I know I always say this, but it really has been a long week. My grandmother died on Wednesday, and so I found myself organising a funeral in doublequicktime (36h from last-breath to oven! They don’t hang around in Italy when it comes to this sort of thing, turns out) – we’ve also had the slightly surreal post-mortem tradition of ‘keeping the body in the flat til it’s time for the funeral’, which leads to these occasionally-curious moments when you emerge from the bathroom without a care in the world and then suddenly catch sight of your dead relative lying there as though it was nothing. Odd.
Anyway, that’s by way of preamble to my saying that once again you’ll have to do without my PITHY OPINIONS on the state of the world as I have stuff I need to get on with. This edition of Web Curios is dedicated to my late grandmother Angela Clerici, who lived to 102 and taught me several things – not least that, on balance, you really don’t want to live to 102. Buon riposo, nonna, spero che ti sei sbagliata e sei finita in paradiso anziche’ il posto che temavi.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and rest assured that my grandmother would be as bemused by all this crap as you all probably are.
By Casey Weldon
THE SECTION WHICH WAS REMINDED THIS WEEK THAT CATHOLIC INCENSE IS LITERALLY THE BEST SMELL IN THE WORLD AND WOULD LIKE TO ASK WHETHER ANYONE KNOWS WHERE I CAN GET HOLD OF SOME PLEASE, PT.1:
- Dinner Party: Despite the seeming inevitability of The Robots and The AIs stealing all our jobs, there have to date been some professions that have seemed out of reach of their horrible, grasping, non-human…hands? Claws? Anyway, it’s generally been a point of consensus when talking about labour automation that whilst it might not be great long-term news for, say, long distance lorry drivers and people working in retail, if you’re a CREATIVE you will be fine. Dinner Party proves that this might not always be true of entertainment production – it’s a (sadly seeminglycurrently on-hiatus) Twitch stream which…oh, look, here: “dinnerparty is a multi-model narrative production platform that allows content creators to easily ‘seed’ dialogue, audio and visuals that generate the most strangely compelling content in real-time that can be used to showcase what’s it’s like to co-create with machines.” Basically what that means in normal language is a sort-of talkshow, scripted by AI and effectively involving machines talking nonsense to each other, with simple CG avatars acting out the dialogue (‘acting’ is a bit of a stretch, fine, but let’s be generous) – to be clear, the output is a baffling mess of nearly-but-not-quite coherent dialogue, which seems to run the gamut from Judge Judy-style courtroom scenes in which feuding lovers seek redress to a skit in which various characters from slasher films have arguments about travel arrangements. Is it…good? No, not in any accepted sense of the word that you’d usually use to describe an entertainment – but it is an interesting idea, and watching the last few videos back there’s something rather nice about the semi-improv-adjacent way in which the chat reacts with the ‘show’, and generally it feels like there’s the germ of an idea in this. All-AI stuff is just too abstract and nonsensical to work, but having an AI ‘character’ as a prompt-generator for talkshows, to add a bit of unpredictability to a conversation. How much better would, say, Graham Norton’s chatshow be if there was an additional guest on the sofa, an AI which occasionally injected a note of surreal surprise into otherwise-bland celebrity puff-interviews by asking things like “Have you ever rimmed a stoat, James Corden?”? INFINITELY BETTER.
- Narrative Device: More fun with AI, this time GPT-3 – this is a GREAT toy which neatly demonstrates how incredibly powerful (and at least superficially-impressive) the current best-in-class written AI can be. Built by Phd student Rodolfo Ocampo, this is super-simple – give the site a couple of elements you want it to include in a story fragment or writing prompt, press a button and BINGO! It spits out a short passage created entirely from scratch JUST FOR YOU, from the ‘mind’ (not a mind) of the machine. So, to give you a flavour for how it works, inputting ‘pigeons’ and ‘submarines’ spits out “Across the harbor, pigeons cooed and flapped their wings as they pecked at the ground. Beneath the harbor’s surface, submarines hummed as they cruised through the water.” By contrast, ‘urine’ and ‘yodelling’ (two things that I would imagine most people struggling to automatically link in a coherent sentence, though perhaps that’s just a crippling lack of imagination on my part) just gave me “Urine and yodelling are two things that seem to go hand in hand. Some people say that urine is the perfect medium for yodelling because it has a high concentration of salt and other minerals. Others say that yodelling is just a cheap way to get attention.” LOADS of fun, but also a reminder (just in case you needed one) that if your job involves churning out shovelware content copy then you might want to start getting used to the idea that you’ll be out of a job as soon as software like this hits its next iteration.
- United Microkingdoms: This site accompanies a forthcoming exhibition at London’s Design Museum, focusing on the idea of design fictions and presenting an imagined, parallel version of the UK arranged around four key sociopolitical groups: “The United Micro Kingdoms (UmK) is divided into four super-shires inhabited by Digitarians, Bioliberals, Anarcho-evolutionists and Communo-nuclearists. Each county is an experimental zone, free to develop its own form of governance, economy and lifestyle. These include neoliberalism and digital technology, social democracy and biotechnology, anarchy and self-experimentation and communism and nuclear energy. The UmK is a deregulated laboratory for competing social, ideological, technological and economic models.” This is GREAT – properly well-imagined world building, with artefacts and aesthetics for each, and I now quite want to pick a tribe and go and live in this adjacent UK and make fun of the anarcho-evolutionists. Seriously, this would make SUCH a cool film or inevitably-disappointing 12-part Netflix adaptation.
- Cyberspace and Time: I can’t wholly pretend that I understand what is going on here, but I think that’s ok and slightly by-design. This is by one Michael Leonard from California, and I can’t really do much more than encourage you to click the link and click once again on the ‘click here’ hyperlink and just sort of…click and wander and wonder. It’s basically a an operating system working within a browser, but with a lot of functionality and a seemingly-active chatroom, and, honestly, WHY, MICHAEL, WHY? I very much enjoy the intensely-cryptic answer to the ‘What Is This Website?’ section of the FAQ, which reads: “This by far is the most common question asked, and I have to say that the answer to that comes with a bit of a struggle for me. I find it a challenge even when I know my audience. I don’t know whom will be reading this, and it is impossible for me to know what they / you already know, but I will do my best to be clear and as precise as possible. In short, this website is an embed player to some, while it’s a nostalgic operating system themed site to others. This place plays and organizes Youtube embeds for a large number of guests that land here, while at the same time, there has been a growing number of people that do click on things to explore, and they do find more.” YES THAT’S RIGHT THEY DO FIND MORE. Honestly, this is for some reason giving me incredibly-sinister vibes, but I am sure it’s all perfectly innocent. Probably.
- Moonfall: The second piece of marketing I’ve featured for apparently-terrible disaster film Moonfall (the first, of course, having been this pleasing spoof site all about how we’re all going to die crushed by a falling lump of spacerock) – I don’t think they were aiming specifically for the ‘middle-aged webmong’ demographic, but on the offchance that that is exactly what they were doing then kudos to their marketing team. Anyway, this is a NEW PROMOTIONAL SITE for the movie which I am featuring because it’s literally the most joyless and miserable use of AR I have yet seen. What magical things can YOU think of building, if you were making an augmented-reality experience that let you place an interactive model of the moon in virtual space? Some sort of, I don’t know, STUFF HAPPENING? Given that the film is apparently all about what happens when the moon comes careening towards the Earth at speed, at the very least the ability to visualise what it would be like to have your field of vision filled by a terrifying, mind-flayingly large mass of space rock before it smashes into your face and obliterates not only you but all sentient life on the planet might have been nice (‘nice’ is, fine, perhaps not exactly the right word, but you get my drift). Instead, you get a CG moon floating in space and the ability to tap on it to, er, buy tickets for the film (or you could just BUY TICKETS NORMALLY), watch some trailers (or you could just USE YOUTUBE), and, most bafflingly of all, to cause the moon model to disappointingly ‘touch’ a CG earth and subsequently split open to reveal a…giant donut. This is, basically, an astonishing waste of the time of everyone involved, and made me want to grab everyone in advermarketingpr by the lapels and scream at them to stop ruining the magic of the potential MIXED REALITY DIGITAL FUTURE by producing such miserably underwhelming crap.
- Survive The Scream House: This, by contrast, is a lot of fun (particularly if you’ve an affection for the Scream franchise) – wander through the Scream house in an attempt to survive (SPOILER: there is, to the best of my knowledge, no actual danger of death here, so readers of a more nervous disposition should feel safe in the knowledge that they can click with impunity; although I confess to not having done multiple playthroughs and so accept no responsibility if I somehow missed an actually-murderous Easter Egg).
- Castellocoin: I had hoped to be able to eschew the horrible world of NFS entirely this week, but this is simply too wonderfully (awfully?) preposterous to ignore. Possibly the apogee of the grift to date – and I don’t say that lightly- this is an ART PROJECT (definitely art, definitely!) which is also an UNPARALLELED INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY, and which features, er, a golden cube! “It will be the first Coin in history to achieve its level of recognition through a unique, physical artwork, and thus will enjoy a unique position in the crypto world and the traditional world. The artwork as a symbol of the Castello Coin will position the crypto world in the traditional world and make it popular there. The Coin acts as a bridge between the traditional financial world of finance, the world of traditional forms of investment and traditional art, and the new world, the world of cryptocurrencies and the digital age. The resulting global recognition will ensure a high level of relevance and acceptance, and leads to strong trust. The Castello Coin also gets a strong emotional connection to the virtual market.” Got that? GOOD! This is so stupid, and so vulgar, and if you want to see exactly what is being ‘sold’ here then I encourage you to click this link and enjoy scrolling down to see the truly-underwhelming image showing the GOLDEN CUBE in situ at some awful, soulless dinner for plutocrats, like some sort of risible stupid person’s idea of what a billionaire’s art investment might look like. Well done everyone involved, this is awful.
- Super Fungible Token: Possibly the best practical explanation of why the NFT thing is at heart a bit broken, Super Fungible Token is a project by Ryan Broderick and others which basically exists as a show-and-tell about the technical side of Tokens and why they are not necessarily what their buyers think they are. The idea is simple – the project has minted a single NFT, which as is their wont will exist FOREVER ON THE BLOCKCHAIN, which points to a single URL. Anyone going to the website can alter the file which the NFT links to – neatly demonstrating the fact that the NFT is nothing more than a receipt, and the digital file which the receipt links to is not in fact the subject of the purchase (if you see what I mean). ART, basically, and significantly more conceptually interesting as a project than that fcuking Castellocoin.
- Color Museum: Own the spectrum, ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! Yes, in another spectacular instance of ‘people in the NFT space selling stuff to idiots who don’t understand the concept of rights and usage and ownership’, this is a project which is selling NFTs of every single colour imaginable (or at least every 10,000 colours – they’re only minting that many, because SCARCITY). “OWN THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE METAVERSE!”, chirps the sales pitch, neglecting of course to do much in the way of explaining how purchasing an NFT which currently points to an RGB hex can in any way be said to confer ownership rights over an actual colour and its eventual usage in hitherto-unimagined digital space. Still, if you want to shell out a few grand to grant yourself access to a future of potentially-endless and very expensive legal litigation as to why Mark Zuckerberg owes you billions for the right to continue to use ‘fuschia’ in the metaverse then, well, HERE YOU GO!
- Right Click Save: Potentially-interesting if you’re in the market for more reading around The State of NFTs, this is a new online journal which, it says here, “is a new online magazine that seeks to drive critical conversation about art on the blockchain.” Fine, it’s part of “ClubNFT, a company that seeks to make it easier to discover, protect, and share NFTs” which means I have one or two doubts about how, er, critical this is in fact likely to be, but if you’re curious about the space then this looks like it might be another interesting resource to add to your RSS feeds
- Thursday: You may have thought that there were no remaining dating gimmicks for the apps to explore, but you would be WRONG – here comes a new variant, Thursday, whose EXCITING NEW SPIN on finding love in the digital badlands is thus: it only works on Thursdays. Yes, that’s right, the solution to ghosting, breadcrumbing, unwanted cockpics and the general misery of selling an idealised version of yourself through other people’s phones is to only do it for 24h a week, thereby compressing all that self-doubt and anxiety into one high-octane stretch. There’s something broadly interesting about this from the point of view of ‘the third wave of digital experiences’ – apps which accept that we might not want to spend EVERY SINGLE WAKING SECOND stuck to them and which prioritise deeper engagement over longer engagement – and I think there’s something in the idea of creating very time-specific or limited services like this, but equally the comments on the Play Store suggest that not everyone’s enamoured of the idea. Special mention to the user complaining that the app is ‘not great for people who work late on Thursdays’ for seemingly spectacularly failing to read the smallprint on what it’s all about.
- Unicode Arrows: A website dedicated to celebrating the least-loved of all the emoji, the unicode arrows. Want some Unicode Arrow-themed jewellery? YES OF COURSE YOU FCUKING WELL DO! Not 100% certain there will be that many takers for the $1800 sculpture they’re peddling, but you might like the necklaces if you’re a particular flavour of codenerd.
- FilmSwears: One of the few pleasing things about my time in Italy has been the way that, as my Italian has become more fluent, my speech has changed to become morelike how I talk in English – to whit, absolutely littered with profanity. I do like swearing, which perhaps explains my affection for this bit of dataanalysis which looks at all the Oscar winning films since the 1930s and tracks how many of what sort of swears they contained. I was SHOCKED to discover that there were films in the 30s which had PROPER SWEARING in them (people in black and white didn’t say ‘fcuk’, surely?) – overall, this is a fascinating overview of changing social and linguistic mores, and a neat way of tracing attitudinal shifts to language; 1975 was a watershed year for the volume of swears, for example, and I would love to read something explaining why.
- Earth and the Moon: A library of pictures of the Earth and Moon, hosted by the Planetary Society. Every single one of these is incredible and will make you feel very small and insignificant – and, if you’re me, will give you a brief pang of sadness at the fact that, unless I make a frankly-improbably amount of cash in the increasingly-short time before I shuffle off this mortal coil or develop an even-more-unlikely friendship with Bezos, I am never going to space. MAKE SPACEFLIGHT FREE FOR ALL! Is my unlikely electoral platform for 2025.
- Namers: Launch a startup? In this economy? Still, if you’re the sort of thrusting, entrepreneurial individual whose BUSINESS ambitions simply cannot be contained, and if you have EVERYTHING you need to create the world-besting venture of the future but ALL you are missing is the name, then welcome to your salvation. Namers is a site offering a succession of names for as-yet-nonexistent businesses, with associated urls, for what they assure you are LOW, LOW PRICES. There’s not a lot of reassurance that I can find on the site that they’ve actually done the global research required to ensure that these names aren’t in fact already being used somewhere – who knows whether Skyk, say, is already a successful satellite dish fitting outfit in Uzbekistan, for example? – but if you’re willing to take a punt then such bounty as the brand and website for CanX.com can be yours for as little as, er, $2.9m (don’t worry, though, it’s actually worth over $4m, according to the site, so, y’know, bargain!). More than anything, though, this is a near-perfect source of made-up business names for your next fiction project – so many of these sound perfect for the role of ‘sinister megacorp in near-future dystopian parable’. Tell me ‘Crazox’ doesn’t sound like a terrible, exploitative nightlife megacorp from a Paul Verhoeven-imagined vision of 2077, for example.
- The Art of Luca: Another wonderful collection of concept art and sketches from a recent animated film, made freely available online, this time for Pixar’s (slightly-underwhelming but very cutely-Italianate) Luca – this is so, so lovely, and as per the Mitchells vs Machines one from the other week, is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in worldbuilding and character design and basically the whole process of creating and fleshing out a fictional environment.
- Your World of Text: The id of the world, in one url. This is one of those occasional projects that crop up which basically present an infinite blank canvas for anyone who fancies to scrawl on – except here you don’t draw, you type. Which means that scrolling in any direction will throw up messages and screeds and insults and massive chunks of copypasta and profanity and political debate and lots of poor-quality ascii art and, oh god, this is PERFECT INTERNET. Obviously given the nature of the project there’s a high probability you’ll stumble across something profane and offensive, so caveat emptor as ever applies, but in the main it’s been pleasingly hatespeech-free – I appreciate you might not all agree, but I find this endlessly-fascinating in a proper human zoo sort of way.
- Footy Scran: A Twitter account which shares images of food bought and consumed at the various football grounds across the length and breadth of England. Come for the terrible pints in plastic glasses, each sadder and flatter than the last; stay for the occasional crimes against sausage, and the occasional sighting of the wigan kebab (a pie in a buttered roll, for the ignorant).
By QuimmyShimmy
LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MIXES WITH THIS LOUNGE-Y, DISCO-Y SELECTION FROM THE BEAT BROKER!
THE SECTION WHICH WAS REMINDED THIS WEEK THAT CATHOLIC INCENSE IS LITERALLY THE BEST SMELL IN THE WORLD AND WOULD LIKE TO ASK WHETHER ANYONE KNOWS WHERE I CAN GET HOLD OF SOME PLEASE, PT.2:
- Chill Subs: If you write for a living – or alternatively if you’d like to write more, and would like to publish said writing, and would like a resource to help you find places who might do so – then this is a potentially super-useful site. “There are too many magazines out there, and that’s pretty damn overwhelming. You look at all those rules, response times, read thousands of issues to find the right fit for yourself, and you still have no idea how to choose which piece goes where (and when), so you end up not submitting anywhere at all. Which is stupid. You obviously want to be famous and accomplished and sexy, that’s why you have to submit at least something. chill subs is here to help with that. We’ll give you some very nice search tools and cool details about each magazine (basic stuff, strength/weaknesses, examples of what they publish, contributors info).” If you’re desperately searching for the perfect outlet to whom to pitch your seminal piece “No Chill, No Vibes, No Hope – Why NihilCore Is GenAlpha’s Siren Song” (NO I THOUGHT OF IT FIRST, HANDS OFF!) then this is probably a decent place to start.
- New Models: Someone said to me recently that we were probably due a new New Aesthetic, seeing as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Aesthetic is over a decade old now and stuff has moved on a bit. New Models is an interesting-looking online…magazine? Community? THERE’S A PATREON! – which explores the intersection of digital and physical culture and how the two interrelate, though essays and podcasts and little pieces of audio that are halfway between plays and documentaries, and whilst it’s all a bit fragmented and messy there’s a lot of interesting stuff here if you can be bothered to dig, touching on influencer culture and THE DIGITAL FUTURE and How Stuff Affects Us, and whilst it’s all very art school (sorry, but) it’s worth reading if digital culture and the reporting thereof is sort of your ‘thing’.
- TV Dictionary: An interesting collection of videos here, which take a single word as the defining characteristic of a film or TV series and take a minute or so to demonstrate exactly how said entertainment embodies said concept. So, for example, you get a 100s selection of clips explaining exactly why the word most emblematic of the TV series ‘Dexter’ is in fact ‘regular’, illustrated with clips from the programme overlaid with the various dictionary definitions of the term. Which, ok, fine, I realise isn’t the most compelling description in the world, but there’s something interesting in the way this series of short films tells a story and pushes an idea or theme through pointed use of clips with sparing text; basically if you’re interested in visual storytelling (and, in fact, storytelling in general) then I think there’s something useful in this.
- The Breuer Archive: “The Marcel Breuer Digital Archive represents a collaborative effort headed by Syracuse University Libraries to digitize over 70,000 drawings, photographs, letters and other materials related to the career of Marcel Breuer, one of the most influential architects and furniture designers of the twentieth century. The first phase of this NEH-funded project culminated in the UNESCO headquarters designed by Breuer in the mid-1950s. The second phase of the project was committed to the digitization of materials related to the second half of his career (1953-1981). The Marcel Breuer Digital Archive is now providing access to over 120,000 digital images covering the whole of the life’s work of Marcel Breuer.” Fine, you’re probably only going to get the most out of this if you’re an architect or a student of architecture, or if you’ve a particular affinity to any of the buildings Breuer worked on in his career, but Web Curios always likes to live in hope that one day such people will stumble across it, and as such links like these are basically a present for some imagined future readership that will almost certainly never arrive.
- These Birds Do Not Exist: I know that ‘this x does not exist’ websites are very 2021 (although weirdly I found this one for horses this week, which saw me clicking refresh repeatedly for a few minutes as I tried to find an AI-created equine with the correct complement of limbs), but this is a lovely Twitter thread in which Daniel Solis presents a bunch of illustrations of birds which he obtained by training an AI on a bunch of illustrations of birds from old ornithology textbooks. These, and the names he’s given to them (who wouldn’t fall immediately in love with a bird known as the Flagrant Scofflaw, for example?) are just perfect.
- Muted: “A magical collection of interactive music theory tools & visual reference pages for musicians and music producers”. Fine, the ‘magical’ bit is intensely-subjective but this is objectively a super-useful bunch of tools and toys to help you learn about musical theory, all created by one person called, apparently, ‘Seb’. THANKS SEB! This is great – there’s all sorts of bits and pieces in here, from tools to help you identify specific chords, to sequencer presets to help you make beautiful music, and basically if you’re interested in How Music Works and How To Make It Less Badly, Maybe, Than You Currently Do, this could be a fun way of learning.
- The Gallery of Physical Visualisations: “What are physical visualisations?” I hear you all cry as one – basically what this means is ‘ways of attempting to illustrate concepts using physical analogues of said concepts’, basically dataviz IN REAL LIFE! Which, on reflection, probably isn’t any clearer. Still, this is a really interesting collection of images of ways in which people have over the course of history sought to illustrate complex concepts via the medium of, say, sculpture, or, in the case of one particular visualisation from 1920 which seeks to represent time, via the medium of a ball of yarn (which, look, might be a brilliant and revelatory way of explaining the concept of ‘past’ and ‘future’, but which sounds to me like EXACTLY the sort of thing you think very deeply about after One Bong Hit Too Many).
- Skybot: If you’re unlucky enough to live under a flightpath, you have a number of coping strategies available to you – resignation, where you simply accept that your life is going to be marred by noise pollution and you just suck it up; retaliation, where you attempt to take revenge on the endless fcuking planes with one of those nifty shoulder-mounted rocketlaunchers you see in videogames (not recommended, and likely short-lived); or DIGITAL ART, where, like the person behind this website, you use your technical chops to create a setup which takes a photo of every single fcuking plane that pierces the otherwise-blissful calm of the skies above your home. No real purpose to this, just how we like it, but it’s fascinating to me that you can just automate the identification of planes at a distance of 30,000 feet using just an (admittedly fancy) camera, a raspberry pi and some publicly-available datasets.
- Make Front End Sh1t Again: An ethos we can all get behind, this site basically harks back to the days when websites all looked like Geocities and you could properly mess with stuff as a designer and it was, well, fun. The site itself is more a manifesto than anything, but it contains an EXCELLENT bank of links to a whole host of sites that embody the particular aesthetic that’s here being espoused. Stuff like THIS, which may well be the most perfect site I have seen all year (fine, it’s February, but still).
- TikTok Investors: The agency that inexplicably continues to pay me for some of my time (honestly, it’s astonishing – it’s getting to the stage now where I wonder whether people only employ me as some sort of masochistic or purgative exercise, or maybe as some sort of professional penance for previously-committed sins, as it’s unlikely to be because of my sunny disposition and Stakhanovite work ethic) has a couple of financial services clients, and I have gotten SO BORED of pointing out to various people adjacent to the accounts that maybe they might want to look at doing something around protecting young, nakedly-capitalistic morons desperate to MAKE BANK from the absolute AVALANCE of terrible, ill-conceived FIRE-adjacent FS advice which TikTok has been absolutely lousy for for about a year now. Seeing as none of them seem to want to listen to me (who knows why, given what an evidently wonderful person I am to work with!) I am telling you instead – there is a SUPER EASY WIN HERE, creating stuff that acts as a counter to the frankly mental ‘get rich quick’ rubbish being peddled left, right and centre. TikTok Investors is a Twitter account sharing some of the best (read: worst, most stupid) financial advice videos out there from children claiming to have found A GLITCH IN THE STOCK MARKET (no, really) which if exploited will DEFINITELY net you millions in minutes and other such plausible-sounding financial loopholes. Another observation about this – at some point in the past few years, dominant social media behaviour literally became ‘making stuff up for attention and clicks’, like we’ve all become that kid at school who DEFINITELY had a girlfriend but she’s in another school so that’s why they never see her, and whose brother got a PS6 in Japan but you can’t come round because he’s actually on tour right now with Yungblood.
- Divorcist: One of the main problems with The Way We Live now is that there simply aren’t enough occasions on which we’re encouraged to buy more tat we neither want nor need to keep the flywheel of capitalist endeavour whirring away at optimal speed. Thank God, then, for the NEW TREND coming at us fast from the US (where else?), which sees GIFT LISTS TO CELEBRATE DIVORCES becoming a ‘thing’. “Divorcist is the first gift registry that caters to people going through breakups, separation, divorce, and beyond. We help the newly-single build a circle of support so they can start over better than before. We’ve curated a list of products for the newly-single shopper. We work with brands based in the USA and Canada with a preference for independent and woman-owned businesses. We ship straight to our users with as little markup as possible. Our product list is always growing but if you can’t find what you’re looking for you can always create a cash fund. We got you!” I’m leaving this here for all of you who need things like this to put in your presentations about coming trends, so you can look all zeitgeisty, but know that I am judging you as you do so – please can you not make this a thing, please?
- Lyrikline: “Listen to the poets”, runs the strapline to this site, and frankly given The Way Things Are Right Now perhaps that’s not a terrible idea. Here, though, it’s ‘listen to the poets’ in the sense of ‘hear audio recordings of poets reading their work in a dizzying array of languages’ – “lyrikline is an international website for experiencing the diversity of contemporary poetry. Here you can listen to the melodies, sounds, and rhythms of international poetry, recited by the authors themselves, and read the poems both in their original languages and various translations. This project from the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin and its partners has established itself as an online cultural project, making poetry accessible and understandable for all, above and beyond national borders and language barriers.” This has apparently existed for over two decades, and I am very late to the party, but it is a wonderful resource and it briefly reminded me this week how lovely it is to hear poetry performed, and how it takes on a different life when spoken aloud.
- Intangible Cultural Heritage: This is wonderful – a list of things that UNESCO considers to be ‘important elements of cultural heritage worth safeguarding’. So things like ‘Sauna Culture in Finland’, ‘beekeeping practice in Tajikistan’ and the utterly-mysterious ‘Wine Horses’. Everything on the list is clickable so you can find out more information if you so desire, and, honestly, if you’re at that stage of the year when you start to think ‘no, that’s it, I simply cannot take another 11 months of pointless powerpoint and morons repeating the word ‘strategy’ over and over again despite being singularly incapable of defining what the fcuk they think that word might actually mean’ (this is how everyone feels about their working lives, right?) and you start instead to contemplate the glorious prospect of quitting and selling up and spending your dwindling pot of remaining cash exploring the vast majesty of human endeavour and creation, this isn’t bad place to start thinking of where you might want to go and what you might want to see. Honestly, ‘pick something that sounds interesting from this list and then go and check it out’ is a pretty decent travelplanning technique imho.
- 30 Dollar Website: Another browser-based synthtoy, but a very silly one which features a bunch of sounds and samples from various videogame properties which you can combine in a near-infinite variety of cacophonous soundscapes. It’s unlikely you’ll make anything particularly good with this, but I guarantee it will sound…different, and moderately-schizophrenic).
- AI Hexcrawl: A Twitter bot which spits out “Curated RPG hexcrawl locations and encounters generated by GPT transformer models which then serve as prompts for AI pixel art” – which is a technical way of saying that this showcases small, AI generated bits of pixelart which are themselves based on AI generated descriptions of the sorts of things that might happen in a roleplaying game. Basically, if you want a bunch of cute, pixellated illustrations of the sort of vignettes you might get in fantasy novels or games then MERRY CHRISTMAS.
- My Wordle: Obviously the word game is now OVER, what with its acquisition by The Man (also, WELL DONE the person who made it; genuinely happy that they have been able to make moderately-lifechanging bank out of something that literally millions of people have enjoyed, and here’s to the occasional glory of selling out – after all, the tragedy is never selling out, it’s trying to sell out and finding that noone, in fact, is buying), so here’s a version which lets you make your VERY OWN bespoke puzzles featuring whatever word you choose, which you can there share with anyone you like via a unique URL which will let them attempt to solve your fiendish wordconundrum. If you want a slightly-involved way of insulting your friends – or a slightly-twee but admittedly geekily-cute way of proposing to someone, this is it.
- Bloodborne PSX: PS4 classic Bloodborne, remade as though it was an original Playstation title with the blocky polygonal graphics and muddy palettes you half-remember from stoned afternoons in the mid-90s. You need to download this, fine, but if you have even a shred of affection for the original then this is a must-play; and even if you don’t, this is a very fun way of spending a few hours.
- Loderunner: Last up this week, this is a PROPER classic – a game from 1983, now playable in-browser so you can travel back in time and feel really glad that you weren’t born into an era in which this was the pinnacle of interactive electronic entertainment. Loderunner is a simple game – pick up the square things, avoid the humanoid things – but the digging mechanic (you’ll see what I mean) makes this a surprisingly-thinking little platform-puzzler, and, face it, it’s not like you’ve anything better to be doing whilst at ‘work’, so.
NEXT, HAVE A LISTEN TO THIS HOUR-LONG ELECTRONICA MIX BY RIVAL CONSOLES!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Sh1t and Old: Thanks Rina for this – an Insta feed, newish and only featuring a few images to date, sharing stylised graphics about OLD PEOPLE THINGS – fig rolls, and hating NFTs, and back pain. I really like this and hope it continues.
- Lord, Give Me A Sign: Street signs of New York. About as New York as it is possible to imagine, including such highlights as someone who has taken the trouble to plant tiny little flags in pavement dogturds which feature the legend ‘my owner is a selfish piece of sh1t’, and the stellar ‘how do mems work i need to get them on my personal computer’. Americans really do do urban street oddness better than the English.
- AC Disneyland: Recreating Disney scenes in Animal Crossing, just like it’s still 2020 and we’re really getting into banana bread. These are quietly amazing
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:
- Varoufakis vs Crypto: Sorry, sorry, sorry. Still, this is, I promise, another really interesting piece from Evgeny Morosov’s Crypto Syllabus project, seeing him in discussion with former Greek finance minister and professional Voldemort impersonator Yannis Varoufakis (who, I appreciate, is something of a divisive character, but I promise is relatively restrained in this piece) about the economics behind web3 and crypto. This gets quite technical in places, and I don’t pretend that my knowledge of economic theory is so comprehensive that parts of this didn’t have me reaching for the explanatory textbooks, but this is a really interesting (and, overall, surprisingly-readable discussion about what sort of economic models crypto can enable, and the extent to which it may or may not be something genuinely revolutionary or whether it is in fact Just Another Flavour of Capitalism (I’ll leave you to guess where lovable Yannis ends up on that score). Lest we forget, Varoufakis was Valve’s economist before attaining celebrity superstar economicsgod status and so is one of the few people currently around who it feels has a legitimate right to comment on the likely macro- and microeconomic implications of digital economies.
- The NFT Ecosystem Is A Complete Disaster: But you know that, right? This is a very good overview in VICE about all the reasons why the current NFT world is such a total fcuking mess – the piece is particularly good at making clear that it’s not a question of having a problem with the concept of NFTs per se, and more about the fact that, even if you think that they are The Future, or even A future, it’s impossible to look at how they are currently being packaged and peddled without thinking ‘this is just fcuking crooked all the way down, isn’t it?’. Or at least it’s impossible if you’re a) not a moron; or b) not one of the people with a vested interest in persuading as many people as possible that it is not in fact crooked at all and is instead an EXCELLENT investment opportunity.
- Content Provenance and Authority: Ok, this is VERY dry and VERY technical and I don’t for a second imagine that anyone will actually go through this and read it all (I sure as fcuk didn’t, to be clear) – that said, it is a super-interesting project. “The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content.” – basically this webpage sets out the principles and design elements behind a nascent system which is designed to enable content to have a permanent record of its creation and edits made to it, thereby in theory allowing for factchecking and provenance determination to be baked into images and video, for example, which would allow reporters to assess exactly when content was made and how it has subsequently been altered.
- Vibe, Mood, Energy: This is a really interesting article about VIBES and MOODS – not the first such thing I’ve read about the concept of ‘vibes’ as a sort of ur-signifier Of Our Times, but one of the better-written and more interesting. There’s loads in here to unpack, and if you’re a cultural semiotician (aren’t we all darling?) then you will find this rich with stuff to refer to in endless beautiful-yet-oddly-flat-and-empty presentations – my personal favourite takeaway from this, though, is the idea of all this talk of ‘vibes’ and ‘energies’ as a human attempt to make sense of and come to terms with a society increasingly mediated by algorithms which we don’t understand and which move us and structure society in ways which are familiar-but-eerily-uncanny (which, now I write it down, does actually strike me as A Genuine Thing).
- Artificial Animals: Or ‘how we might want to consider thinking about non-human intelligences’, with particular reference to how we define ‘sentience’ – it looks at the ‘Sentientism’ movement which seeks to define ‘sentience’ as being a quality applicable to any entity that could be said to ‘experience’ things, a definition which would extend the concept of sentience not only to animals but also, potentially, to the sorts of machine intelligences we can already halfway-imagine. This is great, properly-chewy moral philosophical stuff: “Perhaps moral status shouldn’t be dependent on properties like consciousness, the capacity for reason, or the capacity for suffering—since sentient machines, like animals, are likely to experience the world differently than us, possibly in ways we won’t understand. While traditional moral philosophy tends to be written from the point of view of privileged insiders choosing, benevolently, to extend rights to others, in this social-relational approach, as the scholar David J. Gunkel writes, “what the entity is does not determine the degree of moral value it enjoys.” Instead, the very existence of the other—be it meat or machine—interrupts our own sense of moral superiority. How we choose to behave in relation to this other is a test of us, not them. The question is not only Can they suffer? It’s also: Do we want to cause suffering?”
- On ‘Plant Based’: Or, alternatively, ‘how marketers and advertisers basically ruin language and make everything meaningless’. This essay examines the use of the term ‘plant based’ in terms of the marketing and sale of vegan food, and how it’s basically now become utterly meaningless as a designator for anything at all due to its flagrant over/misuse by tens of thousands of bullsh1t products chasing the clean eating pound.
- The Internet Dealers of Rural Mexico: I love stuff like this, lifting the lid on How Life Works in parts of the world I know nothing about. In Mexico, turns out, in parts of the country where the big telecoms companies and internet providers don’t extend, or where many residents are too poor to buy access from the big providers, there’s a cottage industry of people selling access to the web for 40p an hour. We’re in a weird hinterland period at present – in…some years (I was about to try and make a prediction but realised I have literally no idea whatsoever about the sort of timescales that might be involved here) there will be a baseline level of free (or close to free) web access in most parts of the world, but until that point comes there will be all sorts of weird little edge-cases like this, not-so-tiny economies operating on the fringes of the modern world, grubbily Gibsonian (tell me that the image of a slightly-dusty concrete house in blazing sun, with a small taqueria nextdoor, from which access to the web is peddled for $0.50 an hour to anyone who wants it, no questions asked, isn’t pure ‘the future isn’t quite as evenly distributed as we’d like it to be’ vibes).
- Soundcloud Microgenres: I am including this mainly as a) I found some of the music linked to in here to be quite interesting; b) it reads almost, but not quite entirely, like someone’s been tasked with making up a whole bunch of music genres and then selling them to the middle-aged as a digest of What The Kids Like These Days, much as there was a whole famous ‘glossary of grunge’ published by the NYT in 1992 which was based entirely on lies told to the reporter by people in Seattle who were quite p1ssed off at their scene being commoditised. Anyway, if you’re curious to know exactly what ‘murderdrill’ sounds like (clue: it is not hugely different from what you might immediately expect, except it sounds like it’s playing at a house party you’re very glad you’re not at, about four streets away) then this is for YOU!
- Warrior Camps for Men: One of the best and most consistent grifts in the modern world is that of helping men come to terms with masculinity. Since I’ve been online, about 25 years now, I’ve seen at least a dozen of these sorts of movements come along, seeking to help men DEAL WITH BEING MEN and COPE WITH THE TERRIBLE BURDEN OF MASCULINITY (perhaps I’m not doing it right, but I don’t find it that hard tbh – it’s also reasonable to suggest, however, that I am not exactly a, er, paragon of manliness, so perhaps that explains it) – and here’s another one! This article takes a look at what the current reasons are for men needing a SPECIAL PLACE TO BE GUYS TOGETHER (look, sorry, I don’t mean to mock – actually, no, hang on, I do – but FUCK’S SAKE CAN WE ALL STOP THINKING ABOUT OURSELVES SO HARD PLEASE?) and at a specific camp for such GUYS called The Modern Day Knight Project in which MEN come together to face HARDSHIP (do squats) and BARE THEIR SOULS (scream and cry). I don’t quite know what to make of this, but there’s definitely something to note in the fact that every single one of the men pictured, and referenced, here is of that ‘I know what bench-pressing means and I enjoy it, and I aspire to shoulders that start roughly where my ears finish’ bodytype – borderline-anorexics with the muscletone of an elastic band (hi!) tend not to show up so much in these places, is what I’m saying, and perhaps therefore the secret to masculine contentment (or at the very least resignation) is to just be an 11-stone weakling and enjoy it.
- Trump Coins: It may not surprise you to learn that there are people out there doing a roaring trade flogging limited-edition, gold- and silver-plated coins with Donald Trump’s face on them for profit; it may also not surprise you to know that the coins are not in fact either limited edition or plated with gold or silver. You might, though, be surprised to read this article and discover that there really is no ‘there’ to any of this – it’s a quite astonishing series of tricks and grifts and lies and scams which sees people somehow pocketing seven-figure sums at the end of a process which involves the manufacture, marketing, sale and distribution of goods which have no discernible value, no discernible use, and which, as far as I can tell, noone really wants anyway. This is basically my new favourite parable about How Modern Capitalism Works.
- The Tuluminati: One of the best profiles I’ve read in ages, this – Ben Way is an English serial entrepreneur, former reality TV star and, er, ‘visionary’, who has basically set up a commune for technohippywankers in Tulum on the Yucutan peninsula in Mexico. I can’t tell whether the piece is skewering Way or whether it’s meant to be a puff-piece but has sadly been written by someone who doesn’t realise quite how stupid everything they are describing sounds to anyone reading, but, regardless, this is FULL of choice lines and anecdotes. I mean, look: “In addition to raising money for the Temple of Light and investing in various tech companies, Way is also working on cost-effective hyperbaric chambers that will impede aging; a charity project called The Federation that promises “social, technological and environmental progress for mankind”; and a theory involving quantum mechanics and spiritual beings that will be, in his words, “as groundbreaking…as E = mc2.” “Ben has a beautiful brain,” said Jasmin Arbinger, a German-born member of the Temple community who has attended communal dinners and contributed to a charity event. “Most people who become successful are just thinking about their own success…but Ben is coming from a place that is a very noble mindset. He is altruistic in some sense.”” This is priceless.
- The Moral Calculations of a Billionaire: A wonderful article, this. Most billionaires are not like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Most of them, statistically, are old white men you have never heard of, muchlike Leon Cooperman, the subject of this profile, who at 80ish continues to play the markets and augment his multi-billion dollar purse because, well, what else is there to do? This is a very gentle piece of writing, which leaves Cooperman enough room to breathe as a subject so as not to paint him as a monster or a caricature; he’s just a very, very rich old man, conservative with a small ‘c’, who donates vast sums to charity and doesn’t quite understand why a growing chunk of society sees him as a symbol of Everything That Is Wrong With The Modern World.
- Real Me & Fake Me: Joe Dunthorne in the LRB this week, writing about what it’s like when you find someone using your identity and work to try and scam people into crypto. Your main takeaway from this is hat Mr Dunthorne is a far more patient person than you or I might have been had we found them using our poems to shill sh1tcoins.
- The Order Of Things: This is AMAZING. Seriously, if you have any interest in language and writing and meaning and how words work, and grammar and syntax and all that sort of jazz, this will be the best thing you read all week, I promise you. A piece by Jennifer Croft, specifically about her work in translating ‘The Books of Jacob’ by Olga Tokarczuk from the original Polish to English, but also about how words work at a fundamental structural level, about how meaning is carried through language and how best to preserve that in translation…honestly, if you derive any pleasure from language and the written word, I cannot recommend this hard enough, it is a truly stellar piece of writing and one of the most interesting things I’ve read in weeks.
- The Tragedy of Macbeth: Ethan Coen, one half of famous sibling filmmakers The Coen Brothers, reviews his brother’s solo directorial outing, Macbeth. ‘Reviews’ is perhaps a kind way of putting it – this is more of an evisceration, frankly, done with obvious affection but with the sort of offhand brutality that you imagine only a brother to be capable of. This is fcuking great, and on this basis I would read a novel by Ethan Coen in a flash.
- The Complete: Finally this week, a short story which is either a work of genuine talent or one of the worst things I’ve read in years, and I honestly can’t tell you which of those two things I believe more. Falling somewhere, stylistically speaking, between Easton Ellis, Amis, Baumann and a few other (OBVIOUSLY MALE) authors, this is a series of vignettes and fragments which sort-of nearly coalesce into a whole, but which act more as a sort of delivery vessel for a very particular sort of online VIBE (very much the theme of the week, here, the VIBE). Obviously slightly parodic, but probably not quite as much as it likes to think it is, I…I think I like this, but I very much get the impression that quite a few people really won’t – it’s certainly stuck with me. See what you think – would be good to experience with a cocktail in hand, I think.
By Laura Berger
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- I can’t exactly say I like this – there’s something a bit cloying about it to my mind, like people on the internet who use exclamation marks to carefully connote sincerity! So you can tell I am not being ironic! God, I hate it! – but it’s certainly catchy despite the slightly bland hallmark positivity of the lyrics (“Keep It Up”, exhorts Rex Orange County – well, why? Why not just stop, Rex? Give me one fcuking good reason), so maybe it will do more for you than it does for me. If we’re doing nonironic positive vibes then give me Jimothy Lacoste anyday, is what I’m saying.