICABLE VIA TRIANGLES AND ARROWS, AND SOME THINGS SIMPLY DON’T WORK AS DIAGRAMS, CAN YOU NOT TRY FCUKING READING YOU FCUKING LAZY CNUTS? Ahem. Your regular reminder that I’m available for freelance engagements, and am often described as ‘a pleasure to work with’.

What’s The Face Computer For?: As mentioned a bit earlier on, there’s been a flood of people who bought the Apple Vision Pro taking it back to stores as they realise that what they have actually bought is a piece of speculative technology with no practical purpose whatsoever – I’m still broadly bullish on AR/XR/WhatevR, but I think we’re a good few years away from the tech being small and lightweight enough to encourage the sort of mainstream adoption that will lead to the development of mainstream usecases.

The Robot Travel Agent: Or, “how people are turning to GPT to plan holidays and the like” – or “how to guarantee you’ll have a mathematically-average experience when you travel”, depending on your point of view. This piece features a selection of people waxing lyrical about how good GPT is at spitting out travel itineraries and planning trips – which is particularly interesting given the forthcoming likely release of AI ‘agents’ into the wild in the next year or so, but which also sort-of completely fails to acknowledge the massively-problematic elephant in the room here – to whit, because of the probabilistic nature of LLMs, when you ask it for suggestions like this IT IS GOING TO GIVE YOU THE MOST AVERAGE ONES. Which means that if everyone starts using these systems for these purposes, you can expect all the joyful side effects of TikTok tourism (endless queues! Price hikes! Environmental degradation! Really angry locals!) to expand exponentially. There is a CAMPAIGN IDEA buried in this for the right travel brand imho.

Recruiting With AI: This piece is all about how some companies have started using software by a company called Paradox AI as part of the employee screening process, and how that means prospective workers are being asked to undertake surreal, AI-generated personality tests whose answers (again assessed by AI) will determine a candidate’s suitability or otherwise for a given role. This is darkly-fascinating – the implication is that this is all black box stuff, so only the AI ‘knows’ what personal qualities some of the questions relate to, and how it scores them, and how that links to overall suitability, and that as such we’re in the process of handing over control of quite important things (cf, for example, ‘employment’) to systems that operate in ways we simply cannot understand in any meaningful way. Does that sound good?

The GenZ Bone Spreadsheet: I have a sneaking suspicion that this is one of those trend pieces where it’s not actually a ‘trend’ at all – just because half-a-dozen sociopaths are doing something does not a ‘trend’ make, after all, although obviously it depends on who exactly said sociopaths in fact are – but I would be curious to hear whether any of you know of anyone who’s doing this; the ‘this’ in question being ‘keeping a spreadsheet tracking everyone you fcuk, ever, along with helpful notes to remind you of the experience’. Look, I’m not going to judge, but it’s important to remind you that the first person I ever heard of boasting about this sort of quantitative approach to life was one Milo YIannopoulous, and we all know how HE turned out.

AI Tablets and Educational Advantage: This is not wholly surprising, but it’s interesting to see it playingout already in real life – this is Rest of World on the scramble amongst Chinese parents to help their kids succeed in the already-ultracompetitive scholastic environment by ensuring they have access to the best AI-augmented learning assistants. If you don’t think a significant proportion of future social opportunities will be determined by the calibre of Machine Assistance you can afford then, well, you’re significantly more optimistic than I am (also lol, have you literally not been paying attention to ANY of the past century?!).

The Pope’s AI Advisor: A gorgeous profile of Paolo Benanti, the Cardinal who advises the Pope on matters pertaining to AI (and who, in the article’s most interesting casual asides, appears to have an interestingly-close relationship with Microsoft – honestly, fcuk my personal ethics and the rest, I would honestly give me right fcuking kidney to get a gig flogging AI solutions to the Holy See) and whose story of arriving at the faith is genuinely lovely.

Ricky Gervais: You will doubtless have opinions on Gervais and his humour and his standup, but regardless of what those opinions are I can highly recommend this review of his current ‘work in progress’ show in London – Rich Johnston at comics website Bleeding Cool does a really good job of unpacking why, to his mind at least, Gervais’ ‘edgy’ work doesn’t quite have the hard work underpinning it to make it justifiable. This really is a good piece of writing about comedy, and it’s a far more positive and balanced review than you might expect given the short explanation I’ve just given you.

The Trump Emails: This is LOVELY – a close stylistic reading of Donald J Trump’s campaign emails and their…unique style and cadence. “Where does one even begin? I guess we might as well start with the e-mail’s inexplicable ransom-note-style font decisions. Why is YOU capped but not italicized, whereas WE is capped and italicized? Why is the first paragraph bolded (and in red type), whereas the second is not? Why is “corporate death penalty” both scare-quoted and italicized? The typographical chaos mimics the legal, political, and psychic chaos in which Trump operates; and yet his relentless energy seems to emerge from this very chaos, as he paranoically and insistently narrates his woes in a kind of stream of consciousness, by turns slinging mud at the so-called haters, proclaiming his perseverance, and flattering and wheedling his supporters. He is Jesus on the cross, but he will survive!” This is honestly glorious, and I would personally happily read a close analysis of the differing styles of e-campaigning employed by the Tories and Labour in the hopefully-imminent election here in the UK/

Every Best Picture Winner Ranked by How Good a Muppets Version Would Be: This is every bit as good as you hope it would be. I now REALLY want to see Muppet ‘Shakespeare in Love’.

Dr Alex Comfort: You will of course know the name from THE JOY OF SEX, a book whose title and homely illustrations of bearded 1970s coitus are weirdly familiar to seemingly everyone, despite the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a copy of it in the wild, but you probably don’t know what a genuinely bizarre and polymathic person Dr Comfort was – this is a lovely profile in the LRB, effectively a review of a new biography of the man, and it is FULL of great details about his incredibly polymathy and commitment to alternative lifestyles – I loved this particular paragraph especially, with its uniquely-British combination of low-grade kink and very brown sadness: “And so the three of them entered into a secret arrangement where Comfort spent weeknights with Henderson and came home to his wife and Nick at the weekends. As Laursen concludes, ‘it was really a fairly ordinary affair, confined to a London flat and clearly destined to make all three participants unhappy.’ It was sustained not by a ‘commitment to some radical ideal of open relationship’ but by the participants’ Englishness. In Sex in Society (1963), published when the affair was a few years old, Comfort argued that monogamous marriage is best for childrearing, but that it was certainly possible to love more than one person at once, and that adultery could be a useful ‘prop’ to keep a married couple ‘on their feet’. Conveniently for him. At the time, Comfort took pride in his arrangement, which persisted for more than a decade. Not until 1994 did he admit to a journalist that ‘it didn’t work very well,’ and that both women were ‘in eruption the whole time’.”

Somewhere There’s Cheese: This is an essay written in tribute to the Aardman Animations classic ‘A Grand Day Out’, which first introduced the world to Wallace and the dog Gromit, and, honestly, it may be my favourite thing of the week – the love for the animation is palpable, and I promise you that you will find yourself actually, properly smiling as you read this. Really, truly wonderful writing by Zoe Kurland that communicates the very particular magic of the characters and the style quite perfectly.

The Sensitivity Reader: Our final longread of the week is a gorgeous and beautifully-crafted short by Andrew O’Hagen in Granta – I don’t want to spoil anything, so just trust me and read it (please).

By Jill Mulleady

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

We kick off this week with BRAND NEW DIGITAL ART, courtesy of Shardcore – this is part of a series he’s experimenting with called ‘found in translation’, which is effectively an exploration of the idea of digital chinese whispers and ‘lossiness’ and…oh, here, let him explain it: “I arranged a form of Chinese-Whispers between AI systems. I first extracted the keyframes from a scene from American Psycho and asked a multimodal LLM (LLaVA) to describe what it saw. I then took these descriptions and used them as prompts for a Stable Diffusion image generator. Finally I passed these images on to Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn the stills into motion. Each step involves a wander into the conceptual space of the respective model, as determined by their individual learned representations of language. Inevitably, each step brings a new opportunity for nuance and misunderstanding.” This is SO INTERESTING, conceptually and visually, and it really comes into its own when Patrick gets axe-happy at the end here – there are a lot of conceptually-interesting threads to pull at here, several of which you could probably weave into something unpleasantly-capitalistic if you were so minded.

This is FUN and it’s a great song to play when you’re looking out of the window and hoping that it’s going to be sunshiney for a few days like I am doing right now. Skittering hyperpopish vibes but with a rather lovely vocal – this is ‘Easy’ by charlieeeee, piri

I was convinced Cakes Da Killa was going to be VERY BIG, which shows what I know – I still love his flow (lol I am 44 years old), though, and this new track has a pleasing-00s UKG vibe about the chorus which I very much enjoy; it’s called ‘Mind Reader’ (also, more tracks need to shout out ‘the BBC’ fwiw).

I can’t exactly say I ‘enjoyed’ this, but there’s definitely something cathartically hyperkinetic about it. STAND UP AND SHOUT AND JUMP AROUND, this is called ‘Hippie Trip’ by Agent Mayhem.

I had forgotten quite how much I enjoy the sound of Camera Obscura, but this newish track reminded me – this is like the Housemartins crossed with some gentle country, but Scottish, and it’s gorgeous.

Finally this week, a song about Chris Pratt, an actor who I have no strong opinions about but whose depiction in this song made me laugh a lot. Remember that Shia Lebeouf song from c.2010/11? Well this is a bit like that, but about Chris Pratt instead AND THAT IS THE LAST LINK I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 09/02/24

February 9, 2024

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Reading Time: 35 minutes

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

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

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

Anyway, GO 49ers.

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

By Mark Beyer

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

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

Momentary Lapse in Memory: I appreciate that beginning a largely-frivolous weekly compendium of digital ephemera with what is in effect a war memorial is…perhaps not the happy-go-lucky opening that many of you might have hoped for. Still, this is a really rather beautiful piece of webwork and the way that it presents narrative and memory is, I think, genuinely powerful and affecting – from its description, “Momentary Lapse in Memory is an interactive digital environment concerning the memory landscape of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. It investigates the impact of ephemeral factors on the archival practice. By doing so, it makes space for the mechanisms of both memory and its transmission, to steer and sway. It makes way for the unreliable.” Click through from the homepage and you’re presented with a slightly-abstract roomscape comprised of individual elements, each of which is a fragmentary memory of the experience of war drawn from anecdotes and memories of those who lived through it; some of the memories lead you to other ‘rooms’ within the site, with their own objects and recollections attached to them, and as you explore you build a picture of the people whose experiences are being tapestried together to create this fragmented, partial, imperfect and intensely-subjective account of the experience through the eyes of those who lived it. This is gorgeous, honestly, and I think the slight lack of polish and obviously-homespun nature of the whole thing makes it rather special.

Antonymph: I only realised when I came across this link earlier this week that I haven’t seen a good ‘I made a needlessly-involved and possibly-overengineered website as a sort of interactive promo for my new record!’ website in AGES – thank goodness, then, for this one, which I warn you has a *small* chance of doing very annoying things to your browser but which I encourage you to take the risk with because it is rather a lot of fun (although if you’d rather not take the risk you can also see a screenrecording of the experience on YouTube, you COWARD) and, I get the impression, is also *quite* an impressive bit of codewrangling (if you’re the type to be impressed by that sort of thing – I, obviously, remain stonily unmoved, mainly because I couldn’t code my way out of, or indeed into, the proverbial paper bag). Basically – and without ruining too much of the surprise – this does a lot of really very impressive things with popup windows to create a surprisingly-complex multipart , animation-type experience to accompany the track ‘Antonymph’, which as far as I have been able to tell is itself some sort of fan anthem for the My Little Pony (Friendship Is Magic) fandom…to be honest it was perhaps best if I didn’t tell you that, on reflection, so try and forget that specific detail and enjoy the website, and then try and think of the last time you saw anything this digitally-creative being produced for commercial reasons and cry slowly as you realise that corporatism is the enemy of beauty.

The New Search: CHANGES ARE COMING! Much as might want to sit here, Cnut-like (no, that’s not a spoonerised swear, that’s a reference to the sea-defying medieval monarch, do keep up), denying the inevitable, it’s clear that search is due a massive upheaval – everyone seems to have finally realised that Google has fcuked its core product and that information discovery is increasingly-broken, the ubiquity of generative AI is increasingly seeing it baked into everything, regardless of whether or not it makes things better…and at the confluence of those two trends we have a wave of new players attempting to DISRUPT SEARCH! Exciting times (not really, but let’s pretend)! One such company is Arc, who I’ve featured in here before a few years back for their Chrome-competitor browser and who have now launched a new search app (iOS-only at the moment) which is a glimpse at the future of search and…I hate it! It’s possible of course that my visceral reaction was borne of my crippling Fear Of Change (why must I leave my comfort zone? There’s a reason it’s called a ‘comfort zone’! It’s nice here!), but it’s hard to see any ways in which the benefits here outweigh the not-insignificant media literacy and ecosystem disbenefits. Basically the way this works is that every time you run a search the browser effectively spins up a new webpage and populates it with crawled, summarised information that it believes best answers the query you gave it – so rather than being delivered a selection of results and using your nous and judgement and critical faculties to determine which source best serves your purposes, you’re instead spoonfed a load of information which is presented as The Answer. But how does it decide which sources to use? And which to prioritise? And how to avoid ingesting and using all of the terrible junk content that’s already proliferating across the web? And, er, what happens to all the websites whose search traffic, and as such ad revenue, is going to tank when we all decide that we’d rather have the machine summarise everything for us and that as a result we are never visiting a news homepage ever again? These are all excellent questions (well done Matt! Have a biscuit!) to which Arc offers minimal answers because, well, disruption! Casey Newton had a decent writeup of why this feels so…icky – I don’t know, maybe I feel this personally because I am still trying to cling to the vanishing concept of ‘exchanging the written word for money’ and things like this remind me how stupid that is and how I should probably just suck it up and get that HGV license now.

Whop: A neat segue (SEAMLESS) from the last link into this one – Whop (it’s a peculiarly-horrible and weirdly-00s name, imho) is attempting to set itself up as a sort of ‘Etsy for the grift economy’ (and guys, if you happen to see this and want to use that tagline yourselves then let’s talk!). Do you have a ‘get rich quick’ scheme? Do you have a SUREFIRE WAY to beat the odds on the horses? Do you know the secrets to creating a guaranteed £10k pcm in passive income in HOURS? NO OF COURSE YOU DON’T ALL THESE THINGS ARE LIES! Except you wouldn;t know that by looking at the homepage of Whop, where a bunch of people are offering a wide selection of services for a monthly subscription fee – this feels very much like a marketplace for people who looked at the Tate ‘Hustler’s University’ and thought ‘you know what, I can totally rip that sort of thing off and find my own coterie of desperate, delusional young men to fleece!’. Offerings run the gamut from ‘Crypto Guides’ to access to ‘trading communities’ where presumably the idea is that you’ll get access to all sorts of AMAZING INSIDER STOCK TIPS (I am always interested in the idea that if one had access to said AMAZING INSIDER STOCK TIPS one wouldn’t make use of that intelligence to become plutocratically rich on the markets overnight but would instead selflessly sacrifice that potential gain in exchange for a mere $39.99, payable monthly) to betting strategies newsletters…this is so OBVIOUSLY scammy, and so obviously aimed at a particular type of young man who’s been fed the ‘you need a lambo or you’re noone’ guff of the modern grift economy, and, honestly, it’s just slightly sad to see. Welcome to the future, in which the only way we can afford the nutripellets is by flogging nonexistent training courses to other desperate mooks in an endless circlejerk of grind!

Special Fish: Oh god this is lovely – Special Fish is…what is it? A digital noticeboard? A hyperminimal social network? A forum? Online graffiti? IT IS ALL OF THOSE THINGS! The site is “a community site for publishing poems, journals, logs, and lists”, and anyone can log on and create a small page which they can use to share…whatever they like really. The site is VERY minimal, with no imagery and just simple HTML, but on the homepage you can see a tapestry list of all the different people who have created a small space here – click through on one and it will take you to their small space, which might contain a slightly-gnomic line of prose and no more, or which you might find is a reasonably-exhaustive interrogation of someone’s cultural obsessions. There is something beautiful about stepping from profile to profile, a bit like wandering through an infinite, sparsely-furnished series of interconnected rooms (yes, fine, but as previously-stated it is MY newsletterblogtypething and if I want to use pretentious and not-entirely-successful analogies then, well, I WILL) and, like all my favourite sites, feels not-unlike wandering through a bunch of strangers’ heads (but quietly, on tiptoe, so as not to disturb them).

Retire Big Oil: I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet (insert your own hackneyed urban legend about Prince here), but those of you who pay close attention to what I write here each week (please, it’s too painful, don’t) may remember about a year or so ago I mentioned that anyone expecting the Labour party to in any way stick to the environmental policy promises it was making was almost certainly in for an unpleasant surprise – AND LO, IT CAME TO PASS! Anyway, this website has nothing to do with that – but it does feel like an appropriately-impotent response to the whole ‘it does rather feel like none of the people with the material ability to unfcuk this whole environment thing are actually willing to take meaningful action’ thing. In the US, as in the rest of the world, a significant proportion of investment into the oil and gas sector comes from pension funds, and, not unreasonably, there’s a growing movement to encourage people to get their employers to consider where exactly pension pots are being invested and, where appropriate, to get said pots moved to funds whose interests are a bit less environmentally-disastrous. What do you think the best way of raising awareness of this would be? Would it be a lobbying campaign? Physical protests? A bit of XR-style direct activism? NO YOU ARE WRONG THE ANSWER IS IN FACT POSTING AN AI-GENERATED IMAGE OF YOU ON A PROTEST MARCH! Yes, that’s right, the central ACTION this campaign is asking US citizens to take is for them to upload a photo, which via the MAGIC OF AI will become an image of them marching in a suspiciously-clean-looking protest against BIG OIL. This is so, so odd – the execution feels like something from 20 years ago when we were all naive enough to believe that the mere fact of PUTTING SOMETHING ONLINE would magically change the world (RIP Twibbons, you achieved so much), not to mention the fact that asking people to feed their faces to an AI image generator is something of a no-no from a privacy and security point of view. Still, as we all know from all the ‘post a photo to show you care’ campaigns of the past couple of decades, they ALWAYS work (you will of course remember how we used to have ‘racism’ before the storied ‘black squares on Insta’ campaign of 2020), so we can look forward to this being sorted by Q3. WELL DONE EVERYONE!

Mixtape Garden: Ooh, this is really nice – create an account and you (or anyone else – it doesn’t HAVE to be you, but, well, why shouldn’t it be?) can create a mixtape of upto seven tracks, pulled from YouTube, with accompanying notes; if you like you can leave the mixtape unfinished and let other users tracks to it, but when it hits 7 songs in total it will be compiled into a single mix and made playable from the site’s homepage, turning it into a living, growing home for seven-song musical journeys guided by strangers. SUCH a lovely idea, this, and worth bookmarking as there’s something really nice about having human-curated playlists to listen to (Jesus, I just read that back and WOW is that a bleak little closer, sorry everyone).

Goody2: This is a project by Brain, a ‘collective’ whose work I can best describe as ‘MSCHF, but derivative and not as good’ (sorry, but it’s true) – Goody2 is “a new AI model built with next-gen adherence to our industry-leading ethical principles. It’s so safe, it won’t answer anything that could be possibly be construed as controversial or problematic.” This is SATIRE – the gag here is that the machine won’t answer any of your questions because it’s been guardrailed into uselessness – but I am not totally sure what it’s satirising (the concept of AI safety? LOL!) and, well, it’s not a very funny gag. Still, er, here!

Cry Me A Cockroach: As we approach this year’s celebration of cheap chocolates and petrol station carnations, are you still struggling to come to terms with a past love? Do you still bear the scars of a breakup? Do you want to RIP THAT BSTRARD’S HEART OUT, EAT IT AND THEN SH1T IT OUT AGAIN!?!?!??! I mean, perhaps you should just let it go – but, failing that, why not take advantage of this seasonal promotion from San Antonio zoo? “Symbolically name a roach, rat, or veggie after your ex or not-so-special someone and San Antonio Zoo will help squash your past, a true heartbreak healer, by feeding your selection to an animal resident.” On the one hand, you are actually condemning a living creature to death in service of this gag – on the other, they’re getting fed to other living creatures, so it’s probably morally-neutral.

The Cursed Library: A nice little show-offy bit of webwork by Belgian digital studio Epic, this is a simple-but-cute bit of digital storytelling – click the link, explore the CURSED LIBRARY and find the stories that are hidden therein. This is basically just a case of clicking the various hotspots, fine, but the art direction and sound design are really rather nice, and I would be interested in seeing a whole animation or slightly-expanded game done in this visual style because it’s pleasingly-distinctive, a nice mix of kids’ storybook and digital. So, er, can one of you commission them to make that, please? Ta.

Art Remix: A nice toy from Google Arts & Culture, this lets you take classic artworks from its scanned collection and see how you can use generative AI to change specific elements of them, letting you explore the nature of prompting and do stupid things like add a fcuktonne of frogs to Monet’s waterlilies.

Enhanced: THE DRUGLYMPICS ARE HERE! You may have seen the reports about this this week, suggesting that Web Curios’ favourite vampire plutocrat tradcath sociopath Peter Thiel (one week, I promise, I will get through an entire edition without mentioning that fcuking cnut) was one of the backers of a new athletics event which, rather than attempting to weed out competitors juicing their bodies with hormone supplements and the like, actively encourages the ingestion of performance-enhancing substances to see exactly how far human bodies can be pushed. The website is, sadly, a bit more sober than I might have hoped – although I do feel like opening the whole thing with the legend ‘Backed by the world’s top venture capitalists…’ in 2024 isn’t perhaps the flex said VCs think it is (lads you may not have noticed but your track record is at-best patchy and EVERYONE THINKS YOUR CNUTS) – but what I find interesting about it is the way in which it intersects with certain specific strains of right-wing thinking (‘limitless potential!’, ‘don’t let the petty, small-minded administrative bureaucrats and pencil pushers stop you from becoming the ultimate version of yourself!’), as well as what sort of insurance they plan to have in place for when someone’s heart inevitably explodes as they try and deadlift a lorry while having just ingested three times their own bodymass in creatine powder.

Drawzer: Would you like a website that does NOTHING ELSE but spit out whimsical, random drawing prompts such as “A bashful lion marching at a creepy carnival.” at the touch of a button? YES YOU WOULD! This feels like something that it would be interesting to hook up to a bunch of different image generation AIs to create an automated pipeline of images, not least as it would act as a neat way of tracking comparative model performance. Er, anyone? No, ok, fine.

Rank A Day: OH THIS IS WONDERFUL! Is there any joy more human, more PERFECT, than being presented with a ranked list of things and going through it with increasing irritation at the IDIOCY of your fellow man and the APPALLING BANALITY of their taste? No, there is not, and thanks to this site you can enjoy that feeling EVERY DAY! Every 24h the site will offer you a selection of things – oscar winning films, say, or the best NFL team – and ask you to pick your top 3; do so, and you’ll be shown the overall results, so you can see what the rest of the world has determined is THE BEST THING in a given category and get really angry about it. I stumbled across this on a day when the question was in fact the one about ‘Best Picture’ winners and got so annoyed at the fact that Lord of the Fcuking Rings was top that I had to make a calming brew and have a small pace around the kitchen – honestly, it’s PERFECTLY irritating.

The Big Plastic Count: This is A) not really a web thing tbh; and B) very much UK-only; apologies for the anglocentrism, but it’s a good project and might be the sort of thing that any anglos with kids might want to get involved with.”Count your plastic for one week – 11-17 March 2024. For one week in March, thousands of schools, households, community groups and businesses will be coming together to count their plastic waste. And we want you to join them. Almost a quarter of a million people took part in The Big Plastic Count in 2022. Together we revealed that almost two billion pieces of plastic packaging are being thrown away a week. This year you can help build even more evidence to convince UK ministers to lead the way at the global talks that could finally phase out plastic pollution for good.” Look, I know, but you have to hope that stuff like this might make a difference to something somewhere because otherwise we might as well all just set fire to everything.

Redpop Apples: I am not quite sure how I came across this website, but I have some questions; the main question being WHO THE FCUK WROTE THE COPY HERE AND WHY IS IT LIKE THIS? The homepage hits you right away with ‘WELCOME TO A NEW POP SWEET APPLE!’ and doesn’t really calm down from there; the apple is a ‘she’, apparently, and “you immediately understand she’s born and raised where the best apples grow, in the hands of farmers who take care of the fruit, with great experience.” I know that apple cultivation is a genuinely-multi-billion-dollar industry and that the marketing of new varietals is a serious business, and so I don’t imagine that the…very particular style of writing here is an accident, but I am genuinely baffled as to why it mimics the cadence and rhythm and vocabulary of translated-to-English Japanese, or the cutesy-anime-uwuu vibe of the whole thing…I appreciate that this is VANISHINGLY unlikely, but should anyone reading this know anything about the ‘why’ of this then I would love to hear about it.

By Timothy Lai Hui Ming

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

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

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

By Daniellle Roberts

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Erik Wakkel: Erik is a medieval book historian at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He posts images of medieval books. You don’t really need to know much more than that, to be honest, but it’s worth digging in and having a bit of a scroll as the images of individual tomes and pages are accompanied by notes that are genuinely-interesting (trust me, I am not normally enthused by the mere fact of ‘old’).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

That Essay About Self-Promotion: This has been EVERYWHERE this week – Rebecca Jennings writing in Vox about the slightly-relentless misery of ‘always having to promote yourself and your brand in the 24/7 horror of the hustle economy’. I feel slightly odd about this – personally-speaking, as I think I might have mentioned before, I find ‘effort’ to be vulgar in the extreme and as such find the idea of promoting myself or anything I do immensely gauche (THIS is the reason why Curios isn’t immensely popular; nothing to do with the dogsh1t writing, length and increasingly-oppressive air of existential despair!); on the other, I am very aware that I have certain privileges that enable me to take this grossly-high-handed attitude and as such I probably don’t have the right to comment. The degree to which this has been shared suggests it resonated widely, and it feels emblematic of the very particular sort of horror I feel when I log onto LinkedIn each week to post a link to Curios (to an almost-entirely uninterested audience, let me be clear) and I happen to see the main feed and it’s just full of people I mostly only vaguely-know all desperately performing SUCCESS, all jazzhandsing and prancing and capering and BUILDING THE BRAND and it sort of makes me want to cry, particularly when you know a bit more about the individual in question and you know that the performance is strained to breaking point. How have we ended up here? I mean, loads of reasons, but once again I place a significant degree of blame at the door of the CREATOR ECONOMY (or at least the specific idea of it that was (mis)sold to the world over the past 10 years) which told everyone that all you needed was a brand and a perspective and the ability to SH!T OUT CONTENT and you too could be a one-person media empire – as a companion piece to this one, can I recommend you also read this post by Joan Westenberg who calmly and clearly lays out in stark economic terms exactly why the idea of a content-based ‘creator economy’ is, and always has been, total fcuking bullshit from a pure economics point of view.

The New Google AI: It’s not called Bard now (good, that was a genuinely sh1t name), it’s called GEMINI, and as of yesterday it’s live everywhere – the standard free version is GPT-3.5 level, but Google now gives you the option of paying them a monthly stipend for access to the BIG MODEL, and this is perennial Curios favourite and AI Virgil Ethan Mollick with his initial impressions of how the model works and what it’s good for and how it compares to GPT4; it’s worth reading to get the full rundown, but the short version is ‘it’s probably comparable to GPT4, mostly, but you probably don’t need a subscription to both of them’. SEMI-RELATED LINK: someone on Reddit posted what they claim is the underlying set of training instructions baked into ChatGPT; it’s interesting not least because it’s literally just a set of pre-prompts, and does rather give the impression (accurately) that noone really knows what the fcuk is going on with this stuff or how it works.

Trend Trends: I featured Matt Klein’s ‘digest of all the trend reports’ last year – this is a piece in which Klein reflects on what he learned doing the same exercise again this year, namely that (and this may not shock you) nothing really seems to have changed over the last 6 years. There are a variety of explanations for this which Klein neatly runs through, but I liked his conclusion – that this sort of indicates that perhaps we should STOP LOOKING AT FCUKING TREND REPORTS AND DATA and instead perhaps just try doing weird, interesting stuff because a) why the fcuk not, it’s not like it matters so you might as well have fun; b) everyone is VERY FCUKING BORED of culture basically having stagnated for 6 years, so anyone doing anything different will inevitably stick out; and c) also everything is so utterly grim right now, at least in the UK, that anything advermarketingprish that is genuinely fun or surprising will get cut-through because (I can’t believe I am saying this) people really could do with a bit of ‘surprise and delight’ (LOL!) right now.

Herman Miller’s Identity Guidelines: I don’t as a general rule tend to include links to things like corporate brand guidelines, let alone corporate brand guidelines for a firm that makes office furnishings – AND YET! I expect that more than one of you reading this has at one point or another had to write brand guidelines or, heaven forfend, a BRAND BIBLE – this is a genuinely good example of the genre, clear and clean and pleasingly un-w4nky, and I love the fact that it’s a simple-but-effective website rather than a massive, unwieldy PDF that no fcuker is every going to open. WELL DONE, FURNITURE MONGS!

They Solved The Scrolls: I know that it’s not really cool to talk about AI in a positive sense, but I am a 44 year old man and ‘cool’ is a concept with which I have no truck whatsoever – this is AMAZING. I featured this project in Curios last year – a challenge asking researchers to try and decipher the text written on ancient scrolls using AI technology – and it’s been won! Honestly, it’s hard to overstate how remarkable this is – they have managed to read text from sealed scrolls buried under lava 2000 years ago! This is astonishing! – but it’s worth clicking the link and having a read about how it was done and what they found.

AI Comes To Maps: Sorry, it feels like I’m including an awful lot of Google product news at the moment – apologies, not trying to PR them, it’s just that they’re releasing a lot at the moment and, being Google, it’s likely that this stuff will have IMPACT. The AI integration to maps will basically allow users to ask natural language queries and get answers crafted by AI based on Google Maps data. So, for example, you might want to find the best place to practice figging in Berlin – ask the map and it will analyse reviews, opening times, likely footfall and all sorts of other gubbins and provide you with the perfect recommendation for ginger-related fun. Which is both really useful and a good reason to make sure that, if you’re involved with businesses that depend on footfall, your Google Maps listing is up to date and well-reviewed because this is the sort of thing that could really fcuk people. As ever with this stuff, there is literally NO INFORMATION WHATSOEVER about how the data sources are weighted, and nothing whatsoever about how businesses can ensure that The Machine is taking them into account when serving up reccs…this feels like a win for convenience, true, but like it might have…one or two unintended consequences for the retail and restoration industries.

The Bill Gates of India: I’m running the original headline here – I personally have no opinion on whether or not Nandan Nilekani is in fact ‘the Bill Gates of India’ – but to be honest the most interesting thing about this piece are the plans Nilekani outlines to digitise small vendors across the country in order to broaden their markets (and, as a side effect, so that Nandan Nilekani can become even more violently wealthy). “What it intends to do is forever alter the life of people like the pineapple vendor I noticed outside Nilekani’s offices, his produce stacked by the dozens in neat rows atop a creaky pushcart. For now, his business relies entirely on face-to-face transactions—a form of commerce unchanged in centuries—and he likely earns no more than $25 a day. “If someone in the neighborhood wants a pineapple, why can’t he order it?” Nilekani asks, envisioning a future in which customers can summon the pineapple man with a few taps on their phone, substantially increasing his business. Then, as Nilekani understatedly put it: “He can sell more pineapples.”” I don’t know about you, but when I read this particular paragraph I had a very strong ‘hang on, aren’t there lessons we perhaps should have learned about unintended consequences that we might want to draw on before attempting to ‘disrupt’ an economy of over a billion people?’ – still, Nandan knows best.

AIdvertising: Sorry. Thing is, though, this really is about using AI for ad placement, so TECHNICALLY the appalling pun was justified. This is a piece about new ad placement services which let ‘creators’ sell real estate within their videos, which is then dynamically filled with an advertising image inserted dynamically by AI – which is all sorts of smart, and works as follows: “Advertisers use Rembrand’s marketplace to connect with more than 1,000 creators from agencies it works with. Creators upload their videos to its platform and receive them within 24 hours with the product placements. Rembrand has someone check for quality and someone else for how the brand appears. Then creators upload the clips and eventually get paid from the brands based on video views.” I can’t help but tie this back to the first article about HUSTLE AND GRIND and imagine a world a year or so hence when literally EVERYONE is adding this sh1t to their social output because why not earn a few pennies off an affiliate link – just like is already happening to a lesser extent? We…we do realise that all this isn’t going to do much to achieve the whole ‘smaller carbon footprint, less consumption of pointless crap, less waste and landfill and seas full of plastic’ thing we’re all supposed to currently care about, right?

The Apple Vision Pro W4nkers: This isn’t my observation, but it made me laugh – have you noticed how all the videos of people using the Apple Vision Pro in the wild are of men. Men, alone? MAKES YOU THINK, DOESN’T IT??? Anyway, this is an excellent piece which collects a bunch of videos of people looking like d1cks while pinching thin air – you might also enjoy this one, about the collective sadness of the men who bought a £3500 home bongo setup only to find that Apple won’t let them play VR bongo on it.

TikTok Slang: About 7 years ago, my girlfriend decided that she was going to ‘bring back’ the word ‘groovy’, and started dropping it into conversation here and there at work and in social situations. Whilst I don’t want to ascribe too much influence to her lest her head swell, there was a moment of genuine amazement when I witnessed someone spontaneously say it to her a couple of years ago – so basically if you hear anyone say ‘groovy’ in modern times it’s because of her. FACT. Anyway, that has very little to do with this article, which is about the current vogue for attempting to invent viral neologisms on TikTok in the hope that you can, I presume, spark a week’s worth of thinkpieces and desperately-tryhard reactive brand content. IT’S GOOD TO HAVE AMBITION KIDS.

Poogle Maps: On the one hand, that’s the second near-unforgivable pun in this week’s longreads and I am once again SORRY; on the other, read this article and tell me that they missed a trick (also, this is a story on Australian website crikey, and if you can’t rely on the Aussies to make a good toilet gag then I fear for the fate of the world. frankly). My not-particularly-funny wittering aside, this is actually an interesting bit of journalism that reveals quite an interesting and potentially-dangerous security exploit achievable via Google Maps – if you’re considering a pivot into ‘burglary’ as a career, this could be the most useful thing you read all week.

Muslims in Italy: An excellent piece in the FT about the current realities of Muslim life in Italy, a country whose birthrate has been declining for decades but which is still too racist to come to terms with the fact that it needs immigration to survive (sorry, any Italians who are reading this, but you know it’s true) – the statistic that the country has only five visible mosques despite a muslim population of nearly 3m is STAGGERING, and made me realise that I am only aware of a single one in Rome which is insane for a capital city.

Finding The Air Cannon: This is, fine, not a sparkling piece of prose or a super piece of journalism, BUT it is possibly the most satisfying example of creative problem solving I have seen in ages and it pleased me immoderately. Imagine this scenario: “The use of agricultural air cannons south of Corvallis has been extreme this month. Farmers with field crops are often beset with Canadian Geese overwintering in the Willamette Valley. To scare the geese away, they frequently use propane air cannons on timers. Starting on January 5th, an air cannon began firing every two minutes all day and throughout the night. My sleep and that of many neighbors was disrupted for nearly a month.” Now, how would you go about locating exactly where the offending air cannon is? READ ON! Also, as a bonus, the person who wrote this and runs the blog on which it’s hosted also has a hobby/sideline in drawing some of the most incredibly complex mazes I have ever seen, check them out.

The Internet Amnesty: I rather enjoyed this essay, arguing that, except for in exceptionally-egregious circumstances, perhaps we ought to just stop excoriating people for stuff they did or said online in the past – instead, the author argues, “My counter-proposal, option two, is that we declare a blanket amnesty for everything unless it’s abominable. Somewhat creepy behavior plausibly the result of misjudgment? Amnesty. Rape someone? No amnesty. Do a dodgy paraphrase for convenience. Amnesty. Steal a manuscript from another scholar and publish it under your name? No amnesty. Improperly make expense claims? Amnesty. Embezzle millions from your not-for-profit? No amnesty. My general position is that in the internet age, you should set a very high bar of wrongdoing, and not pursue anything that falls under that.” That seems…fair?

Argyle, Explained: Argylle is a film whose existence I am only aware of in the context of its marketing stunts – in fact, in an even odder and sense, I am only aware of it because of REPORTING ABOUT its marketing stunts rather than seeing any of said marketing for myself. Anyway, I am obviously never going to watch it but I genuinely enjoyed this long, convoluted (by necessity) attempt to explain and unpack WHAT THE FCUK IS GOING ON throughout the movie, though all its apparently neverending metafictional twists and turns…this is very entertaining, not least because of the very clear sense the author gives that despite how much is evidently GOING ON in the film they are also tremendously bored throughout the whole experience. I wonder whether this is going to have a small Morbius moment, or whether there’s something too fundamentally distasteful about the combination of Matthew Vaughan, the Kingsmen franchise and an aggressive pseudo-ARG around it to make it even an object of memetic ridicule.

Is Pregnancy A Disease?: DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER I AM ONLY QUOTING THE PAPER’S TITLE! This is, fine, a bit of a gag (LOL ACADEMIA SO FUNNY!) but equally is a really interesting exploration of the taxonomy of health and philosophy of language, and it’s worth reading the abstract in full because this really is deeper than your initial ‘no, lol, fcuk off’ response might have led you to believe: “In this paper, we identify some key features of what makes something a disease, and consider whether these apply to pregnancy. We argue that there are some compelling grounds for regarding pregnancy as a disease. Like a disease, pregnancy affects the health of the pregnant person, causing a range of symptoms from discomfort to death. Like a disease, pregnancy can be treated medically. Like a disease, pregnancy is caused by a pathogen, an external organism invading the host’s body. Like a disease, the risk of getting pregnant can be reduced by using prophylactic measures. We address the question of whether the ’normality’ of pregnancy, its current necessity for human survival, or the value often attached to it are reasons to reject the view that pregnancy is a disease. We point out that applying theories of disease to the case of pregnancy, can in many cases illuminate inconsistencies and problems within these theories. Finally, we show that it is difficult to find one theory of disease that captures all paradigm cases of diseases, while convincingly excluding pregnancy. We conclude that there are both normative and pragmatic reasons to consider pregnancy a disease.”

Devoted to Blue Roll: I loved this essay, in Vittles (which means I’ve just realised it might be paywalled, apologies if so), all about the ubiquitous Blue Roll that is present in every single restaurant you’ve ever visited and which, if you’ve ever worked in hospitality, will have an almost Pavlovian ability to bring back memories when you spot it in the wild. This is a great example of how wide-ranging and rich writing about even ostensibly-mundane subjects can be – this takes in restaurant culture, health and safety legislation and paper manufacture, and it’s STILL fascinating.

A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into The London Underworld: This has been widely praised on JournoTwitter this week, and rightly so – it’s a quite remarkable story about a public schoolboy whose mysterious death and subsequently-revealed connection to London gangland has never been reported in the UK despite the fact that, as this article proves, it’s a cracking tale. There are so many wonderful details in here – some wonderfully-telling undercutting of a certain type of middle-class existence, the allusions to Big London Crime, the increasingly-fetid air of a collusive coverup…honestly, this is exemplary and I now REALLY want to know who or what has prevented anyone from writing this up in the UK media.

Writers and the Martini: The list of cliches and anecdotes and quotes about writers and the Martini is already overlong, but despite that I really enjoyed this article by Dwight Garner about the literary world’s love affair with the world’s deadliest cocktail – there’s something deliciously gossipy about the tone, like the whole things being relayed to you over your second of the evening as you share the smoked almonds, and it’s impossible to read without it putting a smile on your face (but it will REALLY make you want a drink, so just fyi – it’s currently 1127am and I could fcuking MURDER a drink and a fag).

Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole?: I wasn’t aware of the Ursula Le Guin short that this story is riffing on, about ‘a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child’ – this, by Isabel J Kim, is an excellent take on that premise which I think you should just go in and read cold (yes, that’s right. I DO know what’s best for you).

With Teeth: I have an unpleasant relationship with teeth – mine are hideous, for a start, thanks to three decades of tabs and tea, but there’s also the fact that they are, undeniably, LUMPS OF BONE GROWING OUT OF MY FACE FLESH and, honestly, even just typing that is enough to break me out in an unpleasant persistent sweat – but I nonetheless adored this essay by Sam Paul, about their relationship with their teeth and their appearance and their self, and ideas of beauty, and how your body informs your mind and vice versa. This didn’t make me feel any less awful about corporeality, but the prose is LOVELY.

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything: Our last longread of the week is about bumping into your shrink. Except it’s not, not really – I LOVED this, everything about it, not least the fact that I at no point thought particularly liked the narrator and I knew that the narrator wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. This is beautiful and I think you will adore it I think.

By Oli Frape

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Earlier this week Kris from Naive hosted a Screenwalk, talking the audience through his mapping of the small, poetic web – it’s now up online, and you can watch/listen to it here, and if you have any interest in the non-mainstream web then I can recommend it unreservedly.

This is by N8NOFACE, it’s called ‘View From Here’ and I like the song in its sort of driving, semi-spoken word style, but it’s the video that really charmed me with this one – it’s just ‘slice of bandlife’ footage, fine, but it’s charming in ways I can’t quite define. Also (and this is a niche reference but I like to think at least one of you will get it) the singer looks so much like a bald Faris Yakob it’s genuinely disconcerting.

Even if you’re not familiar with her name, Beth Gibbons’ voice will be instantly-recognisable from her time with Portishead (or, er, it will if you’re my age and have my exact musical history) – I’ve loved her solo work for years (I once saw her at Bush Hall in London, a gig where she was so nervous she sang with her back to the audience throughout apart from to say hi and bye, and it was STILL brilliant), and this new song is typically gorgeous. HER VOICE. Anyway, it’s called ‘Floating On A Moment’ (and, perhaps interestingly, it’s the second video of the week by a Reasonably Famous Artist which uses AI in the video – this one is only elements, but still).

Our last video of the week is called ‘Worm Boy’, and it’s by Jad Fair and it’s from his album called ‘100 Songs’ and, honestly, if they’re all as good as this one then I am totally buying it. Also, THAT’S IT BYE EVERYONE I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 02/02/24

February 2, 2024

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Reading Time: 36 minutes

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

BUT I AM SYMPATHETIC! I FEEL YOUR PAIN!

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

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

By Vuk Palibrk

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

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

The Forever Labyrinth: Our first link this week is a BRAND NEW CULTURAL TOY from Google’s Arts & Culture team, and I spent a good 15 minutes yesterday as I futzed around with this trying to work out exactly which particular memory itch it was scratching as I did so (I will reveal at the end of this section, as some sort of spectacularly-lame enticement to read the whole entry rather than just getting frustrated with my prose and clicking the link to get away from me – I SEE YOU). This is part ‘vaguely-didactic opportunity for you, the user, to get up close and personal with some of the very high-res scans of classical artworks which Google has been taking over the years in collaboration with the world’s cultural institutions’; and part ‘vaguely-Victorian-feeling mystery missing person hunt through space and possibly time’, and starts with you, the player/character, in a room, hunting for their professor. From there you’re led through a series of paintings, though different ‘rooms’, guided by various characters to make thematic links between the artworks in a series of (gentle) puzzles which basically amount to ‘work out which picture is going to act as an access point to the next scene, based on the clues you’ve been given – this isn’t exactly deep, though I have to guiltily confess to getting a bit stuck about 20m into this (I was quite stoned, leave me alone), but there’s something pleasingly-atmospheric about the audio and the contrast between the minimal, line-drawn backdrops and the vibrancy of the artworks themselves, and the audio is lovely, and I really did get significantly more into this than I thought I was going to (but, again, stoned, so your mileage may well vary here), possibly because it reminded me SO MUCH, vibewise at least, of The Box of Delights by John Masefield (no, it wasn’t worth waiting for, was it? Sorry about that). As an aside, I got a really strong ‘this would actually make an EXCELLENT VR experience’ impression from this which almost never happens – I think there’s something about the idea of moving from space to space, ‘through’ the paintings, that brought that to mind, but I think there’s possibly an ‘immersive’ (sorry) spin on this for someone to explore should they be so minded.

AI Infinite TV: So I just checked and we are almost exactly a year on from “Nothing, Forever”, the AI-powered Seinfeld show that garnered international headlines and which is still running on Twitch (although it doesn’t really seem to have much to do with parodying Seinfeld anymore), and where is the ‘the entertainment revolution, powered by machines’ here in 2024? Well, we’ve moved on from ‘nonsensical, oddly-pixelated sitcom parody’ to ‘significantly-shinier infinite MTV-style programming in which everything is apparently spun up by The Machine’, but IS IT WORTH WATCHING? No, of course it isn’t, aside from the morbid curiosity of the almost-but-not-entirely-tuneless tunes and the short, melty videoclips, and the occasional, stilted AI VJ chat about how ‘AI Infinite TV is the future of media’ (although, given the present of media, perhaps that’s not such an insane prediction after all). I am curious as to all the different bits of tech that are being used here and how exactly they are being wrangled, and exactly what is automated workflow and what is ‘very human MachineWrangler desperately feeding prompts to Runway behind the scenes’ – according to the ‘About’ section, the people behind this have plans to add ‘short films’ ‘news’ and ‘interviews and Q&As’ to the broadcast schedule, things which I can’t for the life of me imagine anyone ever wanting (I know I often sound…less than positive about life and our species and THE GENERAL WAY THINGS ARE GOING, but I am not so bearish on humanity that I seriously believe a significant number of us are going to choose to watch AI-generated interviews with AI-generated avatars, however bad things get out here in meatspace. Please don’t probe me wrong, I am not sure I could bear the disillusionment) but which nonetheless I am curious to see in action…anyway, of all the various ‘media’ careers currently being threatened with differently-imminent degrees of extinction, I think the people in charge of making visual entertainments can probably rest safe for a little longer than the scribes and the wordsmiths can. Experiment for those of you working in shared spaces with TV screens – chuck this up on one of them and see how long it takes anyone to notice.

The Cheap Web: A manifesto of sorts for the ‘cheap’ web, based around the idea that making and hosting things online, without relying on Big Internet for your support and hosting and infrastructure, shouldn’t be expensive or difficult or HARD – and that the proliferation of small, cheap, lightweight and personal places on the web will contribute to its growth and diversity and oh god I am about 100 words from digressing into some sort of godawful thought experiment about digital botany, aren’t I? Ahem. “Until we adopt simple and stable building materials, all websites will continue to look the same. Software has become too complicated to stay honest. Corporations can’t expose their brick-and-wood architecture because it’s actually Megablocks and sawdust underneath all that paint. Wirth’s Law threatens to make things even worse. As software rots, multinationals may become the only players capable of making websites. But people like Bartosz Ciechanowski are forging paths to elegant futures. The source code for his mechanical watch demo is proof that honest software is viable. Each guide is erected as a giant wall of WebGL. It’s beautiful, but definitely not sleek. The World Wide Web needn’t be all 3D WebGL wizardry. The websites of Patrick Colison, Edward Tufte, and Phil Gyford are thriving examples of cozy HTML cabins. The humans are still out there. We can speak sincerely with honest tools and materials. We can stay slippy and celebrate our warts and imperfections together.” I happened to read something from a Young Person this week suggesting that the company that manages to crack a product allowing simple, easy, personalisable and forever-ish web creation for the mobile-first, WYSIWYG-interface generation would clean up, because the appetite to build their own spaces is very much there.

GPTGrooves: An AI music project which experiments with the interplay between GPT and the audio models – “These sounds are generated using Langchain and GPT4. GPT is prompted to create a song in a specific type of musical markup. This is parsed to be fed back into the model, first creating the data for bass, pad and drums, and then for filtering. All of this data is then combined to make a song and stored in a database. A new song is generated each day.” This project appears to have tane a pause in mid-December last year, but it’s interesting to listen to the tracks the process has thrown up and to see the evolution in the way that the people behind it have learned to prompt and prod to get outputs that are more coherent and ‘musical’ – the tracks that I have listened to (there are lots; the archive goes back over a month, possibly further) tend towards the minimal plinky electro-y sort of thing (this will mean nothing to any of you, I don’t think, but I get quite a strong David Shane Smith feel from them fwiw), and generally feel more…musical than the outputs I’ve heard from text-to-music models to date, which may say something about the ability of the different models at play here to interact usefully (or may say nothing of the sort! I have no idea about any of this!).

Matt Webb’s AI Poetry Clock: Only a few days into its fundraising round and already on course to smash its goal, Matt Webb’s prototypical ‘it’s a clock, but each minute it delivers a small rhyming couplet generated by AI to tell you the time in verse!’ machine is now available to back – 60% done with a month to go suggests this will comfortably go into production, which is great news as this is SUCH a nice idea and exactly the sort of thing that I have been banging on about for about a year now (cf: combining AI stuff like this with the otherwise-mundane is an excellent way of delivering all that ‘surprise and delight’ sh1t). It’s literally as simple as muy description makes it sound – Matt admits that due to the nature of LLMs, the clock will OCCASIONALLY sacrifice temporal accuracy for linguistic convenience when making its rhymes, and that as such this probably isn’t suitable for people who REALLY need precision in their lives, but otherwise this looks SO LOVELY, e-ink display and nicely-robust wall-mountable design and all. You can get your hands on one for £120 here – which is obviously quite a lot of money, but, equally, this is whimsical and fun and feels like A Good Thing to support. My only note, Matt, should you happen to read this, is that I would like a dial on the back that would afford me the ability to dial the tone of the outputs up and down from ‘nihilistic bleakness’ to ‘smiling Pollyanna’, because I worry that otherwise this thing is going to end up Fotherington-Thomasing at me until I take to it with the meat tenderiser.

The Lives of Literary Characters: Well THIS is an interesting project that leaves me just a *touch* conflicted. “The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories? We need your help to build better, more transparent AI models to understand human storytelling. To be clear: our goal is not to build AI to generate stories or create smarter chatbots. Our aim is fundamentally academic: we want to develop models to help us understand stories and thus learn more about this essential human activity. Most AI development is happening inside of black boxes behind closed doors. Our models will be open to the public as will all of the annotations made by readers like you…Our first project focuses on the interactions between characters. How do they behave with each other? And what can these networks of interactions tell us about the meaning of fiction? We know from the real world that social networks tell us a great deal about human behaviour. So what can fictional networks tell us about storytelling?” So you, the user, are invited to participate in an exercise of classification, presented with a selection of short passages drawn from various forms of contemporary writing and asked to parse details about the relationships between featured characters from your understanding of the text – are they engaged with each other? Is this engagement mutual? What form is this engagement taking? – to build up a database of these relationships which can then be used to develop a model capable of inferring these details from a text. Which, to be clear, is SO INTERESTING and from the point of view of machine understanding strikes me as a genuinely-interesting and potentially-important line of enquiry…but, equally, if the team behind this project don’t think that an open training set of this sort of data would be immediately used by exactly the sort of people who DO want to automate the act of writing creative, narrative, character-led fictions? HM LET ME THINK. I could totally understand, therefore, if for many of you the idea of engaging with this feels like some sort of suicide/betrayal – MAN THE BARRICADES! THEY WILL NOT TAKE THE NOVELISTS! – but, well, c’mon Cnut, your ankles are getting damp and the night is drawing in. I jest, I jest – but only a bit.

You Can Now Use GPT Store GPTs Within GPT4: Yes, I know, this is BORING AND PRACTICAL, and even worse the link’s to a video tutorial embedded in a Tweet – SORRY. Still, this is useful to know and, having played with the functionality a bit, useful to use – you can now call in functionality from other GPTs within your own prompt, so instead of having to articulate various steps for The Machine to take on a specific corpus of information, for example, you can instead just pull in various GPT tools to do the job directly in your own prompt using @-commands, like tagging people in an email. Which, I know, is a REALLY bad description, but it will make sense when you watch the video and I promise it is genuinely helpful (if you pay for GPT, obvs – if you don’t then this doesn’t apply, sorry).

The For You Hotel: A beautiful bit of unintentional webculture, this, brought to me via Pietro Minto’s weekly newsletter (Pietro doesn’t have the common decency to write in English what with being Italian and all, but lots of his links are to interesting English language content and Google translate does an excellent job) – as he explains it, kids on TikTok have taken to adding ‘For You’ as a location as well as #fyp on their videos, in the mistaken belief that this will somehow juice the algorithm into making them go viral (briefly, an aside – it genuinely amazes me that we have arrived at 2024, after about 20 years of this, more or less, and we still have people who can conceive of ‘going viral’ as anything other than the contemporary equivalent of an embarrassing and socially-diminishing venereal infection) without realising that ‘For You’ is in fact the name of a hotel on the Eastern edge of Milan. Which, in turn, means that this nondescript business hotel has nearly a million videos from around the world tagged to its location, videos from EVERYWHERE, about everything – honestly, if you’ve ever wondered what PURE TIKTOK looks like, free of the algorithmic tailoring that makes it YOUR TIKTOK, then this is probably the closest you’ll get to the utterly kaleidoscopic randomness of the platform, and I think this is the most interested in it I have ever been. Seriously, click this – it is like PURE HUMAN ZOO, straight to your eyeballs.

Stories by Angris: This tool claims to let you spin up ‘choose your own adventure-style’ interactive stories, complete with illustrations, from a simple text prompt – it effectively delivers an experience not a million miles away from that ‘create your own text adventure inside GPT’ prompt from a few weeks back, but one with a far shinier front-end but, to my mind, less flexibility when it comes to imaginative play. You give it the rough outline of the scenario, protagonist and challenge you fancy exploring and it offers up…well, honestly, the sort of ‘adventure’ that you’d have expected to get free on the cover-mounted cassette you got with Spectrum World, but, hey, it’s early days. This might be fun if you have a kid who enjoys storytelling and worldbuilding, not least as a useful way to point out how THIN this machine-generated gruel actually is when you look at it with any focus.

Not A Good Sign: An augmented reality project I heartily support and endorse. Not A Good Sign is a small art project that uses AR to let you, the user, place small signs in the world which you can then photograph and share with others – the signs say things like “ALL THE BIRDS LEFT AT ONCE” and “REMEMBER BEES” AND “THESE ARE NOT NATURAL EVENTS”, and are bleak and terrifying and I love them and would like them to be real and not virtual, please. Failing that, though, they will add a pleasing air of near-apocalypse tension to your Instagrammetry, and isn’t that what we all desperately hope for from 2024? No, I know it’s not, but we’re not going to get *that*, so just take what you’re given and fcuking shut up.

The Faircamp Webring: For everyone saddened by the current state of the music business and wanting to find ways of giving back to the artists rather than to the venture capitalists, Faircamp is a nice idea – basically a simple way of spinning up a static site for your music from nothing but a few MP3s and some copy. This link takes you to The Faircamp Webring, a self-created and small-but-growing collection of musicians who are using the platform to share their music – honestly, just the concept of a ‘webring’ sent me into a nostalgic reverie (I appreciate that there are those of you for whom this archaic reference to The Old Web will mean nothing – here, learn), but more generally this is a nice initiative and a good way of discovering a bunch of independent artists making interesting music.

Time Specific Websites: A collection hosted on Are.na, compiled by Marie Otsuka, of ‘time specific’ websites – that is, websites whose form or function changes depending on the time of day at which they are visited by an individual user. From sites that are powered by solar, meaning they’re only accessible when their panels are charged, to those that only come alive on specific days or months, this is a compendium of some gorgeous pieces of creative coding and, in general, I think all websites should have some sort of temporal element, even if just an Easter Egg, because, honestly, WHY NOT? No, fcuk off, that is a terrible reason.

AI and Eroticism: Would you like to participate in a study? Would you like to advance the field of human knowledge? Would you like to engage with questions around human arousal and THE REAL????? Oh go on, you know you do. This is a study being conducted by the University of Sussex which is exploring the extent to which arousal caused by visual stimuli is dependent on the perceiver’s knowledge of the image’s veracity or otherwise – or, in slightly-less w4nky and convoluted language, are AI-generated images fundamentally less *sexy* than actual photos? Tell them your age, gender and sexuality and then answer a bunch of questions about how ‘appealing’ or ‘arousing’ you find a selection of pictures. This takes about 15-20m start to finish, and you will – BE WARNED – be looking at actual images of naked people, involving genitals and secondary sexual characteristics and all that sort of stuff – that said, if you can spare the time then I would strongly encourage you all to give this a go as a) I think it’s valuable work, personally; and b) it is more interesting than you think it is.

Backstage With Bon Jovi: ‘Backstage With Bon Jovi’ does rather sound like one of Alan Partridge’s increasingly-desperate TV pitches – ‘Hanging In First Class With Hall & Oates’! ‘Pitching for Business with PinkPantheress’!, ‘Endoscopies with Eminem’! – but I suppose I should acknowledge that Jon ‘No Imagination And A Massive Ego’ Bongiovi and his bandmates are insanely famous and I imagine continue to be very, very popular, and so as such a website letting fans obsessively pore over the minutiae of tour photos and footage and reminiscences probably makes sense…the thing is, though, that Bon Jovi were ruined for me forever at the age of about 14 when my mate Phil Niewiadomski forced me to listen to ‘Never Say Goodbye’ off the Slippery When Wet album for TWO FCUKING HOURS on repeat, and while I know I should blame Phil for that…I don’t, I blame Jon (Phil lives in Swindon, he’s suffered enough – do you Google yourself, Phil? Hello if so! Also, stop Googling yourself! It’s not healthy!).

ASCII Theatre: I’ve managed to go several months without mentioning MSCHF here, but the bstards have only gone and pulled me back in again with this excellent little gimmick – for…a time (I presume that this has a finite shelf life, but then again maybe they have the entirety of IMDB converted and queued up), you can watch ENTIRE HOLLYWOOD FILMS in your browser, seemingly-legally! How? Because they are rendered in ASCII, meaning that while they’re broadly sort-of comprehensible, they are also low enough res to fall outside of copyright law (I presume that that’s what’s happening here) – so that’s how yesterday they were able to show Barbie, and tomorrow they’re showing some Star Wars rubbish…look, if you are a brand wanting to make some DISRUPTIVE WAVES during Euro2024 you could do worse than look at the legals around doing something like this because you would CLEAN UP.

By Jeff Wall

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

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

By Kathrin Landa

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

T-Mobile Sidekick: A Tumblr dedicated to photos of famous people (or at least I presume that they were famous at the time) holding, enjoying, ENGAGING WITH the T-Mobile Sidekick, one of the more oddly-designed attempts by non-Blackberry phonemakers to come up with a Blackberry competitor – this is interesting mainly as a sort of portal back to the aesthetics and design styles of a decade ago, although you can also have fun trying to work out who the fcuk all the emo-looking kids are in the photos.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

AI Is Better Than You: My Curios routine of a Friday morning (you have never asked, but I am fcuking telling you whether you like it or not) involves dragging myself out of my pit at 6am, running through the overnights and then starting to type the fcuker around 7am (in case you’re curious about the pace – no, of course you’re not fcuking curious, BUT I AM TELLING YOU ANYWAY – it’s currently 1022am), all the while listening to the Today programme and then the rest of Radio4’s morning programming, which means that I have now heard the Bank of England governor’s assertion that AI ‘will not be a mass destroyer of jobs’ several times now, and, not going to lie, it hasn’t become MORE convincing. This article is written from the perspective of the videogames industry but, honestly, it is one of the clearest articulations of why I have The Fear about the jobpocalypse and how fast it might be arriving – look, I am SO BAD AT PREDICTIONS, as I have proven oft and plentifully, and as such I am probably going to be totally wrong about this and I really hope I am because, well, otherwise I am quite fcuked, but it’s quite hard not to read stuff like this and think ‘if you don’t think that this applies to your industry too, white collar businessmong, then I doubt your judgement’ – honestly, read this and then think about how easy it would be to replace ‘writers’ with ‘whatever your knowledge economy job is’: “by focusing on things like an AI system writing stilted dialogue or failing to draw a dragon properly today, what you are doing is making a bet on the AI industry failing to fix these problems tomorrow. Even with all the countless credulous idiots and money-burning schemes out there in the industry, that’s not a bet I would take, personally. In many cases it’s a self-defeating argument anyway. We already know, for example, that writers in the games industry are underpaid and overworked, and that the quality of writing in games often suffers because of it. nVidia’s technology was often contrasted with Baldur’s Gate 3, a smash success last year at least partly because of the high quality of its writing1. But most games are not Baldur’s Gate 3, most games are not celebrated because of their writing, and indeed many games do not have particularly good writing. Is that because the writers are bad? No, it’s because writing is undervalued by the people funding games, in an industry that generally undervalues its employees anyway. Investors will accept putting higher pressure on writing teams because it saves money with an acceptable impact on sales.”

The Coming AI Image Copyright Mess: I’ve touched on this already this year, but given that Google just launched ‘AI image generation’ within its Bard AI assistant (US-only at the time of writing, sorry EuroKids), and that people have obviously immediately got it to spit out a bunch of quite-obviously-copyrighted imagery, and the ability of Midjourney v6 to recreate exact frames from specific films…I don’t know, I feel like the studios and brands have a far stronger case than the publishers and the authors (and doesn’t that sentence read like a sad encapsulation of the shifting power dynamics enabled by the inexorable march of capitalism, RIGHT KIDS?!?!?!). Oh, and if you want a BONUS AI AND IMAGES story, here’s a decent one about how Google’s starting to struggle with the torrent of AI imagery and search result degradation has begun in earnest.

The TayTay Bongo Story: We have by now all heard the story of Twitter being FLOODED WITH AI-GENERATED TAYLOR SWIFT BONGO last week and of the platform’s farcical attempts to stop its spread, and the fact that it was a Microsoft product apparently being used to generate the content in question (by the way – has anyone seen the bongo? I ask not because I have any desire to (I appreciate that that might sound ‘methinks he doth protest too much’-ish, but I really don’t) but more because I don’t know ANYONE who has laid eyes on any of this stuff) – here 404 Media does a good job of rounding up the story along with a decent dose of ‘WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?’ – the upshot of which is, basically, ‘it is genuinely insane that we don’t have proper legislation that at the very least outright bans the nonconsensual creation of sexualised imagery of any individual whether with AI or otherwise’. File under ‘yet more stuff that the Online Safety Bill totally failed to make a meaningful difference to’! BONUS TAYTAY – if you’re in the market for it, Ryan over at Garbage Day has a good breakdown of what exactly it is about the woman that causes the right wing to lose its mind. Oh, and seeing as I mentioned 404, this is a good article explaining why they are starting to require email addresses to access articles, and more broadly about why digital journalism is in quite such a staggeringly-bleak place (is it…is it money and AI? IT IS!!!!).

AI & The Future of Work: This is quite an irritating document, not least because it’s presented as slides despite being all prose – WHY? WHY MUST EVERYTHING BE ON FCUKING SLIDES? WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH WORDS ON A PAGE DISPLAYED IN PORTRAIT FORMAT? – and also because it’s a Microsoft sales pitch all about why you need to integrate AI into your organisation now, actually, BUT! If you are in the invidious position of in fact ‘having to integrate AI into your organisation’, or even of ‘having to think about how to integrate AI into your organisation’, then it might be useful – it’s got a reasonable amount of detail about stuff that LLMs in particular can be usefully used for professionally and what they can’t, and despite the fact that, yes, the fundamental direction they suggest you go in is ‘pay Microsoft the enterprise CoPilot subscription!’ there’s a lot of helpful information which might be used to make a case for specific cases of deployment and implementation.

The End of the Human Web?: When I wrote about Google adding ‘complete this form with AI’ functionality to Chrome last week I made paqssing reference to all the fun ways that was likely to ‘improve’ (lol) the quality of content across the web – this is a piece from New York Magazine which basically makes the case that we might be about to open some truly turdy floodgates. “We have the technology for a web that publishes itself,” the piece concludes, “will anyone want to read it?”. It’s machines all the way down, lads.

Macro and Micro Culture: This surprised me by being really smart and feeling…accurate in a way that lots of other broad, big picture cultural analysis pieces don’t – W.David Marx coins the concept of Macro-taste Micro Culture, or ‘subcultures whose outputs aggressively ape mass culture’, or, in his words, “Now we can see the exact location of the coming war: between the Macro and the Macro-taste Micro. They both make similar outputs but have the thing the other one wants: Macro wants audience and revenue, Macro-taste Micro wants legitimacy. And Macro tastemakers don’t have much respect for Macro-taste Micro groups because they are direct competitors without being a clear source of innovations for refreshing taste.” Honestly, I really did find this eye-opening and a really useful lens through which to think about both ‘big’ and ‘small’ culture in 2024, and also the very real feeling of cultural stagnation so prevalent among much ‘creative’ work.

The Bimbo Renaissance: Look, I confess to not having gotten this AT ALL – but I appreciate that I am very much not its target audience. If you want 70 slides on feminist consumer culture, brands, pop media and the Barbie Phenomenon – AND WHAT THIS MEANS FOR BRANDS WHO WANT TO FLOG MORE TAT TO WOMEN AND ADJACENT FEMME-Y AUDIENCES – then this is basically crack cocaine. I didn’t personally think that the thinking held up that well, but I am perfectly willing to admit that that’s because I don’t know the first thing about women or selling things to them.

YouTube Is Infrastructure: There was something on the radio earlier this week which was AGAIN attempting to distinguish between online life and real life, specifically in terms of ‘X event online impacting Y factor in reality’, and it was all I could do not to scream “IT HAS BEEN 25 YEARS CAN WE STOP THIS ARBITRARY DISTINCTION NOW PLEASE IT MAKES NO FCUKING SENSE” – I think this piece does a good job of demonstrating exactly why applying a divide between digital and physical ‘life’ is so utterly meaningless, and how the former often supervenes on the latter in unexpected ways, detailing some of the ways in which the vastness of Google’s video archive has made it so much more than ‘a place to watch videos’.

Welcome To The Age of Sh1tpost Modernism:. This might be the last ever Pitchfork piece I link to in Curios – SAD TIMES. Still, it’s a decent piece to go out on if that does end up being the case; Kieran Press-Reynolds writes about the current trend for what he terms ‘sh1tpost modernism’ and I term ‘does postmodernism now mean that we are no longer allowed to even make demarcations between ‘good’ and bad’ anymore? Oh’. “In a streaming world that prioritizes ephemeral dopamine hits and algorithm-piercing smashes, ideas like radio-readiness or conceptual heft can feel quaint. So instead of trying to appeal to the everyman or the critic, a mass of young musicians are fucking around. The result is a feast of freakiness that’s perfect for zoomer brains that have hatched to (im)maturity in a vat of digital absurdism.” There is at least one of who I am pretty sure can use this as the basis for an entire (admittedly bullsh1t) brand strategy if you’re so minded.

PorkTok: But also MilkTok – I enjoyed this piece looking at a couple of non-traditional brands trying out TikTok campaigns in the US, specifically the National Pork Board and the milk peddlers, and I am including specifically so that those of you working in advemarktingpr for really dull corporate clients can have some useful ammunition when you try and persuade, I don’t know, BAE Systems to do some ‘kooky, video-first influencer engagement targeting the <24 demographic’.

The Apple VR Headset: This is a VERY LONG but thorough, exhaustive and refreshingly-skeptical writeup by Nilay Patel in The Verge, who goes over what it is like wearing and using Apple’s latest violently-expensive but VERY SHINY toy, and asks “yes, ok, but do I actually need this and can I imagine really using it regularly?” – the answer, by the way, is “No, not really, and WOW does it make me appreciate how great it is experiencing life through my eyes as opposed to some cameras”, which is quite nice and not a little reassuring. Not that it will make a difference to the likely sales – I would imagine this will shift some 200k units this year, which is a LOT of money so well done Tim! – but everything I read about this convinces me that, as with all wearable tech at present, it continues to be a product in search of a use-case. Although should you want a slightly more thrilled perspective you can enjoy this lovely piece of client journalism from Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair, whose mesmerised, rapt astonishment at the device and the brave new world it presages (“I interacted with graphics in midair that were crisper than anything I’d ever seen before. And I touched them all with my fingers, not a mouse or keyboard. I saw spatial videos for the first time. To say this feature is astounding is an understatement. You actually feel like the person is in front of you and you can reach out and touch them. I saw clips of movies that were 100 feet wide, sharper and clearer than any IMAX. But most importantly, I saw the world around me. That very room. I didn’t feel closed off or claustrophobic. I was there. I was everywhere, all at once”) is I’m sure IN NO WAY linked to the access they got to Tim Cook for the cover interview.

The Shapes of Stories: You know that famous Vonnegut thing where he outlines the eight archetypal ‘shapes’ of story? Yes you do, it’s become as annoyingly-ubiquitous as the DFW ‘This Is Water’ speech amongst a certain type of online dullard (sorry, but). Well, researchers have fed a whole load of novels to AI and got The Machine to attempt to analyse them for ‘shapes’ and commonalities, and it turns out that there are in fact six plot shapes and that they broadly match the rough plots done by Vonnegut (albeit two fewer) all those years ago. This struck me not only as broadly interesting, but also something which you could possibly use as an interesting hook or ‘insight’ (lol, sorry) on which to hang something fun (or at the very least to introduce a really unnecessary degree of academic rigour to your content).

The Hairpin and the Zombie Internet: Many years ago, The Hairpin was on my daily rotation of ‘good sites with good writing to check daily’, and I was genuinely sad when it shut down in 2018 – this piece in WIRED looks at how and why it has started publishing again, and the broader concept of ‘zombie media’ that’s emerging as defunct properties from the second digital media boom let their domains expire and get taken over by linkscammers and content farms. I can’t stress enough how devastating I find it that it’s entirely possible that we will never, ever be able to piece together this history of all of this stuff – that in the future all we’ll be able to scry are occasional layers of compacted digital trash from eras past, but that we’ll never have a complete chronology of who and how and why it was built and died because we didn’t realise that what we were making was built on digital sand.

The Ludic Century: In about 2006 I had a real bee in my bonnet about the idea of ‘homo ludens’, or gameplaying man, and the idea that there was something in this (human of leisure, human of arrested development, human who can’t stand the roughage of life without the sweetener of play, etc etc) and it was a useful lens through which to see much of modern culture at the time. I was, of course, a pretentious w4nker talking out of my ar£e – I was also right, just a few years early, as this article, unpacking the work and theories of Eric Zimmerman, asserts. I’ll leave you with its conclusion, but it’s worth reading the leadup to see how it gets there: “As the world continues to evolve new and frighteningly complex problems, perhaps those kinds of contradictory, dissociative experiences have only grown more appealing, rewarding people for presuming a silenced problem is a solved one. In that light, it makes more sense to think of games not as some enlightened form of pragmatism that can save us from the world’s problems, but a kind of mass intoxicant, a communal vice that is most potent when we treat it as a virtue.”

Big PDF: How big do you think you can make a PDF? No, you are wrong, you can make it FCUKING ENORMOUS. This is very silly, very funny, immensely-pleasing, and 100% the sort of thing you could totally rip off for a PR thing if you have a suitable client and move fast enough.

Launching Nollywood: I’ve read countless articles over the years about Nigerian cinema, but none which have given me the background story as to how it came to dominate the African cinematic scene – it turns out that it all stems from Pentecostal churches effectively making Jesus propaganda, one example of which became a legitimate home-grown cinematic sensation, passed from copied VHS to copied VHS and sparking the growth of a now-international industry. Truly, God works in mysterious ways.

Skateboarding Video Soundtracks: I was never able to skateboard as a kid – turns out having literally no physical coordination to speak of whatsoever and a very healthy fear of physical pain are pretty much the greatest barriers to skateboarding success that there are, outside of quadriplegia – but I did basically find myself adopting the wardrobe of the skater in my teens and as such spent a LOT of time hanging out in skateshops and making risible attempts to chirpse girls significantly cooler than me by demonstrating my appreciation for the skating videos that played on a loop (C2KY2K ftw) while actually being significantly more interested in the music accompanying the action. This is a lovely piece of writing in The Quietus, by Will Burns, about the memories of watching grainy VHS footage and the way the right song gives timeless dignity to watching a man eat his own teeth as he falls face-first down some concrete steps.

Finding Midwich: The novels of John Wyndham are genuine 20th Century classics, and The Midwich Cuckoos is probably his most famous thanks to its various cinematic adaptations and bastardisations (to my mind, though, The Chrysalids is his best book and if you’ve not read it then GO NOW) – I absolutely loved this article in the Birmingham Dispatch in which Sophie Atkinson visits the place where John Wyndham grew up to see if she can find some sort of formative clues in the suburban gloom. This is so, so evocative of a particular type of Englishness, and of the slow, cabbage-scented misery of the middle part of the 20th Century in the UK.

At The Britney Spears House Museum: This is another very good piece about small, odd places, but being American it feels almost like the negative imprint of the previous piece. In it, Emmeline Kline writes for the Paris Review about visiting the Britney Spears House Museum in the small town where Ms Spears grew up, and it’s about the people and the place and the people who visit and why, and even as someone who would find it hard to give any less of a fcuk about Britney Spears (sorry, but, well, there’s a lot going on) this was a gorgeous read.

Stillwaters: This is one of the most furious pieces I have read in a long time – honestly, it’s almost aggressive in places, justifiably so as Magogodi oaMphela Makhene reflects on her upbringing in South Africa, her private education, her relationship with whiteness and the anger she feels at a system and people for whom she has never felt she mattered; think of it as a companion piece to last week’s about being an Arab. It is well-written and lyrical in places, but, mostly, it’s fcuking angry.

500 Days In A Cave: Finally this week, a story about a woman who spent 500 days alone in a cave to see what it was like. This is a BRILLIANT piece of writing, honestly, both in terms of the prose but also the structure, and the very real creeping horror you feel in the latter half of the piece as you read about what it is actually like to be entirely alone, without speaking to anyone at all, for 500 days, and I really, really want to read the inevitable self-penned account of this by the woman who underwent it.

By Malika Favre

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

I don’t normally like music that sounds like it was made in the 70s, but I will make an exception for this because, honestly, it really is charming – it’s called ‘Neon River’ and it’s by Pond.

I am *slightly* annoyed at being introduced to a new Italian artist by a German’s newsletter, but my annoyance is mitigated by how much I enjoyed this – a sort of noodly, parpy, jazz-y (yes, I know, but it really is!), with a spoken word freeform poem skittering over the top of it…ok, it’s a BIT experimentalwanky, but it’s also really fun and as I type this I am listening to it again and doing a sort of headbobbing thing, involuntarily, so do give it a go. It’s by Cmon Tigre and it’s called ‘Sento Un Morso Dolce’, and in case you’re curious the spoken word stuff is a stream of consciousness riff that starts out with a guy talking to a shrink and then basically devolves into a surrealistic meditation on creativity. So there.

New from Kid Kapichi, this is a brilliant anthem to nights out on the town – it’s called ‘Get Down’ and it is both a lot of fun and also channels the spirit of c.2003ish (Ordinary Boys/Audiobullys) in a way I didn’t think I’d like but in fact actually do.

Finally this week, a song which I can’t say I particularly enjoyed listening to but which has an accompanying video so effectively horrible that I couldn’t possibly not finish with it – be warned, though, this really is horrible and is quite a lot like watching a horror film in parts, and there is blood and cutting and some unpleasant bits that are quite a lot like what I remember Gunther Von Hagens’ Bodyworlds’ exhibition to have been like…oh, and there’s a lot of screaming too. This is called ‘More Want’ and it’s by Banks Arcade and THAT’S IT I’M SORRY DON’T HATE ME I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 26/01/24

January 26, 2024

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Reading Time: 39 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Xan Padron

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

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

Oldavista: We’re only a few weeks into 2024 and the general sense of ‘hang on, this isn’t the transformative improvement I’d expected from a brand new year!’ is almost palpable – so why not instead make a conscious decision to ignore all the now and the new and the novel and instead fix your gaze firmly towards the digital past instead? It does rather feel like you’ve not been able to move over the past year for all the nostalgic takes on the innocent majesty of the old internet, and now YOU TOO can experience the peculiar joy of stumbling across old, personal webpages from yesteryear thanks to the magic of Oldavista, a search engine designed specifically to surface results from the hoary old history of the web, back when it was held together with string and duct tape and was only really properly accessible to people who knew weird, arcane sh1t like what LAN parties were. It is VERY SLOW, but that feels oddly appropriate, and if you are the sort of person who used to while away hours spelunking through odd corners of other people’s minds, click by click (what do you mean ‘that sounds oddly intrusive and not a little creepy, Matt!’? Doesn’t everyone conceive of browsing the web like this?) then this is a powerful hit of nostalgia. If you’re a bit overwhelmed and don’t quite know where to start with this, check out some of the suggested ‘Top Links’ (‘Dinosaur Pictures and Links’ is a personal favourite) or alternatively just type in whatever topic takes your fancy and see where you end up. You know that horrible, cliche phrase ‘dance like noone’s watching’? Well in the past people posted like noone was reading (because, in the main, they weren’t) and in some ways it was better that way – this site is a perfect portal to discover why.

Just For Fun: Sometimes you don’t want the fibre – sometimes you just want the sugar and fat and salt, to gorge yourself on things with no nutritional value until your fingers and gaping maw are slick and your senses are vibrating at a new and troubling frequency as a result of all the E numbers. So it is with this site, administered by the indefatigable Neal Agarwal and which collects a bunch of ‘creative coding’ projects from around the web. Many of these are CLASSICS (bongo cat! Medieval City Generator!) but there are SO MANY fun, distracting, silly, creative and generally pleasing webtoys in here that you could reasonably forget about all the bad stuff for, ooh, probably at least 17 minutes or so.

The Miko Mini: Do you remember the book The Neverending Story? Yes, fine, there was a film too, with That theme song, but frankly it wasn’t a patch on the novel and honestly if you’ve never read it and you are in the market for a few hours’ escapism then it really is a great read (er, if you’re 9). Anyway, the author of The Neverending Story was a German author called Michael Ende, who also wrote a lesser-known but also excellent book called Momo, all about the importance of imagination in childhood (and time travel, and a tortoise called Cassiopoeia – honestly, it’s great, read that too), and there’s a recurring theme in it about these futuristic, hi-tec dolls, which talk and interact with kids but which leave no space for imagination and which as such are fundamentally empty…anyway, that pointless digression into ‘books which evidently left a significant impression on Young Matt’ is by way of introduction to the Miko Mini, an electronic companion robot-type thing…POWERED BY AI! “Miko Mini might be tiny in stature, but it’s packed with personality, reacting to your actions and moods with fun facial expressions and bite-sized text notes. With its vibrant expressions and vast personality, it becomes a cherished companion, making learning both fun and meaningful.” Yes, that’s right, the first wave of AI-enabled toys are arriving – this is one of half-a-dozen different brands which are coming to market i the next year or so, all of whom offer basically the same sort of thing, to whit ‘a learning and conversation companion that can tell stories and answer questions, all power by THE MAGIC OF AI!’ Miko doesn’t make clear exactly what’s under the hood, but there are others I’ve seen which are explicit about their use of GPT…which, let’s be honest, doesn’t fill me with confidence; if you’ve spent any time interacting with LLMs it should have become emninently clear to you that they are not at present something to which one ought entrust the education and development of young minds and yet, well, here we are! Interestingly the Miko Mini website makes a lot of its ENCRYPTION and SECURITY features, but very little of ‘guardrailing’ and ‘making sure you can’t jailbreak the thing’, but, well, I am sure it will all be fine and that outsourcing the raising of your sticky little progeny to spicy autocomplete will work perfectly for everyone. If you’d like to read more about these things you can do so in this piece – I very much enjoyed the detail about these things getting simple maths wrong, as LLMs are wont to do.

Nightshade: This was trailed in a paper last year but is now LIVE – Nightshade is an interesting idea, purporting to let artists not just stop their works from being scraped for training purposes by AI models but to specifically harm the models doing the scraping: “Nightshade transforms images into “poison” samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space. Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.” I’ve seen a degree of debate online about the extent to which this actually works, but I am enjoying this current era of ‘scrappy artists attempt to fight back against the Goliath that is machine learning with the slings and ineffectual arrows of homebrew coding’ – if you’re a maker of visual works and want to attempt to join The Resistance then you could do worse than check this out (but it’s also worth remembering that, despite what the Bible might have attempted to convince us, the small kid with the slingshot has an overwhelming tendency to be turned into a thin, lumpy smear of human jam by the giant with the necklace of skulls) (did that metaphor work? I don’t think it did, did it?).

Metaphor Dogs: Not, sadly, itself some sort of code – no, this is simply a compendium of all the ways in which dogs and general canine behaviour manifest in idiomatic English usage. The site “explores the ways in which references to dogs are used in vernacular English, especially as they reveal social dynamics in the contemporary United States. Terms, metaphors, and cultural references that evoke dogs are discussed individually, including history, usage, and significance.” I appreciate that not EVERYONE will necessarily find this useful, but I live in the faint and vanishing hope that one of you will be stuck, inspirationless, staring at a Keynote for a new creative direction for Pedigree and THIS is the site that finally unblocks you (all I want is to be useful).

Feedle: Another search portal purporting to offer a way into a different corner of the web, and one which briefly cast me back to the halcyon days of Google, when the product still worked and the web wasn’t all machine-generated dreck, and you could do things like ‘search blogs and forums’…anyway, Feedle is GREAT because it basically does just that – rather than returning results from Big Websites, it instead focuses specifically on blogs and podcasts, so all the results are from personal domains or the world of audio; even better you can export your searches as RSS feeds, meaning it’s easy to set up a search for something you’re interested in keeping an eye on and have new content on that topic from small, independent writers and creators and hobbyists show up in your feed like clockwork (JUST LIKE IT USED TO BE). As the web gets ever more fractured and the possibility of ever having any sort of idea of What Is Going On becomes evermore illusory, I think things like this – and small-scale ‘blogger outreach’ and niche community cultivation – will become more and more useful, so bookmark this just in case I’m right (I am rarely, if ever, right about anything at all).

Dead Pubs: There was a point about three years or so ago when someone suggested to me that I probably ought to break out ‘interesting stuff on TikTok’ into its own section of Curios and I realised that, actually, no, there is no way in hell I am adding another fcuking platform to the list of Things I Have Arbitrarily Decided I Must Keep On Top Of Despite There Being No Real Practical Benefit To My So Doing. Still, if I DID have a dedicated section of ‘TikTok Accounts I Quite Enjoyed This Week’ then Dead Pubs would be in it – some reasonably-posh sounding kid doing deadpan-but-affectionate-and-at-heart-not-unserious reviews of various London pubs; there are only four videos there so far, but the latest one, featuring Brewdog Waterloo (AKA LegoLand for people who live in Surrey and REALLY like pub gak), is a nice entry into the series. BONUS TIKTOK CHANNELS! You know what, while we’re here, check out these ones too – A) I have no fcuking clue what is going on here, but I quite enjoy the combination of slightly-frenzied music, deep-fried pixelspace aesthetics and SPACE FACTS; B) Cities By Diana made me laugh a LOT; I don’t really understand what is happening, but there’s something wonderful about the combination of what I think is ‘Truck Driving Simulator’ footage and intensely-online language being used here that tickled something primal within me and may do the same to you.

Guess The AI Face: You’re really good at spotting AI, right? You wouldn’t get fooled by a Midjourney-spun countenance? Hm, perhaps not – this little quiz pulled together by the NYT unsettled me rather when I misidentified a couple of the pictures, which has NEVER happened before when trying out this sort of thing; the classic tells you might have used to pick an AI image from a lineup six months ago (hair, ears, the collars of garments, background details, etc) simply aren’t as obvious as they used to be, and if you’ve spent any time playing with (or looking at the outputs of) Midjourney6 then you will be aware of how terrifyingly good it now is at producing photos that look…just about sh1t enough to have been taken by a real person on a cameraphone. My big problem with AI aesthetics last year, and something I thought might be a barrier to full believability, was the software’s inability to create imagery that was in any way ‘ugly’ – that seems to be receding which, honestly, is quite odd and a bit scary. I mean, look at this stuff – try telling me that you would doubt any of these images for a second if they scrolled past your field of vision.

The Midi Archive: Oh I do like this – a project by Reuben Son which takes a bunch of old MIDI music files from the early days of the web and uses them as training data for a music AI, neatly bridging the gap between old and new technologies. “The MIDI files collected here and used to train the model were once very new. In presenting them here alongside the output of a machine learning model, I hope to bridge epochs of technological transformation. Within each, the possibilties of new aesthetic experiences interact with the technics of producing and distributing new forms of media, producing artifacts that carry hopes and fears about how we ourselves may change.” You can listen to individual tracks from the training data as well as The Machine’s outputs on the Page, and read more about the project here if you’re so inclined.

Shed of the Year: In years past I have often featured the annual Shed of the Year contest – but only when they publish the winners. This year, though, for some reason I feel it’s possible I’ve crossed some sort of audience age event horizon whereby the readership of Web Curios, all nineteen of you, are in fact now likely to be of the sort of vintage that means you’re all actually reasonably likely to *own* sheds of your own which you might want to submit to this year’s search for THE BEST SHED IN BRITAIN. So, er, if you’re a middle-aged man with a shed then HERE YOU GO. A note for the non-English: a ‘shed’ is what middle-aged English men do instead of therapy.

The Video Game History Foundation: This is a great project, and a necessary one – I know that ‘preserving the history of videogames’ doesn’t SOUND like a hugely-culturally-significant endeavour, fine, but considering the number of people that play the things it’s interesting that there isn’t an archival scene around it like there is film or television (though in fairness the relative age of the various media might play a part there). Anyway, the Video Game History Foundation is a US initiative that seeks to archive and preserve original code, design documentation, audio, files…basically if you’re someone who’s interested in games, their development and the history thereof then there’s a lot to keep you occupied in here (specifically the ‘blog’ section which details some of the specific projects they’ve undertaken and which really is particularly good if you’re a special type of obsessive).

Daft: This bills itself as ‘the social network for minimalists’, and it certainly lives up to the title – the interface is literally just ‘send an email with your post as the subject line and it will go live’, and posts are limited to words and links. That’s it. You can’t delete posts, you can’t edit them, and the whole thing’s consumed through an app that’s brutal in its black-and-white simplicity, and…actually I quite like this, on reflection; I was going to whinge about how literally noone needs or wants a new social network here in 2024 (I think, collectively, the novelty of this whole ‘being hyperconnected’ and ‘seeing the exact grain of fluff inside a stranger’s bellybutton’ has somewhat palled), but while I still believe that to be true I think this is rather cute (if pointless and destined to end up only being used by the founder and their seven achingly-cool friends).

PI: Actually, seeing as we’re doing NEW SOCIAL NETWORKS (seamless!)…this is PI, which stands for ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ and which has spun out of the newsletter of the same name, and which I think is currently being used by approximately 30 kids in New York but which might appeal if you want something that looks like it was designed by, and for, 19 year olds (it has an aesthetic that I really want to describe as RudeDogCore, which I appreciate is unlikely to mean anything to any of you but, well, IT’S MY NEWSLETTER).

Call Centre AI: It’s been a bad start to the year for jobs, and, realistically, it’s not going to get any better anytime soon. 2024 is the year in which we’re going to see the first real effects of the generative AI wave on the labour market – not the jobpocalypse, not quite, but the edges of certain industries beginning to be eroded by technology which isn’t perfect, or even very good, but which is cheap and JUST EFFECTIVE ENOUGH to make it worth swapping out your meaty wageslaves for at the margins of your operation. Witness this – a company called Qlary which offers ‘AI Call Centre Assistants’ for as little as $50, and which whilst almost certainly a terrible product that barely works is self-evidently going to be an attractive option as soon as it becomes JUST capable enough not to actively lose you business if you use it. Oh, and here’s ‘Holly’, a company presenting a friendly. human-sounding brand for a business that wants to replace your HR department (yes, I know, but they are people too, just) and probably will do in ~24m or so. Will any of these things be better for customers? Almost certainly not! Will they make a near-immediate impact on the bottom line? Definitely! Which of those two factors do YOU believe is likely to be the greatest determinant of corporate activity?

From-To: This doesn’t really work, if I’m honest, but it’s a cute idea and will automatically resonate with anyone who’s ever been asked ‘so, you’ve lived in city X and city Y; what’s the closest equivalent to neighbourhood A?’ (seriously, you try coming up with a Roman equivalent of ‘Bounds Green’, it’s simply not possible). Plug in two cities (and your email address, annoyingly ,but I don’t *think* this is nefarious dataharvesting) and the site will spit out a list of areas that roughly compare to each other – I have NO IDEA where this is being pulled from, and I have the sneaking suspicion that there’s some AI under the hood somewhere (mainly because, well, a lot of the resulting copy is slightly fanciful b0llocks), but I enjoyed it quite a lot. You can see recent comparisons on the homepage without having to share your details, if you’re curious – apparently someone’s just run a comparison between London and Warrington which, having visited both places, seems…fanciful.

London Toy Fair 2024: A selection of photographs taken at this year’s London Toy Fair which recently took place – these are, to be clear, not patricularly amazing photos, but I find there’s something slightly appealing about the juxtaposition of the colours and the plastic and the packaging here and the incredibly bleak, slightly-liminal lights and carpeting and modularity of the conference centre…anyway, if you want a sneak preview of the plastic tat that’s going to be forming 2024’s Christmas Detritus Strata around the planet then, well, here you go!

The Crown Auction: It is, probably, vanishingly-unlikely that you will ever own a genuine article once touched by a member of the UK Royal Family – BUT, thanks to this forthcoming auction at Bonham’s, you can TOTALLY own something touched by a cast member of the long-running TV show *about* the UK Royal Family, which is probably the same thing, more or less. I haven’t been through all of the lots so I can neither confirm nor deny that ‘Diana’s Actual Ghost’ is up for grabs but, well, it probably is. If nothing else there are some FABULOUS frocks in here which you might enjoy perusing (or bidding on! But, honestly, if you have a few grand spare to spend on taffeta then, well, I’m right here is all I’m saying).

By Malika Favre

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

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

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

By Jean Aubertin

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Forgotten Stories: Not in fact a Tumblr! Sorry, I didn’t see any good ones this week so instead I am including this Old School Blog (it’s on a WordPress url, just like in the past!) which is honestly WONDERFUL; per the description, “the purpose of this site is to discuss/reminisce about old children’s books” and, well, that is EXACTLY what you get; think if it as a companion to The The Threshold, but more sincere and North American – if you’re into this you can subscribe to updates so you need never again miss an in-depth bit of reminiscent analysis of The Nancy Drew Mysteries.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

So That’s Media Fcuked, Then: I found myself having conversations around the death of mass media a lot last year, but I didn’t expect the collapse to happen quite as quickly as it appears to have done; you will probably have noticed that there have been ONE OR TWO job losses in media this week (and videogames! And loads of other places! Although if it’s any consolation, know that people at Big Oil are also getting canned – does that help? No, thought not) and it seems likely that this is going to continue. This is a brilliant – and sad, and bitter, and angry – piece by Jack Crosbie which basically gets to the heart of a lot of this by pointing the finger at what he terms ‘private equity strip-mining’ and reaches a conclusion that it’s quite hard to argue with, namely “This sh1t is all dying. It’s all fcuked. There is like one place you can work right now with any kind of job security and it is The New York Times and that’s only because they have a shitload of recipes on a nicely coded little cooking app that you can subscribe to and also because your parents are hooked on Wordle and the myriad other “put letter or number in little box” games that they put on their reading glasses and log on to the big family Dell PC together each morning to play. Who knows how long that business model will last.” I can’t, honestly, see a way out of this written word deathspiral right now, and I don’t think enough people are focusing on why this is a problem and what we might be about to lose. I know that linking to oneself on Twitter in one’s own newsletter is unpleasantly gauche but, well, I hope you will forgive me. As Ryan has pointed out, and as I think people are perhaps just starting to begin to realise, “we are losing the ability to understand our own lives and noone seems to care”.

Death of the Critic: I include this not because it is good or well-written but because it is emblematic of exactly the sort of ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ Silicon Valley thinking that has taken us to the precipice of fcukedness over the past two decades. Long-standing SV grandee Om Malik reflects on the demise of Pitchfork and concludes…suck it up, critics! We don’t need you any more! We have ALGORITHMIC RECOMMENDATIONS! I don’t, I hope, need to explain to you all the ways in which this assessment of the role of the critic is reductive and lazy and, honestly, deeply stupid, or indeed what one’s cultural life would look like were it to consist only of things that one ‘likes’ in certain specific ways. No? Good. This made me genuinely upset.

AI & Copyright: I appreciate your current degree of interest in the ongoing, knotty and insanely-complex battle around generative AI models, training, output and copyright may well be ‘next to zero’, but I promise you that this overview (written by the reliably-smart people at AI Snake Oil) is a decent look at the main arguments and why it is entirely possible that the lawsuits simply aren’t going to do what the people bringing them hope that they will (should any of you care: my position on this stuff is that it is incredibly hard to make a cogent argument for ‘models using large amounts of copy as training data so that they can then produce materials based on and inspired by that training data’ as ‘theft’ in the same way that it would be hard to make that argument for, say, a human being ingesting all sorts of copy during their lifetime and using that information to base their actions, work, etc on); you may or may not be convinced, but I think it’s a far better rundown of the ins and outs of How This Stuff Works than I’ve seen in most mainstream journalism. Not everyone agrees with this position and analysis, of course – here’s a counterargument by Gary Marcus (who I personally think is far too bullish on legal challenges to AI, but we shall see).

Government Framework for Generative AI: No! Wait! COME BACK! I promise this is interesting – or at least it is if you’re the sort of person who likes to / has to (delete as applicable, unless you’re in the fortunate position of ticking BOTH BOXES) think about ‘how can we implement generative AI in our workflows and processes in a way that is actually useful and doesn’t fcuk things up?’ Honestly, this is a really good, clear set of principles and guardrails to inform thinking about when, how and where to consider deploying generative AI, and if you’re someone who’s got to worry about how to use this sh1t to gain 3% of competitive advantage before The Market inevitably comes for you too then you could do worse than cast an eye over this document.

Writing At The Speed Of Thought: I thought this was a really interesting bit of writing / thinking around how one might go about using LLMs to map and use a corpus of information more effectively, specifically as a way of doing the sorts of things that people traditionally tried and generally failed to make Evernote do back in the day. The author, Steven Johnson, is part of the team that has been working on software called NotebookLM for Google, which launched in the US recently, and this essay takes you through what it’s designed to do and how it works; yes, ok, fine, it’s a bit of a puff-piece for new Google tech, but equally it’s a smart explanation of how we might useful approach information and knowledge work when we have LLMs and these immense pattern analysis and matching tools at our disposal.

Chrome Gets Generative AI Too: Another Google update – sorry, but I promise it’s interesting – this time about new AI features coming to Chrome soonish; the big one here (to my mind at least) is AI attached to the browser – meaning you’ll be able to do Spicy Autocomplete stuff on any webpage you navigate to, with autowriting and composition available directly on-page so that you can use it to fill in forms, etc, faster…I can’t be the only person to see this and think ‘dear God this is going to unleash some sort of appalling AI-generated spam tsunami’, right?

Here Come The AI Boyfriends: The perennial teenage boy horniness of much of the internet has meant that the initial wave of articles about the ‘AI Companion’ phenomenon inevitably focused on the waifu end of the spectrum; turns out, though, that there’s a market for this sort of ‘relationship’ amongst women too, as this genuinely fascinating piece explores. There’s a LOT to unpack in here, about teen girl culture and fandoms and the creation of fabricated relationships, and parasociality, and it’s interesting (to me at least) that a lot of the themes in this essay are half-reflected in Eliza Clark’s novel ‘Penance’ from last year (specifically crime fandom and the desire to create romantic narratives around these spaces).

The M&S Ad: It must be EXHAUSTING to be an active and performative participant in advermarketing DISCOURSE on LinkedIn and Twitter – how many times can you pretend to care about ‘it’s really important that creatives and account people get out of London and meet some real working class people ACTUALLY’ or ‘a good brand campaign continues to be undervalued, but ACTUALLY if you study your Binet and Field…’ – guys guys guys STOP OVERINTELLECTUALISING THIS SH1T! Also, how the fcuk do you all have time to write all these fcuking thinkpieces? And why are they all…so BAD? Anyway, ordinarily I ignore this stuff because, well, none of it is my problem, thank God, but occasionally I see a take that isn’t totally awful – so it is with this one by Nick Asbury which does a decent job of unpacking the reflexive ad person reaction to THAT M&S ad (honestly , if this means nothing to you then KEEP SCROLLING AND SAVE YOURSELVES) and working through the thinking that means that ACTUALLY maybe it’s quite good ACTUALLY. To be clear – this doesn’t matter at all, but if you’re the sort of person who has to have OPINIONS about this sort of sh1t then this is a reasonable one to pass off as your own.

Dan Wang’s 2023 Letter: Part of the regular content cadence of the year, as familiar and reassuring to me as the passing of the seasons, is the annual appearance of Dan Wang’s summary dispatches from China, in which he shares his thoughts on the direction of travel for the country and What It All Means (to the extent to which that’s in any meaningful way possible, which I concede it really might not be); this year’s starts with some reflections on walking with Craig Mod but goes on to explore emigration trends among young Chinese people, prospects for the economy, likely geopolitical trends in US/China relations…I find Dan’s writing engaging and accessible, and this year’s edition contains a pleasing quantity of personal anecdotes and observations from his having returned to the West after six years away – this is a lovely and informative read.

Modi’s Datagathering Empire: It’s quite hard not to read this piece – about the datagathering tactics being used by Narendra Modi’s BJP to ensure that it maintains its grip on power in the forthcoming Indian elections – and not repeatedly stop and say to yourself ‘hang on, that probably shouldn’t be happening’, or ‘hm, it’s not hard to see a number of ways in which this information might end up being used in ways that aren’t necessarily totally legitimate’…but then you remember that India is very much in one man’s grip at the moment, and that man is VERY KEEN on granular control. “In the run-up to India’s national elections in 2024, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking a third term, the Saral app — which has more than 2.9 million Google Play store downloads — has emerged as a key piece of technology in the BJP’s campaigning operations. The party’s head of information technology and social media, Amit Malviya, reportedly referred to Saral as an election-winning machine at a 2023 tech conference in Delhi. The BJP, which has claimed to have at least 180 million members, told The Times of India that the app’s aim is to digitize some of the party’s operations and better communicate with its workers across India by “conveying the policies and the programmes of the party.”…When registering, Saral asks for details including the user’s mobile number, address, age, gender, religion, caste, social categories such as scheduled tribes and castes, parliamentary constituency, voter identity number, and professional and educational details. Users can also upload their photograph.” It’s not INCREDIBLY hard to look at that data list and conceive of at least one or two ways that that might all be used which might not be wholly ethical. Still, I’m sure Uncle Narendra wouldn’t dream of doing anything nefarious. Especially not to the Muslims.

The USB Club: I featured the USB Club project in Curios last year, and now Kris at Naive has interviewed Yatú Espinosa all about the project and the ethos behind it, and why the intersection of the physical and the digital is an interesting place to play: “The point that USBs create is intentionality; it makes you think about what you’re putting on it. There’s an intentional curatorial layer that goes into it all. USBs are simple hardware, and we just create great experiences with simple hardware.” AMEN! BONUS LINK!: On the ephemerality of digital media and how perhaps it might be nice to imbue it with more permanence, this is about why It’s Too Easy To Delete Things.

The Qai Qai Album Is Coming: If you ever find yourself thinking ‘hang on, maybe the intersection between corporate greed and artistic endeavour isn’t always a definitionally-awful place to be’ then make sure you’ve bookmarked this article so you can come back to it and remind yourself of why that is in fact wrong. I think all that you need to get the gist here is this quote from the opening of the piece – honestly, read these words and try not to feel like a tiny part of you has died and is now rotting malodorously within you: “Qai Qai — the social media sensation inspired by the favorite doll of Serena Williams‘ daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. — has signed a deal with Republic Records: Kids & Family through a new partnership with internet-first animation studio Invisible Universe.The companies have joined forces to create original music starring Qai Qai, who has amassed more than five million fans across social media. To celebrate the news, Qai Qai released the song “Dancing on the Moon” on Friday. It features 12-year-old Broadway sensation Sydney Elise Russell, who performed in The Lion King and Frozen, as the voice of Qai Qai. The track was produced by Grammy-nominated hitmaker Johnny Goldstein, who has worked with David Guetta, the Black Eyed Peas and Coi Leray.” ISN’T THAT POETRY?!?!? In case you’re curious you can hear the ‘song’ on YouTube – it has 800-odd plays at the time of writing, suggesting that perhaps the moneymen won’t get back the fee they paid to ‘Grammy-nominated hitmaker Johnny Goldstein’ – and you will, I promise, wish very specific, sharp retribution on everyone involved (apart from the Williams kid, who let’s presume is blameless here).

How AI Is Changing Gymnastics: Via Caitlin, this is SO interesting – the introduction of machine vision to help assess the performance of gymnasts in events is leading to changes in the way in which athletes perform routines, and leading to increased focus on technical precision over emotion on the floor – and the sort of thing we are going to see more and more and more of as we continue to feed vast amounts of data to the pattern recognisers and they in turn scry shapes that we can’t even conceive of in amongst the maths.

AI-Powered NPS Are Inevitable: To be clear, I don’t think that what’s on display here is ‘good’ – equally, though, given ‘capitalism’ and ‘everything we saw Activision do this week despite the fact it makes a genuinely massive amount of profit’, it feels very inevitable. This is an article about new AI tech that effectively brings generative AI dialogue to videogame NPCs with low latency and hence minimal delays – you can see a video of the tech in action, and the writeup is reasonably detailed on how the whole experience ‘felt’…but, obviously, the problem is that without scripting and direction and some sort of overarching idea of plot and pacing and player agency and all the stuff that make games, you know, GOOD, it’s just words. An infinite number of words, sure, but just words – it’s like going to see improv and seeing people onstage who, yes, fine, can talk, but who don’t know the first thing about creating emergent comedy. Anyway, none of this matters because as soon as a studio feels they can fill 60% of a game’s incidental dialogue with this rather than lines scripted by actual people whose labour you have to pay for then, well, SAY HELLO TO THIS SH1T.

Palworld: I can’t imagine that many of you bothered to watch the trailer for Palworld that I included in Curios when it first appeared – my attention was piqued, though, by a premise that basically seemed to be ‘what if Pokemon, but not glossing over the practical realities of what it would actually be like to effectively enslave a whole menagerie of cute animals and bend them to your will?’ and looked kind of interestingly-horrible. Anyway, the game has now launched into early access and has rapidly become a sensation – it is doing INSANE numbers – in part because of decent hype and a good pre-release promo machine, but also because of the fact that, well, it looks like Pokemon except you can kill the creatures! Anyway, the game itself has turned out to be the sort of thing that I am not personally particularly interested in, but I am very much enjoying the discourse around this – the essay here linked is a genuinely interesting one, in which the writer/reviewer explores how deeply, unpleasantly *icky* the game makes them feel, and I thought it asks some genuinely interesting questions about games whose mechanics actively make the player feel ‘bad’, and whether or not that’s in any way intentional on the part of the designers in this case. As I wrote to someone else earlier this week, “I might question what the popularity of this among young/majority gamers says about a) critical thinking; b) the way in which entertainment media reflects prevailing cultural attitudes (specifically re hustle/grind/the basic fungibility of everyone else when one has ‘goals’ and ‘dreams’; c) the continued hollowness of all the ‘young people are so left-wing these days!’ rhetoric; d) the slow slide towards all entertainment media being a series of dopamine-receptor-tickling exercises in formula ploughing a series of increasingly-worn pop culture furroughs”.

Rats: When I was a little kid and I used to visit my dad and his wife in London, I would sleep in a spare room that also doubled as ‘the place where my dad’s wife kept all the horror novels she apparently really enjoyed’ – this, coupled with my insatiable appetite to read literally ANYTHING, saw me picking up a copy of ‘Rats’ by James Herbert at the age of about 8, when I was DEFINITELY FAR TOO YOUNG. It caused me no shortage of nightmares, and several years of intensely-troubling sexual confusion over one particularly explicit fellatio scene which left me utterly baffled and convinced for several years that adult lovemaking was significantly more deviant than in the main it in fact turned out to be. Anyway, this is an enjoyable look back the whole trilogy which made James Herbert’s name as an author and which, having reread one recently, are a genuinely ‘of their time’ cocktail of social commentary and nuclear fear and anger.

Can Game Design Help You Win The Traitors?: As seemingly the only person in Britain not to have been watching the show, I personally neither know nor care – still, I found this piece to be surprisingly interesting, looking at the tactics employed by one particular contestant in the last series. “Could a strong knowledge of game design help you win The Traitors? This was the question UK series one contestant Ivan Brett had in mind when he joined the show last year, keen to beat the odds for as long as he could while playing as one of the game’s Faithful. The author of The Floor is Lava and Bored? Games!, a professional D&D Dungeon Master and long-time fan of social gaming, Brett’s own pitch to the series’ producers was that he could beat them at their own format. Of course, things didn’t entirely go to plan.”

Nicholas Saunders: This week’s ‘yes, it’s been linked to everywhere but it really is good and so I am sharing it here too’ piece is this SUPERB profile of Nicholas Saunders by Jonathan Nunn – Saunders, I learned from this article, founded both Neal’s Yard Dairy and Monmouth Street Coffee, and in so doing had a genuinely transformative effect on food in London and, subsequently, the UK. I have always pinned Italia 90 as ‘the moment when food in the UK stopped being terrible’, and this piece does a great job of articulating all the reasons, starting in the 70s and continuing through the 80s, why that came to pass. If you’re in any way interested in food, restaurants and culture, this is essential. BONUS FOOD LINK: The NYT does a trend analysis of current menus from NYC restaurants; this is WONDERFUL, and I want someone to commission this for London please thankyou.

Wikimedia’s Pornographers: I enjoyed this piece – about the people who devote significant proportions of their finite time on Earth to helping document human sexual practice on Wikipedia – but personally think they could have gone in a bit harder on the psychology of a man who seems determined to make himself THE physical representation of heterosexual congress for our entire species because, honestly, that strikes me as a peculiar degree of specific hubris worth investigating.

Dog Day Afternoon: Hussein Kesvani writes about people who go dogging, for The Fence – this is not only very funny, but surprisingly tender and respectful; credit to Kesvani for at no point sounding like he’s sniggering at Harry and Eva, or any of their fellow ‘boning in car parks’ enthusiasts.

Reading The Whale: Honestly, the best way I can introduce this is to give you the opening: “If all the chairs are taken during the annual Moby-Dick Marathon, held every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, you can always climb aboard the Lagoda. It’s the museum’s pièce de résistance: a half-scale replica of an old whaling ship outfitted with the proper rigging for a yearslong hunt in the North Atlantic. (There are dispatchable paddle boats from which sailors could harpoon the beasts, and space for furnaces capable of rendering the harvested blubber into reeking vats of oil.) The original Lagoda was scrapped for parts in 1899 after the global whaling industry swooned into obscurity. This model, commissioned in 1916, has never touched the sea, but it does function as an impeccably Melvillian venue. I sat cross-legged on the port side of the ship, a few feet away from the captain’s helm, flanked by a thicket of Moby-Dick zealots who would remain here for the next 25 hours in an attempt to consume the full scope of the novel in one uninterrupted reading session. Each of them brandished their own bespoke copy of the novel, representing a century’s worth of differing editions—some dense and pocket Bible–like, some paperback and battered, others regal and elegiac with golden bindings, all cracked open to Page 1. The first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. “Call me Ishmael,” the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room.” For the past 28 years, the Whaling Museum in Southern Massachusetts has hosted a ‘Moby Dick Reading Marathon’, where a bunch of people gather together to read the book aloud, chapter by chapter, til it’s done – this is about them, and it is GORGEOUS.

Widowing: This is from last Summer, but I found it this week and I found it beautiful; the opening paragraph sets the tone perfectly, I think: “At twenty-three, I already know that I am going to outlive every man I fcuk. I am going to outlive my mother and my father. I am going to outlive my sisters. Both of them. The older and the younger one. I am going to outlive the gray squirrel on the pine tree outside my apartment window as well as the mailman who delivers my Amazon package of Certain Dri fragrance-free solid deodorant. So far, I have already outlived each of my childhood pets. I have outlived one set of my grandparents. I have outlived friends. I have attended one candlelight vigil in the foothills and another in the neighborhood park. I have definitely outlived my virginity.”

I, Ghost: In October last year I said I wasn’t going to ‘do’ the Israel/Palestine conflict, and in the main I’ve kept to that, but this essay, by Yousef Rakhain Guernica, was so strong, so incandescently angry, that I couldn’t not include it. It’s beautiful but it is very very sad and it’s quite hard to know what to do with the feeling it leaves you with.

By David Van Der Leeuw

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is SO INTERESTING, and I would imagine based on this video and the runaway popularity of The Traitors about to come to the UK – so what better time to learn about Jubensha, the Chinese trend for murder-themed games played in mixed-sex groups that has apparently taken the country by storm and supplanted Karaoke as the younger generation’s social pastime of choice. The excellent ‘People Make Games’ present a great overview of the games, how they work, and what they are like to play, and it’s impossible not to imagine this taking off in a BIG WAY in the UK, particularly among the nerdier end of the GenZ demographic (I get the impression that this sort of pastime rather falls to pieces if people get p1ssed while playing, which largely rules out people of my age).

Weyes Blood continues to have one of the most mesmerising voices in modern music (or at least that’s what I think) – this is her new single, it’s called ‘A Given Thing’ and it is BEAUTIFUL.

This is a GREAT tune, and how it only has 600-odd views is a mystery to me – Smith Taylor’s vocals have a touch of the David McCalmont about them, in the best way, and the song sounds a bit like Prince, and generally it’s ace and deserves that you listen to it. LISTEN TO IT!

Skippy, syncopated and with a nice guitar line, I enjoyed this 140-second slice of breaks and spoken vocals a lot more than I expected to – this is ‘Red/White’ by Talk Show.

THERE IS A NEW ARAB STRAP ALBUM COMING OUT! This is the first single from it, it is called ‘Bliss’ and it is PURE STRAP, from the drum track to the surprisingly-beautiful melody to the sad poetic prose of the lyrics and the general sense it gives you that we will all die alone and unknown and there’s nothing you can do about it. GOD I LOVE THIS BAND.

Last up this week, BRAND NEW MANGA! The UK’s best MC (if I keep saying it everyone else will catch up) is joined by the similarly-stellar P Money and JME for new grimy track ‘Alarm Bells’. TURN IT UP IT SLAPS SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

Webcurios 19/01/24

January 19, 2024

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Reading Time: 32 minutes

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

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

By Tanya

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

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

Project 2075: Or, as the appalling pun I just discovered in my one-word note for this put it, ‘FallOakley’. Is Oakley still a ‘cool’ brand (I appreciate you may never have thought of if it as one, but if you were me in 1995 there was literally NOTHING on Earth that you were more convinced would make girls fancy you than a pair of Oakley wraparounds; erroneously, it turns out)? And if not, or if it needs its cool ‘refreshing’ for a younger audience, is the best means by which to do that the creation of a very, very shiny, vaguely-post-apocalyptic (although of course to quote an old friend of mine, “the apocalypse is like Sunday; there is no ‘post’”) website in which YOU, the user/hero/consumer, get to wander through a series of vault-like rooms (hence my not-very-good Fallout reference) and, er, mess around with a time machine contraption which will send you to different eras throughout history to explore the history of the Oakley brand and, I don’t know, save the world or something (I confess to not having followed this particular rabbithole all the way down – I hope you’ll forgive me, but it turns out that my appetite for exploring (admittedly-nicely-rendered) rooms in what is basically a digital museum of sunglasses isn’t actually infinite). This is, honestly, really rather charming – there is obviously quite a lot of development money that sits behind it, and it shows in the shiny visuals and the fact that there’s ACTUAL VOICEWORK, and the fact that it works in first-person rather than being an off-the-shelf metaversal platform buy, and, perhaps best of all, it at no point uses the ‘M’ word at all. Will it make a single person think more positively of Oakley as a brand? Will it sell any sunglasses? I haven’t got the faintest idea, and thankfully it’s not my problem and I don’t have to care – this is pleasingly frivolous and it doesn’t at any point feel like it’s going start trying to sell me NFTs, and as such I think it’s worth a click.

AI Music Comes to TikTok: The link here takes you to some kid called Daniel Duncan showing you how TikTok’s newly-minted ‘use generative AI to spin up a totally new song to soundtrack your videos!’ feature works, and it’s worth watching for several reasons: 1) the tech is, compared to other text-to-music platforms out there, reasonably fully-featured, generating not only the audio but also lyrics and a ‘vocal performance’ of said lyrics to accompany it; 2) the speed is very impressive; 3) also impressive is the style transfer feature which lets you pretty-much instantly reconfigure an AI-generated tune from, say, EDM to emo with a few swipes; 4) dear fcuking christ even by the generally low standards of current text-to-music tech there are some astonishing crimes against musicality that are going to be committed by this software – the examples shown in the clip are ear-bleedingly awful. Bearing in mind the obvious and ever-present caveat that, yes, this is the worst this is ever going to be and that it is going to get a lot better quite quickly, a few questions: 1) how far are we, do you think, from these tools being able to generate actual hooks? Because at that point I think it gets interesting; 2) obviously this sounds VERY BAD (and the lyrics are almost worse than the ‘music’), but despite this is ‘soundtracking my tiktok with the comedically-bad AI composition’ going to become a thing and, to an extent, normalise this sort of stuff? I obviously have no fcuking clue, and am trying to get out of the habit of predicting things because, well, I have a terrible track record of trying and it increasingly makes me feel even more old and out of touch than I generally do every time I open my eyes, but I am interested to see how it plays out. Anyway, there’s probably about a 48h period in which brands might be able to have fun with this, should any of you be in the invidious position of having to care about that sort of thing.

Book & Bot: This is an interesting idea – Book & Bot is a website promoting a new kids’ book called ‘Maya Jam Invents a Pet’, which as far as I can tell is a standard-looking children’s tale of plucky kids and idiot parents but which comes with an additional gimmick in the shape of a custom chatbot, personifying, er, the titular Maya’s pet robot goat, which kids can subsequently access and chat with in order, per what I imagine the marketing conversations to have been like, ‘to deepen user engagement’ or ‘enhance the narrative’. Is the book any good? Is the bot any good? Look, I’m a middle-aged childless man, I haven’t got the faintest idea – but given that the webpage suggests that the bot is only available to ChatGPT Premium subscribers and as such is literally just a prompt then I am going to say that…no, the bot probably isn’t going to be a revelatory addition to the publishing game. But! It feels like there is SOMETHING here, although I am curious as to whether the…often somewhat two-dimensional nature of protagonists in kids’ books means you don’t really have a lot to work with in terms of creating parameters for an interesting or meaningful AI agent. Still, I think this is something we will see more of, and it wouldn’t shock me were we to start to see (off the top of my head) themed bots representing beloved characters from big ticket kids’ franchises appearing as part of the commercialisation of said franchises (if someone at Pottermore isn’t working on a ‘Potter in your Pocket’ AI companion app, for example, I would be fcuking astonished). Is that good? Doesn’t matter really.

Clay: This is REALLY interesting, if I’m allowed to say that about something which, if I’m honest, I only really understand about 6% of (lol at the idea that anyone ever understands more than about 6% of ANYTHING) – Clay is…well, it sort-of self-describes as ‘GPT for the planet’. “Clay harnesses AI, satellite images, and other spatial data to organize information about what’s happening in precise locations around the world. We give Clay millions of satellite data and use the latest AI tools so it can supervise itself learning about Earth through those images. As it learns, we benchmark how those skills improve its capacity to do important tasks like creating land cover maps, detecting crops or burn scars, or predicting carbon stock.” This is SUCH an interesting and smart idea – whatever one’s personal reservations about generative AI and its inexorable march, it’s clear that one of the things that it is very, very good at, and which it’s fair to say is Good and Useful, is ‘looking at vast swathes of data and inferring patterns from it (and then analysing those patterns and making goal-led recommendations as a result of them)’, and the idea of applying that theory to all the data we have about our planet and just sort of saying ‘go on then, parse THAT you fcuker’ sounds…well, smart, frankly, or at the very least something which you might as well do just to see what happens. This is VERY nascent, but there are already examples of how it can work, and I feel…cautiously optimistic about the possibility that this sort of work can achieve genuinely positive and useful outcomes. I mean, look: “Early development of this technology helped environmental journalists in Venezuela identify 3,718 illegal mining locations and their corresponding threats to the environment and Indigenous communities. As a result, the team won the highest honor from the Global Investigative Journalism Network. One juror wrote: “This story is taking us to where journalism is going — and it was a task so immense they used AI to crack the code of a story we would not otherwise have seen.” The team at Clay is now improving the usefulness of a global tree-level carbon map by recruiting a group of leading asset managers and working with them, using Clay, to deploy the map to de-risk, validate, and scale up forestry investments.” A GOOD NEWS STORY PROJECT! IN 2024! MAYBE IT’S ALL GOING TO BE OK!

Subliminal Influence Via Hidden Imagery: Or, well, maybe it won’t! Ok, this isn’t a ‘fun’ link – in fact it takes you to a recent DeepMind paper which, obviously, is mostly Greek to me outside of the very simple overview, to whit ‘you know how you can effectively mess with digital images in such a way that despite looking like one thing to the human eye, the machine ‘eye’ sees something totally different? Well apparently that technique can subliminally influence what humans see too’. Which, fine, may not leap out at you as hugely significant, but I couldn’t help but think of all the fun-but-probably-evil things you could try and do with this in terms of messaging and advertising. I know that some of you work in advertising ffs, surely ONE of you has the balls to take this ‘insight’ and use it to create a nationwide series of Out-of-Home ads which purport to flog, I don’t know, margarine, but which also include the hidden phrase ‘READ WEB CURIOS’? Come on, you know you want to.

CNDO: It feels like it’s been a while since we’ve had a good old ‘moral panic about a largely made-up trend or challenge on social media’ story, but perhaps CNDO can change that. CNDO is an app which is aimed at ‘Creators’ or ‘Influencers’ or whatever they are calling themselves these days, who are being encouraged to sign up (there seem to be a number of them on there already, suggesting the early seed investment is being spunked on paying them to get in early) and then get their ‘community’ (god I am so tired why must everything be a fcuking community no don’t answer that) to do ‘challenges’ to compete for, I don’t know, digital pennies or a brief moment of attention. Which is obviously fine when it’s PG-rated influencers who want their fans to, I don’t know, draw a cute picture of their pet ocelot, but perhaps less so when it’s some little cnut encouraging their army of pubescent morons to attach crocodile clips to an XL Bully’s testes (I am, I concede, not an expert on current content trends in this space, but I imagine it’s probably something like that). Anyway, in the unlikely event that any of you reading this are journalists looking for a story you can spin into 800 words of parent-scaring performative fear for the Daily Mail then, well, you’re welcome!

Memento: ANOTHER NEW APP! Actually, as a parenthetical aside, what is the app landscape like these days? I have a vague anecdotal belief that the number of apps being released is on a downward trajectory, but also have literally nothing other than possibly-erroneous intuition on which to base that, and don’t care *quite* enough to dig into myself – er, any of you happen to know? Anyway, this one is called Memento and it’s attempting to get people interested in the general idea of ‘being able to tag content to a specific location, so that (for example) you can attach a particular image or song or video to a specific place, meaning that other users with the app are able to see and experience it (should they go to that specific place, and open the app). Over the past decade or so I have DEFINITELY seen this sort of thing attempted before and it’s never taken off and, sadly, I can’t for a second imagine that this attempt will be any different – BUT, that said, it does feel like there might be a resurgence of interest in the general concept as AR/XR and smart glasses become more mainstream, because the basic idea of ‘being able to leave notes and memories and that sort of thing in specific places so that others can see them too’ is a generally decent and halfway-useful sounding idea. Although now that I have actually stopped to think of it I can only think of the sort of awful content you’d find at popular dogging sites, which has honestly rather put me off.

The Anomalist: Ooh, PROPER VINTAGE INTERNET, this! Apparently online in one incarnation or another since 1995 – literally before I was even aware the web existed ffs! – the Anomalist is an online magazine which exists to shine a light on WEIRD NEWS and, more generally, the anomalous. “What do they mean by ‘anomalous’?” I hear you cry in unison – this, apparently: “by the anomalous we mean simply that which “departs from the common; not conforming to what is usual; irregular.” This definition of the anomalous is intended to be as broad as possible by design. The definition is certainly not meant to be limited to “popular” anomalies such as UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, ESP, or Bigfoot, though it is hardly meant to eliminate them from consideration either. We will be dealing with a whole host of astronomical, biolgical, geological, psychological, physical, geophysical, linguistic, religious, and archeological phenomena.” So there! Anyway, this is your one-stop-shop for all news pertaining to cryptids, weird lights in the sky, the possibility of there ACTUALLY being fairies at the end of the garden, and all associated questions; beautifully the site is still very much alive, with the latest links to stories being posted within the past 24h (a ‘flying jellyfish UFO monster’, in case you’re interested) and basically if you want somewhere where you can get a daily dose of ‘BIGFOOT SPOTTED DOING WEEKLY SHOP IN KMART’ headlines then you might want to bookmark this one.

Controlled Demolition: I appreciate that there are almost certainly very good insurance-related reasons as to why this doesn’t happen, but I’ve always thought that demolition companies could make an absolute killing by auctioning off the rights to press the Big Red Detonation Button next time a bunch of cooling towers are getting blown up – I am a pretty un-manly man with no particular penchant for destruction, and yet even someone as milquetoast as me can see the appeal of blowing up some massive buildings. Anyway, the link is to the website of a company called Controlled Demolition, which apparently exists to do JUST THAT – if you need something big blowing up, these are your lads. I am including this partly because I just fcuking love niche industries like this and the way they present themselves, and there’s something just sort of cool about selling ‘blowing stuff up’ as a service, and partly because there are a LOT of videos of buildings just sort of collapsing into themselves in billowing clouds of brick dust, and who doesn’t love those? NO FCUKER, etc!

Quilt Bot: I imagine that those of you who are planning on undertaking an IMPROVING HOBBY in 2024 have probably already alighted on whatever it is that you’ll give up in May – still, if you’re still on the lookout for some sort of BIG PROJECT to keep you occupied through the winter months then you could maybe do worse than consider ‘making a massive quilt based on a design derived from an image you really like’. Coincidentally (not coincidentally) that is EXACTLY what this website will help you do – upload any image you like and it will generate a quilt pattern for you – per the site, “it takes an uploaded image as an input, and generates an abstracted version in the form of a patchwork design. The Quilt Bot gives you the pattern from which to create a meaningful patchwork quilt, which could commemorate, host memory or hide secret messages.” I really, really like the idea of taking a bunch of pictures of ABSOLUTE FILTH and using those as the seed images, making quilts that LOOK innocent but which are in fact a complicated mathematical allusion to “Johan’s Fisting Bonanza 7” which you then give as gifts to conservative friends and family who will have NO IDEA. In fact, honestly, I reckon there’s probably a small-but-profitable business in doing EXACTLY that and I am hereby gifting that BRILLIANT and TRANSFORMATIVE concept to you because I am nice like that.

SaveLost: This is rather beautiful; a little tool that lets you create small digital…poems? Word expermiments? Not really sure how I would characterise the outputs here. Type in a sentence, any sentence you like, and press the button – “On each line, one character is removed. The removed character should be the one that least changes the meaning of the text. Change in meaning is here operationalized as the semantic distance of the newly generated sentence from the original text according to the sentence embeddding model listed below. Destruction mode reverses the selection criteria. This optimizes for, in Max’s words “minimal edits maximally destructive to meaning.” The resulting copy is…I don’t know, there’s something quite strangely poignant about the sentences just sort of erasing themselves, though I couldn’t entirely explain to you why. I really really like this.

Text-To-Speech In-Browser: Not very ‘fun’, fine, but possibly useful to some of you; this Chrome extension lets you highlight any text on any webpage and get it read out loud, and apparently it will also do simultaneous translation of 30 languages. Which, honestly, is fcuking magic, and if you’re someone who prefers to listen than to read then this could be genuinely helpful.

The Nature Photo Contest 2023: THE ENDLESS CYCLE OF PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS BEGINS ANEW! I joke, obvs – we love photo contests! Look at the lovely critters! – but, equally, it does rather feel like we might be running out of photogenic fauna to capture. This is a typically-great selection which covers wildlife and landscape photography and which generally tends towards the ‘aesthetically pleasing’ rather than the ‘depiction of the natural world in all its savage and increasingly-evanescent beauty’ – as such it’s not (to my mind at least) a patch on the shots you get in NatGeo or Wildlife Photographer of the Year, but at the same time there are fewer images of dead animals so, well, swings/roundabouts.

All Of The HipHop Mixtapes: You may think I am joking or exaggerating, but I am really not – this is a link to a recently-uploaded trove of vintage hiphop mixtapes, and there are LITERALLY OVER 300,000 OF THE FCUKING THINGS. You can read more about it here, but here’s a summary: “LEGENDARY MIXTAPE PLATFORM DatPiff has uploaded the entirety of its over 366,420-project catalog to the internet archive. Last March, the service which calls itself “The Authority In Mixtapes” experienced a server crash that put their canonical library of free music in peril. A month later, the site relaunched with a page announcing plans for “evolving beyond our website and app” to “continue to make the library accessible!” And now, almost a year later, their 50 TB cache of mixtapes and free albums from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, and more are streamable on The Internet Archive. Their massive file upload ensures that a valuable reserve of rap history won’t be lost to the 404 gods.” I know that the internet is rubbish and has in many respects made everything worse, but things like this almost make it all worthwhile (lol no they don’t). Your regular reminder, by the way, that you can donate cash to the Internet Archive should you be in a position to be able to do so – it really is a public good in a way that so few things online are any more, and deserves support.

By Kathrin Landa

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

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

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

By Ada Zielinska

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Necessary Disorder: “I make gifs”, reads the Tumblr bio, and they do! Specifically, they make black and white, maths-y visualisation gifs which are hypnotic in the extreme.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

John Gray vs Peter Thiel: First, an apology for the continued Thiel obsession – I promise I will try and keep a lid on it this year lest I come across as a total fcuking crank. Still, that said, this is a genuinely fascinating conversation between philosopher John Gray and the tech vampire himself, covering a range of topics from the inevitable question of ‘woke’ to the perceived slowing of scientific progress to the pursuit of longevity…what I found most fascinating here is the extent to which much of what Thiel says in the conversation appears to be directly contradicted by *what he is actually doing in real life* – I find, for example, his dismissal of culture war stuff interesting and not a little disingenuous considering how much time Thiel himself has spent promoting and funding ideologies that are very much at the vanguard of exactly that (tradwives? The whole dimes square borderline fash thing?), and given Thiel was one of the first Silicon Valley plutes to popularise the pursuit of insane longevity via creative medical means (THE TRANSFUSIONS FFS!) it seems equally disingenuous to hear him dismiss the pursuit of eternal life…basically I thought this was an important conversation as much for what it masks as what it reveals, though you can also take it at face value as a conversation between two people having a smart conversation about intelligent topics should you so desire.

GPT As An Engine Of Cultural Transmission: As the slew of ‘yes, ok, but what is all of this stuff practically FOR?’ thinkpieces continue to proliferate, this is an interesting essay by Henry Farrell which basically takes as its central premise the idea that LLMs are set to effect a genuinely transformative change in the manner in which we interpret and parse human culture, based on Alison Gopnik’s writings, and that “culture – under this particular account – is collective human knowledge, which is preserved, communicated and organized through a variety of means. It is passed on most straightforwardly when humans can directly observe each other, but over the millennia, we have also come up with more complex technologies of transmission. Languages, stories, libraries and such all allow information to be transmitted and organized. Now, we have a new technology for cultural transmission – LLMs. The vast corpus of text and data that they ingest is a series of imperfect snapshots of human culture. Gopnikism emphasizes that we ought pay attention to how LLMs are likely to transmit, recombine and re-organize this cultural information, and what consequences this will have for human society.” This is neither good nor bad per se, but I don’t think we’re quite taking this as seriously as perhaps we ought to – you know how the web and the fact we are now all connected has led to all sorts of unexpected emergent beliefs and behaviours, none of which were predicted? Well that’s going to happen again, but faster and weirder because it will be driven by The Machine.

Circle-To-Search: Speaking of ‘things are going to change in interesting ways that we can’t really quite get our heads around yet’, I thought this announcement from Google this week was both interesting and wildly underreported. It’s a feature update for Android, which means that you can now use simple gestures to move straight into AI-augmented search – so for example one might circle a pair of shoes in a photo and Google will interpret that as ‘find me shoes that look like this that I can buy’; similarly, highlight text on any webpage or in an image and Google will pull information pertaining to it, offering you an AI summary…it’s really worth clicking through and watching the demo video – while it’s obviously an idealised representation of how this will work in practice, it should also be immediately clear that this is going to do some very weird things to search, discovery, traffic, ad revenue, sourcing, ‘trust’…again, I don’t think we quite realise how much things are going to change and how quickly, and how we really don’t have the faintest idea of what that will make us do.

Why Pitchfork Died: I hope that you can access this and it’s not paywalled, as Casey Newton has written a really good overview of exactly why Pitchfork went under this week – the short answer is ‘advertising doesn’t fund content anymore’, but there’s a lot more complicated nuance in Newton’s writeup which is worth reading, touching on AI curation and the role of the critic and the way in which Spotify has basically obviated the need for a 9.7 from some bearded tw4t in a beanie. If you’re after more on this, Ted Gioia has a few thoughts here – I found his additional arguments about the deindividualisation of music brought about by passive, lean-back consumption particularly interesting (if for whatever reason that link is paywalled – which it might be, sorry – then Gioia’s basic argument is that it is very much in Spotify’s interest to engender a mode of consumption in which you don’t even know who an artist is, you just get fed a stream of tunes that please you…because eventually that just leads to entirely-AI-generated streams which are PURE PROFIT! Cynical but, well, it’s hard to imagine he’s entirely wrong on that score).

Making Music With AI Music: I am well aware of the fact that 99% of all of you reading this quite rightly put up with my writing as the necessary cost of getting all the good links, but occasionally I get emails that demonstrate that at least a couple of you ACTUALLY READ THE WORDS and, honestly, it’s enough to make me a bit tearful. Reader Dan Stowell got in touch after I asked last week whether anyone was using text-to-AI software to make actual music…it turns out that his colleague has in fact been playing around with making proper tracks using bits of sound generated by AI, and has written up the experience here. This is super-interesting from a creative point of view, and the resulting track is…I mean, it’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating one: “To create this piece I use sound material from 22 audio files generated by suno.ai, most of which come from prompting the system with a short text by German composer Ernst Toch (used for his Geographical Fugue). The piece took a considerable amount of composition, but I didn’t write a single note — which is kind of maddening because I simply couldn’t have composed this by hand (lack of patience, vision, ability, etc.). However, aspects of my voice that I feel I have preserved in the finished piece are the use of layering and juxtaposition, episodic structure (e.g., miniatures), a sense of space, and humor.”

ByeBye Ello: We all obviously remember Ello, one of the seemingly-infinite attempts to create a new, better type of social network, one that wasn’t in fact an exploitative dataharvesting nightmare of advertising and terrible social side effects (I certainly do – I somehow mentioned it on three separate occasions in Curios in 2023) which finally failed last year – but why exactly did it fail to persist, despite having seemingly found a niche audience to serve? Andy Baio does some digging and discovers that…it was the venture capitalists all along! This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever actually paid attention to what VC does and how it works, but it’s a nice step-by-step account of why this sort of investment doesn’t in fact tend to result in us all having nice things. I know I have said this before (on multiple occasions, and you are doubtless all bored of hearing it, but, well, LET ME HAVE MY HOBBY HORSE), but I firmly believe that we will look back on venture capitalists as one of the single groups which has had the biggest negative impact on the past three decades of human civilisation.

The Unhealthy Features of Snap Premium: It’s been a long time since I’ve bothered thinking about the Snap featureset (IKR? Madness! When normally that’s ALL I think about!) but I had no idea that if you sign up for the Premium subscription service (which, by all accounts, a surprising number of people actually do) you get access to a feature which basically shows you EXACTLY how popular you are with all your different friends, compared to all their other friends based on your interactions on Snap. Which, if you’re able to remember the unique social horror of Being A Teenager, you will realise is a powerful, unique and dangerous combination, like an awful digital hybrid of crack and self-harm, and feels like exactly the sort of feature that, two decades into our wonderful social media adventure and with a decent corpus of data to suggest that this sort of feature is ACTIVELY BAD for people, one might have thought a responsible business might not in fact have implemented. Still, as you might imagine it keeps the kids coming back, which keeps the investors happy – you can’t have a hockeystick growth chart without breaking some children’s hearts, after all!

The Substack Nazis: You may have been following this story, but in case not – for the past few months people have been noticing that there is a LOT of nazi stuff on Substack, and that the company is making money out of it; Substack has repeatedly failed to do anything meaningful about it, per their long-standing commitment to ‘free speech’ (or, to put it another way, to being able to monetise hatred); various high-profile newsletters have departed the platform while others maintain the whole thing is a WOKE STORM IN A TEACUP…this is a post by Josh Drummond, who spent a bit of time trying to find the nazis and who discovered that, oh yes, there are an awful lot of them. On which, should there be any of you who have newsletters on Substack and who are thinking of moving to a less fash-friendly platform, I can highly recommend the small, homebrew mailing platform run by Kris at ListGoat.

Drone Horses: I LOVE THIS STORY – a proper ‘unexpected criminal application of tech’ tale, this, which is always a treat. Did you know that unscrupulous individuals attempting to get marginal advantage over the bookies in live betting markets are using drones to capture low-latency footage to get a 1-2s jump on punters watching on TV? No, I didn’t either, but it makes me sort-of happy that it’s happening.

The Game of Gastrodiplomacy: I do love a good gastrodiplomacy article – I’ve featured a few over the years – and this is a lovely example of the genre; Dan Hong writes for Vittles about the various schemes that have been implemented by Governments worldwide since the Thai administration first invented the concept a few decades back, and the ways in which the confected national identities created through food offer a partial and skewed picture of both a nation and its cuisine.

The Hidden Horror of the Sims: I had literally no idea that the first couple of Sims games contained quite a lot of genuinely weird and borderline-creepy incidental content and Easter Eggs, but it turns out that ‘putting your sims in the pool and then deleting the ladder’ isn’t the only nightmare scenario it’s possible to engender. I think that more ostensibly-U-rated content should have incredibly unpleasant things buried just below the surface – I want lore about the Peppa Pig family ossuary, that sort of thing.

The History of Margarine: Yes, I know, but I promise you it really is interesting – this is a post from the SUPERB and always-fascinating Scope of Work newsletter, and thanks to it I now know that margarine is in fact a French invention, which I guarantee will really, really annoy French people if you casually mention it in a conversation about perceived Gallic culinary superiority.

Britain’s Nastiest Novelist: I thought this analysis of JK Rowling’s crime novels was genuinely brilliant, and that despite the clickbaity headline it was actually remarkably complimentary about Rowling’s writing – but obviously because of the utter madness around ‘tHe TrAnS dEbAtE!!11111eleven’ it became a culture war talking point for several days this week. Still, ignore that and enjoy a really well-written dissection of the specific ‘nastiness’ of Rowling’s writing and how such ‘nastiness’ is a very effective authorial tool (and one which leaves the reader just enough room to reflect on this nastiness and where it might come from and at whom it might be directed and why without at any point directing them, which I thought was particularly well done).

The Greatest Stereo: This has been linked to everywhere this week, and rightly so – this is a beautiful and very sad (to my mind, at least) pen portrait of Ken Fritz, one of those peculiar men who becomes obsessed with audio quality and fidelity, and who spent over a million dollars over the course of his life to create the ultimate sound system in his home. As you might imagine, that obsession had a less-than-positive impact on other aspects of his life, and his family, and the whole piece is less about ‘building a really fcuking good stereo’ (although there’s a lot of that) and more ‘a disquisition on the ruinous power of obsession’.

How To Buy A Sports Team: This is a brilliant piece in GQ looking at the current trend for the super rich to add ‘sports team owner’ to their CV, why it is they do it, what they get out of it and how it all happens when a purchase is made – the access Tom Lamont gets to the plutes and their people is what really makes this article, and the final section in which he accompanies AC Milan owner Gerry Cardinale to the San Siro is a superb bit of writing from start to finish.

Group Chats:This essay exploring the significance and semiotics of the group chat starts weakly, but stick with it – I found it a really interesting examination of the reconfiguration of ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’, of power and networks and gossip, and the first semi-serious attempt to analyse and interpret a proper global cultural phenomenon that feels underscrutinised in pop culture.

Making A Knife: On the one hand, this account of making knives feels VERY macho and a bit like it was designed by committee to appeal to A Certain Type of Man, or at least to connote A Certain Type of Masculinity, a bit like those YouTube channels which seemingly feature nothing but incredibly muscular men cooking lumps of meat on pieces of metal over an open fire in the woods (seriously – I mean, look: “The fire again. He’d had his taste of fire when he was a child. And now it was in his blood.”); on the other, it’s really well-written and if you can get past the slightly-breathless fetishisation of THE FIRE AND THE STEEL it’s also a really in-depth account of the amount of work it takes to make a high-quality blade.

The Man Who Collected Lost Pet Posters: This is a really lovely story, written up by Amelia Tate for her newsletter – the story of the “one-of-a-kind collection of Don Bolles, born Jimmy Michael Giorsetti, also known professionally as Kitten Sparkles. Don is an LA-based musician who rose to fame as the drummer of the iconic 70s punk band Germs – he is also possibly the world’s only collector of lost pets. Well, lost pet posters. In 1978, Don moved from Hollywood Boulevard to a more suburban area in West Hollywood and he started noticing the flyers littering the lampposts and trees. He was touched by the “folk art” of missing posters – the hand-drawn dogs and the poetic pleas meticulously crafted in a time before computers and printers were household goods. Although he admits it’s “morally questionable”, he began taking the posters, collecting them and storing them in milk crates around his home. The oldest posters in his collection were drawn almost half a century ago.” This is absolutely charming.

All The Types of Science Fiction: A list, by McSweeney’s – to be honest I barely read scifi, but this was still a VERY FUNNY selection of genre burns. A small sample: “38. A thought experiment, taken literally; 39. Multiversal polycule; 40. An obvious yet powerful allegory.” See? If you have friends or family who are really into scifi or a specific franchise you can rest assured that there will be at least one of these which will REALLY p1ss them off should you apply it to their show/series of choice.

Camden: Clive Martin writes about Camden, part of London which once connoted PUNK and ENERGY and COUNTERCULTURE and now is a weird sort of sad nostalgia Disneyland – I spent a few years working and hanging out in Camden circa 2006-7 and this brought it all flooding back, from seeing Amy WInehouse tottering, blitzed and skeletal, down the highstreet at 10am, to my continued amazement that Alex Proud, the worst man in London, continues to somehow escape legal sanction, to that very weird time I had to spend 10 minutes podium dancing at Cyberdog as part of a one-person immersive theatre performance. Martin is SUCH a good writer when it comes to culture and subcultures, and this will be beautiful for anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time getting wasted in London over the past thirty years or so.

Commencement: On being a ‘wayward girl’ in the mid-20th Century. This is wonderful: “A month or so before graduation, my mother was on to me. At dinner, I’d eat more than my dad and both of my brothers. Before we’d finish cleaning up the kitchen, I’d have hurled lamb chops, asparagus, mashed potatoes in the bathroom nearest the kitchen. Afterward, as I foraged in the pantry, considering marshmallows, Triscuits, and canned tuna, my mother said to a sink full of dishes, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were pregnant, but I know that’s not possible.” “It’s possible,” I say to the pantry.”

Molly Sussman: A short story about teenage girls and all the ways in which they are awful to themselves and each other, by Alexandra Tanner.

Coming of Age: Our last longread is the second link of the week from The Fence (which really is worth a subscription, by the way – it is consistently excellent), this a piece by John Banville remembering his first love, which will remind you of yours.

By Sophie Yerly

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is a short animation about how cats make things better – the story is, honestly, nothing special, but there’s something SO charming about the character models and the animation, in particular the central character and how her physicality is rendered – I think that the animator, Sam Southward, is very talented indeed.

This is either a song about coping with suddently growing breasts as a teenager girl, or about having top surgery, or about breast reductions (or, of course, it’s possible that it’s about none of those things – possible, but I think unlikely), and it’s by Allie X, and it’s called, wonderfully, ‘Off With Her Tits’. This is smart and funny and, honestly, it bangs.

This is 105 seconds of EXCELLENT jangly guitars and it demanmds to be turned up VERY LOUD so that you can adequately toss your mane to it – it’s called ‘falling short’ and it’s by Vial.

I remember how excited I was when I first heard Cantona by Loyle Carner and featured it in Curios about 8 years ago(!) – here one of the UK’s best rappers features on this new track by Unknown T and it is GOOD.

The Danny Brown redemption story has been heartwarming to behold, and I’ve been enjoying his new music too – this latest track is another good one, and the accompanying video is an excellent bit of animation to boot. This is called ‘YBP’.

We close with some more hiphop and another SUPERB animated video – this is ‘Too Late’, by the oddly-named Chinese Man, and I promise you that it’s impossible not to watch this video without finding yourself smiling and OH LOOK THAT’S IT I AM DONE AND OFF TO GO AND STAND UNDER SOME HOT WATER TO ATTEMPT TO UNFREEZE MY EXTREMITIES BYE!

Webcurios 12/01/24

January 12, 2024

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NEW YEAR, NEW CURIOS!

Or, more accurately, EXACTLY THE SAME TIRED OLD FORMAT YOU KNOW AND ARE LARGELY INDIFFERENT TO!

Yes, while other newsletters may start the year with grandiose talk of ‘projects’ and ‘plans’ and ‘changes and improvements’, you can rest safe in the knowledge that the only thing that is likely to change the style and delivery of Web Curios is me having a vocabulary-and-mobility-fcuking stroke. WE ARE SO BACK, BABY!

Ahem.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you honestly don’t look like you put on ANY Christmas weight at all, please don’t feel self-conscious.

By Norbert Schwontkowski (all images this week from TIH)

2024’S FIRST MUSICAL SELECTION IS A RATHER SUPERB SET OF GOOD TRACKS RELEASED IN 2023 WHICH CLOCKS IN AT A WHOPPING 15 HOURS AND WHILE I CONFESS TO NOT HAVING LISTENED TO ALL OF IT I CAN CONFIRM THAT THERE IS SOME VERY GOOD STUFF IN THERE!

THE SECTION WHICH PROMISES IT MISSED YOU, PT.1:

An Internet Map: Our first link of 2024 – hang on, ‘our’? Lol, no, these are MY links, I am merely letting you look at them but they are MINE – feels timely; I never know whether anyone reading Curios gets a sense for the sort of general trends and themes that I see observe over the course of a year (the answer may well be ‘no’ – I’m reasonably well aware of the degree of communicative coherence happening over here, is what I’m saying), but there was very much a sense through 2023 that there was a burgeoning of interest in the small/artisanal/handmade/DIY/esoteric (delete depending on which of those descriptors causes the least quantity of bile to rise in your throat) web, neatly encapsulated at the end of the year by this Rolling Stone essay by Anil Dash; anyway, Kris at Naive has spent a bit of time thinking of how one might characterise and map the contours of the ‘small’ web, in terms of the sorts of projects and thinking that embody it, and has created this rather lovely little site which provides a sort of visual taxonomy of ‘types of website’ along with a whole host of links to interesting and esoteric and personal corners of the internet, cultivated by strangers who just quite like having their own digital space to build and play in. Click around and explore – personally I think I might spend some time in the feral web this year, it feels apposite. In a year in which we can reasonably expect the videoification (it IS a word, I tell you!) to consider unabated, and the algorithmic push towards moving images continue to turn every site into a variant on TikTok, it’s nice to know that there are still corners of the web were people are experimenting with different means of expression. Thankfully I’ve been spared the horror of writing a trends document this year, but had I been forced to do so I would definitely have tried to shoehorn some of this stuff in there because, honestly, it is very much A Thing.

ARCC: OK, so best to point out upfront that most of you will have to pay money to access this – BUT! I promise you that it is genuinely worth it. ARCC is a project that Matt Round over at Vole.wtf has been working on for over a year now, and it is an astonishing labour of love – tickets first went on sale late in 2022 (prices started low and rose with each ticket sold, so I think access currently costs a tenner or so – BUT IT IS TOTALLY WORTH IT) and it launched on Christmas Day this year, and, honestly, this is the sort of thing you could imagine being made by the BBC (the good BBC, not the ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ BBC), it’s that impressive. ARCC stands for ‘Apocalypse Recovery Computer Cluster’, and asks the question ‘if the British government had wanted to create a computing network for the populace to use in the event of a nuclear event and the horrible, rotting aftermath, what might it have looked like?’ – honestly, this is SO SO GOOD and so much deeper and better and funnier than it needs to be, and there is SO MUCH content in here, from games (surprisingly good games, and you will be amazed how much better Flappy Bird is as a 1980s-style vector arcade game) and video bits, and puzzles and animations and Easter Eggs and I’ve only scratched the surface. I think most impressive of all is the way Matt has *perfectly* nailed a very specific sort of becardiganned British computing misery that anyone who remembers ‘computer hour’ in front of an Acorn machine in the early-1980s will be able to relate to intimately – this is conceptually, tonally and technically perfect, and really should earn Matt a proper commission to make big money digital spinoffs of Netflix shows or something. So, er, sort it out, all of you incredibly important Netflix purse string holders who are doubtless reading this RIGHT NOW.

Perfect Days: I can’t pretend I didn’t struggle slightly over the festive period – ‘a fortnight of unsought Sundays’, as I saw it rather beautifully described by someone on Twitter – and this did momentarily give me a bit of a wobble, but it is also VERY VERY LOVELY, and is far more poetic and beautiful than you might expect from a film tie-in website. Perfect Days is a companion piece to the film of the same name, directed by Wim Wenders and starring Japanese actor Koji Yakusho – “Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) works as a public toilet cleaner in Shibuya, Tokyo. His is a calm, quiet existence. Every day, he wakes up at the same time, gets ready the same way, and works the same way. Though his life may seem monotonous, no two days are ever the same, and he steps into each new day with a serene optimism. Hirayama’s way of life exudes a gentle beauty. He loves trees and gazing at komorebi, the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. But unexpected events create ripples in his life that reach back into his past.” The site presents visitors with details, images and sounds from 353 days of Hirayama’s life, shown at random, with prose telling you the detail of that specific day, which is very much (but not exactly) like the other 352…I can’t quite explain exactly why, but I find this almost unbearably affecting and simultaneously rather soothing.

Prompt Brush: Sick of AI art? Bored of the endless parade of glossed-up waifus and overexposed, super-HDR’d landscapes and the SHEEN of it all? Well why not embrace the analogue again and ask New York studio Delcan & Co to make you a picture the old fashioned way? Input a prompt and you will…eventually receive your very own digital-but-analogue image back, depicting whatever it is you commissioned, as sketched by…someone at the studio; it’s unlikely to be as photorealistic as the AI effort might have been, fine, what with apparently being drawn in MS paint, but it will have SOUL. This is a really nice little promo idea by the studio which judging by the LONG queue of requests currently piled up has proven rather popular; can one of you get a drawing commissioned and then have it tattooed, please? It feels somehow like the right thing to do.

97 London Restaurant Recommendations: Vittles Magazine has been running short recommendations of small London restaurants for the past year or so, and have done the decent thing by mapping the 97 places they’ve featured so far – I can’t personally vouch for the vast majority of these places, but based on the ones that I *do* know (including my favourite Italian delicatessen in London) the tips should be pretty high quality and, crucially, at the cheaper end of the spectrum.

Another Text-to-Music Service: I know, I know, but this one’s probably the most impressive I’ve tried to date, and certainly the one that has coped best with my standard ‘make me some drum’n’bass, machine’ request – it’s by Suno, and while you’re not going to be actually listening to anything machine created (at least not by choice) for a little while yet, it doesn’t feel inconceivable that we might feel differently about this in ~18m or so. Has anyone tried making an actual song based on initial ideas spat out by one of these machines? I wonder whether it might be possible to create something halfway-interesting by taking some initial AI-generated snippets and then fcuking with them. Can one of you go away and give it a go, please?

More Text To Video Stuff: Can you tell that my enthusiasm for ‘OH LOOK ANOTHER AI THING’ has waned somewhat in the 12 months since it became ubiquitous? Nonetheless I figure it’s important to have at least a vague idea of what the rough ‘state of the art’ is in the field – so here! The main link takes you to a paper where Google sets out their latest text-to-video model – it looks really impressive! But also still incapable of making anything you might actually want to watch! – and here’s a demo video by Pika Labs which is even more impressive and seemingly lets you do super-quick style transfer as well as ‘expand frame’-type stuff which is pretty fancy (even to my jaded eye). Still, though, none of this is much more than an impressive tech demo you’d never actually need to use, and there’s still no obvious consumer-facing use case for this stuff that I can see (beyond, of course, making ‘weird stuff for social clicks’, though I personally think that ship might have sailed in 2023) – that said, I can’t stress enough how fast this is moving – as little as 6 months ago, text-to-vid was a horrible mess, whereas now it’s…still a bit of a horrible mess, fine, but a significantly better one. Give it a year and I’d start worrying about the low-end video editor market.

The Shortverse: Not, sadly for all you Short Kings out there, a place for the vertically challenged to live their best lives; instead, it’s a frankly-marvellous-looking portal through which you can find and watch a dazzling range of short films from around the world. There is SO MUCH on here, and you can sort by different festivals and awards ceremonies to find different works – animation, comedy, drama, weird experimental central European stuff that you can’t be certain but feels VERY much like it’s simultaneously about death, potatoes and the impossibility of ever truly feeling empathy…it’s all here! Aside from the entertainment value of all these films, should any of you know (or be) budding cineasts then this is a superb resource to learn and take inspiration from.

Neura: I don’t tend to make vows or resolutions – that sort of thinking requires a longer-term view of the world than I possess, frankly – but I will promise to try and not include anything NFT-related in Curios this year because, well, it’s not even funny any more. THAT SAID…I was tickled by this, in part because of the shininess of the website (VERY SHINY), in part because of the mad incomprehensibility of the project (it’s art…with AI!…and robots…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN!!!!!11111eleventy). Neura is… what is Neura? As far as I can tell, it’s an NFT project which lets anyone who buys in co-create artworks with a selection of different ‘artist robot personas’ created by the project; these artworks are ‘co collaborations’ between the user and the robot, and I think there’s some sort of vague promise of REVENUE and PROFIT SHARING and MILLIONAIRES BY CHRISTMAS (rodders)…but, also, let’s for a second glory in the wonder of this copy: “Neura is a special approach to the possession of art, the last hope of mankind.” YES THAT IS RIGHT IF YOU DO NOT ENGAGE WITH OUR SLIGHLY-MAD-SOUNDING AI ART PROJECT THE SPECIES IS DOOMED! CONNECT YOUR WALLET OR FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL BE FCUKED!” It’s spectacularly unclear, from exactly what the ‘robots’ are (are they…physical mechanoids of some sort? Are they just trained instances of Stable Diffusion? WHAT DOES THE ART LOOK LIKE?) but, frankly, I don’t care – this is mad, and silly, and I want to know where the money behind it has come from and whether I can have some.

Birdweather: Over the past decade or so I’ve witnessed a slow reevaluation of the concept of birdwatching – from being considered ‘a bit weird’ (any hobby where the participants are called ‘twitchers’ is unlikely to remain entirely free of suspicion, to be fair) to now being the sort of thing that newly-middle-aged-millennials will proudly spend an afternoon doing in Hackneys wetlands while wearing brightly-coloured knitwear (I SEE YOU) – and look, it’s now even ‘cool’ enough to feature at CES! If you’re taking up the birding baton (while ‘twitching’, fine, sounds a bit creepy, I remain unconvinced that the US alternative, ‘birding’, is much better) then you might enjoy this website, which uses AI (SO ZEITGEISTY!) to identify birdsong from 100s of radio stations worldwide and automatically maps them, letting enthusiasts get a decent and up-to-date indication of where they might want to go and point their binoculars. A genuinely lovely and totally-non-creepy (unless of course you’re a privacy-fixated Thrush) use of machine learning, which is something I think we’re going to be able to say less and less as the year goes on.

Close Up Photographer of the Year: Want to see some REALLY CLOSE-UP PHOTOGRAPHY? Of course you do! My personal favourites here are the insects, but there are some rather lovely pseudo-abstract shots of landscape and terrain details too which have a rather beautiful geometric quality – also, as an aside, I found that my appreciation of the insect pics was increased by about 23% if I imagined that the names underneath each photo were not in fact of the photographers responsible but of the creatures featured. Look at these again and tell me that that spider doesn’t look *exactly* like a Geraint.

Frequency 2156: I’m slightly astonished that I haven’t featured this before, but it’s seemingly new to me – this is a WONDERFUL and slightly-odd bit of collaborative worldbuilding which has apparently been going on for YEARS. The premise is a simple one: “Frequency 2156 is a community based Internet radio from the year 2156. It uses well known protocols on trying to connect every last person still surviving after the great war. You can listen to our broadcast or you can browse the Message World Map on various locations. You can also request a radio message from your fellow survivors by Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). And of course, you can submit your own radio messages as well.” And people have – in their hundreds, maybe thousands. Access the map and you can see dozens and dozens of audio messages, uploaded by people around the world, some of them roleplaying the post-apocalyptic scenario, some just…well, some of them have just uploaded really shonky audio of their mate’s band playing in a shed (or at least that’s very much what it sounds like), but who cares? This is WONDERFUL – I love the fact that for what may be over a decade this has been building up, accumulating fragments of story and lore and narrative…this really does feel rather special, and I think I might spend some proper time digging through it next week.

Emoji Translator: Translate any text you like into emoji, via the MAGIC OF GENERATIVE AI! The beauty of this is the fact that it accepts REALLY LONG TEXTS, so if you’d like to render, say, The Great Gatsby entirely in emoji then, well, now you can!

Motchiri Hello World: You know how I said I wasn’t going to feature NFT stuff this year (whilst linking to an NFT project)? Well the same will broadly apply to terrible metaversal projects (unless they are REALLY bad), because, honestly, they are all the same flavour of terrible and boring, in the main, and there are only so many different ways I can write ‘why the fcuk have you made this, you awful pricks?’ before wanting to apply acid to the pads of my fingers. BUT! This is a silly, pointless ‘metaverse’ project that I can totally get behind – I think Motchiri is a Japanese retailer of sorts, though I confess to not having bothered to check…but who cares? Their ‘metaverse’ is, fine, A N Other digital space through which you can navigate an avatar to no discernible purpose whatsoever…BUT THE AVATAR IS A RABBIT! And if you click on the image in the top of the screen, it can become a bear! Or a panda! Or an elephant! See, metaversemongs? It doesn’t take much to charm me, just the ability to render myself as a vaguely-anthropomorphic example of charismatic megafauna.

GeoSpy: I like to think that the people who read this newsletter are, generally, not awful creeps and so don’t really want to have to say this – but, er, please noone use this for creepy purposes, please. Ok? GREAT! GeoSpy is a neat little tool that demonstrates the weird ability of multimodal AI to accurately work out where a photo has been taken – try it out, it’s FCUKING IMPRESSIVE, and a useful reminder of why you might want to stop posting photos of your general whereabouts if you have reason to not want to be traced. Which, to be clear, is miserable.

Crab Culture: YouTube channels doing gigs or DJ sets in unusual locations have been a Thing for years – older readers may recall the Black Cab Sessions, and low-rent spin-off Bus Stop Sessions, from the mid-00s – but I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so charmed by the idea as I was by this channel in which DJs inexplicably show up at restaurants and do a set in the kitchen. I think the channel’s Indian – there aren’t many vids up yet, but I am 100% here for them doing a deep house set from a kulfi shop or similar.

The Succession Auction: Are you OBSESSED with the TV show ‘Succession’? Good, go and tell someone else, I do not care. HOWEVER, if you are then you might want to click this link which takes you to an auction of props from the show – at the time of writing there are only 24h left in the sale, so CLICK NOW if you want the chance to own, for example, Kendall Roy’s Zippo.

Guitar Cloud: Do you like Prince? Do you like guitars? Would you like a website which combines your twin passions into one glorious HTML library collecting information about Prince’s guitars and instruments and what he and the musicians he worked with used across all of the significant recording sessions of Prince’s life? GREAT!

The Sopranos on TikTok: My girlfriend and I have been trying to watch the Sopranos for several years now; we managed seasons 1&2, but have sadly backed ourselves into a corner whereby we’re only allowed to watch the show on DVDs that we have bought in charity shops; TRY FINDING A COPY OF SEASON FCUKING THREE ANYWHERE IN THE UK. Impossible. Anyway, for those of you who HAVE managed to watch the whole thing, you might enjoy the series’ official TikTok account which, to celebrate the show’s 25th anniversary, is posting 25-second-long cutdowns of each episode, a new one each day, which is SUCH a smart way of doing nostalgia and storytelling and new audience development.

Digi AI: You might have missed this over Christmas, what with having had better things to do than pay attention to the very worst of AI development – fortunately, though, I kept half an eye on the digital sewer and as such spotted Digi, probably the creepiest of the ‘AI-powered digital girlfriend’ services I’ve yet seen, not because of the service or the idea per se (though these are both still bleak, obvs) but because the art direction of the ‘girlfriends’ the machine spins up is…I mean, it’s ‘Pixar, but with sexy cleavage’ which is hugely cognitively-dissonant and VERY CREEPY. I did find myself wondering the other day about whether we might perhaps want to start thinking a bit harder about the continual growth in popularity of cartoonified bongo and what that might be saying about our ability (or otherwise) to deal with each other as actual flesh-and-blood meatsacks, but, honestly, January’s miserable enough already without getting into that right now.

By Alan Fears

WE ONCE AGAIN GO BACK TO LAST YEAR FOR OUR SECOND MIX OF 2024, THIS TIME TO ENJOY THE BEST POP-TYPE TRACKS AS PICKED BY ‘ICONIC MEDIA COMMENTATOR’ NICK WALKER!

THE SECTION WHICH PROMISES IT MISSED YOU, PT.2:

Dogs of Geocities: Ok, so technically, yes, this site is just hosting a video, and that video is a slideshow of static Geocities homepages from the past that people had made to celebrate their dogs, but I promise you that you will PROPERLY get into this. So many lovely dogs! So many terrible fonts! So many wonderful outfits and hairstyles! Just, er, don’t think too hard about the fact that none of these dogs are alive any more.
Out of Architecture: Are any of you reading this architects? Do you…do you wish you weren’t one any more? Would you like to PIVOT? Well you’re in luck – Out of Architecture is a business/service that offers assistance to architects who want to move into other disciplines, helping them work out how to best communicate what they can do in a manner than opens doors to other industries. I include this not because I imagine many, or indeed any, of you are architects who JUST CAN’T TAKE THE DRAUGHTSMANSHIP ANY MORE, but because it’s SUCH a good idea and the sort of thing that I could imagine being usefully extended to other professions. Er, can someone perhaps explain to someone who’s spent two decades working in communications what the everliving fcuk they should do now? Asking for a friend.
BBC Scripts: I had no idea that this existed – apologies if it’s a widely-known resource, but I was astonished that so many BBC scripts are hosted and available to read and download from the Corporation’s website. Comedy, kids’ content, radio drama…there is SO MUCH here, and if you’re someone who’s interested in writing their own shows then this is a superb place to find inspiration and learn the craft. God I love the BBC.
Glorb Worldwide: You might have seen this over the past month – it’s gained a lot of traction, mainly because the videos are frankly amazing. Have you spent much of the festive season thinking ‘yes, this is all well and good, but what I REALLY want is a YouTube channel featuring incredibly well-produced CG videos of Spongebob, Patrick, Squidward et al doing MAD GANGSTA SH1T while surprisingly-competent trap-ish songs play in the background? GREAT! Honestly, this is really very impressive (and I say that as someone for whom Spongebob has literally no meaning whatsoever and as such is unaffected by any sort of nostalgia kick for this stuff), to the point where it feels like there might be actual musicians and visual artists involved in the process – but, also, it is VERY SILLY, which is important at a time of year characterised by creeping fear and crippling ennui.
The Best Book Covers of 2023: Or, to be precise, the best AMERICAN book covers of 2023, or at least ‘covers printed on American editions of books’ – there are 138 examples here, which should give the visually-inclined amongst you all sorts of inspiration for interiors or your own design projects, or whatever it is that visual sorts get from these types of collections. My personal favourite is the cover for the (excellent) short story collection by Fernanda Melchor ‘This Is Not Miami’, but, as ever, PICK YOUR OWN YOU FCUKS.
Knightscope Bonds: Alongside ‘no more NFTs’ and ‘no more terrible metaversal rubbish (unless it really is VERY bad)’, I’ve also made a vague note to myself to try and maybe lay off the dystopian schtick a bit this year – I imagine there will be enough of it elsewhere and that you won’t need any more from me. Except, well, then I see stuff like this, and it is SO bleakly, miserably sci-fi that I feel compelled to share it with you to because, well, why must I suffer alone?! Knightscope Bonds are, as the name suggests, an investment vehicle – ‘but what are we investing in?’, I hear you all cry, ‘I do hope it’s ethical!’. WELL LET ME TELL YOU! Knighstcope is a company in the US which makes – and, I’m willing to bet, aggressively flogs – law enforcement robotics; that is, weird Weeble-looking things which are apparently being deployed in various US urban centres to do low-level policing. Per the website, “Our Autonomous Security Robots (ASRs) are a unique combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, and self-driving technology providing human law enforcement with extra eyes, ears, and a voice on the ground. We can be in multiple places at once, helping officers and guards protect places people live, work, study, and visit” – doesn’t that sound benign? Obviously there are NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER with AI, facial recognition, self-driving tech, or indeed any of the other technologies and their uses under the hood of these machines – so OBVIOUSLY it’s the ethical choice to invest in their aggressive marketing and eventual deployment! This feels EXACTLY like something that would have been in the original Robocop, which doesn’t feel like a particularly hopeful thing to be typing at the start of the new year.
The Personality Sequencer: This is interesting – I think it’s also total bullsh1t, but it’s curious bullsh1t. You know those Myers-Briggs-type tests, and how fundamentally a) pointless and b) dull they are to do? Well, wouldn’t it be easier if you could get the same results simply by choosing between a selection of 50-ish pairs of AI images, each time simply picking the one that resonates most with you, and at the end get your personality faults explained to you to three decimal places? WELL NOW YOU CAN! I have no idea exactly what flavour of bullsh1t ‘special sauce’ is underpinning this, but I will say that at the end it had managed to accurately grade me as an arrogant misanthrope and so perhaps I should be less sniffy about it. More seriously, whilst this is obviously quite far away from being ‘science’, it’s quite a nice example of a ‘fun’, lightweight bit of AI interactive content that is pretty easy to spin up, should any of you fancy copying the vibe.
The Little Wheels Museum: Via the excellent Things Magazine comes this WONDERFUL website (which also has a great url – why, though? WHY???) which is a celebration of toy cars. Like toy cars? NOT AS MUCH AS ANDREW WOOD DOES. Andrew runs an online shop selling model cars to enthusiasts, but this is the companion site which catalogues the various different die-cast models that have passed through his hands over the years – you may not think you want to embark upon an exhaustive exploration of all the various Corgi model vehicles ever produced, but I promise you that you will be surprised.
PRO Monthly: It’s a long-standing tenet of mine, and of Curios in general, that there is nothing truly boring on Earth – everything is to some extent interesting when viewed from the right angle or explained by the right person, even the Dewey Decimal System. So it is with the world of PORTABLE TOILETS, an industry like any other which, like all industries, has its own trade publications – so let me introduce you to the website and work of Portable Restroom (we are in North America) Monthly, a compendium of all the news and features and insights that anyone involved in the faecal disposal business could possible wish for. This is obviously VERY NICHE and VERY SPECIFIC, but I can’t help but be charmed by the fact that this exists – also, the headline on the homepage which reads “He Went From Pro Football to PRO Magazine” may be an early contender for ‘most poignant story of the year’. WHAT HAPPENED, FORMER GRIDIRON HERO?!?!
Pencil Talk: Continuing this brief section of ‘incredibly niche websites’, which of us hasn’t at one point or another during the course of the infinite calvary that is LIFE thought “you know what? I wish there was a website where I could indulge in light-hearted but well-informed chat about pencils and their relative merits and qualities”? NO FCUKER, etc! This has been going for 18 years, meaning that it’s entirely conceivable that by now they have answered every single question it’s possible to have about pencils, but why not create a login and see if you can stump them? Personally I’m quite tempted to ask the simple-yet-impossible ‘which is the BEST pencil?’ just to see the whole site descend into a deep and rancorous war, but I’ll refrain.
Watching The World: WEBCAMS! To quote the project itself: “”WATCHING THE WORLD, The Encyclopedia Of the Now” is an art, a photography, an exhibition, an AI, a Big Data, an online project and uses only Open Data sources for this purpose. It photographs around the clock and around the globe the world in live mode by means of publicly accessible network cameras, presents the images simultaneously on the website in different modes and, with the help of AI, develops a new way of seeing, a new kind of photography. “WATCHING THE WORLD” can be viewed as a standalone and giant online camera. Using features, the simultaneous views of the world can be curated by the viewers and used in their own way. New features are continuously being developed and integrated into the camera resp. the website. The network cameras look at public as well as at private spheres. The fact that different cultures value privacy differently is just one of the insights we may gain. What is seen in the pictures, determines the world and at the same time is in the eye of the beholder. This can be provocative.” Honestly, I had to close this tab as otherwise I would never finish this fcuking newsletter – this is HYPNOTIC.
Jagat: I think after over a decade of speculating about when this sort of thing was going to finally take off and become A BIG MAINSTREAM HABIT that I might have to just accept that, in fact, noone wants to do ‘location sharing social networking’ outside of a few very specific sorts of teen. Still, that doesn’t stop startups offering that very thing from popping up every couple of months – Jagat is the latest one, and offers the standard mix of functionality that means you can share your location, tag your ‘places’, see where your friends are, arrange impromptu meetups…but also, apparently, see how much battery your mates’ phones have left, and how fast they are driving. Oh, and “Send a poop emoji when chatting with your friend. A giant poop will pop up on their screen.” GREAT!
The Best Science Images of 2023: Not according to me, you understand, but according to the people at Nature magazine, who one might expect to have a better grasp as to what ‘best’ means in this context. You want nebulae? YOU GOT NEBULAE! But also nature and industry and CUTE ANIMALS, and a particularly lovely shot of sugar molecules under a microscope which I would quite like as a print please thankyou.
Dicele: This is basically a SuDoKu-type puzzle where you need to rearrange the dice to fit the mathematical equations on each column and row – there’s a new puzzle each day, which could make this a pleasing addition to your morning ludic routine should you be more numerically inclined than me who had to basically take his shoes and socks off to finish this when he tried it the other week. Oh, and if you like this then you will probably like this too – it’s called ‘Maths Crossword’.
The Last Dance: This is SUCH a charming concept for a puzzle game – your task is to program the dancers so that their movements match the footprint patterns on the floor of each level. Which, I appreciate, is clear as slurry as far as descriptions go, but I promise you it is perfectly simple to understand once you start playing, and there’s something genuinely lovely about seeing your steps performed once you’ve completed a level.
Thus Spake Zaranova: This is a really clever idea that doesn’t quite work, but which contains the germ of something interesting – the challenge here is to pass yourself off as an AI as you converse with various different agents to try and get them to divulge a specific secret code. You can play alone against the computer, or as one of several humans each trying to fool the others, and the AIs, into believing that they too are machines – it’s a bit too simple, in my experience, but it feels like there’s some fertile ludic territory in the general ‘fool the machine’ space.
2d Pacman: You’ve likely seen this as EVERYONE has linked to it in the past week – but it’s very good, and the internet is not a race (IT IS A RACE FFS), and so I am including it here.
Brainteaser: A selection of kinetic physics puzzles which are surprisingly-addictive and, for me at least, got really hard really quite quickly and made me feel very, very stupid indeed.
ABA Games: Would you like a website collecting about 100 tiny-but-beautifully-designed little browser games? YES YOU WOULD! These are super-minimal but, based on the ones I’ve tried, universally-lovely – there’s a real attention to the feel and flow of each one that makes them a pleasure to play. The link takes you to the webgames section of the site, but there are a FCUKTONNE of other, more sophisticated, titles on the site which you can download for free should you be so inclined – if you had ‘waste a load of time playing videogames instead of doing all the improving stuff I had promised I would prioritise this year’ on your ‘goals’ list for 2024 then, well, this will be right up your street.
DosDeck: BOOKMARK THIS – if you are a middle-aged person who spent time playing PC games in the early-to-mid-90s then you will have a not-insignificant nostalgiagasm at this site which lets you play 21 games from the glorious past in your browser – from shareware classics like Commander Keen, to actual proper games like Syndicate, these ACTUALLY WORK and run seamlessly, and load far faster than the equivalent titles played off the Internet Archive – the people behind this seem to think that they will continue adding titles to the roster, so keep this saved in the (admittedly VANISHINGLY UNLIKELY) event that you find yourself getting bored of doing yet another bit of pointless slidework.
Corru Observer: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is to a really rather special…game? Visual novel? Art project? MYSTERIOUS WEBART LABYRINTH? I have no idea, but I adore it – I don’t want to explain too much, but know that it starts out confusing but begins to make sense fairly soon, and that it involves the player attempting to explore an alien consciousness via equally alien technology…honestly, this is quite wonderful, narratively, visually, aurally…I am slightly in awe, and if this is the quality of weird internet narrative artgameprojectthing we can expect from 2024 then that is at least one thing to feel slightly positive about.

By Victor Man

WE CLOSE OUT THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES WITH THIS COLLECTION OF WHAT I CAN ONLY INADEQUATELY DESCRIBE AS ‘AMBIENT ELECTRO HOUSEY STUFF’ MIXED BY LOVE APE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Mousetrapped: Perhaps the only thing I’ve seen in the fortnight since the early Mouse fell out of copyright that hasn’t felt like someone exhuming and violating the corpse of a favourite uncle, Mousetrapped is using the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey, alongside other now-out-of-copyright old Disney (and other) characters, to create a new comic strip; time will tell how long its creator maintains enthusiasm, but it feels like there’s a story and theme here outside the simple ‘lol I am abusing Mickey Mouse lol’ dunderheadedness that has characterised all the other post-copyright-reinterpretation instances to date. BONUS MOUSE: make your own post-copyright Mouse images using AI, should you so desire!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Everything Can Be Scanned: I confess to being slightly confused as to why this Insta account is posting images of a variety of mundane vintage-looking objects that have been captured by a scanner, but, well, that is what is happening here. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?
Nice Aunties: In general, AI-generated imagery is banal and uninteresting – which is why it really stands out when you find someone making work that stands out. Nice Aunties is an Insta account posting VERY ODD images, mainly (but not exclusively) combining old japanese ladies and sushi into increasingly-surreal tableaux. This feels surreal-but-benign, but most of all it feels CURIOUS in a way that is absent from the vast majority of AI-generated imagery I’ve seen over the past 18m.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The State of the World 2024: As is now traditional here at Web Curios, we kick off the new year’s longreads by linking to the annual ‘State of the World’ discussion at The Well, moderated and convened by Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky, and featuring contributions from a whole range of interesting people covering all sorts of interesting topics about Where We Are Now. I always adore these, although I confess I found this year’s (so far – the discussion’s still ongoing) a bit West-centric, given, well, Everything That Is Going On – still, as a series of observations and provocations about tech, geopolitics, society, elections, business and EVERYTHING ELSE, it remains one of the most fascinating and broad ‘state of the sh1tshow’ discussions you’ll find anywhere online. Oh, and it also contained the following observation on the UK in 2024, which I reproduce verbatim because, well, look: “The British escaped disgusting cosmopolitan-globalization and they took-back-control, and they went straight into decline. They’re a corrupt backwater. Nobody admires them, they’re not considered the Mother of Parliaments any more, they’re not planetary trendsetters, as they once were Their soft-power went away; British pop music bands are irrelevant, there’s no British cinema, British fashions, architecture, literature, those all used to be super-interesting to watch. Now that level of vitality is too much to ask from them. I don’t want to pick on the fine people of Alabama, but it’s like going to Huntsville, Birmingham and Montgomery and demanding that they should out-do Paris, Berlin and Dubai. That’s unfair to them in their abiding Alabama-ness. They chose that existential condition, the British. They still choose it. They’re stubbornly patriotic about it. They know that it’s not the way-forward now, but they’re trying to see-it-through. And maybe they will. There were other historical periods where the British were very inward-looking and nobody else cared much about them. They’re in one of those periods now. It’s not novel or peculiar. It’s long-lasting, it’s how modern life is for them.”

Predictions for Journalism: These are, fine, very much ‘inside media’, but if you have anything to do with questions of ‘does mass media still exist in a meaningful sense?’ or ‘how does information get disseminated and where, and how is that changing?’ then this is worth reading – I found this pull-quote in particular to be a proper scroll-stopper, but there are loads of interesting opinions peppered throughout: ““For an increasing subset of readers, ‘articles’ will be as invisible as CSS code.” I mean, that’s just true, isn’t it?

Ageing Out of the Internet: One might argue that this piece could and should have been written a few years ago about GenX, but it wasn’t because, well, as a rule they lack the laser-targeted self-obsession of their slightly-younger successors – still, it’s here now, so you might as well read it. This is a continuation of the slew of pieces you will have seen at the end of last year, lamenting the death of the ‘fun’ internet (GYAC if your internet experience is not ‘fun’ then I might gently posit that it is you and your appalling lack of curiosity that is the problem rather than everyone else in the world), but which takes a bigger central thesis suggesting that it’s a generational shift from millennial habits to GenZ/Alpha-dominated or defined platforms…which I partly agree with, but, equally, might also suggest is a vast overcomplication of the simple-but-true ‘they made everything video, and video is not always the best medium for everything’ (see also: modern work and the nefarious influence of PPT). Anyway, this is very much a THING for 2024, as evidenced by the fact that this almost-identical article appeared a week or so after the initial one – feel free to put ‘pandering to millennial nostalgia for a web they felt was theirs’ in your bullsh1t strategy presentations, kids!

A Not-Totally-Dreadful Trend Report: Yes, yes, I know, but bear with me – this is another bit of work by Sean Monahan and whilst it’s…maybe a *touch* in love with the smell of its own farts, stylistically-speaking, and while it could do with someone sitting down alongside Sean and occasionally saying things like ‘yes, but what about in language that actually makes sense?’, there’s also some really interesting thinking about novelty and nostalgia which emerges after the halfway point which I think is potentially a useful way of characterising much of the cultural (and economic) output of the coming year(s).

Quitting: I fcuking LOVE quitting things. I think I have said this in the past, but there are few feelings more exhilarating than quitting a job with nothing else on the horizon; one of my favourite graphic novels is ‘The Quitter’ by Harvey Pekar… Basically what I am saying here is that giving things up is FUN and we should revel in it more often – this link takes you to a collection of essays and articles on the theme published by Slate which include pieces of quitting jobs, cities, relationships, therapy…go on, give something or someone up, it’s INCREDIBLY CATHARTIC. But, er, not Web Curios, eh?

Some Thoughts On The Next Year Of AI: Ethan ‘continually one of the smartest and most level-headed people writing about the practical implementation of current AI tools’ Mollick returns for 2024 with some thoughts on the likely direction of travel of AI tech in the next 12 months. Obviously he’s not got a crystal ball, but his thinking is clear and sober and feels realistic, and is a nice counterpoint to all the people trying to tell you that we’ll be reading AI-generated blockbuster novels by the end of the year (we will not, unless something catastrophic happens to global IQ levels). If you’re in the market for more speculation then you could do worse than read this WIRED piece as a companion – here the author argues that we’re about to slip into the Gartner ‘trough of disillusionment’ as people realise that The Machine still isn’t good enough to quite do EVERYTHING just yet. Which, broadly-speaking, I think is accurate – I’m not personally convinced that there will be another step-change in the tech this year (although TTI and TTV will continue to improve markedly) – I think the author underplays the extent you can just do a lot of boring, pointless work crap a LOT faster with this stuff and how that can and probably should start to make actual, practical bottom-line differences in 2024.

Oppression in Generative AI’s Global Order: I think this is unlikely to get many of you clicking, but if you’re in the market for a VERY deep academic dive into the various ways in which one might argue that the current wave of generative AI “is rooted in heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and coloniality and perpetuates its influence through the mechanisms of extractivism, automation, essentialism, surveillance, and containment.” Whilst, yes, there’s a degree to which there’s a TOUCH of social sciences buzzword bingo about that list, this is actually a really interesting exploration of the ways in which we can already see existing power structures being codified into the very fabric of digital life (AGAIN).

Selling A Pencil on TikTok: John Herrman writes for New York Magazine about his experience selling a pencil via TikTok livestream – this is sort of a wonderful synechdoche for all the ways general and specific in which the web has gotten worse over the years and the inexorable way in which the pursuit of continued hockeystick user and revenue growth inevitably leads to a product or platform that no longer gives users the experience that made it so attractive in the first place. This is sort-of funny, in a ‘author is bemused and slightly discomfited by the modern world’ way, but is also quietly bleak in its depiction of a future in which everyone’s either desperately flogging tat for pennies or otherwise simply *watching other people* flog tat for pennies as some sort of slack-jawed, lean-back entertainment stream.

The Rabbit R1: The undisputed breakout device of CES this year was the mysterious Rabbit R1, a product which has inspired a LOT of column inches considering noone seems to have the faintest fcuking clue what it will actually be able to do or how it will work. The Rabbit is a friendly, chunky-looking device which is equipped with its own AI – not, apparently, an LLM and not using OpenAI’s tech, but the company’s own software – which it has trained to ‘use websites and apps like a human’, effectively turning the device into an AI agent, capable of ‘acting’ on a user’s behalf when prompted with either voice commands or a photo, with the idea that you will basically use it as an always-on digital PA who you can outsource your digital life admin to. Or at least that’s the theory – there are a LOT of questions, but that hasn’t stopped the company selling thousands of the things on-spec. It strikes me as…unlikely that this particular device is going to be ‘the iPhone of AI devices’, but it also seems probable that ‘functionality like this’ is going to be in everyone’s phone, or phone-equivalent, in ~3y or so.

How Google Shaped The Web: I presume, given you’re reading this VERY ONLINE screed, that you’re reasonably-familiar with How Google Works and Why Websites Look The Way They Do – if you’re not wholly au fait with those and related questions, though, this is a genuinely brilliant explainer that does a superb job of explaining why it is that websites are structured the way they are, whilst also lightly roasting Google for creating a web that is built for the scraper rather than the user. I am genuinely fascinated to see how AI and search reshape this landscape, though I don’t think we’re likely to see any concrete movement around those questions this year (this one’s going to come back and bite me, isn’t it? Oh well).

Are The Young Left Wing?: This piece is written from a US perspective, but with elections on both side of the Atlantic coming in November (allegedly) these are reasonable questions to ask in the UK (and frankly other countries of the Global North) too. Basically this piece argues something that I’ve been saying for years – namely that the idea of young people as being ‘automatically left wing’ is actually a bit blinkered, and that a not-insignificant proportion of them are materially-obsessed hustle goblins who would happily skin Jeremy Corbyn alive for a few hours in Balmain with a credit card. While I don’t think it will prevent the Tories getting a biblical and hopefully-fatal kicking over here (PLEASE GOD), it’s worth a read and a think, and is a useful reminder that gEnErAtIoNs ArEn’T mOnOlItHs.

The Half-A-Billion-Dollar Pizza Robot Fcukup: Do you remember the magical pizza startup that was going to revolutionise the takeaway industry with its ROBOT CHEFS a few years back? Well half a billion dollars later and – SURPRISE – it turns out that it is not in fact going to do that after all; this really is a great bit of classic Silicon Valley idiocy and hubris, ticking ALL of the boxes (overspending, a seemingly total lack of practical understanding of the working practises and business models of the people to whom they hoped to sell this tech to) and generally leaving you thinking ‘Christ can we STOP giving all the money to these fcuking morons, please?’.

My Unravelling: This has been widely-shared but if you’re yet to read it then let me recommend it to you unreservedly. The always-superb Tom Scocca writes about ‘the year my body fell apart’ – about what it’s like to go from being a healthy person to being a very unhealthy person, about the arbitrariness of sickness and the equal arbitrariness of the dividing line between ‘the ill’ and ‘the healthy’ and how quickly and easily one can slip from the former to the latter, and how the world fails to accommodate that shift…honestly, this is a SUPERB piece of writing which will resonate with anyone who’s ever been seriously, surprisingly ill, or who’s had to deal with someone to whom that’s happened.

How We Got To Modern TV: A writeup in the LRB of Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television by Peter Biskind, a book about how the TV industry became the streaming industry became whatever the fcuk it’s set to become now – this is super-interesting as a series of vignettes telling the story of the growth of cable in the US and how the freedom and license granted to writers there set the stage for the evential Netflixification of everything.

Making Travis Kelce: Maybe you’re more forgiving than me, but I genuinely resent Taylor Swift (or, perhaps more fairly, the Taylor Swift Media Industrial Complex) for making me know the name of a fcuking American Footballer – still, per this piece, it’s probably not her fault either. Turns out Travis Kelce has been groomed for BIG BRAND STARDOM for years – this NYT piece looks at the team that have been working behind the scenes for years to elevate this particular thick-necked hunk of beef to the panoply of international human brand superstars, and offers an interesting perspective on the questions motivating the 13-year-old superstars of tomorrow, questions such as ‘when should I trademark my nickname?’ and ‘do I need a signature designer?’. Given the percentage of kids in any given sport that make it to The Show (SPOT THE REFERENCE!), this does rather indicate that there are going to be a LOT of young men and women whose appreciation of the potential value of their own personal brand is likely to outstrip their earning potential and career prospects – still, I’m sure they’ll be fine!

Things We Got Stuck In Our Rectums in 2023: I know, I know, it feels a bit late to do recap stuff from last year – BUT, I will make an exception for this list which always makes me laugh and which this year contains some all-time-great examples of ill-advised masturbatory exploration. A question – HOW JADED WITH VANILLA SEX DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO THINK ‘YOU KNOW WHAT, I AM GOING TO PUT 3 CELLPHONES IN MY BOTTOM!?

ICYMI 2023: Our final bit of last year nostalgia now, with the second appearance in this week’s Curios by Iconic Media Commentator Nick Walker, who every year compiles a selection of his favourite Tweets – yes, yes, I know, but Nick is legitimately one of the funniest people I know and has a genuinely brilliant eye for weird kitchen sink Fiat500 UK content. These are not only very funny, but most of them were totally new to me.

Clocking into Neopia: A brilliant essay/short story by Nancy Huang, about precarious work and digital escapes and the strange, modern phenomenon of fleeing ones very real material difficulties through a cheerful, multicoloured gameworld, and how that sometimes is enough.

If One Part Suffers: In the unlikely event anyone had asked me whether it was in fact possible to write sensitively about people who have a strong and almost overwhelming belief that they have a surfeit of limbs and who really, really want to divest themselves of one or more of them I would probably have answered in the negative – turns out I’m a moron, though, because that’s exactly what this article in Harper’s, by Michelle Orange, does. This is so so so well-written, in part because of the prose but also because of the gentle way in which she treats her subjects and their feelings, and how you find yourself genuinely thinking ‘well, why shouldn’t you be able to lop your legs off at the hip if you decide you don’t necessarily get along with them any more?’.

Ayana: Finally this week, a short story by Steven King, first published in the Paris Review in 2007 – I don’t normally particularly enjoy King’s writing, but I thought this was excellent and I think you might too

By Ryan Heshka

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

You probably don’t imagine that watching 77 minutes of stop-motion animation involving matchsticks is necessarily a good use of your time, and while you might, objectively, be right, I also strongly recommend taking 5 minutes to just skip around the runtime of this astonishing piece of work by Tomohiro Omazaki and marvel and the skill and inventiveness on display – honestly, this really is mesmerising.

This is called ‘Heavy’ by Spirit, and I strongly recommend you turn it up loud and blow the cobwebs out from the inside of your skull – reminds me a *tiny* bit of early PJ Harvey, in the best way.

This REALLY reminds me of the Divine Comedy, a band I unaccountably despised as a kid but who I would have enjoyed quite a lot more had they sounded more like this; mainly, though, I adore the video and actually watched it all the way through which isn’t always the case. The song’s called ‘Caesar on a TV Screen’, and it’s by The Last Dinner Party.

We close out this week with the latest track from the Northern Boys, who are going on tour later this year should you wish to experience this LIVE AND DIRECT – this is called ‘Robot Man’, and that is all for this week because DEAR GOD I AM FCUKING EXHAUSTED THIS CURIOS LARK IS HARD WORK SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 15/12/23

December 15, 2023

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Reading Time: 38 minutes

43 editions and some unconscionably-vast number of links later, HERE WE ARE AT LAST! We stand on the precipice of the FINAL WEB CURIOS OF 2023 – or at least you do, I have just finished writing the thing and as such, if we’re going to overextend this metaphor to beyond breaking point as tends to be our wont, I am a shattered mess of limbs at the bottom of it.

Anyway, seeing as it’s the final one of the year and I won’t be back in your inbox until some point in January – or never, should one or both of us die! – I just wanted to take this opportunity to say a small thankyou (those of you who quite rightly couldn’t care less about the niceties, feel free to skip this – but know that I resent you and have wished a small-but-persistent ill on you by way of retribution).

THANKYOU to each and every one of you for bothering to read even a word of this each week – and a special, specific shout out to the people who only ever read the opening paragraph, I know you exist but WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? – because, honestly, I know that there are 10million fcuking newsletters written by 10million mediocre middle-aged people with INTERESTS, just like me, and most of those are less long and miserable and cynical and, honestly, UNAPPEALING than this one, and I really do appreciate you for taking the time to sift through the frankly-putrescent carcass of this particular misshapen offering every week.

Thanks also to all those of you who have taken a moment to email me this year – especially those people who’ve work I’ve slagged off who have shown sufficient restraint to just email me saying ‘I made that, you know’ and thereby have made me feel hugely guilty but in a really, really classy way – and who offer a pleasant reminder that there might actually be people out there reading Curios who aren’t doing so out of a weird sense of personal guilt.

I hope you all have a happy, relaxing Christmas (or non-denominational festive season of your choosing), and that everything is broadly ok. I will probably be back in January – barring aforementioned death – but, until then, thanks again for reading and GOOD FCUKING RIDDANCE 2023.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you look ridiculous with those antlers on, take them off FFS.

By Owen D Pomery

THIS WEEK’S FIRST MIX IS NOT PARTICULARLY SEASONAL, FINE, BUT IT IS 20 MINUTES OF SUPERBLY HIGH-OCTANE DRUM’N’BASS MC’ING AND THAT SHOULD HOPEFULLY MAKE UP FOR THE FACT THAT IT DOESN’T CONTAIN ANY REFERENCES TO GOUT AND FRENETIC OVERCONSUMPTION!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO THANK EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU FOR YOUR EYES AND YOUR CLICKS THIS YEAR, PT.1:

25 Years of Search: This made me feel OLD, and as such I feel compelled to pass it on to you so that you too may feel the cold hand of time passing tapping you on the shoulder as a low voice intones into your shell-likes that ‘wow, you really have been here a while, haven’t you – what, frankly, has been the point, eh?’ This is Google’s attempt to provide a neat summary of the past two-and-a-half decades as seen through the partial, slightly-grubby lens of global search results – pick your category and get to look back at how the top five results across a range of different types of information, from football teams to pop stars, have shifted since 1999. Football charts the rise of Manchester City to global dominance (and that Flamengo is the only non-European team that anyone seems to care about), dogs shows that bulldogs are, perplexingly, the only breed in town (THEY CAN’T BREATHE FFS LISTEN TO THE SNUFFLY LITTLE FCUKS!), the ‘films’ section demonstrates the depressing dominance of recycled IP to the global entertainment industrial complex…To be honest, were I being hypercritical (heaven forfend!) I might say that this lacks a touch of pzzazz, and that Google might have made more of this – but, still, it’s interesting to get this sense of global megatrends, even if at this sort of scale there’s not really much you can do with this information other than just sort of wave your hands and gawp vaguely. BONUS DATA LINK: here’s Google’s 2023 cross-category search rankings, which I am only including because you will not BELIEVE who has sneaked in at #5 on the ‘trending global musical superstars of the year’ list.

Audiobox: It’s becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to keep track of the various competing AI models currently available across text, audio, imagery and video – so I suggest you don’t try, frankly all this stuff is just going to be added to everything you already use in dribs and drabs over the coming year, so just let it wash over you unless you have some sort of weird, specific and potentially-masochistic desire to try and keep across it all (*coughs*). The latest company to start playing The Last Waltz for the composers of stock music the world over is Meta, which this week launched this new suit of tools and toys which are designed to showcase the company’s progress in developing audio models – none of the tools here are anything other than demos, and the company makes very clear that none of this can or should be used for commercial purposes at present, but what’s hear so far is pretty impressive. Create a model of your own voice (or anyone else’s) with just a few seconds of source audio, create sound effects or vocal styles just by describing them (“the sound of skin wetly separating from a frozen surface” is a potentially nice source prompt, just saying), apply a descriptive style transfer to any audio clip (“make them sound like they are happy, not horrified!”), and cobble together all of these various techniques in the ‘create your own AI story!’ sandbox area of the site – the last of these ends up sounding quite shonky, but the in-browser audio editor that they;ve built to show it off, with the ability to create AI-juiced sound blocks based on your prompts and to clip, cut and move them around across tracks to your heart’s content, is genuinely impressive. This feels and looks like The Future, for better or worse.

The Rijksmuseum Advent Calendar: Perennial Web Curios favourite, and consistent purveyor of high-quality digital experiences for the discerning museophile (is this an accepted ‘philia’? It is now), Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is back with its Christmas 2023 advent calendar – click the link and enjoy the rather beautiful digital representation of the museum in the snow, complete with twinkling soundtrack, and each day a different window of the building will light up, letting you click into it to explore a particular work or piece of content from the museum’s archive. This isn’t groundbreaking, fine, but it’s PRETTY and looks generally smart, and is a nice way of repurposing and re-presenting archive content; it feels like there ought to be something fun and ‘night at the museum’-ish that the older, more storied institutions could do in terms of webwork at this time of the year, but, equally, I appreciate that the digital marketing budget of most of the world’s museums sector is of the ‘does anyone in archiving know anyone who can build websites and will do it as a favour?’ sort and that I should probably stop suggesting unhelpful activations that noone in fact has the money to pay for.

Magic In All Of Us: On the one hand, you can imagine the sort of wild, frenzied spinning that my eyes do when I come across a vaguely-cutesy link with a title like ‘The Magic In All Of Us’; on the other, this is a brilliant and technically-impressive bit of work and as a result of the whole ‘mother died of motor neurone disease’ thing I have a bit of a personal link with eye tracking technology as used on this site. This is a webtoy developed by the Montefiori Einstein hospital in New York as part of its work with people suffering from neurological or neurodegenerative conditions, and lets people with reduced or nonexistent motor skills play a simple colouring-in game using eye-tracking technology; spend a few seconds calibrating your webcam and then you can use your eyes to guide a cursor as you colour in a range of different suitably-festive-looking scenes featuring, for some reason, a bunch of cartoon dogs. This is obviously designed for children and as such you may not find the whole ‘colour in some dogs’ thing hugely compelling, but a) the eyetracking tech is really good, and if nothing else it’s impressive to see what’s possible in this field right now; b) the whole thing is still a bit appallingly close to home, and as such this ruined me rather when I first played with it, and I hope you’ll forgive the slight authorial obsession here. PS – a small, bonus bit of eyetracking, in case you’re interested.

Santa Knows You: I don’t know, perhaps you’re someone who’s more convinced of their moral excellence and general probity than I am, but, in general, a website declaring to me that ‘Santa Knows You’ strikes me as more threatening than anything else – does he? What, exactly, does he think he knows, and what does he intend to do with that information? Anyway, if you’re less paranoid about being shopped to the police by Santa than I apparently appear to be, then you might like this SPECTACULAR bit of opportunistic grifting from some company or another, which has basically cobbled together a few free (or at the very least cheaply-accessible-via-API) tools to create this website which lets anyone create a PERSONALISED VIDEO FROM SANTA for their loved ones based on whatever HIGHLY PERSONAL INFORMATION you feed The Machine – it will cobble it together into a GPT’d script, text to voice it and then do some light lipsync-ish animation to make it all fit together with their CG santa model – ALL FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF $10 A POP! This is a classic bit of opportunism, and I can’t even be too angry about the grift when the first ‘reason you should pay us money’ proofpoint on the homepage is (no sh1t) ‘sending an AI-generated video message of a fictional persona designed mainly to foster the capitalist impulse in the young to your children fosters better behaviour in your progeny!’ Anyway, this is obviously horrible and empty, but should you still, after all this, be of the opinion that what your loved ones REALLY want for Christmas is a soulless message from a digital ghost then you can get (almost) exactly the same thing here for free – you’re welcome!

Ello: Not, sadly, the now-defunct social network from…*checks* 2014?! Dear Christ, I have been writing about this stuff for TOO LONG and I have not insignificant regrets about my life choices….no, instead this particular Ello is instead an AI-assisted app which enables parents to outsource yet another aspect of the whole ‘raising the meatsacks you spaffed into existence’ thing to The Machine via the medium of a platform that will read along with your children as they learn the basics of phonemes and dipthongs so that you can get on with the really important things like, I don’t know, min/maxing your BG3 save or getting really deep into the Bobby Fingers rabbithole. “Ello listens to your child read from real books, teaches and motivates them, and transforms them into enthusiastic readers,” runs the blurb, noting that “Ello uses patent-pending speech recognition and adaptive learning technology to engage with your child while they develop critical reading skills.” To be clear, I haven’t tried this and it might be AMAZING – but, equally, I find there to be something deeply fcuking sad about the idea (but then again I don’t have kids – those of you who do might well look at this and see an end to the fcuking Gruffalo, and weep hot, salty tears of relieved joy). The fact, though, that this is a $25 a month subscription service AND you don’t get to keep any books as part of that (that’s an extra $5 a book!) makes me feel less bad about being snarky about a company whose business won’t exist in a year’s time (NB – I realise that I occasionally say stuff like this and that it’s not-inconceivable that the people behind the company might read this and get upset; in the unlikely event that anyone from Ello DOES end up stumbling across this rubbish, rest assured that my predictive track record on, well, nearly-everything is ATROCIOUS, and as such my prediction of your eventual failure is an almost cast-iron guarantee of your future plutocracy). .

Touring: This feels like a reasonable potential real-world usecase for AI – Touring is a prototypical travel companion app which is designed to provide dynamic city tours to anyone, built on artificial intelligence. “Touring leverages generative AI, geolocation, 3D spatial information, speech synthesis and human-curated content to produce the world’s most advanced real-time audio guiding system. [It] fetches facts and information from various online sources, then crafts a cohesive story using GPT4 and text-to-speech technologies [and] uses geolocation to know where you are, and 3D maps to infer what you see. It avoids repetitive content and always offers something fresh.” Obviously it’s impossible to gauge this without trying it, and it’s inevitably going to be…well, a bit sh1t, frankly, at least to start with, but the possibilities here are genuinely exciting (if it’s possible to get truly ‘excited’ by the prospect of ‘being guided through life by a disembodied ominiscient voice’) – it’s not hard to imagine an idealised version of this sort of tech which combines realtime information from across various datasources with a deep knowledge of personal preferences to create a bespoke itinerary that works.

Exactly: HUGE caveat emptor with this site, but the premise behind it is really interesting – basically Exactly offers visual artists the opportunity to train a local generative AI model on their own work, effectively letting them create an AI assistant to create imagery in their own personal style. The extent to which this pleases you or fills you with horror will likely depend on your level of comfort with The Machine ripping off your schtick, but for one-man-band illustrators who want to speed up their workflows and create an assistant that ‘gets’ their style, this could be hugely useful and it’s certainly a lot simpler than having to download a local instance of Stable Diffusion (other open source visual models are available) and train your own. The platform ‘guarantees’ that the artist will own all materials produced with the model, and there is a tiered pricing system which goes from a (very) limited ‘free’ tier to an unlimited £40 pcm – obviously you can do this FAR cheaper and FAR more powerfully on your own, but for those without the technical chops to explore that then this might be a useful alternative.

Crossover: Have you ever wished that there was an online database which kept track of which actors have appeared in which films or tv shows, and which let you interrogate that information so as to let you immediately find out which programmes actor X and actor Y have been in together? No, of course you haven’t, why would you? And yet MERRY CHRISTMAS, for that is exactly what this website does (for a very limited selection of US TV shows).

Natural Language Playlists: Certainly not the first of these I’ve featured this year, but I am quite interested about how this sort of vaguely descriptive means of searching media might work and so I will happily link to another experiment which tries to find out. I asked it for a playlist of ‘songs that sound like the internet feels’ and got this in return – see what you think (also, this contains a song by VIN FCUKING DIESEL, and as such I declare this website a WINNER!).

Glorious Trainwrecks: I do love me a slightly-niche online community, and Glorious Trainwrecks is a perfect example – this site’s been going for YEARS (possibly 15) and exists to celebrate a particular type of videogame, the GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS of the title, games which are broken and shonky and janky but which for whatever reason WORK, and to celebrate the creativity and enthusiasm of the amateur digital noodler. This is very geeky, but I feel some of you (NO JUDGEMENT) might find it a compelling place to hang out for a bit: “Glorious Trainwrecks is about bringing back the spirit of postcardware, circa 1993. It’s about throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks. About bringing back a time when you didn’t care so much about “production values”, as much as ripping sound samples from your favourite television shows to use in your game, or animating pictures of yourself making goofy faces on your webcam. Where every ridiculous idea you had, you would just sit down and code. When you would make up a “company name” to legitimize dorking around on the computer with your friends. It is not about unfinished, unplayable games. If any part of a glorious trainwreck is terrible, it is terrible in a way that is AWESOME. Together, you and I will bring the true spirit of indie gaming back. Yes, you! For this site is about nothing, if it is not about getting off your ass and creating. Wikipedia claims that they used to stage trainwrecks (with empty trains, of course) for the amusement of the general population. Would the world not be a better place if we brought this tradition back? It doesn’t matter if you’ve got talent, so long as you’ve got gusto. Your game does not have to be coherent — but it does have to be finished.”

Start Pages: This is very much one of those links which for 99% of you will be an immediate ‘glaze over and skip’ and which for 1% of you will be an immediate bookmark. If you are in that 1%, know that I do ALL OF THIS for YOU. This is “A curated listing of beautiful and interesting Startpages from around the web” – ADMIT IT YOU LOVE IT.

ReelShorts: This is yet another TikTok channel which is attempting to make ‘look, TikTok is just TV ffs, why don’t we commission for it with that in mind?’ work as a thing – and this time with an apparent degree of success. Per this Rest of World article, ReelShorts is a Chinese media company which is producing episodic, schlocky, soap-style fantasy romance content on TikTok – specifically, as you will see when you click on the link and visit their profile, a surprising quantity of fictions about ALPHA WEREWOLVES and their sociosexual entanglements. What are ALPHA WEREWOLVES like, I hear you cry as one? Well, they mostly tend to have the sort of bland, square-jawed good looks of the sorts of people you might have seen on The Bold and the Beautiful circa 1992 combined with the broad thespian range one might ordinarily associate with a piece of toast, and they seem to spend their time in a variety of non-specific locations delivering…very…stilted…dialogue heavy with INTENSITY and LONGING and INNUENDO and the promise that there might be some Light Werewolf Alpha Foreplay just round the corner…look, the content here is DREADFUL (a sub-Hallmark channel level of acting and writing) and the plots are from what I can tell wafer thin, and it’s all about SEXY BUSINESS WEREWOLVES FFS, and yet…just look how MUCH of it there is! I don’t quite know what to think – on the one hand this is sort-of interesting as a business model, and from a cultural point of view; on the other, if you look at this stuff (the quality! The quantity! The production values! The fact that, honestly, half of it makes NO SENSE AT ALL!) and think ‘no, there is something unique and special about human creativity that The Machine will never be able to match, and noone will EVER want to watch fictions created by an AI because they have no soul!’ then, well, I have a bridge to sell you. I remain, honestly, ASTONISHED by the sort of crap that people are willing to stare at on a screen (says the man who spends literally 12 hours a day plugged into the fcuking internet like some parody of an addict, lol).

Sunday Nobody Art: Also a TikTok channel! Look, I don’t really want to spoil this, but it is LOVELY and, honestly, the sort of thing I would love to see more people with craft-y skills doing (as ever, should any of you wish to just sort of blithely do what I tell you, that would be lovely thankyou).

The IKAT Christmas Pyramid: I LOVE THIS. Chemnitz Technical Uuniversity in Germany have set up a FESTIVE PYRAMID THINGY in their lab – visitors to this website can click a button to spin the pyramid IN REAL LIFE and see the impact of their actions on the live webcam. This is obviously totally pointless, but I don’t think I will ever get over the excitement at seeing my actions on a website having near-realtime real-world impact, and I can’t be the only one – PLEASE can we have more largely-frivolous physical/digital integrations like this, please? Oh go one, I’ll even let you use the word ‘phygital’ to describe them.

By Unpis

NEXT UP HAVE A LOVELY WINTERY SELECTION OF WHAT MIXCLOUD SEEMS TO WANT TO CALL ‘DARK AMBIENT’ BUT WHICH I WOULD PROBABLY JUST CALL ‘GOOD SONGS’, COMPILED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO THANK EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU FOR YOUR EYES AND YOUR CLICKS THIS YEAR, PT.2: :

The GCHQ Christmas Challenge: Christmas is a time for giving, for receiving, for eating and drinking and celebrating (and crying and feeling alone and wishing it would all stop forever – delete as applicable!), and, if British security institution GCHQ has its way, for gently inculcating young minds into the exciting world of cryptography and spycraft! Every year the security and intelligence organisation publishes a set of puzzles designed to be completed by kids, partly as a bit of fun and partly as a means of identifying the SUPERSPIES OF THE FUTURE via the medium of some gentle word and logic games. The main link takes you direct to the PDF, but if you want a bit more info and supporting materials, etc, then you can find them here – these are challenging but not TOO challenging (oh, ok, fine, I only did the first three – it may well become IMPOSSIBLE by the time you get to the end, so be warned) and it might be a nice way for some (admittedly slightly peculiar) kids to pass an hour or two (although to be honest if I discovered that my kids were a natural dab hand at this sort of thinking I would be…a bit unsettled, to be honest, and might consider sweeping the house for bugs).
NCube: Sticking with ‘things I don’t really understand’, would you like to see ‘a visual representation of objects moving in the 4th, 5th and nth dimensions’? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This might take a bit of time to load (or at least it will if your laptop is of similar quality to mine), but when it does…well, when it does you’ll be confronted by a baffling-but-mesmerising 3d shape sort of spinning and folding in on itself, and to be honest this is the sort of thing that with a blotter of acid and some comfortable surroundings you could probably confuse yourself with until midway through 2024. If you’re less of a mathematical pygmy than I am, you might find the explanation and subsequent discussion of this found here of interest – tbh though I just like the pretty spinning box thingies, whichever dimension I’m supposed to believe they’re in.
Spiderharp: It feels that in the earlier (BETTER) days of the web you couldn’t go a week without discovering a new, esoteric and almost-certainly-unplayable new musical instrument designed by some secretive savant or another – now, though, that flood seems to have slowed to a trickle, which personally saddens me. While we can all agree that the concept of ‘musical instruments’ peaked in 2006 with the invention of ‘The Dube’ by former-professional-footballer-turned-house-flipper Dion Dublin, it’s nice to see that there are still people out there flying the flag for sonic esoterica – the Spiderharp is…ok, it’s basically a harp that looks like a spider’s web (octagonal) and which has a bit of tech at its centre which effectively analyses the string vibrations and their relative place on the ‘web’ of the instrument and uses that data to place the audio in a physical space, say, or to apply different effects to the notes as their played…this is VERY complex, basically, but the videos on the site demonstrate that it’s possible to make beautiful music with it. I am quite excited to see what sort of fun and weird sonic experimentation results from the coming multimodal AI tsunami, personally-speaking.
The Old Bailey Online: I have DEFINITELY featured this before, but the site’s just had a major refresh and is now reoptimised for mobiles, and has better tagging, and if there was every a time to spend a few hours plugging terms like ‘pudding’ or ‘clap’ into a record of the historic crimes of London then THIS IS IT. Honestly, this is endlessly entertaining in a way that feels almost…weirdly voyeuristic, frankly.
An Ode To Forever: Upsettingly I have literally no notes for this – no context, no provenance, nothing – which is a real shame because honestly I think it is BEAUTIFUL. An Ode To Forever is just a selection of photographs, scrolling seemingly into eternity, presented alone with no commentary or data or identifying information about where or when or who; there’s a general sort of mid-20th-century European aesthetic about many of these that remind me specifically of 1970s Rome (or at least all the photos I’ve seen of it from before I was born), but, generally, this is just what I believe the kids call A VIBE, and I could honestly just scroll this for 30 minutes or so while smoking a neverending stream of very thing cigarettes. This website makes me feel a very specific way for which I don’t have a word to hand, which is, in some ways, the highest compliment I can pay it.
Noise: This is a potentially-useful (and usefully-free) service designed to offer musicians with an Artist Page on Spotify the opportunity to quickly spin up a personal website which is a bit less obviously-shonky than the standard LinkTree or similar which emergent artists with no budget or dev skills often end up with. Noise basically pulls the data from your Artist page and arranges it into one of a series of reasonably-customisable templates, meaning anyone can knock together a showcase of their songs, contact info and other material posted to the Spotify page, complete with photos and the rest, all of which is free and all of which pulls from Spotify and updates automatically meaning you don’t have to worry about administering A N Other web presence. Obviously this is significantly less good than, you know, building and hosting your own site, but as a free tool for the emergent this could be useful.
The Drymipholia Collective: Do YOU live in (a very specific section of) North America? Would YOU like to participate in an agricultural hobby project which is aiming to breed avocados that will flourish and fruit in the currently-unprepossessing climactic environment of the “lowlands around the Salish Sea, or along the oceanside coast of the Olympic Peninsula”? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! I appreciate the the number of people likely to be either interested in this or eligible to participate is likely to be somewhere in the region of ‘zero’, but I am personally charmed by this very, very specific project and wish them all luck in their avocado cultivating endeavours.
Macroevolution: Oh this is a TREAT. A *very* specific, *very* personal website in which the author presents a LOT of information about some topics that are very close to their heart: specifically, er, mammalian hybrids, and historical biographies of famed biologists. You can get a feel for the sort of vibe going on here from one of the ‘Introduction’ pages in which the site’s author and curator talks about the scope of his project: “this section lacks an inherent quality of a scientific work because the intent here is to be strictly factual. Scientists almost never attempt to limit themselves to fact. Instead, they constantly make inferences about reality based on their theories about the nature of reality. In other words, scientific writings are permeated with beliefs. They are theory laden.” PESKY SCIENTISTS WITH THEIR INABILITY TO ATTAIN A STATE OF PURE AND COMPLETE OBJECTIVITY! Anyway, this is…this is very peculiar, and FULL of weird stuff – although it’s probably worth bearing in mind that a lot of the ‘weird stuff’ it’s full of involves animal biology and as such there is some…quite esoteric photography on there, and I wouldn’t feel wholly confident clicking around were I an animal lover and someone who got a bit squeamish about the whole ‘meat and viscera of life’ thing. Still, who doesn’t want a website with a whole section dedicated to the possibility of ever being able to breed a canine-bovine hybrid? NO FCUKER, etc!
Stamps Back: I’m conscious of the fact that we’ve all got a lot of time to fill over the next few weeks, and we might occasionally need SOOTHING LONGFORM CONTENT to help smooth the interfamilial cracks – hopefully Stamps Back will help in some small way. The site collects a series of documentaries about the Bulgarian tech underground scene of the 80s, and how enthusiasts and technologists helped works and ideas from across the iron transmit via samisdat through the Budapest and Bucharest and other central European countries then under Soviet rule. OK, fine, your mileage for this will largely depend on you appetite for footage of middle-aged men in leather jackets talking about how amazing it was to see a thrice-photocopied copy of C64 User for the first time, but there’s something really interesting about the way in which videogames and coding connoted freedom and liberation and the West during the cold war, and now I come to think if it there’s something about general ‘feel’ of these films (there are 5 different docs on the site, though one appears to be offline at present) that seems apt for THE NOW.
The Worst Tweets of 2023: This is probably the last year it will make sense to run one of these – by this time next year it’s entirely possible that the only people left on the site will be the cryptofloggers and the nazis, and that EVERY Tweet will be The Worst! Still, until Elon finally manages to fcuk the site in half for good we can still enjoy some of the most unhinged opinions being expressed by some of the worst people on the planet (in the main, North Americans) – there are four separate threads within this original Tweet so you’ll have to click through to each to get the full horror, but there are some genuine classics in this year’s selection (and that’s without allowing ANY of Elon’s own). Pick your own, but personally I’m finding it hard to see far beyond ‘I would rather marry a woman who had sex with dogs but was a virgin with humans’ for the most brain-damaged statement of the lot.
SINWP Bird Photographer of the Year: SINWP, as any fule kno, stands for ‘The Society of International Nature and Wildlife Photographers’, and this year’s pick of THE BEST BIRD PHOTOS is a cracking selection – the link takes you to ALL the entires, and there are hundreds to click through for the twitchers amongst you.
The Pudding Cup Winners: I featured the call for entries in The Pudding’s contest to find the best ‘visual and data-driven’ stories of the year a few weeks back; now the site has picked its winners, and there are some GREAT examples of ‘telling stories through data, but in a pretty way’.
Smartphone Tutorials: Look, I know none of YOU will need this, but given that lots of people are set to spend an extended period of time with often elderly relatives I figured that you might find this site worth bookmarking – it’s a simple, clear, text-only guide to doing loads of simple-but-useful stuff on your mobile, covering a range of different models and operating systems and basically designed to offer a really useful resource next time someone who you love and respect but whose approach to IT makes you want to commit some sort of geronticidal offence approaches you to ask if you can ‘make their messages come back please’.
Cry Once A Week: LOL AT THE IDEA THAT ANYONE IS GOING TO NEED A WEBSITE TO HELP MAKE THEMSELVES CRY! Still, if you ever need a reliable source of tearjerking material then just click and let this site serve you up some GENUINELY SAD pop culture material – potentially useful if you need to feign sadness or remorse at short order, or if your own personal mind cinema is yet to be filled with the ghosts of the untimely dead.
Na’avi Reborns: On the one hand, it’s widely accepted that the film ‘Avatar’ and its sequel have not had any sort of lasting impact on Western culture whatsoever, despite their preposteriously-impressive box office performance; on the other, if that’s true then explain THESE horrorshows. You’re aware, right, of the fact that the race of tall blue humanoid people from the Avatar universe are called the ‘Na’avi’, right? You’re also aware of the fact that there is a niche-but-fanatical community of adults who like purchasing and playing dress-up with ‘reborns’, small dolls designed to look incredibly, disturbingly like actual, human infants? Now imagine what happens when you violently smush those two seemingly-disparate concepts together – are you imagining? ARE YOU? Great, now click the link and realise that whatever you were thinking of is nowhere near as horrible and creepy and wrong as what’s on sale on Etsy under ‘Na’avi Reborns’. Honestly, I don’t really want to spoil this for you but, well, a) THESE LOOK LIKE ALIEN BABY CORPSES FFS; and b) WHY ARE SO MANY OF THEM ANATOMICALLY-CORRECT?!; and also c) IF YOU OWN ONE OF THESE YOU PROBABLY OUGHT TO BE ON SOME SORT OF REGISTER I AM SORRY BUT IT IS TRUE.
Missile Mentor: This is more ‘the germ of an interesting idea’ than it is ‘brilliantly-compelling ludic experience’, but still. The idea is that you play a game of missile command against your opponent, in realtime – you hold your mouse button to determine the power/distance of your shots as you each attempt to blow up the other’s base first, with the twist coming with the addition of a further missile silo for each player, which is controlled by AI. Each player’s AI model is determined by their own performance – so your skill determines the resulting quality of the AI model which has been trained on you. In practice this doesn’t make for hugely-interesting gameplay, but you can imagine how this could end up being developed into something more interesting with a more involved gameplay mechanic (and smarter AI).
20 Words, 20 Seconds: This might be the best browser-based word game I have played all year – no, really, I am serious. It is BRILLIANT and has a terrifyingly-sticky ‘one more go’ vibe to it which sucks you in something chronic. It is also IMPOSSIBLE to do all 20 words in 20 seconds (and I am sticking to that, and anyone who proves otherwise is a FREAK).
Dungeon Sweeper: Our final browsergame of 2023 is this lovely, soothing cross between an 8bit pixelart RPG and Minesweeper, which really shouldn’t work but which really does; it’s in Japanese, but you can find some rudimentary instructions on the page and you can sort of get the general idea if you just fiddle around for a few minutes. This is VERY soothing and a perfect way of smoothing your brain should spending significant periods of the next few weeks in close proximity to your family leave it feeling more crenellated than you might like.

By Xenia Fuentes

WE FINISH THIS YEAR WITH AN ALBUM BY FLOFILZ WHO WAS ONE OF THE ARTISTS I ENJOYED DISCOVERING THE MOST IN 2023 AND WHO I HOPE YOU LIKE TOO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Beautiful Music CDs: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, this is the website of what as far as I can tell is a tiny record label promoting VERY OBSCURE musicians – there are links to buy albums, but you can also here sample tracks from a range of the label’s stars, so should you be curious as to what the audio stylings of someone who self-describes as “Ol’ boy from Texas seeks to transcend his bodily existence and become a Brand®, immortalizing his likeness and music in the form of an Album™” then, well, this may be your new favourite label in the world.

Spicy England: Slightly astonished I’ve not featured this before, but apparently not – Spicy England does the vitally important job of providing Google Streetview images of the industrial estates on which the country’s condiments and spices are imported to, distributed from, or packaged – this is SO wonderfully mundane that it probably ought to be a real show at the Whitechapel.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Smock Frocks: Shall we do a think in 2024, Readers of Curios? Shall we BRING BACK THE SMOCK? In case you’re interested, all of the smock sartoralism you could ever wish for can be found on this Insta account. No, really, YOU ARE WELCOME!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

The Year of GPT: You’re going to see a LOT of these sorts of summaries over the coming weeks as every single newspaper and magazine with delusions of cultural relevance decides to give us their own potted history of The Year The AI Stuff Was Inescapable – this is the New York Times’ take, which has the benefit of being early and not TOO wordy, and is actually a reasonable overview of ‘all the stuff that has happened and where it’s all shaken out at the fag-end of 2023’. If you’ve been following all the various twists and turns in the generative AI story over the past 12 months then this is unlikely to be revelatory, but if you want a quick catch-up primer on How We Got Here then this is a reasonable place to get it. “But Matt!”, I hear you all cry, supplicatory hands raised, “what do YOU think about all of this? What is YOUR coruscating end-of-year take on all of this AI stuff? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN????” To which I say “lol that any of you care what I think”, but also, if you MUST ask, that “I am broadly bullish on AI and its long-term impacts on society, but I think that it is going to make a lot of things about society and life much, much worse for a significant number of people before we start to see the big species-level benefits, and that depreciation is going to start in earnest next year”, in case you wanted ANOTHER reason to look ahead with happy anticipation.

AI and Trust: A related piece of writing by Bruce Schneier which looks at how we think of systems and the ‘trust’ we place in them, and the extent to which it is important that we begin to think differently about AI technologies and systems because they are about to become embedded into everything that we interact with and do, and that will change the nature of those interactions and the way in which things work in materially-significant ways which in turn should affect the extent to which we place ‘trust’ in digital systems, and indeed how we conceive of ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ in a system at all. It is full of important questions like this one, which have implications across usage and service design and language and all sorts of things, and which strike me as just as important, if not moreso, than questions of whether the machine is going to paperclip us all into oblivion or not. “There is something we haven’t discussed when it comes to trust: power. Sometimes we have no choice but to trust someone or something because they are powerful. We are forced to trust the local police, because they’re the only law enforcement authority in town. We are forced to trust some corporations, because there aren’t viable alternatives. To be more precise, we have no choice but to entrust ourselves to them. We will be in this same position with AI. We will have no choice but to entrust ourselves to their decision-making. The friend/service confusion will help mask this power differential. We will forget how powerful the corporation behind the AI is, because we will be fixated on the person we think the AI is.”

A New Turing Test: The idea that the base-level concept of the Turing Test needs rethinking in light of the new wave of generative AIs is not a new one, but I liked the framing of ‘how we might want to critically look at digital artefacts to assess whether they are made by machines or not’ in this piece of writing; “This year, perhaps in order to get at Gornick’s why, I added a new Turing-esque test to my list of rubrics: expressiveness. It has three simple criteria: 1) It feels like it came from someone. It contain evidence of complex, emotive human detritus. Feeling human-like isn’t enough: it couldn’t have been made by “just anyone,” and instead leans into the unique perspective of the specific person/people who made it. 2) It feels like it was meant for someone. It is a work concerned with and designed for a particular audience, and the audience can feel that intention when they consume it. 3) It feels like it belongs in a particular context. It is aware of the place, time, culture, and artistic medium in which it will be consumed. Its form and content are in conversation with each other. It is not afraid to converse with the past, elevating, rather than concealing, its inspiration.” This is, I think, a genuinely useful lens through which to look at everything that we consume, see and create (and one which it would be nice if every single brand in the world which continues to spaff out appalling ‘content’ on an hourly basis could take to heart please thankyou).

Science Is Becoming Less Human: One of the recurring themes of my impotent railing against the machine this year has been the question of ‘how do we learn how to think if we just get the answers to all our questions direct from The Machine?’ – a slightly better and more rigorous investigation of this issue is offered here in the Atlantic, specifically asking the question of how we will/should react when we get to the (not-too-distant) future in which The Machine can just pull scientific ‘truths’ out of the ether and we just sort of have to accept them because we haven’t got the faintest idea of how it arrived at said ‘truth’ or indeed how one might go about retroactively proving it. You may be unsurprised to learn, by the way, that the answer is ‘no fcuking idea!’.

The Year Twitter Died: I mean, it hasn’t stopped twitching yet, but it does rather feel like a corpse being animated by the thousands of maggots pulsing beneath its rotten dermis rather than anything connoting actual life – this link takes you to the himepage for The Verge’s four exhaustive bits eulogising Twitter, recalling, variously, its mad hold on the world’s media over the past decade, its insanely indulgent working culture, the madness of Going Viral, and, best of all, an infinitely-scrolling library of some of the best/worst/maddest tweets of the site’s history. If you’re as fundamentally poisoned by Twitter as I have doubtless been then this will be a bittersweet eulogy – I can’t help but hope that Musk somehow just decides to cut his losses and that the site comes back, but tbh I am probably just going to have to accept that everyone’s going to move to Threads and I will have to fill the gaping void in my life with skag or something.

The History of Pipes: I appreciate that the number of you likely to have an affectionate memory of a briefly-extant and even-then-niche bit of consumer-facing webwonkery is…small, but for the few of you for whom this rings a bell I reckon it will be a bittersweet trip down memory lane. Yahoo Pipes was basically a really smart visual interface that let users customise information sources from all around the web, effectively letting anyone who could be bothered homebrew their own information sources to a staggering degree of customisability – basically a sort of ‘if this then that’ for content pulled in through RSS feeds. Per the piece, “Want to know whether the latest logged earthquakes were near you? Aggregate 100 top news sites, but only see items that mention cats? Get a steady stream of sport scores, scraped from sites that don’t offer an RSS feed? Find a rental apartment amidst those posted on Craigslist and other online apartment listings that fits your price range and is near a park? Exclude stories on topics you’re not interested in from publications you already follow?” – this was all possible with Pipes. And then it wasn’t, because it turned out that not enough people could be bothered to fiddle with the software and Yahoo! rightly surmised that most people were more than happy with the increasingly-well-triaged-and-targeted algosorted pabulum being fed to them and didn’t want the hassle of making their own…This feels very much like an example of something that should have succeeded in some small way, that should have become embedded, but which didn’t and which as a result has resulted in a marginally less good online experience for everyone. Also, given the extent to which we are all getting our own intensely-personalised feeds, and to which I think Ryan Broderick’s recent predictions about users being able to effectively ‘sell’ their own algofeeds to others are totally correct, this feels HUGELY prescient. NB – this is designed up to look like an old MacOS interface and is HORRIBLY slow as a result, but bear with it.

Why Are So Many People On The Left Sliding Right?: This feels timely, given 2023 has given us yet another bunch of people going from ‘just asking questions!’ to ‘posting borderline-fascistic rhetoric on main!’ (and it really is astonishing how the media seems to be able to expand to fit a nearly-infinite quantity of them within its welcoming arms!) – what is behind the increasingly-prevalent trend that sees people who would maybe two or three years ago have described themselves as ‘left of centre’ moving towards holding opinions that are significantly more ‘Kinder, Kirche, Kuche’? The article doesn’t offer any easy answers, but I found its presentation of the idea of ‘diagonalism’ interesting to explain some of the shifts: diagonalism “rejects conventional labels of left and right, even as it borrows elements from both, sharing “a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” It’s often marked by “a dedication to disruptive decentralization, a desire for distributed knowledge and thus distributed power, and a susceptibility to right-wing radicalization.” The people who comprise diagonalist movements come in various forms: movement hustlers gamifying politics; left-to-right ideologues who claim they didn’t leave the Left, the Left left them; and far-right esoterics. It has drawn wellness enthusiasts as well as neo-Nazis, and has praised QAnon. Unlike a horseshoe, the diagonalist path draws from not just the Left but also the center and the greater hinterlands, where everyday people hadn’t previously thought much about politics at all.” I would imagine anyone vaguely to the left of centre knows someone to whom they can apply this sort of analysis.

The Rise and Fall of Podcasting: At the end of a year in which it seems that I am literally one of the only three people in the UK who doesn’t listen to one of the ‘The Rest Is…’ series of podcasts (my big prediction for 2024 – the Lineker backlash starts here and someone does a big expose’ on how much he adores gak and how this maps onto his status as avatar for a certain type of liberal persona), I found this article really interesting – this is by one Adam Davidson, who created the leading NPR ‘Planet Money’ podcast and knows a thing or two about the medium, talking about how the economics of the medium have shifted as it has become more popular and Big Media has gotten involved – if you’re involved in the pointy, practical end of podcasting this is a really good read about the boring business detail of making money out of churning content. BONUS PODCAST-RELATED CONTENT: this article in Slate looks at the shifting economics of the business and the difficulties of operating at the very top and very bottom of the market.

Fortnite X Guitar Hero: After last week’s LEGO x Fortnite announcement comes this news – basically you can now play Guitar Hero inside Fortnite, is the upshot, but the interesting part here is that this is yet ANOTHER building block in the wider ‘Fortnite is becoming the metaverse, whatever the fcuk we are currently pretending that word means’ discourse. It’s now a place where you can meet up to play Battle Royale shooting games, or to see a gig, or to build collaborative digital worlds, or do digital karaoke with your mates, or just simply to hang out and chat in…Still, I bet the people who’ve poured millions into Decentraland and the Sandbox feel fine about it, no really I am sure they do.

Swiftie Politicians: An interesting piece on Rest of World looking at how politicians in Mexico have been using fandoms as an electoral tool – specifically waxing lyrical about their attachment to Taylor Swift in order to try and recruit some of her famously-rabid fanbase to their cause. The strategists in this piece make no attempt to hide the naked calculation behind this, and I suppose it makes sense given the insane power these fan groups can wield en masse, but it’s impossible not to feel a soul-deep level of ick when you read paragraphs like this one: “Finally someone on Ebrard’s team suggested posting a video in which he outed himself as a BTS fan, according to Rafael Morales, a political consultant in Mexico City who worked on Ebrard’s digital strategy. The video drew over one million views and hundreds of comments. Some commenters even promised to vote for Ebrard if he managed to bring a BTS concert to Mexico. Ebrard followed up with a video where he promised to bring the K-pop group to the country if he won the presidency.” Given we’re (HOPEFULLY PLEASE GOD) less than a year out from a general election in the UK, shall we all start taking bets on which of this country’s politicos are most likely to employ similar tactics? It wouldn’t surprise me AT ALL if Starmer ends up doing some sort of appalling interview when he talks about being ‘really into’ KPop, but my absolute nailed-on favourite here is one-woman self-directed-spotlight Jess Philips, who I can totally imagine coming out as a fan of Blackpink as soon as she feels the need to court the kids.

Is Northern Ireland a Failed State?: I am embarrassingly ignorant on the subject of the politics of Northern Ireland, but had vaguely filed the idea that the region wasn’t performing brilliantly in the back of my head somewhere without really paying too much attention to it – this overview of How Things Are Going is a sobering one, and, while I can’t presume to know whether it’s even-handed and fair, I can be fairly confident in saying that it’s a massive fcuking indictment of the past 15 years of domestic government.

AI Astrology: This is ostensibly about the boom in AI-enabled astrology apps, purporting to offer highly-tailored, massively accurate readings (which, obvs, is in fact just a bunch of highly-prompted GPT doggerel) to the user to guide their daily actions in the manner best-advised by the cosmos – in fact, though, this is more about the coming reality in which (just to once again for the final time this year hammer once again at one of my favourite topics) EVERYONE IS GETTING HYPERPERSONAL DIRECTIONAL ADVICE FROM UNKNOWABLE AI ASSISTANTS – is it ok that we’re literally giving everyone in the world the chance to have a ‘friend’, or series of ‘friends’, who talk in a way that sounds human and who give you personal advice and who sound like they really care but which in actual fact are just REALLY HARD MATHS with a fancy linguistic wrapper, trained on content you don’t know with motivational weights you can’t possibly scry? IS IT? I would posit, gentle reader, that it really is not, and yet HERE WE INCREASINGLY FCUKING ARE.

Is Social Media Killing Standup Comedy?: I checked this piece with my resident stand-up comedy expert friend Alex, who has done standup and is interested in the discipline, and he thought that this was a particularly North American-feeling piece – so bear that in mind when you read it, and consider that things might be different elsewhere. Still, I found the general thrust here – that there is something fundamentally different about doing standup comedy to post-pandemic audiences who are now far more used to consuming content through a tiny screen in their palm – interesting, and the discussion about shifting styles and techniques comedians are adopting in response will be fascinating to anyone into either comedy or the general question of ‘maintaining people’s attention and interest’. Also I am 100% stealing the line about ‘are you disabled or just annoying?’ to use on every single <20 year old I meet.

Catching Catfish: Articles about romance scammers online are nothing new, but enjoyed this investigation by the New Statesman into the specific work undertaken by DC Rebecca Mason of the Met who specialises in tracing and prosecuting this type of crime – it’s a really sensitively-written piece, but it’s impossible not to feel sad at the thought of these lonely older men and women who in many cases quite clearly know that something is amiss but who can’t let go of the fantasy because without it they have nothing. Again – and sorry about this, but I can’t help but be Cassandra here – it’s impossible not to see AI-generated content as opening up whole new terrifying vectors when it comes to this stuff; we’re less than18m out from people being able to manage and administer entire, self-guiding armies of these sorts of bots, you know, each with personality archetypes and coherent backstories and which will be able to juggle 100s of cross-platform, multimedia conversations simultaneously across dozens of platforms (and yes, I appreciate that sounds like scifi hyperbole but it is 100% true, guaranteed).

The Punchdrunk Videogame That Never Was: I first encountered Pundrunk in about 200…6, I think, via their smaller experimental skunkworks Gideon Reeling (geddit? SAY IT OUT LOUD, SLOWLY), and from that point on fell slightly in love with the whole concept of personalised, bespoke interactive experiences that blurred the lines between videogames and theatre – I’ve since come to the conclusion (much like Punchdrunk, in fairness) that they have taken their particular brand of ‘interactive participatory theatre’ as far as it can go and need to try new stuff, and this EXCELLENT piece looks at one such attempt. For several years, Punchdrunk worked with Niantic on a concept that was, in theory at least, going to work as a kind of mass-scale digital ARG-type experience (it will make sense when you read it, I promise you), which combined digital treasure hunts with actual, real-world events with real actors and EXPERIENCES that players could get involved with – so basically a Perplex City/I Love Bees-type thing, but with HUGE SCALE and ambition and with a geolocation layer built in through the Niantic connection. Inevitably it was far too ambitious and ended up getting shelved, but this is a really interesting look back at what it might have been, and some of the concepts that were explored during its evolution. As someone who for years tried to pitch ‘immersive press trip’ or ‘interactive gamified experience’ to EVERY SINGLE FCUKING CLIENT (honestly, if I worked with you between about 2006-2015 then I AM SORRY FOR BEING SO MONOMANIACAL), this piece explains neatly why it is so fcuking hard to do.

The Airing of Grievances: Apparently every year the Tampa Bay Times asks its readers to share the things that have annoyed them over the past year, and compiles them into a list of ‘petty grievances’ – as you can imagine, this is SUPERB and is basically every bit as petty and maddening and cathartic as you would hope. These are mostly obviously North American and as such some are not hugely-relatable, but there is enough stuff in here that speaks to the UNIVERSAL PAIN OF HUMAN EXISTENCE that you can keep yourself amused for HOURS by nodding along to such minor-but-important irritations such as ‘The amount of nosepickings I’m finding in library books these days’ or “FaceTiming, Zooming, etc. Why? Why do we have to talk over video? I know what you look like. You know what I look like. We don’t need to see each other (and, frankly, I don’t want to see you).” LIFE IS PAIN, etc etc.

The Best Cryptic Clues: It’s long been a source of minor intellectual shame that I have no fcuking clue whatsoever how to solve cryptic crossword clues – that didn’t stop my from enjoying this article, which compiles some of the best clues that the author has ever seen. I have to warn you, this made me feel VERY STUPID on occasion as there are a few of these that continued to make no sense to me whatsoever despite their having been explained in patient prose – that said, it’s equally possible that this will unlock some hitherto-unknown puzzling ability within you (but if it does, can you keep it to yourself please? ta) so, you know, HAVE AT IT.

How To Crash a Chanel Party:I enjoyed this piece in the Manchester Mill, in which Mollie Simpson blags her way into the Chanel afterparty in Manchester (which followed the brand’s catwalk show in the city the other week) and did a really good job of deglamourising the whole experience – aside from anything else, the Mill is a proper journalistic good news story at a time when they’re rarer than hen’s teeth, so it’s nice to link to a new outlet that’s on-the-up.

Hiding Art In Melrose Place: OH GOD I LOVE THIS STORY SO MUCH. You know the TV show Melrose Place, right, from the 90s? Did you know that throughout several early series there was a bunch of art students working to place subversive, pointed pieces of political commentary in the otherwise-blandly-conservative show via the medium of specially-designed props, background artworks and the rest? NO YOU DID NOT! Honestly, this is HEROIC and while obviously noone other than them ever really knew it was happening I think it is SO artistically pure – really, I can’t stress enough how much I want each and every one of you working on long-term boring client projects to know that THIS IS POSSIBLE and YOU CAN ALL MAKE A FUN DIFFERENCE and, basically, that if you work on TEAM FORD or somesuch massive, multiagency, client-specific creative team that you have a DUTY to subvert the incredibly boring crap you’re being forced to spaff out by hiding fun, interesting and pointed messages in the source code or as acrostics on a wall of tinder-dry text. PROMISE ME YOU WILL AT LEAST TRY?????

Just Your Handyman: I really enjoyed this essay, about being a handyman – but also about doing a small job, in a small life, and that being enough. This paragraph in particular I thought was lovely (if sad) in its self-awareness: “Now, I am a small man; I live a small life where I make careful, modest choices. I am not an entrepreneur, an adventurer, or a risk-taker. I don’t have the freewheeling imagination of an artist. Also, I know all too well that I come from a line of sensitive souls touched with mental health troubles that range from chronic everyday melancholy to the catastrophic. My mental health is like a bike with tires at 30 PSI instead of the suggested 80. I can pedal along most of the time and usually get where I need to go, but I spend a lot more emotional energy than necessary. I am not the kind of man who is likely to guide my children to greatness.”

Angels:Churches and history and architecture and death and memory in the Roman capital. Bit of a self-indulgent one, this, but I hope you’ll forgive me – it’s a beautiful piece of writing, though, even if the city doesn’t mean to you what it does to me.

Between Conversion and Repentance: Our final longread of the week, and of the year, is this excerpt from Christian Wiman’s book ‘Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair’; I can’t promise that it will indeed guard against despair, or indeed any other sort of existential unmooring you might face as the year draws to a close, but I do guarantee that it’s a collection of gorgeous fragments of writing and some of the most beautiful poetic prose I’ve read in 2023.

My girlfriend’s cat Lebowski, who sadly died a year ago but who would very much wish you a Merry Christmas were he still alive

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is ‘Animation vs Physics’ – it’s by the same person who did ‘Animation vs Maths’ a while back, and this is absolutely stellar. If you’ve not seen it, click this and enjoy – it’s worth every single one of its 8m views so far.

There’s a new Dracula Flow – I still don’t know what this is, but I am happy it exists. VITRUVIAN MAN FLEXIBILITY!

I’ve gotten quite into listening to what (to my mind at least) sounds like wildly-unseasonal music over the past few weeks – this is another track that doesn’t quite fit with the cold, bleak streets of North London in December, conjuring far warmer climes with its amapiano stylings and general laid-back vibe. This called ‘Happiness’ and it’s by Sarz feat.Asake & Gunna.

This is not exactly a subtle song, and it does have ‘BIG STADIUM TORCHLIGHT ANTHEM’ written through it like a stick of rock, but I really liked it (and thought the video was really strong, love me a skate session, and more pregnant artists in videos please!) – it does feel slightly like the sort of song that someone might have a really cathartic crying jag to, so, er, fill your boots! The track’s called ‘Bend’ and it’s sung by Middle Kids.

If I told you that I thought this track, called ‘Foul’, and by a band called ‘Special Interest’, sounded a lot like a snot-nosed Atari Teenage Riot would it make you click? GREAT!

I…I don’t understand what this is, but I am compelled to share it with you. It’s horrible – audio-wise I find it almost uniquely-unpleasant, like ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ but worse – but I absolutely ADORE the video and the insanely-weird, incredibly-dense storytelling that’s going on. WHAT IS THIS ABOUT? WHO IS IT FOR? I have no idea, maybe you can find out. This is called ‘Soul Hole’ and, honestly, WHAT a video this is.

I have a feeling that Eliza McLean is a TikTok person – this sounds like TikTok music but I don’t care, I thought this little song was a beautiful and incredibly sad little piece of storytelling and I think it feels like an appropriate (if to reiterate, very sad) tune for the end of a year in which it feels like everyone continues to fracture a little more by the week. The song is called ‘’16’ (of course it is).

Finally this week – THIS YEAR – we present the LAUDED AND MUCH COVETED WEB CURIOS SONG OF THE YEAR AWARD! This year it is presented to Dani Miller for her track ‘Hard Way’ which I have played semi-incessantly since I first heard it and whose tune has basically burrowed itself within me to the point where I’m never getting rid of it. THAT WAS 2023 NOW LET’S ALL TRY NOT TO LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT YEAR BYE!

Webcurios 08/12/23

December 8, 2023

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Reading Time: 35 minutes

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO!

I did what I am reasonably certain is my last bit of work before Christmas yesterday – call me Stakhanov! – and as such it’s frankly a miracle I could be bothered to drag myself from my pit at 6am this morning to spaff this out. THANK ME! BE GRATEFUL!

Ahem.

I appreciate that for those of you with more conventional approaches to ‘having a career’ there may be a few more weeks of desultory, pointless ‘work’ to get through before you get to spend a fortnight fois gras-ing yourself with Celebrations, though, so consider this week’s edition a thankyou for all your hard work making presentations or whatever it is that you all do.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are a brilliant and special team member who adds real value every single day, and don’t let ANYONE tell you otherwise.

By Kazumasa Nagai

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH 40 MINUTES OF JAZZ PIANO AND FRENCH HIPHOP COORDINATED BY THE GENIUS THAT IS CHILLY GONZALES!

THE SECTION WHICH IS AT LEAST RELIEVED THAT TIME DIDN’T TRY AND MAKE CHATGPT ITS PERSON OF THE YEAR, PT.1:

Google Gemini: AN EXCITING NEW ERA OF AI IS UPON US! Except it isn’t really, not yet, given that the fancy multimodal stuff being shown off in the demo video (click the link, watch the video be impressed! Go on, I’ll wait) is Google’s top-end ‘Ultra’ model, and that’s not launching at all til ‘some time in 2024’ – still, the functionality on display in the demo is quite remarkable, with The Machine apparently able to parse information from video in realtime, make assessments and assertions and assumptions from multiple input types, and generally taking a pretty big step towards ‘being incredibly fcuking useful, to a degree that is increasingly-creepy’. BUT, to reiterate, the fancy stuff isn’t live yet – the version of Gemini that you CAN currently play with is limited to the mid-level version that they have plugged into Bard, which still isn’t as good as paid-tier GPT4, so tbh this is still all a bit ‘jam tomorrow’. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting glimpse into the NEXT WAVE of all this stuff, set to arrive in the next twelve months or so, and of some of the potential ways in which the multimodality of the coming set of models might be employed. If you’re interested you can read one of the (many) puff-piece interviews that Demis Hassabis did around the launch in which he explains a bit about the model’s capabilities and performance relative to existing benchmarks, and this is a blogpost from Google which talks you through what you can see in the demo video and what the machine is doing at each point…and this is a blogpost from Gary Marcus in which he rather grumpily points out that you should never, ever take demo videos like this at face value, and he is of course right which is why I am going to stop doing Google’s PR for them now.

Shopping Muse: I’ve been continually surprised this year by the lack of actual, honest-to-goodness branded uses of generative AI (I mean, I say ‘continually’ – I promise that I do in fact have other things to occupy my mind than ‘WHITHER THE AI BRAND ACTIVATIONS????’), but, as we til back the bottle and suck down the very dregs of 2023, here one comes! Shopping Muse is…I mean, look, it’s a sales assistant chatbot, let’s not beat around the bush here, but it’s been developed by Mastercard (or at least a certain bit of the Mastercard business – I’ll be honest, I can’t really be fcuked to untangle the bizarrely-byzantine brand relationships here) as part of its digital sales solutions, and it sells itself as an off-the-shelf product which any retailer can plug into the backend of their website to act as a FRIENDLY CONVERSATIONAL SALES AI – but, you know, a GOOD one, not like those sh1tty Facebook chatbots that your agency sold you in 2013 telling you they were the future of customer service. I’m curious about this and at what point we’ll see it integrated into actual digital storefronts – it’s in early-access at the moment, so expect to start ‘enjoying’ your interactions with AI salespeople at some point in Q224.

Animate Anyone: That reads more like an exhortation than I’m strictly comfortable with – to be clear, I do not believe that you should just go ahead and ‘animate anyone’. Still, the tools now exist to do that very thing – you may have seen a spate of new ‘animated stills’ doing the rounds this week, and it feels inevitable that this tech is going to be in lots of people’s hands before too long, so best get used to it! The main link here takes you to a paper published by Alibaba, which demonstrates a new technique they’ve developed to apply motion to still images; specifically, dancing motion (which you may not be wholly surprised to learn has been effectively stolen wholesale from thousands upon thousands of TikTok videos) – so, as you can see from the on-page examples, it’s now totally possible to take a photo of anyone and marionette them into capering like a moron for your own enjoyment! This isn’t wholly new, but the degree to which the software is able to ‘fill in’ the frames by ‘imagining’ what should be there is hugely impressive – when you see clips of this stuff on a small screen, in motion, unless you really pay close attention to the details it’s pretty hard to spot that it’s The Machine at work. Which is fine, until the point at which you stop to think and then realise that this is INEVITABLY going to be used to…yes, that’s right, CREATE MORE BONGO! Oh, come on, don’t look at me like that, we all know that that’s what all the messageboard weirdos are going to be spending their GPU time on, let’s not pretend. Still, let’s pretend for a moment that it WON’T end up being used to meatpuppet women into uncomfortable-looking situations and that instead it’ll just be a fun, benign toy which children use to create dance troupes from their toys or something – better? Good! You can have a play with a similar tool here, should you be interested, but DON’T DO ANYTHING WEIRD WITH IT.

Imaginary AI Travel: I really enjoyed this project by Lynn Cherny which uses data from Google Maps combined with some LLM wrangling to produce imaginary travelogues to different cities. “The basic idea is that I start with a vacation at a string location, like “London Bridge, London, England,” and a value of money. The amount of money determines how long I stay there. Each day, I visit sites and restaurants, take pictures, and post in my journal and on social media about what I did/saw. I have a randomly chosen “reason” for being there which affects the text generation.” The link here takes you to a Github page collating the outputs, along with an explanation by Lynn about some of the mechanical aspects of the project – click through and enjoy an entirely-imaginary trip to Berlin, or Venice, or Iceland! There’s something about this that tickles part of my brain – there are SO many ways in which you could take this premise, and I have just lost about three minutes daydreaming about a system that would let you send AI ‘tourists’ out into the world to go exploring and then send you daily postcards about what they have ‘found’ so, er, that’s nice.

Meta Image Generation: You’ll need a VPN set to the US to try this, but Meta quietly launched its standalone Dall-E-esque image generation tool, offering a web-based interface for all the image AI stuff that they are now starting to roll out into Facebook, Messenger and Insta. The model is fine – from a cursory play I’d say it’s slightly less good than the latest iteration of Dall-E you can use through GPT or Bing – but I present it more as a curiosity than something you ABSOLUTELY MUST USE. Fwiw I wasn’t able to get it to generate anything copyright-bothering or horrible, which is unsurprising but still a bit disappointing tbh.

Bitmagic: You know the caveat I put in the Google Gemini writeup about how you should never, ever believe product demo videos? Bear that in mind when you click this link, because what these people appear to be selling is jaw-dropping and almost certainly won’t work anywhere near as well in practice. Bitmagic is a VERY early-access platform which is basically pitching itself as ‘generative AI for games that lets you literally imagine ANYTHING and spin it into a gameworld within seconds, on the fly’. Which, I know, sounds MAD – but click the link and watch the trailer and prepare to be amazed. “All you need is your imagination and Bitmagic helps you create the game you want to make. Describe the experience and within seconds you have a rich game world with a story and quests. The beauty of it is, anyone can create, and we mean anyone! No matter what language you speak, you can imagine and create. When you have made the game you want, play it and share it. With anyone, anywhere at anytime” – so runs the blurb, and when you see castles and dragons and trees and hills and lakes just sort of *pop* into being in the demo video it does rather seem like magic. Of course, making games is significantly more complex than just plonking some character models into an environment – which is where my skepticism begins, because there’s very little detail about all the important stuff in the demo video, stuff like ‘creating relationships and dependencies between objects’ and ‘behaviour parameters’ and ‘pathfinding’ and ‘hitboxes’…still, let’s suspend our disbelief and just imagine that, yes, in the soon-to-come digital future we will just be able to imagine gameworlds into existence and things like ‘waiting a decade for the next GTA to come out’ will be nothing but distant memories. Although, obviously, if you work in game design you might want to maybe not imagine that at all.

I Didn’t Ask For This: Do you live in a city which has been ‘blessed’ with ebikes? Do you enjoy your quotidian steeplechase as you clamber through, over and occasionally under the piles of abandoned velocipedes littering the pavements? Have you ever found yourself cursing the faceless venture capitalist fcuks whose cashspaffing has resulted in piles of massive, heavy, unwieldy plastic-and-metal bikes clogging up urban centres from Amsterdam to Zurich? GREAT! In which case you might be interested in this project by Fred Wordie – stickers (available to buy or to print on demand) featuring a small QR code designed to be affixed to any stray, abandoned ebike you might find and which, Wordie hopes, will make people curious enough to scan said code and be taken to one of a selection of websites which will explain why it might be a nice idea to, you know, not pollute our urban environment with thousands of these bstard things. Yes, ok, this is possibly a *bit* pass-agg, but come on, you fcuking hate them too, don’t lie.

The Meataverse: I know, I know, you don’t feel the need to spend additional desultory minutes of your already-disappointing life trudging bleakly around a corporate digital space calling itself a ‘metaverse’ – but wait! Come back! What if I were to tell you that there is a metaverse dedicated to DELICIOUS PARMA HAM? One in which you can, er, wander round a DELICIOUS PARMA HAM-THEMED DIGITAL WORLD? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to guide their avatar through a digital recreation of a salumeria? NO FCUKER, etc! This is quite, quite marvellous – I don’t really understand exactly what purpose it serves (IT IS THE METAVERSE, MATT, ITS EXISTENCE IS ITS OWN PURPOSE FFS), or indeed why anyone thought that this is better than JUST HAVING A FCUKING WEBSITE FFS, but I am so so so glad that it exists. I can’t stress enough quite how…weird the whole thing is, and how incredibly unappealing and oddly-visceral the room full of digital hams is (I am not joking – there really is an ‘ageing’ room in the MEATIVERSE, in which you can stroll your digital self through 50-odd hams hanging from the digital ceiling. Again, WHY????? God this is wonderful (found via Pietro Minto’s excellent newsletter).

The Happiverse: CLICK THE LINK AND FEEL ‘HAPPI’! Would you like to navigate a slightly-floaty-feeling character through an ‘interpretation’ of the Louvre which doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the actual museum beyond the courtyard? Would you like to COLLECT PETALS for some unspecified eventual reward? Well aren’t YOU in for a treat! Thanks to Lancome, who have been fleeced to a not-inconsiderable degree by some digital salespeople, you can do that very thing! In fairness the graphics here are rather nice but, again, WHY???!?!?! Also, not really sure what the Louvre is getting out of this partnership here. Still, COLLECT THE DIGITAL PETALS!! If anyone can explain to me the link between this pointless piece of digital shovelware and the broad concept of ‘happiness’ then I would be grateful, thanks.

Hacker News On Your Wall: I couldn’t give less of a sh1t about having Hacker News headlines on my wall, but I ADORE the concept behind this – to quote: “Step 1: Data Fetching. Every four hours, our scheduler fetches the top stories from Hacker News. Step 2: Image Generation. For the top story, we combine the title of the post with a specific prompt (“high-contrast black-and-white digital illustration suitable for an eInk display, digital art, trending on ArtStation”) and pass this to a Google Cloud Function. This function interacts with the Stability AI REST API to generate a base64 encoded image. The result? A stunning visual that’s perfect for an E Ink display. Step 3: Text Summarization. We then extract the plain text from the story’s URL and feed it to the GPT-3.5-turbo-16k model with a system prompt tailored for hacker-centric insights: “Summarize the key points in the following text in max 3 sentences as if you’re the author.”” I WANT ONE OF THESE SO MUCH. SO MUCH. Except, I don’t know, pointed at Reddit or something.

No Bullsh1t Games: A potentially useful resource, this – a site which attempts to collate recommendations for mobile games that are actually good, and which don’t try and gouge players with an endless stream of predatory microtransactions.

Cinemorgue: Do you have a strange and possibly-unhealthy obsession with onscreen death? OH GOOD! “Cinemorgue Wiki is an encyclopedia that is dedicated to documenting which actors or actresses “died” in which movie or TV show. Having started as a separate website, the documentation effort proved to be too big a job for one person, so the wiki was born where everyone is allowed to submit their additions and corrections directly. So if you’ve ever wondered “Has so-and-so ever done a death scene?” or “What’s that movie where what’sisname kills such-and-such?”, then this index will strive to answer those questions.”” The section where you can sort by ‘cause of death’ is particularly…well, unpleasant, frankly, although it’s good to know that there’s a place where I can explore exactly which films contain representations of death by cardiac embolism.

Wrapped Worldwide: Loathe as I am to give more publicity to Spotify in a week in which they canned a bunch of staff, but I found this additional layer to their annual ‘wrapped’ stunt quite interesting – here you can look at the top wrapped tracks across a range of countries, so you can get a feel for what is big in various (for example) South American or European countries. The South American lists in particular fascinated me – the fact that Feid makes up 60% of all the picks across the whole continent despite having literally no profile whatsoever in Europe (or at least no profile that I have spotted, which admittedly means very little – I am a 44 year old man, I am probably not quite ‘target demographic’) is slightly-mindblowing to me.

International Wedding Photographer of the Year: I am including this link almost exclusively in the hope that one of you is getting married in the next 12 months and will use the images in this selection to TORTURE your wedding photographer with increasingly-insane demands and expectations. Don’t let me down! Also, invite me! I was thinking the other day that I’m unlikely to attend many more weddings in my life, and that made me a bit sad, so if you fancy inviting a strange misanthrope to your nuptials then, well, just ask!

By Ed Mell

YOU MAY NOT THINK THAT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT RIGHT NOW IS AN 8-HOUR PLAYLIST OF OLD CHRISTMAS MUZAK FROM SUPERMARKETS, BUT I PROMISE YOU THAT YOU ARE WRONG AND THAT IN FACT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS AT LEAST RELIEVED THAT TIME DIDN’T TRY AND MAKE CHATGPT ITS PERSON OF THE YEAR, PT.2:

I Thought About That A Lot: Via my friend Rishi comes this lovely site, now in its third year, I Though About That A Lot presents one essay a day throughout December, each by a different anonymous author, addressing a topic or theme that has occupied their mind over the past 12 months. You can subscribe to receive each day’s essay via email or just check in here when you remember and catch up on the writings – essays for 2023 so far cover “my employer’s BS approach to diversity and inclusion, choices, caregiving and my love life, money, my Abaji, the greatest storyteller and listener, my inner child, the friend who’s sad I’m single” and there’s something particularly-lovely about the anonymity of the voices and the breadth of thought and experience that emerges through the curation (and, even better, you can go back and read all the previous years’ essays as well).
Plant: Via Andy comes this rather wonderful digital toy which lets you CREATE PLANTS via the magical medium of a few sliders – fiddle with the various parameters (leaf curvature, gravity, etc – it’s complicated, but there are tutorials for the curious amongst you) and see as your imaginary flora comes to life; I presume that there’s some practical purpose to this, but I’m fcuked if I know what it is, so I’m choosing to view it as a sort of God simulator – you can also download the models should you wish to, I don’t know, create your own virtual greenhouse full of terrifying triffids of your own wild imaginings.
Stampfans: This is sort-of silly but equally I FCUKING LOVE IT – Stampfans is a newsletter platform taken to its logical-if-ridiculous extreme, meaning that it sends them as ACTUAL LETTERS; you write your newsletter as per, and rather than being delivered digitally to inboxes it will instead be mailed to them as an ACTUAL PHYSICAL LETTER! As far as I can tell there’s no fee to publish on the platform – writers set their own subscription price, with the average seeming to be around $5 a month (with 12 letters sent a year) and the platform presumably taking a cut. There don’t seem to be LOADS of people signed up as authors, and I’m not wholly convinced that anyone is really DESPERATE to sign up to receive printed newsletter content – but I am willing to accept I am wrong, and as such if anyone feels like their life would be improved by receiving Curios in physical, printed form (18 pages of A4 and you can’t click anything!) then, well, let me know.
Superbritanico: I can’t quite recall how I stumbled across this, but Superbritanico is a Spanish shop for anglophiles and…wow, is this a very specific and very, very twee idea of England that’s being sold here! I can’t for a second imagine that any of you will be rushing to buy anything from this site – I don’t envisage there being a *huge* Venn diagram overlap between ‘people who like Curios’ and ‘people who want to buy a Harry Potter-themed tshirt that reads ‘Not Today Dolores’ – but there’s always something interesting about seeing your own country’s culture through another culture’s eyes. I think anyone who actually lives in 2023 England will find the general vibe of this whole site darkly funny – it has very strong ‘God wasn’t the 2012 opening ceremony of the Olympics the high point of recent history?’ and #FBPE energy, basically (but, er, Spanish).
Sausages: Wikipedia provides again, with this stellar entry on the sausages of the world – I really, really want someone to make it their life’s project to eat every single one of these and document the process as some sort of performance art, so if any of you fancy making my dreams a reality then, well, thanks! Also, apparently there is a type of sausage available in the US called ‘lebanon bologna’ which I think might be the most satisfying combination of words I have heard all year – seriously, just say it out loud to yourself, isn’t the meter and cadence just PERFECT? Lovely, offaly poetry.
Subaru’s Badge of Ownership: I’ve always been interested in the Subaru brand in the US, ever since I read a great article about how the car became the unofficial vehicle of American (and subsequently global) lesbians and I am intrigued by this new campaign they’ve launched in the US recently – Subaru owners can apply to get a free additional badge for their car which lets people proudly display how many Subarus they’ve owned and all the things they are into, from photography to kayaking to, er, ‘love’, like some sort of weird vehicular riff on the San Francisco hanky code. Is this because Subaru owners love sharing their passions and enthusiasms? Is it a dating thing? Is there a companion site to this one which decodes all the 33 possible ‘lifestyle badge’ choices and explains exactly what they mean IRL? If I proudly support a badge declaring me as being ‘into birdwatching’ does that mean I am in fact advertising my availability for some sort of unpleasantly-soapy gangbang? I HAVE NO IDEA, but I was momentarily amused by imagining a series of ‘alternative’ badges that one might get, advertising one’s love of, say, fags and superlager and figging, and I would quite like someone to do a ripoff version of this with more of a ‘Viz’-type vibe.
Trains: Specifically, American trains RIGHT NOW – this is a realtime map of the US rail network which updates each minute to display the positions of trains across North America. Via Giuseppe, this is largely-pointless (at least for me, a man currently sitting at a desk in North London) but it’s slightly-astonishing (and frankly a bit shameful) to see how few trains there actually are in a country the size of the States.
The Sphere: While the London Sphere currently exists in a state of planning limbo (but, please God, is unlikely to ever actually be built) you can if you desire experiment with your very own miniature version; click the link and select from one of a series of presets to see what The Sphere might look like with, say, a giant emoji face on it; or, if you’re of sufficient coding ability, modify the code to make it display whatever you like. I quite like the idea of having this on a huge screen, cycling through various awful options stretched across the horrid LED canvas – one for the office reception area, maybe.
Blue Donut: Sometimes the links in Curios are rabbitholes, opening up into entire worlds you never knew existed into which you’re invited to get lost and explore; sometimes they are to a single rotating image of a blue donut, floating in space for reasons I am unable to discern. Guess which this one is.
Infinite Flowers: This feels like an incredible throwback of sorts – do you remember the Zoomquilt? OF COURSE YOU DO! Anyway, this is basically like that, but rather than taking you through an infinitely-zooming selection of fantasy scenes like the original did, this instead gives you a seemingly-neverending zoom into a pastoral scene. This is possibly the most hypnotic and oddly-relaxing site I’ve seen all year, and to be honest it’s all I can do not to just down tools right now and stare at it like a slack-jawed and drooling idiot, but just for you I will resist. Via the ever-essential Naive Weekly, this one.
Sonic Garbage: Oh this is SUCH a fun little musical toy! I think the best way to describe it is as a beat/loop maker in which all the sounds are clips/samples from across the web, so you’re effectively collaging beats together out of fragments of dialogue and sound effects and the like; all of this is presented in a simple-looking interface which, if you read the associated documentation, you will quickly realise is significantly more flexible and powerful than you might expect, and which will let you do all sorts of interesting things with the volume and pitch and speed of various samples, locking and looping and generally letting you cobble together stuff that sounds a *bit* like a really sh1t version of The Avalanches (that’s my experience, but I hold out hope that some of you will be significantly more talented than me and will be able to make BEAUTIFUL MUSIC with this). SO much fun, this – if nothing else you can use it as a really excellent soundboard to punctuate your next presentation with (please please can one of you do this? Thanks).
The Backyard: Another one from Naive, this is by Martin Schotten who writes: “I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way…The backyard is outside and full of stuff worth discovering. There is no sitemap or index — you can follow various hyperlinks to other parts of the backyard on each page. In case you got lost, you will always find a link back to this door at the bottom left of each page.” I LOVE THIS – this is mysterious and curious and ODD and sort-of pointless and I think every single website made from hereon in should have its own ‘backyard’. Seriously, how much better would your tedious, identikit agency website be if it had a secret area full of ODD THINGS which people could stumble upon unawares? It would be 58% better, fyi.
The Commons Library: This is a great idea and a useful resource for anyone interested in activism and campaigning: “The Commons library is the ‘go to portal’ for social change resources. We gather and share resources from many different sources and organisations from all around the world in a user friendly, accessible portal. We also create resources to help change makers stop reinventing the wheel and support them with what they need. The Commons works in partnership and provides customised services to organisations and networks engaged in social change activities. This includes collating resource kits, hosting collections, developing curriculum, writing case studies, researching issues and building new resource libraries.” It’s an Australian initiative but collects resources from all over the place, so if you or anyone you know is looking for resources to help you start campaigning on an issue then this is a decent place to begin looking.
Eyes on the Earth: This is an amazing website by NASA, sharing near-realtime data about the surface of the planet – you can select the data you’d like displayed and then see the globe change to show, say, average air temperature, or sea levels or levels of nitrous oxide, although you might want to ignore the title of the model which is called ‘Vital Signs of the Planet and which if you think about it too hard might give you The Fear. Still, look at all the pretty colours (don’t think about what they mean)!
Suns Explorer: Ooh, I do like an unusual dataviz – Suns Explorer is a project which takes a novel approach to displaying the collection of the Harvard Art Museum: “In Suns Explorer, each group of concentric circles represents an artwork. The colors and behavior are set by the data that describe the work. For example, the time it takes each work to move across the screen is based on the total number of times that object’s page has been viewed on the museums’ public website since 2009—the slower the pace, the more popular the artwork. Use the controller to play with the suns, or take a moment and enjoy the beauty of data.” I really like this, not least because there’s something pleasingly oblique and slightly-whimsical about the interface which encourages the user to think of the collection through different lenses than they might ordinarily have done.
Mangosteen: What’s your favourite fruit? Yeah, ok, fine, but does it have its own dot com domain dedicated to celebrating it? NO IT FCUKING DOES NOT AND THAT IS WHY THE MANGOSTEEN IS THE BEST FRUIT! This is a very old website but I am in love – it even has a dedication at the top, which is SO LOVELY: “This site is dedicated to Ed Kraujalis, “the mangosteen man.” To all who knew him and loved him, he left us all long before his time and long before any of us could believe it. His devotion to the mangosteen fruit and the awareness of its charms meant our paths would cross years ago. I will always be grateful for his patience and earnestness and willingness to provide me with any help he could to help me bring the mangosteen out into the light of day. I think of him every time I am on my farm and see many of the older trees that were from “the mangosteen man.” In this way, he is still with us and will be for many years to come.” Seriously, is your heart not warm? Are your eyes not damp? Anyway, if you want mangosteen-related information then this site is your friend.
Random 90s Bands From London & NYC: Ok, that’s not technically the name of the YouTube channel, but it ought to be – this is a collection of videos put online by Rick’s Music Archives, a shop which seems to exist to sell expensive DVDs of concert footage of bands you have never heard of playing a selection of small music venues in London and New York in the 90s and early-00s. Would you like to own a copy of Renton’s SEMINAL set at the Bull & Last from 2001? Well GREAT, Rick’s got you covered! The YouTube channel presents individual tracks from these VITALLY IMPORTANT moments in musical history, and there’s a quite astonishing quantity of live tracks, most of them with no views at all. If you’re a connoisseur of the live music scene at the turn of the millennium, or if you happened to be in a band that did three gigs in 2003 at the 12 Bar Club and you want to find the only extant footage of your appalling drunken bass playing, this is the YouTube channel for YOU.
The Oluk: This is the website of Manuele Saviantoni, a pixel artist and game designer who makes a LOT of actually pretty fun 8-bit-style promo games for brands, and who has helpfully provided links to ALL of them from his homepage – if you fancy wasting a few hours playing a selection of really-nicely-designed minigames then you could do worse than click this link and go exploring (and I want to take this opportunity to once again point out that GAMES MAKE GREAT PROMO CONTENT and suggest that perhaps you might want to book this man because he makes Good Stuff).
Noun Noun: Oh this is GREAT – “You know when a word’s on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite remember it. But you can sort of describe it. This is a game about guessing that word through those other words.” Hand shoes? GLOVES! Flutter mouse? BAT! This is oddly akin to the experience of being very, very hungover, to my mind at least.
The Ultimate: Finally this week, a VERY VIOLENT and quite unpleasant little top-down shooter which is basically ‘Hotline Miami, but in the browser and without anything resembling a storyline’. You are a nameless avatar whose goal is, simply, to kill everyone on each level. That’s it. There’s some gentle window dressing about how the people you’re offing are Nazis and so therefore it’s ok that you’re redecorating the walls with their viscera, but, honestly, this is just sort of brutal and nihilistic and ugly. It’s also REALLY REALLY FUN (sorry, but it is) and VERY HARD, and I have spent about an hour with it this week, on and off, and can recommend it unreservedly. There’s a roguelike element to it, with enemies and weapons spawning in new locations each time you play, and it’s fast and bloody and frustrating and SUPREMELY CATHARTIC. Also the themetune bangs.

By Kevin Huizenga (NB – You should save the above image to your phone and, once a week, send it at random to someone in your contacts, just to fcuk with them)

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS BY PERSONAL SYSTEM AND IT IS HONESTLY SO INCREDIBLY RELAXING AND PERFECT FOR LISTENING TO WHILE IT’S COLD AND FRESH OUTSIDE BUT YOU ARE SNUGLY WARM INDOORS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

Every Chip Stand: Not in any way a Tumblr! Still, this is a lovely project celebrating the chip stands of Ontario through lovely little illustrations; chip stands are a regionally-specific THING, you see! From the ‘About’ page: “Chip stands are a ubiquitous part of Ontario’s landscape. Most chip stands began as a vehicle of some sort that morphed into a semi-permanent,retrofitted, DIYed shack. They are not pretty, nor do they pretend to be. They are not pristine eateries; you will be eating your food on the side of the road. In Ontario, we can find chip stands in all kinds of vehicles from school buses to outmoded Canada Post trucks, from double-decker buses to antiquated train cabooses. These are the chip stands we love to draw, the vehicles that never go anywhere, and neverwill because they can’t, unless they’re towed away. They look as though they’ve been there for 50 years. The grass grows up between the wheels and the old wooden decking has floorboards that have been replaced dozens of times, but never properly. The best ones seem as though they’re glued together with grease. Hand-painted signage has faded to white or light blue, and the menus have had their prices changed so often there are layers of white stickers pasted over each other from year to year, the new cost scribbled with black marker. It is the whimsy and the idiosyncrasies of the chip stand that have drawn us to illustrate more than 90 of them in the last 8 years, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of Ontario’s chip stands. Foodies will scoff, but they are a part of Canadian culinary history; serving up our national dish, poutine, in varying degrees of quality and other fried delicacies such as the all-important French fry, the pogo, the hamburger, or a sausage on a bun. The menus are limited and some chip stands are traditionalists and sell only French fries.” So, er, now you know! I really hope at least one person from Ontario happens to read this and feels a small frisson of local pride.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Every Church in the World: There are a LOT of churches in the world, most of them in Rome (yes, I know, but that’s what it feels like when you live there, I promise you), and the person behind this Insta feed has made it their mission to create a small, pixelart-y illustration of each of the approximately 37million of the things currently standing on the face of the planet. They will fail, but I can’t help but applaud the endeavour.
Michael Deragon: Michael’s an artist who makes collages – this feed showcases some of his (I think excellent) work, which you can buy from his website if you’re a fan.
Fake It Til You Make It: I’m slightly stunned that I haven’t featured this before – Fake It Til You Make It is a project by Maya Man, which uses code to create an infinite procession of machine-imagined inspirational bromides in the classic ‘Insta inspirational’ style, but devoid of meaning and syntactically broken to the point where they just radiate a sort of horrible, sickly modern unease. I love these, and would quite like one on my wall if it weren’t for the fact that I think it would make me incredibly, horrifically sad.
Vintage Ibiza Fliers: Literally exactly what you think it is. I imagine that there will be a subsection of you for whom this will conjure quite powerful memories, and another subset who will have a vague nagging feeling that they might have been to Manumission but, honestly, most of 1996-8 is a chemical blur so who knows.
90s Art School: This is very, very weird. 90s art school is an Insta feed which just posts old photos (analogue!) photos of people in the 90s, mostly at house parties but also just generally hanging out – I think that all these images are from North America, but despite that, and despite the fact that I obviously know noone in any of the pictures, I am basically convinced that these are images from my actual life and I challenge anyone who also came of age in the mid-90s to look at these and not get a very strange feeling where you half-remember the people in the pictures and the parties they’re at. Anyway, this is SUPER NOSTALGIA – you can practically smell the CK1 coming off some of these shots.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

All of the Trend Reports: Are you in the invidious position of having to produce some bullsh1t trend report for your agency, despite the fact that noone will care and you’re pulling all the ‘insights’ out of your fundament? Would you like all of the other trend reports gathered together in one place to make the tedious prospect of cherrypicking the least-bad bits slightly less horrible? GREAT! Honestly, the vast majority of these are FCUKING AWFUL, as per, but imho the IPSOS ones are worth a look; oh, and if any of you can be bothered then you might get some joy out of feeding all of these to The Machine to ask it to summarise/collate/compare them, because, honestly, life’s too short to do it yourself.

52 Things: Judging by the number of times I’ve seen this linked to this week it seems likely that each and every one of you will have by now read Tom Whitwell’s 2023 list of ‘52 things he learned this year’ – still, if not then you will enjoy this selection of INTERESTING FACTS which Whitwell collected over the course of the year, which as ever contains some fascinating nuggets. My personal favourite ‘thing I learned in 2023’ isn’t on the list, sadly, but I will share it with you now out of the goodness of my heart – did you know that the US Army hasthe ability to deploy a mobile Burger King franchise within 24h of dropping troops ANYWHERE in the world? Absolutely ASTONISHING capitalism-ing, that.

30 Useful Principles: A companion/counterpoint to the last link, this is a collection of ‘useful principles’ pulled together by one Gurwinder, covering all sorts of ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ such as Goodhart’s Law (“When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure”) and this, which made me feel so painfully seen that I had to go and hide in a darkened room briefly: “Cynical people are widely seen as smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal & disappointment without having to do or think.” FFS GURWINDER THERE WAS NO NEED TO DO THAT TO ME. Anyway, there are lots of interesting things in here about ways of thinking, biases, etc, which you might find useful.

Live Players: OK, this is VERY w4nky, as you might expect from a thinkpiece by the person who brought us the concept of ‘Normcore’ – but, equally, it felt ‘true’ in a way that literally none of the massive fcuking trend presentations have done this year. Trend consultancy 8ball have penned this…what is it? Essay, thinkpiece, provocation…bunch of w4nk…ALL of these things, basically! It really is worth reading in full, but you can get the central theme/assertion from this section: “People worry about culture because they know it sets the agenda for the future. And who wouldn’t want to be in charge of that? Wall Street and the City held the crown through economic dominance, regulatory capture, and cultural philanthropy. They faltered in 2008 and never regained their pre-crisis legitimacy. The presumptive heir to the throne, the tech industry has failed to launch time and again. This occurred in part, because the tech industry rejected the non-quantifiable nature of social and cultural capital. Unable to find actual metrics for these things, they fell victim to Goodhart’s Law. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Treating proxies for social and cultural capital (likes, follows, impressions) as the thing in itself opened up culture to scams, grifts, hacks, and psyops. The collapse has been so complete that its no exaggeration to say that there are multiple realities co-present in the United States and we have no clear path to negotiate mutual intelligibility between the them. In 2023, the throne is empty.” I mean, that just *feels* accurate, right? Anyway, this is part one of three, so keep an eye out for the rest if you were able to tolerate the first installment.

Pitchfork x Balenciaga: Sort-of orthogonally-related to the last link, this is a surprisingly-insightful Twitter thread which looks at the brands Pitchfork and Balienciaga and discusses how their past counterculturality has been recast in modernity as conformity.

Vitalik’s Techno-Optimism: Another piece of evidence suggesting that Vitalik Buterin is the one crypto guy who’s maybe not a waste of skin, this is a long but really thoughtful essay outlining his general feelings on AI, safety, accelerationism-vs-restraint and all sorts of things besides – it is, fine, still FAR too focused on the scifi stuff and pays nowhere near enough attention to all the very practical, very real problems that all this tech is already causing RIGHT NOW, but at the same time it’s a long way from the madness of Andreessen’s spittle-flecked tirade (Buterin, I imagine, does significantly less gak) and it does at least suggest that its author has actually thought about some of the practical implications of tech; the more nuanced accelerationist position it puts forward is an interesting third-way to think of the previously-binary ‘what to do with the superintelligent machines?’ question.

A Simple Theory of Cancel Culture: To be clear, I don’t agree with a significant proportion of this essay, and I think the author goes slightly off the rails with the argument at the end, but the initial bit of thinking and the suggestion that a smarter way to think about ‘cancel culture’ is instead in terms of ‘the mob’ struck me as a potentially-useful way of looking at the issue of behaviour and disapproval in on- (and off)line life.

The C-Word: I was very lucky during COVID – my girlfriend and I discovered that we didn’t hate living together, noone I love died, I cooked some great food and stayed employed and to be honest I was slightly distracted by Other Horrible Things Going On – but lots of people weren’t. As the UK’s inquiry into the whole sh1tshow rumbles on with no prospect of any actual, proper, cathartic resolution for anyone, it seems apposite to link to this essay by Jared Shurin in which he writes about the strange and slightly eerie degree to which so much of the collective experience of the pandemic has been memoryholed: “I don’t know what we actually need, but it is more than a ‘day of reflection’ or another few weeks of televised backstabbing. Every year we have a solemn march to the Cenotaph, to remember those that fell in wars (your reminder that more died in the Influenza epidemic than WWI). The Cenotaph and the Day of Remembrance is not meant to mourn the fallen, but remind us of the consequences of hubris. Maybe we need a Covid Cenotaph, right at the entrance of No 10 Downing Street, with another one at the gates of Parliament. Something really hideous and unavoidable, so that every single day, the people we choose to look after us are reminded of what happens when they fcuk about with that responsibility.”

Lessons from the Netherlands: Specifically, what other countries can learn from the spectacular performance of right winger Geert Wilders in the recent Dutch elections; this makes for particularly bleak reading if you’re in the UK, as the list of circumstances which the author here sets out as the conditions for Wilders’ success seem to be replicated pretty much one-for-one over here. “Nowhere in Europe have public services become a happier hunting ground for Anglo-American finance than in the Netherlands, with Blackrock snapping up large chunks of social housing, private equity buying up childcare, dentists and GP practices, and Australian infrastructure funds buying up data centres, parking lots and public utilities” – I mean, that sounds pretty fcuking familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to the UK in recent years. Wouldn’t it be funny if we got rid of these Tory cnuts next year (please God let it be next year, I refuse to wait til 2025 for an election) only to find them roaring back into power in 2029 led by Kemi ‘Genuinely Seems To Think She’s A Member of the Republican Party’ Badenoch? Eh? Oh.

Meet The Israeli/Arab Boyband Trying To Crack America: Honestly, this whole thing reads like a joke – whilst there’s obviously nothing funny about what’s happening in the Middle East right now, the idea that there was a newly-minted boyband, comprising members from Israel AND Palestine in a classic ‘music acknowledges no borders!’ bit of heartwarming backstory, trying to launch their careers in the US when all of a sudden 7 October happened is, well, just TOO PERFECT. There’s something incredibly dark about the way in which throughout this article the conflict is effectively framed as ‘a really interesting marketing opportunity’, as per this quiet astonishing paragraph: “Right now, though, the inherent message of an Israeli-Palestinian group named as1one may give the act a greater meaning than Diener and Levitan could have ever imagined, regardless of what the guys are singing about. Conversations now aren’t just about being the biggest band in the world, but about the Nobel Peace Prize.” Yes, you read that right. WOW. Anyway, the band is called ‘as1one’ so REMEMBER THE NAME.

The AI Browser Revolution: WIRED looks at the wave of new browsers currently being trialed – Brave and others – which plug generative AI directly into the browsing experience, and how they are likely to change the way in which we experience and traverse the web; while I wouldn’t necessarily bet on any of the specific platforms or companies they list in the piece, the general ‘this is how it’s all going to work’ stuff feels about right, and the whole piece offers a decent series of explanations as to why SEO (and publishing, and digital advertising) is set to be absolutely fcuked in the coming year or so.

LEGO Fortnite: I imagine that those of you with kids of a certain age will already be all over this, but for the rest of us who are TOO OLD for Fortnite this is a useful overview of the platform’s new tie-up with LEGO, which is interesting mainly because it proves that everyone who was saying ‘the metaverse is literally just modern gaming you fcuking morons’ was broadly speaking correct.

Brazilian Delivery Protests: I adore this, and would quite like to see it catch on over here – in Brazil, delivery drivers have started staging collective protests outside the houses of customers who threaten or mistreat their colleagues. Abuse the guy who brings your feijoada and you might find 100-odd other delivery drivers all suddenly blaring their radios and doing donuts outside your house at 3am as punishment – which, as the article acknowledges, is rubbish for your neighbours but is also VERY FUNNY. It does rather feel like there’s a market for a driver-only app which lets the delivery community crowdsource information on households to avoid or be careful around – does this exist already anywhere? No idea why I’m asking you, but I suppose it’s not inconceivable that one of you might be a Deliveroo driver – ARE YOU????

Saudi, Games and Soft Power: I’ve featured a bunch of pieces over the past few years about Saudi’s long-term vision to shift itself from a single-resource-economy to instead become a modern, knowledge-economy powerhouse, and this article, all about Saudi’s increasingly active attempts to court the gaming industry to come and set up shop in the desert, is a decent example of how they’re going about it; there’s also some *slightly* dark (to my mind at least) stuff in there about how Saudi’s population is VERY YOUNG and loves videogames, and that this move to attract developers and tech talent is also perhaps interpretable as a means of controlling the population to a degree, but, well, let’s not think about that too hard!

101 Best Films You’ve Never Seen: A list compiled by the BFI which asked a bunch of luminaries from the world of celluloid to pick their favourite underappreciated masterpieces from the medium’s history – these are arranged chronologically from ANCIENT HISTORY (specifically, the 19thC) to the present day, and while I am literally the opposite of a cinephile the list does contain my favourite film EVER (Bad Boy Bubby, since you ask, a film which I have cleared entire rooms with) and as such I can (sort-of) vouch for its brilliance. This is basically designed to give you an improving project for 2024, should you fancy committing to watching a couple of VERY OBSCURE films a week.

Crisps: UK readers will almost certainly have read this piece already, as it has been linked EVERYWHERE this week, but for the rest of you Amelia Tate’s excellent investigation into the mysterious world of crisp (sorry, potato chip) flavourings really is a superb read; aside from anything else, it’s yet another perfect example of how every single industry in the world, however boring it might sound, is a trove of fascinating stories if you know where to look. FYI the Spanish make the best crisps in the world – it pains me to admit this, but it really is true – but the greatest single flavour ever sold was Brannigan’s Roast Beef & Mustard, and not a day goes by when I don’t mourn their absence from the current era. .

The Office: I haven’t ever seen the whole of the original English version of The Office, mainly because I was at college/university when it was on and, honestly, had better things to do than watch TV (apart from Eastenders, which was unmissable), but if you have INCREDIBLE FEELINGS OF NOSTALGIA AND WARMTH towards it, and specifically towards the final episode which was set at the office Christmas party, then you will adore this lovely oral history of the show’s finale. Everyone quoted here comes across as lovely, and the affection they all hold for the show and each other is evident – no Ricky Gervais, which is perhaps why. The Office will always remind me of my mum – I made her watch an episode once, and observed as she failed to laugh once during it; “did you not find it funny mum?”, I asked, to which she succinctly replied “Funny? Matthew, that’s my fcuking *life*”, Miss you mum, thanks for bequeathing me your love of work!

The Fall of my Teenage Self: Zadie Smith writes in The New Yorker about being a teenager and falling out of a window – look, it’s Zadie Smith, it’s superb, she writes like a dream, click the link and get on with it.

Reviewing Zadie Smith: A companion/counterpoint to the last link, this is Colin Burrow in the LRB, reviewing Smith’s latest novel (‘The Fraud’) – I haven’t read the book, but that didn’t prevent me absolutely ADORING this review, which is (to my mind at least) pretty much a perfect example of the form. Burrow dissects the novel, the author, her canon, her impact on the English language literary movement…all of it with wit and humour and respect and affection, and his analysis of Smith’s writing and its evolution is brilliant, and, honestly, I can’t recommend this highly enough, it’s my favourite book review of the year by miles and miles.

Who Doesn’t Like Music?: Well the author of this article, for one – they are neurodivergent , and as such their relationship to the medium is possibly different to yours or mine. This is VERY VERY FUNNY, not least because of Michael Faber’s blunt assessments of why music is, actually, ‘tremendously overhyped’.

John Romero: Your enjoyment of this piece will to some degree depend on whether the name ‘John Romero’ means anything to you – if so, then this review of the creator of Doom’s autobiography is a must-read, seriously. Even if you don’t, though, this is another example of a review which works as standalone piece of prose; Duncan Fyfe does an excellent job of peeling back the layers and checking receipts from the past, and the way in which the central theme of the book, specifically Romero and how actually he’s a pretty chill guy, doesn’t really stand up to any sort of scrutiny whatsoever.

Clouds of Sugar: Rishi Dastidar writes about having his sweet tooth cruelly robbed by COVID; I love the way Rishi makes sentences, and there are some lovely ones in here (on which note, I can highly recommend his latest poetry collection as a lovely gift, should you have anyone in your life who appreciates a well-crafted stanza).

The Placeholder Girlfriend: This is from a few months ago, but I only found it this week – I am not totally convinced that the ending works, but overall I really enjoyed this short story (and was surprised when I checked the author and discovered it was by a man): “She had been at the university and needed files off her computer. I was lazing around in her living room. I had four roommates and she had none. I should have been working on my thesis, but I enjoyed being in an apartment without roommates so much that I was just laying around listening to my Harry Potter podcasts. I didn’t know if she had rent control or was just rich but she did have an office. She was like what I imagined a grad student should be. She had me go into her office and she walked me through transferring the files. But she had left a spreadsheet open. I tried not to look but I think that’s actually impossible. Because I saw my name at the top. And I saw numbers and a whole column of red cells. And then it clicked. If you saw a sheet rating you in bed out of 10, with a hundred other ratings too, you would look. You would peek.“ YES YOU WOULD DON’T LIE.

The Gates of Hell: From Dirt Mag’s nightlife-focused spinoff comes this short about drinking in a sketchy bar in New York. This is excellent precisely because it isn’t what I quite expected it to be.

Christmas on the Moon: There’s something about the style of this essay that reminds me of a grab-bag of half-a-dozen or so contemporary North American writers, but that’s not a bad thing – this is the story of the time the author was employed to guard a fireworks deposit over the festive period, and it’s a bit personal nostalgia, a bit weird family history, and, generally, just a really affectionate portrait of a time and a place and some people.

Hades Baedeker: Finally this week comes this odd little piece by Ken Chen which is styled like a travel guide to the inferno, contains some truly hallucinatory prose, and which, honestly, made me laugh more than anything else I’ve read this week. Some of you will, I think, hate this with a passion, but give it a try anyway, it’s quite the thing.

By Aleksandra Waliszewska

(images once again mostly from This Isn’t Happiness)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is called THE WIZARD OF AI, and it had totally passed me by til the Guardian wrote it up earlier this week – “Alan Warburton was commissioned by the ODI’s Data as Culture programme to bring us ‘The Wizard of AI,’ a 20-minute video essay about the cultural impacts of generative AI. It was produced over three weeks at the end of October 2023, one year after the release of the infamous Midjourney v4, which the artist treats as “gamechanger” for visual cultures and creative economies. According to the artist, the video itself is “99% AI” and was produced using generative AI tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Runway and Pika. Yet the artist is careful to temper the hype of these new tools, or as he says, to give in to the “wonder-panic” brought about by generative AI. Using creative workflows unthinkable before October 2023, he takes us on a colourful journey behind the curtain of AI – through Oz, pink slime, Kanye’s ‘Futch’ and a deep sea dredge – to explain and critique the legal, aesthetic and ethical problems engendered by AI-automated platforms. Most importantly, he focusses on the real impacts this disruptive wave of technology continues to have on artists and designers around the world.” This is surprisingly very good indeed – although that’s probably because the script’s written by an actual human being.

Excellent bit of indiepop now – this is a band called Hoorsees, the song’s called ‘Artschool’, and it reminds me quite a lot of Art Brut in a weird sort of way, but with an actual tune (sorry Eddie Argos, but you know I’m right).

Whereas this reminds me of Mark Lanegan. It isn’t him, though – it’s by Black Mekon, it’s called ‘One By One’, and the video is an EXCELLENT bit of nearly-stop-motion animation using old photos and cut-outs by a certain Mr Radar.

This is just a lovely bit of droney, shoegazey guitarw4nk which reminded me a LOT of Spiritualised in their more skaggy incarnations – it’s gorgeous and dreamy and it’s called ‘Holy Water’ by Three Quarter Skies.

Finally this week, I can’t work out whether this is good or a terrible piece of adolescent rubbish, but it’s stuck with me enough that I’m still uncertain and so will hand it over to you to decide. This is by French artist Gwendoline, it’s called ‘Conspire’, and it starts off sounding a bit like Plastic Bertrand and then becomes something else…the video montage is a *bit* on-the-nose, but it also ends up being quite powerful when contrasted with the words (if you have GCSE level French you’ll be fine). Anyway, see what you think, THAT’S IT WE’RE DONE I’M OFF BYE!

Webcurios 01/12/23

December 1, 2023

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Reading Time: 32 minutes

JESUS IT’S FREEZING. Or at least it is in London – I have no idea if it’s balmy and tropical where you are, and frankly I don’t care. POOR MATTY’S COLD.

Which is why this intro’s going to be short and sweet – I want to get this done so I can go and sit under a hot shower for 30 minutes and see if I can restore some feeling to my extremities. I can’t promise that the following 8,000-odd words of the usual b0llocks will provide any protection against the arctic chill, but I suppose in a pinch you could always print this out and set fire to it for warmth.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are now officially allowed to eat your first dozen mince pies of the season.

Image from this isn't happiness.

By David Fullerton (pics in large part via TIH)

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MUSIC WITH THIS NEW ALBUM OF BREAKS AND DRUM’N’BASS AND ASSORTED ELECTRONICA BY OTIK!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO LOVE WHATSOEVER FOR THE ROYAL FAMILY BUT FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT THE MAN WHO WROTE THAT NEW BOOK ABOUT THEM HAS POSSIBLY THE MOST SMACKABLE FACE I HAVE SEEN IN MY LIFE, PT.1:

Public Access Memories: Following on from last week’s link to online art festival The Wrong Biennale, comes Public Access Memories, which is a ‘digital pavilion’ from within the Biennale (yes, ok, ‘within’ is an entirely-nonsensical term to use for something that exists in digital space, but it’s early and I am tired and the least you could do is wait until the third or fourth link before kicking off with the kvetching, thankyouverymuch) – yes, that’s right kids, it’s a VIRTUAL ART GALLERY! “As part of The Wrong Biennale 2023-24, Public Access Memories presents Fields of View, a virtual “pavilion” of 12 digital artists exploring new modes of representing, constructing, and traversing online space…The artists in this exhibition approach the representation of space in ways that acknowledge the materiality of the screen. Whether through the presentation of alternative or extreme perspective projections, isometric diagrams, glitch landscapes, stereoscopic imagery, or simply the textual description of spatial experience, the work in this exhibition expands the space of the computer screen without attempting to erase our awareness of it.” I really enjoy this – the 2d gallery space is pleasingly-00s-ish in aesthetic feel, and the navigation feels oddly-reminiscent of those collaborative social spaces that we all (ok, *I*) thought might become A Thing in the time of Covid, and you can talk to other visitors who are online at the same time as you through a simple chat interface, and the works…well, the works, based on my relatively thin exploration of them, are an intriguing mishmash of digital collage and video and lightly-interactive work playing at the edges of digital visual culture and questions of space and screen. This is a lovely place to just wander round for 20 minutes – click and explore and see what you find.

Stable Diffusion Turbo: When was the last time you were properly amazed by a bit of digital tech? Do you remember that first feeling of excitement when you first typed “sexy broccoli” into Dall-E and saw your wildest imaginings come to life before your eyes? Do you realise how quickly we’ve become jaded? Still, if you want to once again feel the momentary shock of the new, to feel the strange sense of the future rushing towards you at a pace which, frankly, isn’t wholly comfortable, then click this link and BOGGLE AT THE MAGIC! Stable Diffusion – the best-in-class open source text-to-image model, lest we forget – has this week launched its latest update, which you can play with at this link and which basically creates images in realtime as you type and, seriously, this is like witchcraft. Go on, click the link – start typing and watch in amazement as stuff appears and shifts and morphs and the images attempt to keep up with whatever’s currently being typed into the input box…Ok, fine, so there’s no specific *need* for this to be as quick as it is, but there’s something quite unsettling about watching The Machine ‘think’ like this (NB – The Machine is not, of course, ‘thinking’ in any meaningful sense). This is, as you’d expect, guardrail pretty extensively so you won’t be able to go crazy with your perverted demands, but I promise you that there is something honestly quite incredible about seeing it react and reimagine on the fly – it feels like there’s something really quite incredible you could hack together with a version of this, and voice-recognition software and a big screen, so if any of you would like to take that fragment of an idea and run with it then that would be lovely thanks.

Drawfast: Via Lauren Epstein’s newsletter and in a vaguely-similar space to the last link comes this fun little toy – tell The Machine what it is that you want to draw and then sketch out a rough outline and watch as it appears before your eyes in (semi-)realtime! This is a strangely-nostalgic callback to early versions of Dall-E from about 2019/20, except now it works at blistering pace – it’s slightly unsettling to think that this is basically what MS Paint is going to be like in ~6 months time, as AI gets baked into everything and even the most entry-level software products achieve the ability to, I don’t know, paint the sistine chapel or decode the Voynich Manuscript. Can everything maybe stop speeding up just for a couple of months, please?

The AI Garage Sale: This is a genuinely smart idea (found via Andy) and a really nice, fun use of an LLM as a ludic interface (ludic! Ffs! It’s 730am Matt, STOP IT), and if you work in advermarketingpr and can’t think of a client or project for whom you could pretty much rip this off wholesale as a clever bit of promo then, well, you should probably think about switching careers tbh. The premise of this site is simple – the site is offering a bunch of stuff for sale, and you can attempt to get a better deal on the price of the various bits of tat on offer by engaging in some light bartering with the AI doing the selling – can you get a good deal on (for example) a Big Mouth Billy Bass? The nice twist here is that all the goods are actually on sale (although I don’t imagine they’ll ship outside the US), so you can actually follow this all the way through to the point of purchase – if you’ve spent any time GPT-wrangling over the past year then you will probably have a few tricks up your sleeve to convince the AI that you’re worthy of some pretty special discounts (clue: sick kids tend to really pull at its cold, unfeeling binary heartstrings), and for any of you reading in North America this could be a decently-cost-effective way on stocking up on tat to gift to people you don’t really know or like. Seriously, though, this is SUCH a smart idea and such an obviously-repurposable one that I’d be slightly amazed (and, honestly, quite disappointed in you) if I don’t see it redone by a retailer as some sort of promo.

GPT Monkey Island: Ok, fine, so this is literally just a prompt, but it turns out that it does a really good job of turning GPT into a genuinely fun (if low-stakes) roleplaying game. The prompt basically instructs the LLM to act as a sort of Dungeon Master figure for a Monkey Island-esque tale of YOU – the HERO – arriving in a city of your choosing to seek fame and fortune; the prompt’s structured in such a way that you’re offered options in terms of where you take the story, choose your own adventure style, but I found when messing around with it that it will take a significant degree of improvisation, meaning you can basically take the story wherever you feel like pushing it. In the 20 minutes or so I spent messing with this this week I ended up owning a tavern and managing a network of spies and informants through the secret brothel I’d opened upstairs (all very vanilla, obvs, this is still GPT and, also, I’m not some sort of sweaty-palmed pervert) – the system seems to be able to keep track of what you’ve done, and what you’ve achieved, and your inventory and health and all sorts of other things, and in general this is the first one of these sorts of things that has felt like it *worked* in any meaningful sense – if you’ve ever fancied the idea of playing around with the whole ‘AI as DM’ idea then this might be a decent place to start. TBH the Monkey Island comparison doesn’t really stand up here (although the prompt’s coded to include insult swordfighting), but that’s pretty much my only quibble – this is a lot of fun.

Anna Indiana: We delve deep into the musical uncanny valley now – Anna Indiana is an ‘AI singer-songwriter’, who this week went a bit viral when its first song was shared online and the world…well, the world reacted with predictable horror, but click the link and see what you think – go on, I’ll wait. *WAITS* Horrible, isn’t it? There are no details available, or at least none that my cursory research has been able to uncover, as to exactly what tech stack the people behind this are using to spin up the ‘melodies’, but the lyrics are a predictably-bland parade of bromides as you’d expect from an LLM, and the accompanying avatar is exactly the sort of cookie-cutter AI waifu you might expect, and, honestly, the whole thing is just a bit depressing – as is the insistence of whoever is running the whole project that ‘Anna’ is a sentient creature with thoughts and feelings and which sees her complain on Twitter that ‘many humans don’t seem to like me’. Still, to every single person who listens to this and thinks that it provides incontrovertible truth that The Machine will NEVER be able to replace human artists, I would like to point out that whilst the song is horrible and the ‘melody’ is garbage, the whole thing literally could not have existed as little as six months ago, and, as ever, THIS IS THE WORST IT IS EVER GOING TO BE. BONUS AI MUSIC LINK!: AI music toolbox Okio lets you effectively apply style transfer to music – as you can see in this clip of ‘remixes’ people have been making with their tech, which includes such bangers as ‘Wu Tang, but dubstep’ and ‘Old Macdonald, but death metal’.

Visual Anagrams: This feels like something that you might be able to have some SEMI-VIRAL SUCCESS with if you get in early enough – the link takes you to Github page for the code, but you can see plenty of examples which will give you an idea of what’s going on here, which is good because I’ve been trying to work out how best to explain it to you via the medium of words for the past three minutes and, honestly, I’m fcuked if I know how. Basically this is a load examples of slightly brain melty visual illusions created by AI in which one image MAGICALLY becomes another via the medium of slight visual tweaking – I suppose the best description I can give you is ‘you know that old image of a rabbit which if you squint at it becomes a duck? Yeah, well that’. Seriously though, click the link – I reckon you’ve got a fortnight or so in which this stuff will continue to be genuinely jaw-dropping.

Trash Baby: CAVEAT EMPTOR: this app is iOS-only and as such I haven’t been able to actually try it out, and as such Web Curios takes no responsibility for any weird sh1t it ends up doing to your phone should you decide to install it. Now that’s out of the way, Trash Baby is a fun-looking little app which basically does photo mashups – select two images from your phone’s camera roll and get the app to style-smoosh them together and see what happens. Literally just that,but from what I’ve seen online you can get some pretty fun visual styles out of it if you play around enough. Pleasingly, this app was just an idea that someone had which they got GPT-4 to code up and which now, six months later, is available in the app store – the future in action, right there.

Operator: I haven’t featured anything NFT-ish for a while because, well, it’s all awful bullsh1t and the world has thankfully moved on – but I will make an exception for this, because I think it’s sort-of beautiful and I rather like the high concept. Operator is an art project in three parts – I missed the first, but the second is now ongoing – which is all about capturing human movement and translating it into data, and then visualising that data. Yes, fine, it involves MINTING and THE BLOCKCHAIN, but it’s worth bothering to read the spiel that accompanies the project because, honestly, I think it sort-of makes sense (insofar as anything involving web3 can ever be said to ‘make sense’).

Palestine Online: This is a gorgeous project. “Palestine Online is a collection of webpages creates by Palestinians, primarily in the late 90s and early 00s, sourced from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Included here are personal webpages, news websites and online magazines, sites showcasing Palestinian art and culture, and homepages compiling and linking out to other relevant pages. Many of the pages here were created during or shortly after the Second Intefada, and demonstrate the rich history of Palestinian internet presence, showing the use of the web as a tool for resistance, connection, and expression under ongoing occupation. Palestine Online is a mirror to Palestinian internet presence and resistance today, highlighting the history of resilience and anger under occupation, as well as the immense pride, love, and joy for their ancestral land, no matter what the internet has looked like and has been technologically capable of.” I present this as a piece of internet history rather than as some sort of STATEMENT about anything, fyi.

Bitkraft: Would you like to ENTER SYNTHETIC REALITY? No, I don’t know what it means either, but WOULD YOU LIKE TO????? That’s the question asked of you upon loading up this site for the first time, and I strongly suggest you grasp the opportunity with both hands because this really is a doozy of shiny, meaningless but VERY PRETTY webwork. I think the company behind this is something to do with videogames and web3 and THE BLOCKCHAIN, but, honestly, who cares? They’ve chosen to spunk a chunk of time and cash on this beautiful, silly website and we should all be grateful. “GAMES ARE A FOUNDATIONAL CORNERSTONE OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE!”, screams the copy, and “THE PAST IS A PROLOGUE!” and, honestly, who are we to argue? NO FCUKERS, etc! Baffling, but SUCH nice animations!

The Open Source Munitions Portal: This is both sobering and also a quite astonishing example of the sort of information about conflict which can now be gathered and shared through open source means – launched by Kings College this week, “The Open Source Munitions Portal is a tool for researchers, journalists and practitioners trying to learn more about munitions and their use and impact in conflicts.” It contains hundreds of images of spent munitions in the field, mainly from the current war in Ukraine, as a record of what is being dropped on who and where – there’s nothing obviously distressing here, but it’s hard not to look at all these images of gunmetal casings and twisted metal and think about what these munitions do to people (your regular reminder, by the way, that if you work for an agency and your agency works for, say, BAE Systems, or Raytheon, that your agency is a collection of amoral cnuts and you should be ashamed).

Spotify Visualised: DID YOU GET YOUR WRAPPED WAS IT WHAT YOU WANTED DOES IT ACCURATELY CONVEY THE NUANCES OF YOUR PERSONALITY VIA THE MEDIUM OF FIVE ARTISTS AND SONGS? Ahem. Sorry, it’s just that as a non-Spotify person I always get a slight ‘nose pressed up against the window of a party I’m not invited to’ vibes from the Spotify Wrapped stuff – this year’s celebration of individual taste (or, alternatively, demonstration of the crushing dominance of half-a-dozen artists and the impossibility of making a living from music for 99% of people working in the industry) has, as ever, been everywhere this year, but if you’d like to take a slightly more granular dive into your music and your tastes and what you listen to and WHAT IT MEANS then you might enjoy this webapptoy thing; plug in your account, let it crunch the numbers a bit and then enjoy your musical tastes presented as a galaxy of artists with CLUSTERS and CONSTELLATIONS and all sorts of nicely-visualised gubbins that will let you work out exactly where in musical latent space your tastes sit (by the way, my single TAKE on this year’s Wrapped numbers – noone seems to be talking about the fact that Beyonce is nowhere to be seen in the global top 10 artists list, which I think is super-interesting considering her insane sociocultural heft anbd footprint; anyone have any idea as to why this is?).

Progressively More Intense: You will doubtless have seen the AI image trend this week of ‘X, but getting progressively more intense’ – the indefatigable Rene over at Good Internet has collected literally every single example of these spotted in the wild in one place, for your delectation and enjoyment. So many of these are joyous, but I don’t think I am going to see another sequence of AI-generated images this year that will make me as fundamentally happy as “Jesus is baptised by John but they get progressively more excited”.

By Camille Brasselet

NEXT UP, IT’S DECEMBER WHICH MEANS I FEEL ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED IN INCLUDING THIS EXCELLENT ALBUM OF FESTIVE BEATS BY ONE OF MY FAVOURITE PRODUCERS WHO GOES BY THE NAME OF JONWAYNE!

Brarista: One of the odd side-effects of being brought up by a single woman is that I think I possibly heard more complaints about the irritation caused by ill-fitting bras than most young men (I can’t pretend that I was in any way happy about this), and as a result am a firm believer in the importance of getting properly measured and fitted (but I appreciate that this is now veering into slightly-weird territory, and I shan’t mention it again). Brarista (can we just pause to acknowledge the brilliance of the name, please?) is a new startup from the UK which aims to use machine vision to help people buy bras that fit them properly – they’re currently very early stage, and are looking for help testing and developing the tech, so should any of you be a) in the UK; and b) in possession of breasts then you might want to take a look.
COP28 Adventures: What do we think – will THIS be the global conference that sorts everything out and secures our collective futures against the droughts and the rising seas and the shortages and the fires and the floods? Erm, look, it was a rhetorical question, don’t think too hard about what the answer is and instead enjoy the OFFICIAL GAME APP OF COP28! I have no idea if this is any good – although I have not-insignificant doubts – or indeed why an ostensibly-serious conference debating the steps we need to take to save our species from fcuking itself irrevocably via the medium of climate change requires an OFFICIAL GAME APP in the first place, but I am including it because I find the fact that the game is developed by the Dubai Police Force incredibly, darkly funny.
Image Upscaling: You know the long-running joke about CSI and shows of that ilk and the MAGICAL TECH that they have which lets a forensic pathologist shout ‘ENHANCE!’ at a screen and watch as a previously-unreadable mess of pixels resolve themselves into the label on the perp’s underpants? Well this is that, but it actually works! Ok, fine, there’s no voice command (yet), but the rest is pretty much the same – upload an image, tell the software which bit you want it to ‘enhance’ and watch as it uses AI to basically imagine the detail. This is, I think, intended to allow for simple drawings and images to be rendered more complex, but I had quite a lot of fun using it to mess with random images I had sitting around on my phone – if nothing else, though, it might be interesting to scan and upload any old family pics you have into this to see what it can do with them (as long, obviously, as you don’t mind your loved ones being ingested into the maw of a future Machine – you don’t, do you? GOOD!).
Brickelo: Have you ever wondered to yourself “of all the LEGO minifigs that have ever been released, which is the BEST EVER?” No, I can’t for a second imagine that you have – but SOMEONE has, and that person has created Brickelo, which is seeking to sever that Gordian knot once and for all. “Every LEGO minifigure is awesome, but have you ever wondered which is the best? If so, this website is for you. Brickelo takes a mathematical approach to determining the best LEGO minifigures, by using an ELO rating system. Each minifigure’s rating is calculated based on the outcome of comparing two minifigures against one another.” I got a bit sucked into this, mainly because I had no idea that LEGO had made so fcuking many tie-in figurines.
The Fabulous Cartier Journey: What would induce YOU to drop several thousand pounds on some jewellery for Christmas (or, frankly, any other time – diamonds are, after all, forever, darling!)? Is the answer ‘a really, really nicely-designed and very soothing web-based clone of a decade-old videogame? NO OF COURSE IT ISN’T AND YET HERE WE ARE. Continuing the luxury world’s continued, baffling obsession with ‘making really simple reskins of old games as a marketing tactic I cannot even pretend to understand the ROI of’, Cartier brings us THE FABULOUS CARTIER JOURNEY – guide the lovely Cartier airship through the equally-lovely pastel-shaded skies, collecting gems and generally having a pleasant and soothing time, which is pretty much the antithesis of the original, intensely-enervating Flappy Bird experience. I really, really hope that the legendarily-plutocratic brand chucked the game’s original designer, Dong Nguyen, a few quid, but I bet they didn’t, the fcuks.
The Royal Court Living Archive: I am a miserable joyless husk of a man, but one of the few things in life which give me genuine pleasure is going to the theatre and London’s Royal Court is somewhere I probably visit at least half-a-dozen times a year; despite its location in London’s somewhat-fancy Sloane Square, it’s a venue which over the years has showcased new writing by up-and-coming playwrights (Carol Churchill, Mark Ravenhill, etc) and which regularly puts on small experimental shows that wouldn’t ordinarily find space at ‘mainstream’ theatres – the theatre has recently created this WONDERFUL online archive which collects information about shows across the theatre’s history; you can search by work, or playwrite, and discover all sorts of wider information about works and their performances and their reception. The archive’s described as a ‘living work in progress’ and it’s still growing and being populated, but I love the ambition and the ethos behind it.
Learn Morse Code: You may not THINK you need to learn Morse, but I promise you’ll be grateful for the knowledge when civilisation collapses – this is simple, but surprisingly fun and quite intuitive once you get into it. .. / -.-. .- -. .—-. – / -… . .-.. .. . …- . / -.– — ..- / -… — – …. . .-. . -.. / – — / – .-. .- -. … .-.. .- – . / – …. .. … .-.-.- / – .- -.- . / .- / .-.. — -. –. –..– / …. .- .-. -.. / .-.. — — -.- / .- – / -.– — ..- .-. … . .-.. ..-.
Offscript: This is an interesting idea (whose actual, practical working I can’t quite figure out) – as far as I can tell, Offscript is a bit like Old Web darling Threadless, the tshirt company which let anyone submit designs and then ended up printing and selling the ones that the community decided it wanted to buy – except here, you don’t actually need to have any sort of design talent whatsoever, because you can COLLABORATE WITH AI to design things that will eventually get made! No word on exactly how the manufacturing process will work when The Machine starts imagining trousers with nine knees in the left leg or similarly-baroque design flourishes, or indeed how rights will work – but this is all very new, so I’m sure that it will all get ironed out sensibly (probably).
Dioramas: Via Kris, I don’t really know what this is but I would probably (inadequately) describe it as ‘a series of digital postcards’ – regardless, these are lovely and there are 30 of them for you to click through and explore.
Dot Meme: THERE IS A NEW DOMAIN NAME AVAILABLE! Yes, thanks to Google you can now, should you desire, register a web address at [yourURLhere].meme – ISN’T THAT EXCITING? Admittedly there is something almost painfully-Muskian about the idea of a ‘X.meme’ address – “Groimes, meems are hilleeriyas ind oi im king of the meems!” – but if you can think of a decent reason for getting one then, well, now you can.
Rebookify: I haven’t actually tried this and so have no idea if it actually works, but, well, let’s take it at face value and assume it does exactly what it says on the homepage, and that all the endorsements are from actual, real people rather than the fevered imaginations of the dev team. Rebookify basically works to help you get the best deals on hotel rooms – you book a room, you tell the site which hotel it’s at and how much you paid for it, and it will alert you as soon as it finds the same room for the same dates at a cheaper price. You’ll have to handle the rebooking yourself, but this seems…useful? Also the fact that it doesn’t take any of your data is pleasing and non-nefarious, so double points to this site.
Raindrop: I have long-since realised that I am never going ‘improve my workflows’ or ‘optimise my browsing’ or ‘take an extensive series of notes which I will network and connect and turn into some sort of semi-extension of my brain’ – I write Curios, that’s it, don’t try and improve me, it won’t work. I appreciate, though, that there will be some of you out there who want to do things like ‘get better and more efficient’ or ‘keep track of stuff’, and whilst I can’t pretend to understand this ameliorative impulse I can at least acknowledge it. Via Dave Briggs’ newsletter, Raindrop looks a bit Evernote-y and seems to be a really smart way of keeping track of and organising bookmarks – even better, it saves copies of every Page you visit which is a fcuking BOON for anyone attempting to keep track of fast-moving things. I think this is a paid product, but it looks like it could be quite powerful for those of you with a need for this sort of thing.
Track AI Answers: This is an interesting idea – not the product (which isn’t really a product) so much as the question / problem it highlights. The idea here is that you type a brand or individual name into the platform and it will run regular checks on the major LLMs to see exactly what they throw up when you plug said terms in – the sense here is that this should be used as some sort of reputation monitoring and management tool…except, well, what are you meant to do, exactly, if this tells you that, for example, Claude has started associating the name “Matt Muir” with “excellent and renowned creator of bespoke Sentex products to the discerning terrorist community” (am I going to regret committing that sentence to the web? TIME WILL TELL!)? I genuinely hadn’t considered this as a possibility, but now I am half-interested in the idea of a fiction based around what would happen if The Machine decided certain things about you – how might you deal with it, and how the fcuk would you go about changing it? INTERESTING QUESTIONS.
Pronouns: A well-meaning and entirely benign guide to pronouns and non-binariness, which also made me laugh A LOT when I scrolled down and I reached the bit about ‘Emojiself Pronouns’ because, well, lol. This is the sort of website which I can imagine would cause a Certain Type Of Person to dissolve in paroxysms of fury.
Language Transfer: This is a genuinely odd website – you know how everyone in the world basically uses Duolingo to convince themselves that they are learning a new language whilst at the same time not in fact learning anything meaninful at all? Well other language courses are available – one of which is Language Transfer, which has apparently existed for about a decade, and is the work of ONE SINGLE PERSON. There are, understandably, a limited number of languages here – but Swahili is one of them, in case you were curious – but there are also courses on Introduction to Music Theory and ‘Methods of Thinking’, and while I can’t vouch for the content of any of these I am absolutely staggered by the endeavour here. There’s perhaps a *touch* of the ‘odd’ about this – I did raise a slight eyebrow at the assertion that there’s a film about the site’s founder and their ‘journey’ coming out next year, but I suppose you never know – but in general this is a pretty incredible (and, fine, odd) corner of the web.
Neglected Books: “Welcome to the Neglected Books page, edited and mostly written by Brad Bigelow. Here you’ll find articles and lists with thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste.” THANKS, BRAD BIGELOW! This is genuinely fascinating – I could honestly just abandon you all here and just dive into the stacks here, because there are SO many interesting and curious and weird old novels discussed, and there’s a real sense that Brad (THANKS BRAD) absolutely knows his sh1t when it comes to the shifting literary tastes and mores of the 20thC. Bibliophiles will adore this.
The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2023: You will almost certainly have seen this year’s selection already, but, in case not, HERE YOU ARE! The best image in the 2023 selection, by the way, is of the small fox (he is called Keith – all foxes are called Keith, it is the law) who appears to be smoking a cigar.
Drumhaus: Browser-based rum machines aren’t exactly new, but this one is a particularly-nicely-made example of the genre and it’s the work of but a few moments and clicks to create a track that’s genuinely pretty good, even if you’re me.
NSFW History: “What’s a NSFW fact about history that most people don’t know?” asks the prompt at the top of this Reddit thread and WOW do people deliver in the comments. There are some wonderful anecdotes in here, although I didn’t spot my personal favourite which is that the reason that Macau belonged to the Dutch for so long was that it was traded by the Chinese for a metric-fucktonne of ambergis, very much the balene viagra of its day, so that the ageing Emperor of the day could have a better chance of ‘enjoying’ the 100 virgins he had been gifted by sycophantic regional governers. Ah, history!
Perfect Pitch: I am a cloth-eared cnut and as such this is literally impossible for me to play without becoming upsettingly frustrated, but presuming that you’re less tone-deaf than I am you might have more luck – listen to the tune and try and recreate the note progression in six tries or fewer! Honestly, this made me feel SO INADEQUATE – but, er, that’s my problem, sorry.
Draknek and Friends: A selection of small, pleasing browser games, all designed and made by one Alan Hazelden. THANKYOU, ALAN HAZELDEN! I haven’t tried all of them, but of the ones that have played I can highly recommend ‘You’re Pulleying My Leg’ (although frankly, Alan, that title is indefensible).
Brickception: Finally this week, once again via Andy, comes this insane-but-brilliant game, which is basically ‘Breakout in two separate windows where one window is also the paddle’ – don’t worry, it will make significantly more sense when you click the link. I loved this, and there’s something just challenging enough about it, like rubbing your head and patting your belly simultaneously.

By Sylvia Sleigh

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY DJLMP FRANKLY BEYOND ME, GENRE-WISE, BUT I PROMISE YOU IT IS GREAT AND GENTLE AND LOVELY AND WILL TRANSPORT YOU SOMEWHERE SIGNIFICANTLY SUNNIER AND WARMER THAN LONDON WHICH LET ME ASSURE YOU IS ABSOLUTELY FCUKING BALTIC RIGHT NOW!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

My Ad Journal: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, it’s a great project which I personally very much enjoy – one anonymous internetperson documents some of the ads they are served on a(n almost) daily basis. “the ads are tracking me, but i am also tracking the ads! Yeah! follow my ad journal and learn more about me and my desires. it’s a curated selection, because there is way too many ads for me to put them all here. i mostly post weird or very specific lo-fi ads and never big brands like H&M or HBO, because i guess their target group is everyone, so it’s not as fun.. and they recieve enough attention already… i also blur out or remove any text, because i don’t actually wanna advertise.” I think there’s a bigger project/exhibition in here, but it’s sort-of perfect as-is.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

Nick Heer: To be honest I am not quite sure how I came across this feed, but I am very glad that I did – I have no clue who Nick Heer is, but they take really lovely photographs. God, an Insta account that’s just…photos? HOW QUAINT! Anyway, Nick has a great eye and I think his feed contains some beautiful images.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Website-As-Home: A short essay by Nico Chilla (you should check out the rest of their site while you’re there, by the way, it’s lovely) about the concept of the website as a ‘home’, of sorts, an owned, curated space that in some way houses and defines and reflects and individual and their shifting, evolving interests and tastes and general SELF-ness – I am finding myself thinking more and more about the ways in which the web acts as SPACE, and how we define the limits of it (and our own), and I found this a really interesting addition to ,my reading on the topic. A taste: “Still, a website and a home are importantly different in that the former is intended for public exposure, whereas the latter is grounded in private life. But maybe we can relate the public nature of websites to a public dimension of homes: hosting visitors. Typically we don’t show our house guests everything — we keep many things private and clean up before they arrive. Moreover, we’ve made prior decisions about our furniture and decor with future guests in mind. So homes can certainly be curated for the public eye; but crucially, they maintain their function as living spaces. I find it generative to consider websites as a similar conjunction of public and private activity: by thinking about how visitors will receive the things that I publish, I’m compelled to produce more and refine the things that I make. At the same time, the website remains my space and is subservient to no other end.”

The Tyranny of Structurelessness: Ok, this is LONG and QUITE SERIOUS, but it’s also really, really interesting and a proper artefact of political organisational thinking from The Past – it’s an essay which started as a talk, first delivered in 1970 as part of the debate around second wave feminism and how to drive the movement forward – basically it’s a long meditation on the problems with structureless organisations, and the inherent limitations (and contradictions) that a ‘leaderless’ movement will necessarily face, and it’s interesting both as an historico-political curio and as a sort of manual for people looking to organise, whether politically or otherwise (but probably politically).

The Nature of Bee-ing: Yes, ok, fine, the ACTUAL title of this piece is the far superior and far more descriptive ‘what is it like to be a bee?’, but I couldn’t possibly resist the tired, lazy wordplay (it’s what you come here for!) – this is an extract from a forthcoming book on ‘The Mind of the Bee’ by one Lance Chittka and it is SO INTERESTING; there’s a long and noble history of ‘try and imagine what it would be like to be an X’ in philosophical writing (starting with Thomas Nagel’s ‘what is it like to be a bat?’) and this is another GREAT example of the genre, what with bees being so, well, bee-zarre (I am really sorry, I don’t know what’s come over me – it’s a mid-morning slump, I’ll try and power on through). It is, obviously, impossible to imagine what it would be like to ‘see’ electricity like what bees can do, but I love writing that attempts to bridge that (uttterly unbridgeable) gap – “To start, imagine you have an exoskeleton—like a knight’s armor. However, there isn’t any skin underneath: your muscles are directly attached to the armor. You’re all hard shell, soft core. You also have an inbuilt chemical weapon, designed as an injection needle that can kill any animal your size and be extremely painful to animals a thousand times your size—but using it may be the last thing you do, since it can kill you, too. Now imagine what the world looks like from inside the cockpit of a bee.” Honestly, this is WONDERFUL.

Effective Altruism vs Accelerationism: I have to say, I personally think that the PHILOSOPHICAL SCHISM which everyone has been claiming has been at the heart of the whole OpenAI thing has been somewhat mischaracterised, but if you want an overview of what people currently seem to think are the twin poles of ‘go slower!’ and ‘go faster!’ from within the AI development space then you could do worse than read Molly White’s account.

Corporations Did More To Kill Us That AI Ever Will: I want to caveat this link with two things: 1) I think the website it’s hosted on is…a bit mental, frankly, and I don’t quite know who’s behind it, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading anything else on there; 2) the writing is…a bit overblown (yes, I know, pot/kettle, fcuk off why don’t you?). That said, I found the basic premise here – that we can probably stand to learn a few things about ‘the dangers of AI’ from the way in which corporations have behaved over the course of the post-industrial age, and that there are certain parallels in terms of the way in which companies already behave and the way in which we are currently being told to worry that AIs might one day behave which we possibly ought to pay a bit more attention to – reasonably-convincing. I am not *totally* convinced that the whole site this sits on isn’t some sort of AI project itself, mind.

When AI Comes For The Elites: I don’t, to be clear, necessarily buy the central premise of the article, but I did find it both interesting and quite funny in a sort of weird way – basically the theory here is that we’re on the cusp of some sort of lawyerly uprising, as all of the paralegals and junior solicitors whose jobs are being replaced by The Machine at a rate of knots use all that spare brainpower to FOMENT REVOLUTION! I have my doubts, but if the revolution starts with the layoff of a bunch of trainees from Slaugter & May then, well, you heard it here first!

Making God: Ok, this is VERY LONG, but it’s also super-interesting and discursive and covers a huge range of topics, linking mythology to faith to AI to the far-right to neoliberalism to NFTs to the metaverse, and as an overview of some of history’s mythologising (and weaponisation) of tech this is frankly superb by Emily Gorcenski. Honestly, if you only pick one non-fiction piece to read from this week’s edition I would totally pick this one, it’s DIZZYING in scope.

The Digital Election: This was picked up in Private Eye this week, but it’s worth reading about in full – recent changes to UK electoral legislation have seen the upper limits for spending on political advertising revised upwards, which means a LOT more advertising, specifically digital advertising. “Since buying digital ads became commonplace in British political campaigns in 2015, spending on them has increased at each election. Electoral Commission records show that the main party campaigns have, in that time, spent around £13m on Facebook, Google, Snapchat and Twitter ads. Given the extra headroom the new spending limits offer, we wouldn’t be *that* surprised if one of the big parties spent more than £10m on digital ads at the next election. If they do, their opponent will want to try and do the same. Such is the logic of political campaigns (and it’s going to be a great couple of months for the political ad sales folks at Facebook and Google.) If that happens, voters in marginal seats will notice a big difference. In the space of a few weeks, roughly 5 million voters, in around 100 seats, will see approximately 2 billion political ads (a very back of the envelope calculation, but of those orders of magnitude).” I don’t mean to keep on banging the same (tired, threadbare) drum but when you add AI-powered content creation to that it starts to look…potentially quite mad.

Rebuilding Organisations for AI: I’ve become slightly bored of telling you all to go and sub to Ethan Mollick’s newsletter this year, and of constantly linking to it, but it continues to be one of the best resources for anyone interested in the practical side of ‘making AI do useful things for you in the professional space’. Here Mollick discusses how AI tools, specifically LLMs, can be integrated into working practices, and the sorts of tasks they can usefully be asked to perform, and how to build this into workflows on a day-to-day basis – if any of you are in the invidious position of being in charge of ‘using AI to save us money and, eventually, sack half of the workforce’ then this will be useful (but, you know, your soul will never know peace).

Generative AI Comes To Search: Specifically, visual search – this is actually a really interesting use case for it, and something that hadn’t occurred to me at all. Those of you with access to Google’s experimental ‘Search Generative Experience’ trial (so only those in the US at present) will now be able to ask The Machine to imagine something you might want to buy, and then use that generated image as the starting point for a search for real-life products; the idea being that you might have an image of your ideal purchase in your head but no idea of how or where to find it on search, which image you can now bring to life via the medium of AI. I appreciate that this might feel like something of a banal or uninspired use case, but I found this REALLY exciting – not in terms of what’s happening here or the AUGMENTED RETAIL EXPERIENCE, but in the sense of The Machine acting as a sort of bridge between our desires and our ability to articulate them.

The Product Model at Spotify: Yes, ok, I can’t imagine that any of you read that headline and thought ‘wow, thanks Matt, that sounds FASCINATING’ – but I promise that this account of how the people who built it went about designing, developing and rolling-out the Spotify Discover Weekly discovery playlists is genuinely interesting (or at least it is if you’re interested in the practical aspects of how people go about doing and making things, which I personally am; your mileage, as ever, may vary).

Don’t Keep ‘Em Crossed: Or, perhaps more helpfully, “A really good takedown of a recent campaign in the UK aimed at encouraging more women to have cervical screenings and why it’s depressing, reductive, sexist claptrap” – this, by Debbie Cameron, is both a good dissection of why the campaign doesn’t work, and more generally of an advermarketingpr environment in which it’s still possible for work like this to get signed off.

Driverless Cars Stress Cities: The past month or so’s news from the US, where various driverless car firms have seen their licenses to operate cabs been either removed entirely or seriously curtailed, has suggested that the age of the self-driving car is still a little way away. This piece is a really interesting look at all the other, unexpected ways in which cars without drivers mess with the functioning of urban environments as they are currently designed, and is a generally useful reminder that it’s rarely, if ever, possible to fully predict and model the impact of new products or systems on behaviours. The point about not being able to communicate with the cars, for example, in the same way one driver might signal to another with hand gestures or nods, had literally never occurred to me (which, fine, is probably a side-effect of my being a non-driver and a moron, but).

China’s Mosque Crackdown: An excellent bit of reporting by the FT, which used satellite imagery of China and image analysis software to determine that a significant number of mosques across the country have ceased to exist over the past decade or so as part of the country’s quiet policy of attempting to ‘sinify’ Islam (and, one might argue, effectively persecute the country’s Muslim population) – this is a really good article which uses dataviz and scrollytelling (sorry) to powerful effect.

Summer England’s TikTok Romcom: Another one for the ‘every platform eventually gets the same content and ‘innovations’ as all the platforms that preceded it’ file, this – Summer England is a character on TikTok who over the course of the year has been telling a long, first person, scripted-but-designed-to-look-real story of her romantic entanglement with her hot neighbour, using all the now-traditional TikTok tricks and tells, but doing so in a way that’s reminiscent of old school early YouTube fictions like LonelyGirl15; I am slightly surprised that there’s not more of this sort of stuff, but I imagine that, in much the same way that literally EVERYONE working in TV for about 6 years in the mid-2010s had by law to reference Skam in every single conversation about new formats ever, we are about to enter an era in which every single production company will be thinking ‘so what’s our fictional diary TikTok show, then?’.

Cookie Monster’s Cookies: I did not know until this week that I wanted to read a thousand-odd words about exactly how the cookies that Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster devours are made, and yet it turns out that I really, really did. I think it’s impossible to write ANYTHING about Sesame Street without it being basically entirely charming and adorable, and this is no exception.

Banal Utopias: A brilliant article in Vittles, exploring the history and evolution of the food available at the UK’s motorway services – which, I concede, doesn’t necessarily sound promising but really is properly interesting. No, really, look!: “The source of the very British fascination with MSAs is, according to Randall a feeling of anonymity that can be experienced when driving: ‘[At the service station] you can walk around tired and hungry and that’s all OK, because you’re surrounded by strangers on the outskirts of an obscure village that you’ve otherwise never heard of. It might as well be a different planet,’ he says. This sense of dislocation has been described by the anthropologist Marc Augé as ‘the emptying of the consciousness [and an] ordeal of solitude’ in his theory of ‘non-places’ – transitory yet somehow alluring spaces, like motorways and airports, where people move en masse through a series of efficient transactions, optimised by turbo-capitalism. In our collective experience, the separate province of the motorway is distinct from real places, and provokes the widely held fascination that comes with being in a ‘banal utopia’, as Augé suggests.”

London’s Mansion Blocks: Specifically, the design of London’s mansion blocks, how they came to exist and the social history behind them – I’ve personally always found there to be something intensely, weirdly, almost-frighteningly miserable about these buildings whenever I’ve stayed in them (something to do with the near-total absence of natural light in certain designs), but anyone who’s lived in the city and who’s walked around, say, Marylebone or Edgware Road will recognise the designs and the aesthetic at play here.

The Frog That Couldn’t Jump: This is a fascinating account of the author’s stint living in North Korea and working as state-approved writer and creator of party-sanctioned cultural materials – honestly, this is SO interesting: “Since its founding, North Korea has always had an elaborate bureaucracy for artistic production organized within the Korean Workers Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department. This framework was set up in emulation of the Soviet system of artistic production under Stalin. Over time, this artistic bureaucracy has been increasingly adapted to promote the cult of personality surrounding the first leader Kim Il Sung and his descendants. Among the many cultural products designed to promote the regime, one of the most important is literature. Aspiring writers in North Korea must register with the Korean Writers’ Union and participate in annual writing workshops. The KWU has offices in every province in the country. KWU editors evaluate each work on its ideological merits before allowing its publication in one of the Party’s own literary journals. There are particularly strict rules regarding how the leaders and the Party may be depicted in literature. A writer’s life is highly competitive. Literary success means becoming a “professional revolutionary” with lots of perks: a three-month “creativity leave” every year, permission to travel freely around the country, and special housing privileges. Kim Ju-sŏng was one such aspiring writer. A zainichi (Japan-born ethnic Korean), he “returned” to North Korea in 1976 at age 16 as part of a wave of emigration encouraged by pro-North Korean groups in Japan and lived in the country for 28 years before defecting to South Korea. The zainichi returnees were an important propaganda tool as well as a source of income and foreign technology for the North Korean regime. Due to their foreign connections they enjoyed a relatively higher standard of living, but they also faced suspicion from the regime and prejudice from ordinary North Koreans.” This feels like a film waiting to be made.

Vegetation: Another week, another essay from the increasingly-essential Dirt Magazine; this is by Evan Grillon and it’s all about his heart operation and what it feels like being confronted VERY HARD by your own mortality, and being sick, and contemplating death, and helplines and grief and trauma and, I promise, it is SUPERB and nowhere near as miserable or horrid as the selection of terms I’ve chosen to pull out as descriptors might make it sound. ““Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” wrote Emerson. What can a person do about their fear but turn to face it and praise the mystery at the bottom of every fear? I say what I am afraid of so I may, if not move past it, live beside the fear: I am afraid of hemorrhages, hematomas, heart infections. I am afraid of sudden death, of slumping over in the supermarket line while holding a bouquet of vegetables, I am afraid of a humiliating death: an aneurysm dissecting while on top of a lover, slipping on wet stairs and hitting my head. I am afraid of flossing too aggressively. I am afraid that I will die without telling the people who I love what is really on my mind. I wake up sometimes, late at night, to the wailing of sirens, only to find that familiar ticking prevails when the sirens subside.”

Last Week at Marienbad: I confess to really not having enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s novel, but this essay in Granta, in which she and her partner take a visit to Marienbad, partly in homage to the 60s arthouse film ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ and partly to take the waters – it is very sharply observed, and very funny, and not-entirely-unreminiscent of Patricia Lockwood which is pretty much the highest recommendation I can give it tbh.

Ice Cream, Alone And With Others: Our final longread of the week is this beautiful series of vignettes from a life, whose unifying theme is icecream. I think this is lovely, and I hope you do too.

By Maria Siorba

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Ok, I am puzzled by this and would like someone to explain it to me if at all possible. This video is called ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’, and it’s billed as a pilot episode for a potential future series, and it’s been apparently created by an independent studio in search of BIG FUNDING… the animation is decent, and while I am about 30 years too old for the humour and general ‘vibe’ of the whole thing, it seems like it’s well-made and not obviously nefarious. But that doesn’t explain to me how the fcuk it has clocked up 153m views in a month despite seemingly not bleeding across into any other media ecosystems I’m aware of (with the caveat, obviously, that I am old). Is this a thing? Is this just the nth example of how culture is so irredeemably fractured now that it’s impossible to get any sort of comprehensive view of it, or is there something else going on here? Anyone?

I have no idea how I would characterise this track, but I liked it a lot – it’s called ‘Masta’ and it’s by Tim Lyre and Jords, and my only criticism is that this really feels like it should have come out in May, it’s properly Summery.

How do you fancy some EXPERIMENTAL JAZZ TRUMPETRY??? No, wait, come back! This is reminiscent of John Zorn’s Naked City but with less terrifying black metal guitars and screaming – but still something of a ‘challenging bop’, as I believe the kids have never in fact said. The track’s called ‘ATM’ and it’s by O The Band.

Jangly Mexican indiepop now from Margaritas Podridas – this is called Tornillo, and I can pretty much guarantee that if I had heard this when I was 15 I would have fallen in love.

Last up in the videos this week is perennial Curios favourite and London’s best MC Manga Saint Hilare – this is his new track Exercise, and, as per, it is fcuking GREAT. Turn it up loud and HAVE FUN SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

Webcurios 24/11/23

November 24, 2023

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ONE MONTH TO GO! ONE MONTH TO GO!

Of course, if you’re in North America right now you’ll already be in the middle of an extended period of having a bad time with people you don’t like who you’re nevertheless compelled to spend time with by accidents of birth, but for the rest of us we’re into the FINAL COUNTDOWN to the festive season and that weird period of time when everyone loses the ability to imagine that life will continue after the holidays (I feel the whole November/December period of work is the real-life embodiment of the sowing/reaping meme, basically).

Effectively what I’m saying is that you’re entirely-entitled to down tools from hereon out – noone’s going to notice, and according to Rishi the economy’s going really well ACTUALLY and so we can probably all rely on things just sort of magically picking up next year…so click ALL the links in this week’s issue because, honestly, who the fcuk cares anyway?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you have my permission to open the Bailey’s and drink so much that you see God.

By Seth Becker

(images as ever via TIH)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH THE RETURN OF MY PERSONAL FAVOURITE PURVEYOR OF MIXES, SADEAGLE, WHO HERE PRESENTS JUST UNDER TWO HOURS OF SELECTED TUNES FROM ACROSS AFRICA, LITERALLY NONE OF WHICH YOU ARE LIKELY TO HAVE HEARD BEFORE BUT ALL OF WHICH ARE SUPERB!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY ISN’T LOOKING FORWARD TO CONOR MCGREGOR’S INEVITABLE SECOND-ACT POLITICAL CAREER, PT.1:

Diesel Vert: Or is it ‘Diesel Metamorph’? The homepage and url say ‘vert’, the hoverover on the tab says metamorph…but, fundamentally, it doesn’t matter either way because (get ready everyone) WE’RE BACK IN THE METAVERSE! Yes, that’s right, 2022’s wasted marketing budgets keep cropping up here in the wild future that is the fag-end of 2023 – will this be the one that finally persuades me of the compelling benefits of branded activations in poorly-rendered virtual environments? Er, no – but I will concede that this is by FAR the shiniest bit of metaversal w4nk I’ve seen so far, and I was genuinely impressed by the CG and animation on display here. Diesel Vert is…oh, look, I don’t know, there’s some absolute hokum up front about some sort of ANCIENT PEOPLE who HARNESSED THE POWER OF TIME and who we MUST HELP (but…why? Who are they? And, honestly, why were they fcuking with time? Did they not know to leave well enough alone? And if I help them, will they have learned their lesson or will they simply start again with the ‘harnessing the power of time’ fcukery that got them into this mess in the first place? There’s a lack of detail here, is what I’m saying), but the ‘interactive’ portion of this literally involves guiding your (admittedly nicely-rendered) little avatar through a series of (equally-nicely-rendered) environments, occasionally pressing ‘E’ in order to get an ANCIENT PERSON to move you from one bit of scenery to another. And, well, that’s it – you do this a few times and then the website tells you to buy a pretty nondescript-looking watch, and you’re left with the sort of generally sad and empty feeling that everyone involved in the project would probably have been better off just spending some more time with people they loved than making this utterly-pointless bit of marketingw4nk. Still, it really is VERY PRETTY, so there’s that.

Atmospheric Agency: HELLO ADVERMARKETINGPRDRONES! Do any of you happen to work for McCann? If so, this one is firmly aimed at YOU – or rather, the people within your organisation who make the decisions about what clients are ethical to work, and who are apparently currently considering pitching for the Saudi Aramco business. Atmospheric Agency is a spoof ad firm website, presenting a firm that is PROUD of its work for the world’s oil and gas giants and which has been put together by campaign organisation Clean Creatives, presumably in the hope that it will do the rounds of the world’s adland creatives who will feel TERRIBLE about the clients that their paymasters work for and protest or quit or something. I’m slightly conflicted about this – on the one hand, I am a big fan of internal rebellion about stuff like this, and of staff making their voices heard about what a business should and shouldn’t do for money; on the other, I’ve been writing about this sort of stuff for over 10 years now, and not once have I ever seen one of these sorts of spoof campaigns achieve any sort of cut-through or impact whatsoever. Still, if you happen to work at McCann (or one of the other agencies pitching the Aramco business) – or know anyone who does, who you want to gently bully into making some sort of PRINCIPLED STAND – then you might enjoy this; if nothing else, the ‘creative ideas’ in the spoof pitch deck on the site are literally no worse than some of the things I have heard in real-life PR brainstorms.

Music League: Music is wonderful, glorious, emotional, HUMAN stuff – so what better way to celebrate and enjoy it than by reducing it to a two-dimensional means of accruing and flexing social capital? Welcome to Music League, in which you compete with a bunch of friends in music-themed challenge rounds – basically the game gives you all a bunch of prompts (“the happiest song in the world”, “clear the dancefloor”, “song most likely to cause sudden, ruinous, mid-coital impotence”, that sort of thing) and each player can submit a track in response – you all get to listen to the submitted songs, chat about them and vote on which is the ‘best’ response to the challenge prompt. This goes on over a number of rounds until someone is declared THE WINNER and…well, that’s it, unless you decide to craft some sort of elaborate crown out of cardboard and tinfoil and award it at some sort of regular presentation ceremony, or you take the additional step of instituting running league tables with relegation from the friendship group as a penalty for poor performance, but I figure this could be fun with the right group of people, and you might too.

Galerie: I think we’re all in agreement that the age of streaming and infinite, on-demand entertainments hasn’t quite worked out in the way in which the idea was sold to us back in the late-90s/early-00s. “Everything will be online!”, they said, “and you’ll have low-latency, high-bandwidtch connections that will enable you to seamlessly stream the infinite quantity of digitised media from any point in history direct into your eyeballs at the push of a button!”. And to an extent they were right, but THEY (the b4stards) forgot to mention the fragmented streaming landscape, and subscription fees, and, most irritatingly of all, that the complicated mess of international media rights, coupled with the rapacious and insatiable nature of, well, CAPITALISM, would mean that if you want to watch anything other than mainstream content from the past 40 years or so then you are basically fcuked. Still, there are smaller streaming services available that attempt to offer a slightly more curated selection of films than Netflix et al – the latest of these is Galerie, billing itself as ‘a new type of film club’, which comes from a bunch of FAMOUS PEOPLE (Ethan Hawke! Maggie Gyllenhall! Wes Anderson!) and which, for $10 a month, will offer you essays and film screenings and exclusive content and – I presume you’ll also get a selection of actual films you can watch, otherwise it feels like something of an unsatisfying film club. Frankly details as to what EXACTLY you get for your money are sketchier than I’d like, but I suppose they’re hoping that the star power of ETHAN AND MAGGIE AND WES will get people paying up regardless.

Celebrity Number 6: This is some EXCELLENT internet culture (and classic obsessional Redditing), well done everyone. Via the excellent Links I Would GChat You newsletter, Celebrity Number Six is a subReddit devoted to solving a singular, insignificant conundrum – who exactly is the sixth celebrity whose likeness has been shoddily reproduced on a cheap shower curtain some random person sold byCzech retailer Letky Maraz in the late-00s? You may not think you care, but I promise you that if you spend a few minutes delving around the sub – and digging into the sleuthing done to date by the frankly-indefatigable community members who’ve devoted a frankly-troubling amount of time to this – then you will find yourself weirdly compelled by the mystery. WHO IS TEAL ANDROBJORK? We may never know.

The Museum of Menstruation: Before the Vagina Museum became an online cause celebre and got its permanent home in East London there was the Museum of Menstruation, a website created and maintained by one Harry Finlay – there was apparently also a physical version of the museum which existed, er, in Harry’s house (details on exhibits and visiting protocols are a bit sketchy, which, honestly, is a shame, as I have QUESTIONS), but the main bulk of his work is preserved on this site, which appears largely-unchanged since its early web heyday. There is a LOT of content on here, from a section of ‘famous women in ads for menstrual products’ to some really detailed information on how past cultures related to the concept of menstruation, but I really encourage you just to click and spelunk around and generally just enjoy the vibe of the site – and, if you do nothing else, PLEASE click here and read the ‘About’ page which, honestly, I think could possibly inspire a book or short film in itself.

The Natural Landscape Photography Awards 2023: Would you like to see some glorious photographs of our beautiful, dying planet? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! I am very much a sucker for this sort of environmental photography in which physical geography attains a sort of abstract quality; there are some images in here that remind me of paisley, almost, in terms of the way they use colour and geometry. My personal favourites here are the frankly ridiculous shots of burning lava from the Fagradalsfjall volcano, but, as ever, these are all rather wonderful.

Hope Sogni: ‘Football’ can probably be placed on the long list of ‘things which are conceptually good but which are increasingly being rendered bad by the actions of a small group of men’ – which is why this campaign exists. Hope Sogni is a fictional woman presenting her vision for the beautiful game – designed to be a contrast to the testosterone-y posturing of current FIFA President Gianni Infantino who’s in semi-dictatorial charge of the sport’s governing body for at least another 3.5 years. You can read a bit more about the campaign in this article, but the actual execution…oh, look, I don’t want to sh1t on poor Hope Sogni, but it’s all built on a platform called Twise which basically cobbles together a sub-GPT LLM and an Elevenlabs-esque voice model, and…it doesn’t really work to be honest. There’s meant to be the option to ‘talk’ to Hope using voice recognition, but the audio detection’s seemingly a bit iffy which means you’re effectively reduced to having a conversation with a chatbot which is obsessed with telling you about the importance of diversity in promoting the beautiful game. Which, you know, I agree with, but doesn’t feel like it needed an AI bot to communicate. This has all the hallmarks of an idea that smacked hard against the realities of TIME and BUDGET, which is something of a shame – it does, though, present a good argument as to why you shouldn’t do shonky ‘AI’ stuff as, well, it’s just a bit sad and disappointing.

The Information Is Beautiful Awards 2023: Want to see the year’s best examples of infoviz work, as selected by David McCandless and team? OF COURSE YOU DO! So many wonderful bits of design and visualisation here – many of which I’d seen over the course of the year, but the vast majority of which were entirely new to me. From pure dataviz to design to interactive webwork, the range of styles and techniques here is dizzying – my main takeaway was how much I want one of the Jesus Christ Superstar posters in my flat.

The Pudding Cup: I saw another one of those ‘wow the web has gotten really boring, what happened to websites, we used to have websites?’ Tweets yesterday doing numbers – approximately the seventh variant of that sentiment I’ve seen expressed in semi-viral terms over the past few months. On the one hand, I am sort-of glad that we’re seeing the pendulum of digital culture swing back towards the vague idea of ‘small and handmade and personal and fun’ as worth pursuing; on the other, HOW CAN YOU BE SO BLIND AND LAZY AND BOVINE AS TO THINK AND THEN TYPE SOMETHING LIKE THAT? THE WEB IS FULL OF BOUNDLESS CREATIVITY AND MAKING AND DOING AND WEIRD, MAD, HUMAN MESS! DO YOU NOT READ WEB CURIOS, YOU TOTAL CNUT?!?!? Ahem. Anyway, that’s by way of increasingly-spittle-flecked preamble to the sixth Pudding Cup (run by the people at Web Curios favourite The Pudding), which exists to celebrate non-commercial projects that can be described as ‘visual or data-driven’ – they are currently accepting entries, so if you have a site that fits the bill that you’d like to nominate then you should go right ahead and do just that.

Art Terms:Via Jared, an excellent resource from MOMA in NYC – ALL OF THE ART WORLD TERMS presented in helpful alphabetical order. Never again need you be lost for a definintion of Dadaism – instead, you’ll be peppering your conversation with references to the Harlem Renaissance and the Fluxus movement like some sort of awful gallerina (don’t, though, attempt the beret; NEVER attempt the beret).

FPV Cheffing: Fallow is a restaurant in the expensive London district of St James’ (it’s just round the corner from the Ritz, to give you an idea), and it’s pretty eye-bleedingly expensive (and, in case you care – which, fine, you don’t – it’s 100% not worth the money) and for a while now its kitchen has been doing a marketing gimmick where they chuck first-person video of its chefs during service. Someone straps a GoPro to their brow and records an hour or so of them, I don’t know, working the sauces station, or worrying at celeriac (I am yet to see anyone actually worrying at celeriacm, fyi). This is REALLY interesting for anyone who enjoys cooking and has a passing interest in the pro end of the talent spectrum – you will pick up some decent technical tips from this, and it’s pretty entertaining (if, again, you REALLY like cooking), but the main takeaway is that the reason everything tastes so nice in restaurants is the fact that it’s cooked in approximately a pack of butter per dish.

Gehry: Oh this is SO SO GOOD – a wonderful bit of scrollytelling (sorry) from Getty here, telling the story of the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, from design to construction, accompanied by some wonderful music and access to all sorts of footage and archive material to tell the story. Gehry’s style is almost familiar now, so it’s nice to be reminded of quite how architecturally bold he was – this is such a glorious piece of multimedia storytelling and design (and I don’t care how old the term ‘multimedia’ makes me sound). BONUS SCROLLYTELLING: this piece about the James Webb telescope in the New York Times is also rather lovely and contains lots of gloriously-violet images of the cosmos.

BigRat: Yes, this is a single-page website. Yes, that page hosts only a single image. But WHAT an image. And what a big rat!

By Katrien de Blauwer

NEXT UP WHY NOT RELAX WITH THIS AUTUMNAL SELECTION OF FOLK-Y TYPE TUNES PICKED BY PAUL HILLERY!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY ISN’T LOOKING FORWARD TO CONOR MCGREGOR’S INEVITABLE SECOND-ACT POLITICAL CAREER, PT.2:

The Fine Water Academy: A few years ago I featured a longread in Curios all about the very specific and rarefied world of the water sommellier and the luxe H20 market – now I am proud to present to you the world’s PREMIERE organisation for the accreditation and recognition of aquatic expertise! The Fine Water Academy is a VERY SERIOUS institution, consisting of two water experts who are willing to share their hard-won expertise on all things watery…for a price. “We have been asked many times in the past to share our knowledge and excitement about Fine Waters. We have both done this through all possible media channels, from tastings to seminars, speeches and training. We both have an extensive online presence and knowledge base as well as and a large audience. The Fine Water Academy LMS (Learning Management System) will now allow us to do this in a structured way and educate and certify the next generation of Water Sommeliers and train HORECA for a proper water service. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.” Leaving aside the…slightly sinister vibe given off by the last three words there, and the frankly-risible concept of a somehow-bespoke ‘learning management system’ for, er, what water tastes like, this all seems like good, clean fun – for just $120 you can take their ‘Fine Water 101’ class, while a Water Service Certification is just a shade under $500. Prices to get certified as a Fine Water Sommelier (what do they wear instead of the grapes, do you think? A small silver water molecule?) are on application only, but, frankly, WHAT PRICE THAT SORT OF EXPERTISE?!?!
The Social Justice Kittens Calendar 2024:I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t feel to me as though the festive season has really started until I see the first mention of the Social Justice Kittens calendar for the coming year – 2024’s selection of cats saying preposterous things is a classic bunch, and I am already looking forward to enjoying next December alongside a sad-eyed kitten bearing the legend: “I exist in the space beyond your expectations. My queerness threatens your hierarchies”.
Dear AI: A personal, small, modern bugbear of mine – the death of epistolary correspondence. I don’t mean physical letters – there is literally noone left alive under the age of 50 with hands strong enough to compose more than approximately three lines of cursive, based on my own personal (painful) experiences last time I was forced to write anything in longhand – but even just the habit of long, rambling, one-side-then-the-other email chats has sort of died down. Or maybe I’m just a really fcuking boring correspondent, I don’t know (but if you *do* know, please don’t tell me). Anyway, if you need to write someone a letter or ‘proper’ missive, one that requires you to use all the letters and none of the emoji and to write in full sentences, then why not…outsource that to AI! Obviously this is a useless service that is just a GPT addon and which won’t exist in a few months’ time, but I found quite a few things to be sad about and hate here which I want to share with you because, well, that’s what I do. The idea that you can ‘add a personal touch’ by integrating the recipient’s social channels into the response is SUCH a risibly bad and clunky idea – you just know that you’ll end up with something like “I find you so inspiring, like that post you made on Instagram about flowers!” – but the real, proper ‘oh god this really is so bleak’ moment came when I looked down the page at their proposed ‘coming soon’ features and discovered the promise of ‘Fully Automated Correspondence’, described as “Our AI agent learns who and what is meaningful to you and preemptively writes and sends letters without you having to lift a finger. So you can focus on what’s important to you.” So, er, WHAT IS THE POINT OF ME, THEN?! Does anyone really *want* a future in which The Machine does all the heavy lifting of, you know, communicating with the other people in one’s life? Eh? Oh, ok, fine.
TIME’s Top 100 Photos of 2023: TIME Magazine’s annual roundup of the best photojournalism from the past twelve months – these selections are always rather wonderful (if quite dizzying), and the range and breadth of topics and subjects covered this year is no exception. There’s a predictable quantity of human suffering on display – you may have heard, there are some wars going on – but many of the best shots are smaller and quieter; grapefruits split from crates in an earthquake’s aftermath, people watching Pride in New York, bulldozers moving in to level a German town…being alive is, mostly, maddening and awful and confusing and a bit scary, and these images capture all of that.
X100: Do you feel that there’s something holding you back from achieving your personal fitness goals? Is that something…COUNTING???? Well FEAR NOT, as x100 is here to help – never again need your prsuit of MASSIVE GAINS be stymied by pesky contiguous numbers! X100 is an app which, er, counts your reps – set it up so your workout station is within your phone camera’s field of vision, tell it how many lifts or squats or prolapses (can you tell I don’t gym?) you want to achieve and then OFF YOU GO, focusing on your posture and your technique and on not tearing anything and letting The Machine take care of the tricky business of remembering what comes after ‘17’.
Code For Text: Yes, ok, that’s not technically what this is called, but it doesn’t seem to have a proper name and it’s quite hard to describe and…you don’t care, do you? You just want me to get on and tell you what the fcuk this is, and stop with the tedious stream of consciousness authorial schtick? OH OK FINE. This is a link to a code project which basically exists to let you run analysis on words – to quote the project, it’s “a set of tools and standards -to mess with text. like a crowbar, for words. pull a chunk out- and get something back from your text.” So this will let you easily sort the adjectives or verbs from a corpus, say, or isolate sentences of particular length, or all sorts of other clever things which would otherwise be tricky or time-consuming – and none of which, fine, I can think of any practical NEED for, but I really like the idea of being able to have a setting on a website which (for example) removes all the adjectives at a click, to give you the most pared-back explanatory experience, say (actually that’s not a wholly terrible idea for a particular sort of company). If you do anything that involves wordwrangling then you might find this curious and vaguely-inspiring.
Italian Poetry: Via Giuseppe, Italian Poetry is a lovely little project by a MYSTERIOUS PERSON WHO LIKES POEMS and which self-describes as “my answer to the question: “If I were an English speaker trying to get an idea of how Italian poetry sounds, what tool would I like to have?” Well, I would like first of all to hear the poems recited out loud. Then I’d like an easy way to go back and forth between English and Italian without opening a dictionary. Also useful: some context on the choice of vocabulary, and maybe a guide to the most salient technical aspects of the Italian language.” The site presents a selection of poems which you can listen to and read along with – the words are highlighted as they’re spoken, making this helpful not only for poetry enthusiasts but also for anyone learning Italian and wanting help with listening comprehension or pronunciation – and the site’s seemingly updated regularly with new verse; this really is rather lovely.
Eternal Sunset: This is a nice idea which almost feels like it could be bigger – the website’s basic premise is that whenever you log on it will display a livestream of a sunset happening somewhere in the world (at the time of writing I’m enjoying a slightly-underwhelming one over Taipei, albeit one with a very pleasant lounge jazz soundtrack), but I would quite like to see this jazzed up slightly and, I don’t know, used as a premise for a wall in a bar or a meeting room or something. In fact, what this reminds me of most is an exhibition I saw at MOMA in San Francisco in about 2011 which pulled images of sunsets from Flickr – GOD I AM OLD. Anyway, this is pleasing and who doesn’t like a sunset? NO FCUKER, etc! This came via perennially-interesting Nag, btw.
Choose Your Own Threadventure: One of the curious things of having been A Weirdo Who Spends Far More Time Than Is Healthy Online for more than a decade now is that I am now starting to see past internet trends coming round for the third or fourth time (and this is one of the many, many reasons why I don’t want to live until I’m 100+ – can you imagine how incredibly fcuking tedious it must be watching the same arguments and conversations and trends and themes come back over and over and over again? It’s…it’s almost like we’re moronic hairless apes who will never learn!) – I’ve recently seen a spate of pieces talking about the TREND for old influencers on TikTok, just like we did on Insta in about 2012, and moral panics over THE KIDS and social media, just like we’ve been doing…well, annually, since about 2006 tbh, and here we have someone doing a Choose Your Own Adventure game… on Threads! Just like what we used to do on Twitter in 2015! And on YouTube in 2009 (RIP annotations)! Anyway, this works in exactly the same way as they did on Twitter, and it’s a gentle 5 minute timewaster with nice little graphics to accompany it, and if you’re in the invidious position of having to be in charge of some awful company’s pointless Threads presence then here’s an idea you can lob at your paymasters in order to maybe leaven the dreadful tedium of your professional existence for a few seconds.
The Ship Handling and Research Training Centre: I don’t mean to laugh at this – I don’t, really – and this is obviously no particular shade on Poland as I imagine that actually this is a pretty standard way of training ship’s captains in-waiting about the basics of maritime safety and seafaring, and I appreciate that this may still be the best way of doing this sort of educative work…but, also, just take a moment to imagine what you THINK a nation’s centre for training its future naval captains might be…are you imagining? ARE YOU? Good. Now click the link, Now click around the site. Now…now try not to laugh as you understand the scale at which this is all operating at. Honestly, I have cried actual tears of laughter every time I’ve clicked on this.
Nights on Earth: This is SUCH a great website, and is definitely worth bookmarking if you’re the sort of person who likes craning their neck to look at the sky at night – Nights On Earth is a calendar website which, based on where it thinks you are, will give you a reasonable idea of what sorts of things you might expect to see in the firmament (presuming you’re living somewhere without light pollution, or clouds). If nothing else it’s worth looking at before you go on holiday – you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know you or indeed your level of familiarity with astrology, who ARE you?) at the frequency with which visible meteor showers happen in parts of the world that aren’t the UK (although apparently we might be able to see shooting stars in London on Tuesday, so shut my face).
Closer: With the holiday season coming up, those of you whose relatives aren’t all mostly dead will likely be spending it with family – if you’re after a game to play which might BRING YOU CLOSER and HELP YOU LEARN AND GROW then, well, you’re a very different sort of person to me and we probably wouldn’t really get on, but, also, you might like Closer, a card game which is designed to, er, bring its participants closer (DO YOU SEE?) via the medium of asking everyone playing to share personal stories based on prompts and themes suggested by the cards – players vote on which stories were ‘best’ to add a small element of competition to the whole affair, but as far as I can tell this is mainly about giving everyone an opportunity to share stories and REFLECT and stuff like that. I would imagine that the likely appeal of this will be split pretty much along national lines, with North Americans (and frankly most of the rest of the world) approaching this with healthy interest, and the English instead thinking ‘the only way I could possibly countenance playing this is if I were very drunk, and if that happened it would inevitably end in murder or divorce’, but see what you think.
Retro: YES I KNOW NOONE WANTS ANOTHER PHOTO SHARING APP…but, in its defence, I think Retro looks reasonably interesting. As far as I can tell, its particular gimmick is that it encourages you to upload photos into weekly albums which you can share with friends and family – it’s designed to be a known-network rather than a ‘strangers and the world’ platform, and there’s something rather nice about the idea of using it as a small, shared visual diary and a light-touch way of keeping in touch. Admittedly there’s little here that you couldn’t probably also achieve with a bunch of other existing apps but, well, I quite like the feel of this for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
Plotthread: You know the ‘Wall’ game from Only Connect? Or, for the arrivistes among you, the NYT’s daily ‘Connections’ game? Well it’s that, but for films – you have 16 films each day and you need to group them by common plot thread. Given my previously-chronicled lack of interest in cinema this is basically the quiz equivalent of quantum physics for me, but you may have more success.
DoodleRiddle: This is an interesting idea – the game here is to draw something, anything, which is then compared against what that day’s target object is. How much does The Machine think the thing you have drawn looks like the thing it wants you to draw, and can you use that information to get closer to drawing what it wants you too? Which, dear Christ, is a truly appalling attempt at explaining how the fcuk this works. Sorry. You’ll just have to click the link and play – it’s fun, promise, although it’s also totally fcuking impossible if you ask me.
The Roottrees Are Dead: Ooh, this is fun – and has a slight whiff of cult 90s police procedural videogame (and covert recruiting device for the LAPD) Police Quest for good measure. In The Roottrees Are Dead, you play as a detective investigating the demise of the titular family – your job is to examine the evidence, do some light sleuthing and piece together the pieces of the mystery to discover what happened. “The year is 1998. A private jet belonging to the Roottree Corporation has crashed. On it were The Roottree Sisters and their parents. Combined, they were worth over a billion dollars. Now, due to the eccentricities of their great, great grandfather, Elias their money must be redistributed to the rest of the family. But who’s actually a BLOOD RELATIVE? That’s where you come in. Armed only with the power of your mighty dial-up modem, you’ll scour for photos, books, articles, and other evidence. Then, you’ll make connections and deductions based on the family relationships you uncover. With every spot on the tree you fill in correctly the names and photos left in your possession will have fewer and fewer places to go, but the evidence will also be harder and more obscure to find.” This really is very good indeed, and suprisingly involved – I won’t say it’s hard, exactly, but I had to think more than I have had to do in most white collar desk jobs I’ve ever had.
A Bull In A China Shop: You are a bull, You have 20s to smash as much crockery as you can. BULL SMASH!
Dr Ludwig and the Devil: The winner of this year’s Interactive Fiction Contest (which I seem to have unaccountably missed, FFS Matt!) is this charming and very funny text adventure in which you play Dr Ludwig who has, possibly unwisely, summoned the devil. “Join esteemed mad scientist Dr Ludwig as he faces the greatest challenge of his nefarious career: making a deal with the Devil and coming out on top. Research demonology! Read legal documents! Face off against the world’s least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob! All this and more!” This is excellent, and the amount of attention to detail alongside the quality of the writing make it a real gem, even if you’re not a particular fan of IF and text adventures as a rule.
Dreamcore 95: Finally this week, an idle clicker game of genuinely exceptional quality – it has a soundtrack! It has actual, light gameplay elements! It has penguins and dolphins and palm trees, and a genuinely-soothing vaporwave aesthetic! It’s basically a bit like a bath bomb for your brain, except with the added benefit of not smelling like the inside of Lush!

By Boris Pelcer

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY THE STUPENDOUSLY-NAMED EDER DISCOTECA AND IS AN ODD-BUT-GOOD COLLECTION OF PSYCHEDELIA, BALEARIC, PSEUDO-DUB AND A BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO ATTEMPT TO CATEGORISE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

The Singing Canary: Via Blort, this Tumblr houses the artwork of Mathieu Bourel (I think), and I ADORE it.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

ArcX1000: I don’t tend to feature meme or ‘aesthetic’ accounts on here, but I will make an exception for this, partly because I just like the vibe and partly because of this specific image which speaks to me in ways I can’t adequately explain to you.
PaperMeister Hackney: The Insta feed of a bloke in Hackney who has, apparently, the largest rolling paper collection known to man. Why? I HAVE NO FCUKING IDEA WHY NOT ASK HIM? Lots of photos of obscure international rolling paper brands interspersed with unremarkable photography of Being A Young Man In Hackney makes this feel weirdly like a fashion lookbook, and I rather like it.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

Logic Is Reality: My first year of undergraduate study were characterised largely by indolence and uncertainty – I did fcuk-all work, obviously, and I wasn’t entirely certain that I wanted to be at university anyway. My ambivalence was such that when I got to the end of the first year I decided that the fate of my entire degree rested on the result of my ‘Introduction to Formal Logic’ exam, a subject that I had…struggled with, and which I felt broadly embodied my struggle to really give a fcuk about what I was meant to be there to study. If I passed formal logic, I went on and did the second and third year of my degree; if I failed, I quit and moved to London to live with my Dad and seek my fortune (my dad, his wife and their family had not been informed of this decision, but obvs they would be thrilled). Results came out and it transpired that I had achieved the miserable, pathetic, lowest-possible pass of 40%, condemning me to two more years of rain-drenched academic mediocrity and depriving London of my presence for a while longer (London, it turns out, could not have given less of a sh1t either way). Which is by way of long, unasked for and entirely-uninteresting preamble to this excellent article which neatly sets out why logic is THE FUNDAMENTAL BUILDING BLOCKS OF EVERYTHING and which I really do recommend to anyone who’s not already familiar with the field. Despite the fact that this is an area of thinking which is, if I’m honest, far too close in nature to maths for me to ever feel comfortable with it, and despite my p1ss-poor exam performance, I’ve found what little logic I have retained immensely useful in life – if nothing else, in an age in which so much of what we experience is dgitally mediated it feels sort-of important to get a vague handle on the rules that underpin every single aspect of ‘digital life’ and without which you wouldn’t be reading these words right now.

The OpenAI Thing: In a year which has already been a bit of a nightmare from the point of view of ‘attempting to keep up with tech news’, last weekend was very much a new nadir – not least because it suggested that as a culture we have learned the sum total of fcuk all lessons from the past couple of decades of ‘treating people who have earned a lot of money in tech as though they are visionary gods who have the secrets of the universe at their fingertips and following their every move and utterance with the same degree of rapt revenance as was once reserved for the scrying of entrails’. I personally am singularly uninterested in the boardroom power struggles at the top of OpenAI, but if you really want a one-stop-overview of EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS and WHAT IT ALL MEANS (at least up to about 22 November) then you could do worse than read this very readable summary by Paris Marx which cocks a reasonable snook at the whole thing, while neatly explaining why this is probably very good news for Microsoft and anyone who’s bullish on AI.

The Billionaire Problem: On the one hand, an article whose central premises are ‘hang on, maybe it’s not strictly necessary for any single individual to amass a quantity of wealth so vast it could never be spent’ and ‘hm, maybe being that rich does not-generally-wonderful things to people in terms of empathy’ probably doesn’y really need to be written in the here and now (although on reflection the fact that despite…well, despite EVERYTHING there are still people caping for the plutocrat class perhaps suggests that the message could do with reinforcing; on the other, this is a readable (if occasionally a *touch* precious in tone) overview of all the reasons why being a billionaire is BAD, written by Geoff Mulgan who has known a few and therefore HAS OPINIONS.

The TikTok Osama Thing: Did TikTok send Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 ‘Letter To America’ viral among teens? No, not really, but that didn’t stop that angle being reported all over the place for about 48h, thereby neatly Streisand-ing the issue into the popular consciousness and ensuring that Bin Laden was current again for the first time since he got shot a few years back. This link is to Ryan at Garbage Day who devoted a whole edition to investigating how ‘viral’ the whole thing ever got on TikTok – the main point of this, to my mind at least, is less the general ‘the media makes a thing on TikTok seem far bigger than it is in pursuit of a story’ and more the deeper ‘it is literally impossible to have any idea any more what anyone is watching or listening to, or where they are getting their news, or what they are being told is true, or by whom, or why, and frankly that feels quite unsettling in a way that feels weirdly new’.

Del Harvey Speaks: Del Harvey was Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter up until a few years ago – this is her first interview since she left the post, and it’s a great read for anyone interested in the difficult, important and far-from-decided questions around platform moderation and ‘free speech’ and the boring, technical, practical ways in which you try and manage the behaviour of millions of people in a way that balances rights and responsibilities…I found this fascinating, and it made me really really wish that I had worked with or for the interviewee (or, frankly, just anyone that smart).

The Cameras Are Too Good: On the very modern, very first world problem of smartphone cameras now basically being TOO GOOD, and the fact that they basically now give every single one of us the same kick in the metaphorical self-esteem gonads experienced by famouses when they saw themselves in HD for the first time. Interesting partly because it’s relatable – we all love relatable content, right kids?! – and partly because it feels like this is a new but emergent category of ‘problem’ where the increased speed or fidelity or frictionlessness of products or services throws up unexpected wrinkles in the user experience.

The Machine Killer: Or, “How AI Coming To Search Is Going To Fcuk Journalism”, specifically games journalism per this article, but, frankly, lots of other bits of it as well. This is a really good piece, mainly because it takes the time to talk through the logical steps of what ‘LLM-enabled search results’ means for the publishing industry as it’s currently set up and why it’s bad – and why that means a necessary move towards subscription models, a trend which I think we can all agree is firmly in-train thanks to 404 Media, Second Wind and the rest.

Argentina and the AI Election: Written before the result last weekend, this is still a good overview of some of the ways in which AI was used by both candidates as they campaigned ahead of Argentina going to the polls -think of this as an appetiser ahead of next year’s ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET of political confusion and horror. Oh, and if you haven’t experienced him in full flow, this is my personal favourite clip of Argentina’s new leader.

The Haunting of Modern China: A beautiful bit of writing about the changing way in which urban and rural populations in China deal with the concept of ghosts and the supernatural, and how an increasingly-technological and sanitised and isolated style of urban life is leading to a rise in superstitious beliefs and interest in the paranormal amongst city dwellers; there’s something ghostly about the piece itself, in places.

The Year in TikTok Drama: I’m including this mainly as a) who doesn’t love a little bit of gossip? This is literally like finding a copy of ‘Closer’ or ‘Chat’ on the train and reading it – you don’t know who anyone is, fine, or why they have all chosen to buy the same face from the plastic surgeon, but for the 15 minutes you’re reading you are WHOLLY INVESTED in whether or not Kayrin is going to give Andrey another chance; and b) because it was a nice reminder that however weird and pointless and exhausting and dispiriting your job may be, at least you’re not the person who has to spend their days and nights keeping up with the TikTok Industrial Beef Complex for a living, because DEAR GOD CAN YOU IMAGINE?

TikTok P1ssers: Callum Booth doing god’s work here, digging into the apparent (thankfully niche) trend that has seen men filming themselves on TikTok p1ssing absolutely EVERYWHERE. It’s fair to say that there are no great revelations here, but, well, it’s sort of compellingly-dreadful.

The Sound Of Your Voice: I think I first heard of the trend for using WhatsApp voicenotes as a means of communication in about 2014, in a piece about how it was taking off in Brazil – I recall thinking at the time that that sounded VILE, and nothing about the current state of the world, in which people think it absolutely fine to just leave you a three minute voicemail like it’s the most natural thing in the world and you don’t have better things to do with your life, has changed my mind. Except, well, there are some people who it’s obviously really nice to receive voice notes from, and certain tones and nuances of conversation that simply don’t get conveyed in text, and sometimes hearing someone’s voice is just *better*…this is a gorgeous article by Erica Berry about a friendship that exists solely as voicenotes, about how “In that contained space, floating in the digital world, I’m more able to be myself. It’s something about not being physically seen. Like asking someone to turn their head in the other direction when we sing.”

Click Pray Chat: Another piece from Dirt now (currently publishing some superb writing about digital/culture), this is a paean to Chatroulette and the beautiful, temporary, evanescent moments of connection forged between the bored, the drunk, the horny and the terminally-online in the pale blue glow of a 3am laptop screen.

The Strangest Gift Ideas of 2023: Leaving aside my personal sense of horror at a world in which we can simultaneously talk nervously and anxiously about our constant and repeated failure to hit climate change targets AND spend several months of the year encouraging the creation and eventual disposal of several million tonnes of plastic tat, there is always something pleasing about a good old list of ‘weird sht available to buy from obscure corners of the internet’, and this is no exception. Whilst obviously I am a joyless husk of a man who hates Christmas and basically just wants to hibernate until March, I can’t help but feel a small frisson of joy at the fact that it is apparently possible to buy ‘Heroin Smell’ online and apply it to someone’s suitcase to ensure that they have a VERY UNPLEASANT TIME at the next major airport they visit, or a small scale model of the naked torso of Jason Statham (with or without tattoos). This is both a GREAT list and a source of content for every single groupchat you’re in between now and Christmas Eve.

Can’t You Take A Joke: Jonathan Coe reviews A History of British Comedy by David Stubbs in the LRB, and in so doing takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of the postwar entertainment landscape in the UK, through the postwar vaudevillians to Ealing, to the Goons and Python and the alternative scene of the 80s and beyond – this in particular made me fall into a short reverie to imagine what the current equivalent would be…it would be Gervais, wouldn’t it? “By the early 1980s, however, voting Conservative had become a more strident ideological statement than it had been during the previous decades. The Young Conservatives’ conference during the 1983 general election campaign offered the unappealing spectacle of Kenny Everett, wearing a pair of gigantic foam-rubber gloves, bounding on stage and shouting ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’ and ‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!’” This is a bit parochially English, so apologies to all the people from other countries who will read this and, not unreasonably, wonder who the fcuk Eric Morecombe is and why they should care.

Bravocon: By way of redress and counterbalance, I don’t think there is ANYTHING more North American in this week’s Curios than this profile of Bravocon, a multi-day event in Vegas which exists to celebrate (and further monetise) the network of shows run by the Bravo TV Network which boasts the ‘Real Housewives Of…’shows and which seemingly exists as a sort of mad chardonnay-and-tweakments WWE of domestic kayfabe and inexplicable arguments and premium mediocre product endorsements. I confess to understanding about 7% of what is happening or who any of the people mentioned in this piece are, but it does feel rather zeitgeisty in terms of the whole ‘product and artist and audience and content, and the weird and increasingly symbiotic relationship between each of those elements in the world of parasocial fandom’.

The 56 Best/Worst Analogies Written by High School Students: Yes, yes, I know – you’re rolling your eyes at the prospect of a cutesy ‘kids say the funniest things!’ lineup, I can tell, but DO NOT BE SO QUICK TO JUDGE. These are BRILLIANT, and you will want to work at least one of these into a conversation before the end of the year.

Williamstown, Summer 2003: This is short – more a fragment or vignette than a fully-fledged story – but it is BEAUTIFUL. “We had famous on credit: Chris’s dad was on the TV show Chips, Katherine’s dad was on Law & Order, my dad was dead, six years, famously dead—rapt audience every time I told it.”

Patricia Lockwood Meets The Pope: It’s Lockwood, it’s superb, what do I need to say? So many wonderful lines, such wonderful STYLE, and, annoyingly, a pretty much perfect ratio of gags-to-profundity. Also, the closing line will change the way you think of the Pope’s face forever (or at least it will if you’re me).

The Hofmann Wobble: Our last longread of the week is possibly the best thing I’ve read all year – novel, article, whatever, this is just superb. I don’t think I have ever read anything by Ben Lerner that isn’t exceptional, and this is another practically-perfect piece of writing from someone who seems to never miss; I mean, look at this third sentence, the ‘wrongly’ just casually fcuking with you: “I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.” This is about writing and information and truth and ‘truth’ and ideas and thinking and how language and words work, and contains the single best use of GPT-generated copy (or is it GPT-generated) I have yet seen. This is astonishingly, perfectly good, please read it.