One of the side effects of writing Curios (other than a generally unhealthy posture and attitude towards my fellow man, RSI, chronically-stained teeth as a result of approximately seventeen daily litres of very strong tea and a complete inability to ever really ‘switch off’ to any meaningful degree) is that, despite having a media diet that might reasonably be described as ‘omnivorous’, there tend to be whole swathes of pop culture to which I am basically entirely blind.
Which means that occasionally there are weeks like this one in which multiple stories break which are totally mysterious to me and which leave me feeling like some sort of informational Helen Keller. Why are Holly and Phil fighting? Why is it bad that Taylor Swift is dating that man (and how is it possible that, much like the musical output of Rita Ora, I have never, ever knowingly heard a song by The 1975?) Why is it the law that every single newspaper article this week needed to make reference to Succession, and can it stop now? SO MANY QUESTIONS!
Do YOU have questions? If they are mainly around ‘what exciting links and treats has Matt prepared for us this week’ then, well, YOU ARE IN LUCK!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I personally don’t think that anyone who refers to themselves as ‘Matty’ should be trusted, ever.
THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE SCHOFIELD THING BUT WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR ANYONE USING THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY MAKE EQUIVALENCES BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALITY AND PAEDOPHILIA BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE ARE FCUKING CNUTS, PT.1:
- The Tiny Awards: You will, I hope, concede me a moment of self-indulgence here as I chuck something I am vaguely involved with in at the top. THE TINY AWARDS ARE HERE!!!!! “But Matt!”, I hear you all cry, “what the everliving fcuk ARE the Tiny Awards, and why should I care?” To which I can offer two answers: 1) The Tiny Awards is the brainchild of lovely Kristoffer at Naive,which a few people online are setting up of which I am one, which is designed to celebrate in some very small and not-really-significant way some of the cool, small things that people are making online for the love of it and which probably aren’t celebrated as much as they ought to be. There is a TINY CASH PRIZE and a TINY PHYSICAL TROPHY, and a selection panel made up of ACTUAL, TALENTED INTERNET PEOPLE, and there will be PUBLIC VOTING to determine the winner, and, basically, it just felt like a nice thing to do; and 2) there is no reason why you should care, to be honest, but it might be nice for you to share the link around and consider nominating any web projects you think might fit the bill and deserve a genuinely-microcosmic degree of recognition from the wider world for their existence. I don’t usually ask you to share stuff (or at least I don’t think I do), but I will make an exception for this: PLEASE TELL THE WORLD ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS! Or, at the very least, that weird person you know who makes that weird internet thing that noone understands and that even fewer people care about – that sounds PERFECT!
- I Spy With My AI: I’m trying to sprinkle the AI stuff throughout Curios at present rather than just piling it all up top like some sort of horrible, indigestible bolus of imminent future horror that you’re forced to gulp down before you’re allowed access to the sweet, sweet linky ephemera (joke! It’s ALL indigestible futurehorror round here, kids!), and this, at least, is a very silly bit of AI toymaking that will hopefully act to reassure you that the SENTIENT MACHINES aren’t going to take over the world and turn us into so much human mincemeat *just* yet (to paraphrase the old Peter Kay John Smith’s campaign, it’s not the future superintelligent AIs you have to worry about, Jonny, it’s the *current* ones that are going to be used by the people already fcuking your existence via the medium of exploited labour to fcuk you even harder with sharper tools!). Anyway (god, I can’t keep up this degree of logorrhoea, sorry), this is a cobbled-together bunch of AI toys which together let you play an incredibly-rudimentary game of “I Spy” with The Machine, all done over voice – you’re presented with a photo in which the software has identified and chosen an element for you to guess; then, once you’ve managed to outwit the dastardly superintelligence (it is…not challenging), you get to ask it to guess, while it flails around in stilted English and fails to get the answer right while you feel a bit smug about how superior your lovely, meaty brain is. This is fun-ish for about five minutes, but is more interesting to me as (another) example of how much interesting stuff you can gaffer tape together from existing AI/ML pipes for really not very much money – it feels like there ought to be dozens of these sorts of (relatively) lightweight-but-eyecatching sorts of toys that one might experiment with while the world’s still reacting to AI toys with ‘JESUS FCUKING CHRIST THIS STUFF IS MAGIC’.
- Kriller: OK, a couple of caveats to this; 1) it doesn’t properly launch til 3 June (so ‘tomorrow’ at the time of writing), and as such I’m not 100% certain what its final shape is; 2) it does contain the dreaded words ‘mint your NFT’. Still, though, the NFT thing doesn’t appear to be the entire point of the thing, and I quite like the idea and the aesthetic behind it – basically, from what I can tell at least, Kriller is a generative music/art project which involves a bunch of scanned illustrations and another bunch of man-made musical stems, all of which are going to be combined by code into 6300 individual art/music bundles (each of which will be available as an NFT…but look, as I said, it’s not, from what I can tell, the point), and which, when all 6300 have been compiled, will then be combined into a seven-day long seamless stream of thematically-connected ambient music. Which, I appreciate, is a bit hard to get your head round – the website offers a vastly-better explanation of what they are trying to do, and you can liste to the stems on which the collection is based and see some of the art that forms the basis for the aesthetic, and, look, I really rather like the sound and general, uh, ‘vibe’ (sorry) of this and am quite looking forward to coming back in a week or so’s time to fully immerse myself in an entire seven days’ worth of roboambientdrone.
- Web Roulette: This has been getting a reasonable degree of hype this week, and is sort-of interestingly emblematic (to my mind, at least) of why we’re doing the Tiny Awards thing, and why Curios (and an infinity of other, superior curatorially-driven newsletterblogtypethings) exists – IT IS TOO HARD TO FIND INTERESTING THINGS ONLINE IN AN ALGORITHMICALLY-MANDATED SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD! Which is the issue that new app WebRoulette is attempting to address – you give it a list of your favourite ‘interesting websites’ and the app (iOS-only, obvs, the Apple-fetishing fcuks) will let you swipe through randomly-selected pages drawn from your selections to apply a TikTok-style (sorry) selection process to let you swipe and select. There’s also a ‘shake your phone to get a totally random site!’ function which you can use per a certain number of swipes – which is cute, fine, but personally-speaking I don’t necessarily think that an app which simply automates the tedious business of clicking through your bookmarks list is the revelatory solution to curing yourself of online agoraphobia that they seem to think it is, not least because the initial step (to whit, ‘tell us the websites you find interesting so we can only send you to those websites!’ feels like the very opposite of any sort of meaningful ‘roulette’ experience). Someone build this but using the Web Curios database of webspaffs as your souce (that is, perhaps upsettingly, literally what the backend refers to them as) – DO THIS PROPERLY OR GO HOME FFS.
- Paragraphica: I am sure I’ve seen this floating around for a few months now, but it has been EVERYWHERE this week and rightly so; this is SUCH a nice idea, and very much orthogonal to the AI photo booth concept that I featured a few weeks back. Paragraphica is a project by Bjoern Karmann which is SO clever and such a lovely, smart use of the boom in natural language interfaces – he’s created a prototype device which works like a camera but, rather than taking a photo of whatever you point it at the machine instead generates a description based on what it ‘thinks’ it’s seeing; this description is then fed to a GAN to create a visual interpretation of what it ‘thinks’ the description should look like, creating a sort of Chinese Whispers creative pipeline between The Machines and a wonderful high concept to go with your stranely-convinving-but-equally-horribly-uncanny AI-generated image. The site even features a browser-based version of the camera that you can try out, but it’s been hugged to death by traffic this week and so your mileage may vary – regardless, this is SUCH a lovely, smart bit of thinking and making about the idea of The Machine having ‘vision’ and what it ‘sees’ and the act of photography itself, and, per the AI photo booth project, I want to see more of this stuff because this feels creatively interesting in a way that ‘make an AI imagine the rest of 4’33’ (h/t Guy Kelly for that excellent gag) simply isn’t.
- Illusion of the Year 2023: Insert your own Gob Bluth gag here! These are typically-excellent, with the added benefit that at least a couple of the tricks demonstrated here are actually pretty low-cost to replicate and therefore you can almost certainly harass whichever poor underpaid person currently does the social media for your horrible, pointless, consumer-facing client into attempting to replicate them for branded content lols. Also, you feel the ‘buddha’s earlobe’ thing is probably going to get a LOT of traction on TikTok.
- Does My Idea Exist?: A genuinely useful, possibly-AI-enabled, tool to help you determine whether or no the genius idea that you just had while showering is in fact going to be the thing that finally frees you from the yoke of toil forever (lol).
- Bumper Pedal: As I think I have mentioned on here before (lol, I have been writing ~10k a week for YEARS, there is nothing that passes through my tiny mind that I have not yet bored you with you poor, poor b4stards), one of the odd things about being a middle-aged man is that everyone you know gets into cycling (or, er, mental illness, depression and suicide) – as a result, I naturally assume that a number of YOU, dear readers, whoever the fcuk you may be, are also probably interested in cycling and, in particular, in minimising the amount of pain that your active, fat-burning hobby causes you. Hence the Bumped Pedal, which has already met its modest funding goal but which is continuing to accrue support for its REVOLUTIONARY new pedal design which, the makers promise, won’t do untold damage to your shins when you stop suddenly and the pedals clatter against your bony, twiglike legs (am I projecting again? I’m projecting). Look, whenever I get on a bike (rarely) I have an almost-unerring ability to drive into stationary objects and so I am very much not someone who can comment on the need or otherwise for this, but, who knows, this might be the thing you’ve been dreaming of (in which case, YOU’RE WELCOME).
- Wilding Radio: SO BEAUTIFUL SO SOOTHING! You only need the description, and to click and to listen and to be transported, briefly, to a bucolic riverside scene: “In Feb 2022, a pair of beavers were introduced to a small brook that runs south-north through the estate. Beavers are ecosystem engineers: they coppice shrubs and trees to build dams. Their dams are already altering the flow of water and turning the small seasonal lag into a complex wetland area. How will this changing landscape affect the local fauna? Can we hear these changes? Will the growing wetland create habitat for new species? Might we start to hear the tick of water beetles and the scrape of water boatmen? How might the changing wetland affect the behaviour of birds and mammals in the area? Might new invertebrates bring new birds? What ecological changes might new birds bring? To find out, we have installed a solar-powered, quadrophonic live audio feed just north of the dam: A pair of hydrophones brings us closer to the sounds of the water itself and reveals the tiny sounds of fresh-water organisms. A pair of microphones in a fallen willow tree let us get to know the birds and mammals that live near and visit the water, and hear the play of weather in the trees. In the springtime, listen out for blackbirds, song thrushes and woodpeckers during the day, and owls and nightingales during the night. Summer brings the turr-turring of turtle doves and the squeals of teenage piglets; the autumn, the guttural coughs and bellows of rutting deer. And, all the while, small anonymous invertebrates munch tirelessly in the stream. Who else can you hear?” SO LOVELY!
- Taper: I’ve featured a previous edition of ‘Taper’ in here before – it’s a small online…poetry journal, I suppose? Basically it features work that straddles the boundaries between poetry and digital art, work in which meaning is expressed via code, and which works at the intersection of form and function (wow, that was w4nky, well done me!) – not everything collected here works, to my mind, but each of the pieces is interesting to contemplate and think about in relation to the text, its presentation and the user interaction with it, and in some cases to try and work out what the everliving fcuk is meant to be going on (my personal favourite is the last work, ‘Writing Lines’ by Wenran Zhao, fwiw).
- Outreach Space: Remember 2017? Remember how MAD it all felt, with UK looking forward to the sunlit uplands that awaited us just as soon as we get all this pesky legislative paperwork sorted out (and didn’t that go well?!), the Trumpian presidency offering glimpses into what an increasingly-fascistic US might might look like (thank GOD that didn’t presage anything, eh?), and massive frozen space-turd Oumuamua confounding scientists as it whizzed through our solar system like the discarded relic of a Stansfeldian lovemaking session (there is a vanishingly small chance that any of you will get that reference, but I offer a genuine, actual, real-life prize to anyone who can email me telling me what I am referring to here). Only one of those three things is celebrated on this website – and thankfully it’s the space object rather than Brexit or the fash! This site is a nice bit of scrollywork which offers a few theories as to WHAT THE FCUK WAS THAT?, and a nice reminder via quotes from experts at the time of its sighting that it was PROPERLY BAFFLING (you wonder, had it appeared at a…less obviously febrile moment, whether it might have garnered a bit more attention), although it’s important to remember that NOONE KNOWS and, on balance, Occam’s Razor suggests that it probably wasn’t the space aliens.
- Darren Bader: Darren Bader is a New York-based artist who’s been making work for 20 years to what I imagine is middling-degree success; he’s not a Koons, fine, but he’s also known enough to have a profile about him in the NYT which is how I found out that, after two decades in the game, he is offering to sell his artistic identity. For a sum Bader estimates as being ‘in the low seven figures’ (there’s no fixed priced, this is a negotiation) he is willing to sell his identity as ‘Darren Bader, visual artist’ wholesale; whilst ownership of his back catalogue will, in the main, remain with him, a select few works, along with ownership of the right to continue to create under the Darren Bader name, will go to the person who offers a suitable bid. Click on the ‘About’ bit of the homepage to learn more (and, generally, click around the site as a whole – there’s a pleasing rabbithole of weird urls that you can get sucked into if you spelunk arond enough). This is obviously conceptional and w4nky as all hell, but, also, WHY NOT? Does anyone fancy clubbing together to become Darren Bader? Oh God, if this was 2021 this would totally being done under the moniker DAOrren Bader, wouldn’t it?
- Geneva: A NEW SOCIAL APP!!! This one, though, is all about REAL LIFE activities and meetings (heard it all before, so jaded, so tired)! Geneva is basically a system where anyone can create a ‘group’ (basically like a multimedia grouipchat with some bells and whistles on) which is geolinked to an area and which is invite-only; groups are discoverable by search, but there’s a load of options to keep them secure and to customise moderation rules, etc, per the organisers’ wishes…it feels (and I say this from the outside because, honestly, I am personally the literal opposite of the target audience for this sort of thing) like a vague cross between NextDoor and Reddit which, I appreciate, sounds like a lethal cocktail, but I can sort of see the appeal here from the point of view of local matchmaking and discovery.
- AI Girlfriend: Another week, another questionable use of the increasingly-open-source AI codebase in order to make manipulable digital girlpuppets! Actually, in fairness, this link is less awful than that – I mean, it’s still weird and creepy and doesn’t feel in any way ‘right’, but at least it’s seemingly a consensual thing made out of love. Ish. Romanian developer Enias Cailliau developed this code to create a chat interface based on his girlfriend (she is, apparently, fine with this), and, per this interview with him, “he first created a large language model framework that was customized to reflect his girlfriend, Sacha’s, personality. Cailliau said he used Google’s chatbot Bard to help him describe her personality. Then, he used ElevenLabs, an AI text-to-speech software, to mimic his girlfriend’s voice. He also added a selfie tool into the code that was connected to the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion that would generate images of her during the conversation. Finally, Cailliau connected it all to Telegram using an app called Steamship, which is also the company he works at.” Which, to repeat, is INSANE – this is all done with open source tech and it’s FREE – but, also quite weird, as is the fact that, because the code is open source, the homepage is now getting populated with versions of the code with other girlfriend archetypes to try…look, I link to this stuff not because I find it hugely compelling or personally-interesting, but more because I find the prospect of a world in which everyone carries their own, bespoke conversational agent in their pocket, in which socially-awkward teenagers learn social cues and mores not from each other but from digital agents trained to make them feel secure and comfortable, curious and unsettling in equal measure. Oh, and then there’s stuff like this, which I have obviously not tried out or even clicked on the app store link for, but whose existence upset me to the extent that I felt compelled to share it so that you could suffer too.
By Romina Bassu
THE SECTION WHICH HAS NO PARTICULAR INTEREST IN THE SCHOFIELD THING BUT WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR ANYONE USING THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY MAKE EQUIVALENCES BETWEEN HOMOSEXUALITY AND PAEDOPHILIA BECAUSE THOSE PEOPLE ARE FCUKING CNUTS, PT.2:
- Lost Books: This is presented more as a conceptual curiosity than as a recommendation – I am in the middle of a bunch of decent novels written by real people at the moment (general point – in the unlikely event anyone ever reads this sh1t and thinks “ooh, the person responsible for this SPARKLING and in-no-way overwrought prose is exactly the sort who I want recommending fiction to me!”, feel free to email me and ask for reccs as I will happily oblige) and so didn’t really have the appetite to fork out actual cashmoney for one of these. BUT! The idea is…interesting. I stumbled across the ‘Lost Books’ collection via this Newsweek piece which profiled the man behind them, one Tim Boucher, who over the past year or so has used a selection of AI tools to create over 100 ‘novels’, also AI illustrated, which are all available to purchase for around £3 a pop from this website. Boucher’s fairly sanguine about the limitations of his work – they are short (around 2-5k words, so ‘novel’ feels like a stretch) and rather than being recognisable formal exercises in story writing they tend to be interlinked fragments or vignettes from a broadly-imagined world (this to get around inherent limitations in the ‘memory’ of LLMs which prevent them from holding concepts such as ‘characters’ and ‘motivation’ over extended periods of creation), and Boucher says he’s earned $2k over the past year. Which, to be clear, is not a lot! And is definitely, on a pay-per-hour basis, not worth the amount of time it’s taken him to make all these! It is, though, really interesting that there *is* a market for this stuff, however, small, and his notes on the worldbuilding aspect of what he is doing here were interesting to me in terms of how these sorts of tools, whilst obviously a long way off being able to create anything that a discerning reader might actually want to consume, could actually be really rather helpful in doing some of the gruntwork of fleshing out the corners and edges of an imagined environment or scenario.
- Bottell: What are the sort of tasks and topic expertise you’d be willing to outsource to a faceless, anonymous machine’intelligence’? Diet? Exercise? Reading material? Training regime? How about ‘the care of your children’? ARE YOU FCUKING INSANE WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!? Nonetheless, that is EXACTLY what new business Bottell is offering – an offer which, I feel reasonably-confident predicting, will not end up with this business being a household name anytime soon (can you imagine the sort of insurance you would have to have for this sort of thing? Especially in the US? Er, guys, you do…you do *have* insurance, right? Created, allegedly, by two parents (I don’t know why, but I am…skeptical here) the blurb on the site literally says (I paraphrase): “we relied on Google search for parenting advice, but it was so unreliable and hard to know who to trust…thank God for ChatGPT!” I mean, yes, LOL at the idea that you believe the hallucinatory LLM to be *more* trustworthy than the search engine, but wevs. This is obviously a very silly, very bad, very doomed idea, but, also, it’s slightly depressing that someone somewhere thinks that there are enough stupid people out there who would pay $5 a month for what is literally a GPT3.5 API call with two lines of prompt baked in. That said, given the insane amount of parent-focused research and literature and video that, say, P&G has in its vaults, I would be amazed if one of the Proctoids (for example) is currently working on the Pampers equivalent of this.
- MagicFlow: Do you DO productivity? Are you the sort of person who has a Pomodoro clock on the go at all times, who chunks their day into 15m segments to better optimise the GOLDEN HOURS OF MENTAL FLOW? Do you optimise and track and WANT TO IMPROVE wherever possible? Wow. What’s that…what’s that like? I don’t think I’ve felt any real ambition for personal betterment since about age 13 when I briefly started doing situps in my room at home (it lasted a week after I saw no notable improvement and decided, honestly, that heroin chic was probably here to stay and I could forego the sixpack), but I appreciate that not everyone is so content to limp towards the grave as I am and that some of you might want to LIVE YOUR BEST WORKING LIVES. For you, then, comes MAGICFLOW (whose creator actually got in touch with me as part of their PR efforts and who I hope really doesn’t regret so doing as a result of this pseudo-writeup), an app designed (in the main at least) for the coders amongst you and which offers you the chance to analyse your productivity and output to work out what is distracting you and how you can best organise yourself to WORK BETTER WORK HARDER WORK STRONGER! This does, my slight reticence aside, look like it tracks an impressive amount of detail and might be helpful in determining when and how you work best. Equally, though, do you REALLY want to be able to crunch code more efficiently? Maybe, you know, just…be slow! Be inefficient! Because, honestly, it really doesn’t matter. Was…was this the writeup you were looking for?
- Metaphor: This is interesting if not-entirely-successful; Metaphor is a natural language search engine (no idea what it’s built on, maybe DDG or something?) which invites you to structure your queries differently to attempt to surface better results. This is VERY bare bones, and won’t in any way replace whatever your regular search solution is but it does, based on my cursory playing this week, offer some interesting results – I tried to get it to throw up a load of interesting linky sites and it gave me some genuinely good ones, including a few properly obsecure sources I never see cited anywhere; however, it didn’t surface Web Curios and as such I can’t in all conscience recommend it to you. Sorry.
- Anti-scraping SiteText: I don’t, if I’m honest, have a whole load of confidence in the fact that this will make a blind bit of difference, but I suppose it can’t hurt to try. This is the attempt to create a standard bit of code that webdevs can install on sites, much like the classic robots.txt that’s used to instruct crawlers for Google and the like not to scrape the site for info or whatever – this, the code’s creators hope, will become an accepted standard way of indicating to whatever the next iteration of the OpenAI feeder bots looks like that you don’t want them to ingest your work to feed The Machines. Except, well, the code’s creators also admit that there’s obviously no way to compel said scrapers to comply with the request, so it’s all basically at the mercies of the scrapercreators…but, well, we live in hope, eh? It seems fairly obvious that any and all sites with any serious desire not to be subsumed into the Great Content Blob of 2023 should probably implement this and cross their fingers.
- Free Weed Books: What do YOU do when you smoke weed? Me, mainly I offer overpriced strategic consultancy services (lol, jk!), but I know that others like to read or play videogames or engage in an increasingly-paranoid exploration of The Dark Cabal That Really Rules The World, or sometimes draw or write or doodle…Free Weed Books is an online resource that lets you download and print a bunch of what can charitably be described as ‘kids colouring books for very stoned adults’, which will give you things to colour in and prompts to write about and games to play and effectively bills itself as a JOURNAL FOR YOUR LIFE which, objectively, I find very, very funny – imagine that you die at some ripe old age, and you bequeath your secret collected diaries and journals to family and friends who solemnly open them, only to find…a bunch of sticky, jam-smeared colouring books full of gnomic utterances like “PR, The Musical – script idea!” and “shorts for ducks”. I am now slightly regretful that I will never breed and will therefore never be able to disappoint my progeny in this manner.
- The 8-Track Tape Store: This bills itself as the world’s largest collection of 8-track tapes for sale, and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc! The physical shop is based in California, but they ship internationally should you be in the unlikely position of having an 8-track tape player and nothing to listen on it.
- Sightful: We’re on the cusp of another big moment for AR, in which people once again try and persuade us that it’s a technology whose time has come – and, in fairness, Snap continue to produce some really cool stuff using the tech, and there’s no doubt that Appple’s new headset will raise the profile of mixed reality stuff to a huge degree and make it all feel ‘cool’ again in a way that it hasn’t for a few years, but…but, well, I still don’t REALLY see the point tbh. Which is a shame for this new laptop brand which looks both SUPER sci-fi and also HUGELY pointless – but, honestly, so scifi! Imagine, if you will, that your regular laptop has not just the one screen but an INFINITY of them, all hovering around the space in your field of vision, all arrangeable however you like and customisable and…doesn’t that sound horrid and overwhelming? Still, HERE IT IS! “A 100-inch Screen In Your Backpack!”, screams the blurb, not bothering to ask whether a 100-inch screen is TOO BIG (it is) – you also need to wear the accompanying AR glasses to see the aforementioned virtual AR screen, but that does have the benefit of privacy. I honestly can’t conceive of a situation in which this makes any practical sense – for a start I imagine the processing power required to keep this 100-inch virtual AR monitor going with multiple apps means performance is utterly banjaxed beyond a certain point – but for those of you who’ve always dreamed of being able to carry your Goon Cave with you wherever you go then this is probably some sort of sticky vision of paradise.
- Milky Way Photographer of the Year: On the one hand, these are astonishing images of the majesty and unknowable wonder of the infinite vastness of the cosmos; on the other, they are SO filtered and HDR’d and generally post-produced that, if I’m honest, they’ve started to take on the general aesthetic cast of AI-generated imagery to me. I wonder if that’s going to be a side-effect of the Midjourney boom – that a certain style of very-digitally-altered photography is going to become less appealing due to its ostensible similarity of machine-created images? Or maybe I’ve just been aesthetically poisoned, it’s possible.
- Supertape: Oooh, this looks like a great idea for musicians. Supertape is basically a new, simple, website tool for people who make music – the idea is that it functions a bit like a more flexible LinkTree or similar, with the aesthetics and personalisability of a website but the automation and centralisation of a linkcollector. You create the site using Supertape, plug in all the other bits of your MUSICAL EMPIRE (YouTube, Bandcamp, Spotify, merch platforms, socials, etc), and thanks to MAGICAL INTERNET PIPES, each time you update one of those your central Supertape will automatically pull said update into its CMS and neatly rework the frontpage to reflect it. This is currently free and in beta, and it looks like a really useful product imho.
- Terrible Terms: A superb collection of examples of the worst possible ways in which one might design a ‘Terms and Conditions’ consent page online. Some of these are genuinely evil, and I wonder whether there are circumstances in which you might be able to get away with actually using them on a real website – you know how certain videogames in the past used to have code that rendered them unplayable if users couldn’t pass copy protection? Something like that, but for online services. Like, I don’t know, as a means of guarding against bot activity, or as a more-annoying Captcha? Obviously this is a terrible idea, but I now really want to see one of these in the wild somewhere.
- Community ModerAItion: Obviously you probably wouldn’t trust this in real life, yet, but it’s another canary in the coalmine for What Is Coming Soon. This is called MadLad and is an AI-powered community management bot for Discord; you can train it on the specific rules and guidelines for your channel, set its conversational tone and various other guardrails per your wants, and then let it loose to answer user questions and filter content and, presumably, wield the banhammer when necessary…The pricing here looks punchy, frankly, for something which as per most of this stuff at the moment is just sellotaped together from API parts and has no moat whatsoever, but, equally, if you consider that for most games companies these days ‘Discord Moderator and Community Manager’ is a proper job with a proper salary you can see the commercial value in spending $30 a month rather than $3000 a month…AND THAT’S HOW THE JOBS APOCALYPSE HAPPENS, KIDS! THANKS, THE MARKET! THANKS, CAPITALISM! Sorry.
- Food Photos of the Year 2023: The annual Pink Lady-sponsored awards have rolled round again (I wouldn’t normally mention the sponsor, but in this case feel compelled to because of the slight ridiculousness of the idea that an apple can sponsor anything) and here collected are a dizzying number of photos of food and people enjoying food and the process of preparing food and, look, a lot of these are really really great but (again) an awful lot are also SO post-produced as to look like CG, and there are approximately 20% of these which, honestly, are in terms of lighting and composition and framing and subject literally EXACTLY the sort of stuff that I see dozens of times a day now made by machine and, seriously, if you can look at this and think ‘yes, the future of photography as a discipline is definitely rosy!’ then, well, you’re a more optimistic person than I am (which, I concede, is not that hard).
- Adel Faure’s ASCII Website: I don’t know who Adel Faure is, but I adore their website which is all in ASCII and contains ASCII art and pixel art and tools for making your own, and some ASCII games, and, honestly, is just lovely and generous and overall a pleasing place to spend 10 minutes clicking around.
- APPARLE: A truly horrible name (seriously, try saying that word out loud and then spend a few seconds spitting to get rid of the odd-but-inescapable feeling of having a mouth full of cotton wool) for a fun little game – guess the retail price of the pictured garment, in USD, in as few guesses as possible. Each guess gives you a new tidbit of information, and you’re told whether your last try was too high or two low…yes, ok, fine, this *is* technically a Wordle variant but let’s pretend I hadn’t promised to never include one ever again and just move on.
- Ice Cream Van Simulator: A very small, very simple game in which you have to sell ice cream to kids – kids who get VERY ANGRY and a bit murderous if you get their order wrong. This is about 5m worth of fun, max, but those five minutes are very much leavened by the fact you can run over the children; fine, it screws your high score, but GOD the satisfaction.
- Setris: This requires a download, fine, but it is VERY GOOD – after last week’s Tetris-y game from Matt Round comes this variant on the old classic, in which the bricks turn to sand as they land and you need to match colours rather than make straight lines…it takes a couple of minutes to get your head round the mechanic, but I promise you that it becomes second nature after a few goes and quickly becomes genuinely fun as you work out strategies.
- Slide To Unlock: Finally this week, if you are yet to try the most brilliantly-frustrating mobile UX game EVER devised then, well, TRY IT NOW. Mobile only, and you will HATE this (but also quietly love it and wish that you had thought if it; SO clever).
By Dani Orchard
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Horsegiirl420: I don’t personally find ‘person DJs whilst wearing a mask’ a particularly compelling proposition, but the success of Dangermouse, Marshmello and, now, Horsegiirl420, suggests that I am in a minority. There’s a backstory to this in which the person behind the mask is some sort of society ‘it’ girl, but, honestly, who cares? It’s someone DJing who is cosplaying as Paris Hilton cosplaying as a horse, what’s not to love?
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- Design Is Governance: Design isn’t really my ‘thing’, as a cursory glance at the aesthetics of the Curios site will conclusively prove, but I find it a really interesting discipline (that I have literally no talent in) and an increasingly-useful lens through which to look at certain aspects of the world. The heart of this long (and, occasionally, slightly-frustrating) piece by Amber Case is how design of an experience, space, app, etc, determines the locus of possible user activity within the space governed by said design and that as such design is a means of control, and should be thought of as such. The central experience her recounted is that of trying to work in a coffeeshop (hence, possibly, my slight annoyance at the piece), but it’s well-explained and applicable across all sorts of areas and disciplines and is, I think, a really helpful way of considering the impact of the shape and form of anything one creates. It does, fine, turn into a BIT of a plug for her own imminent ‘Calm Technology Standards Body’ (which is another possible source of my irritation), but I very much enjoyed the thinking articulated here overall.
- The AI Canon: Annoying as it is to link to Andreesen Horowitz, this is a really good and comprehensive list of articles and useful resources for any of you who might want to get a little more under the skin of all this AI stuff that everyone seems to think is so interesting. This gets very technical quite quickly, but also contains loads of more generalist stuff that does patient explaining around ‘what is an LLM and how do they work?’ and ‘what is a GAN?’, and ‘what do we mean when we talk about models and training data and weighting?’ and, basically, all the stuff you need to make sure that you don’t make the mistake of blanket-referring to all this stuff as ‘ChatGPT’ and therefore sounding like a moron (sorry, but).
- I Can’t Believe What The Morons Are Doing: Max Read gives good incredulous outrage here, looking at some of the recent ways in which stupid people have attempted to use an LLM as a search engine and cope a cropper as a result. This is a useful cautionary series of tales to share with people you work with – I recently ran a training session on this sort of thing (look, I have to earn a living and I am very ashamed of myself) alongside some other guy who literally spent the whole session telling the assembled junior staff all about how he used ChatGPT like Google; because he was part of the in-house team that was paying for my time, I couldn’t stop him and point out quite how stupid and wrong everything he was saying was – but, wow, was he saying some stupid and wrong things! The point here is STOP USING THESE MACHINES FOR THINGS THAT THEY ARE NOT CAPABLE! Use them to write your stupid boilerplate advermarketingpr copy instead! Literally noone can tell anymore!
- GPT Bargaining: This is a link to some code on Github, but there’s some explanatory writing and diagrams that are worth looking at – this is basically an experiment in trying to get two LLM-based agents to interact with each other, with one attempting to ‘bargain’ with the other. As with so much of this stuff, this is less ‘wow, this is amazing!’ than ‘wow, this demonstrates some really wild future applications of this stuff’ – I am really looking forward (not looking forward at all) to the point when all campaigns and consumer-facing comms are parsed through an AI ‘persuasiveness test’, for example.
- Machine Telepathy: With the news that That Fcuking Man’s AI monkey-killing business Neuralink is set to start testing on humans (several thousand dead apes can’t be wrong!), the ever-interesting Rene from Good Internet offers us a useful overview of the history of machine/brain interfaces as a concept – this is a really good history of the science and its evolution, with some reasonably-easy-to-understand explanations as to How This All Works In Theory (when I say ‘relatively easy to understand’, that’s obviously ‘for neuroscience’). Whilst I am very much not in the ‘AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL’ camp, I concede that it’s possibly a *bit* creepily coincidental that all this stuff is happening so fast and in parallel.
- Google Welcomes The Age of Pixel Fakery: The Verge writes about some of the new image AI tech that Google announced the other week, in a piece which is half PR puffery and half genuinely-concerned thoughts about whether, in fact, offering professional-quality image manipulation software to the world, for free, in an age of at-best-questionable media literacy, is in fact A Good Thing. The question is, of course, redundant – to once again abuse my favourite metaphor, the horse has already been captured and melted down for glue as we stand around wondering whether we did in fact leave the gate open – but it will be interesting to see how much the fact that there are literally zero barriers to usage for 90% of this stuff finally moves the needle into proper ‘you literally can’t believe anything you see anymore’ territory.
- Nick Cohen: An unpleasant story, this one, for multiple reasons – the millionth account of a man with power and privilege and influence using those qualities to sexually harass younger women with impunity over several decades; the inevitable failure of said man’s employers to do anything about it; the industry omerta’ around the story despite its having been public knowledge online for years; the lack of anything resembling accountability for any of this…what’s most depressing about it is the papers referenced are, you know, GOOD PAPERS, largely (unless of course you subscribe to the ‘all hacks are b4stards’ school of thinking, in which case, well, you’re wrong) and yet journalistic integrity and standards don’t seem to apply when it’s an old boy and one of their own…There’s an interesting side-note here about the extent to which Cohen is a friend and ally of a bunch of other UK media figures who have all taken a particular side in the current ‘debate’ over transgenderism, and the degree to which that might have motivated certain people around him to gloss the story and assist the cover-up, but, overall, this is just grubby and sad and does nothing to disabuse one of the notion that the UK media is an unpleasantly-clubby and inadequately-scrutinised beast (as an aside, there was a show on Radio4 this week asking whether the Westminster lobby journalists were ‘too cosy’ with politicians that didn’t make ONE MENTION of the fact that Harry Cole of the Sun is Carrie Johnson’s ex-boyfriend, or that Rishi Sunak was James Forsyth’s BEST FCUKING MAN, which rather reinforces the point).
- Korean Beauty: This is an excerpt from a forthcoming book on the rise of the Korean beauty standard and What It Tells Us about culture and society – per the best use of book extracts it leaves you wanting to know more about the author’s (Elise Hu) viewpoint rather than telling you everything, but it’s still an interesting look at the book’s central questions around how our new, post-internet, post-social media, pan-global, data-driven aesthetic sense works, and what influences it, and how those influences shape us. “Clinics are designing and constantly tweaking their computer algorithms for analyzing aesthetically appealing faces so they can recommend optimal procedures to their clients. These algorithms measure the proportions of pretty people of all different ethnicities and analyze the aggregate data to discover “global proportions … what the common beauty ideal is in all races.” This is part of the technological gaze at work, feeding and creating demand at the same time. Machines learn which faces and traits conform to science-glazed “magic” ratios and present us with the latest aesthetic standards to reach.” It will be genuinely fascinating to observe what the next few years of post-AI aesthetic shift do to the way we reflect the now in our faces.
- Evie Magazine: I am aware that the past few months of Curios, and in particular the longreads, might make it seem like I have some sort of troubling and all-consuming obsession with forever-living fash-lizard Peter Thiel and all his works – which might, fine, be true, but it’s also true that I keep mentioning him because the cnut is EVERYWHERE and his tentacles stretch long, and some of the levers they pull and also VERY LONG and as such the effect of his pulling them isn’t always immediately apparent…this piece ties into the broader point I have been making (boring you with, fine) for a few years now; to whit, that the rise (and rise, and rise) in ‘traditional’ values being used as a cloak for borderline-fashy concepts is not an accident and is in fact the result of a long-standing lobbying and influence campaign by a selection of prominent right-wing, often Christian billionaires of whom Thiel is probably the most well-known. This article, profiling young women’s mag Evie which looks a lot like, I don’t know, InStyle or something, but which features an awful lot of ‘kinder küche kirche’-type messaging when you scratch the surface, makes me want to point at it and wave it and shout “DO YOU SEE?!?!” but I shan’t because, well, it makes me look and sound mad. Seriously, though – Peter Thiel is the real-life version of what the right wing wants people to think George Soros is.
- Where Everybody Knows Your Theme Song: On the work that a theme song does in a sitcom – basically setting the parameters and guidelines for action, establishing a baseline tone and vibe that the audience can expect and which can offer a degree of creative guardrail for scriptwriters and actors alike. This is a really interesting piece, and made me think (only briefly, I’m not a total sociopath) at the extent to which brand audio work, audio stings and campaign theme songs and the like, do the same sort of job in a different field.
- On Latex: Note: this is about latex, yes, but it’s about the production of the product rather than any of the variously-sexy and wipe-clean uses that the eventual material might be put to; any of you hoping for some HOT FETISH ACTION will have to either go back to FetLife or wait a few links. Still, for the rest of you who doubtless come to Curios ONLY for the occasional link to writings about specific industrial manufacturing processes, MERRY FCUKING CHRISTMAS! This is, however hard I may try to convince you otherwise, a properly-interesting read about the history of latex, and rubber, and the mad economic boom that occurred around it after its discovery, and it is proof that there is NOTHING boring in the world if you look hard enough (apart from fishing and golf; I am sorry, but they are objectively tedious pursuits and I will brook no argument).
- Brand Names Are All Nonsense Now: This is SO TRUE, and also, you fear, only going to get worse as so much of the naming process for a new business will inevitably be outsourced to a Machine that has been trained on internet data and so therefore thinks that words like ‘Grunsh!’ and ‘Oblixy’ are perfectly acceptable suggestions.
- The Kinkiest Fetishes: As selected by a sex worker who, you’d presume, knows their stuff, this is a nice list because a) nothing here is THAT weird or gross tbh and you won’t feel skeezed out by it; and b) it’s still unusual enough that there will be at least one of these that makes you go ‘no, hang on, WHAT?’ and make you log onto a bongo site of your choosing to see what all the fuss is about, which is basically one of the sub-goals of the whole Web Curios project. Oh, and also c) there’s a small possibility that one of you will click this link and have a hitherto-unimagined erotic awakening around, I don’t know the idea of being inflated to three times your normal size and this will unlock a whole new world of sensual pleasure for you – in which case, please, do feel free to let me know (but, whatever you do, keep it vanilla and NO PICTURES).
- The Hardest Videogame Levels Ever: A list compiled by Vulture which is a great trip through gaming nostalgia which is leavened by the inclusion of some genuine cult classics (God Hand!) and which will trigger all sorts of happy / incredibly frustrated (delete per your childhood skill level and whether you ever caved and bought a Game Genie) memories in anyone Of A Certain Age.
- What Martin Amis Taught Me: Yes, sorry, one more Amis hagiography if you’ll let me (he really was such an astonishingly good writer) this is Edward Docx, with a genuinely beautiful (if a *touch* ‘me me me’-ish) bit of writing about Amis and his intelligence and generosity which, fine, if you’re not a fan then you can skip but which if you’re someone who is still sad that you will never again read another fresh Amis sentence is very much worth reading. Two asides: 1) the bit in this week’s Private Eye which parodies Dead Babies is uncannily good; 2) Edward Docx’s ‘The Calligrapher’ is by no stretch of the imagination a ‘good’ book, but it is one that I have inexplicably read about a dozen times and which I have genuinely enjoyed on each occasion, so if you’re on the lookout for something undemanding and ‘romantic’ and ‘summery’ then you could do worse (also, if you REALLY want to hate a male protagonist tbh).
- Hiring A Popstar For Your Party: Or, “What It’s Like When Flo Rida Gigs Your Son’s Bar Mtzvah” – this is a GREAT story, with loads of good colour about what it’s like going to these sorts of gigs, and performing at them (even if you’re not interested in the overall topic, please can I encourage you to click the link and enjoy the performer’s-eye-view of the Flo Rida gig – it is a whole story in itself, I promise you), and the sort of insane money that Beyonce gets for forgetting that she loves the gays for a few hours in the Middle East. Contains all sorts of wonderful lines, my favourite of which was “Snoop confirms that he has, indeed, smoked weed at a Bar Mizvah”, and in general this is just a lovely piece of fluffy feature writing.
- Caroline Calloway, Again: I am not so interested in storied scammer and Massively Online Personality Caroline Calloway, or her ‘work’, but I am intensely-interested in the media’s reaction to her, and the weird symbiosis that exists between the sort of lifestyle press that seeks to pin down and dissect online figures like Calloway, and Calloway herself, who you feel needs these occasional mainstream drivebys to refuel the parasocial grifter machine that seems to be her life these days. This is a really interesting piece – Calloway is obviously a monster of some sort, but like all the best monsters she’s knowing and compelling to read about and the journalistic self-loathing that runs as a consistent undercurrent through the piece feels real enough – but at the same time I wonder whether the Calloway ship has sailed and whether we like our mad internet muses to be more hysterical in 2023, less sociopathically-calculating…Caroline Calloway feels like Jeffree Starr for people who read the Paris Review, basically.
- Guinness World Records: A rare Guardian link now – this is a GREAT piece of writing about the history and present of the Guinnness World Records, now less a global record of insane human achievement and now more a large-scale marketing agency and moneyspinning scheme, but still full of fascinating stories and brilliantly written up by Imogen West-Knights: “Glenday, like many Guinness employees, from the CEO down to junior office workers, has undertaken the official adjudicator’s training. This takes about a week, and involves media training, public speaking guidance, codes of behaviour and a crash course in how to use various types of measuring equipment, such as a sound meter to record, say, the loudest burp by a male (112.4 db, roughly as loud as it is possible to blow a trombone). Adjudicators are often sent across the world on very little notice, and aren’t told what the record attempt is until they have accepted the mission. Every record has to be treated with the same gravity. “It sounds ridiculous, things like someone skipping in swim fins,” one longtime adjudicator, Alan Pixley, told me. “But they’re practising every day, they really believe in it. I have to treat every adjudication as if it’s Usain Bolt running the 100 metres.””
- Everybody Hates Normans: Tom Usher writes in Vittles (I think this is the free link, but if not then you really should subscribe as it is 100% worth £3 a month if you can afford it) about Normans, a reasonably-new cafe in North London which is basically doing ‘traditional’ cafe food (fry-ups, basically) but in a manner that a) photographs really well and has an obvious post-Insta aesthetic; b) costs significantly more than these establishments generally do for this sort of food; and c) attracts the sort of person who, as Usher witheringly points out, worry and get angry and concerned about the ETHICS of this sort of thing “people like me, people who are acutely aware of gentrification from an ethical standpoint, but love the fact that they can easily access pints of Beavertown. In fact, I probably hate these people more than anything else in the world.” This piece generated DISCOURSE over the weekend about class and food and whether someone like Tom Usher who has done the whole gonzo ‘man takes drugs and eats mad food and attempts to give himself blood poisoning and then writes about it MEANINGFULLY’ for VICE really ought to be doing these pieces anyway, but I think it’s validated entirely by the self-awareness and the fact that I 100% bet that the vast majority of English people reading this will look at the following sentence and scream internally with self-recognition: “Whenever I walk around Clapton, I’m thinking, ‘Fcuking hell, look at the state of all these pr1cks’, even though I look exactly like them.”
- O Lurida!: On the sea and Selkies and oysters and what it is like to shuck them and eat them, and about place and taste and nature…honestly, this isn’t usually my sort of thing but I was struck by the quality of the writing here which is honestly superb.
- Better Living Through Algorithms: Finally this week, an excellent scifi short story which touches upon some of our current concerns about AI and automation and control and who, in fact, is in charge, and which offers a more hopeful conclusion than perhaps you might expect – DON’T WORRY IT WILL ALL BE OK!
By Maud Madsen
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: