I went to the seaside last weekend, to visit an old friend of mine who lives there with his partner and child, and who has an allotment, and who is pretty much the least-online person I know, and I looked at his life and thought ‘yeah, ok, fine, leaving aside the kid, I am…jealous?’
For the first time in what feels like years, I am feeling the weight of the web a bit. Not just the web, but the fact that, unfortunately, the only ways I can find to earn a living seem to involve me having to stick my face into the sewage outlet that is ‘everything happening in the world’ and emerge clutching interesting nuggets between my teeth. I found myself this week wondering about what I might do were I to suddenly decide that, actually, I don’t want to spend approximately 35h of my life a week online (conservatively). It was, frankly, a bit unsettling.
Thankfully, though, I quickly realised that removing ‘not terrible at the internet and on it all the time’ from my personal brand quickly lowers my employment prospects to ‘basically nil’, and so if I want to keep doing things like ‘eating nice lunches’ and ‘working my way towards the cirrhosis that will eventually end me’ I probably don’t have any choice but to put my face right back in that sewage outlet where it belongs. Much like an unfortunate participant in one of those appalling human centipede films, I am stitched-in unto death.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should thank your lucky stars that you spend less time online than I do.
By Melody Tuttle (all images this week via TIH)
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY NEW READERS THIS WEEK FOR, WELL, THE FACT THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS LIKE THIS, BASICALLY, PT.1:
- Trisha Code: Every now and again I find something on the web and I am struck by a) how amazing it is and how wonderful people are and how boundless and weird human creativity is; and b) why the fcuk noone else seems to be anywhere near as enthused about it as I am. Trisha Code is, honestly, one of the most exciting things I have seen in ages, but (and apologies in advance) I am probably going to have to try and explain why. So…Trisha Code is a YouTube channel, on which the creator posts a series of short (30-60s) sketch-type vignettes done using various AI tools – the channel’s been going for just under a year, and there are 50-odd videos on there, including three compilation ‘episodes’ (Trishasodes!) which, for my money, is where this really shines. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how much it is worth your time to take AT LEAST 15 minutes to watch the first compilation (and then another 15 to watch the second, and then another 15 to watch the third) – “so, Matt” I hear you ask (worryingly, I DO actually hear you ask that – the voices, they get louder and however hard I type I cannot drown them out), “what exactly is it that makes these things so ‘great’ then?” WELL LET ME TELL YOU! To be clear, the AI production techniques are in many respect the least interesting thing about these videos – they’re made using (I think) a combination of Midjourney/Flux, Runway and a few other tools, and they are pretty slick by the standards of this sort of tech…but that’s not what makes me excited. Rather, this is the first AI thing I’ve seen where the medium and the format just sort of works perfectly – the surreality of AI video and how it warps when you attempt to sustain it too long lends itself perfectly to short, quick-cut editing, which in turn informs the sketches and the songs here. Trisha’s sketches (and the compilation Trishasodes) are shortform skits – either rapping/singing (again, I LOVE the style of this – both sort-of almost good and actually quite bad, which I know doesn’t sound like a recommendation but really is one) or spoof adverts, or trailers for imagined films or TV shows, or odd little kitchen sink vignettes featuring odd monsters or aliens – and they feature an occasionally-recurring cast of supporting characters and callback gags, and I think what I like most about this is that the person making them really *gets* the format – like, not everything here works and there’s no guarantee that you will find it all (or indeed any of it) funny, but it has a flow and a feel to it that is a million times more coherent than any other AI-led video project I’ve seen, and the writing is, in the main, genuinely quite good, and it feels like a nice, Centaur-y combination of human and machine. Basically this is what I think is GOOD about AI – someone with clear ideas being able to use these tools to make something that simply wouldn’t be possible without them (and yes, I know, the planet! The burning! The artists! The copyright! But, equally, I also have no time for the (to my mind) lazy ‘oh well if it’s AI then it’s automatically evil’ argument – this is interesting creative work using interesting creative new tools, and if you can’t see that then, well, sorry, but you’re wrong). I am already going FAR too long on this and it’s 716am and OH GOD GET ON WITH IT MATT – look, if you only click ONE link this week, make it a click into the Trishaverse. In the unlikely event any TV commissioners are reading this, I 100% believe this is worth looking at (the hubris! Fcuk’s sake Matt). By the way, this link is via the superb Things I Think Are Awesome newsletter by Lynn Cherny, which, if you’ve any interest at all in the cutting edge of AI when it comes to graphics and video, is pretty much essential reading. Oh, one last thing – this is the culture humans are currently producing. Are you seriously trying to tell me this is *better*?
- Imageteller: Another interesting use of AI here – Imageteller’s a rudimentary tool which lets you feed a selection of images to The Machine and then spits out a narrative (ok, fine, we’re using that term VERY LOOSELY, but) based on those images – so you give it (say) an image of two people at a bar, a hand having a ring slipped onto its finger, a wedding day, a blissful beachside scene with two people in love, and a fiery explosion as a plane crashes spectacularly…and BOOM!, The Machine will in return give you a heartbreakingly poignant story of a honeymoon ending in tragedy. Or at least it would if it weren’t an LLM and therefore hidebound by training to pen nothing but two-bit bromides – this really falls down based on the quality of the copy, but there’s something undeniably fascinating about seeing the attempts to stitch together a coherent narrative from a selection of potentially entirely-disparate images (I tested this using a random selection of images from Curios past and let’s just say that it went quite wonky quite quickly), and I think there’s the interesting germ of an idea here in terms of the development of a rudimentary storyboarding tool.
- Goodbye Domains: One of a frankly ridiculous number of links this week I have lifted from last week’s B3ta (THANKS ROB!), Goodbye Domains is a small, surprisingly-poignant site that collects people’s memories of domains they once owned which are since expired. This is SO LOVELY, in an odd way – it’s basically just a list of urls and a small explanation of what said url was, or was intended to be, which means it’s as much a memorial to old sites that are no more as it is to ideas that never quite made it – the hobby projects that were born in a burst of enthusiasm but which didn’t ever achieve critical mass, the drunken moments of inspiration which perhaps didn’t quite merit the same degree of enthusiasm in the cold light of day…stuff like “discontinuedcereals.com – The idea was to buy and freeze a few boxes of every niche cereal brand, so that whenever a cereal was discontinued we could sell off our stock to distraught cereal lovers at a terrific markup. I was never going to actually do this, but the domain name made me happy.” Lovely bit of internet, this.
- The Planetarium: This was sent to me this week by its creator, and I confess to feeling a genuine pang of guilt that I haven’t stumbled across it over the 25 years(!!!!) it has existed. Created by David Whiteland back in 1999(!!!!!!!!), The Planetarium is a quite extraordinary thing – it’s basically an interactive puzzle story, vaguely in the same sort of thematic/vibe ballpark as Masquerade, that’s divided into 12 chapters – what’s interesting about the mechanic here is that each chapter is released to the reader on a weekly basis, meaning that there’s a necessarily slow and methodical cadence to the experience. Each chapter contains an illustration which you can click to explore more – contained within each illustration is a selection of vignettes, giving detail to what you see and slowly sketching out a small fable within which the puzzles sit. Puzzles are of the word, number and logic game variety (and I have to confess they are very much the sort of thing that I struggle with), and the solutions will give you access to NEW puzzles, and everything ladders up into a STORY-SPANNING META-PUZZLE (but, to be clear, you can still experience the story without solving the puzzles), and, honestly, this is SO beautifully constructed, a really beautiful, handmade (if you know what I mean) experience, with far better writing than it needs (there’s a certain gentle wryness to the writing which feels very much redolent of a Certain Type Of English Writing of a specific era, and which I very much enjoyed). Honestly remarkable, and even moreso for being 25 FCUKING YEARS OLD FFS.
- A New Chinese Text-to-Video Tool: I mean, you know how these work by now – this is pretty much ‘as good’ as the last couple of variants, and as such only really interesting as a ‘fcuk around and see’ toy. Oh, while we’re doing new AI bits, here’s the latest Ideogram – text-to-image with VERY GOOD text replication capabilities, and a decent photorealistic style. It’s sort-of astonishing to me how the OpenAI visual stuff is very much worst-in-class right now.
- Agents In Minecraft: Do YOU play Minecraft? Do YOU want to experiment with introducing small, blocky AI agents into your small, blocky universe? GREAT! I sadly don’t play Minecraft and so was only able to read about this rather than experience it myself – you need a copy of the software, as you might expect – but you can find details in this Twitter thread if you’re interested, and the suggestion is that you can basically just set a bunch of these lads up in a Minecraft instance and just, well, see what happens and what they get up to. There is a LOT of hype in the copy (persistent memory! Goal-oriented behaviour!), but I am personally fascinated by this emergent area of the AI space and how the agent thing develops over the next few years (please don’t quote this back to me when we’re all living in fear of the AGENT SPIES monitoring our every digital move in ~4y time).
- A Tube Map of London House Prices: While we wait for the Evening Standard to finally breathe its emphysemic, black-lunged last (so many years breathing in the smog and the soot and the grime! Poor Stanna’!) and for the Mill Group to set up their planned new local paper for the city, a few other outlets continue to attempt to fill the frankly staggering void in news and information for one of the world’s major urban centres – one is The London Spy, which this week published its Tube Map of London property prices, which neatly maps average house (or flat – you can toggle the view) prices around each tube stop on the network. Which, honestly, doesn’t make for a wholly-cheering picture – like, I’m sorry, but I live near Vauxhall and there is no way in hell that it is nice enough for the average house price to be the thick end of £700k. BUT! We all know that house prices are mad, and we all know that nothing’s going to change until more housing stock is built and something’s done about the twin scourge of landlording and Airbnbs, so while we wait for those particular porkers to get airborne then we might as well spend 5 minutes staring at property prices, getting angry and then using it as fodder for this week’s bleary-eyed conversations at soft play on Sunday morning (I have certain stereotypical expectations about what some of your lives are like, what can I say?). Also, sorry, but where the actual fcuk is ‘Shenfield’ and how is the average house price there over £800k?!?! Based on its location on the tube map IT IS PRACTICALLY IN FCUKING FRANCE FFS.
- Biceps Grotesk: A free font! Not only that, but it’s…unpleasantly, almost biologically, lumpy, a bit like those extremely fleshy Resident Evil bosses.
- Following Wildfire: An interesting project, this – it’s basically all about using machine learning/AI to analyse images posted on social media for early signs of wildfires – so, er, based on the pictures they use as examples, massive plumes of white smoke on the horizon, that sort of thing. On the one hand, using this sort of tech for pattern recognition in a large dataset of images is obviously sensible; on the other, I sort of think that by the time people are posting photographs of the aforementioned ‘massive plumes of white smoke’ on Insta, captioned with ‘wtf island is burning lol?’, then I think the pyro cat is somewhat out of the bag. Still, it’s a nicely-made website and THAT’S WHAT COUNTS.
- Internet Gradient: Another ‘multiplayer’ website – we were right! They are a trend! – which in this case lets users change the colour gradient on the webpage by clicking around. I mean, that’s literally it, but the theory is that if lots of people are online at the same time then it becomes a live, interactive, multi-directed artwork with the colours shifting and moving as the various visitors prod at their screens. Not quite as granular in terms of control as I might like, I would very much like a version of this that takes the idea a step further and links the site to a room covered in those colour-changing LED lights, so the internet could mess with people’s home decor colourscheme in realtime. Go on, one of you smart home enthusiasts (I KNOW YOU ARE READING THIS YOU LIGHTBULB PERVERTS), make it happen.
- Is My Blue Your Blue: Seeing as we’re doing colour gradients (SEAMLESS linking, there), this is a lovely little site which does that oh-so-perfect thing the web is so good at, to whit ‘reminding you that the way in which you experience the world is yours and yours alone, that shared experience is always fundamentally illusory, and that this means that, at heart, we are necessarily solitary beings who can never, ever know what it is like to Be Another’ – the site will throw up a selection of different colours and you are asked whether each is blue or green, and will, after a while, tell you whether you are a green-seeing person or a blue-seeing person, and how you compare to the rest of the world. Basically Buzzfeed’s The Dress, but for people who think in binary.
- Swype: This is iOS-only and so I haven’t been able to try it, but the TL;DR here is ‘Tinder, but for jobs!’ – yes, now you can apply the same degree of care and rigour to your search for a new job as you do to your search for a new person upon whom to dump all your neuroses (this is how relationships work, so I am led to believe)! I have NO DETAILS about this beyond what’s on the app store description – ‘Swype makes job hunting easy and effortless. Just swype right to apply for a job, and our AI agent will handle the rest. No more wasting time typing the same information over and over again.’ Beautifully, the copy goes on to say ‘You can focus on better things while Swype takes care of the applications’ which doesn’t make it sound anyone’s really that invested in the whole ‘work’ thing. Anyway, given what the job market looks and feels like at the moment you might be desperate enough to give this a go.
- Webbed Briefs: This is the webpage of a video series which posts…very occasional explainers about How Stuff On The Web Works (and other things too), all delivered with a pleasing voice-over and really rather nicely-done animations. It’s all quite geeky – recent videos include ‘what is react js?’ and ‘what are accessibility overlays?’, so it’s not exactly LOLcats over here is what I’m saying – but if you’re someone who’s trying to get their head round specific tech/coding concepts then there may be something here for you, or equally if you’re interested in video-based teaching/communication-type stuff. This is all the work of one Haydon Pickering, which is very impressive – TAKE A BOW, MYSTERIOUS STRANGER HAYDON PICKERING!
- Wonderland: Are YOU into nature? Do YOU like ‘nature journaling’? Erm, in which case, can you explain what the fcuk the term means, as I have no idea and this site doesn’t really explain it very well? Anyway, Wonderland is an international community of nature enthusiasts and nature journalers (WHAT IS IT???), and there are apps, and, as far as I can tell, this is basically just a sort of friendly community for people who like rambling, pointing at terns, that sort of thing. Here’s the description – not going to lie, a not-insignificant part of the reason I’m including this is the fact that it’s founded by someone I share a name with (HELLO, DISTANT MUIR-FRIEND! HELLO!): “Join our free, supportive, creative, and joyful global nature journaling community cofounded by John Muir Laws, an award-winning author, artist, educator, and a principal innovator in the global nature journaling movement. The Wonderland community is passionate about nature, art, science, curiosity, and wonder. We love to learn from each other, inspire each other, and have fun together in nature’s beauty while we share the joys of nature journaling.” Seriously, though, the journaling, wtaf?
- Rude Captcha: A lovely bit of creative coding and webcam use, this – a captcha that requires you to prove you’re human by swearing at your webcam. PLEASE someone, implement this on your actual website because it’s very, very satisfying telling your computer to fcuk off, turns out.
- Your Name In Landmasses: Via Friend of Curios Lee Randall, a lovely new site by NASA which uses its ridiculous database of satellite photography to let you write any word you fancy, spelled out in satellite images of lakes and the like which look vaguely like the letters you requested. There’s obviously a swear filter in there – BOO NASA! – but it’s very US-centric and as such I was able to get it to spell out ‘NONCE’ in roads and reservoirs with nary a complaint, so, well, IN YOUR FACE, SPACE PURITANS.
- Splitscreen ASCII Videos: It’s quite hard to explain this – basically it lets you apply an ASCII filter across either your webcam feed or any video you give it, which filter can be extended across however much of the width of the video you like (see? I TOLD YOU IT WAS HARD TO EXPLAIN). I can’t for the life of me thing what you would use this for, but I hope at least one of you uses it for SOMETHING.
- Microwave Too High: A subReddit dedicated to photographs of microwaves which are TOO HIGH UP. Can any North Americans reading this explain to me what the everliving fcuk is up with interior design in your country because fcuking hell some of these interiors.
By Laura Krifka
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY NEW READERS THIS WEEK FOR, WELL, THE FACT THAT THIS NEWSLETTER IS LIKE THIS, BASICALLY, PT.2:
- Chocolate Milk: ANOTHER reader submission (thankyou, by the way, I really do appreciate it when you send me stuff), this one by Jack Bewley, who writes (with a pleasing degree of consideration, I must say): “This guy has singlehandedly traveled the US and reviewed thousands of chocolate milk drinks. Looks like he’s at 1,791 tried, ranked and reviewed. Most seriously I’ve ever seen chocolate milk treated. As a fan of the drink, his reviews seem to be right on too.” I am personally not a huge fan of chocolate milk – look, it’s an Italian thing I think, in Italy chocolate milk IS Nesquik, and it’s for kids to have at breakfast or teatime and dunk biscuits into, and NOTHING ELSE – but I respect Jack’s specific knowledge and feel inclined to trust his judgement. Bookmark this page for all your chocolate milk knowledge needs. NB – he also reviews UK drinks, and awarded Frijj a pretty harsh score of 1.0, should that help you decide whether you trust this man with your lactic hydration.
- 25 and Me: The post-Harris wave of cautious optimism continues, although tempered by the slight worry that, well, it’s still VERY close, and she is yet to actually SAY anything, and it could all still go horribly wrong (please God no). One of the main vectors of fear amongst liberals of a certain stripe is PROJECT 25, the think tank vision of what ‘a robust conservative future’ looks like and which is either ‘a terrifying vision of a post-Democratic future in which Trump basically becomes God emperor’ or ‘QAnon for the libs’ depending on your perspective. Anyway, if you would like to explore some of the concepts apparently espoused in the doctrine but don’t fancy wading through several million words of tortuous wonk-prose to work out what the fcuk they might be, then someone has built this site which basically uses an LLM (Gemini, in case you’re curious) to interrogate the documentation behind the project. Don’t get too scared, it might not happen.
- Become a Judge at the Tiramisu World Cup: Brought to my attention by Former Editor Paul, there is apparently a world cup of Tiramisu’ happening in Italy in October, and they are currently accepting applications for judges. Would YOU like to go to Treviso and eat your own bodyweight in coffee, egg, mascarpone and biscuit-based dessert?GREAT! All you need to do is answer some…actually incredibly obtuse and confusing questions about the granular detail of the judging process, and keep your fingers crossed! Should any Curios readers happen to be successful in their application, may I take this opportunity to apply for the role of translator/factotum for the trip? Thanks1
- Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024: Fish, cephalopods, corals and crustacea (and a bunch of other stuff too) – these are gorgeous, and it’s worth taking the time to click through the various categories as there are more nominated images that are immediately apparent from the UX here (small gripe: why are so many of the sites accompanying these photo contests so fcuking bad at displaying the actual photos they are rewarding?). My personal favourite is the big walrus in the first set of shots, magnificent b4stard that he is, but I have a big soft spot for this one too.
- Uses This: Occasionally I think ‘wow, I’ve been doing this for a long time’ (and usually at that point do a small cry for my lost youth and wasted years and WHAT HAS THE WEB EVER GIVEN BACK TO ME, EH, WHY IS MY LOVE SO UNREQUITED) and then I come across projects like this which has been going since 2009 and I feel like a dilettante. “Uses This is a collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done” – and, yes, that’s exactly what this is. There’s a pleasing variety of people and professions, as you’d expect over the course of over 1200 interviews(!), and even though a lot of this stuff doesn’t mean much to me I can concede that there’s something rather lovely about reading about people who are very DEEP into doing something, and doing it well. If you’re a particular sort of LIFE OPTIMISING person there’s probably some useful stuff you can glean from here, if you’re willing to do a bit of spelunking.
- The RollerCoaster Database: I have definitely featured something like this before, but not, I think, this one – ALL OF THE ROLLERCOASTERS IN ALL OF THE WORLD! China has the greatest number, unsurprisingly – I have to say I think a grand tour of China’s theme parks would be a VERY good time, should anyone want to take me on one – but this really is international, covering (seemingly) every single theme park in the world outside of (I assume) North Korea. Details on each coaster vary wildly, but you can usually see at least a few pics – there’s also a page listing record-holding coasters, ranking them by drop size, top speed, etc, and I confess that it makes Alton Towers look a bit provincial by comparison. I mean, look, I have no desire to ever visit Riyadh, but LOOK AT THIS TERRIFYING BEAUTY.
- Ambiguous Words: A list of words with ambiguous meanings – “Here’s a bunch of words that, free of any other context, have a LOT of meanings. Because of this flexibility, they can be instrumental in titles for your songs, poems, stories, and jokes. Click on each word to delve deeper into these words’ meanings. The most flexible words are at the top of the list.” Potentially useful for poets, copywriters and the like, it’s also a pleasing 5 minutes for anyone who loves language. I remember having a moment of proper revelation as a kid when I read Lolita and realised that Humbert’s…ambiguous description of his honeymoon (‘I had the idiot in hysterics’) was sort of the key to much of the reading of the rest of the novel, and I adore this site.
- 10,000 Pixels: ANOTHER collaborative/multiplayer website (I told you it was a trend ffs), this is basically /r/Place but on a single URL. 10,000 pixels, each of which can be colour edited in realtime by any visitor to the page, allowing for REALTIME COLLABORATIVE PIXELART COMPOSITIONS. At the time of writing it’s all very benign and there’s no nazis or even anyone writing ‘poop’ (rare, I promise), and there’s something quite nice about just having the webpage open and seeing it change and evolve in realtime (zoom out for a proper view, it’s…slightly magical to watch, to my mind, as a bunch of strangers patiently collaborate to make things appear and disappear over time).
- Oh My Goodness: Oh wow, this is a quite incredible site. I don’t THINK it is riddled with Malware, but I appreciate that the aesthetic very much screams ‘WE ARE GOING TO INFECT YOUR PC WITH SO MUCH INCREDIBLY DODGY SPYWARE AS SOON AS YOU SO MUCH AS CLICK’ and, in general, it has almost unparalleled ‘old person who doesn’t understand the internet’ energy. What is it? It is a free greetings card site! Have you ever had an older relative who sends you ecards (RIP mother mine, you inexplicable Jacquie Lawson obsessive, you)? In which case you will get the idea – except, well, a lot of the designs here are what a certain type of online person might describe as ‘very cursed’, and there’s a weird bawdiness to the tone, and then you get to the ‘about’ copy which details the site’s history and you realise this is ANOTHER 25 year old web domain which is somehow still going (they even added ‘AI cards’ last year, astonishingly), and, well, I sort-of love this. The cards, mind, really are fcuking awful – I promise you that there is a LOT of mileage in picking one person you know (ideally not all that well) and communicating with them solely via the medium of Oh My Goodness cards for a solid week.
- Weird Little Ripple Generator Thingy: Yes, I know, but YOU click the link and then tell me what you’d have called it. See? EXACTLY. Anyway, this is a bit trippy and a bit soothing and I rather liked the fx (I suspect it’s also quite nicely coded, though I am too much of a luddite to be able to actually tell).
- Reflect Orbital: I can’t quite work out how I feel about this. As far as I can tell, this company is putting a bunch of massive mirrors in space which it is then going to use to reflect sunlight down to the surface of the Earth, directing it very precisely so as to enable the continued production of solar energy via panels even at times when it ought to be night – which, tentatively, sounds like an incredible idea, extending the potential productivity of solar energy by a huge amount. Except, also, I have seen and read enough vaguely-dystopian scifi to be able to ALSO imagine the ways in which this could be used to effectively torture entire populations with FOREVERDAYLIGHT, or (and, ok, I appreciate my grasp of physics here is perhaps not exactly ‘robust’, but still) maybe BURN A CITY LIKE ANTS IN A MAGNIFYING GLASS, and now I don’t quite know what to think. It is quite frankly a remarkable idea, but I would quite like someone who understands this stuff to explain to me whether it is indeed A Good Thing or whether it’s in fact A Bad Thing (or, perhaps more likely, whether attempting to define everything as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a fundamentally fcuking stupid approach to life that I really ought to grow out of).
- Citroen 2CV Brochures from the 1970s: I mean, what more do you need to know? The brochures are actually fascinating from a design/style point of view, even if you’re not a Citroen obsessive like the owner of this website (I don’t think they would mind me describing them as such). If you are, though, then this is basically REALLY filthy bongo.
- Fantasy Name Generators: ‘Fantasy’ in the ‘swords and sorcery’ sense rather than the ‘erotic reverie’ sense, although perhaps for some of you the two overlap to a degree. Anyway, if you’re a D&D player and need to quickly spin up a bunch of convincing-sounding names for, say, a bunch of half-orcs or a dwarven encampment, then you might find this interesting – if nothing else, the insane granularity you can apply here suggests someone somewhere has REALLY studied all the class guides closely. This is VERY niche, but might please some of you – and if not, it’s worth a click through and a quick play, because if nothing else a lot of the names it seems to throw up are pleasingly multisyllabic and ‘chewy’, if you have the same sort of vague word-synesthesia as I do.
- The Lesbian Bar Project: Remarkably this is the second bit of BRANDED CONTENT to feature in consecutive weeks, and the second which I looked at and thought ‘you know what, this is…quite good!’ – although I’m not sure that it will do much to shift the brand position of Jaegermeister from ‘the medicinal stuff wot REAL LADS do shots of’’. Still, it’s a really interesting project which has been going for 4 years now, and which started as a Jaeger-sponsored PSA airing in the US to raise awareness of the fact that lesbian bars across the country were dying out, and which has pivoted into being what the homepage tells me is “an EMMY and GLAAD Award-winning documentary series, which tells the stories of lesbian queer bars from around the world.” Without watching any of the docs I can’t vouch for their quality, but the awards *seem* like a positive endorsement and in general I am very much in favour of the idea of something like this, where a brand effectively helps document a culture and preserve it rather than instead attempting to brand its fcuking logo all over said culture’s face.
- Wall Town Wonders: I’m personally not really a VR person – I find the helmets cumbersome, and I will need better and more immersion before I’m ready to eschew the comfort of my chair and my gamepad. That said, this forthcoming title for the Meta Quest looks ABSOLUTELY AMAZING – it’s basically a small steampunk townbuilder thing, where you construct a city of buildings which…sort of get built into the actual walls of wherever you’re playing, and which contain ACTUAL TINY PEOPLE living ACTUAL TINY LIVES, and, honestly, if you’re the sort of person who’s ever thought ‘actually having the Borrowers as pets would be pretty cool’ then you will fall slightly in love with this.
- Black Screens: From the FAQ: “Just a black screen display that fills your entire screen, creating a dark surface that you can control. This tool also can create and download any size black screen wallpaper image.” I genuinely have no idea AT ALL why this exists, or indeed why anyone would need the parallel service on the site of a 15 minute video that is nothing but…a blank screen, but, well, I have no idea who you are and so perhaps YOU will be the person who can explain it to me. Anyone?
- The USC SFX Archive: Sound effects! So many of them! Some from the 30s and 40s, some more recent, but this is a HUGE trove of samples and clips – in particular there are a bunch from old cartoons which would be PERFECT as hiphop samples, but, honestly, this is a staggeringly rich collection on the Internet Archive.
- Dogelon Mars: I think – and there’s been some pretty stiff competition over the past few years – that this MIGHT be the single lamest crypto/NFT/web3 thing I have ever seen. It contains the usual word salad complete with vague promises of ‘massive gameplay’ and ‘fungible digital goods’, and even goes so far as to make the following genuinely risible claim: “Dogelon Mars is creating a metaverse set on Mars, by integrating AI to create an immersive and interactive virtual experience. Our goal is to redefine how communities interact, build, and engage in digital spaces.” YES MATE OF COURSE YOU ARE NOW EXPLAIN WHAT THE FCUK THOSE WORDS MEAN! But, of course, the lamest thing of all is the name – I’m slightly of the opinion that anyone who gets suckered into this deserves everything they get. I mean, honestly, who can read this sentence and claim to understand what it is meant to be saying? “Scheduled to launch in Q3 2024, “Dogelon: Land on Mars” aims to provide users with new opportunities to explore, create, and interact within a Martian-themed environment. By leveraging AI and the efficiency of Rufus L2, Dogelon Mars is set to offer a unique experience that aligns with our mission of exploring new digital frontiers.” NO FCUKER, etc.
- Family Fortunes Generator: You just got the ‘NEH-NERRH’ sound in your head, didn’t you? ADMIT IT. Anyway, this website lets you generate your very own Family Fortunes answer card, so you can set the category of thing (‘types of firearm’, say, or ‘ways to kill yourself’, and the answers you want to appear, and LO! Welcome to an exciting new world of low-stakes memetic fun. I think, with a bit of work and a well-honed central bit, you could over time bully someone to the point of tears with these.
- SceneWise: This is a theoretically fun game which I found a touch too easy to be really compelling – you have to rearrange the six images, each of which is an individual frame from a film, into chronological order, which sounds tricky but given you get six goes and the tiles lock into place as soon as you get them right is actually pretty easy to get right simply by guessing at random (which is what happens to me, as obviously I have no fcuking idea what any of these films are). Still, cinephiles might enjoy this.
- Crucig: As a wordcel, though, this one I really do like. A small daily word puzzle where you have to solve both horizontal and vertical clues – it’s not hard, but it does that weird thing where it made me feel vaguely like I was using different bits of my brain simultaneously, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach.
- One-Page RPG Jam 2024: An absolute motherlode of one-page RPGs for you to play, should you be into that sort of thing. Some of these are games, some are what feel more like personal acts of meditation or reflection, some are designed to be played in company while others are entirely solo experiences…there is a LOT in here if you’re willing to explore.
- Graphs: The website shows you a graph tracking two variables over time – your job is to pick which of the four options said graph is depiction. Very much from the school of ‘correlation is not causation’ and quite interesting in a gentle, very geeky sort of way.
- A Castle Built From Random Rooms: Finally this week, a charming little CYOA-style adventure which combines a light degree of surreality and self-reflexiveness with surprisingly deep mechanics (I particularly enjoyed the persistence of certain choices across the narrative) and a huge degree of replayability – this is basically a text-adventure roguelike, where each time the rooms you’re trying to traverse change in terms of layout, contents and the like, and where no two playthroughs will ever be the same, and there are a bunch of different endings, and, honestly, this is just a really good way of passing 30m while you wait for something more interesting to happen to you.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Girls of the Internet Museum: This is nine years dormant, but it is SUCH a perfect time capsule of a certain era – the aesthetic, the discussions about webart and self and sexuality and presentation…I got a proper hit of digital nostalgia here, and I think this site will be a real madeline for you should you be of a particular era/persuastion.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS IS, ODDLY, EMPTY!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- People Aren’t Posting: We;ve been having the ‘social media (or at least this era of it) is DYING!’ conversation for a few years now, accelerated since That Fcuking Man bought Twitter, but it feels timely again given the latest round of reasons to leave X and the simultaneous lack of any real, meaningful boom in any of the alternatives (yes, I know people have ‘flocked’ to Bluesky…but actually most of them really haven’t; yes, people are signed up to Threads…but I am yet to meet anyone who finds it a pleasant or useful place to spend time, and without news it’s dead to me). This piece is a good overview of the whys, and does a better job of most that I’ve read of articulating the mechanical reasons as to them – it’s a decent overview of incentives and burdens inherent in a network, and how unbalancing those two factors can fatally wreck a posting ecosystem, and basically boils down to this: “Apps like Instagram are split into two separate platforms for two separate groups of people: a social connector and an entertainment media center. The goal is to balance incentive enough for the latter to ensure there is enough fodder for the former” and this: “Since social media is now more aligned with digital video entertainment platforms, the act of posting is arguably more aligned with work rather than leisure, while the act of consuming is more aligned with being entertained and, therefore, sold to rather than offering connection.” This is smart and worth a read if you’re interested in how communities and incentives and power networks function, in both theory and practice.
- John Lanchester on Markets and Value: I will include pretty much anything Lanchester writes for the LRB about money, markets and late-stage capitalism – he’s not only a superb writer (I have said this before, but ‘The Debt to Pleasure’ is one of my favourite ever novels and one you really should read) but he’s also got a rare ability to explain concepts that ordinarily I find not only hard but STAGGERINGLY BORING in a way that makes them comprehensible and interesting. Here he does a combined review of two books about modern finance, the first a profile of one of the world’s most successful hedge funds and the second the autobiography of a now-reformed City trader, which allows him to offer a range of reasonably-digestible series of explanations as to How This Stuff Works and Why It Might Be Better For Everyone Not Directly Involved In Making Violent Bank From Such Systems If They Didn’t In Fact Work That Way. It’s quite hard to read this without getting a *bit* annoyed at how much of this stuff seems designed less to aid ‘value creation’ and more to aid ‘specific men at specific companies becoming plutocratically rich’, basically, and if you’re not 10% more left-wing by the end then I really don’t know what to do with you.
- That ‘AI and Art’ Essay Everyone’s Talking About: Ted Chiang’s written several well-shared pieces talking about AI over the past few years, largely focusing on the creative output side of things – this essay has been EVERYWHERE this week, largely as a result of a title (“Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art”) which is being wrongly interpreted as “You can’t make art with AI”, which is very much NOT what Chiang is saying. Broadly speaking I agree with some of the points he makes, specifically about the requirement for art to have an element of intentionality which is necessarily absent from anything made by (current generative) AI being as all it is is maths, and maths cannot have intent. Equally, though, Chiang concedes that artists have made, are making, and will continue to make, work *in conjunction with* non-intentional systems, and that these works are perfectly capable of being considered as ‘art’. Basically I think this piece is a storm in a teacup – all Chiang is saying is that The Machine cannot alone be considered to make art because of the lack of intentionality embodied in its making, but that that does not preclude intentional entities (ie us) from using the outputs of AI to create work that is very intentional indeed (and here we circle all the way back to what I was saying about Trisha Code all those many thousands of words ago – see, SEAMLESS ffs).
- Post-Apocalyptic Education: Ethan Mollick is back again with another measured ‘where we are with this stuff’ on AI, this time as it relates to education and particularly university education. Mollick’s a professor and so has a particular special interest in this – his point, that the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to students using GenAI and that as such it makes sense for educators to start to think of ways you can teach said students about how to maybe use these tools to augment, rather than replace, their studies, is a sensible one, and worth reading if you’re a parent worried that your kid’s going to fail their GCSEs because they’re getting ChatGPT to write all their coursework (that is not why they are going to fail – they are going to fail because of YOUR subpar genetic material!).
- Why LLMs Aren’t Quite Modelling Language: Ok, this is quite knotty but reasonably-accessible and it touches on issues I’ve mentioned in here before about language, consciousness, embodiment and LLMs, and why their relationship to language is possibly different (and less intimate) than we might have initially assumed – rather than attempt to summarise, I am going to take the lazy way out and paste a couple of reasonably-explicatory paras: “The problem is that one of the more modern branches of cognitive science sees language as a behavior rather than a big pile of text. In other words, language is something we do, and have done for hundreds of thousands of years. The approach taken by Birhane and her colleagues is to understand human thought in terms that are “embodied” and “enacted.” “The idea is that cognition doesn’t end at the brain and the person doesn’t end at the the skin. Rather, cognition is extended. Personhood is messy, ambiguous, intertwined with the existence of others, and so on,” she said.”
- How Do You Change A Chatbot’s Mind?: To be clear, I think this is a bad and badly-written article penned by someone who, based on the bodying he received for his last piece on AI, I would have expected to still be hiding somewhere, licking his wounds and reading up on how this sh1t actually works. Kevin Roose – for it is he, the man who wrote that risible piece about how he got freaked out because a chatbot said it loved him – writes for the New York Times about how the latest versions of ChatGPT et al will now, when asked about him, be less than complimentary. Roose seems to ascribe this to them having ‘learned’ that he has ‘doubts’ about them, and seems to spin it into some sort of vaguely-Roko’s Basilisk (sorry for dooming you there!) adjacent situation where he wants to change their mind ahead of their inevitable takeover of everything…look, this is all very dumb, and borderline-irresponsible reporting, to my mind (I think the NYT shouldn’t publish essays that make this stuff sound sentient or magical!), but about halfway through it segues into slightly more interesting territory, as Roose starts talking to the new wave of AI SEO consultants (just as mendacious, just as shady, twice as expensive!) and you get a glimpse of how many people are going to make quick back developing ‘AI ingestion-resistent content strategies’. Go on, quick, register the consultancy, buy the url and spin up the website, there are idiots to fleece!
- The NaNoWriMo AI Controversy: This week’s big ‘GAH THE INTEGRITY OF ART IS BEING FCUKED BY THE MACHINE’ is on one hand a bit depressing and on the other very funny. The depressing bit is that the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo – you know, that thing where people decide to write a terrible, unreadable, unpublishable novel within a 30 day timespan) people this week released a statement saying that they would be fine with people using AI to write said terrible, unreadable novels – WHICH SORT OF RATHER DEFEATS THE FCUKING PURPOSE OF A NOVEL WRITING INITIATIVE SEEING AS THERE WOULDN’T IN FACT BE ANY WRITING HAPPENING. They even went so far as to call opposition to AI ‘ableist’, which, well, fcuking hell. This 404 Media piece does a decent job of outlining the controversy – and NaNoWriMo’s subsequent ‘clarification’ of their position, but to my mind the funny bit is that, well, NaNoWriMo as an entity/organisation is no stranger to some beef, as evidenced by this astonishingly petty and detailed document, and what I want to know is how the everliving fcuk does an initiative which, to be clear, is about nothing more than saying ‘hey, why not try writing a whole book one November? Might be fun!’ has managed to be THIS messy. I am possibly being unfair, but I feel that the NaNoWriMo people have very strong ‘polycule energy’ if you see what I mean.
- The Doc Web: Jay Springett writes about the beauty of collaborative documents, and the idea of ‘working in the shop window’, and I partly just really like the thinking in here about how this might work as collaborative/performative work: “Here’s the idea: Once a month. A group of authors and contributors come together for a live writing session, jamming in Google Docs. Maybe we stream the Zoom call on Twitch, allowing viewers to watch the new issue evolve in real-time – perhaps even contributing comments and suggestions in the document. This would transform the act of writing and publishing into a performance—a shared experience that blends the roles of creator and audience. As well as making the production of each webzine fun.” Would you like me to open up the Curios draft so you can watch me type this shit in realtime? No, of course you fcuking wouldn’t, shut up Matt.
- This Summer, Everything Was Marketing: You might read this headline and think ‘only this Summer?’ and then sigh and cry a bit, but it’s a broadly-interesting look at how this year really has felt like the apogee of the ‘zeitgeist chewed up by the global brand ecosystem and digested and fed to us again as the vomited up remains of said zeitgeist’ thing, and how the pace of it is getting A BIT MUCH. “It’s 2024 and every man with a strong nose is a hot rodent boyfriend, every situationship is diabolical, and every girl is demure. Brat the album will stand up on the basis of our individual relationships to it, but Brat the concept has been run into the ground. This is the way of everything now. From the “auras” on display at the Olympics to the coconut tree comments of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, the language of social media is increasingly the first point of entry to culture and politics, creating a mythology that informs the subject rather than the other way around. In other words: everything is marketing and nothing matters.”
- Securing the Viral Bag in 2024: With the news that FellatioGirl (I refuse to use the other nickname because it is too ugly to type) is launching a podcast under the Paul umbrella (fair play, the title is very good), and the recent story about the ‘demure, mindful’ woman struggling to secure the copyright on her viral catchphrase, this is an interesting piece about how ‘creators’ (sorry, but I feel…angry about being forced to use that word to describe someone who has found fame thanks to her ability to onomatopoeically describe the act of giving sloppy head – no shade to Miss Welch who seems like a nice enough young woman, but ‘creator’?) these days have to move fast to secure the proceeds of their 15 minutes. I like to imagine Antoine Dobson reading this somewhere (hopefully somewhere warm and comfortable) and smiling to himself.
- Google Forms Dating: I had heard that people were using Google Forms as means of finding and screening potential partners, but I confess that the additional hack of then chucking a bit of ad spend behind the link to promote it to your local postcodes was new to me and is sort of brilliantly depressing. IS THERE NO FACET OF OUR LIVES ADVERMARKETINGPR CANNOT INVADE? No, seemingly not. Anyway, this is a decent overview of the latest nadir in the modern dating landscape and made me momentarily miserable until I realised that I am so old that none of this sh1t is ever going to apply to me again and I should instead just sit and wait quietly for lonely death.
- The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes: Nolen Royalty – he of TINY AWARD-WINNING website One Million Checkboxes, writes a genuinely heartwarming (if slightly-geeky) tale of how his webproject got hacked by kids in a genuinely lovely way. This honestly gave me a proper sense of ‘the kids are alright!’, which doesn’t often happen these days – this is SO creative, seriously.
- Burgers: This is a New York Times piece about burgers – specifically, about 11 variations across the US that ‘make the burger great’ – and I am including it mainly because OH MY GOD do these look good, and read well, and this basically made me want to inhale about seven minced cows at once. Can someone take a look at this and PLEASE tell me where I can get a decent burger in London that doesn’t involve me having to a) queue or b) watch some awful cnut’s TikTok to find the location? Serious request.
- Countess Bathory: I have always had a soft spot for the Bathory story, but had always assumed that it was either entirely or mostly-confected – turns out, though, that there’s a grisly core of truth to the whole thing and that an awful lot of young women did disappear and die in and around her residence in 1600s Hungary. Questions remain, though, about whether it was Bathory doing the killing, and why – this piece doesn’t answer them, but it’s a fascinating look at both the history and the resulting mythos. It also contains some fabulous details, including this one – whatever you say about People Of Past Times, it is undeniably true that they were endlessly, brilliantly inventive when it came to inventing novel ways of offing people: “Violent public executions were commonplace in Hungary during her childhood, and stories tell of a young Báthory witnessing a man being stitched into a horse while still alive.” READ THAT LAST BIT BACK AGAIN. THAT’S RIGHT.
- The Rise of Pirated Medicine: This is a nice callback piece – about 6 or seven years ago I featured a longread in here about biohacking collective Four Thieves, who were playing around with CRISPR and related technologies to effectively work out how to fix their own bodies at low cost (you may be unsurprised to learn that this motivation arose from them being North American and realising that, say, ‘getting cancer’ is a really fcuking expensive proposition) – this is an update on the collective, their work, and what they are now able to do, and it is both inspirational and vaguely-terrifying and ought to make you quite angry about how the Pharma industry works and what it charges (and yes, I know, R&D costs! But equally I was once told by someone senior at Pfizer that these days their marketing budgets significantly outweigh the research spend, so, well, fcuk them and their profit margins into the sun).
- In Search of Lost Time, lol: Ok, this is a single note gag but for some reason it has repeatedly made me laugh quite a lot this morning (overtired, as per), and as such I share it with you – this is a link to a GDrive containing a PDF of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’, in all its many thousands of pages, the only difference from the original being that each and every sentence ends in ‘lol’. Which, it turns out, does radically alter the tenor and general vibe of a classic – honestly, can someone build something that will automatically Lolify any ebook in your collection? Please? It’s like stick-on googly eyes for prose.
- WTF Is The River Cafe Podcast?: Podcasts are, basically, sh1t, aren’t they? Not ALL podcasts, obvs – I went to a recording of this one last night which was actually excellent, and, should you be interested in hearing my horrible, too-fast voice, I even appeared on one earlier this week – but as a rule they can fcuk off (I am just bitter at how much I know Alastair Cambell and Rory Stewart earn from TRIP). In this piece in Vittles, Simran Han goes in on the River Cafe podcast (WHY DOES IT HAVE A PODCAST?!?!?! I *bet* whoever’s doing the production and editing on this is fleecing them like nobody’s business), where Ruth(ie) Rogers interviews a cavalcade of VERY A-List guests about, er, food, I think, and how ace the River Cafe is – I think this does a very good job of articulating why, as a rule, I would like the medium to die, and it’s very funny, and despite everything I’ve written in the preceding 150 words it made me quite want to listen to an episode damn them.
- I Am Having A Really Hard Time: I have no idea how I found this, or who J Keenan (the author is), but I thought it was a lovely little bit of writing, a semi-stream-of-consciousness about fear and death and friendship and loss, and it stayed with me all week and maybe it will with you too.
- Oath To The Queen: Xiaolu Guo writes in Granta about the process of ‘becoming English’, taking the citizenship test, about how ideology manifests differently in different countries and how it’s seen and how symbols are interpreted and how, perhaps, a current global giant looks at a previous one, with a degree of curious pity. “As I exited the exam room, I had little hope that I would pass. Deep down I think my lack of preparation was not just laziness, or merely the product of preoccupation with other things, but also resistance. There was something about the implicit pride in a supposed thousand years of monarchy, and the parliamentary system – which few I suspected understood – that made me feel ill at ease. It was the same syndrome as The Archers. I was just being introduced to the cultural symbols and motifs of the United Kingdom. People learn the history of kings and queens just like we learn fairy tales or consume the latest soap operas. And what for? It’s all about instilling the collective wisdom of the ruling classes, yet done in the most bland and innocuous way.”
- In Search of Circus Europa: I’ll be honest, I’ve never really thought of Switzerland as a place where interesting things happen – there’s a reason P&G, home to the blandest corporate drones ever vat-grown in a lab, have their home there, after all. Then I read this piece, about Basel’s lunatic-sounding three-day carnival, and I want to go SO MUCH. This is honestly such a good piece of writing – about circus and carnival and performance and folklore and community and all sorts besides, which more than anything evokes a powerful sense of the ODD; there’s something incredibly Midsommar-ish about the atmosphere of this piece (no, really), which will make me very disappointed should I ever visit this carnival and not get, I don’t know, abducted by some sort of pagan goat creature.
- This Is Not A Eulogy: Finally this week, notes on a friendship, notes on a suicide. I thought this was beautiful. “If this were fiction, I’d set the following scene in a restaurant with a view of the park, the two of us cozied in a velvet banquette, me studying the sprinkling of freckles on her nose revealed in the late afternoon light, crème fraiche and martinis coating our words. Instead, it happened over the phone: she asked me if I wanted to come with her. She’d been saving up pills and was sure her supply had reached overkill. She’d reserved a room at The Paramount, the Philippe Starck place du moment conveniently located only two blocks from my apartment, and said she’d buy champagne too, the good stuff. She was living off her mom’s insurance money. “We lie down, side by side on the bed. On it, not under the covers, that’s important. Then we’re falling, and neither of us will ever be alone.””
By Guy Vording
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: