HELLO EVERYONE! Are you enjoying the Olympics? Or are you instead choosing to use it as an opportunity to pursue your single-minded fixation on incredibly complex questions of human biology?
However you’ve chosen to spend your week, I hope you’ve had a fabulous time – unless, of course, you chose to spend any portion of it chanting ‘we want our country back’, in which case can I ask that you fcuk off? Thanks!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably want to click all the links this week, they really are ACE.
By Pale Flare (and via TIH)
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ALL THE BLOKES PICTURED LOBBING BRICKS AT MOSQUES THIS WEEK ALL LOOK LIKE TOTAL FCUKING SH1T, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT BEING A VIOLENT RACIST IS TERRIBLY AGEING AS WELL AS BEING STUPID, PT.1:
- Eyechat: Did you ever spend any time with Chatroulette? As it happens I just logged onto it now (704am UK time, fyi) and was thrilled to find that a) it still exists and is live and is, largely, unchanged in its interface; and b) that I was confronted by someone aggressively masturbating at me within three clicks (in the unlikely event that said masturbator ever happens to find this and feels bad about me noping out of their solo love show approximately 0.1s into it – I AM SORRY, MYSTERY MASTURBATOR, BUT IT IS TOO EARLY FOR THIS). Anyway, the indefatigable and seemingly-infinitely-creative Neal Agarwal (see multiple Curios passim) has created a new and, to my mind at least, infinitely better version of Chatroulette – Eyechat is, at least ostensibly, the same gimmick, whereby you access the site and are paired with a random stranger somewhere in the world, but whereas with Chatroulette the idea is that you have a full video view, with potential voicechat should you wish to communicate verbally with your new friend (if only to tell them to PUT IT AWAY), with this ALL YOU SEE IS THE EYES. I have no idea whether this is ACTUALLY realtime peer-to-peer connection or whether it’s being spoofed in some way, but I am going to hope that it’s doing what it seems to be doing – there’s something genuinely slightly wonderful (and intensely human) about seeing someone’s eyes react to your own, the inferred emotion you receive from the small muscle movements, and (and I say this as a pretty spectacular misanthrope) there is a genuine feeling of human connection when you see a strangers’ eyes creasing into (what you assume/hope is) a smile as they clock your presence. This is beautiful, honestly – there’s something about the reduced field of vision at play and the whole ‘windows to the soul’ cliche that makes this particularly wonderful, to my mind.
- Dump Site: The second site of 2024 to use the ‘recycle bin’ function of your desktop to interesting artistic effect (do you have any idea, by the way, of how humiliating it is to realise that your brain is so web-warped that you can literally look back over the past 7 months of your life and say with cast-iron certainty ‘oh, yes, this is the *second* project about digital ‘rubbish’ I’ve come across this year – a TREND, I tell you!’? Let me tell you – it is very humiliating), this is another riff on the basic premise that ‘rifling through other people’s bins is fundamentally fascinating, even though we don’t necessarily always want to admit the fact’. It’s not super-intuitive, but if you look at the page UI you can see there’s a set of controls in the top-right – press play, turn up the volume, and get a slowly-scrolling exhibit of the various bits of digital detritus that have been shared so far, accompanied by what I can only describe as a weird digital cacophony of soundfiles that have also been added to the project. You can click on the images as the scroll past to see the upload date and any associated metadata, but otherwise it’s just a slow-moving procession of images and clips and sound that have accreted from a selection of strangers’ lives, and I LOVE THIS SO MUCH SO MUCH, it is mad and cacophonous (visually and aurally) and messy and incomprehensible and dense and pointless and it’s one of the most succinctly-impressive ways of communicating THE MADNESS OF THE DIGITAL NOW that I’ve seen in years. Per their description, “By virtue of pulling files out of the trash folder and resignifying them as artifacts of history, we reinstate their thingness. Pooling our own digital trash together enables us to reminisce across desktops. Dump Site transforms deleted files into tangible substrate for cultural memory. When reconvening with trash files, we realize the materiality of deletion. Byte by byte, the ephemeral becomes tangible. This digital trash heap metabolizes deleted files into archaeological artifacts. Dump Site has three goals: make mess and sow fiction in archival practice, bridge dichotomies within materiality, privacy, usefulness, and time, and provide a field of cyber residues for gleaning cultural memory.” Well, quite.
- One Million Screenshots: There’s something slightly-dizzying, per the last link, about anything which gives you even the vaguest sense of the SCALE of the web and its contents, which is what makes this so interesting – One Million Screenshots is a promo project by a company called Urlbox, which, simply, collects screenshots of the million most popular websites in the world and presents them on a single page, arranged by dint of popularity, for anyone to scroll around and explore. SO MUCH WEB! Obviously this isn’t *quite* as simple as it sounds – there’s obviously some curation at play here given the conspicuous absence of anything even vaguely 18+ – but it’s quite a remarkable collection of information and images, and from a simple webdesign point of view there’s something really interesting about seeing homepage convention laid bare at such scale. A significant proportion of these websites are for INCREDIBLY BORING companies you have never, ever heard of, but think of this less as ‘a portal for discovering fun and interesting things’ (THAT’S WHAT CURIOS IS FOR HANDS OFF) and more of a high-level overview of design tropes.There’s a degree of AI at play here with a ‘similar sites’ functionality, letting you see homepages that have a similar palette or page design, meaning this is potentially also a superb tool for anyone wanting to pull together some design examples for ‘inspiration’ – if anything, though, what this proves is that the vast majority of websites a) look the same; and b) are incredibly boring, so perhaps use this as your clarion call to ensure that all your future digital builds are delivered in magenta using Wingdings.
- Deceptio: One of the nice things about the advent of the web has been the way it’s led to the debunking (amongst people with a base-level reading comprehension level, at least) of a bunch of myths and assumptions – for example, that polygraphs work, or that any sort of ‘physical tracking of mental or emotional states’ is reliable or meaningful. BUT HERE COMES THE AI VERSION! Annoyingly the website has been SIGNIFICANTLY locked down in the few days since I stumbled across it (and annoyingly they’ve excluded themselves from the Internet Archive, so you can’t Wayback it), but you can still get the vague gist from the few pages remaining – Deceptio (astonishing name by the way, lads, managing to combine the gravitas of a low-grade ‘mentalist’-type performer with frosted tips with that of Transformers, the 80s shapeshifting robot franchise) is a service that promises to allow anyone paying for the tech to determine whether someone is telling the truth or not…BY THE POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE! From what I remember of what USED to be on the homepage, the proposed gimmick is that the tech will analyse any video you feed it for SIGNS OF MENDACITY, presumably based on such famously-reliable indicators as ‘visible brow sweat’ or ‘pupil size’. Look, you don’t need me to tell you what a spectacularly-fcuking-bad idea this is – but, well, IT’S A SPECTACULARLY BAD IDEA BECAUSE THIS SORT OF STUFF IS AT BEST QUESTIONABLE SCIENCE AND AT WORST TOTAL BUNKUM, and machine vision simply can’t make these assessments with anything resembling accuracy at all! Except that doesn’t matter, because I am willing to bet actualcashmoney that, regardless, this is being looked at by questionable people in all sorts of iffy places (America, for example) as a neat, cheap and allows you to effortlessly hand over responsibility to The Machine (“No, sorry, the system says you’re not to be trusted – and who am I to argue??”) and thereby screw people over in a variety of exciting and technologically-advanced ways. GOOD TIMES! BONUS DYSTOPIAN AI BULLSH1T TECH! This system is designed to help employers detect when staff aren’t wholly sober by analysing their pupil size…with AI! Again, you don’t need me to tell you what a fcuking terrible idea this is – if you happen to be someone like me, someone whose pupils even when stone cold sober are basically massive black holes (to the extent to which I have genuinely been asked if I’m on pills at work, which admittedly says as much about my personal/professional demeanour as it does my eyes), you can imagine how this sort of thing might lead to the odd false positive here and there.
- The Maison of All Victories: Preposterous luxe brand website corner! This is LVMH’s turn, with the digital ‘activation’ of their Paris 2024 sponsorship, and WOW was this not worth the hassle! I’ve always been…curious about the actual value of brands spunking all the cash on Olympian association – once you get to the second or third tier of sponsor rights, beyond your headline brands like P&G or Adidas, you do sort of wonder whether it’s in any way worthwhile – how much did (admittedly not exactly cash-poor) the fashion house have to fork over for the right to use the five rings and the Paris logo? And why did they decide that one of the best uses of that sponsorship was to create this staggeringly-shiny but OH SO FCUKING DULL web experience in which you ‘explore’ (click around) a Parisian townhouse which has mysteriously been dubbed ‘the maison of all victories’ (WHY THE MIXED LANGUAGES IT IS DRIVING ME MAD) and in which you can find all sorts of thrilling information about, er, the ways in which LVMH has ‘engaged its staff in the spirit of the games’, and some bits where you can see some of the various athletes they sponsor in various bits of sponsored apparel, and you can, er, FIND MEDALS! Why can you find medals? What possible purpose could there be in spending 15 minutes of your life clicking around a promotional website for one of the world’s very richest companies, in the hope of perhaps, maybe, accruing some nonexistent metallic rewards? I have no fcuking idea, honestly. I would absolutely LOVE to know what the ‘cost per visitor’ of this web build ends up being at the end of the games – 100% it’s more than £10.
- Friend: This week’s big ‘O NOES DYSTOPIA!’ bit of AI tech comes in the form of Friend, a physical AI device whose launch this week caused something of a conniption on Twitter and beyond, but which you, dear reader, will obviously have greeted with a degree of tired ennui because you’ll have thought ‘hang on, didn’t Matt feature this in Curios on 3 May?’. WELL. There is a story here. But, to get back to the main product, Friend (set to ship in 2025, supposedly) is another AI pendant-type thing, whose gimmick is that it listens to everything that you say, and that others say to you, and which parses that information and which you can ‘talk’ to about your life, your day, etc etc etc (via messaging through an app rather than voice chat) – basically ‘a wearable companion’, or therapist, or whatever the fcuk you want it to be. The website and the promo stuff does, to its credit, lean hard into the FutureWeird nature of this, and part of the reason for Friend’s insane viral ubiquity this week has been the…slightly-unhinged tone of the promo video, which really is worth watching as an example of how to nail ‘unsettling, but weirdly-appealing’ as a vibe, but it’s hard not to immediately leap to conclusions about What This Might All Mean. Anyway, aside from the bare facts of the product – which, to be clear, is literally ‘a bluetooth mic which captures audio and sends it to an LLM’ – the most interesting thing about this is the beef between this product’s founder and the founder of a REMARKABLY SIMILAR project, launched on Kickstarter in May, and also called ‘Friend’, which was raising money to produce an open source version of the same product. You can read a bit of an overview of the two products and the increasingly-pathetic beef between the founders here – in general, though, my main takeaway is ‘neither of these things is going to do what they currently say they will do, and there are going to be a lot of very disappointed purchasers when this finally ships’.
- Aladdin Skylab: A TikTok account featuring videos of someone doing terrifying skydiving stunts – there are only nine videos on the page, and while the first couple are just static shots, and the next few are short clips of parachute jumps, there’s a proper leap in ‘hang on, what the actual fcuk?’-ness about three videos back when Aladdin posts a video of what one assumes is them doing what looks awfully like a wingsuit drop EXCEPT INSTEAD OF A WINGSUIT THEY ARE USING A RATHER BEAUTIFUL AFGHAN-STYLE RUG. I…I don’t know what to think about this. On the one hand, I genuinely don’t think that this is possible from a physics point of view; on the other, perhaps I’m being very dumb but this doesn’t look like there’s any CG happening. Can someone who understands science, gravity, flight and all that sort of jazz maybe shed some light? Because otherwise I think this might be magic.
- Kamala Holding Vinyls: Yes, I know, the ability to create your very own image of Kamala Harris holding any album you choose is about a week beyond its memetic resonance highpoint, but, well, it’s not my fault Curios is on a weekly cadence (ok, it is totally my fault). Still, if you’ve ever wanted to make an HILARIOUS MEME featuring the (let’s hope) next US President holding an old LP from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop then MERRY CHRISTMAS!
- Anagrams: Type in any word you like and find ALL the anagrams possible for it – not just single word anagrams, but multiple-word combinations. This is obviously a huge boon for crossword fans (crossword fans who don’t mind CHEATING, at least), but even for people who don’t necessarily have a daily (or weekly, or frankly even monthly) need for an anagram solver this is worth a look, if only because the interface is really lovely and you’d be amazed how much mileage you can get from typing the full names of everyone you know into the interface to see which of them can be anagrammatised (no, I know, but it should be) into the rudest-sounding phrase (sadly ‘Matt Muir’ is anagrammatically barren, unless you find ‘trait mum’ to be amusing in any way).
- Druglarking: A beautiful project, this, and SO BRIGHTONIAN – Druglarking is a site, seemingly sadly on hiatus for a few years, which shares photos of discarded drug paraphernalia, specifically glassine baggies, from the wider Brighton area. Much in the same way that you can map certain eras of your life to the designs stamped on ecstasy, I imagine there’s a similar sort of dating process that can be undertaken with the designs stamped on the outside of your bag bag. An aside – does noone make wraps anymore? ANOTHER GREAT INDUSTRY SENT TO THE KNACKERS BY PROGRESS AND TECH.
- Double Horn Music: This is quite an ugly and unweildy website, but FCUK ME does it contain a genuinely insane quantity of music files – ok, fine, for these to be of interest or appeal you will probably have to be significantly more into ‘world music’ or the Armenian klezmer scene than I am, but if you’ve ever dreamed of uncovering a trove of MP3s of obscure Bulgarian pop-folk then OH MY DAYS is this going to be a treat. There’s stuff here from Serbia, Greece, Russia, Armenia and the aforementioned ‘world music’ category, and while it’s not exactly a ‘modern’ interface, it works well enough. None of this is streamable on the site – it’s literally just a series of downloads – but based on the jaunty slice of aforementioned Bulgarian folk-pop I’m currently enjoying in the background there’s a lot to enjoy here.
- What Font?: A Chrome extension which gives you information about any font on any webpage you visit. Simple, useful, helpful.
- Manga Apartment: I imagine that there are some people for whom this is THE DREAM – an apartment is being made available in Tokyo for artists to live and work in, for free, for periods of a year at a time, allowing them to spend that time focused exclusively on drawing manga. They’re taking applications at the moment – the only stipulations are that you can’t currently have any commercial projects in train, but otherwise applications are being invited from anywhere and everywhere. Places will be assigned based on…actually I have no idea, the website fcuks up quite hard when translated into English so the details are a bit hard to parse, but for a particular type of weeb this is basically ALL OF THE DREAMS COME TRUE. Interestingly, the FAQ gently explains that you’re not allowed to take any sort of part-time employment when living in the house – you are there to draw Manga and NOTHING ELSE, which sounds, frankly, like the sort of premise that would make for an interesting, slow-burn psychological horror film. But don’t let that put you off! Apply!
By Ollie Jones
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ALL THE BLOKES PICTURED LOBBING BRICKS AT MOSQUES THIS WEEK ALL LOOK LIKE TOTAL FCUKING SH1T, CONCLUSIVELY PROVING THAT BEING A VIOLENT RACIST IS TERRIBLY AGEING AS WELL AS BEING STUPID, PT.2:
- Twanalysis: Plug in your Twitter handle (don’t worry, it doesn’t do anything nefarious) and get an AI-generated summary of what The Machine thinks you’re like based on its analysis of your feed. I have to say I was impressed with its assessment of me, not least the age thing given that I don’t think I’ve really mentioned it on Twitter before – although on reflection all that means is that my prose is middle-aged-coded, which is admittedly *slightly* crushing. Anyway, you can plug in any username you like, so feel free to spend the next 10 minutes getting it to assess all your hatefollows after it’s done you.
- T Minus: Ooh, I quite like this – feels like this might be EMINENTLY THIEVABLE for a bit of easy brandwork (if nothing else it feels like you might be able to use this to game ‘website dwelltime’ stats, in the unlikely event any of should have that as a metric on your ‘do I get a payrise or bonus?’ bingo card). “T-minus is a collaborative online game, contributed to by hundreds of people from across the internet! The objective is to get the counter down to t-0! The player who makes the last click gets a special reward….” I can’t imagine that this will ever get to the end – but, equally, I can TOTALLY imagine this becoming a weird internet craze if, say, Nike were to do something similar with the promise of an EXCLUSIVE DROP for the final clicker. This is basically Peter Molyneux’s ‘Curiosity’ game stripped down to the very bare bones, but that doesn’t mean you can’t totally lift this for PR gain.
- Date Like Goblins: How long has everyone been writing the ‘hmm, online dating and the apps really suck, huh?’ thinkpieces? FCUKING YEARS, it feels like, and yet still the western world persists in tapping and swiping and ghosting and breadcrumbing and all of the other miserable neologisms that reflect the increasingly-miserable process of ‘trying to find someone to see out the apocalypse with’. Date Like Goblins is a new spin on the old horror, with the gimmick that it’s designed for people for whom even the prospect of ‘chatting to someone on a dating app’ is A BIT MUCH – instead, the service offers to match you with a potential date via the medium of games. This is a beta project seeking to raise funding – there’s a link to the Kickstarter on the homepage – but the gist, per their blurb, is: “We let singles meet and then seamlessly schedule dates in their favourite video games while voice chatting. We’re for the introverts, neurodivergent, and the perpetual third wheels who know their person is out there, they’re just having a hard time finding them.” Look, I can’t imagine for a second that this is the sort of thing that will a) get funding; or b) ever get beyond the basic problem that all the users will be desperately horny teenage boys, but part of me approves of the hopeful intent behind it.
- Traini: Do you have a dog? Do you want to train it to do EXCITING CANINE TRICKS? Would you like to do that THANKS TO THE MAGICAL POWER OF AI????? Oh good! Traini is an iOS app which purports to let you learn all sorts of exciting training commands to get your dog to, I don’t know, roll over, or play dead, or rip out the postman’s jugular (there’s a big splash at the top of the homepage which seems to suggest you should use it to teach your dog to skateboard, which, well, ok!) – I have a sneaking suspicion that this has existed for a while now and the whole ‘AI!’ thing has been added to the copy by a zeitgeist-chasing marketing drone, but there’s an alleged ‘video analysis of your dog’s posture and behaviour’ gimmick which is meant to give you detailed insight into ‘your pet’s bone structure’, which feels worryingly close to some sort of weird canine eugenics-type thinking, but I’m sure it’s all entirely benign. Terrifyingy, the homepage also promises to help you “make dogs into KOL” – presumably ‘key opinion leaders’? – which is both horrible and also utterly ridiculous, so well done whoever penned that line.
- On Track: No idea whether any of you are the sorts of people who would like the opportunity to download a ‘game’ which provides you with a procedurally-generated view out of a virtual railway carriage, with bucolic scenery sliding by, which is basically designed to give you a soothing vista to gaze at while you, I don’t know, get on with tedious, menial bits of digital administration from your small-windowed urban hovel, but, well, this is what this is! You’ll obviously need a second screen to play this on if you want to use it for its intended purposes as ‘productivity tool’, but should you be one of the fabled ‘two monitor’ tribe then this could be quite a nice, soothing addition to your screen setup.
- Look So Unique: Leaving aside the slight horror or ‘so unique’ as a phrase, this is a terrible ‘generate a tshirt design using AI and then get it printed and shipped’ service which has literally nothing to recommend it, other than the fact that you can opt to have your original prompt included in the eventual design, which lends the resulting creations a weird sort of poignancy – without the caption it’s just another sh1tty Stable Diffusion image of a kitten wearing a suit; with the caption it’s a strangely-poignant vision of a feline businessman, captioned “the most professional cat in the world gets ready for the most significant meeting of his life”, which I think we can all agree elevates the resulting creation to ART status.
- Gaping Maws: A website dedicated to photos of animals with VERY WIDE-OPEN MOUTHS. Literally just that – this hasn’t been updated since 2007, sadly, but I hope whoever’s responsible for its creation is happy to know that a whole 17 years later his collection of mouthy critter pics is still bringing joy to the world (or at the very least the three of you who click this link).
- The Best of The Far Side: Anyone old enough to remember the late-80s/early-90s will have a soft spot for The Far Side, Gary Larson’s single-panel comic strip which was for several years an IMMENSE cultural juggernaut, literally everywhere, and which then just sort of…stopped being everywhere, and which hasn’t, to my mind at least, really achieved the same sort of post-web fame and love that other strips like Calvin and Hobbes have. The link takes you to a selection of QTs of people sharing their favourite panels, and fcuk me you forget how GOOD so much of this is. Seriously, if you’re a YOUNG PERSON and you’re not au fait with the strip, this really is worth digging into – there’s an internal logic and coherent worldview across the strips which really makes them stand out, a sort of inherent ‘Larson-ness’ that permeates the canon, which imho is the hallmark of the very best comics work, in the same way that Calvin and Hobbes is clearly imbued with a significant amount of Bill Watterson’s personal philosophy. Pick your favourite – personally speaking, I think the ‘thagomizer’ cartoon might be mine.
- Italian Air Pollution: Via Giuseppe, this is a very simple but LOVELY bit of visualisation work, presenting shifting air quality in four Italian cities over a monthlong period in a genuinely-inventive, clear and effective way. Really, really smart – this feels like an approach that can be repurposed for other data, potentially.
- Off TikTok: I have a vague feeling that a few of you reading this are in India – if so, this is for YOU (and for Americans, should the TikTok ban actually go ahead, about which I continue to be…sceptical, frankly). This is a simple website that lets you watch TikTok’s off TikTok, meaning that it should let you view them even in countries in which the platform is technically banned.
- Zack D Films: Via Former Editor Paul, this is the Facebook page of Zack D Films, which seemingly pumps out two genuinely-batsh1t CG video ‘explainers’ per day, covering subjects as diverse as ‘getting struck by lightning’, and ‘the importance of not eating undercooked bear meat’. Do you remember about ten years ago there was a brief online craze for sharing the CG news summaries created by some South East Asian TV channel, in which big news events would be recreated in dreadful, clunky 3d models? Of course you do! Well this is pretty much in the same stylistic ballpark, and I can’t stress enough how marvellous it is to (for example) watch a computer-generated mountaineer curl out a perfectly-rendered CG brown as part of the clip for ‘why is Mount Everest covered in poo?’ video (you really do need to see that one).
- Public Work: SUCH a good resource, this one. “Public Work is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.” Not only can you keyword search for anything you fancy, but there’s a lovely bit of ‘similarity matching’-type code doing on which means that you can explore stuff that has the same visual energy too – this is just a really pleasing site to scroll around and explore, leaving aside its obviously utility in terms of finding images that are free to use.
- The LAAX Highline World Championships: Slacklining is one of those things that gets me properly sweaty-palmed when I watch people do it, but I’d totally forgotten about its existence as a sport until I stumbled across this site this week – JESUS GOD DOES THIS LOOK TERRIFYING. Last month, the 2024 highlighning (slacklining, but, well, VERY HIGH UP) world championships were held in Switzerland – this site features videos of them doing their thing. If you can watch these without your stomach doing strange cartwheels as you watch them bounce and caper and, on certain particularly-terrifying occasions, DO CARTWHEELS AND STUFF, on a loosely-tied rope hanging over a massive alpine ravine then you’re a braver person than I (lol, of course you are, I am a total physical coward).
- Corals:3d models of a whole bunch of different types of coral, collected by the Smithsonian museum. Why? I have no idea, but corals are cool. Actually I do sort-of know – the page features five separate guided education modules to help people learn about corals, what types there are, their shapes, etc, so you can either use this to learn about them or, if you’re perhaps less invested in IMPROVING YOUR MIND, just to look at some really impressive renderings of some cool undersea organisms.
- Tim Andraka: You might have seen these doing the rounds this week – Tim Andraka is an illustrator who creates wonderfully-inventive and surreal drawings of animals. I can’t really explain these beyond ‘no, I meant it when I said ‘surreal’, honestly’ – and yes, I know that I always say that, but click the link and then try and work out how YOU would explain these. See?
- Blue Screen of Death Maker: Working in an office with minimal IT support? Want to take the rest of the day off? Chuck this up on your screen, throw your hands in the air and head to the pub! NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any implications resulting from your paymasters seeing through this incredibly obvious ruse.
- Online Dice: Did you ever read the 70s classic ‘The Diceman’ and briefly think ‘hm, that does sound like quite an interesting way of approaching life and decisions, even if one which would eventually lead to some absolutely-fcuking-catastrophic places’? This site lets you roll any number of any-sided dice you choose at the push of a button – ostensibly I presume it’s designed for online tabletop/roleplaying games, but I prefer to think of it as your very own decisionmaking device. Why not spend the rest of the afternoon leaving all of your personal and professional decisions UP TO THE DICE? Go on, what’s the worst that can happen? NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for your life being entirely fcuked beyond all recognition as a result of you handing over its reins to the capricious whims of The Dice.
- Glitch Game: This is a really interesting riff on the nascent ‘text adventure game using LLMs to allow for natural language in game’ – in Glitch Game, your job is to exploit your knowledge of prompting to subvert the mechanic and escape the weird simulation. It doesn’t QUITE work, but I really liked the way it uses LLMs’ own inherent weaknesses to exploitation as part of the narrative/ludic hook. If you’re confused or struggling you can read the developer’s writeup here, but I’d advise you to have a play around blind first as it’s quite nice to discover the premise by yourself the first time round.
- Arsonate: Occupying the coveted ‘last slot in the miscellaneous links section’ position this week is this excellent little game – a demo for the forthcoming full release – in which you play a card game against a sinister, gas masked antagonist. There’s a fire coming – the way you play your cards determines which of you gets consumed in the flames. Really nicely done, this – pleasingly sinister, the game is simple but surprisingly chewy in terms of strategy when you get your head round it, and the PS1-era graphics make the whole thing feel grubbily retro in a vaguely-Manhunt-esque way. An excellent way to spend an hour or so trying to see all three endings.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- I Think I’m Judge Judy69: I have literally no idea what this is or what is happening here but I love the aesthetic SO MUCH.
- Fruits of the Web: I also love the aesthetic here, but the real draw is the large selection of genuinely mental gifs it hosts.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- OO KK AA: I *think* this is someone whose work I featured in a video a while back – stop-motion animation featuring matches, ring a bell? – but this is an Insta feed full of some of the most incredible, short pieces of stop-motion work I’ve ever seen, ever. Beautiful, precise, verging on the sublime (no, really, it is that good).
- Life Imitates AI Art: Ooh, a WHOLE NEW AESTHETIC! No, seriously, you may not even have thought that was possible here in the used-up, dried-out husk of the 21st Century, but this really is a properly novel thing – welcome to the brand-new category of ‘actual photographs which look like AI-generated images but are in fact actual images of the real world’! These really, really mess with my brain and I think this feels like a potentially-interesting visual direction for a very particular type of campaign, should you be in the market for such a thing. Even if not, there’s definitely a bunch of w4nky thinkpieces all you creative directors can get out of this for LinkedIn – you dreadful, soulless fcukers, you!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Southport: We kick off this week with a piece which should hopefully serve as a reminder of the importance and value of local journalism – Jack Walton of the Liverpool Post reports from Monday night’s riots in Southport, giving a flavour of the scenes on the ground and doing an exceptional job of giving a clear, cogent explanation of what happened and who was doing it. This is just good, responsible local journalism, done well – it’s worth reading in part to remind yourself of what this sort of thing looks like, and in part as a useful series of correctives to anyone attempting to pass this sort of thing off as ‘just working class people expressing some concerns’. If you can read this and come away with the impression that there was nothing massively racist and far right about how this all played out then, well, you’re a fcuking idiot, or alternatively you’re deliberately ignoring some pretty damning evidence – there’s a quote from one of the Telegram channels involved in organising the ‘protests’ that made me genuinely gasp at the language being used. Look, you don’t need to hear my opinion on this, God knows there’s been enough opining, but a brief point: while it’s obvious that a significant load of lies about the identity of the perpetrator of the attacks were started on social media and continued to spread there, the immediate knee-jerk reaction to blame the platforms does seem to me to rather ignore the potentially-outsize role of a media and political class that in large part has spent the past decade or more fearmongering against Muslims and immigrants. If you can’t draw a throughline between five years of right-wing (and, shamefully, not just right-wing) political comment along the lines of ‘stop the boats’ and ‘we want our country back’ and those same slogans being chanted by fat racists while they lob bricks at a mosque then, well, you’re a fcuking moron.
- The Seagulls Descend: This is particularly about the US elections – I know, sorry! – but also feels relevant and applicable to those that just finished here; specifically, the fact that the vast majority of people in any given country simply don’t pay attention to politics for 99% of the time, and that therefore the 1% of the time they do the way in which politics is packaged and presented to them is necessarily simplified and binarised, and how that tends to privilege the worst actors in any political theatre (specifically, the fash!). This is obviously about the way in which the US media has, until very recently at least, presented the contest between Democrat and Republican as one between basically-comparable actors as opposed to one between ‘a side still practising what might, if you squint, be termed ‘broadly-not-insane politics’’ and ‘a side that is full of actual fcuking lunatics’ – but you could also apply its thinking to the way in which Farage managed to get ‘both sides neutrality-ed’ to a position of borderline-respectability despite having repeatedly demonstrated himself to be a vile rabblerouser of the knuckledragging contingent.
- Hollow Point: Tom Stevenson writes The London Review of Books about the new UK Government’s approach to defence spending, arguing (to summarise) that, on balance, maybe the UK doesn’t actually need to spend all that money on incredibly-performative ordnance, and that in fact maybe we could do something else with it instead. I enjoyed this piece, largely because it provided me with a bunch of decent arguments for something I have felt very strongly for a long time – specifically, that the UK’s defence budget is fcuking insane.
- An AI Wall (and What Comes Next): Gary Marcus has long been one of the AI world’s leading sceptics when it comes to the potential of LLMs and their ability to ever surmount issues like consistency, hallucination and the like – whether or not you agree with him, this is an interesting essay which goes over his thinking on why they won’t, and some ideas about alternative approaches to AI tech which might be able to do rather better in the long-term. Technical, but a useful overview of some of the current thinking at the edges of ‘if not LLMs, then what?’.
- Speaking to AI: Ethan Mollick again, this time writing about his experiences with the early access version of the new version of OpenAI’s voice GPT – this is being rolled out to people VERY SLOWLY so it might be a while before you get to play with it, but it’s worth reading this to get an idea of how it works in practice, and to hear the clips of Mollick interacting with the LLM in realtime conversation. Honestly, I personally don’t ever have any interest in ‘talking to the machine’ whatsoever, but I was FLOORED by the clips in here. Honestly, this really is quite astonishing and one of those ‘fcuk, this is actually magic and might change the world’ moments – there’s a video of him getting it to read poetry in different styles which you can see here which is similarly ‘oh, fcuk’; I am…unsettled by the way the voice does nuance and feeling, and you will be too. I wonder whether this is the thing that’s going to see this stuff become normie-friendly; it’s certainly immediately obvious of the potential of ‘talk to the device’ for certain specific products.
- Using AI To Write A Pudding Story: This is excellent – the dataviz people at The Pudding decided to see how far they could get at writing a typical Pudding-type story using AI. No spoilers to say that the answer is obviously ‘only some of the way’ – what’s surprising is how far it got. The team here used Claude, and it would be interesting to see a model-by-model comparison of the same workflows – the article not only explains the steps they went through, but also shares full prompts and outputs so you can get a feel for the workflow, which is hugely useful should you wish to experiment with ‘using this stuff to do actual work’.
- Finding The Poetic Web: An interview with Kris, my Tiny Awards cofounder and author of the gorgeous Naive Weekly newsletter, all about his ongoing search for the small, poetic and playful web – Kris is an unusually thoughtful person when it comes to the ‘what’ of the web, and it’s always interesting to hear him expound on what he thinks it can be, and how we might preserve and promote the small, strange bits around the edges. It increasingly feels like the small web is a ‘thing’ – and if it is, that’s in no small part thanks to Kris and people like him who care about the internet and making things and who are less bothered about being famous or rich. BONUS RELATED CONTENT: Maya Man writes about ‘small scale worlding’, and “work that changed my world and claimed nothing more”, which, honestly, is such a beautiful turn of phrase and a lovely way of considering what we make and why.
- Going Nuclear: This is a TechCrunch article and so reasonably-horribly-written (sorry, but) – however, on the plus side it introduced me to the concept of ‘nuclear’ content – IT’S THE NEW VIRAL! This is basically a framework for thinking about how information spreads (mostly, but not only, online) which likens the process to the various stages of nuclear fission “Firstly, the initial online rumors are compared to neutrons, uranium nuclei are compared to individual rumor receivers, and fission barriers are compared to individual active propagation thresholds; Secondly, the process of nuclear fission is analyzed, and the degree of energy accumulation is used to compare the social impact of online rumors…The rumors are neutrons, shooting off of people (atoms), which like different states of uranium have varying thresholds for activation, but upon reaching a sufficiently excited state, also become active propagators.” Basically if you work in a particular type of place, with particular types of people, I reckon you can turn this into a NEW MODEL and get about six months of professional credit in the bank for it before everyone realises that it doesn’t actually help you achieve anything at all.
- Looking Back to 2012: One of two Clive Martin pieces this week – here, he looks back at the London 2012 Olympics, a genuinely weird moment which for a certain type of person (one who, if you’ll excuse the slightly-lazy stereotyping, almost certainly had #FBPE in their Twitter bio and who has bought at least one copy of The New European, and probably loves Jolyon Maugham) has become THE HIGH WATERMARK OF MODERN BRITISH CULTURE AND SOCIETY. Martin rightly reminds the reader that this is, frankly, insane revisionism which totally fails to take into account the fractured and fcuked state of the UK after the first four years of brutal austerity, the mad military and surveillance operations, the turfing out of homeless people from Stratford as the area as sanitised for a global audience…”And I think, in some ways, this is the real Olympic legacy. It was the moment where even a place as rough-edged as Stratford became conquerable. Since the Olympic torch passed through those dark streets of old London, there have been skyscrapers hastily-erected in Acton, chain hotels in Canning Town, a “tech city” in Croydon. Almost as if the whole city was put on the market, or under the spotlight of globalisation.” Still, the opening ceremony WAS ace, wasn’t it?
- The Physical Embodiment of AI Slop: Specifically, the gorilla sofa-shaped physical embodiment of AI slop. Honestly, I LOVE this story – I mean, obviously there’s a certain angle from which it’s just another example of how our incessant desire to consume total fcuking tat like this is paving the way for a very fiery future, but, in general, the whole unexpected side effect of ‘AI image generation is leading to Chinese factories having to somehow now make physical representations of products imagined by The Machine’ pleases me no end. The opening para gives you the idea – “I keep seeing ads for gorilla sofas. It’s something you can order, but the pictures and videos in the ads are AI slop. Clicking on them brings you to more AI slop. If someone spends the $7,000+, what happens? Does the JPG get sent to the workers in the factory who must then do their best? That’s exactly what happens—just as when you buy AI-generated garments.” – but it really is worth clicking the link, if only to see the sad reality of what your ‘gorilla sofa’ will look like when it arrives on a container ship all the way from Shenzhen.
- Pop Lore: One of the benefits of being an avid reader of Web Curios, as you doubtless are, is that you will of course have been aware for over a year now about how ‘lore’ was an increasingly important part of brand-building, and how a generation raised online is eager for backstory and mythology and NARRATIVE around everything – this, in The Face, applies that argument to the CharliXCX thing, and contrasts that with the relatively-minimal cultural imprint left by, say, Dua Lipa, who, contrary to the brat marketing machine, didn’t do anything to create a mythos around the music. This feels like the sort of thing that, if you’re in the invidious position of having to use words like ‘brand marketing’ in cold blood, might be a useful source.
- PowerPoint Is Cool (Again): I’ve definitely said this before in here – STOP FCUKING REPEATING YOURSELF YOU SENILE OLD FCUK – but one of the great joys of ageing is the realisation that nothing is really new, ever, and you’re inevitably condemned to seeing the same trends and ideas and themes coming round again and again and again as the carousel of culture does its nauseating circular thing. So it is with this piece, which gave me some whiplash-inducing flashbacks to about 12-15 years ago when I CLEARLY remember ‘PPT as a sort of ironic party game’ cropping up at all sorts of startup-y events. Anyway, this is apparently a ‘thing’ again, so dust off that ‘PowerPoint Karaoke’ event template and prepare to coin it in!
- How To Generate Sudokus: Ok, this is…quite technical, and, honestly, I didn’t really understand all (oh, ok, any) of the maths, but somehow I still managed to find it interesting – this is all about how Tom Nick wrote some code to automatically generate Sudoku puzzles, which, ok, fine, I appreciate doesn’t SOUND thrilling, but there’s something genuinely fascinating about the way he works through the problem, and even as someone who basically needs to take their shoes and socks off to count to 20 (I am exaggerating, but only slightly) I was slightly captivated by the smarts here.
- How PEGI Ratings Work: I confess to having worked in videogames PR for about 5-6 years, and during that time having absolutely no fcuking clue how the whole PEGI age rating system worked – thanks to this article, now I know! Also, this contains a clip of the actor who’s responsible for voicing the ‘PEGI 18’ audio sting that autoplayed ahead of the titles of games of a certain era which, honestly, is so INCREDIBLY pleasing to hear.
- Sexy Saint Sebastians: Or, to give it its full title, “The Martyrdom Of Saint Sebastian, In Ascending Order Of Sexiness And Descending Order Of Actual Martyring”. This is obviously very silly, but equally it made me laugh a LOT. I had no idea that Saint Sebastian was a gay icon, but according to this piece he very much is. What becomes apparent over the course of the article is that, for a saint who famously met his end thanks to a significant quantity of arrows being discharged into his body, a significant proportion of the paintings are very light on ‘arrow-y death’ and instead choose to major on ‘look at this beautiful beefcake’, which perhaps rather explains the gay love for poor old Seb.
- This Likert Life: On the ubiquity of the Likert scale – the ratings system which asks you to categorise a product or experience along a five-point scale, from most x to least x – and the weird effect it has on one’s appreciation of existence. “If assessment numbers confer worth, lack of numbers implies worthlessness. So now that I’ve retired, and the numbers have stopped coming, I’m appalled to find myself missing them. How do I have value, and know it, without them? How does anything? How can you enjoy an apple without comparing it to other apples? How do you dare to eat a peach without logging your experience?”
- CryptoArt in Dover: Our second slice of Clive Martin now – here, Clive schleps to Dover to meet ‘tech impresario’ David De Min, who’s behind “TechFort, a project described on its website as “the most advanced technology hub in Europe,” and a “thriving innovation ecosystem””, and who’s also got a sideline in crypto art because WHY NOT? This is, as you might imagine, something of a skewering for Mr De Min, not that you imagine he will particularly care, and Martin’s on typically excellent form reporting on that weird part of British culture where large sums of potentially-imaginary money rub up hard against shabby, crumbling infrastructure and the general sense of hopeless poverty that pervades so many of the country’s seaside towns (and yes, that means Margate too). The artworks in particular are…astonishing and really do deserve a look.
- Clickolding: This is ostensibly a review of a videogame called ‘Clickolding’, but you don’t really need to be interested in either it or games in general to enjoy the writing – Taylor Hicklen writes about the game, its mechanics, and how it reminded him of moments in his own life and his own sexuality and power dynamics and and and…this really is very good, far better than a simple ‘review’ has any right to be. “I realized that my internal calculus was different at an early age, but that didn’t spare me the pain of mapping out my equation of desire. I struggled through it like an Algebra II worksheet, desperately trying to get the two sides to balance as “man and woman,” just how I was taught.”
- American Bimbo: A collection of essays – I’ve read three of them, so feel reasonably comfortable recommending the whole thing – all inspired by the (in)famous 00s tabloid pap shot of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears on a night out together, captioned in the New York Post as ‘BIMBO SUMMIT’. The pieces variously address feminine identity in the 00s, the concept of ‘the bimbo’ as means of feminine empowerment, artifice and identity and presentation, and all sorts of other stuff besides, and if you’re interested in gender studies or feminist theory or THE SEMIOTICS OF POP then you will lap this right up.
- The Day You Ate Our Deliveroo Delivery: I think this is superb. Farah Ahamed presents a series of vignettes, imagined reactions to customers waiting for their food order at home, only to find that when the driver finally shows up they have in fact eaten the meal in question. A brilliant stylistic exercise whose inherent formal repetition properly hammers the messages (he said, pretentiously – sorry about that) – really, really impressive.
- The CostCo Holiday: Given it rather feels as though the cruise ship essay has rather been done to death, perhaps we can anoint ‘the package holiday article’ as the next big breakout format? This is a very, very funny piece by Simon Wu, who takes his parents on a holiday provided by US bulk shopping chain CostCo – a company which majors on price, and very much focused on the value. “This is the Costco psychology: quality over brand; value over status. To be ripped off is to be taken for a sucker. It is to have your resources wasted, your hard-earned cash sucked into a delusion of taste, timeliness, or class. It is to be left with nothing; or worse, to be haunted by an alternate timeline in which you saved more money. Costco is a fortress against this loss, and the only vacation that my parents would allow is one that safeguarded against that mentality.”
- Trivial Pursuits: Finally this week, a republished piece from 2019 by Marlowe Granados – I missed it first time around, but this is so so so good. On the feminine pursuit of love, lust, experience,adventure, whatever, and the way in which the world responds to it. “The term “adventuress” fell out of vogue during the last half of the twentieth century. In its traditional definition, it is “a woman who seeks position or livelihood by questionable means.” I am not interested in what is questionable. Like I tell people in England, morals have never been in. I wish more women sought.”
By Martha Rich
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: