The world’s either going to get maybe, possibly, a tiny bit better next week, or it’s going to get LOADS worse – EXCITING, ISN’T IT? I don’t know about you, but part of me quite wants to be put into a medically-induced coma until America gets its sh1t together.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re sick of their fcuking politics too, admit it.
By Zhiyong Jin (all pics this week via TIH, for which thanks as ever)
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY ANGRY AT THE FACT THAT IT KNOWS WHO AND WHAT ‘THE RIZZLER’ IS, BUT IS EVEN MORE ANNOYED THAT THIS WEEK IT GOT HIM MIXED UP WITH BABY GRONK, PT.1:
- 3d Workers Island: This week’s first link is a bit of an odd one (plus ca change), and to be honest it’s more of a short story in slightly-odd webpage form, and, well, I appreciate I am hardly selling it to you here but I PROMISE IT IS GOOD. You just have to be aware of the following things: a) despite what it might look like, there’s no real interaction happening here – you advance the narrative by clicking, and that’s your only form of agency here; b) so effectively that means that what you’re doing is reading and looking – do you like reading and looking? GREAT! I don’t want to give too much away here because part of the pleasure of this is how gently-unsettling it is, but think of this as a spooky tale for hallowe’en (yes I know I am a day late, it’s not my fcuking fault when the days fall), one which wonders what it would be like if you one day realised that the computer sandbox you like to play with might have something slightly more going on under the hood than you at first thought. Told through ‘game’ footage, screenshots of forum posts, messenger conversations and other fragmented bits of digital media, this is REALLY nicely–paced and gets…quite creepy by the end. It will take about 10 minutes of your life, but you probably weren’t going to do anything important with them anyway, were you? Exactly.
- MusicFX DJ: A NEW FUN MUSICAL AI TOOL TO PLAY WITH! This one’s from Google, and basically takes a multi-track approach to AI music – rather than just inputting a single prompt to generate a piece of music, this interface lets you specify various elements that you want included, and then use sliders to change the emphasis given to each prompt in the resultant composition – so, for example, you might have one term which is just ‘crying’, and by adjusting the slider you can, in realtime, determine the exact amount of wracked sobbing you’d like to include in the song. This is, in the main, a GREAT way of creating some genuinely-horrible-sounding cacophonies (as I type this, some truly appalling sounds generated by the terms ‘southern gothic’, ‘hardcore’ and ‘breakbeat’ are swirling around my kitchen), but it feels like this particular way of directing The Machine allows for a lot more interesting and malleable results – there’s something honestly sort of magical about moving the sliders and hearing the track respond to your urgings in semi-realtime, even if I haven’t yet managed to create anything that doesn’t make my ears want to immolate themselves. Have a play, this is FUN.
- The Bullsh1tometer: I am, perhaps naively, clinging onto the hope that as of this time next week North America will have collectively decided that, actually, the past 10 years haven’t actually been all that fun, and that it might now be time to put this whole miserable episode behind us and forget, ideally forever, that That Fcuking Man ever existed (I appreciate it is unlikely that it is going to be that simple, but hey ho). As the rest of the world waits to see whether the population of one country ends up making a decision so catastrophically stupid (AGAIN!) that it fcuks things up for everyone else too, why not enjoy this election-themed explainer from Australian satirical outlet Crikey, which is running a project to neatly demonstrate the ways in which AI can (and already is) being applied to news output, and how that affects the way in which a reader experiences facts. Per their explanation, “We’ve used the current US election campaign as a test case. We started by selecting six “base” stories, pivotal moments in the campaign so far that have been covered across the globe, with the key details generally agreed upon across the spectrum. The team at DDB and Pow Wow then took a “neutral” article (acknowledging that no article, even wire copy, can ever be truly neutral) for each of these stories and passed them through a fine-tuned LLM (large language model). The LLM is designed to find opportunities to insert political bias. As the dial is turned up, the AI system adds more and more bias, until the “neutral” base article is converted into a piece of extreme propaganda.” So, basically, you select one of a selection of articles and can turn the AI heat up to a degree of your own choosing, seeing how quickly and easily The Machine is able to turn relatively-staid and neutral prose into something significantly more partisan and inflammatory in just a click. This won’t tell you anything you don’t already know, but it’s a neat educational explainer as to why you need to be (even more) cognisant of how easy it is to spin facts with words, and how (per everything else) it’s not going to get any better anytime soon.
- Hourly at the Whitney: What time is it RIGHT NOW? No, seriously, it’s important. Basically if you click this link on the hour, you will experience a lovely little bit of site-specific art by Maya Man; if you click at any other time, you’ll just get the website for the Whitney (which is nice, but, well, not all that interesting per se). I won’t spoil the work by explaining or describing it (although if you’re too impatient to wait for the hour to strike, you can get the details here – but know that I judge you poorly), but I was utterly charmed by this – I think there’s something wonderful about this sort of subtle, additive webwork, and the idea that someone might just be online while the hour strikes and be surprised by the unexpected interaction is lovely to me. It sort of puts me in mind of those elaborate water clocks that you occasionally find in provincial shopping centres, which twice a day do some sort of insanely-elaborate trumpet-and-geyser routine to the tune of the William Tell overture (you OBVIOUSLY know what I mean here, don’t pretend that this isn’t the most evocative and resonant description of anything you’ve ever read). Basically I think that anyone who’s in charge of a website should give serious thought to including some sort of regular, time-based easter egg, the stranger the better – I am very much available for ‘consultancy’ here, should anyone want to discuss some options.
- Smashing: Of all the things that need ‘hacking’ (nothing needs hacking, NOTHING, you are not fcuking Neo, you are just a tedious micromanager of your own experiences and you should just fcuking relax, ok?), I think if I’m honest that ‘finding things to read online’ is pretty low down the list – JUST SUBSCRIBE TO CURIOS FFS WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE? However, should you somehow be of the opinion that 20-odd high quality longreads, lovingly curated by ME, isn’t enough for you each week, you might be interested in Smashing, the second ‘surface more articles to read’-type app I can remember in the past 18 months (you may recall Artifact, which lasted approximately six months). How it works is a *bit* opaque, but as far as I can tell there’s a combination of…some sort of algorithmic content sorting, alongside ‘community recommendations’, with the idea that the app’s userbase will also contribute interesting things to the content pool based on their own surfing/browsing/reading. Which is a nice idea in theory, but rather undermined by the intended target audience for the app is…people who feel they need help finding interesting things to read. DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM IN THIS THEORETICAL FLYWHEEL? There’s also quite a large red flag in the app’s blurb, which, when reaching for topics that users might be interested in, alights immediately on ‘marketing’, ‘wellness’ and ‘AI’, suggesting that, possibly, it’s aimed at people who don’t actually like reading for reading’s sake at all (look, I’m sorry, but if you are asked for your primary interests and your immediate response is those three terms then, well, I think you have dust where your soul should be), an opinion further reinforced by the fact that ‘AI Summaries’ is a big selling point (you can instruct the app to make any article ‘funny’, which will send a genuine shiver of revulsion down the spine of anyone who’s been exposed to LLM-generated ‘humour’ at any point). Basically this looks like it’s for cnuts, and I hope none of you download it (but, as ever, I will never know if you do, so).
- The Geoguesser Man Has Reaches His Final Evolution: OK, so this is literally just a link to a video on X, and it’s only 20s or so, but also I think this might be significant at a species level. The Geoguesser guy – you know, the bloke who’s somehow discovered he has a quite incredible facility for working out where on earth any given photograph was taken – has worked out that he can, more often than not, identify the rough geolocation of an image based on nothing more than the tone of the sky in said image; this video is of him realising the full extent of his powers. I am honestly slightly astonished and not a little terrified by this, as if it’s not all a scam or a setup then I honestly think he might have hit a new tier of evolution.
- A Flood of AI Animation Is Coming: This link takes you to what, fine, is a very dry update from AI videmongers Runway about a new update to their stack; ignore the boring (and frankly far-too-technical) words, though, and enjoy the videos, which demonstrate the frankly startling animation/mocap results that you can now get from AI style transfer in what I think might be realtime. Basically it takes facial movement and voice patterns and uses those to animate an AI-generated facial model – as you can see from the example clips here, what this means is Pixar-grade lipsyncing and emoting with literally no effort whatsoever, which, from the point of view of lowering the barrier to entry for creating animations, is pretty significant. On the one hand I appreciate that, as with all this stuff, there are a LOT OF QUESTIONS (whither jobs! Whither the environment! Etc etc) but I can’t help but see things like this as…broadly good? I don’t know, I just think that anything that allows kid with an idea and an imagination to more easily make things based on said ideas and said imagination is, on balance, A Net Positive, and I can’t get immediately angry about something that lowers the barriers to Making Fun Things. Sorry. Also, let’s be honest, there’s a fcuktonne of very ropy human-created animation already out there, so let’s not pretend it’s all fcuking Golden Era Disney.
- Synthwave Chimes: Via Kris at Naive, this is a lovely, fuzzy and slightly-incomprehensible little synthtoy – there are some…dangling things (the titular ‘chimes’, I suppose – fcuk, I could probably have worked that out before I started typing this now-entirely-pointless digression) which you move your mouse over to produce sounds – the sounds in question are a bit ragged and frayed around the edges, and I like the vaguely-atonal cacophony that results when you careen the cursor across the shapes, and, in general, I think I would like windchimes significantly more if they sounded like this.
- Grief Garden: Also via Kris (THANKS KRIS!) comes this simple-but-hugely-poignant (and, realistically, only going to become moreso) website which exists to collect people’s memories of the things that they have lost, or know they will lose, as a result of climate change. Per the blurb, Grief Garden “is an exploratory space, containing stories of plants, animals, and other memorialized climate grief. Explore the canvas by clicking on cells to either learn more about a memorial or to add your own — this can be a favorite tree, a beach, a friend, anything that you would like to memorialize.” It presents as a simple ASCII-ish map – clicking on any square on the map that has a character on it will show you someone else’s memory; clicking on one with no character will allow you to enter your own. This feels very much like something that could / should be taken by a museum and made bigger, because…well, look, none of this is getting better, is it, and it feels like these are feelings and ideas that a significant proportion of the global population is going to have to start wrestling with sooner than it probably realises. Seriously though, please do spend some time with this – there are some really lovely bits of writing buried in the memories, like this one: “But there are snapshots of this season I won’t forget. Toddlers receiving commendations for bravery on behalf of fathers who will miss a lifetime of milestones. Stepping onto the tarmac under that ominous, orange sky, the scarcest smattering of ash on the breeze. Evacuation sirens; smoke so dense it cancels out the sun. The fear in my son’s eyes as he struggled to catch a breath. Thousands upon thousands of livestock charred and scattered by the road; millions upon millions of native animals – likely entire species – incinerated.” Yes, ok, fine, I didn’t say it would be cheerful.
- Leon Eckert: I have no clue whatsoever how I found the personal website of Leon Eckert, who, per his description, is ‘a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society’ and currently living in Shanghai (HELLO LEON, should you be the sort of person who Googles themselves, HAPPY FRIDAY I HOPE YOU ARE WELL), and I am linking to his website because it has THE most pleasingly fun/silly UX/UI flourishes I have seen on a site in AGES. Seriously, just click the link and then toggle the checkboxes on the left-hand-side of the page to make your browsing experience significantly more fun. I would like all new websites to come with these features, please, especially the ‘multiply my cursor by 1000’ one which genuinely made me feel as though I was having some sort of minor episode for a second.
- Thos Computer: This is a very simple site but I LOVE the interface and how the drop-down menus and what you select from them effectively act as a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure-type recongfiguration of the website content (which, I promise, will make more sense to you when you click the link and play around). This feels like a really interesting and potentially-fruitful way to explore narrative design; I really like the idea of a story which reconfigures itself around you as you change individual words, alter verbs or swap out nouns.
- On Games: A new magazine! An actual, physical magazine! About videogames! All glossy and high-quality and super-designed! This looks LOVELY, and very grown-up, (and pricey, at £25 for volume one), and the sort of thing that would sit among the exposed brickwork and filament bulbs of someone from 2013’s warehouse apartment. Gorgeous design, though.
- Nintendo Music: I was never a Nintendo kid as a child, and as a result don’t have the deep-seated nostalgia associated with the brand, its consoles and its characters – I am aware, though, that for many of you the sound of the NES (or SNES, or N64, or Gameboy, or Switch, dear god this makes me feel old I am going to stop listing old consoles now) is the sound of CHILDHOOD and BETTER TIMES, and as such I realise that for some of you a mobile app which lets you listen to ALL OF THE NINTENDO MUSIC EVER is basically like some sort of holy grail so, well, here you go! I haven’t tried this so can’t attest to its quality, but it’s an official Nintendo app so I’d expect it to be pretty decent. I particularly like the way that the app will apparently let you extend the duration of shorter tracks, so you can transform (for example) the Rainbow Road theme into some sort of 18-minute prog fever dream.
- The RIP Off: This is a project by an outfit called Brain, very much the Gobots to MSCHF’s Transformers when it comes to ‘gimmicky short-term gimmicks with immense viral potential’ – they are the people behind the ‘Green Day, but with the songs reproduced on crappy instruments’ which you doubtless saw when I was off, and while I am sure they’re perfectly-pleasant people this does very much feel like a bunch of people who saw what MSCHF were doing and literally thought ‘yeah, ok, we can copy that wholesale’. Still, I grudgingly have to admit that I think this is quite a fun idea – the simple premise is that each time a famous dies, someone somewhere is the first in the world to express their condolences via social media, and that that person should be rewarded in the form of a medal. The site lists a bunch of now-deceased celebrities; if you believe you were the first in the world to wish them well in their shuffle off the mortal coil, link your Twitter account to the site and claim your prize – in this specific case, a medal engraved with your name and the fact that YOU were the first person in the world to publicly mourn (for example) Liam Payne. Sadly the medals only ship within the US, which means that I feel it important for a UK funeral parlour to rip this off wholesale for the anglo market.
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY ANGRY AT THE FACT THAT IT KNOWS WHO AND WHAT ‘THE RIZZLER’ IS, BUT IS EVEN MORE ANNOYED THAT THIS WEEK IT GOT HIM MIXED UP WITH BABY GRONK, PT.2:
- I Can’t Believe Other People Don’t Do This: We have all experienced the very particular feeling of watching someone else undertake a task in a manner which, to us at least, looks so utterly preposterous, so wrong-headed, so STUPID, that it makes us question whether or not the person in question is in some way, I don’t know, intellectually subnormal (professionally-speaking I have found this most often when watching how people use search engines; by contrast, others tend to get this feeling watching me dress) – this is a Reddit thread collecting a VAST crowdsourced list of the ways in which various people perform certain tasks in hyperoptimised ways and, honestly, some of these are fcuking GAMECHANGERS. Seriously, there will be at least one thing in here which utterly changes your life (as well as a lot of others which, yes, fine, make you slightly question the sanity or life-choices of some of the posters in the thread – I appreciate you like tidy drawers, mate, but plastic ziploc bags in said drawers in which you organise all your individual gubbins feels a touch…excessive) – I experienced a moment of genuine revelatory clarity at ‘open bags of crisps upside down because all the seasoning sits at the bottom’, for example, akin to when the image of the duck suddenly resolves itself into a bunny rabbit.
- Extract All The Links: I feel quite strongly that I am cutting my own throat by serving you up this link, but such is my dedication to bringing you the very best of the web that I can’t hold back even when a link is basically designed to render Curios (or at least the bit of it which involves me) entirely redundant. Simon Willison got an LLM to code this up for him as part of some tinkering he was doing (you can read the notes of how here, should you be interested) – it’s a very simple tool which lets you paste in any copy you like from any webpage you fancy, and which will quickly and neatly extract any embedded urls from said text and dump them out for you without any of the annoying accompanying prose. Which means that should you decide that while the links are good the words are, frankly, dogsh1t, you need never again suffer through my prose – just copy the entire text of Curios, dump it in here and then surf to your heart’s content without my godawful words ruining your webspelunking. Know, though, that if you choose to do that I will do everything in my power to come back from the dead and haunt you to the point of insanity (not joking).
- AI For Culture: Do any of you work in the cultural sector? I have a vague feeling a couple of you might – anyway, if so, this might be of use/interest. Basically this is a set of tools and resources compiled by what looks like a range of pan-European cultural institutions designed to help people within the sector work out how best to deploy generative AI as part of their work – per the blurb, “We are on a mission to empower the culture heritage sector through Artificial Intelligence. Our aim is to enable professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts within the sector with the resources they need to integrate AI into their daily workflow, find creative ways to use them and solve their current problems. The platform hosts a pool of readily deployed AI software tools, along with training and testing datasets that have been curated for use within the sector. To describe what is possible and showcase existing successful deployments, various types of upskilling material are also hosted by the platform.” The fact that none of the tech companies have their logos on this makes me think it’s probably a genuine attempt to assist culture workers rather than a naked attempt to inject The Machine into every possible corner of the world for pecuniary gain. There are over 100 tools in the database here, so if you’re interested in AI for general purpose, practical use it’s probably worth a quick look.
- Napkin: This is, I concede, quite dull, but it might also be quite useful. Are you the sort of person who makes slides with diagrams on them? Do you have to get someone else to make the diagrams for you because, fundamentally, you’re a useless design refusenik? Enter Napkin, which will use THE MAGIC OF AI to spin up appropriate, diagrammatic illustrations for your slides based on the copy you feed it – basically you just plug in the on-slide text and it will spit out what it concludes are suitable graphical/diagrammatic representations of said text for you to select, tweak and ultimately use – if you’re the type of, I don’t know, SYSTEMS THINKER who likes to describe complex processes and feedback loops and stuff then this will probably be far too noddy for you; on the other hand, if you’re someone who works in advermarketingpr and whose slides contain concepts which should probably be written in crayon so RIGOROUS are they then this is probably EXACTLY the degree of sophistication you need. As an aside, I have been in many, many meetings over the course of my career with consultants from places like Accenture, and I am entirely convinced that 70% of all monies paid to the people in those companies goes on creating slide templates featuring triangles and arrows in important-looking configurations which mean the square root of fcuk all but very much LOOK businesslike.
- Hummingbirds: A new(ish) twist on the influencer model! This time with an emphasis on HYPERLOCALITY, though, which is obviously ENTIRELY novel (not in fact really that novel at all), which I suppose makes sense in, say, the US, given the size of the country, but possibly marginally less so somewhere like the UK, where it’s questionable whether the market exists for finding influencers in, say, Maidstone. Still, the premise feels solid – local businesses sign up, set up campaigns that they want influencers to participate in; said influencers sign up, select the brand campaign then want to work on, make their content, get paid, everyone wins! Well, in theory at least – as ever with these things I have…questions about the economics of the whole thing and whether the incentives available are attractive enough to tempt a sufficient volume of creators, or whether the impact of said ‘influence’ is enough at a micro level to make the brand campaigns worthwhile, but should you be less sceptical about all this than I am then you might find the model of interest. BONUS INFLUENCER PLATFORM: this is by possibly the UK’s least-favourite entrepreneur James Watt, the man who singlehandedly managed to render the word ‘punk’ utterly meaningless thanks to his work with Brewdog and who’s now branching out into the influence space himself with his new venture called ‘Social Tip’, where (basically) if you buy something from a brand, said brand can then pay you to talk about how happy you are to have bought said something all over the internet. This doesn’t, apparently, require any form of disclosure whatsoever from the person being paid, as given that they have already made the purchase it’s considered that they are not being induced to promote the product – which strikes me as…something of a grey area which may not remain grey for that much longer should the ASA be paying proper attention. In fact, the whole terms section of the site strikes me as being full of the sort of stuff that feels very much ‘we’re fcuking around! Let’s find out!’, so it will be interesting to see how long this lasts for.
- Cafeteria: Seeing as we’re doing ‘links vaguely related to advermarketingpr’, here’s Cafeteria, an interesting idea from the US which is designed to let brands get REAL INSIGHTS from REAL TEENS about what they REALLY THINK. They do this by paying them to complete short surveys – the company behind the app has a cohort of teens signed up, presumably with a reasonable demographic split (this is North America only, I think) and paying them to answer questions about what they’re into, the brands they like, etc etc. Kids get asked to participate at most a couple of times a month, to prevent burnout or, presumably, them gaming the system to earn lots of pocket cash; participants get paid upto $20 to participate, which seems like an awful lot of money for this to be in anyway practically scaleable, but, then again, American budgets are American budgets. Worth being aware of if your job has anything to do with ‘knowing what the kids are into’ (if that’s the case you really are reading the wrong newsletter).
- Walkcast: This is a really lovely idea which is sadly ruined by the appalling LLM-generated copy – Walkcast is basically an AI-generated podcast which spins up a story based on where you are in the world. As far as I can tell what happens here is that there’s a combination of geolocation (which tells the programme where you are), light prompting (which generates the story based on the aforementioned location data), and text-to-voice (which streams it into your ears), resulting in a new, location-specific story delivered to you whenever you want it. Which is in theory SO COOL, but is totally undermined by the fact that the tone is so utterly grating, full of the sort of horrendous, vaguely-millennial-inflected slop that is an LLMs default output. As previously discussed here, it is HARD to make The Machine write anything non-businessish that isn’t awful to read, but they could at least have attempted to mitigate the baseline mediocrity here a bit. Feels like there is an idea in here with a bit of tweaking, though – oh, this came via the excellent Sentiers, by the way, which continues to be a great newsletter for futures-type writing and thinking.
- The UFO Timeline: This is a great little project by amateur UFOlogist (is that the term? Apologies if I’ve just used the community equivalent of hatespeech here) by one Sam Lingle (HI SAM LINGLE!) who decided that it was quite annoying to keep track of the history of UFO investigations and discoveries and that what was needed was a website which presented a timeline of what was learned when – A UFO TIMELINE, IF YOU WILL! Ahem. This is GREAT, even if, like me, you are…unconvinced as to the existence of extraterrestrial life (or, perhaps more accurately, are unconvinced of the extent to which extraterrestrial life is interested in hanging out with us), and it taught me that the earliest recorded instance of alleged alien abduction occurred in the 1770s in Sweden, when one Jacob Jacobsson ‘came face to face with short, humanoid beings and a chubby man wearing a red cap’ and was somehow disappeared by them for four days (I don’t mean to be sceptical here, but I’m guessing it was easier to spin yarns like this in the late-18th Century). Anyway, this is a really nice personal project which is far better-coded than it probably needs to be, and is a pleasant way of spending 10 minutes learning about all the different parts of the world that have seen citizens claiming to have been ‘probed by the greys’.
- Jordan Stone:I don’t do TikTok, I am not interested in it, and I don’t find it, as a rule, particularly interesting as a medium (I know, I know) – that said, I think Jordan Stone might be a genius and that their videos are ART. I don’t, honestly, know quite how to explain these to you – they’re a sort of evolution of brainrot content, stitching together and overlaying multiple different videos and music with fx to create something oddly-meditative and poignant and beautiful (I am not joking, seriously, I think this really is quite moving at times), despite being composed from clips that are, objectively, often very, very silly. I can’t quite explain the power of this, but trust me when I tell you that it may be the best thing I’ve seen on the platform all year and I would 100% watch an hour-long supercut of these, ideally very stoned in a comfortable gallery setting.
- Stop Project 25 – The Comic: To all the North Americans reading this – you poor, poor fcuks, seriously, this election has been going on for approximately three decades and it increasingly looks like it might in fact NEVER STOP HAPPENING; it’s exhausting and very boring for the rest of us, but for you it’s exhausting, boring and TERRIFYING, which must be even worse. I am not going to suggest what you do with your vote because a) it’s none of my business, who the fcuk am I to tell you what to do?; and b) I am 99% certain that everyone reading this is a Democrat (the only person I know who actually supports Trump and who might in fact read this is not a US citizen and lives in Mexico, so give a fcuk), but I found this website, which details some of the Project 25 stuff that has so many on the ‘left’ (lol at the idea that the current democratic party could be described in any such way in any rational world) so scared, nicely done – detailing the alleged plans for the post-election Trump supremacy in comicbook format to neatly explain via sequential art exactly how bad it could get for, basically, anyone who isn’t a straight white man. As I’ve said before, part of me does slightly think this is ‘QAnon for liberals’, but, even taking a lot of this with some grains of salt, it’s…a bit troubling. Anyway, hopefully That Fcuking Man will do an Elvis between now and Tuesday so this will all end up being moot (if we all hope hard enough it COULD HAPPEN).
- Use YouTube As An Instrument: Ooh, this is a FUN little hacked-together toy – plug in any YouTube url and this website lets you assign timestamped portions of the video to individual keys on your laptop, meaning you can basically turn any vid into a customised soundboard; this could be quite a lot of fun for mixing and recording (or if you just want to be able to quickly and easily use the ‘AW YEAH!’ bit from Timmy Mallett’s ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ as an on-demand audio sting for the rest of the day).
- Battleships: The game of Battleships – you know, the one where you have to guess where your opponents ships are placed on a grid – reimagined as a single-player daily puzzler. This is clever and neat, but I was really bad at it and so it has made me unaccountably grumpy and I don’t feel like praising it anymore than the bare minimum as a result. Sorry.
- Color Gum: A tiny little puzzler which you will get through in about 5 minutes, and as such a perfect ‘tea and biscuit’ companion – you just need to manoeuver the blob to the goal, ensuring that it’s the right colour when it arrives; simple, but you can see how the mechanic could get quite chewy and complex if you extended it a bit.
- The ThinkyGames Games Archive: ThinkyGames is a website all about, er, games that require some thought – they recently updated their website, and it now includes this GREAT archive of games, many of which are browser-based and entirely free-to-play, and which will require you to use your brain in some small way but which also include titles for all the major consoles and PC; if you’re after something to play right now then there are dozens of options here, but, equally, if you’d like a resource to help you decide what to play in the future then this is worth bookmarking. SO MANY GREAT GAMES, SO LITTLE TIME.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- PicVoid: As far as I can tell, these are just found photos from around the web, seemingly all depicting people’s bedrooms or living rooms in a non-specific period that feels…vaguely-early-00s, I think? There’s a certain quality they all share, despite the disparate contents, that give the whole collection an odd, vaguely-hauntological vibe which I very much enjoy – this is PURE VIBES, basically, and not particularly comforting ones.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Kelani Fatai: Fatai is a Nigerian painter who does portraits of figures from Black culture in a sort-of-faux-Renaissance style – I *really* like the look and feel of the work here, and Fatai is set to become VERY FAMOUS quite soon as I think they have been picked to do the cover art for the forthcoming Mama Knowles memoir ‘Matriarch’. YOU SAW HIM HERE FIRST.
- Devil’s Blush: An account that posts videogame screenshots – honestly, though, that doesn’t come close to expressing the BEAUTY of this. Seriously, the shots are ART – they’re photos of screens, so there’s a very particular quality to the images, and the way the pixels show up, that is SO powerfully of-an-era that it feels like being transported back to your memories of playing Mario on a CRT round your mate’s house (you can read an interview with the person behind it here, should you be so inclined).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Labour Party In 2024: We start this week with one of three LRB pieces in this week’s longreads (it really is such a wonderful magazine), this one a synthesis-review of three books on UK politics which presents as more of a ‘state of the Labour Party in 2024’ piece and which, as a general primer on the party and the journey it’s been on over the past 15 years, is absolutely superb. The books it covers include Diane Abbott’s recent autobiography and a recent bio of Starmer, thereby neatly capturing the left and…not-so-left of the party, and delves into the internecine conflict that has characterised much of the past decade (and the past month or so) of the Labour story, and, in general, this is a superb ‘where we are and how we got here’ piece on the current party of Government.
- Trump and Male Insecurity: I’m keeping it relatively light on the US politics front this week because, well, we’re all fcuking sick of it, aren’t we? An election campaign that feels like it’s been happening since 2014, dominated by the same dreadful man (albeit with a revolving cast of dreadful cheerleaders)…please god let this be over soon (but not, to be clear, in The Bad Way). Anyway, I enjoyed this piece in the Ink about the weird, incredibly insecure masculinity that’s been at the heart of much of the past couple of years of Republican (Trumpian?) rhetoric – the fear that they will take the guns, the meat and the petrol away, thereby depriving red-blooded males across the 50 states of WHAT MAKES MEN MEN – neatly summed up in this paragraph: “Eruptions of hypermasculinity — which is to say, faux masculinity — are reactions against perceived threats to the vertical binary of male and female and produce a rise in the popularity of authoritarianism. As women—and other categories assigned to the female position in power relationships — have moved towards greater equality, those who have counted on an impenetrable floor beneath them (which is also the ceiling above women and others designated as inferior) have become hyper-anxious.“Build the Wall!” really means “Rebuild the Floor!””
- The Cult of the Founders: Henry Farrell writes about the monomaniacal founders of the Valley, and how we might usefully conceive of them as cult leaders (which, can I just point out, plays neatly into my overarching cultural theory about how the most important prism through which to attempt to understand the post-web era is cults in general – COME TO MY TED TALK, etc etc), and how problems arise when these cult leaders are forced by success or circumstance into instead acting like church leaders, and it’s the conflict between their vision of themselves as being worthy of adulation and ceaseless praise and the practical reality of ‘living in a world with other people that probably ought to be considered too’ that creates so many issues. This neatly encapsulates the core tenet: “Once, they believed that software would eat the world. They’d ride their sandworms from the desert through the shield to their own glory and the despair of their enemies, smash everything up, and create a galactic empire of inspiration and awesomeness. Instead, they found themselves managing self-ramifying and self-perpetuating empires of bureaucracy, submerged beneath memos and trivial decisions, and worst of all, dealing with fcuking HR and surly and subordinate employees who didn’t share their values, nor behave as worshipfully as they ought have done” – as someone who has occasionally had to deal with ‘brilliant’ entrepreneurial types I cannot stress enough how much this chimes with my personal experience.
- Carbon Inequality Kills: I did a quick search on this, and it was covered, as far as I can tell, in a grand total of three publications this week. Three. FFS HUMANITY!!! Anyway, in a week in which it once again became abundantly clear that we are in no way ready for what we are going to have to accept as ‘weather’ in the coming years, Oxfam published their latest piece of research into the actual climate impact of the super wealthy – and it may not surprise you to learn that you turning your thermostat down by 0.5 degrees this winter isn’t going to make an iota of difference to the climate crisis when you have the hardcore plutes spaffing emissions out left, right and centre. It really is worth reading this – it will make you FURIOUS, but it contains some truly jaw-dropping stats, including this pair which made me just sort of stop and stare, slack-jawed, at the screen for a second while attempting to process them: “If everyone began emitting as much carbon as those in the top 1%, the remaining carbon budget would be gone in fewer than five months; if everyone emitted carbon at the same rate as the luxury transport emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires, the remaining carbon budget would be gone in two days.” FCUKING HELL THOUGH.
- GPT Search: OpenAI yesterday announced that the long-awaited SearchGPT was here – now paying subscribers (it will be rolled out to everyone else ‘in the coming months’) get access to an LLM which can pull live info from the web when answering questions. I played around with this a bit yesterday, and on the one hand it’s pretty good and works as you might expect (it’s basically like Perplexity – I couldn’t tell you which is ‘better’ at present); on the other, though, WOW is this going to be…interesting in terms of truth and knowledge and stuff. Per all of these things, answers are delivered as summaries with linked ‘footnote’-style sources so you can see where The Machine’s pulling the info from; the thing is that there’s no guarantee that it’s going to go to the best sources, and when it’s drawing from something that itself is already a synthesis of sources you can see that tracking back to the source of a ‘fact’ is going to get…tricky. Turns out, for example, that OpenAI’s model has ingested exactly the same incredibly-racist non-science as Perplexity and Copilot, because it gave me exactly the same answers as those highlighted in this piece when asking about IQ scores – this feels like something that is quite quickly going to become…problematic.
- Be Like Water: The second piece in a week from the smart agency people Nemesis, which I feel slightly bad about because, well, I don’t really care about marketing or brands any more (lol, I never cared, ever), but I appreciate that some of you sadly still do and as a result might find this piece, which is a really good, clear and simple primer on ‘how to think about selling stuff and how, specifically, the question of ‘brand’ works in the context of that selling’ – this might be the sort of thing that those of you who regularly mainline Binet and Field and Mcluhan might all scoff at as TODDLER STUFF, but I liked it because it’s very, very unpretentious and doesn’t try and dress this stuff up as more complicated than it actually is (BECAUSE IT’S NOT FCUKING COMPLICATED, WHATEVER YOU CNUTS ON LINKEDIN WHO SPEND YOUR ENTIRE FCUKING LIVES WRITING ESSAYS ABOUT ADS THAT YOU DIDN’T MAKE AND YET ON WHICH YOU HAVE SEEMINGLY INCREDIBLY-STRONG OPINIONS SEEM TO THINK SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS?).
- My Bad Bot: Katie Notopoulos writes for Business Insider about her odd experience of having a bot of her on Instagram – Meta’s new ‘make an AI of yourself!’ feature’s open to a limited set of users, and lets you effectively train an AI on your output to create a ‘digital you’ that can respond to DMs because, I don’t know, you want to maintain the illusion of approachability but at the same time don’t actually want to interact with your ‘fans’? No idea what the point of this is, basically – and neither does Notopoulos, who realises early on that the bot is incapable of speaking in anything other than horrifically-stilted millennial cringe. Still, it doesn’t matter that this stuff is sh1t, and pointless, and literally noone seems to want it – IT’S A-COMING!
- Who Owns The Culture Scans?: This is super-interesting, and raises a question which feels like it’s going to become more and more pertinent as so much of the physical gets digitised and, eventually, ingested – there’s an online community around a website called Sketchfab which lets users upload scans of physical objects and host them there for free, and it’s mainly comprised of people working in the cultural or institutional sector, making 3d scans of museum collections and keeping them on Sketchfab as a global resource for anyone who might want to access and use them. Except now Sketchfab has been bought by Epic Games, and there’s no guarantee that this freedom of use is going to continue – Epic being…pretty keen on monetisation, overall. In a nutshell, “Sketchfab is no longer accepting new seller applications, and has invited existing Sketchfab creators to migrate their models to Fab, which launched last week. Epic Games has also not made clear what the plan for free and open access 3D models on Sketchfab is after 2025, but it says that it will provide those users an alternative solution eventually and plenty of notice on how that transition will work. The Sketchfab users I talked to have a variety of specific concerns about this transition, but ultimately they are all worried that Fab is a marketplace designed for Epic Games to make a profit on sales, whereas Sketchfab prioritized open access and the ability to share 3D models for free.” This sort of thing might feel a bit niche, but I can’t stress enough how important these questions are going to become in the coming years, and how important the creation and maintenance of public, freely-accessible digital materials is (and, conversely, how bad it will be if we let private interests gate stuff like this).
- I Am My Own Legal Department: A post by Molly White – of ‘web3 is going great’ fame, amongst other things – about the oddity of being a solo media empire (my term, not hers), and all the different hats you need to be able to wear (legal! Marketing! HR! Sales!), and how tHe CrEaT0r eC0nOmY, at its heart, basically requires that said creators do all of this stuff, and how it’s…hard. I feel this will resonate for many of you out there attempting to Do Your Own Thing – in particular, I really like the acknowledgement that this sort of life/work really is not for everyone, and to assume that ‘oh, just go indie!’ is an option for everyone is, basically, dumb.
- Character Amnesia in China: Ooh, this is SO interesting and feels like an excellent basis for a bit of creepy speculative fiction – did you know that there’s a genuine phenomenon amongst speakers (or, more accurately, writers) of the Chinese language whereby people simply…forget how to write certain characters? I did not, and was fascinated by this article explaining the phenomenon – basically it’s partly a result of the complexity of the written language and the full characterset, and the largely non-phonetic nature of the relationship between spoken Chinese and the corresponding written characters. This is SO interesting, not least in terms of what it reveals about how the brain works and how we relate language and symbolic representation of said language.
- Who’s Afraid of GenAlpha?: On the YOUNG, and how they are TERRIFYING – specifically how there’s a generation of kids who are growing up with a degree of preternatural confidence as a result of being trained on TikTok and influencer content to be FABULOUS at all times and how that is playing out in the real world, specifically the classroom. To be clear, the author doesn’t wholly buy the ‘these kids are terrifying!’ thesis, but I do think there’s something in the idea that a generation raised on ‘like and subscribe!’-type personalities as opposed to, I don’t know, Ed The Duck might turn out a bit different. For what it’s worth, I sat in front of three 11 year old boys at a show last weekend and, apart from the fact they said ‘what the skibidi sigma?’ literally every 5 minutes, they were adorable (it was a screening of Ghostbusters, in case you’re interested, and their reaction to the bit where Sigourney Weaver gets all lusty at Bill Murry was literally to make concerned noises about ‘consent’ which was just TOO PERFECT).
- RIP Tiger Tiger: In memory of central London nightspot Tiger Tiger, a genuinely appalling ‘nightclub’ which basically acted as a byword for ‘a certain type of person on a certain type of night out’ for much of the 00s. I had honestly forgotten this place existed until I learned it had finally shut down this week, but this article rather wonderfully captures ‘the vibe’ and the era that birthed it in which the mainstream suddenly realised that there was a LOT of money to be made by selling the idea of ‘clubbing’ to people who didn’t really like dance music and who were a bit scared of drugs. “The Piccadilly original opened the year before Fabric, in 1998, and in its own way came from the same spirit. The mass market democratisation of clubbing, the peak of the superclub era. Tiger Tiger was a place for people who had no clue about A Guy Called Gerald and found the drugs stuff way too weird. It came from the same genus as the Australian-themed Walkabout bars, the great sheds of cheap booze and bad pop that once stood at Charing Cross, Embankment and Shepherd’s Bush. If you didn’t know the names of any real clubs, well, these were always open, and always reassuringly the same.” MEMORIES. SO MANY TERRIBLE MEMORIES.
- Translation: A beautiful essay by Emily Wilson, on translation and picking the right word or phrase or alighting on the exact sentence structure that reveals the meaning of the original text in its new language. Here she writes about attempting to perfect one specific line in the Odyssey – this is SO interesting, both on the act of translation itself and on the particular challenges of doing so from Ancient Greek, and will appeal to any of you who are either multilingual or just really, really like words and playing around with them.
- The Food of Amazon Marketplace: On the cooks in New York who are running small-scale food operations out of their houses and selling through Facebook Marketplace – I’ve featured this sort of operation before, but previously it’s been sales via Whatsapp groups rather than anything this public. Does this happen in the UK? It feels vaguely like it might – or that it will soon.
- Wonder Kitchen: This also feels like a taste of things to come (sorry for the unintentional, appalling wordplay there) – Wonder Kitchen is a new initiative in the US which basically takes the Dark Kitchen template and ramps it up a notch, with big name restaurants from all over the country having their recipes standardised, tweaked and made mass-market-viable, and then sold under a single umbrella retail brand within which customers can order a mix-and-match selection of dishes from a range of different restaurants. The difference between this and the dark kitchen model that came of age during Covid is that those were all made-up brands, invented to pop on an app; these, by contrast, are actual, bricks-and-mortar restaurants putting their name to the dishes, giving a degree of cachet to the offering but at the same time posing no small risk to the original venue should the quality of the deliverable versions drop off. Anyway, expect this to come to the UK before too long, allowing you to order a meal composed of, I don’t know, an American Hot, one of Max’s Sandwiches and an Almost Famous burger (all of which will arrive cold and oddly-rubbery, and which will cost you the fat end of £100) – God, I can’t WAIT.
- The New Primal Scream Album: I have never really understood Primal Scream as a band – never liked any of their records, and Gillespie always struck me as a massive tool (see also: Richard Ashcroft. I bet they’re both DEVASTATED about this) – which is why I very much enjoyed this absolute SHOEING given to their new album by JR Moores in The Quietus. Honestly, this really is a proper going over – enjoy this snippet and then get involved with the whole thing, it really is VERY cathartic: “The first voices to appear on the album are those of a gospel choir, which indicates they are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting on the choruses throughout the LP. That’s true of the next track, ‘Love Insurrection’, and the backing singers do try their best despite it having a vocal melody that barely exists. That applies to the next song, too. So it continues. Then there are the words, on which Gillespie worked so hard before whining them into the least fortunate microphone since that owned by Morrissey. To say this 63-year-old is still writing sixth-form poetry is an insult to the nuanced submissions of this year’s A-Level candidates.”
- What Actually Else Is There: Ok, this is VERY LONG (seriously, I read it over three evenings) and it is VERY HARD (hence the three evenings), but, honestly, I really do promise you it’s worth the time and the effort, because it is also BEAUTIFUL and fascinating and so so so smart, and you will, I promise, feel like a marginally more clever person when you finish reading it. It also made me cry twice, weirdly, despite not really being that sort of piece at all. This is Jenny Turner, writing about the life and work of Gillian Rose, a philosopher whose work I wasn’t previously familiar with who dealt in critical theory and Hegelian philosophy (hence in large part the ‘hard’ comment – I don’t know about you, but critical theory has always made my head hurt and this is no exception), and while there’s a lot of discussion of her work and thinking there’s also a lot about her life, and how Turner’s life intersected with hers as a student, and, basically, this is as much a love story as it is anything else; Turner’s love for Rose, Rose’s love for ideas and thinking…really, I promise you that this is gorgeous and worthwhile – and, even if you can’t face the whole thing, can I just ask that you click the link and ctrl+f for ‘barbarism’ and read the three or four paras there because it feels…very apt, frankly.
- Wine and the French: The last LRB link this week is this wonderful piece of writing by known francophile Julian Barnes about the historical relationship between the French and wine. There are some great anecdotes in this – not least the one which mentions the fact that ‘drinking in moderation’ in France c.1900 was classified as ‘no more than four litres of wine a day’, and which once again proves that if you go back far enough in history everyone was, basically, half-cut ALL THE TIME – and it then takes a…darker turn with the second half, which explains how the French army basically used booze as a means of control over soldiers when they were being asked to do frankly-suicidal things like ‘run at a machine gun nest’. Barnes, as ever, writes superbly, and this is just fascinating overall. FOUR LITRES THOUGH.
- Rubbish in the Maldives: A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the Maldives – I know, I know, but I had had a VERY BAD (couple of) year(s) – and one of the things that struck me (other than the very odd and not particularly pleasant realisation that the act of going to see a thing can in circumstances such as this one make it slightly more unlikely that future generations will be able to see it) was the fact that Male, the main island of the archipelago, is, in large part, an enormous rubbish dump. This piece by Lawrence Lenhart tells some of the stories of the people who try and manage the waste in the region, and I can’t pretend it’s not…a touch dispiriting, but it really is very well-written indeed.
- My Marriage Was A Scavenger Hunt: The story of a marriage, in retrospect. Addiction, depression, lies told to yourself and your partner – this is quietly devastating but very beautiful. Another one that made me weep like a baby, fwiw.
- Falling Through: Finally this week, an excellent little scifi story by Steen Comer, taking the ‘what if every now and again you woke up in a slightly-different but still-recognisable timeline, with no control over when?’ plot device and spinning gold out of it. Excellent from start to finish.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (WHICH WANTED TO INCLUDE THIS ONE TOO BUT COULDN’T WORK OUT A WAY TO EMBED IT, SO HAVE THIS EXCELLENT TRACK AND NSFW VID FROM AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS AS A BONUS)!: