Webcurios 10/05/24

SUMMER HAS COME TO LONDON! Or, more accurately, it is not currently raining and that is good enough for me. I would imagine that you’re all excitedly preparing your spangly pants and protest songs in anticipation of Eurovision, so I will keep this intro short and encourage you to dive right in, as otherwise there’s no way you’ll be finished before all the besequinned caterwauling starts.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably stick a fiver on that Baby Lasagna song (according to someone I know who understands this stuff; I have no fcuking idea, obviously).

By Michelle Thompson (all images this week lifted from TIH, to whom thanks as ever)

AS YOU WERE DOUBTLESS ALL AWARE IT WAS 45 DAY ON 04 MAY, CELEBRATING VINYL AND ALL ASSOCIATED THINGS, SO HERE IS AN APPROPRIATELY VINYL-Y MIX BY TOM SPOONER WITH WHICH TO CELEBRATE!

THE SECTION WHICH IN THE WAKE OF NADHIM ZAHAWI’S DECISION TO STAND DOWN WOULD LIKE TO REMIND READERS THAT IN HIS YOUTH HE LITERALLY LOOKED LIKE A TERRIBLE STREET MAGICIAN WHO WAS ALSO A PECULIARLY-UNSUCCESSFUL PICK-UP ARTIST, PT.1:  

By Yuwei Tu

OUR NEXT MUSICAL TREAT IS THIS PLAYLIST FEATURING EVERY SINGLE SONG MENTIONED IN THE BEASTIE BOYS BOOK – SERIOUSLY, BOOKMARK THIS, IT IS FCUKING AMAZING AND IS OVER A DAY’S WORTH OF BRILLIANT TRACKS!

THE SECTION WHICH IN THE WAKE OF NADHIM ZAHAWI’S DECISION TO STAND DOWN WOULD LIKE TO REMIND READERS THAT IN HIS YOUTH HE LITERALLY LOOKED LIKE A TERRIBLE STREET MAGICIAN WHO WAS ALSO A PECULIARLY-UNSUCCESSFUL PICK-UP ARTIST, PT.2:

• Record Club: I know, I know, the last thing anyone wants in the year of our Lord 2024 is ‘another social network’. Or, frankly, any social networks at all. Still, let’s not think of this as a social network – let’s instead think of it as, er, a record club! This is a new online community built by and for music enthusiasts as a place to hang out, chat about music, share recommendations and all that sort of jazz (lol) – crucially, it’s not trying to be a destination for listening, more a space for people to congregate around particular artists or songs or genres, and to find like-minded people who are also into the same sort of thing. Obviously this isn’t a wholly-new premise, and there are doubtless other places online that offer a similar sort of vibe (or which try to), but I rather like both the design and the feel of this – it’s in beta, but I was let in pretty quickly, and if you’re the sort of person who really likes talking about how much the B-side of ‘I Touch Myself’ meant to them as a kid (look, I’m not judging, it takes all sorts) then this may be your new online forever home. I think it reminds me a bit of ‘This Is My Jam’ (RIP, wiv da angles), which may be why I feel so warmly towards it.
• Etymonline: OH GOD I LOVE THIS. How have I not seen it before? Evidently I am not spending enough time online. I have just checked out the FAQ page and I think this has been going since…2005ish? Anyway, it is OLD – Methuselan by modern web standards – and it is venerable, and it is a BRILLIANT resource for, er, etymology nerds. Are you the sort of person who really, really enjoys finding out the origin of terms like ‘macadam’ or ‘two-step’? GOOD ME TOO! Honestly, the fatigue is really starting to kick in now and it’s all I can do not to abandon you right here and just go to bed and send myself to sleep by going through the linguistic history of the verb ‘to eat’ – but I won’t, because I am DEDICATED and, also, I have compulsive issues which means that I wouldn’t be able to relax chiz chiz. Anyway, this is a genuinely wonderful resource, and as with so many things it’s mainly maintained by a single individual, who, honestly, is a fcuking hero. I can’t stress enough how wonderful I find these sorts of sites, useful and deep and PERSISTENT, and which exist solely because someone is interested and cares and believes it important that it SHOULD exist. It’s almost enough to make me like people, almost.
• The London GreenGround Map: Another link from Rishi, this (buy his poems, they are great), and another which I am slightly upset I hadn’t known about previously. A piece of design by Helen Ilus, the London GreenGround Map is (roughly speaking) a sort of tube map analogue for the capital’s green spaces, mapping connections and routes between public parks and gardens and areas less blighted by urban sprawl, letting you plan routes that take you through the bits of the city that are yet to be tarmaced over. “An enthusiastic walker and urban explorer Helen travelled widely, studying and working in UK, before coming up with the idea of connecting parks to tube style network for walkers. Fan of Harry Beck’s London Tube map she wondered what would happen combining the schematic mapping with walking routes. As an intuitive traveller she found the schematic maps more accessible in urban environments, but realised they also trap people in transport networks. This is why her maps give priority to green infrastructure, replacing stations with parks and tube lines with walking routes. She has also experimented with creating a walking map for libraries as well as worked with several commissioned maps.” It’s free to download, and if I had access to a colour printer I would totally do a big copy of this and carry it with me – whether or not you want a physical copy, this is SUCH a good way to plan walks and routes, and if you live in London it’s worth looking for your local area and seeing if there are any nearby spaces that are new to you that you might want to explore over the coming few weeks before it gets cold and wet and grey again.
• London Rent Prices Map: A sub-Page of the previously-featured Pint Prices page (mapping the price of a beer – which, by the way, I saw someone pay £EIGHT FCUKING QUID for a pint of neck oil  the other day, which is an awful lot to pay for beer that bad), this takes data from SpareRoom to map average per-room rental prices across the city. The values are colour-coded, so the lower end of the pricing scale is green while the higher end is red, but it’s important to remember that GREEN DOES NOT EQUAL CHEAP, because there is no cheap housing stock in this fcuking city and you can expect to shell out a minimum of about £800 for a room that is practically in Essex, let alone something on an actual tube line. If you’re looking for somewhere to live, this could actually be useful – you can click into specific areas, and then find individual links back to the SpareRoom listings, which might be helpful if you’re currently unlucky enough to find a new rental (I am sorry, good luck).
• The Hacker News Map: A map! Of posts on Hacker News! Arranged thematically! You can search, or just zoom in and around – it’s actually a pretty decent search engine given the massive range of topics covered on the site over the years, and you can read a decent explanation of what it is, how it works and how you might use it on this blogpost by its creator Wilson Lin – it’s a surprisingly good way of finding interesting things, and for doing topic-based research (as long as you don’t mind it throwing up things from a few years back), and is a generally interesting place to spend a bit of time digging around.
• The Water Drinkers: I think I featured a piece on here a few years ago about the weird world of hydration YouTube, where people, mainly young men, would post videos showing them drinking water, performatively chugging a bottle of Evian or whatever, again and again, day after day, maintaining ‘hydration streaks’ (surely, you know, a prerequisite for being alive?) and generally building a small, weird, niche, but dedicated, audience of hydration fans – this link takes you to a spreadsheet listing some of the top water drinkers, how many days their ‘streaks’ have been going, that sort of thing. The person at the top of this leaderboard has been filming themselves drinking water and posting the footage to the web for (at the time of writing) a total of 4541 days, which is a degree of obsessional, and quite possibly deeply-psychologically-unhealthy, dedication to which I can very much empathise.
• Abandoned Blogs: Via Kris, this is an Are.na board collecting blogs that have been left dormant by their owners. This is INCREDIBLE, a series of windows not only into the past, but into the specific pasts of specific strangers – the blogs collected here (there are over 100 I think) run the gamut from the personal to the obsessional, covering fashion and music and food and ‘just, you know, LIFE’, and there is so much here to explore and enjoy. Some of these will have been abandoned through lack of interest of a loss of focus or simply time and change and, you know, growing up, and some will have been left because their owners don’t exist anymore, and wandering through these is…I wanted to type that it was like wandering through a graveyard, but that makes it sound sad and elegiac in a way that this isn’t. It’s more like walking down a street where all the houses are empty but perfectly-preserved, able to step through any door you choose and explore what was left by whoever once owned it, and it is BEAUTIFUL. I really need to look into forever hosting for Web Curios – given I am never going to procreate, this fcuker is my SOLE LEGACY (literally the saddest line I have ever written, that) and I’m fcuked if I’m letting it decay when I finally manage to get off this mortal coil.
• Weathersight: Self-describing as ‘tools for data-driven climate journalism’, this is basically a resource that seeks to make weather datasets more easily readable and accessible – genuinely useful for anyone who is involved in researching or looking into all of the various interesting and awful ways we’re fcuking the planet and, by happy extension, ourselves!
• Tiny Dogs: One of the rare occasions when I feature a commercial endeavour in Curios – but, honestly, it is SO CHARMING that I couldn’t leave it out, even if it is something you have to pay for. Do you have a dog? Would you like to have a tiny version of said dog? A tiny version crafted out of felt? Which looks EXACTLY LIKE YOUR BELOVED HOUND? YES YOU WOULD! Hence Tiny Dogs – this person is based in Austria, and if you send them a photo of your dog they will send you a quote to have it ‘tinified’ – effectively rendered in miniature using what are probably some really quite impressive crafting techniques. Look, I am very much not a dog person – they smell, and you have to take care of them, and having dealt with two terminally ill, bedbound family members already in my short life I’m done with that thankyouverymuchindeed – but these are SO CUTE, and, honestly, if someone you love has a SPECIAL BOY (or girl) of the four-legged variety I can think of few nicer (if unspeakably–twee) gifts for them than this. I also very much enjoyed the short, one-word answer to the ‘Do You Do Cats As Well?’ FAQ (“No”).
• AI Recruiting: Do any of you work in Human Resources/Recruitment? If so, you might want to skip this next bit. Gone? Good. YOUR DAYS ARE SO NUMBERED! This is a slightly-chilling service, selling itself as a one-stop-solution for (specifically) tech recruitment, which claims that it basically does EVERYTHING automatically – CV vetting, task-setting, interviewing, interview assessment…all managed by The Machine, with the magical, unknowable Black Box deciding who the optimal candidates are without a human ever needing to be involved in the process, undercutting recruitment agencies or headhunters by a purported 80%. “What about bias?”, I hear you cry, “And what about the fact that the process is entirely inscrutable?”. “WHO CARES?”, responds the software company, firing up the AI and effectively putting Randstadt out of business.
• Books About Food: This is a site made by two guys in London which is designed to be a hub for people – authors and those on the publishing / design side – who are involved in the business of writing about food, a site where they can showcase their work and promote their projects, and it works as a really useful directory of ‘people in food in the UK’. If you are after food writers or stylists or photographers or designers in this space, this feels like a hugely-helpful place to start doing your research; you can focus in on a specific author and see, for example, who art-directed their cookbook, or find inspirations for brand collabs, or find potential recipe writers for a commercial project… If you work in UK food publishing, or foodie advermarketingpr, this is GREAT.
• Motown Junkies: A proper old-school blog, this: “a track-by-track review of every US and UK Motown single, including all subsidiaries. Not ambitious, then…I’m Nixon, and I’m British. I love music in almost all its forms, and I love Motown…Here’s how this will work. I’m going to do a separate post for every released (or planned) A- and B-side, and these will then be compiled both on the pages for each label, and also in the Master Index, which is just a great big list of everything that’s been posted to date. Unless otherwise noted, for the stuff between 1959 and 1972, I’ve treated the liner notes in the Complete Motown Singles box sets as the Word of God, and will only be dissenting from the officially-sanctioned “party line” where I think it’s important to do so (and noting the conflict). I’ll also provide external links to any information out there which I’ve taken note of, or which might provide useful further reading.” This is excellent, a proper labour of love, and a wonderful way of finding some genuinely brilliant music.
• Snail Is Inevitable: This is very silly, and also feels like something that you could iterate on in a variety of fun ways. “A snail relentlessly follows your cursor. There’s a fun hypothetical that asks if you would accept the following conditions: you get ten million dollars, but a snail follows you for the rest of your life, and if it ever touches you, then you die. Naturally, I took this hypothetical and made it into a chrome extension (the “snail that follows your cursor” part, not the “getting ten million dollars” part, though you are free to pretend this is the case). Once you press the “start” button on the extension’s popup page, a snail (shoutout Slay the Spire) will invisibly start tracking your cursor’s position. It moves very slowly, but it is always moving. If it touches you, then you die (get a blue screen of death popup).” I installed this earlier this week and it has added a pleasing note of existential angst to my browsing experience, which, fine, may not be what you’re after from a link, but LIVE A LITTLE FFS.
• Tranquil Words: I enjoyed this. Tranquil Words presents a blank screen on which you type whatever you want – but the words are invisible, unless you choose to reveal them or send the output to yourself via email. Whether you’re interested in practising free writing – you know, that stream of consciousness unblocking technique that a certain subset of ‘creative’ people swear by – or just use it as a secret way to write all sorts of invective about your colleagues or flatmates while they are RIGHT THERE, I very much like the unfettered ‘type your id into the void’-ness of it all.
• Other Orders: Code which lets you play with text in interesting ways, taking words and rearranging and reordering them in different ways based on different rulesets. Which I appreciate may not make much sense, but will do when you click, I promise. Not practically useful for anything I can immediately think of, but potentially fun from the point of view of experimental writing (or, actually, doing interesting/oblique interrogations of a corpus or single text, which could be useful now I come to think of it). If you’re a very particular type of wordw4nker there’s something interesting/whimsical/romantic you could do with your collected correspondence with a lover here, I think.
• Courtesy Vulture: Gah, ANOTHER TIKTOK (sorry) – but this is SO GOOD. Stop-motion animation in the ‘weird, and a bit gross’ category, which reminds me, vibe-wise, of Salad Fingers in the best possible way. If you click the link, the first vid on the page is a compilation of previous episodes (each tends to be about 30s long), which will get you nicely up-to-speed (insofar as this makes anything resembling ‘sense’). Aside from anything else this is technically really impressive, props to whoever’s behind it.
• Dhime: It will almost certainly come as no surprise to anyone reading this that I cannot dance for sh1t – I am largely arrhythmic, afflicted with the ‘dancing white man’s overbite’, and frankly far too tall and thin for my efforts to look like anything other than a collection of coat hangers having an epileptic fit. Still, maybe this will CHANGE MY LIFE – Dhime is a really interesting idea, using AI to teach you how to dance. The deal is that you watch videos of dance routines, then set your phone up to film you attempting to replicate the moves – The Machine then analyses your movements and attempts to work out how similar or otherwise you were to the ideal, and then offer you feedback to improve your spastic flailings. Whether this works I have no idea, and will never, ever find out, but if you’re someone who really wants to nail whatever the current TikTok fad is then a) why are you reading this newsletter? It seems frankly incongruous; and b) this might help.
• Perfect Pitch: Last up in this section, ANOTHER GAME! Listen to the notes, attempt to map them to the correct keys on a keyboard, and if you’re anything like me realise that you really are tone-deaf to a spectacular degree. This is, honestly, fun, even if you are really, terribly bad at it.

By Chang Ya Chin

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS A SELECTION OF TRACKS THAT SOUND NOT UNLIKE A HARD DRIVE DEFRAGGING ITSELF, BUT IN THE BEST WAY POSSIBLE, MIXED BY FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Manu Kant: Specifically, SEXY, YOUNG, AI IMMANUEL KANT! No, really, look at his cheekbones! FEEL THE WEIGHT OF HIS SMOULDERING CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE (little Kantian joke for the heads out there)! This was a short-lived art project that, for reasons I can’t adequately explain (despite the writeup here), decided to present selected bits of Kant’s thinking as though they were coming from the mind, and mouth, of a VERY PRETTY 24 year old influencer called Manu Kant. Isn’t he gorgeous? And SO DEEP!
• The E-Ink Cam: Another Krislink, the E-Ink Cam is a wonderful project, describes by its creator, Kaloyan Kolev, as follows: “eink.cam is a lo-fi digital camera with a tiny energy footprint that makes charming dithered pictures. I like to describe it as a “digital polaroid.” eInk (or ePaper) is an alternative display technology that uses physical ink particles to produce images. eInk displays are much more power efficient and legible in sunlight in comparison to LCD screens, but suffer from slow refresh times and limited color reproduction. While these limitations will be overcome as the tech develops, they also give it an undeniable charm. The images on eink.cam look futuristic and retro at the same time.” I would imagine if they ever chose to make this a purchasable product they would be INUNDATED with orders – I barely ever take photos of anything, and even I want one of these immoderately.
• John Pork: Who is John Pork? Why, he’s a virtual influencer with the head of a pig! What a silly question! I honestly have no fcuking idea about this one AT ALL.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Andrew Brischler

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: