Welcome to England, a country now reaching the ‘results’ stage of a decades-long experiment designed to answer the question ‘so what do you think happens to the social fabric of a nation when its inhabitants spend 20 years watching their quality of life diminish by almost every conceivable available metric while a significant proportion of the people responsible for said diminishing continually tell them, with a straight face, that it is all in fact a direct result of the arrival of people who do not look, sound or behave EXACTLY like their grandparents did’!
Oh, and to anyone suggesting that what’s been seen in the past week isn’t a demonstration of racism and specifically Islamophobia – how else would you characterise a group of people being demonised, protested against and attacked for a crime THAT LITERALLY HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM? I don’t know, man, feels weird.
Anway, you’re not here for this – why are you here? Don’t think, just click.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can all join me in shouting Allahu Akbar in Robert Jenrick’s stupid fat Tory face.
By Joe Webb (images this week again via TIH btw, to whom thanks)
THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN WANTS TO TAP THE ‘YOU DO KNOW WHICH OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRE ELON IS GETTING A LOT OF THIS END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION’-TYPE SCHTICK FROM, DON’T YOU?’ SIGN AGAIN BUT WHICH REALISES IT’S LIKE A BROKEN RECORD ON THAT TOPIC AND SO WILL FOR ONCE RESTRAIN ITSELF, PT.1:
- NoFilterGPT: You are all good people. You are all familiar with the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as enshrined both in wider human society and the specific way in which they are applied in your own geography and community. You are curious, but in a benign way. You sleep reasonably soundly at night, you do not grind your teeth, you are kind to your family members and supportive to your colleagues, you floss and you exercise regularly, you have a balanced diet and a healthy relationship with legally-sanctioned muscle-relaxants. You do not abuse animals, or pornography, or blameless foreign nationals who find themselves on your soil, or people who don’t look and sound exactly like you. When confronted with machine that can in theory provide an answer to any question you could possibly ask it you DEFINITELY don’t ask it to plan, down to the last detail, a successful spearphishing programme to enable you to part hundreds of strangers from their savings, or to tell you how to manufacture 2cb in your bathtub, or to explain the best method of quickly and quietly disposing of a human corpse within a standard domestic environment. You are all good people. Which is why I feel entirely comfortable sharing this link with you, to a an LLM which, as far as I can tell, really WILL tell you anything you ask it. Not only did it give me what looked like a VERY convincing recipe for meth with nary a pause, it also answered my questions about how to commit online fraud with cheery specificity, and then provided follow-up information about under-the-radar software I might want to seek out to help me in my nefarious plans. Ever wondered why OpenAI et al have been very keen to ensure that their offerings are at least a BIT hard to mess with? Play with this for a bit and learn why. I’ll be honest, I was a bit weirded out by this – I was reluctant to push it too far because, well, I am actually a disappointingly law-abiding person and my actual imagination when it comes to ‘illegal things I want to explore, even theoretically, with a chatbot’ is pretty stunted, turns out, but also because it’s a bit troubling quite how well it works – obviously all the information you could get from this is theoretically just a Google search away, but (and I say this as someone who has very much tracked the evolution of what you can and can’t find on Google, to the point where I buy drugs online from exactly the same person who I found when I Googled ‘buy weed online’ at work in 2003) the benefit here is that you don’t have to spelunk, and, because it PROMISES that none of the queries are stored anywhere, you can ask away to your heart’s content without having to worry about your local law enforcement agents knocking at your door and asking awkward questions about your sudden interest in the chemical properties of fertiliser. Really, have a play – BUT PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS TO COMMIT ANY MURDERS OR CREATE ANY BOMBS OR DISPOSE OF ANY CORPSES OR MAKE ANY ILLEGAL DRUGS. Does that cover me, legally? I think it probably does.
- Porter Robinson: This is a really rather nice website for the US DJ Porter Robinson, which I think is to accompany their latest album called ‘Smile’ – it doesn’t explain itself particularly well, but it’s basically a series of little 3d vignettes, all featuring the same character who seems to be the record’s ‘mascot’ or something, all of which invite you to do some PLAYFUL INTERACTION – on the homescreen, clicking around will move the avatar across the small city map, growing into a Godzilla-type kaiju before your eyes – click the hamburger menu in the top-right and you can choose between 20 different little game things, some of which link into the others…this is really nicely done, and I am hoping the slightly-bizarre lack of any soundtrack whatsoever to the whole thing is a weird browser/html failure on my laptop’s part rather than a massive and slightly astonishing oversight on the part of the developers here, because, well, IT’S PROMOTING A FCUKING ALBUM FFS.
- The End of Aging: This is, fine, a digital representation of a physical exhibition (just wrapped up in, I think, Basel), but COME BACK because this is actually done in a pretty novel way (‘actually’? Jesus, Matt, you insufferable pr1ck, why the ‘actually’? Stop it). Rather than just being a standard ‘move through the gallery maze that basically feels like a slightly-staid artworld DOOM clone’ you can instead ‘move through the gallery that has been captured from life using LIDAR’ (LIDAR, you will all doubtless remember, being that technique to do volumetric capture of a physical space which results in the whole thing having that vaguely pointillist vibe), which lends the whole experience a slightly weird and dreamlike quality as you wander through the various rooms and look at the artworks. And the artworks? Well, the whole piece is based on the following premise: “Longevity is a desire as old as humankind. In the near future, we may have numerous ways to slow or even reverse aging, with some in proof-of-concept experiments and others already in human trials. The first anti-aging drugs could arrive within the decade, followed by a procession of therapies. Yet, the exhibition grapples with the social, economic, and cultural implications of longevity. Do we truly wish to live forever? How would society cope with people aged 150 or over? Is there a need to enact the right to die?” Which, yes, fine, is so much internationalartw4nk, and I can’t say any of the pieces I saw in here particularly spoke to me, but equally there’s a creepy vibe about the whole thing that I quite enjoyed – see what you think.
- Lasting Petals: Some of the news coming out of Gaza this week has been absolutely horrific, and so appallingly-underreported that I can’t find anything to link to which isn’t doesn’t feature some footage too upsetting to feature. Lasting Petals is another website created to help memorialise some of the many, many thousands of people to have lost their lives in the 10 months since the October 7th atrocities, each memorialised as a poppy in a seemingly-infinite field. Every single flower represents a dead human being – the names of everyone remembered on the site can be seen by clicking the middle button in the top-right, which takes you to a slow-scrolling wall of names and ages and Jesus fcuking Christ it is dizzying and horrifying.
- The Icelandic Penis Museum: LOL C0CKS! Web Curios is a grown-up newsletter, practically old enough to nervously sidle up to the counter in the newsagents and attempt to order three bottles of strawberry/kiwi Mad Dog and a packet of 10 B&H (children of today, what glorious folkloric rituals you are missing out on!), and as such I would like to reassure you that this link is being included less because there is something inherently ‘funny’ about a museum dedicated to penises (one might argue, given the undue degree of relevance and import granted to the male member over the course of human history, that frankly we could do with focusing on it a bit less) and more because it is just a REALLY nice example of webdesign. From the homepage splash, which simply reads ‘HUNDREDS OF PHALLIC SPECIMENS’ in very big letters (their caps, by the way), to the scroll, to the page layout, to the fact that the copy, in a very dry way, knows exactly what it is doing throughout. I’ll be honest, I don’t think the *actual* museum is that interesting – as a man, I feel I spent quite enough time as an adolescent exploring ‘the mysteries of the penis’ tbh – but I would like to congratulate the people who designed this because it’s great (and also doesn’t do the simple, easy traffic-baiting thing of having a page of funny pictures of animalc0cks).
- Medals Per Capita: I confess to having watched literally 0 minutes of this year’s global celebration of human sporting endeavour, but, broadly-speaking, it seems like it’s been…good! Even for someone as broadly-disinterested as I am, though, it’s been impossible to ignore the once-again steady stream of medals that the Great Britain team is racking up, which led me to wonder about this country’s performance vs other nations of comparable size and that sort of jazz…anyway, thanks to this wonderful website you can now come to your pub chat about THE BEST NATIONS IN THE WORLD armed with a worldbeating array of ‘well, actually…’ stats to make all your companions vaguely hate you – see medal tables by capita, gold medals by capita, weighted in…ways I don’t totally understand…basically the main takeaway is that Granada is currently leading the ‘we have fcuk all people and yet still some medals’ list, while GB is in a very respectable 22nd place in terms of medals per capita (beaten by France, interestingly, which made me briefly wonder whether the French have poured a comparable amount of money into their national athletic success story – in fact what I really want to see is a ‘per pound invested’ medal league table, as I think that would be far more telling, so if someone could sort that out for me then that would be great thanks).
- A Collection of Collections: Ooh, a PORTAL! Well, ok, fine, it’s still technically just ‘a website’ (you joyless fcuks), but it’s a website that presents a HOST of links to other interesting online places, characterised by all being ‘collections of things’. ‘“Gathering Softly” is a collection of collections in the digital space and serves to explore collections on the web and their impact on web-based design. It emerged through intuitive web exploration and “link hopping” and was curated according to three selection criteria. First: The website hosts a collection curated from external content, not self-created. Second: It is not primarily for commercial purposes. Third: Not only the content but also the design and architecture of the website are interesting. The curated collection then becomes the subject of various archiving experiments aimed at countering the ephemeral nature of the internet and preserving the websites over time. The interplay of experiments offers a perspective on web archiving that foregrounds design and interaction. Multiple combined methods make websites accessible in different ways, emphasizing various aspects in fragments and even providing new possibilities.” So, yes, fine, it’s a *bit* artw4nky, but there are SO many interesting links in here, to design collections and archives and odd personal passion projects, some of which I have featured in here over the years and others which were entirely new to me. Basically like a lovely library of interesting online collections, to which everyone is invited to contribute – if you think of a site you believe fits with the ethos you can submit it for inclusion into the collection.
- Aerial Ashes: What do YOU want to happen to your mortal remains when you shuffle from this mortal coil? Obviously that assumes that you’re going to meet your end in a manner which is going to leave some mortal remains to dispose of – this question applies less should you be the victim of an industrial woodchipping accident, say, or should your final moments be spent in the company of a particularly hungry shark – but, given the choice, what would you put in your will? Personally I was always taken with the idea of being cremated and then getting someone to very quickly knock the ashes up into a three-tiered chocolate sponge cake to then be served to everyone at the wake without their knowledge, but I have to say that this service, which lets you have your ashes scattered by a drone from a great height over a location of your choosing, is pretty tempting. I presume that there are some tedious ‘laws’ governing where you can and can’t deposit a boxful of corpse dust, but I am now partly determined to have myself scattered over Glastonbury festival one year so I can be ingested by a quarter of a million unsuspecting festivalgoers (why…why do I want to be eaten after my death? Bit weird, this, possibly messiah complex-ish, best not to think too hard).
- 100 Gigs: Drake is an incredibly successful musician, whose music has been listened to by hundreds of millions of people – not sure I’ve ever met a Drake *fan*, though (the same applies, on a lesser scale, to Rita Ora – I refuse to believe that there are ANY Rita Ora fans, apart perhaps from the woman herself and her annoying husband). Still, should any of you be interested, he this week did something moderately interesting, dropping this website which contains links to 100g worth of material from his digital archives – videos, demos, new songs, behind the scenes stuff, all the sort of stuff you’d imagine. Which is quite a cool idea if you ask me, a nice bit of fanservice and a whole load of LORE (sorry) for the committed. The fact that one of the videos on there is called ‘Barbados Studio Mandem’ made me do a full-body cringe, though – mate you are not from round here, stop that.
- ZZap Radio: Are you a videogame enthusiast of a certain age? Do you have a sepia-tinged fondness for entertainment systems of your youth? Do the bloopy 8-bit synth sounds of the half-remembered games of your childhood send you off into Proustian reverie? CALLOO CALLAY, then, for today really is all your Christmases come at once. ZZap Radio is explained thusly by its creator: “Welcome to a new C64 Radio Station! I’m Dave Clarke aka RetroBeachMan and I love listening to classic game/chiptune music so I decided I would make a station I and others could listen to. Zzap Radio plays SID tunes 24/7 for you to enjoy! All this is done for free and is a hobby that I enjoy. I enjoy listening to classic game music and quite enjoy SID music so have created an internet radio station that I and others could enjoy!” This is the soundtrack, for me at least, of being about 6 years old and round at Alex Reilly’s house and being really annoyed at the fact that he wouldn’t let me have a go on Barbarian while simultaneously feeling a bit weird about having watched a ripped VHS of ‘Robocop’ that morning – see which peculiar childhood experience this flashes YOU back to!
- Fluid Frenzy: I am, it turns out, a massive sucker for in-browser fluid dynamics simulators (who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc! Actually, while I’m here, someone wrote to me this week who is doing the genuinely mad thing of seemingly going back through ALL of the Curios archives – no, no idea – and who wrote some nice things but who also made a passing reference to ‘authorial tics’ which, fine I know it’s true but OW MAN that sort-of hurts), and this is a really fancy version of exactly that sort of thing. Will make your computer wheeze somewhat emphysemically, but if you like the idea of “a wide range of tools to create realistic, immersive, and dynamic fluid simulations” then you will enjoy this (click ‘Live Demo’ on the linked page to start playing).
- Pictures of Japan: A lovely website by one Christian Mackie, which I think is just a presentation of photos he’s taken in Japan but whose interface makes it a really playful and interesting experience – when the page loads you’ll see a single image in the centre of the screen, which you can drag to any position you like, revealing another photo beneath it, letting you explore the collections by sorting and arranging them into ‘piles’, which in turn makes you think about the thematic and compositional elements of each image, and how they relate to the others, and, honestly, this is SUCH a nice way of exploring a collection of images, others take note.
- Penguin Series Design: A website dedicated to the cover art of Penguin novels, curated by one Greg Neville in Australia (HELLO GREG NEVILLE, should you ever happen to find this!) – “Penguin Books has had numerous categories in its long history: fiction, crime, sci-fi, poetry, theatre, classics, non-fiction, education etc. Alongside these broad categories more specific printings have been made with particular themes. For example, an edition of a particular author’s works, a specially priced series, a focus on regional authors, or series based on food, travel or romance. These editions of related books, where the art direction and design is co-ordinated in a single aesthetic with variations on a theme, is the subject of this site.” As you’d expect there is some gorgeous cover design on display here.
- TableFlipper: Load the page and become slightly entranced as you’re presented with what feels like an infinite selection of people flipping over tables in real or simulated rage (mostly simulated, this is largely from film and tv). I have no idea what you might conceivably do with this link, but there’s something undeniably-cathartic about watching people lose their sh1t at a largely-blameless inanimate object. Clicking the page loads a new gif – GO.
- Cyclemarks:This is an interesting idea. Based on the premise that in an algorithmically-led feed you will regularly be served stuff that is by people who you might find interesting but who you don’t necessarily end up following, Cyclemarks lets you basically set a reminder to check back on them in a set period of time, and sends you occasional email alerts to nudge you – the idea being that you can use it to set cyclical reminders to go back to things that you thought were interesting, which, honestly, feels like a generally good principle which might be applied to other aspects of online life (this is, I think, only for social profiles). This is in very early beta but you can apply for access to the early release should you so desire.
- The Wigtown Book Festival: I don’t usually include physical events in here because, well, I have no idea who the fcuk any of you are or where you are – but I will make an exception for the Wigtown Book Festival because a) its programme is being curated by Friend of Curios Lee Randall; b) because it sounds GORGEOUS, a lovely, mid-sized literary festival in a beautiful part of Scotland in early-Autumn with some really interesting speakers; and c) because Lee kindly asked me to do a talk there which I’m unable to do (they honestly have no idea how lucky they are and how lightly they have gotten off), and I feel the least I can do by way of apology is to give it a plug.
By Gil Rigoulet
THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN WANTS TO TAP THE ‘YOU DO KNOW WHICH OTHER TECH BILLIONAIRE ELON IS GETTING A LOT OF THIS END OF WESTERN CIVILISATION’-TYPE SCHTICK FROM, DON’T YOU?’ SIGN AGAIN BUT WHICH REALISES IT’S LIKE A BROKEN RECORD ON THAT TOPIC AND SO WILL FOR ONCE RESTRAIN ITSELF, PT.2:
- Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle: A special link for all you lovely North Americans! I confess to finding certain aspects of the Walzian love-in this week ever so slightly…icky? Childish? I don’t know quite how to explain it, but it’s the same sort of slight disgust I’ve mentioned before at the whole ‘phew, the grownups are back in charge!’ thing, a slight feeling of disappointment that all it takes for people to express ‘LOVE’ for a politician is the very smallest suggestion of their humanity or being even vaguely in the same ballpark as ‘someone you might once have met and not actually hated on sight’. Then, of course, you look back at the procession of ghouls that the American electorate has been presented with over the course of the past decade and you realise that, yes, fine, perhaps the relief is at least *slightly* comprehensible. Anyway, back in the OMG EPIC BACON LOL era of the Obama years, everyone was so enthused and excited by Barack and his promises of hope (let’s not scrutinise those too hard) that someone set up a Tumblr called ‘Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle’ which would spin up a new ‘Barack is AWESOME’-type message each time you refreshed (very much in the vibe of Chuck Norris memes from The Old Web) – this is the same, except it’s HOMELY UNCLE Tim Walz who’s being lionised here as (for example) being ‘happy to check over that job application for you’. Honestly, I don’t personally get this parasocial aspect of politics AT ALL (I have worked in politics, they are all basically weird lizards, even the good ones), but if you’re a US Democrat looking to keep the feelgood buzz this week going then you might enjoy this (don’t want to talk about the US elections too much because a) they are still going to be happening at the time of the heat death of the universe, or so it feels; and b) I don’t want to jinx anything, but, well…it feels vaguely positive? SHUTUPMATTDONOTBRINGTHEBADLUCK).
- The Banned Book Club: A neat segue into one of the (many, many) reasons why it is probably quite an important thing for the US that the Republican party don’t in fact win on November 5th – this is an initiative by The Palace Project, which aims to “support public libraries in their mission to provide equitable access to digital content, while restoring the direct relationship between library and patron.” The Banned Book Club is a brilliant initiative – apps available on Android and iOS which will enable students at schools in states that have banned specific texts from the curriculum on grounds of conservative complaints to access them securely in digital form via inter-state lending protocols. This is very much only for people in the US who I think are registered students – but it’s a brilliant idea and a great act of resistance against intellectual myopia and mad fundamentalism.
- Did You Make It?: I have on occasion featured websites that have a physically-reactive component to their function – sites that only function when the sun’s out, say, or which follow a diurnal rhythm in terms of content or design – but I think this might in some small way be my favourite, conceptually at least. “”Did you make it?” Is a poem writen by Sam Mason de Caires. It is contained within this website which is synchronised to the tides of the coast line where Sam lives. As the tide rises it covers the beaches and also the lines of this poem, as the tide recedes it reveals more, until at low tide it will reveal the entire poem. The accompanying music is meant to be listened to while visiting the site and reading the poem and is made from local recordings and samples made by Sam and also gifted by friends.” SUCH A BEAUTIFUL IDEA – and, let me repeat this for the nth time, SURELY something which you can use as ‘inspiration’ for something big and shiny?
- Millennium Skills: One of the lovely things about YouTube is that it’s demonstrated the universal human appeal of ‘watching people do stuff they are really good at, however ostensibly-dull that practice might initially seem’ – this channel is FULL of footage of people in (I think) India just making things. Gold-dipped statue of Ganesh? CHECK! Cricket balls? CHECK Hammers? CHECK CHECK CHECK! All the videos are just ambient audio with some light plinky piano behind it, so there’s a vague ASMR vibe to these things, and all the titles have that peculiar tone which you find in so much stuff from south Asia (lots of ‘Amazing!’ and ‘Most Incredible!’) which I personally rather like, and, look, if you really enjoy watching people doing ONE THING very very well indeed, and if you don’t mind if that ‘thing’ is something seemingly-mundane like ‘making melanin crockery’ then you will very much enjoy this.
- 100 Vending Machines: ANOTHER photo website with an unusual interface – this is, er, what I presume is 100 photographs of vending machines, taken across several months in 2024 by…some nameless person – as you move your cursor across the white screen, so the photos are dropped following the path you trace, making a sort of trail of vending machines which, for reasons I can’t quite articulate, I find very pleasing indeed. It’s not, fine, perhaps the best way of displaying them for anyone who has a really deep interest in the vending machines of Japan and who wants to really go deep into the details, but let’s presume you just want 30s worth of pleasing UX/UI before you move onto the next link and just leave it there.
- What Vegetable Are You?: Ok, fine, this is a very silly quiz, but there’s something honestly really charming about the vague sense of whimsy and how (really, very) silly it is. In case you’re curious, I am broccoli (I am fine with this).
- The SmallWeb Subway: Oh I like this a LOT – it’s a really simple idea, presenting a bunch of thematically-linked websites as though arranged on an imagined city’s underground map, each ‘stop’ a new site and each ‘line’ a collection of web projects linked by a particular quality or subject, with intersections from line to line taking place at sites where two conceptual ‘lines’ converge. From the creator’s explanation: “The Smallweb Subway is an experimental project that seeks to connect communities online using webrings. A webring is a list of websites linked together in a circular structure. The usage of webrings dates back to the early days of the internet before search engines were widely adopted and when there were no big social media platforms with discovery algorithms. Webrings were ways for people to discover new sites by clicking through conveniently organized links, eventually bringing you back to where you started…The subway system theme is my attempt at making the internet feel more like a place where you can have neighbors. If a webring looks like a subway line, then it’s easier to imagine a friend only a few stops away!” Beautifully, they’ve provided code so that anyone who owns a site they think would fit can add themselves to a particular line, making this a theoretically organic, growing series of connections – which is lovely, but, equally, I really like the idea of giving people the tools to make their own versions of this. I can’t imagine – lol, I KNOW FCUK ALL ABOUT HOW TO BUILD STUFF, WHAT DO I KNOW? – that it’s beyond the wit of man to create a simple interface to let anyone create their own version based on their own taxonomies and selections, and I would genuinely be thrilled were someone to create such a thing (do, er, any of you want to thrill me? Please?).
- Quick Share For Windows: Sincere apologies for what is, objectively, an incredibly-fcuking-tedious link – BUT IT IS USEFUL. Would YOU like an app (and an official one too!) which lets you simply and easily send files from your phone to your laptop without having to do that fcuking annoying thing of emailing it to yourself (literally half my life is me emailing links or files to myself; I promise the other half is less sh1t, though)? Yes, of course you would! Simple, quick and actually useful, in a way which, if I’m honest, pretty much none of the links I usually give you are. BE GRATEFUL.
- Auto Highlighter: This was sent to me by the aforementioned reader who’s doing the Curios Back Catalogue Marathon, one Tim Magee from Cambridge, who is using it to help them filter out stuff they’re not interested in from their online reading. It’s a really clever little idea for a browser extension – you basically give it a bunch of keywords which will, from point on, be highlighted in whichever colour you want, or hidden, basically helping you either easily identify topics of interest, or avoid trigger topics or spoilers…the only annoying thing about this is that it’s seemingly Firefox-only, although I’d be amazed if there wasn’t a variant on this on Chrome somewhere.
- Rick Steve’s Travel Forum: There are a few rules of thumb that I have found it useful to live by over the years – never drink in a flat-roofed pub, or one built directly into a housing estate; never, ever assume that the pills are duds until AT LEAST an hour has passed, etc etc – but in recommending this site I am having to abandon one of those I hold to be most true, to whit ‘never, ever trust a man who has two first names’ (I once worked with someone called ‘Robert John’ who is comfortably the worst human being I have ever encountered, personally or professionally – he is a former Conservative councillor now living in Dubai, which, I think, probably tells you all you need to know). Rick Steve’s Travel Forum is, I have now seen said in various places I trust, THE single best source of European travel advice anywhere on the web, a community of people who just really, really like sharing tips and tricks and recommendations about places to go. I am told that if you have a question about traveling ANYWHERE, your first port of call should be ‘check the Rick Steve forums’. The fact you need to register an account upfront is a good sign that Rick Steve’s Travel Forums (sorry, there’s just something inexplicably pleasing about typing the full name out – I’m doing that very odd thing of reading the words as I type them because they are just VERY SATISFYING) is a Serious Place for Seriously Helpful Travel Experts, and, generally, this gives me Good Vibes – although, equally, there’s every possibility that once you’re in it’s just 300 different flavours of Minnesotan asking about why there aren’t any Starbucks in Naples.
- Mumbdle: Congratulations to the creators of this (very good) little daily puzzle game on coming up with a name that is really quite particularly unpleasant to say out loud (try it, go on – HORRID) – although perhaps I’m just bitter as this is one of those things that I am simply Not Built To Be Good At. The premise here is simple – each day there’s a different song for you to guess based on the hummed interpretation of the site owner; you get five guesses; with each guess, a new layer of humming harmony is added, fleshing out the track and making it (allegedly) easier to guess what it is. You might be able to do this with nary a thought, but I am basically tone-deaf (not quite, but almost) and as such this is, for the most part, a bit like staring at a Magic Eye picture and consistently failing to see any sailboats whatsoever.
- ASCII Frogger: This is only a demo, really, so don’t expect to spend more than 30s with it, but I can’t tell you how wonderful the squished frog effect is and so it definitely deserves you to die at least once so you can experience it.
- The Point Clicker: A clicker game which is also a really annoying maths problem. I didn’t realise at first and was clicking like a slack-jawed yokel until I cottoned onto what was happening and realised that, actually, no, my brain doesn’t actually work in the right sort of way for me to be able to do anything other than attempt to brute force this and, honestly, life is too short. I like to think that one of you will look at this and just sort of GET IT (and then explain to me what the optimal strategy is here and how you arrived at that, in a manner which a particularly-docile ruminant might understand).
- Sets: Ooh, I like this – it requires you to look at and think about patterns in a way that is *just* unusual enough to mean that you (or at least I) feel it tugging at the edge of your brain slightly as you solve them (does…does anyone else get this? Like a near-physical feeling in your head when you’re doing thinking that is outside your usual wheelhouse? I feel it most either when I’m being forced to ACTUALLY THINK by something like philosophy, or when I am trying to use one of the bits of my brain that mostly languish unbothered, like ‘spatial awareness’ or ‘pattern matching’ or ‘anything but the most cursory aesthetic judgement’). Created by Shelby Wilson, the premise is simple: “Set is a card game in which each card has four properties: color, shape, shading and number of elements. A ‘set’ is created by finding three cards that are either all the same or all different for each property. In a deck of 81 cards, this means there are 1080 unique sets.” It’s match by similarity or exclusion, basically, and it’s surprisingly addictive when you get your head round what it’s asking of you.
- Eidercake: A cute little interactive fiction game set in a mediaeval cloister. You play as a young woman working in the kitchen – per the short description, “It’s the feast day of your patron saint, and a recipe has gone missing. A short tale of birds, books, and the cloistered life” – and it’s a gentle 10 minutes of exploring the different rooms and looking for the recipe book and talking to the various other inhabitants of the cloister who, inexplicably, are all birds of various sorts. The sounds and the visuals are really lovely here too.
- Asciicker: This week’s final ludic distraction is quite incredible. This is a project which has, as far as I can tell, been going for YEARS, cycling through phases of development as the person or people behind it get better at coding and what they can do with the limited palette of ASCII characters…it’s basically a sort of limited proof-of-concept for a browser MMO which is, remarkably, all built from the ASCII characterset – but wait, honestly, click the link and click ‘new game’ (and then click one of the options below it – the interface is…sub-optimal) and then marvel at what they have been able to create. I promise you, this really is quite incredible from a technical point of view – functionality’s a bit limited, and you might have to google around a bit if you want to work out what the fcuk is meant to be going on, but you can explore the landscape and collect items and meet other players and while this is very far away from being a ‘game’ in any meaningful complete sense it’s certainly a pretty amazing exploration of what you can do with some pretty simple tools (honestly, when it loads up try right clicking and moving the mouse to make the camera circle, it’s a proper ‘oh wow, this *is* smart’ moment).
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Teletext Art: HOW HAVE I NOT FEATURED THIS IN NEARLY 15 YEARS?!? Anyway, this is a collection of glorious, highly-pixellated ART from the wonderful, incomparable, much-missed (by me, at least) Teletext. SO MUCH MISTY-EYED NOSTALGIA!
- Videogame Bread: Some really nicely-illustrated an animated digital sliced white. I have no idea why.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The Andy Altman Studio: Andy Altman is a graphic designer, whos Insta feed is just a collection of really good-looking bits of design. Oh, and he’s currently posting old detergent boxes, which is an aesthetic that is RIGHT up my street (BONUS 70s DETERGENT PACKAGING FACT! According to Jonathan Meades’ excellent-if-genuinely-horrible novel ‘Pompey’, OMO-brand washing up powder was used by British housewives in the mid-20th Century as an indicator of their availability for sexual favours, OMO being a handy TLA for ‘Old Man Out’. No idea if this is true, but I like to imagine so.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- This Time It’s Worse: Sadly, inevitably, we kick off the longreads this week with another selection of pieces about the what and the why of the UK’s current enthusiasm for ‘doing a bit of a racism’. This is Daniel Trilling in the LRB, offering a broad overview, from the perspective of someone who’s been covering this stuff for a while, of why this feels different and worse to previous comparable instances of racialised violence. It was written a few days ago when everything felt slightly more raw and awful than it does at the time of writing, after a few days of relative quiet, but it’s a good and sober(ing) overview of what has happened and some of the reasons as to why.
- Bristol: Much like last week, the past seven days have been an excellent reminder of the importance and value of local journalism and how much we stand to lose if we continue to let the gap where they used to be get filled with ‘citizen journalists on Facebook Groups and TikTok’. This is on-the-ground reporting from the antifash in Bristol last Sunday, and, again, is excellent – not that the writing is particularly stellar, more that it displays an obvious sense of feeling for people and place that you don’t get from having a national reporter parachuted in to do the colour piece.
- Rotherham: More local reporting, this time by Dan Hayes who found himself last Sunday at the Holiday Inn full of asylum seekers which was threatened, and almost set alight, by a charming collection of people who were, lest we forget, simply demonstrating ‘legitimate concerns’ (a small point on that specific phrase – you hear it used a lot, but at no point does anyone stop to say ‘hang on, ok, you keep using that phrase – can you explain EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN BY IT?’ which I think is a mistake because, from what I can see, it’s often being used as a way of saying ‘people feel uncomfortable about the fact that not everyone who lives near them has the same colour skin’ without in fact saying those words out loud). I found this quite hard to read in places, because it’s fcuking HORRIBLE and because a lot of the language quoted is stuff that I genuinely didn’t think you heard any more in big old 2024 (recall that I grew up in an era in which it was LITERALLY TOTALLY NORMAL to refer to the shop at the end of the road as ‘the p-word shop’, a charming turn of phrase which my immigrant mother helpfully beat out of me at a young age when she caught me parroting it), but I think it’s an important piece in particular because of how it neatly dismantles the ‘legitimate concerns’ lines.
- GakRiots: We return to the increasingly-prolific Clive Martin next, who writes in the New Statesman about how the UK’s gakky Summer is extending into a season of gakky riots, and how cocaine really is the driving force between so much of mass culture in this country right now. Look, I am a middle-aged man who lives in London and who has worked in advermarketingpr for 20+ years – of course I have done cocaine, I am in no position to moralise. What I would say, though, is that of all the drugs in the world, cocaine is the only one which in EVERY SINGLE CASE I can think of makes people actively worse versions of themselves whenever they take it, no exceptions. NOONE is a better, kinder or nicer person after their third brief trip to the cubicle, and I do think that that’s a slightly-underexplored side effect of the current boom in coke across the country.
- Labour and the Lobbyists: Another LRB piece now – this is long, and quite involved in the money and connections within UK business and politics, but I thought it a really interesting overview of an environment which I continue to be astonished isn’t scrutinised nearly as much as it ought to be. The piece is basically a look at how lobbyists increasingly form part of the political intake – it was ever thus, but it’s seemingly become even more of a conveyor belt – and the necessary…complications that arise when someone who’s spent their entire career cultivating political relationships for money suddenly becomes exactly the sort of person who the people with said money now want to reach. As someone who worked as a lobbyist (very badly) 20 years ago, I continue to remain slightly aghast at how much the industry just sort of gets away with, and the fact that its a set of systems and structures which legitimise ‘cash for access’ in pretty egregious fashion.
- The World Assumes War Posture: Just in case you haven’t found the initial selection of longreads too depressing, have this one, all about how a seemingly-significant proportion of the world’s governments appear to be quietly-but-efficiently battening down the hatches in preparation for some sort of flavour of big-scale bellicosity in the not-too-distant. All of this might be old news to those of you who are close readers of The Economist and other such Serious Tomes, but I found it a really decent overview of ‘where we are’ in terms of the big stuff like China/Taiwan and the broader network of interests across the Middle East. Honestly, though, if you’re feeling a bit fragile this week then maybe skip this one – after all, there’s literally NOTHING that you as an individual can do about it!
- The Tech Industry Vs Journalism: Or ‘why big tech people are increasingly only talking to other big tech people’ – to which the answer, obviously, is because ‘actual journalists have finally started asking them hard questions about stuff’, alongside ‘whereas talking to one of their mates on a podcast lets me say all the stuff necessary to juice my portfolio on the way to my dreamed-of 10x’. This is interesting from a tech culture point of view, but, equally, it doesn’t do much to reassure readers who might have arrived at the general position that much of modern tech exists in a weird Cali bubble that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lived experience of 99% of people on Earth: “But both the progenitors of these projects and their fans share an overarching ethos that building and turgidly celebrating tech is itself an identity. They also tend to share other aspects of their identities: 70% of Pirate Wires’ paid subscribers are men ages 25 to 40 who work in tech and finance. In his own words, Solana is writing for and perpetuating a “new class of people building new things” who are “increasingly isolated from mainstream culture.””
- Stop Fawning Over His New Hair: Ok, not technically the title of the piece, but it should be. This is about Mark Zuckerberg and his GLOW-UP and the fawning coverage that has been lavished on the Meta CEO as a result of his finally, after 15 years in the public eye, managed to develop a public persona that doesn’t cause spontaneous revulsion in his audience, and the fact that THIS IS TERRIBLE JOURNALISM AND SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. This is a good overview of all the different ways in which Meta and its subsidiary platforms are in hot water, and an explanation of some of the reasons why it might have been convenient, timely and useful for Zuckerberg to get some nice image-focused headlines as a ‘look over there’ PR tactic, but, honestly, WHY THE FCUK DO JOURNALISTS DO THIS? Rhetorical, obvs – it’s the clicks!
- Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From: 404 Media continues to do God’s work, now answering the question ‘so, what exactly is the deal with all of those Pages pushing obviously AI-generated crap into the TL? What do they stand to gain?’ – the answer being (of course!) small-scale payouts from Facebook’s Creator Bonus Programme! I confess to having been ignorant of this monetisation option, but apparently it’s invite-only – per the article, though, you only need a few bits of VIRAL CONTENT to get on their radar and get invited into the tent, at which point you get access to the MAGICAL MONEY TREE that is, er, getting paid $40 for 300,000 likes or somesuch appalling ratio. Which, obviously, is probably not going to float your boat if you’re attempting to pay rent in London or NYC, but if you’re in a village in Chetinad, say, then is probably significantly more appealing. So there’s an inevitable cottage industry sprung up selling guides on how to produce the BEST AND MOST ENGAGING content, and more and more people are jumping on the bandwagon, and all the while Facebook’s vast machine is paying out trivial sums in order to convince its users to produce rubbish they don’t really understand for an audience of morons and bots half a world away, all to feed the largest interconnected communications network our species has ever known with enough CONTENT FUEL to keep the wheels churning as it prints money for an investor class who probably don’t even use it anymore. WHAT A FUTURE!
- Punching and Culture Wars: I thought this was a decent writeup of the boxing controversy – also, I am very much on one side of this specific debate, so please don’t email me attempting to have an argument about it because I really, really don’t want to. What I enjoyed about this is that its focus on Imane Khelif takes in Algeria and Algerians, voices I haven’t seen involved much in all the screaming and shouting.
- The Aphantasia Spectrum: This is a really interesting piece – you are all obviously aware of the concept of ‘aphantasia’ and that there are people who, when asked to ‘imagine’ a thing do not conjure up a visual representation of said ‘thing’ in their mind’s eye, and in fact don’t report having what others might commonly refer to as such, but this explores some of the ranges of experience which are being discovered as scientists explore the concept (also, this is one of those sorts of things that feel like a wonderful post-web learning, one of those ideas that only makes sense when you’ve been linked to a significant chunk of the world’s population and get to hear about how they experience the world in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible pre-www). What I enjoy about this is that it demonstrates the sheer, insane variety of internal human experience, the proper SUBJECTIVITY OF LIFE stuff which is what makes being alive sort-of amazing (the rich tapestry of human experience is vast and infinite!) and also sort-of terrifying (noone can ever possibly experience life in exactly the same way as you due to the innate subjectivity of the human condition and such we will all in some very real way die entirely alone!), and it’s particularly interesting for me as I am definitely not ‘aphantasic’ but, equally, I am DEFINITELY further towards that end of the scale as here described. A nice reminder that WE ARE ALL REALLY REALLY REALLY DIFFERENT, which, personally, I think usefully links to the previous article in certain important thematic ways.
- The Virtual Preachers of Kenya: The preachers, to be clear, are analogue – its the ministry that’s being delivered digitally. Rest of World explores the world of Kenyan preachers who are spreading the word of God – and, in some case, soliciting some nice donations – via livestreamed prayer sessions. I do love this stuff, the conjunction of tech with old-school worship (and, if you’ll allow me to be momentarily a *bit* cynical, not a little grifting), and overall this is a really nice piece (which features several people who don’t, in fairness, appear to be attempting to make a quick buck out of their congregations). I did very much enjoy this description of the setup of one particular guy, though, who started small and then grew: “Now his follower count is around 25,000. His ministry’s name has evolved to Spirit Light Ministries Online Church. It’s governed by a team of leaders and headed by two chairpersons charged with keeping in touch with members. There’s also an administrator who manages donation pledges, a secretary who keeps record of meetings, and a treasurer who manages projects such as equipment purchases and Wekesa’s occasional visits to orphanages. Then there are 10 pastors who, when needed, can take up Wekesa’s role as preacher for a night. All these officials work as unpaid volunteers.” Unpaid volunteers, eh? WHAT WOULD JESUS DO???
- Roblox Dress To Impress: I am not cool. I have never been cool. I am not ‘down with the kids’, nor indeed do I want to be. I accept, and indeed to certain extents embrace, that I am no longer for whom the zeitgeist tolls (A BRIEF AUTHORIAL ASIDE: I met a very old friend of mine last night for the first time in 12 years (she lives in LA) and discovered that she and her husband WRITE FILMS FOR HALLMARK – she told me that it was so, so liberating to do something that could not be less concerned with ideas of ‘cool’, which I think is something we should all take on board a little more. Mind you, I suspect that she and her husband are also earning some pretty violent wedge, which possibly also helps one be zen about one’s personal position relative to the cutting edge). Still, I confess to never having felt as old as I did when reading this, a guide to a ‘craze’ apparently sweeping Roblox – my only small consolation was that it was introduced to me by a younger millennial who was equally baffled by it. I do wonder whether in about three generations’ time anyone under 16 will basically be incomprehensible to anyone over-25 (lol, people have obviously been saying this FOREVER). If you can read this and parse it in any meaningful sense then, well, I have some questions: “Themes are central to the Dress To Impress gameplay. These range from mainstream aesthetics like royalcore, coquette and Y2K to colours, activities and moods like heartbreak and sadness. Alternatively, players can purchase custom themes with in-game currency called Robux. In the past, this feature has led to some impressive themes like Genshin Impact. But on the other end, there have been some questionable and bizarre entries like the now-removed ‘Period Clot’ and ‘Apology Video’. The latter has seen players problematically recreating the outfits worn by YouTuber Colleen Ballinger, known online as Miranda Sings, in her controversial ukulele apology song as a response to grooming, harassment and doxxing allegations.” WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???
- Quitting Spotify: One of my best friends actually works at Spotify and is quite senior, but I’m reasonably-certain that he’s probably too busy to ever read this, or certainly not this far down, so hopefully he won’t see me posting this piece by Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker which explains why he’s decided to quit the platform – I care less about Chayka’s personal decisions than I do about the general point he makes, to whit that Spotify is the latest software company to place revenue-driving UX/UI tricks ahead of user need. I mean, look, from their point of view it’s working – they’re seemingly actually making money now, though I have questions about the degree of expensively-creative accounting that’s happening around the numbers – but it feels…a bit sad that they seem to have alighted on the solution being ‘just basically railroad everyone into algogenerated playlist streaming’.
- Inside OzempicTown: A really interesting piece in Bloomberg looking at a particular town in the US where, seemingly, everyone is on fatloss jabs, whether one of the big, official ones or some sort of generic or homebrew knockoff in an attempt to address the clinical obesity which afflicts a massive proportion of residents. What’s this going to do long-term? NO IDEA! There’s something CLASSICALLY darkly-American about the picture painted here of people getting the real stuff on health insurance as part of their diabetes treatment, then losing weight to an extent whereby they fall below the threshold at which the insurer will continue to pay, by which point they don’t want to stop the jabs and get fat again and so they slide into the black or grey market for knockoff alternatives. Definitely going to be fine, that.
- A Really Annoying Article About British Slang: This came to me via the ever-excellent Links – a piece in the Wall Street Journal clutching its pearls about the fact that certain pieces of ‘traditional’ British slang were falling out of usage, and it properly got on my tits (SEE? SLANG IS ALIVE AND WELL!). Firstly, the piece uses terms like ‘ninny’, ‘blighter’ or ‘toe-rag’ which haven’t been in common usage for over half a century; secondly, as I pointed out to Caitlin via email (she did solicit this, honest, I wasn’t just ranting): “This is just language shifting – also, the fact that there’s no mention of the fact that most kids in the UK speak a version of what’s often termed MLE – Multicultural London English – which takes influence from slang and patois from all sorts of different culture and means that wherever you go there will be teenagers referring to each other as ‘blud’ or ‘cuz’ or ‘fam’. And that’s not even to take into account the flattening effect of international internet English on the written word. It’s all w4nk, basically.” So there.
- A History of Keyboard Cat: I know, I know, meme nostalgia is LAME – but I promise you that this is a surprisingly-charming story, and you will be pleased to learn (or at least I was) that the person behind the cat is actually someone who’s just a generally fun, creative, silly performer-type, and who has been making ridiculous and weird things all their life, of which Keyboard Cat was simply the most visible example. Sometimes things on the internet are just NICE, and this is very much one of them.
- VR Soccer: Or, ‘What The MLS Imagines The Future Of Watching Football Will Be’ – I am personally unconvinced at the idea of watching sports on massive, bulky headsets, but I can see some of the stuff here being viable when the hardware becomes less intrusive. Still, the old man luddite part of me can’t help but look at this and grumble about sport being yet one more thing that’s been fcuking RUINED by data and our fcuking obsession with it. Do you ever think we live in a quantitative world when maybe it would be better to live in a qualitative one? I do, but then again I am simplistic thinker who never really got beyond ‘stoned philosophy student’ in his conception of the world.
- The Fentanyl Supplychain: ALSO sent to me by Tim Magee, to whom once again HUGE THANKS, this is a really interesting look at how easy it is to acquire the chemicals required to buy fentanyl via merchants based in China. A confession – when my mum was dying I spent a LOT of time injecting her with fentanyl, and once, when cracking an ampoule and shooting her up, I found a miniscule drop of the liquid on my finger – reader, I licked it. OH MY GOD. If ever I wanted a sensation to validate my ‘in the unlikely event I make it to 55 I am totally getting into skag’ lifeplan then MY WORD was that it – turns out that this stuff really does make you feel quite remarkable. DON’T DO IT, KIDS. Also, do not get any ‘bright ideas’ about what you might do with the NoFilterGPT, please.
- The Chipotle Trial: Ok, this is a story about a case in the US when a woman got sentenced to community service after throwing her bowl of food at the Chipotle staff member who served it to them – I appreciate, ostensibly not that interesting, I get it. BUT as I read it it become a wonderful sort of representation of so much of modern, Western urban life in 2024 – people are tired, people are stressed, people are selfish and angry and have forgotten, quite simply, that the other strangely-shaped meatsacks they keep seeing around them are in fact OTHER PEOPLE and might be worthy of consideration, and there are so many points in this piece that felt weirdly representative of actions and reactions you observe – or, let’s be honest, perpetrate – every day in London. A very modern argument born of a very modern set of tiny frustrations with some very modern conclusions, basically, which makes the article significantly more interesting than you might originally think.
- Pigeons in Arndale Centres: Vittles with an article on the weird majesty of Britain’s slightly-crap inner city markets – I didn’t realise that ‘Arndale Centres’ were a pan-British thing rather than just being a Manc institution, for example, but it turns out that they were built up and down the country by the Arndale Corporation. Vittles has a degree of reverence for ‘incredibly culturally-specific foods served in strip-lite environs’ which, look, I don’t personally share, but there’s so much affection in this piece, and the writing and history are excellent as ever, and it also features quite a lengthy bit about Wood Green Food City which, til recently, was a regular haunt of mine, and so I feel very warmly towards the whole thing.
- At The Florida Bigfoot Conference: I refuse to believe that that title isn’t enough on its own to induce a click, but, fine, have an extract too: “At the happy hour, I sat down next to Thomas and Todd, who’d driven down from Mississippi. In his free time, Todd designs Bigfoot-themed coasters. He doesn’t have an Etsy shop and wasn’t a vendor for the conference. “I just make ‘em for myself and for friends,” he told me. “Take one.” He handed me a coaster which read “Florida Skunk Ape: The Original Florida Man.” The coaster, disintegrating beneath the ring where his beer had been, was red, green, yellow, and black—the same colors you might find on a head shop ashtray. Thomas told me he was an HVAC repairman and heavy metal guitarist with a long ponytail who filled his time driving between jobs listening to Bigfoot podcasts. His dad got him into it. “It’s intergenerational for me,” he said.” TELL ME YOU DON’T WANT MORE OF THIS.
- I Got Snipped: Finally this week, another Paris Review piece, this one by Joseph Earl Thomas all about getting a vasectomy as a middle-aged black man who’s already got several kids – this is VERY funny indeed, as well as being an interesting portrayal of black (US) masculinity, and the writing’s generally a joy, particularly given there’s not as much as there should be about the experience: “But who am I anyway, strolling through Target at eight this morning in a BABY DADDY T-shirt Jess got me two Father’s Days back, buying a thirty-six-pack of SKYN Elite condoms—could be large or regular, mind your business—and sexting back one of your friends about what she likes and where. Four kids too late, I’d like to say that getting a vasectomy was the best sexual decision I’ve ever made, and that you can love someone, many people, in fact, and not want any more of them at all.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- My notes for this just say ‘WTAF’, and having just played it through again I am not sure I have much else to add, other than it sounds like three or four songs, some of which might be happening simultaneously, and a bit like what I imagine an aneurysm to feel like. This is by death’s dynamic shroud & galen tipton (no, really) and it’s called ‘Generate Utopia’.