I had a genuinely-chastening professional experience this week which I will share with you because, well, it contains a LESSON of sorts. I was asked at short notice to record a podcast on Monday to talk about That Fcuking Man and the Twitter rebrand, and I said a happy ‘yes’ because, well, I’m a middle-aged white man and as such I not only love the sound of my own voice but feel it desperately important that as many people hear it as is humanly possible. Now, whenever I have recorded this particular podcast in the past it’s always been a down-the-line interview with the host which then gets chopped into the requisite pieces for inclusion; as such, I was blithely unconcerned about little things like ‘prep’ and ‘knowing what the fcuk I was talking about beyond the superficial’, because, well, I could always do pickups and stuff. Great!
Except they have changed the format, and instead of that what was now required was that I go to a room in Soho and sit with two actual other people and have a ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION on a range of issues that would then be lightly edited to make up the first half of the episode; oh, and the other people are ACTUAL PROPER JOURNALISTS who go on telly and stuff. So, er, turns out that if you just show up with only a vague. half-ar$ed idea of what you’re going to say you will very quickly find yourself quite out of your depth, and feel very embarrassed, and probably make quite a poor impression on people who, on reflection, you possibly ought to have tried a bit harder to impress.
So the lessons here are multiple: 1) DO YOUR FCUKING PREP YOU ARROGANT CNUT; 2) when you see people on telly being really funny and knowledgeable, chances are they have notes – MAKE SOME NOTES YOU ARROGANT CNUT; 3) maybe apply antiperspirant to your temples, because it turns out that this sort of embarrassment really does make sweat absolutely HOSE from your forehead and you will find this very, very embarrassing. Basically, it’s things like this that have led to me having the stellar ‘career’ that I have.
Anyway, I am off to Rome next week to sign a piece of paper (no, seriously, literally one – THANKS, ITALIAN BUREAUCRACY, ONCE AGAIN YOU AMAZE AND DELIGHT!) and so Web Curios will be off; I’ll be back in a fortnight, presuming I’m not dead of shame or anything else.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should listen to me lest you end up doing THIS every week for the rest of your days
By Kate Breakey
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE COSTA AD THEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE SAME AS PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THERE BEING NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR BANKING ADS, PT.1:
- AI Kwebbelkop: One of the potential benefits, we’re told, of just sort of lying down and letting the future happen at us will be when we can finally sigh with weary contentment and hand over the reigns of whatever quotidian drudgery we currently undertake to pay the mortgage – why work yourself when you can send your AI avatar out into the digital fields to work the content farms? Obviously this isn’t *quite* how it’s going to work out – or at least, it isn’t if you’re you or me, but does in fact appear to be how it’s going to work out if you’re (apparently very popular) Dutch YouTuber ‘Kwebbelkop’ (no, me neither – anyone speak Dutch?), who recently announced after 15 years(!) of streaming that they were retiring, and that instead of appearing on-stream themselves they would instead be delegating all future video work to…AI KWEBBELKOP! As of the beginning of this month, the channel has posted two new videos, both of which featuring a cartoony avatar and what seems, based on my relatively cursory analysis (look, I am 43 years old and I am not sitting through more than about 2 mins of Minecraft YouTuber, even in service of this fcuking newsletter), to be AI-generated voicework. Obviously I have no idea what the workflow is here, but I presume that this means that Kwebbelkop (feels very silly typing this over and over again, fyi) can just record themselves playing the game for 30m, knock out a quick script, juice it with an LLM trained on their general style and then text-to-vid/text-to-speech it and sync the whole thing – the whole process taking a matter of a couple of hours rather than, say, a whole working day. The comments on the AI-generated vids are…confused, in the main, and I have no idea if this is going to be embraced by the streamer’s fans, but it’s an interesting idea (and, if you ask me, a perfectly-reasonable response to spending 15 years gurning at the gamera while playing digital LEGO).
- The Sprite MixTape Generator: I have to say, given the fact that all this AI stuff has been FCUKING EVERYWHERE for nearly a year now – and, frankly, has been workable tech for a couple – it’s genuinely dispiriting to see how few interesting or creative or fun or imaginative uses of the tech there have been by the world’s assorted army of advermarketingprdrones. I mean, FFS, you’re supposed to be CREATIVE POWERHOUSES ffs, and yet you give me…stuff like THIS. ‘THIS’ being a ‘brand experience’ from nobody’s favourite brand of carbonated sugar water Sprite, in which “Sprite and Complex teamed up with OseanWorld to celebrate 50 years of hip hop with an AI-Powered Digital Art Experience. Let your words and creativity become the canvas that generates your very own custom mixtape artwork.” What might that mean in practice? What sort of interesting and exciting combinations of generative AI technology will this multi-million dollar brand and the marketing geniuses who steer it through the choppy waters of the zeitgeist come up with to surprise and delight me? It’s…a mixtape cover generator! Yes, that’s right, engage in a vapid conversation with a natural language chatbot that will ask you some bland bromides about your ‘connection’ with hiphop (sample question: “Hey [USERNAME]! Great to meet you. Now, let’s dive into your hip hop preferences. How do you usually discover new hip hop music? Any favorite platforms or methods?”) and then use the answers to generate a ‘mixtape cover’ whose look depends on your interactions with the bot. WHY? WHY DO I WANT A MIXTAPE COVER?! I DON’T HAVE A FCUKING MIXTAPE FFS! WHY IS THERE AT THE VERY LEAST NOT A BASE-LEVEL SPOTIFY INTEGRATION SO YOU COULD MAYBE CREATE ONE FOR ME? IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? Also why is the artwork so small, and so utterly sh1t? HOW DID YOU FCUK THIS UP SO BADLY?! Given the amount of fascinating, creative, surprising and imaginative stuff there is out there on the big old internet, brands creating stuff like this is, frankly, miserable and dispiriting. DO BETTER FFS IT’S NOT EVEN YOUR FCUKING MONEY.
- EXPTV: Joining a long and storied list of ‘sites on the internet that are basically like the sort of weird hinterland TV that you used to occasionally stumble upon at 230am on Channel4 in the 1980s’ – I’ve featured several of this sort of thing in Curios over the years (no, I don’t keep a list ffs), and this is a particularly nice example. “A 24/7 live TV channel, broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera”, or so its description says, this is SUPER – like old-school MTV fed through a John Waters filter, and with a programming schedule that includes slots such as ‘Incredibly Strange Metal’ and ‘Kung Fu Wizards’. If you’ve ever hung out in a very particular type of bar (often with significant quantities of old film memorabilia and a pseudo-50s kitsch aesthetic) then you will recognise THE VIBE of this channel from the sort of thing they would have had wordlessly playing on a single corner-mounted television – this is excellent fun, and really well-curated (based on my admittedly cursory examination), and frankly feels like the sort of thing you could happily chuck on in the background on a Friday evening while you get very, very stoned and play stupid boardgames.
- Move It, With Pepsi!: I mean, technically this is called ‘Muevelo Con Pepsi’, but I thought I’d do the heavy lifting of the translation for you (I’m nice like that) – rejoice, everyone, we’re back in the metaverse! One of the side effects of having seen a LOT of really bad ‘metaversal’ projects over the past 3 years or so is that you start noticing certain details that are specific to the 3-4 different software platforms that every single brand has unquestioningly used to build their deeply-miserable, empty, soulless, 3d brand purgatories – so it is that when I arrived in PEPSI’S EXCITING LATINO DANCE WORLD (it is not exciting, and, honestly, if I wanted to create a brand activation that ‘celebrated’ the rich and varied and INHERENTLY PHYSICAL world of dance from central and southern America I would probably consider doing it in a medium that, I don’t know, existed) I immediately recognised the particular ‘jump’ animation applied to avatars by this particular metaverse vendor and I felt, momentarily, at home (interesting aside – if all these things are built on the same platforms, why aren’t they more…interoperable, and why is there no way for users to easily switch between worlds on the same platform? Is it because none of these things are really ‘metaverses’ at all? MAKES YOU THINK). Anyway, this is incredibly sad and pretty much the antithesis of the fun, vibrant and carnival-esque atmosphere you might associate with Latinate dancing – but, on the plus side, you get to wander around this empty digital space and look at huge screens on which you can see ‘creative director and actor’ Beau Casper Smart teach you some dance moves in the metaverse (dance moves which, to be clear, you can’t attempt to replicate or mimic because the functionality simply isn’t there! It’s great!) while his eyes scream “THINK OF THE PAYCHECK THINK OF THE PAYCHECK”. Honestly, this is superb and DEFINITELY worth the six figures in agency and platform and talent fee that this inevitably required. WELL DONE EVERYONE!
- Pamera: This comes to me via occasional Web Curios contributor and digital artist Damjanski, who writes “Hi Matt,hope you do well. You might enjoy this app (disclaimer it’s very stupid)”. Well, that sort of description was bound to hook me in (I am nothing if not a predictable sucker for dumb digital ephemera, after all), and, honestly, this is SO FUN! Pamera is a really simple idea – an iPhone app that uses machine vision to ‘see’ whatever you take a photo of and then (probably) the GPT API to take whatever objects it’s ‘seen’ and use those as the basis for a poem written about whatever object or scene the machine has ‘perceived’. THIS IS SO FUN – and, case in point, an interesting and cute and enjoyable and surprising and creative use of generative AI tech. It’s easy to imagine some small builds on this – you could let users choose from a variety of poetic forms, for example, or poetic styles, or apply tonal filters to the outputs (“make it more redolent of consumptive melancholia, please!”) – but in general this is pretty much perfect. THANKYOU DAMJANKSI!
- Experience Business: I have something of a fraught relationship with the world of ‘BUSINESS’ – on the one hand, I need to earn money and, because I am lazy and the very opposite of ‘entrepreneurial’, to do so I tend to need to operate within the confines of the existing corporate world; on the other, I find the world of BUSINESS very, very silly, and, largely, ridiculous, and tend to ACT OUT a bit when I am around people who treat it like it’s serious. Which is, perhaps, why I enjoyed this site so much – it’s the (perfectly reasonable and very nicely-made) online home of the KKL concert hall in the Swiss city of Lucerne, specifically the branch of the venue that rents out its various spaces for corporate events, and I don’t think I have ever seen a shinier and more fancy way of showing off the fact that they have nine separate spaces that you can book for your skullfcukingly-tedious quarterly marketing all-hands. You can whizz around the building in 3d! Each of the rooms has its own dedicated 3d model thing, and some copyritten blurb about what makes it special (‘The multifunctional hall becomes the hall you need for your event.’ – I mean, really, this is great)! Honestly, this really is wonderful – it’s really good, but, I might argue, perhaps a TOUCH overengineered. God I love the Swiss.
- Poisons Help: Have you ever thought “I really wish I felt safer in my pursuit of my amateur mycology hobby, but my terrible memory and failing eyesight mean I can’t ever be fully confident that the fungi I’ve just picked aren’t in fact going to make my bowels liquefy and my blood turn to mulch”? WELL IT’S YOUR LUCKY DAY! Poisons Help is a Facebook Group whose sole purpose is apparently to answer questions from mushroom pickers about whether or not that really is an Ammanita Phalloides, and whether they do in fact need to go to A&E about the strange numb prickling they’re starting to experience all down their left-hand side – or, based on the most recent comments on the Page, whether their dog needs to be rushed to the vet RIGHT NOW. This is a lovely community and super-interesting, and one which feels like it could form the centre of a rather dark story in which an ostensibly-minor spat over community etiquette six months ago inexorably leads to a passive-aggressive withheld response to a ‘shroom-based query and a tragic, avoidable death a little further down the line.
- The Screw Project: This feels vaguely familiar, but apparently I have never featured this before (or certainly not in the past 8 years or so, and, honestly, NOONE FCUKING CARES OTHER THAN ME) and so it’s fair game – The Screw Project is a wonderful and slightly-unhinged idea by the creators of the ‘smile screw’, a new design for screws/screwdrivers that someone came up with in 2014 and which is functionally-identical to the normal flat/phillips screw of tradition, but which looks like a smiley face and so is therefore, objectively, better. This site features a map of all the different places in the world where someone has sought to make the world a marginally-cheerier place by installing smile screws in their home or establishment (aside from anything else, smile screws have the very particular benefit that, unless someone happens to have a very idiosyncratically-designed screwdriver on their person, noone can mess with your screws) – there are, at the time of writing, only 66 instances of smile screws being used in the world, which feels…low, tbh, which is why I encourage all of you to buy a pack and a special smile screwdriver from the website and spread the smile screw gospel far and wide.
- Lennybot: I featured a previous iteration of this project a few months back – it previously used natural language search to create a useful, searchable archive of podcast episodes, but that has now been extended to cover blogposts and writings as well. This is interesting less because of the content (sorry, Lenny – although if you’re DESPERATE for more product marketing insights then maybe you’ll find something to love here) and more because of the sort of proof-of-concept nature of the project in terms of the whole ‘look at what you can do with a corpus of information and some light generative AI on top of it ffs!’.
- Liar Liar: One of the interesting (lol!) things about the coming AI revolution is the odd, asymmetric information dynamics that it’s goint to introduce – as I think I’ve previously bored on about, the world becomes marginally more unpredictable when everyone (for example) has their own personal AI-enabled digital assistant in their pocket and they are all potentially different and customisable, and you never have the slightest idea whether the person you’re interacting with is the sort who just goes with the ‘default Google Helper’ avatar or an enthusiastic hobbyist who’s decided to install ‘Tatepilled Waifu Companion’ on their iPhone 24. Or indeed when you have no idea whatsoever whether the person who you’re chatting to online has installed a piece of tech like Liar Liar on their machine – this is a (almost certainly TOTALLY BULLSH1T) service that purports to let anyone install it on their machine, after which they can use the tech to run realtime AI-assisted polygraphic analysis of anyone their videochatting with, based on the tech’s assessment of a bunch of physical signals as observed through the cam feed. To be clear – polygraphs are questionable tech at best, and that’s with actual sensors attached to actual physical people; the idea that there’s software that can make any sort of accurate assessment of whether or not someone’s telling the truth based on ‘machine-observable physical signals’. The site claims to use “Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG), a technique that detects subtle color changes in the face, indicative of your heart rate. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s also monitoring for eye movements, facial expressions, and body language, each providing valuable data to the AI. With all this information, the AI uses psychological know-how to interpret it all. Sudden eye movements, particular facial expressions, or specific body language, all add up to reveal a potential deception. The tool combines these individual signs, often undetectable to the human eye, and uses the cumulative data to offer an accurate assessment of truthfulness. It’s the seamless integration of technology and psychology that makes LiarLiar.AI a powerful ally in lie detection.” It’s TOTAL BOLL0CKS – but, obviously, the unsettling thing is that despite the completely unscientific claims being made here and the fact that’s, to repeat, TOTAL BOLL0CKS, you can equally imagine stuff like this being applied to all sorts of real-life situations, and this sort of dodgy tech being used to take real decisions that impact real people’s lives, and it’s stuff like this that we should be worried about rather than the killer machines imho.
- The Civic AI Observatory: An interesting new initiative by the smart people at Newspeak House and NESTA – to quote, “Nesta is partnering with Newspeak House to establish the Civic AI Observatory. Rather than being just another AI initiative, the Observatory will be a space in which people can come together to learn about AI calmly and safely, and talk about relevant work. The Civic AI Observatory will host events tailored to diverse groups from civil society, from leaders, to funders and capability-builders, to practitioners. There will also be a newsletter and an online community: ways to stay abreast of developments in AI of relevance to civil society. We can’t predict the outputs of the work but we have some outcomes in mind. If the Civic AI Observatory works well, people in civil society will: have a better understanding of AI technologies have a better grasp on the kinds of value that AI can add, while being well-informed about trade-offs and risks be better connected to people asking similar questions.” If this sounds like you or your organisation, get in touch.
- The Japanese Paper Film Project: “In the 1930s, several Japanese companies produced films made on paper (“kami firumu”) instead of celluloid. The Japanese Paper Film Project preserves the surviving movies and promotes scholarship about these films. From 1932 – 1938, two Japanese Companies dominated the paper film market. Most well known are REFCY, based in Tokyo, and Katei Toki (“Home Talkie”), based in Osaka. They produced animated and live action films and often in color. Moreover, many of the films contained synchronized sound tracks on 78rpm vinyl. Given the short period of production, the varying paper quality, and WWII’s devastation, very few Japanese paper film prints survive. Now, almost 90 years later, the handful of surviving prints are beginning to deteriorate. Thus, this project is racing against time to preserve the films before they disappear entirely.” This is SO INTERESTING – you will recognise the style here, but I had no idea that this is the animation technique that resulted in that very particular look and feel. If you want to see clips from the films that are being preserved you can see them on the project’s accompanying Twitter (SUE ME ELON YOU CNUT) account.
- Audio Atlas: It’s interesting (to me, at least) that the past six months or so’s frothiness around AI still hasn’t seen a decent natural language music search crop up yet, not even from Spotify (or have I missed something) – this is another attempt to create such a thing, and it doesn’t *quite* work. Type in the sort of thing you need to soundtrack (I just gave it “I need a soundtrack to a film which pans slowly over a field of corpses”) and it will spit out a selection of suggested tracks in seconds. Having said at the start of my writeup that this doesn’t *quite* work, I now find that it’s given me at least one reasonably decent suggestion based on that macabre prompt – the gimmick here is that it’s a sales tool for a licensing library, giving you the ability to license a track in two clicks after listening to the preview. This is reasonably-smart, although I still maintain that as soon as the text-to-music stuff gets really good then all these music libraries are going to be utterly banjaxed.
- The Web Fractal Clock: This is mesmerising and brilliant and beautiful, and I want it on a giant digital screen in my house for evermore (it is also very easy to read, I promise, you just need to take a moment to work out what’s going on). Seriously, this is so so so cool and ought to be a massive installation somewhere so if one of you could sort that out that would be great please thankyou.
- AI Concerts: Via Andy comes this TikTok account which creates…surprisingly good covers of famous tracks, redone by AI so as to make them sound like they’re being covered by a bunch of cartoon characters – sadly all said characters appear to all be from Spongebob and Phineas & Ferb, and other titles that I was too busy being too old to ever have really have had a cultural relationship with, so I can’t gauge the quality of the voices, but the accompanying CG ‘concert’ videos are really excellent and in general this is a fairly-uncomplicated Good Time.
- CubeTrek: Not, sadly, a new IP in which the crew of the Starship Enterprise grapple with the mysteries of the TimeCube (which, now I come to think of it, sounds…quite good?) but instead a rather cool service aimed at the climbing and mountaineering communities and which effectively uses GPS tracking to create a 3d visualisation of the journey you take up a mountain; like Strava, basically, but for people with more walking poles and a generally casual attitude towards trudging past a few hundred frozen corpses on your way to the summit. This actually looks pretty cool, and I like the fact that it hooks up to Google Earth to let you show your best hikes in a CG flythrough – personally-speaking I think they’re missing a trick by not having some sort of 3d printing option here, but I increasingly think that I am the only remaining person alive who remembers that 3d printing is even a thing (but seriously, who wouldn’t want a perspex cube into which had been laser-etched the route of their greatest ever ascent – NO FCUKER, etc!).
- Make 8bit Art: 8bit art generators are not new and, frankly, are a bit ten-a-penny and I wouldn’t normally bother including them, but I’ll make an exception for this which is genuinely pleasing to use and which even I managed to make something not-entirely-repellent with in just a few short seconds.
By Stipan Tadic
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IF YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE COSTA AD THEN YOU ARE LITERALLY THE SAME AS PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THERE BEING NON-WHITE PEOPLE IN THEIR BANKING ADS, PT.2:
- General Index: “General Index is a shapeshifting encyclopaedic project by Ill-Studio focusing on factual information from all of human knowledge gathered into a corpus of abstract ideas and practical things’”. So, er, that clears things up then. General Index is slightly-baffling initially, but does start to make sense once you click through a bit and land on the accompanying semi-explanatory site which delivers some context behind the dizzying, shifting taxonomy of everything that flashes across the homepage (it will make sense once you click the original link, I promise you). I like this a lot.
- EVIDENT Images of the Year 2023: Would you like to see some images of REALLY REALLY SMALL THINGS, all pretty and iridescent? GREAT! Some of the things that these people have managed to capture are insane – the individual scales on a butterfly’s wing, ffs! SO SMOL! – although best not speculate too hard about whether or not the red-backed salamander whose skull is so beautifully captured in cross-section is doing ok.
- Casehopper: A (theoretically) genuinely good and positive use of generative AI! No, really! Casehopper is a service designed to help legal practitioners dealing with immigration applications in the US accelerate the speed with which they process said applications, offering assistance with the doubtless-formulaic process of information compiling and submission. Basically you (the lawyer) feed in all the information you have into the system and it will knock out the required documentation required by law, all in the appropriate legalese – or at least that’s the promise, but obviously I have no way of verifying whether or not the outputs are decent or whether by using this service you’re effectively condemning your clients to a swift return to whence they cane via the cheery repatriation mechanisms of the famously-accommodating US immigration system. Still, this feels like…a Good Thing? I mean obviously we’d like in a world in which each individual’s immigration request was dealt with humanely by a real person, but given that almost the exact obverse of that seems to be true and that The System is already basically a gigantic and unpleasant bureaucratic meatgrinder then it sort of makes sense to attempt to play the system using a bit of light automation – if, of course, The Machine does the job properly, because the caveat to all of this is that a bad-but-quick solution makes everything worse so much faster. Let’s…let’s hope for the best, eh?
- Unspun Heroes: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is a project by my mate Simon, but I promise that even were it by someone who I hated and wished a painful death on I would probably still feature it because, well, it’s a GREAT idea and I wish I had thought of it (and the name tbh). Unspun Heroes is a music label which answers the single burning question which I imagine has been on your lips for YEARS (whether you have been aware of it or otherwise), to whit: “Is it possible to find under-appreciated albums and reissue them on vinyl?” – and thanks to Unspun Heoroes, the answer is now a loud and unequivocal “YES”. The site is both a place where writing about favourite underrated records lives, and will eventually become a place where you can buy said limited edition reissues of classic, underappreciated records on lovely environmentally-friendly (insofar as that’s possible) physical media. This is a great idea (damn you Simon) and a lovely thing for all those middle-aged men amongst you who think that a record collection is a substitute for having a personality.
- The BBC on Mastodon: How are you all getting on in the middle of the Great Social Media Revolution? Have you managed to stick it out on Threads/Bluesky/Post/T2/Mastdon? Are you enjoying the very 2023 experience of posting the same thing (with a small degree of platform-specific tweaking) to six different platforms and finding that noone cares on any of them? Isn’t it great? No it is not great, it is sh1t, and part of me does rather pity the poor people at the BBC who have been tasked with running the Corporation’s new presence in the Fediverse and who, I fear, will be Skeeting into the void rather. Still, this is A Good Thing and exactly the sort of thing the BBC *should* be experimenting with if you ask me, and as ever with the Beeb they are being very thoughtful about how they approach the whole thing: “This is an experiment – we will run it for 6 months and then decide whether and how to continue. We aim to learn how much value it has provided and how much work and cost is involved. Does it reach enough people for the effort we need to put in? Are there risks or benefits from the federated model, with no centralised rules or moderation and no filtering or sorting algorithms? We’re learning as we go, and we’ll write about what we discover in the hope that it might be useful for others. The BBC will continue its other social media activity in the usual places. Looking ahead, could we move beyond Mastodon to other ActivityPub applications for publishing content? And would this provide us with some insulation from the risks that might be created as other social media platforms continue to change and evolve? And will large, planet-scale social media platforms persist or are they gradually disappearing? What are the alternatives and what will we have in 10 years time?” Honestly, I am so so so glad that an organisation exists that can and will do this sort of thing, and I am happy to pay for it.
- Songwriters: A new bit of dataviz exploration by the Pudding, this latest example of their now-signature ‘TELL STORIES WITH NUMBERS AND SCROLLING’ style looks into the number of female songwriters involved in penning modern hit singles, and the oddity of the fact that, per their investigation and analysis, while half of the songs they analysed that made the Billboard Hot 100 top 5 had all-male songwriting teams, only one had an all-female songwriting team. This leads them down a rabbithole of enquiry that takes the reader on an interesting journey through songwriting trends and which while so doing does a decent job of gently explaining some of the innate sexism inherent in the way the music industry functions and moving onto the manner in which this data tells the story of men controlling women’s work and money and agency throughout the course of the past 70 years – as the site puts it: “Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence.” An excellent example of how to do BIG THEMES in a way that doesn’t feel preachy or heavy-handed (and, as always, just great data-led communications – these people really are consistently excellent).
- The Constitute Project: A project designed to let anyone compare the contents and composition of national constitutions worldwide: “New constitutions are written every year. The people who write these important documents need to read and analyze texts from other places. And citizens need to know, and to be able to understand, what’s in their countries’ foundational documents. Constitute offers access to the world’s constitutions so that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics—using an inviting, clean interface.” This is FAR more interesting than I’d expected – yes, fine, I am an ahistorical ignoramus, what of it – and I didn’t think I’d find myself spelunking through the previous iterations of the Italian constitution with quite such relish. It’s impossible not to feel a slight ‘fcuk me the weight of history’ moment when you look at some of the dates on this stuff (or, potentially, to think ‘hm, maybe it might not be a terrible idea for us to perhaps come up with something to maybe update the Magna Carta a bit?’).
- Design Spells: I don’t *think* this is actually anything to do with the occult, but, just in case, Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any hideous eldritch familiars which may manifest at the foot of your bed as a result of your use of this website. Design Spells is a newsletter – ALL OTHER NEWSLETTERS ARE FALSE GODS THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE TRUE NEWSLETTER AND THAT IS THIS ONE – which exists to highlight small, lovely, often inessential design features which you might otherwise have missed. From their description, “Do you remember the micro-interaction that made you smile? Or the Easter egg you stumbled upon in your favorite app? These design details might go unnoticed by many and have little impact on the metrics that today’s apps are optimized for. They probably won’t appear in any product roadmaps or company OKRs. Nevertheless, these details are not pointless. They infuse life, personality, and fun back into the web. They spark joy and reward those who find them with a sense of delight. They represent the last bastion of hope against the backdrop of a homogenous web. It is at the intersection of design and engineering where these details are made possible. It is here that the real magic happens.
That’s why we started Design Spells — to celebrate and showcase the design details that feel like magic.” I am 100% a fan of this ethos – I will forever hold a candle for those sites that feature pointless-but-happymaking bits of UI or UX work, and personally think that anyone working on any deadly-dull bit of faceless corporate busywork make it their mission to include ONE incredibly-silly thing hidden somewhere no right-thinking person will ever click (I am 100% putting a secret ‘link to furry bongo’ on the next digital project I work on and that is a GUARANTEE). - One-Take Video: A bunch of new AI-ish features introduced by Vimeo and being bundled together as their ‘One-Take Video’ offering – this might all be super-useful if you’re a creator, but as with loads of this stuff all I can see when I look at it is a bleak future for lots of people currently making a living as video editors and scriptwriters and the like; I can’t tell you the amount of old rope money I’ve earned from cobbling together half-ar$ed scripts for videos I know that noone will ever watch (as you can tell, I bring my a-game to that sort of work!) and now these b4stards are STEALING THE VERY FOOD FROM MY MOUTH by offering functionality like ‘automatic video scriptwriting’ (and a bunch of other stuff too, like teleprompting and AI-assisted topline video editing). This might be useful, but it has slightly-hamstrung my future earning potential and so THANKS FOR NOTHING VIMEO YOU FCUKS.
- Ratatan!: A Kickstarter! This one is a shoo-in – it’s for a new videogame created by the same team that developed cult hit Patapan! a few years ago and which is now seeking funding (and has in fact achieved its goal in a matter of days) to develop a brand-new esoteric-looking rhythm-based game in which, as far as I can tell, you play rhythm games to lead a cute army of critters against ANOTHER cute army of critters! The official blurb says: “Ratatan is diving onto the roguelike scene in this combination of rhythm and side-scroller action. Players can move to the groove alone or team up with friends in multiplayer mayhem suitable for up to four players! Engage in huge melee brawls with more than 100 characters duking it out for supremacy. Defeat your enemies by riding the rhythm of Ratatan’s catchy, toe-tapping soundtrack in this delightful, heartfelt adventure!”, but all you really need to know is ‘CUTE-BUT-VIOLENT RHYTHM GAME WITH SLIGHTLY-MAD VISUALS’ and that should give you the general idea.
- Diarrhoeacoffee: ANOTHER KICKSTARTER! This one also already-funded, but…significantly sillier. This also feels like a bit of a cheat – it’s an LG project, and I wasn’t aware that Big Business used Kickstarter like this tbh – but also means that I don’t feel bad about making fun of it. The device being crowdfunded here is a whizzy new coffee machine which it seems LG is about to add to its range – the gimmick here is, in part, the fact that it can hold two coffee pods simultaneously which allows you to BLEND DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAFFEINATED BEVERAGE! I know – IT’S WHAT I HAVE DREAMED OF TOO! If that wasn’t enough, though, LG’s design team have obviously been worshipping at the church of the infamous(ly ineffectual) Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, because this coffee machine is a(n admittedly pretty cute-looking) tripod design in nice, reassuring, Baymax-style curved white plastic…which, unfortunately, deposits the coffee from a central nozzle in a manner that can only be described as ‘a bit like watching it take an unpleasantly-liquid bowel movement’. Look, I promise I’m not exaggerating – click the link and watch the promo video and try and get past the fact that it looks almost exactly like your coffeemaker is, effectively, browning into a demitasse for you. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE YOU CANNOT.
- Sch1zo.net: It’s important to caveat this link, I think – when you spend a lot of time online, you often come across sites and work by people who are somewhat…outside the norm, shall we say, and in such cases I always try and make sure that if I do feature the site in question I do so in a manner that doesn’t feel like I’m making fun of anyone or punching down (I have no idea whether I succeed in this endeavour, but I promise I do try). In this case the site’s creator, one Sebastian Prusak, openly mentions on the homepage that the work of creating and maintaining it is in some way part of his recovery from severe schizophrenia, and the content of the site reflects that – the bio section is (to me at least) incredibly poignant, but the real draw for me is the art – I have seen…a lot of ‘outsider’-type art websites, but it’s rare that I see anything so…interesting. The work itself is sort-of mathematical-geometric, with lots symbolic references, but the most fascinating thing to me is the navigation interface which seems to try and create an interlinked thematic map of Sebastian’s works, based on…criteria I don’t quite understand. I can’t quite explain why, but this really stayed with me this week and I think it’s quite remarkable.
- Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023: The winner’s announced on the 8th September, but while you wait for the STARS TO ALIGN (lol) for the lucky victor you can peruse the nominees on this webpage (or, if you’re able, pop to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to check out the exhibition that accompanies the contest). These are obviously FCUKING AMAZING if a *little*-too post-produced for my taste – it’s cheesy, true, but the Pandora pic is quite cool, though my personal pics for the win this year are the solar flare shots because WOW, frankly.
- The Sounds of Space: In fact, while looking at the images at the last link, why not accompany your wide-eyed appreciation of the majesty of the cosmos with this soundboard of THE ACTUAL SOUNDS OF SPACE? It’s not, fine, a hugely-compelling soundtrack, but there’s always the outside possibility that if you download the audio files and run them through a bunch of filters/enhancers you’ll be able to hear something TERRIFYING AND ALIEN.
- Woodward Draw: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this GREAT game in which you’re asked to come up with as many different four-letter words as possible simply by changing one letter at a time – the goal is to find all of the SPECIAL words which have been given a delightful pixelart illustration, and which you can ‘collect’ like some sort of mad, acquisitive;linguaphile. If you have a small kid who is into vocabulary, I reckon this is probably a good 30 mins in which the sticky-faced little treasures might just be quiet, should you be in the market for such a thing.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Bowiesongs: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, it’s a lovely project which feels Tumblr-adjacent and it’s written with such erudiet affection that it’s an easy recommend – Bowiesongs is a long-running site (it’s been going since at least 2009 ffs!) which features essays about, er, Bowie’s songs (and, latterly, songs about Bowie), and it’s still going (the latest update was last week) and, honestly, this is LOVELY and really well-written to boot (which it’s fair to say isn’t always the case with this sort of stuff).
- Knobfeel: A sadly-defunct website but one whose ethos I very much enjoy and approve of – while it existed (2013-17 RIP) it served solely to offer reviews of various pieces of hifi equipment based on how good it felt to turn the knobs on said hifi equipment. As someone who regularly sighs when observing the unique beauty of a slow-closing kitchen drawer I very much enjoy the fact that this existed (and am frankly confused as to why it stopped – how could anyone possibly get bored of writing this stuff?).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- SeoulTribe: One for the K-Pop fan in your life (IS IT YOU?) who wants to branch out a bit from the Blackpinks of this world and spread their musical wings slightly (but not so much that they ever leave Korea), SeoulTribe is (was? I hope not, though the bio does rather suggest it might be on hiatus) a place where its creators shared recommendations of Korean music outside of the more mainstream/large-scale K-pop acts.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- Search and the Meaning of Information: I thought this was an excellent and interesting article on the way in which the past 25 years of search engines have altered our relationship with information and what we consider the POINT of it to be – the central thesis here, that all information providers are either ‘librarians’ (people who point you at more information that you can use to deepen or better understand or further contextualise your query) or ‘physicians’ (who instead just point you at the answer and don’t bother you with extraneous info or context), struck me as a potentially-useful way of looking at the world and, even if you don’t agree, the general points made around what is lost when one ‘just’ gets the answer without having to think too hard about it and how the intersection of generative AI and search might possibly impact the issues raised in interesting and baroque ways.
- Elon and X (Again): Oh, fine, in case any of you really care then here’s the ur-writeup of the whole ‘Elon Musk’s history with the letter X and how the story behind his initial obsession with it proves once again that the man is literally a 14 year old boy somehow magically become the world’s richest human’ – it’s largely the same stuff as in the Twitter thread I featured last week, but rendered more readable, although it does contain some genuinely great quotes which I hadn’t previously been aware of (in particular the line about x.com being ‘the coolest url in the world’ is just PERFECT – note, also, that Musk was already 29 years old at that point and really should have been beyond this sort of thing). BONUS MUSK – I was asked to talk about the ‘X’ thing on a podcast this week, in the unlikely event you want to hear any more about THAT FCUKING MAN (and, also, some stuff about Nigel Farage – really selling it to you, aren’t I?).
- The Mastodon Problem: I appreciate that an article that can best be described as ‘a detailed and deep investigation into all the reasons why people who tried to move from Twitter to Mastodon mostly didn’t manage to do it, or if they did they tended not to bother sticking around very long’ probably doesn’t have mass appeal, but let me attempt to draw you in by explaining that it’s actually a really good breakdown of all the ways in which users bounce off a product or experience and, while it’s obviously quite specifically software-tech-y it’s also full of general principles that can probably be usefully applied elsewhere if you’re in the process (or the general practice) of building things and trying to get people both to use them and to keep using them).
- How Large Language Models Work: I know, I know, you don’t want to hear any more about AI and you don’t need to know the technical details about how the fcuk they work (to the extent to which anyone is able to adequately explain it, in any case) – I know this, and I hear your weary pain. BUT! Given the seemingly-inevitable advance of this stuff into every single corner of every single element of your working life, it’s probably not a terrible idea to have at least a passing idea as to what the fcuk is happening beneath the hood every time you type ‘please turn this bulletpoint list into a 2,000 word report because I honestly think that if I have to write any more of this pointless tripe I will actually attempt to drown myself in the sink’. This is a very, very good primer which is about as ‘layman’s terms’ as it’s possible to be, and I promise will give you at least a base-level grounding in the science behind the magic.
- Why The Artists Will Lose The Lawsuits: I am not a lawyer – SHOCKING, I KNOW – and as such I am obviously in no position to make assessments about the likely progress of the various copyright cases being brought against the various AI companies by artists, writers and the comedian Sarah Silverman; I have checked, though, and the author of this piece at least went to law school and so as such is at least in-part qualified to opine on the issue. According to this person, Silverman in particular has no legs to stand on based on US law, and in particular the specifics of copyright law: per this section, “The thing about copyright is that, as the name suggests, it is all about stopping people from making copies of the work; importantly, you cannot copyright an idea. Therefore, you can’t stop people from creating their own creative works, like lists that mention your works or analyses of your creations, which is called transformative work.¹ Parodies, for example, are transformative because even though they often involve the use of copyrighted material, they transform the material in a permitted way. The AI companies are going to wipe the floor with these litigants using copyright law as their towel because it’s basically impossible to argue that machine learning isn’t transformative use.” Now obviously different rules apply in different territories, but I find it hard to see much beyond the argument presented here.
- Russian Propaganda and the Videogame War: An interesting look at how and where the Russian administration is placing propagandistic messaging around the country’s invasion of Ukraine in various digital spaces, in particular gaming environments, as a means of attempting to secure hearts and minds – this feels very kitchen sink future (by which: grubby, mechanical, now and also VERY SCIFI), but also like the sort of thing that anyone who’s been banging the whole ‘THE METAVERSE IS JUST VIDEOGAMES’ drum might want to reasonably point at as another datapoint that proves they’re right.
- The Robots Are Already Here: I’ve spent much of the past few months having increasingly miserable-sounding conversations with middle-aged friends about when exactly will be the time when we jack in this white collar stuff and instead decide to get an HGV license and some hi-vis, based on the not-unreasonable assumption that the full automation of manual labour is a few years behind the full automation of ‘doing stuff with words’ – and then this week I read this article and realised that perhaps even attempting to outrun that particular wave is futile. Here the New York Times profiles a bunch of different businesses working on developing the latest in labour robotics for factory floors and the like – despite the title, though, I didn’t leave this piece thinking ‘our days are numbered and I will never work again’ so much as ‘Christ, am I going to have to retrain as someone who fixes the robots? I DON’T WANT TO’, so I suppose that’s a positive of sorts.
- RCTA: ‘RCTA’, I hope you’re unaware, stands for ‘Race Change To Another’ – this article purports to raise the lid on a NEW ONLINE SUBCULTURE in which people claim to be able to alter their ‘racial characteristics’ by, you know, just WANTING IT really really hard. “Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”” This is, obviously, a mental riff on the whole longstanding otherkin-esque Tumblr sickness (see also: lucid dreaming, Tulpas, etc), and the sort of behaviour which I am increasingly convinced is just an example of kids on forums deciding to see if they can fool a bunch of clueless journalists into treating their sh1tposting as ‘A REAL THING’; honestly, if you were a 14 year old and you came to the realisation that 90% of lifestyle journalism in 2023 is seeing whatever odd internet sh1t the algorithm decides to feed you and then profiling it in all seriousness because all culture is a 2dimensional plane now then you would TOTALLY run a year 10 competition to see who could be the first to get “Thatcherpilled” into a national newspaper as a NEW YOUTH CRAZE. The alternative, of course, is that there are some people who do actually believe this, and that’s far too scary a possibility to entertain.
- Supercars for Prom: On the one hand, I don’t for a second want to make fun of the London kids profiled in this piece who have taken to celebrating their secondary school ‘prom’ by hiring influencer-style supercars to be photographed next to; on the other, there will never be anything funnier than seeing an objectively-slightly-overweight teenager who you get the feeling still gets told off for not making their bed or for talking back to Auntie posing in front of a Huracan while making gang signs.
- On Fan Entitlement: This is a really fascinating piece, exploring an increasingly-interesting and complex question – what is it, exactly, that being a ‘fan’ means in 2023, and what exactly is the relationship between object of fandom and the fans themselves, and what, exactly, are we celebrating when we say we are a ‘fan’ anyway. Riffing on the increasing number of celebrities (cf Doja Cat, etc) who have of late come out to suggest that perhaps some of the behaviour of the people who make up their fanbase is…a little unhinged, and the subsequent fan backlash against artists who are perceived to not be ‘grateful’ enough for the army of borderline-obsessives whose ‘love’ pays their bills, this is perhaps more interesting in terms of what questions lie underneath. “Historically, fans have felt entitled to celebrities because they’ve been aware that the artist is a product; they give love, dedication, money and time to artists, and they expect something in return – that’s the Faustian bargain that celebrities have to make,” runs one quote from the piece – but isn’t what fans get from the artist…the work? I wonder whether there’s something in here about the digitisation of culture – and its subsequent ubiquity, and the fact that you can in theory listen to any song by any artist at any time any where for no money, that has divorced the relationship between an artist’s work and any ‘value’ to zero in the eyes of fans, and, if so, what exactly does lie at the heart of the relationship between the two. See also this piece, about the frankly unhinged way in which BookTok has latched onto hockey players and how said hockey players and their wives are not hugely happy about being objectified like this – and the equally-unhinged response of said BookTokers when the subject of their obsessions says that maybe he might like them to leave him alone a bit.
- The Thirst Trap Chefs: A month or so ago, Facebook (yes, I know, but there are Professional Reasons why I have to use it, leave me alone) decided, for reasons known only to Maths, that I was in fact a gay man, and as such the advertising and promoted content in my feed changed…quite drastically, and OH MY DAYS did I see some eye-opening content that shows the lengths some content creators will go to to tap into the doubtless-lucrative bongo-adjacent cheesecake market (I appreciate that this will make me sound uncharacteristically-naive, but I had NO IDEA that there were knitwear brands whose whole marketing strategy seems to be ‘let’s photograph men who look like bongo actors in the scene JUST BEFORE they get totally naked and start with the sexy touching’, for example)). Anyway, that’s by way of long-winded preamble to this piece profiling a bunch of male chefs who’ve worked out that making desserts and kneading dough while topless (and, er, occasionally pretending to perform cunnilingus on a pre-baked loaf of sourdough) will bring a certain type of eyeball to your content – which, fine, more power to you, lads, but equally, per the last article, I would be VERY SCARED about some of the people for whom you’re becoming some sort of pinup.
- When Did People Stop Being Drunk?: An important investigation into when, e exactly, in recorded history everyone stopped being mostly p1ssed all the time as a result of the fact that the water would kill you and so you HAD to drink booze to stay alive. A great read, and contains wonderful historical information such as: “in the archdeacon court of Colchester there were 756 prosecutions for drunkenness between 1600-40, comprising around 2% of all offenses in the court.In an online project detailing over a hundred fatal accidents from Tudor England, we find multiple people falling drunk into ditches drains, or rivers, one of which is a priest. We also bare witness to a drunk driving accident “Edwardes had too much of the drink and drunkenly hit one of the horses with a stick so hard that it left the road and pulled the cart up a hill in the field, overturning it.”. It’s sort of funny to think that we might look back at the current era and ask “so, when did everyone start being basically stoned all the time, then?” (for me, 2020 since you ask).
- Why Does Scandinavia Love Metal?: Is it the whole ‘it’s dark for 5 months of the year’ thing? Is it the trolls? Is it a reaction to the region’s reputation for quiet, calm and order? Or is it, perhaps, a simple reaction to the fact that Scandi countries are rich and liberal and as such tend to have really excellent music teaching, meaning that loads of kids are actually really competent musicians and so are perfectly-placed to get involved with the technically-complex and often quite demanding rhythms of METAL? Or are they all just DEEPLY SATANIC? A combination of all of these things, quite possibly (oh, ok, fine, the Scandinavians are not, per se, ‘deeply Satanic’), as this interesting little article outlines – this is also just a good reminder of the fact that there are always multiple explanations available for anything, and which you choose to focus on can be an interesting and useful way of changing perspective and thinking differently (there, you can now allocate all the time you spent reading Web Curios at work this afternoon to ‘strategy and planning research’. You’re welcome!).
- Dancing With Devil Daggers: Devil Daggers is a relatively-obscure indie videogame available on PC; you probably haven’t played it (I haven’t played it), but that doesn’t matter – this piece is all about the experience of playing it, but more specifically about the very particular experience of ‘flow’ in games (or indeed anything else), and that sensation of smooth-brained oneness with ones fingers or limbs that occasionally kicks in when you’re in a state of grace, and, honestly, I LOVED the writing here and the way in which author Hayes Gelmacher describes that very particular sensation of almost weightless, frictionless DOING that very occasionally comes upon one. You really don’t need to play games to enjoy this, I promise you.
- The History of Tomb Raider: Or, specifically, the history of Core Design (the studio that developed the original) and all the people who were involved with the first game and its subsequent sequels, and how it all went sort-of wrong. This is very much an ‘inside industry’ piece, which is no bad thing – you get a very real sense for the working environments at the time, and also the (still obviously not-exactly-resolved) resentments and tensions that resulted from the combination of immense success and huge pressure and LOADS OF MONEY and also ‘being men in the 90s/00s’. If you have ever worked in or around games (or frankly in production of any sort tbh) then a LOT of this will be very familiar to you.
- How I Became A Modern Bootlegger: On being, briefly, a middle-class drug dealer in North America, ferrying weed over long distances in a rental car – this is a great piece, less about how ‘cool’ it is to sell drugs (it is not cool) and more about the very particular niche that selling weed has occupied in American culture for a few decades (a not-unreasonable part-time profession for a certain stripe of college-educated liberal, basically – if you’ve read any contemporary American fiction over the past 40 years this is a trope you are probably intimately-familiar with) and the people who occupied it, and the general concept of ‘slacking’, and, finally, the way in which the legalisation of marijuana across much of the US has quietly closed this particular loophole, for better or worse.
- Against Curation: I think the ‘c’ word as used here fell out of favour about 10 years ago, when EVERYTHING was curated and EVERYONE was a curator – here, Jonathan Nunn writes in Vittles about the way in which ‘curation’ has extended to the UK food scene, and specifically the sort of food that gets offered at festivals and ‘street food’ and ‘farmers’ markets across London and the rest of the country, and how, as a result of ‘curation’ and the flattening of culture based on a series of datapoints, this effectively amounts to an identikit procession of dishes drawn from a narrow selection: “the food options of the entire world can be portioned out into ten categories: burgers, pizza, katsu curry, burritos, mac n cheese, pasta, doughnuts, churros, hog roast and halloumi fries.” Nunn writes brilliantly about food and place and culture, and this is a typically-excellent article about what happens when, at heart, you tRuSt ThE dAtA too far.
- We Are All Animals At Night: On working nights at a ‘Gentleman’s Club’, as a dancer – this is not about ‘what it is like working as a stripper’ so much as it is ‘what it is like working nights and specifically nights in a space that marks you as being slightly different from other people, and if you’ve ever spent any extended periods working the night shift (whether in adult entertainment or otherwise) then this will resonate with you, I promise.
- One Day It Will All Make Sense: Finally this week, a truly brilliant essay by the exceptionally-talented Tabitha Lasley whose work I’ve featured in here before and here writes in Granta about an affair and being a writer and success and fear and superstition and therapy and luck and, honestly, this is a superb piece of writing and I promise it leaves you with a feeling that, perhaps, everything is going to be ok, maybe, and frankly that should be enough to recommend it to you.
By Marc Dennis
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: