Webcurios 08/11/24

Reading Time: 34 minutes

WELL.

I know I say this after every big event, but you really don’t need or want my opinion on the US election and so I will spare you (see, don’t you wish other newsletters were this considerate?).

Oh, ok, fine, apart from two specific, semi-related things.

One, we really, really need to hope that a lot of very successful, very decorated, very well-educated scientists operating at some of the world’s most august institutions and dealing with the very freshest realtime data about the state of our planet are very, very wrong about a lot of things, because it does rather feel like in the next four years we are about to sail gaily right past every single (already risibly lax) climate target we have set ourselves over the past couple of decades.

Two, per the above, we really, really need to hope that the accelerationists are in fact right and we can just sort of tech our way out of this, because it’s clear as fcuking daylight that we’re simply not going to take any of the other steps available to us.

So, er, fingers crossed then!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you may as well take comfort in the links while they last.

By Wes Lang

LET’S START THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH NEARLY THREE HOURS OF TRACKS WHICH SAMPLE THE LATE QUINCY JONES AND WHICH ALSO HAPPEN TO BE SOME EXCELLENT HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO LIVES IN THE UK AND WORKS IN ADVERMARKETINGPR AND WHO HAS FELT THE NEED TO WRITE LONG SCREEDS ABOUT US POLITICS ON LINKEDIN THIS WEEK IN A DESPERATE AND FAILED ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK INTELLIGENT TO FCUK THEMSELVES INTO THE SUN PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.1:  

  • Waves of Interest: Don’t worry, this is the only US election-related link in this section – just get through this one and it’s wall-to-wall digital frippery (well, at least until we get to the longreads, but that’s about three hours and nine cups of tea away). The Democratic post-mortem will be long, and tiresome, and almost certainly largely-exculpatory, but looking at this website it does rather strike me that, based on the data here, it perhaps oughtn’t have come as too much of a surprise that the Harris campaign’s ‘more of the same, but you like this democracy stuff so, well, vote to keep it!’ melted like butter beneath a blowtorch when subjected to the white heat of the Trumpian ‘I will make you richer, I will protect you from the mad criminals slavering at the gates, and I will inflict suffering on those you dislike and fear’ rhetoric. This site basically tracks search interest in the US across a variety of election-related topics between 2020 and now, showing relative volume trends – and so we can see here that searches on ‘inflation’, ‘energy costs’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘tax policy’ are up hugely, while searches on social issues (‘racism’, ‘gender equality’, ‘birth control’, ‘inquality’) are down by a few points (the data actually goes back to 2004, and you can look at heatmaps for each issue which change over time, showing you the relative change in search volume across North America over time for, say, ‘gun control’). The data here is from Google, and while it’s obviously important to note that search data isn’t a reliable indicator of behaviour it’s also worth pointing out that it’s not NOT a reliable indicator of behaviour, and that, looking at this now with the cold realisation of ‘oh god what the fcuk have they done?’, it does seem like someone maybe ought to have been looking at this and possibly factoring some of these sorts of factors into the thinking when it came to campaign focus. Hey ho, it is what it is, it’s not like the ramifications of this one will extend significantly beyond the national borders of the US and the temporal limits of the single Presidential term (lol)! BONUS ELECTION-RELATED LINK: Oh, ok, one more, just because this feels…just horribly emblematic of Where We Are At. Have a thread of AI propaganda images featuring Peanut the squirrel, harbinger of a second Trump term – a sentence which is even more preposterous for the fact it in some way makes perfect sense. Do you ever get the feeling we deserve everything that’s coming to us? Looking at this stuff gives me that sensation VERY STRONGLY.
  • AI Minecraft: Shall we turn away from the terrifying contours of the real world and instead retreat into an infinite digital playground of wonder? OK! This is another of those quite astonishing developments in AI which, while (ok, fine) still obviously incredibly shonky and effectively-broken, also feels quite a lot like actual magic and which offers a tantalising glimpse of the sorts of exciting virtual worlds we’ll be able to spin up and explore while outside the irradiated winds howl across the surface of the bunker (I JEST, I JEST! Like the power will still be working by that point!). This is a demo by a couple of tech outfits (Decart and Etched, don’t ask me exactly what it is that they do because my embarrassing lack of technical chops will become, well, embarrassingly apparent) who have combined to release this proof-of-concept demo of what is, basically, ‘Minecraft, but infinitely-AI-generated, running in realtime in your browser’. Which, to be clear, is FCUKING ASTONISHING. Let’s set some expectations – you click the link and you’ll be placed in a lobby where you’ll wait to get a turn on the servers; each turn lasts a max of 10m, after which you’ll get booted, and this runs in a very small window in your browser because it can’t process at higher scale yet (can you tell that I’m winging the tech explanation a bit here? I totally am); oh, and there’s no persistence, so nothing you do in the game really ‘happens’ in any meaningful in-engine sense (more of which briefly)…BUT THIS IS AMAZING! You can pick from different Minecraft biomes, and each lets you wander round an infinite world! Which you can build in! The game is trained on enough Minecraft to ‘get’ that you can mine, and that there are resources, and you can build stuff – but, equally, because there’s no persistence and nothing ‘exists’ in memory, everything you see and walk through is being generated on the fly, and so if you do a 360 degree turn in-game you will find that the view you return to is not the view you started looking at…because there is no ‘there’ there, not even a digital one, and The Machine’s just imagining what it ought to show you based on what you last saw (if you see what I mean). Honestly, this is INSANE, and if you play games then it will give you a very real ‘imagine the opening of Fallout 3 when you leave the vault and that immense sense of exploratory possibility, but different every time’ vibe. Honestly, this really is quite astonishing (and will be even moreso if you’re more au fait with Minecraft than I am), and is probably worth all the sea-boiling energy it’s taking to maintain (lol lol lol).
  • All of the Mikus: Hatsune Miku, as you are all doubtless aware, is the first ever true virtual superstar, who turns 18(!) next year and who has over the past few years become something of a symbol of international solidarity and one-ness, as embodied by, er, a blue–green-haired-anime-pop-starlet. Over the past few years, people from all over the world have been imagining their own, nationally-tweaked versions of Miku, clad in more local costume and with accessories connoting particular regions or subcultures, and there’s been a largely-heartwarming fandom that’s formed around people on Tumblr sharing their drawings and sketches – now someone’s created a map of ALL OF THE MIKUS, so you can scroll around and see the nearly-2000-different variations that the world’s fans have seen free to gift us. Aside from just being kind-of interesting from the point of view of ‘one character interpreted a million different ways’, there’s something slightly revealing about the ways in which different countries choose to show themselves via Miku, and what it is that they see as being most representative or emblematic of their national character (based on a few of the more visible examples, I worry slightly about Italy).
  • Bluesky FollowerFinder: As previously discussed here, it’s not entirely clear to me that the pre-Musk era of shortform social media is ever going to return – I do rather get the feeling that after a decade and a half we might have collectively decided as a species that, actually, putting all of our brains into a digital room together and just seeing what happens is not, in fact, a recipe for success – but, equally, it’s fair to say that for some of us (ok, me) there’s an extent to which the dripfeed of information delivered via 280-character textual updates has become…something of a problematic addiction, and we might be interested in maintaining said addiction somewhere when Twitter finally becomes an entirely-unusable ghost town. To which end, and presuming that you have at some point set yourself up a Bluesky account (on which – I can’t do Threads, I simply can’t, it feels entirely fcuking wrong and I don’t want to; Bluesky is twee and has incredibly strong and offputting #fbpe energy, but, well, it’s better than nothing) you might find this Chrome extension useful – log into Twitter, go to your ‘following’ or ‘followers’ page, and this will attempt to find all those people on Bluesky. It’s slow, it gets stuck every now and again and you will need to click ‘continue’ to make it get going again, and it doesn’t like it when you navigate away from the browser window, but it really does work, and might be a useful way of at least beginning to replicate the vibe of your Twitter feed (but it won’t; that is never coming back and we should probably just accept it. Ok, *I* should probably just accept it).
  • Text-To-Brainrot: What with everything increasingly feeling like it’s going to be quite…hard and abrasive and tricky, at least for a little while, you might find this tool useful – give it any PDF you like and it will BY MAGIC (thanks to a couple of genAI hacks and a few stock video sources) turn it into a TikTok ‘brainrot’-style video – you know, the ones which combine vaguely-soothing videogame footage with an unlinked voice-over, supposedly to create a GENTLY DISSOCIATIVE VIEWING EXPERIENCE. Anyway, if you want a slightly-less-painful way of ingesting all the dozens of utterly-pointless, meaning-bereft trend documents that litter the streets at this time of year, you could do worse than plugging them into this and letting them wash over your increasingly-smooth brain accompanied by footage from Temple Runner (NB – I would briefly like to point out that LESSER newsletters, newsletters that don’t source their links ARTISANALLY and who perhaps don’t click on every single thing that crosses their digital path like some sort of compulsive, included links to something purporting to be this service last week, but which didn’t in fact work. WEB CURIOS ONLY BRINGS YOU WORKING LINKS! Or, at least, they work at the time or writing. Or they do as long as I remember to paste the right one and don’t fcuk up the url. They work MOST OF THE TIME, ok? Jesus).
  • Morning Pages: I really like this. A page on Alicia Guo’s website which exists simply to let you type – as you type, the letters disappear one by one, so you’re effectively only ever able to see the few most recent words of characters of the passage you’re scribing; the idea, I imagine, is something to do with flow state, and the idea of just writing for writing’s sake, without the pressure of looking back and realising ‘oh, hang on, I fcuked up that sentence something chronic, how galling’ (something which, it may not surprise you to learn, I do not experience when writing Curios. Curios exists in only one direction, and that direction is FORWARDS!). If you’re the sort of person who writes, and who when writing finds that it’s helpful for them to limber up a bit with some exercises or just a few hundred words of stream-of-consciousness, then this could be really useful. Aside from anything else there’s just something really pleasing in seeing the words vanish into the past; would that everything were so easily discarded.
  • BioArt: Would you like access to a truly remarkable database of illustrations and diagrams of bacteria, cells, proteins, bits of anatomy, animals and ALL SORTS OF BIOLOGICAL STUFF? Yes, of course you would, you’re not some sort of MONSTER. I am sure there’s an excellent and educative reason as to why this exists and why the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US has made it public, but I’m fcuked if I know what that is and, honestly, I don’t really care either – JUST LOOK AT HOW COOL ALL THE VIRUSES LOOK! Aside from anything else, if you’re a certain type of person I think that some of these would make cracking tattoos.
  • Sock Puppet Master: A good TikTok account! Sock Puppet Master basically does one thing, but it does it very well – taking the audio from 911 calls, police bodycams and the like, and animating them in the surreal style. Which, obviously, given what we know about policing in North America is very much a case of ‘laughing while at the same time acknowledging that, well, there are many, many occasions when it would be VERY HARD to make amusing animations based on the actions of law enforcement’, but as long as you go in with that caveat in mind it’s possible to find quite a lot to enjoy here. This is the TikTok offshoot of a reasonably-long-running project that’s won actual comedy awards and stuff, should the ‘TikTok humour’ label put you off (I say this as someone who went to see some comedy last night which was, unbeknownst to me, some bloke who was famous on TikTok, and it was noticeable how much better he was from about 10m in when he realised that the TikTok-y schtick doesn’t really work so well when your audience is actually in a room in front of you rather than holding you in a tiny box two inches from their face).
  • Eyeball: Ooh, this is interesting. Given you’re here and reading this (or at least clicking the links while you desperately try not to focus too hard on the horrible words) then I presume you are broadly keen on ‘interesting links from across the web’ – Eyeball is a new app which is designed to facilitate light-touch linksharing with a group of friends. The idea is that it sits as a widget on your homescreen, and within that widget appear links that have been shared to your group – so you create groups of friends (upto five for the free version) and then simply drop interesting links you think they will like into the chat, which others can look up whenever they want; kind of like a small, discrete friends-only linky messageboard which lives on your phone. I feel like I’ve slightly butchered the explanation here – plus ca change, eh? – but this looks really cool and were it not iOS-only at the moment I would have totally downloaded this and tried it out this week.
  • EyeCandy: I featured a site a bit like this during lockdown many years ago, but it’s still a good idea and this is still a useful resource – EyeCandy is basically a resource for people who want to make video which basically features a laundry-list of techniques along with visual guides to what they mean and how they work (masking, tilt-shift, match-split, etc etc – this is the same as the previous site), along with what looks like a really nice selection of clips and showreels highlighting exciting visual innovations or BEST PRACTICE or just generally stuff which looks cool and videomakers might find inspiring. If you make films, or want to make films, this looks like a really useful thing to bookmark.
  • Ode to a Laundry Room: I love this LOADS. A website dedicate to a single place, specifically a laundry room in the Dutch city of Rotterdam in which the site’s creator lived for a year and a half. “my dear friend was kind enough to offer me a place to stay during, what was supposed to be, a 10-day-long visit to Rotterdam to see my pals. a laundry room at the place they were renting. the war started 3 weeks before my flight to the netherlands. in march, after 2 weeks on the road and a different reason to leave, i got to my destination, and the short-term-stay little laundry room turned into a place i called home for a year and a half. to be specific – 527 days…this page is a digital ode to the laundry room, as well as its archive. i never said a proper goodbye and will forever regret it. on the last day of moving out and cleaning, i did not at all realise it was the last time id be there. this here will never make up for it, but it is a way to bring me some peace about the fact that i never said goodbye.” I believe VERY STRONGLY that we should do this more often – I honestly adore the idea of making small digital shrines, memorials, to people or places or things that have held meaning for us.
  • Earth Magic Portals: Ok, there’s no actual magic here – or anywhere else for that matter – but if you squint a bit then it might FEEL like magic, and, well, we’ll take what we can get this week. This is basically just a bit of showoffy webwork by a webshop called Flavour Machine to demonstrate how good they are at doing webcam-based gestural controls…and now I’ve just managed to make this sound really dry, WELL DONE MATT YOU TERRIBLE FCUKING HACK. Ahem. Anyway, click the link, click the ‘use hand-tracking controls’ and then enjoy the vaguely-wizardy sensation of being able to swap between youtube videos using a few swipes of your hands – there’s something particularly nice about the ‘pinch to select a portal-type tweak to the UI, and as a general point this feels like something that can be iterated on. If nothing else I now REALLY want someone to build something that lets me conduct an orchestra via the medium of sweeping hand gestures in my kitchen, so if one of you could sort that out please that would be ace thanks.

By Frank Kunert

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS SPECTACULAR SELECTION OF TUNEFUL OBSCURITIES COMPILED FROM THE CRACKLING ARCHIVES OF SADEAGLE’S INCREDIBLE RECORD COLLECTION! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO LIVES IN THE UK AND WORKS IN ADVERMARKETINGPR AND WHO HAS FELT THE NEED TO WRITE LONG SCREEDS ABOUT POLITICS ON LINKEDIN THIS WEEK IN A DESPERATE AND FAILED ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK INTELLIGENT TO FCUK THEMSELVES INTO THE SUN PLEASE AND THANKYOU, PT.2:  

  • Suffrago: Look, let’s get this straight – this is not some ‘let’s organise! The work starts here!!!!!111eleventy’-type resistance sh1t I’m espousing here (lol that I would ever be so motivated or hopeful), but, equally, it’s not inconceivable that some of you in the UK might this week have thought ‘hm, maybe it’s worth engaging with politics beyond the standard electoral cycle this time around’ – to that end, you might find Suffrage interesting, a new platform which is, ambitiously, attempting to basically ‘do digital democracy better’. It’s not intended solely for politics, long-term – the idea, I think (in common with lots of these projects, FCUK ME are they bad at explaining it – seriously guys, if you happen to see this, it is NOT EASY to work out what the everliving fcuk any of this is for!) is that this eventually becomes an issue-agnostic platform for the sharing of views and the agglomeration of complex information around an issue so as to enable better decisionmaking by the polis. In theory there is a LOT in here – the ability to follow policy at a constituency level and discuss/debate your representative’s voting record; simplified explanations of the legislative process and the passage of bills through parliament; condensed information about debates and discussions at national, regional and local level…look, I’m personally…unconvinced that this is ever going to get enough views and traction to be meaningfully useful, but, equally, if everyone had my cynical, negative and defeatist attitude then nothing would ever get done and we’d all be well on our way towards hell in the proverbial handca…what’s that? Eh? Oh. Anyway, still, here’s a website about democracy.
  • Noomo Beat: This is interesting – not necessarily in terms of what it does (which, to be clear, is very little – albeit in VERY shiny fashion) but more in terms of what it means about agencies, digital and AI. Noomo Beat is a webproject by digital agency Noomo, which is designed to show off what it can do with AI and fancy graphics and indicate the sort of thing that potential clients might commission – the site shows off an interface for an imagined clothing brand which basically asks a few simple questions of the users and then uses that answers to said questions and a soupcon of generative AI to create a BESPOKE EXPERIENCE for each user – what this in practice means is that you then get shown a (really VERY SHINY, I must stress) selection of clothes (the clothes are seemingly always the same) with a slightly different soundtrack and colourway based on your answers. That’s it! BUT LOOK IT IS INTERACTIVE AND IT HAS AI IN IT! I would posit that, more than two years on from The Great Initial Wave of GenAI Excitement, if this is what agencies think is ‘useful’ about it then agencies deserve everything they’re going to get in the next few years.
  • 1 Dataset, 100 Visualisations: Oh this is such a lovely project, and such a useful and interesting look at all the many different ways one might present a single set of datapoints and how the difference in said presentation affects the manner in which the information communicated is interpreted and received. Per the blurb, “this project is not made to show off, but rather show how interpretation can create better results. Take a close look at your dataset, and figure out what the main story in your data is. Different approaches and focuses demand different visualizations. We decided to keep every visualization the same style and colors and let the interpretation and story angle dictate the visualization. This resulted in 100 vastly different visualizations.” This is a bit of a calling card by Danish design studio Ferdio, and a smart one – it neatly demonstrates that they are quite good at this sort of thing, that they can do it in lots of different styles, and that they understand how style impacts substance, as well as showing that they are nice enough and confident enough to disseminate their expertise for free. This is both textbook CONTENT MARKETING and a really excellent resource for anyone interested in dataviz and all the different ways in which you can use smart visual design to bring numbers to life.
  • Buttons: I have to be honest with you – this is not, in general, a hugely-interesting website (as far as I can tell it’s the storefront for a Czech studio that designs typefaces) but it IS the first one which basically offers potential customers a discount on prices in exchange for, basically, d1cking around. Basically the link here takes you to a page which, with a click, will generate a new website button at random, which will plonk down from the top of the page; more clicks will see more buttons deposited onto the page. If you, the user, click enough times to fill the whole screen with RANDOM BUTTONS then you will unlock a discount you can redeem when you buy fonts from the shop. Why? I have no idea, but I am very much a fan of this and STRONGLY suggest that any and all of you working with online retailers lobby hard to include similar mechanics on their websites.
  • Gravitational Lens Simulation: Look, I could pretend to understand what this is showing, but I’d be lying – in large part my reasons for including this amount to little more than ‘ooh, cool visual FX that look a tiny little bit like what happens to the edges of your field of vision at the start of a trip’. Let me instead delegate the explanation to the site itself, which says the following in explanation of what the everliving fcuk Gravitational Lensing in fact is: “Imagine a heavy ball on a trampoline – it creates a dip that makes marbles roll towards it in a curved path. That’s similar to how massive objects in space (like black holes) bend light. When light from distant stars passes near these heavy objects, it bends around them, creating multiple images or making the stars appear in different positions than where they really are. This bending of light by gravity is called gravitational lensing, and it helps astronomers study things in space they can’t see directly. The pulsing star in the center helps demonstrate this effect by making it easier to track how the light bends around the black hole.” There, clear? No, me neither. Still, you probably don’t need to know too much about the INCREDIBLE, MIND, BODY AND UNIVERSE-BENDING PHYSICS being modeled here – instead, click the link, let your jaw go slack and marvel at the pretty lights as you move the black hole around the twinkly cosmos.
  • Documentary Storm: I appreciate that you may not necessarily be in the market for ‘deep-dives into this fcuking world we live in’ right now, but, on the offchance, you might find this website a pleasing resource – Documentary Storm is, basically, a place that collects a fcuktonne of documentaries on a wide range of topics and makes them searchable by theme, title, etc. Nothing’s hosted here – these are all YouTube embeds – but it’s a convenient portal to find non-fiction filmmaking should you be interested. It’s also worth pointing out that the term ‘documentary’ has been largely rendered meaningless in the past few years, as the streaming platforms seemingly-snakebelly-low quality control bar for this stuff has seen some…questionable-quality investigations and VERY propagandistic material being peddled as ‘objectively-researched fact’; put it this way, I wouldn’t expect everything on here to have Attenborough-level rigour, and I would perhaps take significant portions of the films on here with a skipful of salt (I am thinking specifically of a lot of the UFO-type things, but I reckon there is probably quite a lot of…iffy medical stuff lurking here if you lift enough rocks).
  • Photo Exhibits: Ooh, this is nice – an oooooooold website featuring the photography of one Stephen Edelbroich, who snapped a load of photos of New York, Paris, Venice, Vietnam (and other places too) and uploaded them here for the world to see – these are OLD, either analogue or early-digital depending on exactly when they were taken, and it’s honestly quite a thrill to go through them and go back a quarter-century.  I’m not sure how GOOD the photos are, if I’m totally honest, but it’s so nice to find them here.
  • Daze: So this has been getting frothy writeups left right and centre over the past few weeks, despite the fact that the app itself is only out of waitlist this week (and even then iOS-only because of FCUKING course grumble grumble) – anyway, it LOOKS very cool even if, as a result of the aforementioned iPhoneonlyness, I am yet to try it. Basically Daze is a new messaging platform whose gimmick is (basically) that it combines the simplicity of messaging (ie you are literally just messaging someone, or a group of people) with the creative multimedia possibilities of Stories or Reels; so you can effectively create chats that look more like the collage-type-canvas you might expect from a c.2015 Insta/Snap aesthetic. Slap down gifs and videos and audio and animations and CHANGING FONTS and colours and it’s all CHAOTIC and MESSY and this looks like it might be ALL THE RAGE (for 10m until Meta rips off all its features wholesale across the ecosystem and kills this stone dead).
  • Practical Betterments: I am pretty sure I have never in my life practised any form of self-improvement –  certainly not in the decade and a half that I’ve been making myself a worse person via the medium of internet obsession – but, should you be a more aspirational sort of person than me, the sort who believes in the possibility of things and people and circumstances getting better rather than constantly decaying towards entropy, then you might enjoy this website collecting a list of simple things that we can all do to improve our lives in small ways. Things like ‘lubricate your keyholes’ (no sniggering), or, er, ‘organise your toiletries chronologically’ (I have no idea what this means and am slightly too scared to click through and find out), and, look, this all strikes me as utterly insane, microoptimisation in search of tiny, imperceptible marginal gains, but, equally, I cry most days and so as such perhaps the person behind this, one ‘Nathanial’, is a better person to listen to than I am.
  • An Incredibly Satisfying Swedish-Accented Rap: This is a bit of an unusual one – it’s literally just a link to a video which would ordinarily go in, well, the videos section where it belongs, but this is on Insta and as such I can’t embed it down there, but it doesn’t fit in the Instagram section either because it’s just a single video and the rest of the account isn’t (so far at least) delightfully-accented rap/poetry, and so you’re just going to have to put up with me queering the Curios running order slightly by putting it here. What’s that? You don’t give a fcuk? Oh. Anyway, this is a video posted by one Cecilia Elise Wallin and I am slightly obsessed with it – the delivery, the diction, the movement, the fact that when I first saw it I was half-convinced it was CG…this is just wonderful, and I really hope Ms. Wallin makes more of them.
  • Perverse: Speaking of (sort-of) poetry (SEAMLESS!), Perverse is a new online (and offline, but mostly online I think) journal of verse, “a magazine for “deliberate, obstinate, unreasonable or unacceptable poems, contrary to the expected practice”, which might appeal to those of you who enjoy slightly-unconventional forms of poetry – it’s a newsletter too, so you can sign up for occasional deliveries of crafted words to your inbox.
  • PacCam: We begin the BUMPER GAMES portion of Curios (I think we can all agree a bit of low-stakes ludic distraction will make it all better, right?) with this excellent, silly little game which basically lets you play a slightly-shonky, rudimentary version of Pacman using your face as a controller – enable your webcam and you can direct your small yellow pillmuncher around the screen by turning your head to the left or right or looking up or down. This is silly and a bit shonky but VERY fun (in a slightly broken way) – be aware though that a) it will give you a lot of shots of you looking VERY unattractive as you contort your neck to direct the sprite onscreen; and b) in fact, if any of you ever watched Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, those are basically exactly the faces you’ll be pulling.
  • Letroso: Another week, another daily word game – this one’s like Wordle but you have a 10 letter word to guess each day; the basic ‘if you get the right letter in the right place it changes colour’ thing is the same, but there are a few tweaks in acknowledgement of the fact that, well, longer words make for a harder game. I like this a lot, and it’s a nice alternative to Wordle if you’re deciding to boycott it while the NYT fights with the unions (yes, even your daily word puzzle can become a complex labour rights issue! EVERYTHING IS POLITICS THERE IS NO ESCAPE).
  • Moida Mansion: This is SO good – not least because of the meticulous attention to detail applied to the design and style and look and feel of the whole thing. Moida Mansion is a browsergame that’s designed to look and play like one of the old ‘Game And Watch’-style LCD games that those of a certain age will remember from long car journeys – an LCD screen, simple movement, no animations – updated with some really clever wrinkles that transform it into an actually fun game (none of the original titles of the era were, to be clear, ‘fun’ in any accepted way). Everything about this is just perfect, down to the manual and the way it’s written and presented, and the game itself is a solid 15 minutes’ enjoyment – a really exceptional bit of work by renowned game designer Lucas Pope.
  • All Of The Ludum Dare 56 Entries: Via Lynn Cherny’s superb newsletter comes this link, to all the entries to the recent Ludum Dare game design jam, which challenged designers to create a small game from scratch in 72h or less, under the loose theme of ‘Tiny Creatures’ – there are DOZENS here, many of which you can play in your browser but the rest of which are free to download, and there are puzzlers and platformers and silly narrative fiction experiments and, honestly, there are HOURS of entertainment here if you just fancy turning your brain off and playing for a while.
  • Tenebra: I know that you don’t THINK that what you need and want in 2024 is a browsergame built on emulating the graphics and OS of the long-forgotten BBC Micro from the 1980s – and, look, you might be right, maybe you DON’T need or want this, but, well, I’m giving it to you anyway because it’s honestly great and SO much better than you think it’s going to be. Tenebra is a puzzlegame with 31 levels – the gimmick is that you have to get the protagonist to the end of each, but he is afraid of the dark – how do you get him through the dark areas to safety? This starts simple but becomes fiendish enough to be interesting and fun after a few levels, and I imagine there are some of you for whom this is a genuine, brainscratching pleasure.
  • Wigmaker: Our final miscellaneous offering this week is another infinite clicker (it’s not infinite, don’t worry). Would you like to play a game about making wigs? Are you pleased by liberal use of terms like ‘peruke’ to connote a hairpiece? Oh man are you going to enjoy this, in that case. A particularly nice example of the clicker genre, with a pleasant interface and some nice writing, this is a gentle, soothing and satisfying way of passing some time, ideally while on payroll so you can get remunerated for watching Wig Number Go Up.

By Devin Lunsford

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED ‘LEGALIZE LAMBADA’ AND MAKES ME WANT TO USE THE WORD ‘FUNKY’ DESPITE THE FULL-BODY-PRETZEL-CRINGE THAT DEPLOYING THAT TERM MAKES ME FEEL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Blocky Graphics: A collection of powerful aesthetics in one place; is it time for the third vaporwave revival yet?
  • 420Princess: Actually, no, wait, I take back what I said about the last link – THIS is a powerful aesthetic. I think it might be deeply, deeply evil, but, well, that feels kind of apt this week. DRINK IN THE BADNESS.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Hamid Naderi Yeganeh: As far as I can tell from their bio, Hamid is studying maths in some capacity at UCL; he uses his maths skills to create frankly amazing pictures from equations (ok, fine, he might well be doing loads of other stuff with them but the likelihood is I wouldn’t understand ANYTHING about that, whereas ‘making pictures with equations’ is something I can broadly get my head around). This is…quite astonishing, although to be honest this could all be absolute lies and I would have no idea whatsoever.
  • Geometry Club: Per the bio, “Celebrating the beauty of architecture with precisely aligned photographs from around the world.” You want photos of the top corner portion of a lot of buildings? GREAT!
  • Artisan Embroidery: Via Jana over at Zuckerbakerei (honestly, SUCH a lovely newsletter/website which is also home to some glorious baking recipes), this is the Insta feed of Jordan Cunliffe in Lancashire who embroiders data. EMBROIDERS DATA. There are some of you who I know will be ABSOLUTELY TUMESCENT at those words – know that I write for YOU.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Welcome Back To Trumpland: It pains me to have to say that one of the best immediate analyses of Tuesday’s vote – which, by the way, evidenced once again my unerring ability to be wrong about stuff; I went to bed around midnight convinced that it was going to be a drawn-out affair with recounts and contestations and no declaration til Thursday at the earliest, which once again proves that you should never, ever listen to a word I say about anything and that, basically, I am a know-nothing bozo – came on unpleasantly-right-wing website Unherd…but it did, hence why I am linking to it. It’s not triumphalist – Tom McTague doesn’t appear to have wanted this result any more than I did – but it does a good job of presenting the bald reasons as to why the result went the way it did, reasons which have continued to be borne out as more data emerges about voting patterns across demographies. This paragraph in particular seems to neatly-encapsulate things: “Ultimately, Joe Biden was right that his vice president was a weaker candidate than he had been and Obama was before him. Harris was weaker than Hillary Clinton, too. The Democratic Party’s presidential nominees are getting progressively worse. Some Democratic analysts were arguing overnight that Harrris had been denied the time to introduce herself to the American public. But this only reveals the depth of their denial. Biden was no longer fit for the presidency and would surely have lost by an even greater margin, yes. But Harris was only as plausible as she was because she was parachuted in at the last moment. It is surely the case that the emptiness of the drama she offered could only be sustained for the mini-series we got.”
  • Immediate Post-Mortem: I thought this was an excellent post by Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, who had predicted a victory for Harris ahead of the polls closing and, in the wake of being proved quite decisively wrong, wrote this explaining why he thought that had happened. It’s very much worth reading, in part for its dissection of the inadequacies of the polling and prediction industries, and in part for its reasonably-clear-eyed assessment of the factors driving the Trumpian success – in particular, “People’s memories of the Trump administration were quite favourable. Until COVID broke out at least. And it seems that – as with Boris Johnson for example – the public weren’t inclined to blame Trump for the initial period of COVID chaos in early to mid 2020. For many people, their memories of Trump from early 2017 to early 2020 were strong economic growth, lower taxes, stable inflation and a calm international environment. And those same people looked at high inflation in 2021-22, high levels of border crossings, and a chaotic international environment, and they used a simple heuristic. Things were pretty good under the last guy. Things are less good under these guys. I vote for the last guy.”
  • I Told You So: Not me, to be clear – no, this is Sam Kriss, with 2000-odd words on ‘why he was right about this and so much other stuff besides’ (in Kriss’ defence, he did in fact call this). It feels oddly appropriate to be featuring Kriss in Curios again after about 8 years – he was very roundly discredited c.2016ish in a me too-adjacent scandal of which I forget the details, but he’s managed to maintain a career outside of the big ticket UK publications doing his post-hipster cultural analysis schtick and this piece is…look, I don’t necessarily like some of the tone, or what feels like slightly mean-spirited personal criticism of Harris, but a lot of this *feels* right; in particular the section about Brat and the summer hysteria that surrounded the campaign at the outset reminds me very strongly of stuff I remember saying to friends at the time (and may well have written here, I can’t be fcuked to check now, sorry) about how the whole thing had quite strong ‘YES SHE CAN!’ energy, and not in a good way, and basically for the past few days I have had the phrase “The Harris campaign exhumed, and was eventually consumed by, the zombified corpse of the girlboss’ and, well, I don’t know what to do with it and so I am leaving it here for you.
  • The Final Weeks of the Trump Campaign: It’s interesting, isn’t it, how the same piece can read incredibly, entirely differently depending on when you read it relative to other events. When I first read this on Sunday afternoon it was an interesting and slightly-catty look at the obviously-dysfunctional circus that exists around Trump and the infighting between his cabal of dreadful lieutenants to see who gets to be that weeks favourite lickspittle; rereading it again yesterday afternoon, it instead becomes…quite a worrying image of the sort of court that will once again spring up around the mad, syphilitic king. It really is worth reading this, not least because the people sound – and I say this even by the standards of US politics, where the monstrous is very much the quotidian – like REALLY appalling human beings (it’s also interesting that it doesn’t touch the Loomer rumours AT ALL). Remember the days of Conway and Spicer and that crowd? IT’S ALL COMING BACK! Oh god I am so so tired already.
  • The Ads: Ok, so this one is TECHNICALLY about the election but it’s actually more about the advertising around it, and specifically how it was advertised to the citizens of Montana – a State in which there was so much political advertising that the campaigns bought more inventory than actually existed. Alexander Sammon recounts his experience of spending 26h watching TV in the state to get FULLY IMMERSED in the scale of the ad campaign being waged, and it’s a superb and slightly-unhinged account of what nonstop exposure to political messaging can do to a man. It’s also slightly incredible to read this and then to check the data that shows the immense spike in people searching ‘did biden drop out’ on election day – like, managing to avoid details about this election does feel like it would have taken a not-insubstantial effort of will, so congratulations to everyone who managed to get to polling day uncertain as to who the candidates were.
  • Liberalism and the Far Right: This is an academic paper, and it’s quite hard and quite knotty and not exactly an easy read, but it feels like it fits quite aptly this week given its findings “suggest that far-right movements can gain power by embracing liberalism’s ambiguity and contradictions. In other words, mastering liberal messaging can be essential to the growth of far-right movements, challenging any easy dismissal of these politics as “illiberal.”. HM.
  • The Money Funding All This: Look, it’s taken me 6 links to mention Peter Thiel, DIDN’T I DO WELL? In fairness this piece in the Byline Times doesn’t mention cuddly Peter T, but it does reference his ageing counterparts the Koch brothers, who are the oldschool version of Pete’s ultramodern Silicon Valley techlibertarianism – this is a look at the ‘talent network’ that unites all the young, presentable, telly-friendly and strangely-identikit right-wing talking heads you see cropping up as participants on panel and debate shows on and offline. You may not recognise the names but you will definitely recognise some of the faces, and you may not be…wholly surprised to learn that the organisation which is working to promote them into the mainstream and which is working to polish and refine their messaging and presentation is…FUNDED BY MASSIVELY-RIGHT-WING US BILLIONAIRE INTERESTS! Look, I don’t mean to be some sort of mad conspiracist about this, but, well, THIS IS HOW THIS SHIT WORKS FFS THESE IDEOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS ARE NOT ORGANIC. So if you see a lot more of these people being invited on to places to discuss Trump, the new right and how it links to (or should link to) UK politics, know that it’s possibly not quite as simple as it ostensibly looks. BONUS SEMI-RELATED CONTENT: Taylor Lorenz wrote in her newsletter yesterday about ‘why the left can’t have its own Rogan’, which basically boils down to ‘there aren’t any leftist billionaires willing to fund this sort of stuff whereas, turns out, there are fcuktonnes of right-leaning plutes who very much are’. Don’t, please, think too hard about what the argument at the heart of all this says about the relative likelihood of right-wing things happening vs left-wing things happening.
  • The Rise of the Climate Anti-Hero: It feels…very wrong that the best article I have yet read about XR and Declare Emergency and Just Stop Oil and the current ‘souping the artworks’ protest movement was written in New York Magazine, but, well, here we are! This is long but SO good, a really interesting and multifaceted and fair portrait of the movement and some of the people within it – I enjoyed it in particular because it doesn’t paint them as perfect or as crusaders so much as people who are very frightened and simply don’t think that it is viable to no longer act. I think that this week is probably not a terrible time to read something like this and maybe consider whether or not they might be right.
  • Vanishing Culture: This is VERY LONG and quite involved, and, honestly, you sort of need to be REALLY interested in the general question of ‘how do we preserve online culture and materials?’ – but, presuming that you are, this is a fascinating document pulled together by the Internet Archive (now back online, huzzah) about why the work it does is important, not just in a ‘wow, isn’t it nice to be able to go and look at webpages from 2009!’ way but in a ‘look, we’ve been effectively putting most of our new culture onto digital media for the past 15 years at least, and at no point have we given anything resembling sufficient thought to how we’re going to make sure that it lasts and that we don’t get left with a fcuking enormous ‘digital dark ages’ in a few generations’ time’ (lol like we have that many generations left lol!)-type way. Aside from anything else, should any of you work for anyone who’s looking for something PURPOSE-Y to do in 2025 (like that’s ever going to be a thing again – unfettered capitalism all the way, kids! Markets gonna market!) then you could do significantly worse than steering them towards the general issue of digital preservation because, honestly, this is very much a THING and is only going to become more of one.
  • AI Right Now: Another week, another brilliant post by Ethan Mollick on AI – this time outlining some incredibly interesting extant use cases for LLMs which are smart and useful and creative and which should give you all food for thought. In particular there’s a lot of really useful stuff in here in terms of how to helpfully think about multimodality and image/video analysis which, to me at least, was quietly-revelatory.
  • My Week As An AI Slave: Oh OK, fine, that’s not actually the title – in reality it’s something more prosaic like ‘I let ChatGPT control my life for a week’, but I prefer my formulation. Anyway, this is an NYT piece and is pretty middle-of-the-road, but I found it interesting, partly as a contrast to the last iteration of this piece I remember from a year or so ago – it’s notable how much difference the ability to parse images and ‘dialogue’ with a user through voicechat, enhances the experience. It was also fascinating to me that the author realised halfway through that the key feature of an LLM is its middle-of-the-roadness, and that allowing it to dictate one’s choices effectively condemns one to a Basic B1tch existence of taupe and ugg boots and buddha bowls and Oh God this stuff is going to take over, isn’t it, because that is literally what most people like and want. Welcome to the future, an army of AI voice assistants directing an army of Deanos to an out-of-town leisure complex while wearing matching leisurewear, forever.
  • Where ‘Order’ Comes From: I ADORED this, in large part because it took stuff that I am really, really bad at understanding – specifically probability and maths – and helped me understand it better than I did before. Honestly, this is such good, clear writing that I think you should all read it, if only to enjoy the sensation of someone making something comprehensible in such calm, cogent fashion – this is by one Marco (thankyou Marco!) and is about why order arises our of apparent chaos and, I promise, you will feel SO much smarter after reading this (unless you already know all this stuff, in which case…why are you reading this sh1t? Shouldn’t you be off using your MASSIVE BRAIN for better things? THERE’S WORK TO DO FFS!).
  • Trying The Light Phone: You may recall the Light Phone, a recently(ish)-buzzy, nicely-designed new entrant to the ‘like a smartphone but designed to not let you get distracted by apps and stuff’ market – this is one GenZ person’s experience of using it. Look, this is in Mashable and so the writing is…fine, but I found the user’s experience really interesting and important in light of current talk about ‘banning smartphones for under-16s’ – per their account, it was all lovely and digital detoxy up until the point they started butting up hard against all the ways in which the modern world simply requires you to interact with it using a smart device, and how that makes not having one incredibly friction-y and very fcuking inconvenient indeed, and how, actually, that creates all sorts of stresses and annoyances and inconveniences that mean all the ZENLIKE CALM you get from, I don’t know, not being on Snap every living second, is somewhat wasted. Basically what this demonstrates is IT’S NOT THAT FCUKING SIMPLE (on which note, it’s worth having a close look into the Australian government’s ‘ban social media for <16s’ policies just to see how spectacularly-badly-designed they are).
  • Hey, Chat: On the rise of ‘chat’ as a conversational term used irl by kids, in the sense of ‘there is no distinction between me talking in real life to an individual or a group, and me talking online in a chat with one or more interlocutors’, which, actually, makes perfect sense on the one hand (why should we make distinctions between ‘communicating in physical person’ and ‘communicating online via text’? Except of course for all sorts of reasons of nuance, etc, but wevs!). On the one hand, this is literally just AN Other example of language evolving as it always has and always will do, and it’s nothing to get het up about; on the other, this could, if you squint, be looked at as yet more evidence of the growing degree to which interactions are being reduced to ‘actor—->audience’ rather than ‘dialogue’, and this is another expression of the sickening maincharacterisation of everyone and the NPCification of everyone else (I have THOUGHTS on this, fwiw) – you decide!
  • Training Your Colour Vision: This is a bit of a followup to the link a few weeks back of the GeoGuessr guy realising he can literally identify places by the colour of the sky in photos – here, Max Levy, who is colourblind to at least some degree, tries to see whether he can improve his ability to identify specific pantone shades on sight. Why? WHY NOT FFS???? This is a lot more interesting than I have just made it sound, I promise.
  • Mycology for Dummies: A brilliant piece of writing by Jan Hopis, about why writing about drugs is usually horrible and cringeworthy and unpleasant to read – and, also, about taking mushrooms. You shouldn’t be able to get away with having both of these things in one essay, but credit to Jan here because he nails this.
  • Fear and Loathing on Feeld: Or, based on having read this and the reactions it elicited online, ‘why dating in London is seemingly like ‘Nam’. This is…this is horrible, honestly, and made me want perform some fairly invasive brain surgery on myself to scoop out whatever part of my frontal lobe is responsible for ‘wanting to feel loved again’ to ensure I am never, ever tempted to try one of these fcuking things. If you are in a couple, you HAVE to read this as it will make you so, so grateful; if you are not, it will make you fervently pray for the asexual/aromantic fairy to visit you while you sleep because there is NOTHING about any of this experience that sounds good for anyone. If there’s one thing that this article I think pretty conclusively proves, by the way, it is that the normalisation of therapy culture and speak in the UK has been a net negative for at least one, possibly three, generations, and we are all worse people for all our ‘self-care’.
  • Happy Hardcore in Glasgow: For a certain generation, before people decided that it was the psytrance community with their white dreadlocks and dogs on strings that deserved mockery and vilification, it was happy hardcore that occupied the uncoveted ‘least cool genre of dance music’ position (in fairness it was also comments like this, delivered by some monged-out kid to my mate Paul: “I like happy hardocore because it’s really happy and really safe” – that’s very much the calibre of person it tended to attract). If you’re not familiar with it, take a moment to listen and then come back when you’ve washed the blood out of your ears, and then enjoy this great piece in the newly-launched Glasgow Bell about the Glasgow hardcore scene and the kids that made it – you can almost smell the cheap speed and glue! Also worth noting that this link and the last one are from new independent local journalism outfits launched in the past few months, a rare feelgood moment in UK media in 2024. Dear God I still have the hardcore tab open and playing, this is HORRIBLE.
  • Athens Revised: Beautifully-written but inevitably-harrowing account of rape, by Erin Wood. I didn’t touch on the Saoirse Ronan stuff last week, but this feels like a suitable paragraph to quote: “A month before I graduated from high school in 1996, I was learning to see my female body as more than just a vessel to resent and attempt to thin. My body was also a set of weapons that could protect. The heel of my hand could drive nasal bone into brain. Bunched fingers could eject eyeballs from sockets. The self-defense course, called Model Mugging, was underwritten by an alumna of my school and offered to every senior girl. The male instructors—known as “padded assailants”—would don protective gear so that we students could practice hitting them without restraint, as if fighting for our lives, or to prevent being raped. Or both.”
  • Not My Problem: Finally this week, one of the best pieces of speculative writing about near-future AI stuff that I’ve read in an age – this is Tim Maughan with a short story called “Not My Problem”, and it’s really impossible to read any of the elements in this without thinking “well, yeah, I mean that’s probably actually going to happen, isn’t it?” Brilliant, and only about 80% as frightening and unsettling as you think it’s going to be, which is a bonus of sorts.

By Raija Jokinen, via blort

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: