Webcurios 07/06/24

HELLO EVERYONE!

Ordinarily I use the bit at the top here for some p1ss-weak attempt at topical satire or an op-ed, but I hope you will forgive me this week for giving it over to some MINOR SELF-PROMOTION.

Kris and I are once again running The Tiny Awards in 2024! TELL THE WORLD! In case you have managed to somehow wipe the memory of last year’s edition from your minds, the Tiny Awards is our attempt to spotlight some of the brilliant, weird, heartfelt, curious, creative, poetic, beautiful, pointless websites that people all around the world make and which tend not to be surfaced by algorithmic feeds because they’re not FCUKING VIDEOS (have I mentioned how fcuked off I am about the ubiquity of video as the dominant medium of our age? I really am, you know).

As with last year, we’re running nominations for the next few weeks – so PLEASE submit sites you like, whether your own work or those of other people, because the more there are the better, and the better the final shortlist (decided upon by an ESTEEMED PANEL OF JUDGES from around the world), and one of these sites will win £500 and a SMALL HANDMADE TROPHY (and there’s another £300 prize for the best ‘multiplayer’ website too!).

Noone gets rich from this, there’s no desire to turn this into something massive, it’s just something we thought was a nice thing to do and we hope you do too. If you know communities that might find this interesting, or people who might like the idea, then please share it with them – you don’t HAVE to, obviously, but think of it as a small thankyou to me for, er, writing an overlong, self-indulgent newsletter that literally noone in the world ever asked for every Friday morning.

Ok, that’s the end of the self-indulgence, you can fcuk off and click the links now.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you want to tell everyone you know, don’t you? Yes you do.

By Edu Monteiro

WE START THIS WEEK WITH THE SUPERB NEW ALBUM BY MACHINE DRUM WHICH IS AN EXCELLENT COLLECTION OF HIPHOPDRUMNBASSBREAKSTYPESTUFF AND VERY MUCH WORTH YOUR TIME! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE YOU TO PLEASE TELL ANYONE WHO MIGHT CARE ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS BECAUSE THEY ARE A GOOD THING, PT.1:

This is from Twitter in 2017. 2017!!! Do you ever think about the universe and how altered it might be if one single event had gone differently? I often dream of a world in which that plane crash had been fatal.  

A SURPRISINGLY-EXCELLENT PLAYLIST OF MODERN GERMAN MUSIC, NOW (SORRY, GERMANS, BUT ALSO, WELL, YOU UNDERSTAND, RIGHT?), EXPERTLY COMPILED BY GERMANOPHILE FORMER EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE YOU TO PLEASE TELL ANYONE WHO MIGHT CARE ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS BECAUSE THEY ARE A GOOD THING, PT.2:        

• Space Explorer: This is SO CUTE! Steve Gardner has made a little website that explains how you can, er, make a small website where the interface is a spaceship flying around an interacting with various on-page elements – so you can move the ship around the page, which explains how various things work (objects, movement, inertia, interactivity, etc) and then gives you the opportunity to remix the page or to make your own – this is a LOVELY piece of interactive tutorialising (no, it IS a word, fcuk you) and personally I would like to see more websites that have this sort of (entirely pointless and somewhat-overengineered interface). Just like…
• Dolce Activation: A LUXURY WEBSITE! With a truly appalling url – seriously, Dom and Stef, could you not have bought a better domain? Still, I forgive them because while the site itself is dull as fcukery the style and interface is GORGEOUS – you navigate by moving a little Vespa around a map of Rome, with your goal being to find a selection of monuments which in turn let you access EXCITING PRODUCT INFORMATION about various bits of D&G tat. To be clear, this is an objectively terrible way to experience what is, at heart, a very content-lite website – it’s slow, inefficient and you will inevitably be a bit disappointed by what you eventually get served when you ‘uncover the secrets’. BUT! The art style is gorgeous – sort of cel-shaded, which you don’t see often enough in webdesign if you ask me – and YOU ARE DRIVING A TINY VESPA AROUND ROME!!! Oh, by the way, if you have the time I also recommend looking at the playlists that they have included here to publicise the perfumes they’re flogging, which I think are the most appallingly-generic attempts at ‘musical curation’ I have ever seen and which made me actually lol at the thought of there being some sort of ‘cool consultant’ behind the decision to fill a mix with the EDGY SOUNDS of, er, Drake and Jack Harlow and Skrillex.
• TrippyTunesTV: Ooh, this is cool – a 24/7 stream of dance music of various kinds (when I’ve logged on this week at various points it’s been psytrance –  look, I LIKE IT – and breakbeat and at the time of writing it’s playing d’n’b) with an accompanying visualiser that’s all generated and animated by AI. Not sure of what the workflow is here, but the description on the page says: “this is the output of my computer god image creator – it uses much gpu (a whole 4090) and much cpu (a whole 14900ks) to make weird pictures somewhat synchronized to the musical entertainment to serve as a demonstration of the powers of our future ai overlords.” This is…weirdly hypnotic, I have to say – the machine occasionally gets ‘stuck’ in odd loops of ‘thought’ (not thought), and it’s fascinating seeing it move from image style to image style and interpolate between them, and I think this would look ace on a big screen.
• Het Archief: Speaking of dance music and clubbing, this is incredible and a proper slice of musicultural history (well, Dutch musicultural history, at least). De School was a space in Amsterdam which for 8 years was a sort of arts and cultural centre that hosted artists, musicians, club nights and collectives, and which shut in January this year – this website is a frankly astonishing archive of audio from that period, capturing sets and club nights from across genres over the entirety of 2016-24. “On January 15, 2024, De School closed its doors for the very last time. From a first Friday night in 2016 until the 66-hour grand finale, Amsterdam’s former technical school functioned as an ever-evolving space, with at its core the steadfast pulse of a club. Infused with new life, the labyrinthian building—lest we forget: derelict classrooms, pitch-black basement, blossom-kissed garden, checkered cubicles, highway-like hallways—became a temporary home for the interlocked wonder of music, art, and culture. A blueprint for countless special people to forge countless special days, nights, and the blur beyond time. Het Archief, which you have just entered, translates eight years of club history into an expansive sound archive. Eight years of recordings are indexed, escape the walls, and finally see the light of day. Het Archief is a time capsule for the present and future, and an open-ended zone to remember through sound.” Seriously, if you are into techno this is a fcuking MOTHERLODE – and even if you’re not, there is SO MUCH in here to explore and listen to.
• Stompers: Over the years I’ve featured a variety of ‘gamified fitness’-type apps, none of which have ever achieved the same degree of success or profile as the OG version Zombies Run! – Stompers is another in similar vein, but which feels a but more fun and silly than some of the previous iterations, a bit like a sort of ‘Mariokart with your mates, but for step counts’ – basically you create an avatar and compete in daily step goal challenges with your friends…but there are powerups! And debuffs! And it all feels sort of fun and dumb and playful, which might make it the sort of thing that’s fun to do with your family or groupchat. Or not – I’m basically fcuked if I understand anything about the compulsion to exercise, if I’m entirely honest with you.
• Alt Text Selfies: This is rather beautiful and occasionally poignant and a tiny bit sad. A series of paragraph-length self-descriptions, designed to invoke the alt-text one might apply to a photograph, the idea being to create a non-visual representation of the self: “For us, an alt text selfie is any written self-portrait. This project takes a well-known practice—the selfie—and approaches it through a disability lens. Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but to us, an alt text selfie doesn’t need to center visual presentation or a literal description of an image. Alt text selfies might focus on feelings, smells, tastes, sounds, emotions, textures, or some combination. Alt text selfies can be any length, but for this project, we focused on writing in the one-sentence to one-paragraph range…Selfies and self-descriptions are often visually focused, but, to us, an alt text selfie doesn’t need to center around visuals, or literally describe an image. As the selfies gathered on this website exemplify, alt text selfies can blend smell, taste, touch, sound, and more. At their core, alt text selfies are an access practice, tools for connecting across sensory experiences and distance.” Do take a moment to read through a selection of the pieces here – they’re all bitesized, and some of them are quite arrestingly beautiful.
• Shade Map: I think I’ve featured something similar in Curios a few years back, but the site wasn’t as nice as this one – ShadeMap does exactly what the title suggests, which is, er, show you where the shade will fall, anywhere in the world, at any given time of day. Which, honestly, is fcuking mental when you think about it. You can select the date and time at the bottom of the page, which means you can use this for all sorts of useful purposes – planning walks in such a way as to ensure you’ll be in the sunshine more often than not, or conversely for ensuring that you’re not exposed to the TERRIFYING BURNING ORB more than you absolutely have to be (don’t worry, goths, I see you), or for planning any outdoor/experiential thing which might benefit from sun or shade…in fact it feels like there’s probably some quite fun outdoor installation work you could do with this, playing with where shadows and light fall at different times of day, which I would quite like one of you who’s significantly more artistically and creatively inclined than I am to think about some more, please.
• MemoryLane: To be clear, this is a grift and a BAD PRODUCT and I do not endorse it at all – but it feels like there’s an idea here that someone else (a charity, for example) could improve significantly. MemoryLane is a ‘tell The Machine your memories and it will turn them into a book which we will then print for you’ service, except it’s run as a £20 a month subscription service which makes no sense at all except from the point of view of parting gullible people with their money – that said, I think there’s something quite nice about the concept, and with a bit more care (and a significantly-less-aggressive pricing model) and maybe the ability to speak to The Machine rather than just type, this could be quite a cool service for, say, Age UK, or the Alzheimer’s Society.
• Sonicity: Various cities from around the world, interpreted as audio based on specific information about them (temperature, elevation, population, etc) – this is a standard ‘convert data to sounds!’ project, but I quite like the way it results in each of the cities having quite a distinct audio profile, which in itself sounds like a CLEVER CREATIVE IDEA for certain types of brand, should you be in the market for such a thing. London sounds sh1t, I am sad to say – POOR LONDON.
• MusicLawyerAI: This seems like…a legitimately good use of AI! With no apparent downsides! Apart, of course, from the possibility that it might give you bullsh1t information (or, perhaps, that it’s an early death-knell for a particular type of lawyering – although your opinion of whether or not that is in fact A Bad Thing will obviously depend on the degree to which you think that commercial lawyers are a category deserving of preservation – I am keeping my own counsel on this one). MusicLawyer lets you plug in your contract, at which point the AI will analyse it and, apparently, tell you exactly how it’s fcuking you, to five decimal places – but, obviously, I don’t have any music contracts to hand to test it with, and even if I did I’m no lawyer and so would have no idea whether The Machine was in fact offering a decent analysis or whether it was just making sh1t up left right and centre – which, I suppose, is the problem. Still, it’s free, and I would be intrigued to hear from anyone who tries it about whether it actually seems to deliver the goods.
• Life In Jars: When I was a kid, someone I was at school with (no, really – this isn’t one of those euphemistic anecdotes where ACTUALLY IT WAS ME; I want to stress this very much WASN’T me, for the avoidance of doubt) decided to see what would happen if they left a jar of their own p1ss in a cupboard in one of the history classes over what turned out to be an unusually hot summer – turns out what happens is that it turns into a very weird black sludge and causes not-inconsiderable consternation in the member of staff who opens it curiously come September. Which is by way of only-slightly-tenuous introduction to this YouTube channel, in which a bloke looks at what happens when you leave water in jars for a while and then look at it under a microscope. SO MUCH LIFE! SO MUCH TEEMING, TINY LIFE! This is brilliant YouTubing – educational, entertaining, a tiny bit weird/gross…also, it’s not just ‘stuff in jars’, there’s a lot of other nature/science content on the channel which is very much worth an explore. Still, though, STUFF IN JARS!
• Museum Artefacts in Fortnite: I really like this – this is a set of Twitter videos showing how various museums are experimenting with integrating 3d scans of elements from their collections into Fortnite maps, as a light-touch way of introducing, for example, ACTUAL DINOSAUR SKELETONS to kids as a natural part of the in-game experience (there’s one vid in here which shows a player mining in-game, and as they do so uncovering a scan of a real-life triceratops skeleton which is a perfect example). This just struck me as a really smart way of ‘meeting your audience where they are’, and of using digitised collections in creative fashion.
• Cartwheel: This feels like a useful thing for any of you into 3d animation – Cartwheel is an AI-enabled platform that’s designed to let you create first pass animations to any character you feed it through text prompting. So, for example, you upload your character created in Blender or whatever, and then tell the software to ‘make it do a cartwheel’ and HEY PRESTO, there it goes. Or at least it does in theory – I imagine it’s probably not QUITE that simple, and that the results probably don’t always look like the ones on the homepage – but, even if it’s not quite as slick as they want you to believe, this strikes me as something worth playing with for anyone interested in animating characters (also, I really, really hope that they’ve not been rigorous with the guardrailing because dear God can I think of some potentially-wonderful if not-entirely-tasteful prompts I would like to try out).
• Fractal Life: You know Conway’s Life simulation, right? The gliders, all that sort of jazz? Well this is that, but infinite and fractal and DEAR GOD this messed with my head something chronic. Click the link and then scroll out…and keep scrolling…this gave me proper, dizzying, ‘we are just specks in a petri dish’ insignificance vertigo, and I hope it does the same to you because, frankly, I see no reason I should suffer alone.
• Classic Computer Brochures: This very much does what you’d expect it to based on the title – “Welcome to my personal collection of vintage brochures”, says the welcome banner, and that is EXACTLY what you get. Obviously if you’re the sort of person who gets excited at the prospect of delving into the instructional documentation for the APPLE II then, well, ENJOY, but even if you’re not quite *that* much of an IT enthusiast there’s something genuinely interesting about the way in which this takes you through the history of brand and marketing in the personal computer space, how the devices were presented and sold and the differing roles they were sold as occupying in our lives.
• Nightmare Kart: AN ACTUAL, PROPER, FULL VIDEOGAME WHICH YOU HAVE TO DOWNLOAD BUT WHICH IS AVAILABLE ON A ‘PAY WHAT YOU WANT MODEL’! This is BRILLIANT, honestly – can you imagine a version of MarioKart, released for the PS One, and themed around the beloved FromSoft game Bloodborne? Can you? IMAGINE NO MORE FOR IT IS HERE! Seriously, this is really, really fun and is 100% worth downloading and chucking the devs a few quid – the courses are great, the references to the Bloodborne (never named, for obvious legal reasons) are integrated beautifully, and overall it is just a Good, Fun Time for All the Family – highly recommended, this one.
• Tiny Glade: Another game you actually have to download – but it’s only a demo, and it’s free, and, honestly, if you liked Townscaper you will absolutely adore this – you just make a beautiful little woodland dwelling, basically, all tilt-shifted and SUPER CUTE, and, honestly, it’s a genuinely relaxing little toy which I once again recommend unreservedly.
• Jasbiac: Guess the genre of three albums based on their cover art – this is a fun daily quiz to add to the rotation, should you be in the market for yet ANOTHER timewaster to add to your pre-work routine.
• TILT: BAAAAAAAAAAAAAH this is infuriating but incredibly addictive, a tiny little bullet-hell type game where you simply have to survive the spinning and swirling death blobs long enough to collect a set number of…things in order to ascend to the next level. This is very, very hard, and quite brain-mangly if, like me, you have the approximate spatial awareness and coordination of a piece of Gouda, but bitesize enough that it doesn’t get frustrating so much as compellingly ‘I CAN DO THIS’-y.
• Word Up: Last in this week’s selection of games is this mobile-only variant on Scrabble, where you have to score a set number of points each level – inbetween levels you can spend the points you’ve earned on tweaks and powerups that change the gameplay in interesting and creative ways, maybe instituting a minimum word length for a score to register, say, or banning abstract nouns (I am making these up, but you get the gist). This is a LOT of fun (if you’re a wordcel like me) and one I very much recommend giving a go.

By Coco Capitan

WE CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS SURPRISINGLY-EXCELLENT MIXTAPE COMBINING VARIOUS GRIME TRACKS WITH OLD TV THEMES WHICH I KNOW SOUNDS FCUKING TERRIBLE BUT WHICH I PROMISE YOU IS GENUINELY GREAT! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Mitch Sea: Mitch Sea is a sculptor, and this feed shares his works, and works in progress – I personally find some of the musculature a bit fussy for my tastes (ffs Matt you fcuking ponce!), but the talent here is undeniable and it’s rare to see this sort of stuff on Insta (in my experience, at least).
• NTFLX & Drill: You might have seen some of these doing the rounds this week on Twitter under the guise of ‘AI Music’ – it’s not AI, though. Per the artist bio, “One man making beats and animations based on Film/TV characters. The only AI is the voice change.” Regardless, this is another example of how amazing the current tech stack is in terms of what you can pull together in your bedroom – I don’t personally find ‘raps about characters from Harry Potter’ compelling in any way, but there’s no denying the skill here; there is something sort-of magical about the insane creative toolbox that’s now available to anyone with the wherewithal to learn how to open and use it.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Faith 47

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: