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

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

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

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

By Albert Reyes

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

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

By Jaehoon Choi

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

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

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

By Jérôme Masi

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Dolf Kruger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

By Barbara Kruger

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

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

By Thibaut Grevet

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

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

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

By Paul Davis

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Frances Waite

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE HELLO!

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

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

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

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

By Ralph Gibson

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

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

By Rose Barberat

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

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

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

By Matthew Hansel

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Danny Galieote

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HAPPY FORELOCK-TUGGING HOLIDAY!

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

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

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

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

By Austin Harris

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

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

By Ada Zielinska

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

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

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

By Thomas Schostock

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Dana Stirling

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hello! Happy Friday! IT’S A BANK HOLIDAY!

I know that they’re ten-a-penny this year, but this feels like a good one, mainly because at no point is anyone going to try and persuade me that the coronation is A Good Thing or indeed that any of the people present at it shouldn’t in fact be sacrificed for food and fuel.

(Apologies to any of you reading this outside of the UK and who as a result don’t have a three-day weekend to look forward to, or a coronation looming; console yourselves with the fact that, well, you don’t live in the fcuking UK and that as a result you might currently be enjoying things like ‘temperatures above 6 degrees’ and ‘a functioning health and education system that hasn’t been eviscerated over the course of a decade by some of the very worst cnuts in the world’).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I think ‘Unicorn Kingdom’ may well be an all-time nadir for this fcuking country.

***SPECIAL ADDITIONAL LINK OF SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT WHICH YOU CAN ALL IGNORE!***

I appreciate that the number of people who subscribe to this newsletter and want to listen to a podcast in which I spend 15 minutes talking about AI stuff is, in all probability, zero, but I feel honour-bound to include this as, well, they pay me and so it feels like the least I can do. So, er, here. CLICK AND LISTEN! Or, if you don’t want to hear what I sound like – HORRIBLE, is the answer – then why not click

By Zach Henderson

WHY NOT KICKSTART YOUR BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND WITH SOME (VERY) HARD TECHNO COURTESY OF 3.2KM? THERE IS NO GOOD REASON!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER IF WE ALL FORM SOME SORT OF HUMAN SHIELD WE CAN IN FACT PREVENT CORDEN FROM RE-ENTERING THE UK, PT.1:  

By Marcella Mastrorocco

I AM HAVING SOMETHING OF A WEIRD “I REALLY MISS TAKING DRUGS AND GOING TO CLUBS” MOMENT THIS WEEK, SO TO ‘CELEBRATE’ WHY NOT ENJOY THIS SUPERB CALLBACK TO WHAT I USED TO ENJOY DOING WHEN I WAS YOUNG COURTESY OF THIS EXCELLENT HARD TRANCE MIX BY OBERON FROM 2002? 

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER IF WE ALL FORM SOME SORT OF HUMAN SHIELD WE CAN IN FACT PREVENT CORDEN FROM RE-ENTERING THE UK, PT.2:          

• The Artefact Shop: My friend John makes Artefact Cards, tools designed to help creatives and strategists and people who like to wear slightly-too-short trousers and matelot tshirts and have at least one stick-and-ink tattoo to THINK and IDEATE and come up with ideas. He has a new website where he’s selling this stuff, and, whilst in general I tend to be hugely sniffy about frameworks and processes and things (in the main, because I am a lazy and un-rigorous thinker), I think these are genuinely useful and can help you think ‘better’ (or at the very least, a bit obliquely).
• Banknote of the Year 2022: Did you know that there’s an annual contest, organised by the International Banknote Society, to reward the best-designed new banknote introduced by a country’s mint over the previous 12 months? No you DIDN’T, don’t lie! This came to me via Kristoffer’s Naive newsletter (as did a bunch of the cuter/cooler links in this section; you should subscribe if you can handle more things in your inbox), and is GREAT – the winning note this year was from the Philippines and features, amongst other details and somealmost-certainly impressive technical specs, a FABULOUSLY-angry looking bird on one side, but all of the featured notes are pretty cool-looking (and I had no idea that the new Scottish £100 note was such a nice piece of design tbh).
• The Breakfast: I think it’s important to be clear from the outset that I think making fun of people for an imperfect command of a second (or third, or whatever) language is a sh1tty thing to do, and that I wouldn’t for a moment judge somebody for their inability to turn a perfect sentence in English when it’s not their mother tongue (I mean, I do have at least a small degree of self-awareness). That said, I feel I ought to confess that I totally lost it when I landed on the homepage of this website and saw the legend there displayed “Would you like to have The Breakfast?”. WOULD I?!?!?! Is it just me, or does ‘The Breakfast’ take on a genuinely sinister air when delivered like this – like the author night be inviting you to break your fast with a nice spread of human flesh, say, or that your coffee and OJ might be accompanied by one of Aleister Crowley’s legendary ‘cakes of light’. It’s not, though, or at least it doesn’t seem to be – instead it’s an app that offers to pair you with a new person every day for breakfast. It’s based out of Lisbon and as such I have no idea how widely its userbase spreads, but if YOU fancy being algorithmically-matched with a stranger to enjoy THE BREAKFAST (literally crying here) with, then why not give this a try? NB – be aware that EVERYONE using this will be a terrifying type-A sociopath who probably runs marathons before breakfast; I am *reasonably* sure that Web Curios readers tend…not to be like that, so caveat emptor my fragile pretties.
• A Living Archive of Milton Keynes: Look, I didn’t ask for this; you didn’t ask for this; noone, to the best of my knowledge, has requested a living archive for England’s second-most-mockable urban centre (Swindon will ALWAYS take the crown) – and yet, here such a thing is! Despite my slight snarkiness, though, this is genuinely great – “Conceived as an antidote to the assertion that ‘new towns have no history’, and nurtured by the belief that ‘everybody has a story to tell’, our work collects, preserves and shares the stories of residents’ lives, building a sense of place and using old memories to create new ones and bring communities together.” – and if nothing else I would like any of you with any sort of musical talent whatsoever to navigate immediately to the Milton Keynes Songbook and see what you can do with the gems contained therein.
• Small Worlds: As Twitter continues to be ground into dust, small projects like this offer an occasional reminder of what we will lose when Elon finally hubrises the site into oblivion once and for all. “In 2023, I’m creating an illustrated tiny sci-fi story every day”, wrote the account’s owner at the beginning of the year, and they have been true to their word; there’s no fixed format for the shorts, but they tend towards the “You buy a time machine on eBay. It arrives six days ago”-style; each is presented as a vintage book cover with a suitable illustration, and, honestly, this is SUCH a lovely creative exercise and I would read every single one of the books it imagines.
• What I See When My Eyes Are Closed: This is over a decade old, but is stil a really interesting project both in execution and conception. ““What I See When My Eyes Are Closed” is an online data visualization project that documents the approximate colors seen by users when their eyes are closed. The data was gathered using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a site for crowd-sourced labor. Participants closed their eyes while facing a white screen, they then recorded the color they saw. Their name and location, when provided, are associated to the color.” I’m Una from Serbia, tag yourselves.
• Text Art: OH THIS IS SO GOOD! Text Art is a collection of copy-and-pasteable bits of…er…text art! The link takes you to a list of hyperlinked subjects – click one, and you’ll be taken to another page where you can enjoy a variety of text-based art depicting whatever it is you chose, from ‘pancake’ to ‘italian’ and everything inbetween. Even better, you can copy and paste the artworks with ease, meaning that if you want to use this stuff for whatever creative purpose you conceive then it’s simple and easy (and, equally, if you want to spend the rest of the day communicating with people solely via the medium of textual images of broccoli then that’s totally possible too!).
• The Collective Noun Database: Everyone knows that crows come in ‘murders’; we’re all familiar with the concept of a ‘pride’ of lions; I’m pretty sure that the collective noun for PR people should be ‘irrelevance’…but there are LOADS more of these, and you can find them all (probably) at this link, which takes you to a Google sheet offering information about the exact word one ought to use when describing a collection of things (both material and non-, abstract and organic), and, honestly, this is AMAZING. Did you know that one ought to refer to a ‘billing’ of consultants? A ‘carbuncle’ of architects? Beautifully and recursively, it also taught me that one ought to refer to a ‘clutch’ of collective nouns. It’s not entirely clear to me the extent to which these are ‘real’ vs ‘wishful’, but, honestly, I don’t care and neither will you – if you like English you will absolutely adore this link.
• The Mala Project: This is the website for a Chinese restaurant in (I think) Brooklyn, which I appreciate is of limited interest to the 99.9% of you who don’t live in Manhattan – I am including it because it PERFECTLY nails the aesthetic of 1980s television, and in particular a certain sort of colourtone and…fcukit, sorry, ‘vibe’ that is so redolent of a specific time period that it’s almost like time travel. No idea whatsoever what the food here is like, but the webdesign is fabulous.
• The Burp and Fart Piano: On the one hand, there is nothing funny about toilet humour (sorry, I can’t help it; it’s the Italian in me, Italians don’t really ‘do’ fart gags); on the other, this is a keyboard on which you can play Paganini in C entirely as though performed by Barney from the Simpsons and, honestly, you can’t really argue with that. I promise you that if you have a small child this will be simultaneously the best and worst link you will have seen all year.
• Taquitos: I know that there are various websites that celebrate THE GLORIOUS INTERNATIONAL WORLD OF SNACKS AND SWEETS (on which point – I know that China, Japan and Taiwan are revered for their sweet and savoury snacking options, but imho Mexico wins hands down; you can get stuff from Mexican cornershops that contain so many chemicals you actually feel like you’re having an out-of-body psychedelic experience, and most of them contain lime juice so you can also avoid scurvy – win/win!), but I think that this might be the best one. “We’ve eaten and reviewed 10,593 snacks over the past 23 years, covering 86 categories from 1924 companies in 90 countries, with more than 157 major brands and 125 flavors” says the blurb, and who am I to argue with that sort of dedication? NO FCUKER, etc! Amusingly, their list of ‘the worst EVER snacks’ contains Pickled Onion Monster Munch at number 5, which to my mind suggests a sophisticated palette but which I concede for some of you might mean that you can’t take anything they say seriously.
• Darc Room: Some really nice webdesign on display here – this is the professional portfolio of photographer Darko Pašalić, which lets you explore his work by mood, time of day and colour, and which offers a genuinely interesting and unusual set of ways of exploring his (generally excellent) work and style.
• Dwelling: Do YOU want to embark upon a new social media journey? No, of course not, as previously discussed we are old and tired and Coming To The End, and the last thing we (OK, fine, the last thing *I*) want is to start ‘building online communities’ all over again. Still, if you’re feeling a bit more positive about the idea of ‘hanging out with people on the internet’ than I currently am, and if you REALLY want to loook at photos of other people’s houses and flats and yurts, then you could do worse than checking out Dwelling which is basically (as far as I can tell) an app that encourages you to post pictures of your house and interior decor and enjoy those of others whilst secretly hating the fact that their DIY project appears to have gone MUCH better than yours and FFS Tony when will you finish wallpapering the spare room. Sounds AWFUL, to my mind, but I appreciate (and occasionally feel very grateful for the fact that) I am not necessarily representative.
• The American Prison Writing Archive: “The United States holds nearly two million people in its prisons and jails — a larger share of its population than in any other nation on earth. Yet there remains widespread ignorance of conditions inside. Amid the unprecedented American experiment in mass incarceration, the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts and voices of incarcerated writers.” This is so so so interesting and there is SO much in here – I won’t pretend that all the writing is brilliant, but every piece I have read here has been interesting and emotional and that feels like recommendation enough for you to explore the collection.
• Mouthpad: In one of the year’s earlier Curios I featured a prototypical device that was designed to let the user control a computer via the medium of…of…ok, there’s no other way to say it, via the medium of fellating a specially-modified dildo. Now, a few short months later, we have the more socially-acceptable version – Mouthpiece is, from what I can tell, a sort of dental retainer-type bit of tech which can be manipulated with one’s tongue in order to allow hand-and-voice-free typing and computer interfacing. Which has potentially interesting implications for all sorts of people with disabilities, and could be hugely useful to people with debilitating neurological conditions…but also, SPIES! Spies and whistleblowers and journalists oh me oh my! This feels quite fun and exciting, and very much the sort of thing that might have been sold in one of London’s infamous spy emporia back in the day.
• Scale of the Universe: This is an OLD site – you will doubtless have seen it before online; you know the one, it lets you zoom in and out and see how BIG stuff is relative to other BIG stuff – but it’s recently been revamped for the modern age and it’s a really good example of how to update a classic internet property in a way that feels coherent but also BETTER.
• Iconic Moronic: Long-term readers may be aware that I have something of a problem with the word ‘iconic’, mainly as a result of my time working with the sports team at H+K and wincing each and every time a brief came in and someone would suggest doing some ‘iconic’ photography (GYAC MATE IT IS NOT YOU WHO DECIDES WHETHER A PHOTOGRAPH IS ‘ICONIC’ FFS) (but, er, they were lovely young men really) – anyway, I fcuking hate the word ‘iconic’ and if you do too then you might enjoy this Chrome extension by Monkeon which will replace the word ‘iconic’ with ‘moronic’ at the press of a button.
• The Submarine Cable Map of the World: Stuff that genuinely amazes me if I stop to think about it for more than approximately 3 seconds, part x of y – the fact that the internet only works as a result of gigantic physical cables running along the ocean bed at a depth and pressure that would reduce us to pate! This is a map of those cables and where they sit and what they are called, and, I promise you, you cannot help but be amazed at the engineering on display here. Honestly, this is MIND-BUGGERNG.
• Spiral Wishing Wells: A HUGE thankyou to reader Elizabeth Huntley, who sent this to me last week – it is SO GOOD! You know those charity donation boxes that you roll 1p and 2p pieces into (insert appropriate local coinage here), and which when you do spiral around and around and around like some sort of incredible kid-hypnosis tool? OF COURSE YOU DO! But did you know that there is a whole website devoted to them, and the man who invented them, and his myriad other inventions? YOU DID NOT! This is so, so, so good – terrible, old-school web design, a degree of sincerity and enthusiasm and, frankly, pride, totally out-of-step with the subject matter, not a little hubris in the general vibe of spiral wishing well inventor Steve Divnick…honestly, this is perfect and surprisingly-interesting, and I promise you that spending 20 minutes looking around this site will be better for you and your state of mind than whatever crap task your paymasters are currently asking you to complete.
• Hairy Barbie: Look, I don’t understand why someone is selling what appear to be Barbie dolls with pubic hair trimmings stuck to their faces – but they are, and therefore it is The Law that I share them with you here.
• Discord Ghosts: OK, I haven’t personally tried this, but it looks interesting and like it could be a fun thing to play if you and your friends are the D&D/TTRPG-type of crowd. Discord Ghosts is a ruleset for a roleplaying game played over, er, Discord, in which some players play ghosts and some players play ghost hunters, exploring a haunted mansion and trying to discover its secrets. The mechanics suggest and interesting mix of voice and text, as the ghosts scare the hunters and the hunters try and scry the spirits, and it feels like you could have a good time with this with the right group of players.
• Cat Park: Finally this week, a game that’s also basically an EDUCATIONAL TOOL, but which is still quite fun and so deserves a look. Cat Park is a gently-educative interactive storygamething in which you explore some of the techniques used by Bad Actors to foment division and conflict online, to peddle false narratives and to deliberately promote lies in pursuit of specific-but-hidden agendas (could never happen here!) – it’s not super-sophisticated, fine, but it’s a nicely-designed and easy-to-understand tool for exploring some of these concepts. Imagine, though, how much more interesting and sophisticated this could be if you combined it with the sort of setup seen in the AI-only social network I linked to right at the top – imagine how fun it would be to seed lies in a community of AI agents to see which took hold, and what the consequences were?

By Melody Tuttle

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, RECOVER FROM THE LAST TWO WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL, CHILLOUT-Y MIX THAT IS PERFECT FOR A BANK HOLIDAY AFTERNOON – THIS ONE’S BY SOMMERBAD! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Thieb: The Insta account of a French graphic artist who is posting a bunch of images and videos of some lovely, cuddly-looking pastel CG robot things (all a bit reminiscent of that big white robot from that kids’ animation a few years back…Baymax! That’s it!) which I found very charming and which I hope you do too.
• Violet In Question: Back in the early days of the web there was something of a vogue for anonymous blogs which presented a character or a mystery and which skirted the line between fact and fiction to interesting effect; some, like Diary of a Call Girl and Girl With A One Track Mind ended up being real; others, like She’s A Flight Risk, remained shrouded in mystery. It’s impossible to replicate that era of storytelling online, sadly – the internet works differently, and everyone’s been so trained in infosec these days that anyone attempting to present a veiled and anonymised version of their life, or pass off a creepypasta as a real-life blog, would be outed and doxxed in seconds by the mad mob, but it’s nice to see projects that channel a similar sort of vibe, and this is such a thing. Violet In Question is the Instagram feed of one ‘Violet’, investigating strange goings on in Question Mark, Ohio. This feels like another nascent ARG/transmedia project, the second in as many weeks – hang on, does that mean…transmedia is COMING BACK?!?! Honestly, if anyone fancies paying me an inordinate amount of money to scope out a multilayered narrative-led campaign whose ROI will literally be a fraction of its budget, COUNT ME IN!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Matt Bollinger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Happy Friday everyone! Unless you worked for Buzzfeed News, in which case it’s probably quite a rubbish Friday – sorry about that.

(Brief aside about Buzzfeed News – reading Peretti’s statement from yesterday in which he said that he didn’t think it was possible to make a business from journalism anymore – maybe, Jonah, just maybe, the issue isn’t that journalism can’t be made to work as a business – perhaps it’s just that it’s impossible to make it work as a business WHILE AT THE SAME TIME ATTEMPTING TO FEED THE HORRIFYING VC VAMPIRES? Just a thought that perhaps the problem here isn’t so much ‘journalism’ as ‘the horrible ratfcuking greed of every cnut involved in financing any and all vaguely-tech-adjacent businesses in the past decade or so’?)

This week’s newsletter is typically replete with goodness, so much so that I advise you handle it carefully lest it burst all over you like some sort of overfilled knowledge-abscess (a simile both disgusting and nonsensical, well done Matt!) – and no, sorry, the prose doesn’t really rise above that sort of level I’m afraid.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if any of you are doing the marathon this weekend then good luck you lunatics but I th.

Photographer Unknown

REJOICE FOR SADEAGLE HAS RETURNED WITH ANOTHER GENUINELY SUPERB MIX OF OBSCURE-YET-REMARKABLY-TUNEFUL GEMS FROM HIS TERRIFYINGLY LARGE RECORD COLLECTION – THIS IS NEARLY THREE HOURS OF FCUKING GREAT MUSIC, SO BE GRATEFUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES AGAIN FOR THE AI STUFF AT THE BEGINNING BUT WHICH PROMISES THAT ONCE YOU GET THROUGH ALL THAT RUBBISH THIS IS A REALLY GOOD EDITION, HONEST, PT.1:  

By Domenico Gnoli

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE RECENT 100 GECS BOILER ROOM SET, LISTENING TO WHICH FEELS A BIT LIKE THE AURAL EQUIVALENT OF STUFFING ALL YOUR ORIFICES WITH SHERBET AND THEN GETTING INTO THE BATH, BUT IN A GOOD WAY! 

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES AGAIN FOR THE AI STUFF AT THE BEGINNING BUT WHICH PROMISES THAT ONCE YOU GET THROUGH ALL THAT RUBBISH THIS IS A REALLY GOOD EDITION, HONEST, PT.2:  

• The Coronation Toolkit: Are you excited? Have you greased your elbow in preparation for all the forlock-tugging? For those of you outside the UK who might be bemused as to what the fcuk I am talking about – WE ARE GOING TO DO A CORONATION! Yes, in just a few short weeks the UK will pretend that it’s a perfectly normal and natural thing to celebrate the illusory hereditary superiority of the latest in a long line of largely-mediocre inbreds whilst all the while ignoring the fact that half the country is cold and hungry and increasingly mad. PAGEANTRY! CEREMONY! HERITAGE! SERVILITY! Anyway, in preparation for that WONDERFUL WEEKEND OF JOY the Palace has released the Official Coronation Toolkit and, honestly, it’s just so miserable. Go on, click the link – some slightly crap ‘print and colour at home’ kids’ games! Five terrible-sounding recipes! PRINT YOUR OWN BUNTING! To be honest this is SO crap it feels like satire, but the url is the official one and this is legit and OH WHENCE THE DAYS OF EMPIRE. Lol, we are *such* a joke of a country, aren’t we? Although on the unofficial memorabilia side of things, I do rather like these.
• Companion: I like to think that in 2023 everyone carries around their own personal mental version of the Doomsday Clock that tracks exactly how close they feel everything is to Total Collapse – if your Apocalyptic Countdown Ticker is moving somewhat faster than you find comfortable, you might be in the market for “Companion”, a USB stick for sale for the low, low price of $10 (in fairness to the people shilling this, they also offer refunds) which its makers assure you is packed with ALL THE DOCUMENTS you will need to survive a ‘SHTF Event’ (this is their terminology – I am presuming that that stands for ‘sh1t hits the fan’, but have limited interest in being targeted forever by mad prepper advertising and as such you’ll have to accept my uncertainty in this regard). Obviously it’s on a USB because the internet may have gone down and so you’ll need offline resources – I imagine that if you’re the sort of person who feels the need to buy this sort of thing you’re also the sort of person with a backup generator to power a laptop, otherwise, well, lol! – and the website promises that with all this information to hand you’ll be safe in the event of “natural disaster, economic collapse, or societal breakdown”, which is nice. Now, I’m not suggesting for a second that this is a good or ethical idea, but, well, given they’re selling this for only a tenner, I reckon there’s probably a semi-lucrative grift in buying the content, scraping it all and feeding it to an LLM to create ‘PREPBOT: YOUR APOCALYPSE COMPANION!’ which you can then sell as a subscription service to morons. Obviously, though, that would be a deeply unethical thing to do and Web Curios in no way condones it (but would appreciate a 10% cut of any profits should any of you be appalling enough people to follow through with the idea).
• Space Elevator: Prolific creator of viral toys Neal Agarwal returns with this page, which does the whole ‘scroll and explore something really, really deep/tall/long’ thing – as you scroll, the page takes you up through the various atmospheric stages between the floor and space. The mechanic here isn’t new, and you’ve seen this done a dozen times before, but this is elevated by the care and attention to detail – this is information-rich, and full of gently-amusing gags, and the graphics and design are much better than they need to be, and in general this is both a nice, fun bit of lightweight webwork and a good example of how polish can elevate a concept, even one as broadly unoriginal as this.
• Buy ALL The Classic Cars: Or at least, bid on all the classic cars – whether or not you’ll be able to buy them will depend rather on the depth of your pockets. Still, there are 230 vehicles being auctioned as part of this lot on May 19th, so if you’re in the market for a vintage sportscar then you could do worse than take a look here – although judging by the blurb, these could be in need of a bit of TLC before you’re able to don your driving gloves and go Full Partridge in a bank holiday traffic jam. Still, there’s something lovely (and, to be clear, VERY mad) about the fact that this was all one person’s lifelong passion – “The collection was stored in a church and two dry but dusty warehouses. Mr. Palmen was starting the cars on a regular basis to keep the engines from being seized. Most of the collection is in an unrestored and original condition. He kept the cars how they were when entering his warehouses and he almost did not sell anything after it was added to his collection. He rarely showed the collection to anyone, so very few people knew of its existence. The maintenance was mostly done by himself. You can definitely call it one of the best kept secret car collections of Europe. Mr. Palmen loved Italian cars like Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and Ferrari. Plus, French Facel Vega’s and German BMW’s, Mercedes, and NSU’s. The British are well represented with Jaguars, Aston Martins, and Rolls-Royces, while American classics include Chevrolets, Cadillacs, and Fords. The collection also features Tatra, Monica, Moretti, Matra, Alvis, Imperia, and Villard.”
• Sounds Like These: Oh God I love this website. Click the link and make sure your sound is on – Sounds Like These is a company that does sounds for brands – they call themselves a ‘creative audio company’ – and their website is one of the very, very few that makes it worth turning the volume up for. This is SO SO SO SATISFYING, from the sound splashes on the homepage to the way it plays (pun unintended, but I will take it) across all the other sections – really, this is such smart and pleasing digital design and I am slightly in awe of it.
• Fireman: I rather like tools and sites that enforce constraints on the user, and Fireman is no exception – a Chrome extension which lets you save links to read later, much like any other bookmarking service, but which asks you to specify a time limit when you save a link; once the time limit’s passed, the link is no longer available to you, and can’t ever be resaved in the app. As someone who has a weird problem where I have started to vaguely anthropomorphise the open tabs in my browser, to the point where I am beginning to actually feel *guilty* if I close them without having read them after a few days, I feel that this could help solve what I worry is a burgeoning psychological issue.
• Random Airports: Would you like to be taken to a different random airport in the world every time you click? No, probably not, and yet that’s what this website is offering and so the least you could do is feign gratitude. This is, in fairness, more interesting than you’d think – it’s astonishing how many airports worldwide are built in places that really don’t look like very sensible places to build airports.
• Bubblemania: You know when you’re a little kid and you take a straw and blow HARD into a bowl of washing up liquid and become entranced by the bubblepatterns that emerge and burst and vanish and reemerge with each childish exhale? Yes, well this is EXACTLY like that it except it’s in your browser and its digital and it requires neither a working pair of lungs or a bowl of Fairy to enjoy and therefore it is BETTER.
• Koi Pond: Do you feel stressed? Do you feel like it’s all TOO MUCH? Would you like to be able to gaze blankly at a pond full of peacefully-unaware fish, moving quietly through water in a state of near-zenlike piscine bliss? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Here, then, for your delectation and relaxy enjoyment is such a thing, but in digital form. If nothing else, it might be fun to load this on your phone and watch your cat go mental for a few minutes.
• Doogie Typer: This week’s ‘link nicked from last week’s B3ta’ is this rather fun toy which does the whole ‘mash the keyboard anywhich way you like and the site will pretend you’re typing’ thing, but rather than making you look like (for example) a l33t h4xx0r (I have never felt my internet years weigh so heavily on my shoulders) this instead has you typing out the journal entries from 1980s/90s ‘he’s a teenage boy, but he’s also a Doctor!’ medical comedy-drama Dougie Howser. Which, fine, is probably only funny if you remember the show, but I do and it is so there.
• A Simulated Deck of Cards: Why? WHY NOT! If nothing else, this will enable you to play poker and blackjack at work even if they’ve blocked your access to gambling sites so, er, that’s nice! On reflection, possibly not the best use-case I could have come up with, but hey ho.
• Tokyo Jazz Joints: If you’ve ever read any Haruki Murakami then there’s a decent chance that any mental image you have of Tokyo will be soundtracked by jazz, and that you’ll have a vague picture in your head of the sort of tiny jazz bar staffed and frequented by monomaniacal obsessives, the sort of place I believe Murakami worked before he embarked upon his insanely-successful novel writing career. Anyway, this site is literally ALL ABOUT THOSE PLACES, and is just glorious – it’s mostly just photos, but the places depicted in the shots are AMAZING, tiny and rickety and smoke-stained and SO SO COOL, and this whole site basically rekindled my long-dormant desire to visit Japan and feel incredibly uncomfortable and out-of-place in venues just like this.
• Tetris E60: As part of the promo for the film, here’s a chance to play a version of Tetris which is coded to look like the original version which Pajitnov coded on a device called an Elektronika60 – look, it’s Tetris, it still fcuking rocks whatever version it is. Plus, this has a particularly-banging rendition of the soundtrack which renders it immaculate – I lost HOURS to this this week, so be warned.
• Where In America?: This is a little game by The Pudding which has to be a p1sstake, no? The idea is that you’re shown five photos of a mystery location in North America, and you have to drop a pin on the map to guess exactly where you are – you get one guess per photo, and after each you’re told how far away you are from your target…except HOW THE FCUK ARE YOU MEANT TO IDENTIFY THE LOCATION BASED ON SOME GENERIC PHOTOS OF GENERIC BUILDINGS? I just loaded it up now, and the first clue it’s giving me is literally a photograph of some rocks by a roadside – I posit that this is IMPOSSIBLE and is in fact some sort of weird gag that only Americans can understand. Can one of you explain it to me, please?
• EggHunt: A presumably Easter-themed browser game by some retailer or another, where you have to collect the eggs across various maps – this is surprisingly fun for 10 minutes, which I appreciate isn’t a huge endorsement but, well, the bar gets lower each and every day.
• The Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction: I love IF, and I love an IF festival contest thing, and as such it’s no surprise that I have enjoyed so many of the entries in this year’s Spring Thing IF festival. I haven’t tried all of these – there are about 30-odd entries split across two categories – but, of those I’ve experienced, I personally particularly enjoyed Drew Cook’s ‘Repeat The Ending’. All the entries are categorised by theme, length and content, so it’s easy to find something that suits your tastes or mood – I genuinely think that IF is one of the most interesting narrative genres around and continues to be wildly underappreciated in terms of storytelling creativity, and the works here reinforce that.
• The Greggs Game: It feels like Greggs is now what Wetherspoons was in The Time of Jeremy – to whit, something which is, objectively, not very good but which it is Very Important that a certain type of left-wing commentator be loudly and performatively be a fan of lest they be thought of as somehow pretentious or out of touch (you know I am right about this) – but despite my slight irritation at how much everyone LOVES IT I can’t help but, well, LOVE this videogame representation of A Day In The Life Of A Greggs Worker – made by someone called ‘Gav’, this is a superb 8-bit evocation of a day spent manning the ovens and churning out Questionable Meat Products (but you really do need to read the instructions before you start, as it’s harder than you might imagine). Why the pasty-peddlers haven’t chucked Gav a few grand to make this official is beyond me tbh, this has ‘superb brand activation you don’t even have to think about’ written all over it.
• Escape Speed: XKCD has done another of its occasional ‘interactive explainer game-type things’ and, honestly, this is really impressive and a lot bigger and deeper than you might initially think. I am increasingly of the opinion that XKCD is one of the great treasures of the past decade or so of online cultural life, and that we don’t quite appreciate it enough.
• Undergrowth: Finally this week, a browsergame which is also a song! Undergrowth is what I presume is the lead track from the forthcoming album ‘O Monolith’ by the band Squid – to accompany its release, they have made this game which acts as a sort of interactive music video and which does a few nice things with genre and expectations and, most importantly, is genuinely fun and a nice accompaniment to the music (there are a couple of bits where the gameplay shifts gear just as the track does which are particularly nice). Basically I want to know when we’re going to have the first proper ‘album as videogame’ thing, and I want to make sure that it’s not done by U2 (it just feels like the sort of thing they’d do tbh).

By Barkley L Hendricks 

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS SUPERB BIT OF JAZZHIPHOPTYPESTUFF COURTESY OF THE NEW EP BY VENNA! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Wrinkle The Duck: Wrinkle is the duck’s name, not an instruction. Wrinkle has 600k+ followers, meaning it’s not impossible that many of you are aware of…her(?) already – still, if not, enjoy this very photogenic quacker (although I am not 100% convinced that the whole ‘feeding it at the table in restaurants’ thing is ok, if I’m totally honest).
• RK Ceramics: This is just lovely work, and rather unusual in style, and I have a vague feeling that it’s being run by someone I used to work with years ago (in which case “HI RACHEL, I LOVE YOUR POTS!”), and even if not I think it’s worth a look.
• Health & Safety:  Despite the name of the account, this feed is very much NOT goal zero. Watching stuff like this makes me genuinely amazed that we’ve lasted this long as a species, frankly (and makes me look less negatively on the idea of the machines just taking over once and for all).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By  Timothy Lai Hui Ming

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

HELLO EVERYONE WELCOME TO ANOTHER WEB CURIOS DID YOU HAVE A NICE TIME THIS EASTER OH THAT’S NICE GOOD.

Ahem. Are you well? Did you manage to avoid either crucifixion or the acquisition of chocolate-related type-2 diabetes? GREAT!

I am in something of a hurry what with having to get to lunch and it being 1155am at the time of writing and my still being in my pants and needing to get something of a move on with the washing and the dressing and suchlike – so, er, this is all you’re getting by way of an intro. Sorry.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you and I both know that the opening few paragraphs are always the very worst of each week’s edition.

By Miloš Ilić

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH AN OLD ALBUM RATHER THAN A NEW MIX, BUT I MAKE NO APOLOGIES BECAUSE THIS WILL ALWAYS FEEL LIKE SPRING IN MY MIND AND MAYBE IT WILL FOR YOU TOO! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT THE GUY LEAKING ALL THE STUFF IN THE US HAD THE RELATIVELY-BANAL ‘OG’ AS A USERNAME RATHER THAN SOMETHING PLEASINGLY-CHAOTIC LIKE, I DON’T KNOW, “WWE P1SSPIG” , PT.1:  

By Mark Steinmetz

WE CONTINUE THE THROWBACKS WITH THE EXCELLENT ‘THIS IS MY DEMO’ BY SWAY FROM 2007! SIMPLER TIMES! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT THE GUY LEAKING ALL THE STUFF IN THE US HAD THE RELATIVELY-BANAL ‘OG’ AS A USERNAME RATHER THAN SOMETHING PLEASINGLY-CHAOTIC LIKE, I DON’T KNOW, “WWE P1SSPIG” , PT.2:    

• QI Meditations:  Do you meditate? Does it…does it help? Does it stop the voices? Crucially, does it do a better job of at least keeping them a bit quiet than drugs and booze do? Maybe I should give it a go – and maybe I should use QI meditations to do so (I probably shouldn’t, though)! QI Meditations combines text-generating AI with text-to-voice synthesis to present you with a selection of guided meditations penned by machine; “Defying the norms of traditional mindfulness, Qi offers a series of randomly generated meditation exercises. These peculiar and amusing prompts urge users to embrace the absurdity of the content, promoting the idea that meditation can take many forms. As a commentary on society’s increasing dependency on technology and the prevalence of AI-generated content, Qi challenges users to scrutinize the boundaries of AI and its impact on human experiences. By presenting AI-generated art in such an eccentric manner, Qi compels users to face the unpredictable nature of AI and consider its potential consequences on art and culture.” Honestly, these are actually quite funny – there’s a featured one today in the style of Trump and whilst there’s nothing I find funny or interesting about That Fcuking Man anymore I confess to being charmed enough to listen to the whole, ridiculous thing.
• Travel Photographer of the Year: BRAND NEW AWARD-WINNING PHOTOS! These are, as you would expect, superb – there’s a UK winner too, in the shape of the Young Travel Photographer of the Year Cal Cole from Manchester, but my personal ‘favourites’ (I use the term advisedly) are the images of the little kids boxing about halfway down because, well, just look at them.
• CookNovels: I really like this idea, and it feels very much like something that half a dozen of you could reasonably steal for your ‘6/10-rated concepts that we can keep to lob in any presentation that’s looking a bit thin on the creative front’ folder. CookNovels riffs on the running gag about online recipe sites requiring you to read War & Peace before you get to the ingredients list – except here the joke is that you really DO get a whole (out of copyright) novel before each recipe. There are only three, but you can get your recipe for simple Chile Con Carne served with a sider order of Homer, say, or pair Moby Dick with a low-carb prawn cocktail – I refuse to believe that there’s not a million ways you can ‘borrow’ this and frankly improve it for the right brand but, equally, I am too lazy to bother to try and think of any so who the fcuk knows?
• PrankGPT: This, though, I feel honour-bound to point out, is A BAD IDEA and Web Curios in no way endorses it. Do YOU think that it sounds like a sensible or liability-free idea to hook up an LLM, a text-to-voice engine and an web-to-phone calling protocol to spin up a system whereby you can call in an AI-generated ‘prank call’ about any subject you cabn imagine to anyone in the world whose phone number you know? IT IS NOT! It is, honestly, a very bad one! Yes, ok, fine, I know that the setup here is almost certainly made my a couple of bored highschool kids and is therefore is janky as fcuk (and in fairness I wasn’t quite able to get it to work this morning), and I am also aware that it’s probably not possible to make the bot generate anything awful because of guardrails and limited guiding inputs…but, also, I don’t think this FEELS like something that bodes well. Still, file this one away for June when you’re sitting around brainstorming Hallowe’en ideas.
• EuroVelo: Whilst obviously I have no idea of the identities of anyone reading this, I’ve got a vague idea that the readership for Web Curios tends towards ‘middle-aged urban-dwelling men who probably work in a media-related industry’, which, from what I can tell, is a pretty much 1:1 Venn diagram match with ‘people who make cycling and the fact that they like it a core and frankly insufferable part of their identity’ (sorry, but I have lost friends to the two wheels and lycra disease and I am BITTER about it) – as such, I imagine that there are a few of you for whom this website, which lets you plan cycling trips around Europe (thankfully that’s geographical rather than political Europe, meaning even the great act of national self-harm that was Brexit hasn’t managed to spoil it for the Brits just yet), will be of not-insignificant appeal. Although on reflection ifyou like cycling that much then you probably new about it already. FFS.
• April Fool’s On The Web: Yes, I know, there is very little in the world less funny than the lies that brands tell you on April 1st (apart, of course, from the ones they tell you on the other 364 days of the year! “Sustainability!” lol!), but at the same time you might find it helpful to have a searchable database of every single one of the (to repeat, DESPERATELY UNFUNNY) corporate gags committed to HTML each year since 1994, if only so you can use it to resurrect every single one of these with the addition of “…but with AI!”.
• Colouring The Past: A photography series by Eri Erlick which serves not only as an colourised archive of great shots but as useful reminder that trans people have been a thing throughout recorded history, all over the world, and recent attempts to portray the concept of transgenderism or gender fluidity as some sort of uniquely-modern aberration born of post-web decadence is, frankly, stupid and wrong and ahistorical. “Using recent breakthroughs in photo editing techniques, Eli colorizes, restores, and digitizes photos from queer and trans history. The following images are originally from 1897-1973.After noticing how much more responsive audiences are to color photos, Eli decided to share these amazing moments from queer and trans history. During a time when politicians can openly argue trans people did not exist until 2015, it is important to use reminders like these that we have always been here.” It’s honestly astonishing and not a little miserable to note the degree to which the tenor of the conversation around gender has in many respects worsened rather than improved over the course of the past 50 years.
• High Rises: Gorgeous photos of very tall American buildings. “The prosperity of early 20th century America resulted in a boom of skyscrapers that still tower over cities across the country today. Focusing on the character and craftsmanship on display at the top of these landmark buildings in a way that can’t be seen from street level, the Highrises Collection reveals fascinating details and stories of these distinctly American icons.A drone-mounted camera takes multiple high-res photos of the top of each Highrise. Images are stitched together manually to create a elevation scan with flattened perspective and enhanced lighting effects to accentuate depth and form.” The way in which these images are created lends them a slightly-odd flattened quality (I am fluctuating between describing them as ‘videogamey’ and ‘Wes Anderson-y’, but given I hate Wes Anderson let’s go with the former), but that’s part of the appeal here imho.
• Reliable Robotics: To be clear, this links to the website of a robotics company – it may be a super-exciting robotics company, but it is very much a corporate website rather than a FUN DISTRACTION FROM MEATY HORROR. EXCEPT! The scroll animation features a genuinely-delightful graphical render of a plane, and features the near-perfect legend ‘scroll to activate take-off’, and I can’t tell you quite how much this apparently-unnecessary piece of graphical overengineering pleases me (and I hope it pleases you too). FLY, POINTLESS LITTLE CG PLANE!
• Shed Of The Year: Many years ago, when this first launched and I was working for a company who did the PR for Amazon (yes, but those were simpler times when they were less evil, I promise) we launched an ill-feted attempt to get the ecommerce behemoth to sponsor this (look, they had just launched their gardenware vertical, it made sense at the time) – the fact that they basically laughed and rejected the concept out of hand is up there in the pantheon of my greatest career disappointments (other examples: not getting the job at The Sun when I was 20, the fact that I ever worked in PR in the first place), but I like to think that the company’s current reputational travails might have been somewhat eased had it been they rather than Cuprinol who badged the UK’s annual Shed of the Year contest. Anyway, click the link, marvel at the sheds and, if you’re a middle-aged man, feel quietly jealous of ‘The Fortress of Solitude’ (and all the rest tbf).
• Soren’s Clever Design Gags: You’ve probably seen some bits of design sature doing the rounds online over the past few weeks – apps whose interfaces have been alterered slightly to make a point about how TERRIBLE they are, like LinkedIn adding an ‘opentowork’ button to acknowledge the fact that the only reason anyone engages with that horrible, soulless colosseum of misery is to climb another rung up the slick, viscera-greased pole of corporate success. Almost all of them will have been by this person, Soren (no surname supplied), who collects examples of his work on this website (you can sign up to get a new gag via email each day should you be so inclined).
• The Shapes of Stories: Ok, now this is an interesting use of AI. One of the most-helpful ways of thinking about LLMs (and indeed the current crop of ‘AI’ tools) is less in terms of ‘this thing generates words’ or ‘this thing generates images’ and more in terms of ‘these tools let us develop links between different disparate things in ways that have never been attempted before’ – which is exactly what this experiment is doing. Taking a bunch of classic stories, the person behind the project (Superb Owl, whoever they may be) asked GPT to ascribe a numerical value to the emotional state of each character at various points in the story, which can then be graphed to create a visualisation of the emotional journey experienced by protagonists throughout the novel in question – which is both interesting from the point of view of narrative construction and the Vonneguttian idea of ‘story shapes’, and also from the perspective of ‘how The Machine can effectively do some really interesting quant/qual-mixing stuff’. The idea of taking this sort of approach and then adding an instruction to ‘and now translate this graphical representation of a story arc into a symphonic composition for bassoon’ really rather appeals to me – I am basically waiting for someone to create an entire, machine-imagined operetta based on the emotional beats of the entirety of Crossroads, so if any of you fancy knocking that out that would be great, thanks.
• Tape Cassette Inserts: Who wouldn’t want a Flickr page which exists solely to catalogue all the different graphic design styles that were applied to the bits of paper and cardboard that you used to inexplicably get inside blank cassette tapes when you bought them? NO FCUKER, etc! Leaving aside anything else, I reckon you could probably make a reasonable line in passive income (sorry! sorry!) from setting up a company selling 80s-esque bedsheets in these sorts of colourways to the recently-divorced.
• MouseTok: This is the TikTok account of one Martin Critchlow, whose feed consists exclusively of videos of his collection of fieldmice just sort of hanging about. In particular, Martin seems to focus on one particular mouse he has named ‘Mr Jingles’ – tragically, Mr Jingles recently lost his partner (“Mrs Jingles”, should you be curious), but both Martin and the mouse appear to be managing ok in her absence (although I challenge you to watch the tribute to Mrs Jingles on the feed and not tear up a bit). I am going to assume that this is entirely pure and sincere, and as such I wish nothing but the best to Martin, Mr Jingles and the rest of his nameless troupe of rodents.
• Frog App: OH GOD NO MORE SOCIAL APPS EVER PLEASE GOD. Still, if YOU are in the market for a BRAND NEW video-first social app, but this time one that’s focused on FRIENDS and CREATIVITY (now where have you heard that before? Oh, yes, that’s right, everyfcukingwhere!) then you might be in the market to check out Frog, made by former LSE students and which aimed SO far outside my demographic that I can barely make sense of the website. You post ‘Sups’ apparently (yes, that sound you can hear is my jaw clicking in barely-concealed irritation), and there’s a nice gimmick in that anyone can continue any of their friends’ stories by creating ‘sequels’ which effectively follow on from the original content and which feels like a nice tool for all sorts of creative endeavours but, honestly, everyone featured on this website looks so young and fresh and full of life that it mostly made me want to just lie down and bleed into the floor until it all fades to white and mercifully just stops.
• Permanent Beta: DON’T THINK JUST CLICK! Oh, ok, maybe think a *bit*, but generally I found this website was at its best when just approached with a sense of curious and open-minded wonder. If you have any professional interest in / intersection with the arts and digital then I think you will very much like this – or, at the very least, find it a though-0provoking exercise in digital practice/praxis (sorry). “[permanent beta] is an online platform that visualises the ongoing research of Fotomuseum Winterthur in the field of algorithmic and networked image cultures. As a platform meant to remain in a state of perpetual change, it tracks the research process, turning it into a creative and performative act in which knowledge around a specific thematic focus is collectively collected, (re-)arranged, edited and streamlined over time.” This will, I guarantee, only make marginally more sense when you click through, but I am fairly-certain you will like it.
• PrisonGames: This is so interesting – Marcos Paz runs programmes in Argentine jails helping to teach inmates useful skills to help them gain employment in the games-and-games-adjacent industries after release, but also as a means of helping them express themselves through creative storytelling and ludic mechanics. This site collects some of the work that the people he’s taught have produced, seemingly all pieces of interactive fiction using Twine or similar – it’s in Spanish, as you’d expect, so you’ll need a bit of language, but these are poignant and, honestly, in parts heartbreaking short works of semi-autobiography.
• Word Solitaire: This is a good game, but it is SO HARD that it has made me feel really quite thick and I am, to be honest, mainly sharing it with you all so that you can all feel stupid too.
• Legend of the Red Dragon: The final miscellaneous link of the week is a proper throwback – remember BBSs? Oh, fcuk, you may not – erm, bulletin boards! Does that help? Erm, no, ok…just think of them as old, slow forums, basically, or, alternatively, just go away and Google all this and then come back when you’ve done your homework. Done? GREAT! Anyway, this is a wonderful and painstaking recreation of oldschool multiplayer RPG Red Dragon, whose Wikipedia entry describes it as follows: “The premise of LORD is that a red dragon is wreaking havoc in a town where the player has recently arrived. Multiple players compete over a period of weeks to advance their skills and to kill the dragon. In order to achieve this goal, players must face combat to gain experience. Once they have gained enough experience, they must face their master at Turgon’s Warrior Training and advance in skill level. Advancement increases the players fighting stats and gives an additional skill point in the current skill (up to 40). Advancement also presents stronger enemies and masters; a player must challenge and defeat master Turgon himself to reach level 12, the final level, before attempting to search for and slay the dragon.” Enter text commands! Meet other players! ENTER THE METAVERSE AS IT WAS IN 1984!!!!! Lol that is funny satire because aside from the bells and whistles that is basically what this is. A time capsule, a bit of history and a weird illustration of the whole general ‘plus ca change, plus reste la meme chose’ vibe of modernity right now.

By Claire Morgan

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS SELECTION OF FUNK AND DISCO AND ASSOCIATED OTHER BEATS AND PIECES, COLLATED BY MIDNIGHT MAGIC! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Siegfried Und Joy: Yes, ok, fine, they ARE magicians, but they are FUN magicians! The subway exit magic will honestly NEVER get old to me.
• Rob Strati: Smashed plates and surprisingly-good artworks.
• Rupublicans: Republican grandees, reimagined by Midjourney as drag queen versions of themselves for SATIRICAL PURPOSES. On the one hand, a pretty lazy, one-note gag – on the other, some of these images are GREAT.
• Project JDM: Combining maths, animation and music, this is so so so smart and so well made – I am slightly in awe. Thanks to whoever it was who sent this to me this week, whose identity I have totally failed to recall.
• The Tube Map: Do you love the London Underground map? Would you like more of it on your Insta? GOOD WELL HERE IT IS THEN. Beautifully, this doesn’t appear to be affiliated with TFL in any way, which means that this is just someone who really loves the tube map a LOT. Thankyou, anonymous tube map fan!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Brecht Van Den Broucke

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

It’s Friday, it’s lunchtime, it’s practically the holidays and I just bought Arab Strap tickets – ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD!

It’s not, of course – everything’s a benighted mess and liable to get worse before it gets better or, more accurately, we all die! – but let’s pretend otherwise as we, the Web Curios family (incestuous, dysfunctional, sickly, genetically compromised), come together for a rare moment of collective joy and hope.

*PAUSES*

Wasn’t that nice? Eh? Oh.

Still, like I care – this is the last Web Curios before the traditional Paschal break, and I am very much looking forward to not paying any attention to A-fcuking-I and associated topics for two weeks (by the time I come back I expect you all to have been replaced with automata). I hope that you have a pleasant fortnight, and that those of you who celebrate the cruel and bloody execution of a poor carpenter who was JUST TRYING TO BE NICE TO EVERYONE FFS have a wonderful, chocolatey time.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and here’s what crucifixion looks like if you’re curious.

By Steve Kim

WELCOME THE ARRIVAL OF WHAT MIGHT, IF YOU SQUINT, BE SPRING, WITH THIS PLEASINGLY-UPLIFTING SELECTION OF TUNES COMPILED BY TOM SPOONER! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TELL ANY OF YOU WHO WERE CONTEMPLATING GOING TO SEE ‘BERLUSCONI, THE MUSICAL’ IN LONDON AT THE MOMENT THAT YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T BOTHER, PT.1:  

By Petrina Hicks

NEXT, ENJOY SOME TECH-HOUSE COURTESY OF THIS NEW MIX BY DON’T BLINK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TELL ANY OF YOU WHO WERE CONTEMPLATING GOING TO SEE ‘BERLUSCONI, THE MUSICAL’ IN LONDON AT THE MOMENT THAT YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T BOTHER, PT.2:  

• RoboPianist: Yes, ok fine, it *is* more AI and I am sorry – BUT I PROMISE THIS IS FUN AND CUTE AND NOT SCARY! This, instead, is a rather amazing demo which accompanies a recent research paper into the development of articulated robotics; the link takes you to a bit of code that lets you watch a pair of machine-controlled virtual hands, complete with fully-articulated fingers, manipulate themselves into playing a virtual keyboard; the amazing thing here is that this is all being calculated in realtime, with the ‘fingers’ interacting with the ‘keyboard’ as though both existed in physical space, which is…slightly mind-boggling, if I’m honest. You can change the song you’re asking the machine to play, and even use your mouse to try and impede its progress – which feels mean, fine, but also allows you to see that, yes, this really is ‘working out how to ‘play’ the piano on the fly’ which, I repeat, is astonishing. I know that any sort of humanoid robot is a long way away, but the advances in articulation currently being achieved really are quite amazing.
• Chia Earth: I can’t stress enough how much I am enjoying sites like this one at present. Chia Earth is…what is it? It’s an ASCII-ish series of small meditations on Being Online. It’s a small repository of links and thinking about a different type of internet; something small and crafted. It’s, almost certainly, a bit too twee. It’s part of a growing dialogue between digital makers and creatives about what a folk internet might look and feel and sound like, and how it might work, and what it might be for. I encourage you all to have a click and an explore and a think – you can find lots of interesting things through this if you dig enough, I promise.
• Dial: You know that ever-so-slightly satisfying lockpicking minigame mechanic that you get in a certain flavour of videogame? Yes, well imagine that but significantly more inscrutable and online. As far as I can tell, this is a small lockbreaking toy which, should you manage to UNLOCK THE DIAL, will grant you an access code to shiny new alternative browser Arc – I can’t tell you whether or not this actually in fact works or whether it’s an incredibly cruel troll designed to keep new-browser-enthusiasts turning the dials for evermore as, honestly, I got bored after approximately 12 seconds, but those of you with more lockcracking nous (and, frankly, patience) than I might be able to get something moe out of this than I did.
• Snack Memories: A Twitter account dedicated to sharing pictures of old snack foods which have since been discontinued – this is runout of the US and so obviously has a North American bias, but that’s not bad thing when you consider how famously-batsh1t food across the Atlantic often is. Kellog’s Toaster Pizzas! That weird time when fast food chain Denny’s offered up “Frodo’s Pot Roast Skillet (2012-2012): Part of the themed promotional menu for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” this meal featured slow-cooked pot roast, roasted carrots, red potatoes, onions, celery, and mushrooms, topped with shredded cheddar, served in a skillet”! The honestly repellent-sounding Nabisco Hammies, which had possibly the best slogan ever and were: “Party crackers, with  the “taste of baked ham”, as well as pineapple and cloves, pressed into the vague shape of a baked ham. The slogan? “Ham tasty!…Ham shapey!””” This is genuinely brilliant and will make your Twitter experience marginally better (whilst it simultaneously continues to get worse each and everyday thanks to That Fcuking Man).
• The World Happiness Report: This made me slightly annoyed, if I’m honest, which frankly feels like something of an ironic slap in the face. Were you aware that there exists a World Happiness Report, ranking the world’s nations based on how happy they are, a quality inferred from a range of different statistical markers, each weighted to provide an overall per-capita happiness quantification? I mean, actually, now I come to think of it this *does* ring a vague bell, but the latest dataset has just been released and therefore it seems timely to link to the website accompanying it, which purports to let you explore the numbers and run country comparisons and all that sort of numberwrangling fun. You may or may not be unsurprised to know that Finland ranks top of the list (I’ll be honest with you here – the Finns I have met have not, in my experience at least, struck me as particularly full of joie de vivre, but perhaps that’s just how they react to me), with Israel. The Netherlands, Switzerland and New Zealand making up the rest of the top-10 (the UK, should you be interested, is in 27th place, which feels both…surprisingly high, and also a real indictment of all the countries below us) and Afghanistan propping up the table (you can imagine the Taliban being pretty gutted) – this SHOULD be the point where I tell you how much fun it is to explore the data and delve into the reasons why certain countries do so well, how the list changes when you look at different indicators…but I can’t say that, because the website is a fcuking broken horrorshow and the ‘data exploration’ bit is almost comically non-functional (in Chrome, at least), and…it’s just such a shame, to be honest, because this is the sort of thing which could be genuinely useful for all sorts of planning and research purposes but which is rendered entirely pointless as a result of some really crap webwork. Amusingly this is sponsored by both Walls and Unilever, who you’d think might be a bit irked at how poorly their sponcash had been spunked but who, I suspect, just signed off some monies and forgot all about why.
• Collected: This is a nice idea – collected is a site which each time you visit presents 8 different examples of good homepage/landing page design. That’s it. Each visit you get a different shuffle of the 2000+ examples it’s got in its database, meaning it’s unlikely you’ll see too much repetition unless you get REALLY obsessional, and there are some really nice bits of work in here – well done Jonas Pelzer whose work this apparently is.
• What Do People Wear In Paris?: Should anyone reading this actually know me in real life, I imagine you are sniggering slightly at the idea of me including a fashion channel thing. “But Matt!”, people who know me would probably say at this juncture, “You have worn literally exactly the same clothes for approximately three decades and they hang on you like a ‘comedy’ outfit on a lab skeleton! What do you know or care of the stylish people of the world’s most fashionable city?” To which I would probably respond “ffs must you always kick me? MUST YOU!”, but also “look, just because I dress like a blind tramp doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate the style of other people”, and “the thing about this video series is that not only are there some pretty interesting outfits on display (if you like that sort of thing), but there’s also something really quite nice about the way in which the person filming asks questions about the lives and hopes and wants of the featured fashionistas beyond the cut of their cloth; it feels human and…nice, for want of a better word, and I found myself watching more of these than I ever expected to. Oddly enough it reminded me a bit of the OLD SCHOOL days of the Sartoralist and similar, which gave me a pleasing nostalgia-kick and reminded me of a time when someone I know was featured in it and referred to as a ‘Grup’ which I still have no fcuking clue as to the meaning of.
• Gomps: Ok, so this is QUITE technical and game development-y, but given I have no idea who any of you are and what any of you do or are interested in I suppose there’s the vanishing outside possibility that for one of you this will be aTRANSFORMATIVE piece of software. Gomps is a tool which basically lets you add multiplayer to any game built on the Unity engine – or at least very basic multiplayer features, specifically “See other players ghosts around you in real time, and leave notes throughout the game worlds for other players to read.“ Which, generally, I am a huge fan of as a mechanic – I really like the Souls-esque idea of asynchronous interplayer communications (PSEUD!) and would happily see it applied as a layer to basically every communal online experience (I still remember those nascent attempts to create a universal annotation layer over the web in the early-10s – a terrible idea, but one with SO MUCH comedic potential) – and the fact that this basically lets you do this with ANY game in your Steam library,adding a slightly social element to games that didn’t previously have them, strikes me as not only technically amazing but also a pretty cool way of exploring some emergent gameplay ideas.
• Splace: Seeing as we’re doing games, Splace is an interesting idea which is simultaneously very different from the last link and also very vaguely related – the idea of the app is that it effectively (and I appreciate I am probably simplifying the concept in ways the devs won’t necessarily enjoy so, er, sorry!) creates communities around individual games, with each title featured having its own map onto which users can add annotations, gameplay clips, tips and tricks, Easter Eggs, etc, with the idea that eventually there will be a ‘Splace’ for every single title within which its fans will be able to interact and chat and all that sort of jazz. Which, effectively, is a forum with bells and whistles, and I don’t know whether or not there’s enough here to hook people in – but, at the same time, I can see how a map-based interface collecting content relating to specific in-game locations and instances could be useful. Although, of course, it could just end up being flooded with content from moronic children – WHO KNOWS? God it’s exciting being online, isn’t it?
• MonkeyType: Look, I know that ‘learning to type better’ is noone’s idea of fun (unless you’re Mavis Beacon) but, honestly, now that we’re rapidly coming to the fag-end of the period in which ‘being marginally better at Google than your peers’ is considered any sort of competitive advantage whatsoever (I am so scared) you might want to start enhancing some of your other skills – and given we’re apparently all going to spend much of our remaining future years typing instructions to machines (until it all goes voice recognition and our fingers atrophy as our stomachs swell) you may as well take this opportunity to steal a march on your fellow prompt engineers (lol!) and learn how to communicate with The Machine marginally faster than they can. MonkeyType is a genuinely decent typing trainer, with a nice minimal style and a bunch of different training exercises that you can do to improve your performance. Look, you and I both know that this is a Cnut-like (the king, not the bowdlerised swear) attempt to stave off the inevitable obsolescence of the white collar office drone but, well, it’s worth a try, eh?
• The Blue Car: The TikTok account of a remote control car, or rather its owner – the car is used to run errands and do favours for people, and whilst you might not think that you would be amused and entertained by dashcam footage from a small RC vehicle going to the shops with a $10 bill and returning with some groceries let me assure you that you are wrong and that this is the most charming four-wheeled content you will see all day.
• Zigazoo: As the largely-confected fury about TikTok continues to swirl – gyac, everyone, if you’re worried about nefarious datacollection by bad actors then a) lol! Too late!; and b) have you checked how secure your router is?; and c) what about all the OTHER apps ffs?! – so a youth-focused competitor is making its move. Zigazoo is basically ‘TikTok for kids and with more guardrails built in’ (you will, doubtless, be heartened to learn that the platform’s ‘mission’ is to “bring out the best in humankind, build genuine connections, and cultivate a better society through positive, authentic social media built on ethical algorithms. At the largest of scales. For all”, which is nice), which promotes POSITIVITY and doesn’t allow text comments or messaging to supposedly keep it safe and clean, and the content is supposedly vetted to make sure it’s ‘positive-only’ – which, honestly, sounds MISERABLE, can you imagine a social feed filled with nothing but teenagers talking about how happy they are? Still, if you want to give a child in your life yet another reason to spend the majority of their waking hours staring slack-jawed and swiping into the eye of their portable, infinite Wunderkammer then GO FOR IT!
• Roast Me Greta: To be clear – I don’t find this clever or funny, but I do think it’s quite remarkable that someone’s been able to spin up this site which lets you click on a picture of Greta Thunberg and have a voice read out some words in her voice about what an ar$ehole you are for not doing enough to save the planet. This feels like it was created by a 14 year old – and it’s sort of amazing that it’s possible, and that the faux-Thunberg sounds as convincing as it does.
• Welcome Dream: I don’t really want to tell you anything about this. Click, explore, read, and fall down the rabbitholes of this seemingly-simple but VERY twisty and surprisingly rich little indieweb project, where every hyperlink takes you to a new fragment of…fiction? Dream? Parable? Thesis? Manifesto? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but I really really really like this. It makes me want to misuse the adjective ‘Borgesian’, which is pretty much the highest praise I can bestow.
• Sequoia Health: This made me laugh a LOT. Sequoia is apparently a ‘men’s sexual health’ app – exactly what it does is unclear, but apparently it will allow you to “Track, analyze, and improve your intimate health by executing an individually created training program developed by sexual sphere medical experts.” Yes, that’s right, SEXUAL SPHERE MEDICAL EXPERTS! There are tests you can do – beautifully, the screenshot accompanying the ‘tests’ section of the site shows the app giving a reassuring diagnosis of ‘you seem to have a healthy erection’, but HOW DOES IT KNOW?!? – and exercises it can walk you through, and a degree of what I presume is performance tracking, and, best of all, a KNOWLEDGE CENTRE featuring helpful articles and useful content, where the example they have chosen to feature is a piece headlines “Tight underwear and its impact on men’s health”. SIGN ME UP! Should you feel that this is a product you need in your life, be aware that you will need to subscribe and pay a monthly fee – but you can’t put a price on sexual health, right? RIGHT! Reassuringly the site also features a bunch of testimonials, so you can rest easy knowing that the app was awarded “Alpha Starup at Web Summit”, and is a “Partner of the Unition Nations Population Fund” and was also named as an “Impact Starup at Web Summit” (all sic), which I imagine means you’ll all be rushing to exchange your hard-earned pennies for some d1ck-diagnostics. I am sure all the 5-star reviews on the app store are DEFINITELY LEGIT.
• The Journey Planner Challenge: SO GOOD, or at least it is if you’re either a Londoner or the sort of transport nerd who knows the tube map by heart despite not being one – The Journey Planner Challenge offers you five tube stations, and you have to put them in the order that lets you travel between them in the shortest time. I promise you that this is more fun than it sounds, and EVEN BETTER it can be used as an utterly spurious “I am more London than you are” badge of honour with your girlfriend who always makes fun of you for having grown up in Swindon even though you were born in London and are DEFINITELY a Londoner whatever she thinks (what? Projecting? No).
• Dance Music WTF: The videos section of Curios is always hardest for me to write, mainly as I find attempting to describe music in prose almost impossibly difficult (or, more accurately, impossibly difficult to do without it reading really, really badly) – in part because I simply don’t really get genre minutiae and the like. Which, if this quiz is anything to go by, is because genre minutiae is absolute bunkum and means NOTHING – here the challenge is to listen to a piece of dance music and identify from a short clip whether the track in question is (for example, hardstep or gabber or nu-hardcore or technotrepanning – one of these may be of my own invention). It is in part VERY HARD, but more than that it’s genuinely amusing to finally find out what “Chemical Breaks” are meant to sound like. This feels both like something to waste time with at work and something which you could legitimately lose a whole afterparty to circa 5am.

By Useless Arm

THE FINAL MIX OF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS COMES FROM THE CHARMINGLY-NAMED SUPER YAMBA BAND AND COMBINES FUNK AND AFROBEAT AND LATIN STUFF AND IS GENERALLY A VERY GOOD TIME INDEED! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY AGAIN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Slappy The Little Green Frog: It’s a small green frog, on Insta! From what I can tell there’s noone in the comments of any of these pics screaming “THAT BEHAVIOUR IS A CLEAR SIGN OF AMPHIBIAN DISTRESS”, so I feel reasonably-safe in recommending this to you.
• Charlie Engman: I’ll be honest – I don’t really know what’s going on here, or why Engman makes images like this (unsettling ones, mainly, mixing media and human/AI created works in the feed to dizzying effect), but I very much like the style here.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Alex Schaefer

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

Hello! Hi! How are you?

I am TIRED (you didn’t ask, but seeing as you’re here…) having done a 60h round trip to Italy which involved signing documents in 87 separate places (I counted, and this is not an exaggeration) to the point where the final signature looked nothing like the initial one and my hand was basically just a slightly-deadened lump of meat at the end of my arm, but, generally, feeling reasonably positive. The sun’s out! I submitted a quote for some work so risibly overpriced that if they buy it I will literally laugh out loud! ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD!

Ahem. It’s not, of course, but let’s for a few short hours just pretend. Take my hand as I lead you now through the cracked glass and syringescape of reality, through the looking glass and into the BLISSFUL UTOPIA OF THE WEB, where everything really is perfect and if you don’t see that then the problem is almost certainly with you and you alone.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably be aware that the long reads section at the end contains at least 5 genuinely superb pieces this week, so if you only read one section then please make it that one (NO COME BACK READ ALL OF THEM FFS).

By Pier Louis Ferrer

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL OFFERING WITH THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF NORTH AFRICAN TRACKS COMPILED BY JUAN CARLOS DIAZ! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ENGLAND FANS OF THE DISPARITY IN ACTUAL MEANINGFUL TROPHIES WON BY THE NATIONAL TEAMS OF BOTH SIDES, PT.1:  

By Masahisa Fukase 

WOULD YOU LIKE AN HOUR OF HARD AND FAST TECHNO TO ACCOMPANY THE NEXT SECTION? REGARDLESS, THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE GETTING COURTESY OF THIS MIX BY SECRET RAVER! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ENGLAND FANS OF THE DISPARITY IN ACTUAL MEANINGFUL TROPHIES WON BY THE NATIONAL TEAMS OF BOTH SIDES, PT.2:  

•  Not By AI: Would you like to proudly make a stand and proclaim the humanity or your content (lol at the general concept of the use of both ‘humanity’ and ‘content’ in such close proximity!)? Would you like to wear the messy, organic, meaty nature of your creative processes like a badge of honour? GREAT! ‘Not By AI’ is a project which lets you use a variety of different ‘badges’ on your website or work, helping identify it as not AI produced. There’s obviously no practical purpose to these other than as signifiers (at least not at present, though there’s an interesting potential line of thinking here about using these as ways of differentiating input materials for future generations of AI ingestion), but I quite like the idea of them becoming something like a kitemark of humanity in the coming months and years as The Machines spin up the content flywheels and begin to bury us in an avalanche of slightly-too-shiny Midjourney aesthetics.
• Google Bard: It is here! Have you tried it yet? If not, you should do – the ‘waitlist’ seemed to take 20 minutes to clear when I signed up on Monday, and noone I know’s been kept waiting longer than an hour or so to get into to try Google’s GPT-equivalent. Is it any good? No, honestly, not really – it’s marginally faster than OpenAI’s models, but it doesn’t seem to know what it is for; it performs less well with general writing tasks than GPT4 in my experience, it’s less good than Bing at ‘AI-augmented search (Bard, in my limited experience, is not very good at ‘being right’ or ‘saying things that are true’), and it certainly can’t do all the fun image-generation stuff which Microsoft rolled out to Bing this week. Basically this doesn’t really seem to be very good at anything right now – but, on the other hand, it’s by Google and it’s not like they don’t have enough disposable cash to keep this free at the point of use to everyone, so who knows whether they can just brute force their way to market dominance despite a currently-inferior product? Not me, to be clear, I know literally fcuk-all about anything.
• RunwayGen2: Text-to-video is obviously orders of magnitude harder than text-to-image, but it’s another technology that’s coming on at a frankly terrifying clip; this latest update from current industry leaders Runway shows off the latest version of their video manipulation tools and what you can do with them. This is very clearly at the ‘experimental’ phase, and the look/feel is not unlike the stuff that was being created with Dall-E Mini last year (but, er, video), but it’s not hard to see the potential for tech which lets you (effectively) do the job of an entire post-production studio setup with a few prompts and a bit of patience.
• LERF: You know that ‘NERF’ video technique that I’ve written a bit about, that basically lets you create amazing sweeping camerawork and apply it to any video you like, consistently, thanks to 3d imaging tech? Of course you do (although I concede you may not recognise it based on that hamfisted description)! Well there’s another iteration of it which has emerged this week – LERF (which stands for Language Embedded Radiance Fields) effectively makes video natural language searchable. Click the link, watch the demo, and see as the software identifies and isolates the image/3d model for whatever the user types in…the possible applications of this (yes, fine, EVENTUALLY, but still) are genuinely exciting. Oh, and while we’re doing exciting future 3d videostuff, check out this other NERF-related thing where you can just apply changes to video in realtime based on text prompts…were I the sort of person who wanted to MAKE THINGS WITH VIDEO, this would all be very appealing.
• Magic Slides: While we all wait for Miscrosoft to actually launch their AI-powered Office suite, why not try playing around with this toy – plug it into your Google Slides account and it will MAGICALLY spin up entire presentations for you from just a few prompts. To be clear – it won’t make GOOD presentations, but if you find yourself in the invidious position of having to work with people who insist on things being put into fcuking slide format for no fcuking reason whatsoever (can you tell that this is a personal  bugbear of mine? CAN YOU?) then this will allow you to quickly and calmly produce an entirely-mediocre ‘deck’ (FFS!) to satisfy their pointless, stupid and arbitrary format requirements. Perhaps more seriously, it might be worth learning how this sort of stuff works to get a headstart on the MS suite of tools once they launch (dear God what a depressing sentence – ignore that, please; trying is vulgar).
• Chatshape: I remain convinced that ‘plugging your whole website into GPT and seeing what happens and what you can do with it’ is going to be one of the most interesting things you can do with LLMs at a professional level; if you’d like to have a (low-level) play with what you might be able to accomplish with that sort of interaction then you might want to give Chatshape a go. This is a Chrome extension which you can run on any webpages you like to create small, trained chatbot instances from the copy/data – this is quite basic, and a long way from what you can do if you do the whole API thing, but as a rough proof-of-concept it might be helpful.
• Midjourney Magazine: It does rather feel like Midjourney is winning the text-to-image war at the moment, with the outputs from its v5 model dropping jaws worldwide since its launch last week. If you’re the sort of person who feels they need to keep an eye on the tool’s development then you could perhaps do worse than subscribing to the OFFICIAL MIDJOURNEY MAGAZINE which promises to feature the best work from the best creators, along with, one presumes, tips and tricks and guides and stuff like that. Obviously you can get all of the above from the creative community that exists around the tool, but, equally, this is an OFFICIAL MAGAZINE and therefore might even be good. They’re asking for $4 a month as a sub, though, which seems, honestly, pretty fcuking punchy, so maybe see if you can fool your work into paying for it.
• /AI: This is both very clever from a technical point of view and also an astonishingly bold grift; /AI is a Chrome Extension which lets you basically employ GPT on any website by letting you invoke it through any textbox on any webpage – which, yes, I know is a horrible attempt to explain it, but imagine any webpage on which there’s a text input field. Done that? Good. Now imagine that you can call up a GPT response into that text input field on any webpage you like, simply by typing /ai and then your command – EXCITING, EH? I mean, no, not really, but it is very clever and impressive, and it would I suppose saving you some tab-switching and copy and pasting…it is not, I don’t think, worth the $19 that the kid behind it is trying to charge for the download. Still, kudos to him for the code and the chutzpah – and a reminder to you that you really, really don’t need to be paying anyone other than OpenAI and maybe Midjourney for this stuff right now, because, honestly, these layers are all grift and will vanish with time.
• Handmade Tools: A TikTok account in which some kid from (I think) New York posts these incredibly satisfying videos of them making various tools and things by hand. There’s one of these where he melts down a bunch of cheap ‘gold’ jewellery to make a TEENY TINY CHEF’S KNIFE and, honestly, it was possibly the most hypnotic and relaxing thing I’ve seen since 2015. BY THE WAY – I found this via a website called Oink!, which is a linkdump run by a very friendly Spanish-speaking person who I think is called Paco, and whose links I recommend unreservedly.
• The VGA Museum: Have you been hankering after a website whose sole ostensible purpose is to feature photographs of compter graphics cards on a white background? Would you like to be able to sort said cards by chipmaker, BUS or card maker? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This site is maintained and run by the mysterious -but-fabulously-named ‘Slaventus’, whose dedication and faintly-obsessional love of graphics cards I salute (but do not in any way understand or share).
• Living RPS: This is a now-dormanty account, but last year it posted some of the most unusually-compelling sporting content you will ever have seen, ever. THE LIVING ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS TOURNAMENT! Each matchup basically works like a sort-of loose game of ‘Life’ – icons representing rocks, paper and scissors bounce around the screen; if rocks touch scissors, rock ‘wins’ and the scissors icon transforms into a rock, and so on and so forth; each video ends when one of the three has emerged victorious and is the sole remaining icon on the board. “Matt”, I hear you cry, “why the fcuk do you think I would be interested in watching what is effectively a screensaver from 1997? Why do you bring me this? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING???” – but you are wrong, this is literally mesmerising and I cannot begin to tell you about the heart-palpitating tension that will grip you in the latter rounds. Genuinely hope that this happens again this year – this may be the only reason I have found to date to actually give a fcuk about TikTok.
• Trianglify: A small tool which lets you make pleasing triangle-based abstract art, based on the position of a few sliders and the selection of a colour palette. If nothing else this is a lovely toy for making backgrounds and wallpapers, but I also find the geometry here very soothing indeed.
• Creme: This is rather nice – Creme is a new cooking app which does video recipes (so far, so unremarkable), but whose gimmick is that said recipes are presented as a series of short looping gifs so that each step is onscreen with visual guidelines for as long as you need it to be rather than you having to desperately scrub forwards and backwards through a video with jammy fingers. It’s also got a bunch of slightly-less-appealing gimmicks added on – the playlist feature strikes me as particularly otiose – but the general idea here (teaching via gifs) is a good one which I am embarrassed to admit had literally never occurred to me before.
• Supersonic: I am, I think, probably the least-healthy person I know. I’m not saying this as some sort of badge of pride or honour (oh, ok, I probably am a bit), more to indicate that I am very, very much not the sort of person who has ever even for one second contemplated ‘getting into running’ or ‘joining the gym’ or ‘stopping smoking’. Despite this, I was briefly almost sold on Supersonic when I discovered it – as far as I can tell it’s basically like Strava, but (and these were the magic words) for running or WALKING. Now, a Strava for strolling I can get behind – I may not be fast, but I rack up the miles, and I genuinely like the idea of being able to ‘own’ the 300-meter saunter from the tube to Tesco’s, say. This feels like an exercise tracker for those for whom even ‘standing up’ is occasionally a bit of an effort, is what I’m saying,and to that end I broadly endorse it.
• Stuck Songs: A spreadsheet, tracking a single thing. “Almost every morning,” writes the unnamed curator of this document, “I wake up with a song stuck in my head. This is my attempt to keep track of them”. This, then, is that list of songs, up to date as of 22 March (when the song was “Kids In America” by Kim Wilde), some songs having accompanying notes to offer context but otherwise just listed by name and date. Honestly, I love this very much indeed – in a weird way it works better for not being able to hear the tracks in question.
• Trust Exercise: Via Kristoffer comes this beautiful webproject – I think that what is happening here is the juxtaposition of a beauty influencer’s video script with the comments and reactions of their fans in the comments, creating a lovely sort-of dialogue between artist and audience which at the same time is continually, necessarily, slightly at cross-purposes. No idea if this was the artist’s intention (who IS the artist?), but it struck me as pleasingly evocative of the creator/fan relationship in general (he said, like the total fcuking pseud he in fact is).
• You Are Not Special: This webcomic made a lot of people very upset online last week – I, on the other hand, love it, and think it should be given to everyone as soon as they are able to read. Your mileage, as every, may vary significantly.
• Dadagrams: A daily word game where each day you have to achieve a higher score than the website maintainer’s dad, who is charmingly bad at the game and therefore means you can start your day with the pleasin frisson of victory more often than not.
• Whichipedia: Which of the two Wikipedia entries is longer – GUESS! That’s, er, literally the extent of the ludic entertainment on offer here, but it’s more diverting than you might expect (although you will gain an unfair advantage over the machine if you make sure to remember the cast iron law of Wikipedia – to whit, any nerdy topic you care to mention will ALWAYS have a longer entry than any non-nerdy topic, regardless of the significance of said non-nerdy topic (this is 99% always true, I promise you).

By Melody Tuttle

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, CELEBRATE WHAT LOOKS VERY MUCH LIKE THE IMMINENT ARRIVAL OF SPRING WITH THIS EXCELLENTY BALEARIC MIX BY LOVEBIRDS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Carlos Jiminez Varela: Varela is a photo compositor and retoucher who I presume works on all sorts of things in real life but whose Insta feed features nothing but pictures of gigantic trainers (oh, ok, fine, ‘sneakers’, if you must) dropped onto the urban landscape – a Nike Airforce One disrupting LA traffic, an Adidas hightop reflected in the windows of a towerblock at sunset, that sort of thing. No, no idea at all.
• Renee French: Small, odd, vaguely-surreal and slightly-bathetic art and animations by Renee French, which are small and surreal and inhabit a not-entirely-dissimilar universe to Marcell The Shell With Shoes On but which are, mercifully, nowhere near as insufferable.
• Entreprenure: A genuinely wonderful account parodying business hustle culture and all those people who seem to do nothing with their days other than penning what appear to be blank verse updates on LinkedIn and taking photos of themselves in rental supercars on an Essex industrial estate.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Alexis Ralaivao

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (ONCE AGAIN LARGELY SOURCED FROM THE EXCELLENT ‘GOOD MUSIC’ NEWSLETTER)!:

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

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

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

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

By Jess Allen

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

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

By Alex Schaeffer

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

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

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

By Natalia Gonzales Martin

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Heesoo Kim

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: