So, kill the rich or don’t kill the rich – where do YOU stand?
Obviously MURDER IS BAD, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think I’ve come up with a solution to the general problem of plutocratic wealth accumulation which we can all get behind.
Let’s all agree that noone should be murdered – ok? OK! Let’s also accept that as part of our general social contract we all agree to abide by this and that everyone should be protected from murder by the law – ok? OK! Let’s ALSO agree that this applies to everyone alive…UNLESS you decide that you personally want to accumulate a personal fortune above a certain centrally-agreed threshold – let’s say, arbitrarily, $100m (I will leave it to you to decide where you think that line should fall) which will still let you enjoy the benefits of being RICHER THAN YOU COULD EVER POSSIBLY NEED TO BE whilst at the same time preventing you from achieving the sort of patrimony that allows you to, I don’t know, buy elections. If you DO decide that, actually, I still need more money than that, then, well you’re free to accumulate it – but, also, you forfeit your right to protection from murder. Want to be a billionaire? GREAT! As long as you’re willing to also therefore be an active participant in a global game of ‘Killer Manhunt’, like Hunted but with live ordnance and some STRONG MOTIVATIONS!
Honestly, I can see NO DOWNSIDES to this idea and look forward to it forming the central plank of a coming manifesto somewhere in the world.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably cursing the fact you’re not able to vote me into power RIGHT NOW.
THE SECTION WHICH, WHILE IT HAS NO DESIRE TO BE SEEN TO BE IN ANY WAY AS SHARING AN OPINION WITH KEMI BADENOCH, WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY POINT OUT THAT THE ENGLISH OBSESSION WITH SANDWICHES IS FCUKING WEIRD, PT.1:
- The Bluesky Curiobot: If you will allow me a brief moment of authorial self-indulgence (LOL I KNOW!)…whilst obviously the terrible words are the price I demand for all the awesome links in Curios each week, I am conscious that this isn’t the…easiest format to cope with, or the most digestible, and that to be honest there are better and more efficient ways of getting your link fix than ‘wading through whatever stream of consciousness bullsh1t Matt happens to spew out when time comes to write up the link’. AND SO! For those of you who might prefer a lighter, easier way of getting ALL OF THE INTERNET, Shardcore kindly knocked up the CurioBot on Bluesky – all of the links from Curios (minus the the videos), extracted from the newsletterblogthing and posted to Bluesky at a rate of one every few hours during (roughly) UK working hours. You get the link, and a graphic of the copy that accompanied it – but you can ignore that and get to the good stuff without having to wade through my prose at all. BE GRATEFUL! Also, look, if this is still too much then be in some way mollified with the knowledge that you’re only a year or so away from AI agents being good enough that you’ll be able to tell one to just pull you the 5-10 links it knows you’ll like best from that week’s Curios without needing to interact with the copy whatsoever – AND THEN WHERE WILL I BE?
- Americans: This is both a beautiful bit of digital exhibitionmaking, and a rare example of a brand campaign that I really like. WeTransfer has been effectivedoing the ‘brand as patron’ thing for ‘creatives’ for a few years now, but I think this is the most successful- and best-realise project to date; in it, Dutch artist and filmmaker Robin du Puy presents a selection of films and photographs and audio portraits of ‘America’ and its citizens, captured over the past two years (there’s a book being published now-ish, and an accompanying documentary film next year). There are 24 people here from across the country, spanning ages from 6 to 80+, across gender and race and economic boundaries, and some of the images captured here are wonderful, the portraits in particular. The whole site is just a pleasure to explore – it’s well-made but not overly fussy or fancy, the navigation works, and the UX/UI presents the work effectively – honestly, this is a GREAT exhibition which works perfectly as a website, well done everyone involved.
- Cloud Data: Another week, another beautiful (if somewhat puzzling) website found via Kris at Naive. I need to be completely honest with you – I haven’t got the faintest idea what this is, why it exists, who made it or how it works or what, really, is going on, or why; that said, CLICK THE LINK IT IS LOVELY! Basically it’s a sort of loopy ambient music toy visualiser thing – the site shows a sort of particulate simulation of steam or smoke, and clicking around it will cause small audio samples to play (whose pitch and timbre I think depend on where on-screen you click), which sort of fade and loop into themselves over a simple piano loop – the effect is of a strange, slightly-mysterious musical instrument which you can use to create fragments of odd, Sigur Ros-adjacent ambient-type sound (fcuk, music journalism’s loss really is your gain, you lucky readers!)…oh, and the particulate thing responds (slowly and subtly) to your mouse movements…honestly , I really do adore this and have spent longer than you might expect fiddling around with it in slightly-confused wonder, give it a go (and, er, if any of you can come up with a better explanation of what this is and why it exists then please do tell me because).
- The Tinder Year In Swipe: All of the platforms, as alluded to last week, are in their wrapup era (dear God I am SO SORRY I promise never to use that sort of appalling construction ever again – I am leaving that infelicity untouched so it shames me into remembering) and Tinder is no exception – I can’t personally say that I found this any more revealing or illuminating than any of the others, but I was struck by the frankly insane tone of it. Obviously I am very, very far away from being part of Tinder’s core userbase or target market – I presume that the dating apps are broadly stratified by age, and that Tinder is where young people go to swipe, cry and eventually go back to browsing the hentai subs – but the framing of the whole thing around the idea of a ‘vision board’ (for the manifesting, you see) is, to my eyes, somewhat batsh1t. All of the various ‘trends’ are buried behind icons with no textual overlay or preview – so you have to click on the pair of ‘so kooky!’ 50s-style flick-corner sunglasses to find out that, according to Tinder, ‘eyecontactships’ (cf ‘A connection built entirely on intense eye contact — an unspoken bond without words’) have been BIG in 2024, for example. It is very, very much Not Worth The Hassle in terms of the ‘insights’ available – but don’t worry, because you can then go and create your own MANIFESTATION BOARD for 2025 when you can pick a grab-bag of these trendy traits (or the icons that represent them) and create a sort of slightly-gaudy collage to represent how YOU want your dating life to be next year…oh, God, look, this feels like it’s aimed at 14 year old girls, honestly, which is why perhaps I don’t understand it – but, equally, why the fcuk is an app designed to help people find others against whom to consensually rub their mucous membranes employing design techniques that seem more suited to Just Seventeen magazine than something for over-18s? I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING ABOUT THIS (and dear God I am going to die so so so alone).
- Once More With Feeling: A really lovely bit of data analysis and visualisation work by Naitian Zhou and David Bamman from the University of California (and brought to my eyes by Lynn), which basically asks the question ‘how do the emotions elicited in cinema tend to vary across the runtime of a film, and what commonalities can be seen in the way in which cinematic stories use emotion over the course of a narrative arc?’. Which, yes, fine, sounds dry as fcuk, but it’s great, I promise! Basically think of it as a riff on Vonnegut’s famous ‘shape of stories’ way of considering plot, but applied to emotion. There are, aside from anything else, some interesting inferences that you might draw from this in terms of the apparent decline in ‘emotionality’ evidenced in the study since the 1980s, not to mention a whole HOST of new ‘SCIENTIFIC’ reasons you can point to as to why it’s structurally VITAL for your 6-second preroll to hit specific narrative beats (there’s an academic paper linked to on the main page here for those of you who want to go deep on this – I can imagine, for scholars of filmmaking, there’s actually a lot of rather useful information in there if you can be bothered to dig it out).
- Sitters or Standers: More excellent datawork! This is once again from the talented people at The Pudding, who have here chosen to investigate the crucial question of ‘how many people spend the majority of their working life sitting down vs those who spend the majority of it standing up’ (if you are reading this I have a reasonably-strong feeling about which of these camps you fall into, although I concede that it’s possible that some of you might be standing desk freaks). What this does brilliantly is takes that initial question and then, using MORE DATA, unpacks what that means, what that difference looks like, where YOU sit relative to the US population, and how the differences in income and outcomes for the two different groups maps onto – and you’ll be surprised about this! – all sorts of structural societal inequalities because, THAT’S HOW THINGS WORK! I know I say this with tedious regularity whenever I feature these people and their work, but they are SO good at this and I sort of think every single organisation dealing with public data and the communication thereof should look at The Pudding’s website and, basically, learn.
- The Queue Game: Sadly not a link to the actual game, but to an Insta carousel post (sorry, I appreciate that this is a SH1T LINK but I promise it describes something interesting) which describes how Nike built a game in Roblox which simulates the process of queueing for a sneaker drop, which rewarded players who completed it with a Snap code allowing early access to a…real life sneaker drop, which is so horribly meta and ourobouros-like that I feel like I’m getting some sort of intensely-recursive digital labyrinthitis (and it’s sentences like that one which make me feel honour bound to point you once more at the Curiobot and say ‘you can spare yourself this, you know’). This is really clever, damn the sweatshop footwear peddlers.
- Deta Surf: There really does seem to be a general sense of AI fatigue out there – so many ‘PLEASE STOP TRYING TO MAKE AI-GENERATED SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS HAPPEN’ complaints, charming in their finger-in-dyke futility! – but, sadly, I don’t think 2025’s going to see less of it in your life. There may be occasional positive side-effects to its continued incursion into every aspect of human/digital interaction, though – witness Deta Surf, a prototypical new web browser whose gimmick is, basically, ‘full LLM functionality wherever you surf’. So, for example, you could be browsing some photos and see something that has the PERFECT colour palette for your A/W26 wardrobe – just tell the browser to extract the colours from the image as HEX values into a CSV! See an interesting diagram on a page but not quite sure what it’s telling you? Highlight the relevant area, ask the browser to explain it to you and VWALLAH! Or at least that’s the theory as-sold – whether this will be the advertised reality is of course uncertain (what IS certain is that all of this sort of functionality will be baked into Chrome eventually and you will never hear of these plucky, first-to-market innovators ever again), but it’s clear that this is the direction of travel for the browser experience one way or another. Come on, don’t make that face, it sounds useful! What? No, no, sorry, it won’t make it any more likely that your job will still exist in a decade. Sorry about that.
- Sora: OPEN AI’S TEXT TO VIDEO MODEL IS FINALLY HERE! Except you can’t use it in the UK due to OpenAI being scared off, at least for the moment, by UK/EU regulation – but, honestly, based on what I’ve seen floating about the web you’re not missing anything particularly groundbreaking or significantly better than Kling, Runway and the rest of the other TTV tools. What you get by all accounts is the standard genAIvideo suite of skills – great at abstract images, great at stuff that looks like stock, really really bad at anything that involves object permanence or any sort of real-world physics whatsoever (the physics thing is really interesting to me from the point of view of the whole ‘so, is embodiment a vital component of getting this stuff right then?’ question) – and, per all the other stuff on the market at the moment, it can’t maintain coherence for longer than a few seconds at a time. To be honest, of all the stuff that OpenAI has shipped over the past week or so I think I’m less interested in Sora than I am in the realtime video update they just gave GPT – which means that you can now get it to analyse and interpret live video through your phone camera or screensharing, so you can literally point your phone at stuff and ask the ai to tell you what it makes of what you’re looking at…which potentially has huge implications for simultaneous translation and tourism and all sorts of other things, as long as you don’t mind the fact that there’s a better-than-even chance that your magical AI interlocutor will just make a bunch of stuff up. This stuff could potentially be REALLY useful – and, again, there’s a host of genuinely fun and SUPRISING and DELIGHTFUL (zzzzzzzzz) things that you could do with a live video feed, an LLM reading it and MAKING STUFF HAPPEN as a result. Come on, please, someone use this in a halfway creative way for once, I’m bored of agencies wasting AI on boring, rubbish stuff.
- Mozi: It’s pronounced ‘Mosey’, don’t you know. This is BRAND NEW, by Ev Williams (one of the two founders of Twitter who *hasn’t* turned out to be a gigantic new age cryptowellness jackass) and is basically a small social network for (reading between the lines) the international plutocrat class (or, if I’m being less bitter for a second – for reasons I can’t really get into, I currently have…something of a personal beef with the super-rich – just people who travel a lot for business and have lots of friends who also travel lots for business). The idea here is that you sign up, you make your small network of REAL FRIENDS, and you simply use Mozi as a kind of basic location tracker/planner so you can better coordinate where in the world you and all your plutey mates will be so you can better arrange the concordance of private jets to your mutual social advantage (fcuk, dammit, still feeling quite chippy). “What’s that, Jans? You’re going to be in Gstaad for 9 hours on Friday? Oh great, I’ll just shift the booking on the Lear a couple of hours and we can have a light dinner at that gorgeous new Bosi place carved into the mountainside!”. I think I am going to be sick.
- All The Albums of the Year: It is quite funny to me that the boom in ‘curation’ (up there with ‘gaslighting’ as one of the most traduced and abused words of the decade) has itself resulted in the need for metacurators – people doing the ‘roundup of all the trend docs’, say, or ‘the best of the gift guides’ or, as in this case, compiling EVERY SINGLE ALBUM OF THE YEAR LIST THAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN BY ANYONE AT ALL ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Or at least that what this feels like – there are a LOT of lists on this (including the wonderful, utterly obscure Quietus top-100 which, even by their standards this year – and I say this with love – is…niche), but they have also helpfully provided a bunch of ways in which you can check out the albums, including one view which shows you a sort of aggregate list which, as you might possibly have been able to predict, shows Brat at the top of the annual critics’ pile. Still, if you want a starting point to get REALLY INTO the year’s best music over the holiday season (if you’re wearing headphones they can’t talk to you!) then this is a perfect website.
- StampFans: I LOVE THIS IDEA! Stampfans is a project for people who want to produce newsletters that are a bit more meaningful, and personal, and…weighty than this ephemeral digital rubbish – rather than your missive getting sent via Beehiiv or Substack or whatever platform you’ve chosen to hitch your email agon too, StampFans will PRINT IT AND MAIL IT OUT! Yes, that’s right, this is basically a service that lets you create a (small-run) physical mailing list, to which you can send actual, physical post in bulk for a really quite modest fee. The idea is that people will pay more for a monthly physical update in letter form, which means that you can absorb the fees for the printing, paper and postage which StampFans in turn charges you – honestly, I think if you’re a poet or somehow named writer, or if you’ve got a project in the epistolary romance vein, or…Jesus, there are SO many fun ways in which you could use the mechanic to create something beautiful and personal for a small community of readers, I am getting almost…excited thinking about it, which, honestly, is no mean feat here at the fag-end of 2024 when enthusiasm for anything much beyond ‘numbing it all with drugs’ is pretty much nil. SOMEONE PLEASE USE THIS FOR GOOD!
- AP’s Photos of 2024: The Associated Press shares its pics for the best news photography of the past year. Stunning across the board, but my personal pic is the Romanian Orthodox nuns. As you’d imagine, this covers the FULL GAMUT OF HUMAN LIFE (and death), so caveat emptor for blood and death and tears and suffering (and sports!) and all the other fun things that make up the rich tapestry of existence.
By FeeBee
THE SECTION WHICH, WHILE IT HAS NO DESIRE TO BE SEEN TO BE IN ANY WAY AS SHARING AN OPINION WITH KEMI BADENOCH, WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY POINT OUT THAT THE ENGLISH OBSESSION WITH SANDWICHES IS FCUKING WEIRD, PT.2:
- Sanborn Fire Maps: Per the history books, “”D. A. Sanborn, a young surveyor from Somerville, Massachusetts, was engaged in 1866 by the Aetna Insurance Company to prepare insurance maps for several cities in Tennessee. [..] Before working for Aetna, Sanborn conducted surveys and compiled an atlas of the city of Boston titled ‘Insurance Map of Boston, Volume 1, 1867’” – “But Matt!”, I hear you ask, “why the fcuk should I care?”, which is, frankly, a not-unreasonable question. The answer is that Brandon Silverman loved the typography and design of the aforementioned maps so much that he’s taken the time to create this website dedicated to them – you can buy prints of some of the design work, but you can also browse the archive in high-definition and, honestly, the lettering and layout of the title pages alone is, I promise you, fcuking AMAZING – seriously, if you’re in any way visually inclined then I think you will slightly fall in love with the work on here. It’s astonishing when you go through the galleries how much stuff seems to riff off this particular style – it really does feel ICONIC, in an odd sort of way.
- UnWrapped: Were you somewhat underwhelmed by your Wrapped last week? Do you not feel it quite captured the intricacies and nuance of your DEEPLY PERSONAL relationship to music, a relationship which is ENTIRELY UNIQUE and UNLIKE ANYONE ELSE’S (“you listened to 3,208 hours of Chappell Roan, CharliXCX and The 1975”)? Well why not create some alternative graphics to share amongst your friendship group and see if anyone gives a single iota more of a fcuk – this does a very good job of mimicking the vibe of this year’s Wrapped, down to the nonsensical AI-generated genre soup it created for everyone and some truly stellar made-up bandnames (I just fired it up again to remind myself of what it does, and it’s telling me that I listened to a LOT of Hedgerow Focaccia in 2024 which, honestly, I wish I had, maybe it would have made me feel better) – part of me wonders whether you could actually fool people with these, and the answer is, I think, ‘yes’ (making up fake bands and trying to get people to pretend to be sincerely into them even though they are entirely fictional is a MEAN thing to do, though, and I still feel guilty about getting a friend of mine’s little brother to swear blind that he was a massive fan of underground indie heroes ‘Chimney Factory’ c.1996).
- David Whyte: David Whyte is a poet – I personally wasn’t familiar with his work, but this section of his website, which presents the text of one of his poems to music, has a genuinely BEAUTIFUL look at feel to it, all watercolour landscapes that get filled in as you scroll, both digital and, oddly painterly (which in my experience is a really hard balance to strike when trying to nail this sort of aesthetic on-screen), and despite the fact that this is possibly a *touch* on the twee side for my personal taste I can’t help but admire the gorgeous webwork on show here.
- The Tiny Tools Directory: A handy collection of small webbuilding and creative tools, compiled by Curios favourite Everest Pipkin, designed for anyone who’s interested in building games or any sort of other lightly-interactive project online. Contains links to all sorts of useful things, from documentation about the ‘how’ to bits of software that will help with the ‘what’ – from game engines to graphics packs, mapmakers to sound generators, all helpfully=filterable in a variety of different ways. Such a generous collection of tools, rendered genuinely useful thanks to simple, helpful taxonomy and design – an object lesson in how to run this sort of thing.
- Specific Suggestions: You will, of course, as diligent students of Stuff Online, be familiar with the 1944 CIA document which described in detail how best to sabotage an organisation or bureaucracy from within, with helpful tips like ‘talk as frequently as possible and at great length’ or ‘hold conferences when there is critical work to be done’ – all the sorts of things that, IRONICALLY, are often hallmarks of modern working culture. Anyway, some kind soul has now compiled all these helpfully-unhelpful ways of working into a single website where you can hit a button to get a new piece of sabotage advice each time, along with some accompanying text explaining a little more about the project. Why not make it a workplace ‘thing’ in 2025 to share a new one of these with your team at the start of each new week? Although, er, given the way everything’s going perhaps we shouldn’t accelerate the decline of the labour market any more than is already happening.
- Fearleaders: Did you know that there is only ONE all-male (and non-binary) cheerleading team in the world, and that that team is in Vienna, Austria, and that they are call THE FEARLEADERS????? No, fcuk off, you did NOT know that, stop lying. Per the site, “As Fearleaders Vienna we support gender diversity and emancipation. We subvert gender stereotypes by turning them upside down and expose ridiculous and in the same way toxic masculine behaviour with overstatement and irony. We want to set a strong statement for equality and fundamental rights for every person in our society. We think that there is a need for men to not only choose a clear position when it comes to equality, but to also make a statement and fight side by side with the women* we support. Staying silent means accepting the status quo.” Also, and this is really important, they have some really sweet outfits in a popping orange/blue colourway. If you feel that this is YOUR SORT OF THING then you may be happy to know that there is a 2025 calendar currently onsale, featuring (based on the brief selection of sample images on display) some PG-rated queer lols in the Alps.
- Do Professional Stuff on Bluesky: Look, I imagine any of you working for Big Agencies will have access to one of the big social media multiplatform management systems and as such will get this as standard at some point soon (if it’s not already baked into Hootsuite et al – thankfully this sort of thing is No Longer My Problem) – but if you don’t you might find this useful. TrackBlue’s a platform that lets you do a bunch of ‘pro’ stuff on the platform, like scheduling posts and managing your audience and getting analytics and that sort of jazz. Is it interesting? No, no it is not, but it might be USEFUL and sometimes I sacrifice my personal interest for your professional development, because that’s the sort of selfless misanthrope I am.
- TimeyWimey: The name of this website/tool is so utterly abhorrent that I considered excluding it on grounds of crimes against language, but the design here is SO NICE that I couldn’t quite bring myself to. This is, fine, a very, very simple idea – a website which helps you calculate time differences – but the way it works is so simple and so elegant that I was left slightly agog (I appreciate that it’s entirely possible that none of you will be that amazed by this, but you have to bear in mind that, as I have mentioned, I am basically an anti-visual person and so possibly my threshold for this sort of thing is maybe…a touch lower than yours). Still, I thought this was super – it almost made me wish that I was the sort of international jetsetter who had cause to pay attention to different timezones (but I am very much not).
- The Best Book Covers of 2024: Or at least ‘the 100 best book covers of 2024 according to Print Magazine’ – those slight caveats don’t make this any less of a great selection of designwork though. I think, based on the fact there are occasionally multiple editions of the same book, that this covers the wider world rather than just North America – there is such a wonderful breadth of work here and several of these which I would LOVE as prints (the cover to Napalm in the Heart by Pol Guasch, in particular, made me properly stop and gasp as I scrolled and I LOVE IT SO), and this is both just a lovely thing to scroll through and a wonderful source of high-quality visual inspiration should you be in the market for such a thing.
- Photo Dharma: Do you like Buddhism? Do you like photographs? Do you like the concept of ‘photographs of Buddhism’ but have previously been unsure as to what the best place online to explore it might be? WELCOME TO YOUR HEAVEN! Photo Dharma contains “over 18,000 photographs of Buddhist archeological sites, pilgrimage centres, and temples in S & SE Asia, as well as Maps, Posters, etc.” for you to scroll through to your heart’s content. Web Curios – getting you one step closer to Nirvana with every link you click! Found via Jodi Ettenberg’s excellent monthly roundup of things.
- Every Colour Imaginable: Now, I don’t know you, I don’t know what your mind is like and as such I simply have no idea what you can or can’t imagine. Are you capable of conceiving of colours of a depth and brilliance I can’t even guess at? Do your eyes perceive frequencies denied to me by my low-quality retinas? I HAVE NO FCUKING IDEA. As such I’m not able to gauge the veracity of the whole ‘every colour imaginable’ thing – but trust me when I say that there are a FCUKTONNE of colours on this page, although I am baffled as to exactly why.
- SkullSite: An early Christmas present for the goths now (lol, like this hasn’t been on all your bookmarks lists for decades) – SkullSite is dedicated to photos and 3d scans of bird skulls – JUST BIRDS, FCUK OFF WITH YOUR MAMMALIAN CRANIA! – of which there are seemingly many, many hundreds collected here. The site is OLD and is seemingly in the process of being migrated elsewhere, and the 3d scans don’t currently work because of Flash being dead, and, well, what’s left is a collection of photos of the headbones of dead avians, but WOW are bird skulls cool looking and multivariantly weird-looking. Were it not *a bit weird* I would be sorely tempted to pick up a few of these as decorative objects (but I am quite acutely conscious at the moment of the fact that I probably can’t really afford to add any more ‘odd’ to my personality lest I become entirely incapable of relating to actual human beings).
- Anti-Tag Clouds: Ooh, this is an interesting angle from which to look at a text which I’d honestly never thought of before – “An Anti-Tag Cloud shows you the most common English words that never appear in a text, visualizing the “negative space” of a literary work. Size indicates how frequent a word is across other texts.” Select classic books from the drop down and learn that ‘blood’ is never mentioned in Pride & Prejudice, that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes apparently contains not a single mention of the word ‘religion’, and that, genuinely surprisingly, the word ‘horse’ does not occur even once in ‘Carry On, Jeeves’. Ooh, and the complete absence of the terms ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in Winnie The Pooh is REALLY interesting (to me at least). There’s an interesting reverse game in this where you’re presented with the missing words list and asked to guess which book the tag cloud applies to, in case anyone fancies engineering that.
- Hotpipes: A reader writes! Thankyou so much to Caroline Crampton, who got in touch after last week’s Curios saying “I would like to recommend my favourite regular pipe organ broadcast: Hot Pipes. As far as I can tell, this radio show/podcast is made by a single British ex-pat living in Spain who just really, really loves documenting and explaining the sound of historical pipe organs. He often themes shows around particular composers or locations. For instance, this is one featuring organs that were built inside American pizza restaurants.” I obviously had no idea when writing last week that one of the six of you who read this thing would be a pipe organ enthusiast and would really appreciate my including an organ-related link, but THIS IS PERFECT AND WHY I LOVE WRITING CURIOS AND WHY I LOVE THE WEB (in the brief moments when I don’t resent it for making me the broken husk of a man I very much now am).
- The London Community Laptop Orchestra: Based in Hackney, because some stereotypes are simply too powerful to overcome, the LCLO (I refuse to type the whole name more than once) is “a london based community laptop orchestra, open to anyone who’s interested in getting involved. no experience is required. only a laptop.” I know NOTHING about this and am working on the basis that these people are unlikely to be murderers, but if you’d like to find out for yourselves then there’s a meetup in FCUKING HACKNEY next week! Please do go along and reassure me that they are not in fact some sort of weird digital satanic cult or something.
- Julianne Aguilar: I’m going to paste a small section of the ‘about’ bit of digital artist Julianne Aguilar’s website here, as I think it will help you understand why I love it: “Julianne Aguilar is an artist, writer, and narrative designer. Her work is inspired by HTML1, unfinished and abandoned 100k+ word fanfics, weed, hell.com circa 1999, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Net Chick: A Smart-Girl Guide To The Wired World by Carla Sinclair, the 1999 Nine Inch Nails masterpiece The Fragile, “Mother Earth, Mother Board” by Neal Stephenson, Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, dying MMORPGs, gail.com, the 1996 first person shooter Quake…” – the list of influences goes on, but it’s safe to say that this is all VERY MUCH MY SH1T. Aguilar’s website features a selection of small little digital artworks (along with a selection of articles and non-digital works), all linked from the homepage, some lightly-interactive and some which unfold over a short period as you watch them, and I have only explored a dozen or so but I honestly think there is some really, really lovely stuff in here that rewards both investigation and a bit of careful attention.
- Into Time: Ok – click this link and and watch the beautiful colour gradient shift over the screen. Get a bit mesmerised. Then click the screen and realise that you can subdivide it into different sections and create a unique, vaguely-kaleidoscopic artwork composed of shifting windows of colour in a geometric grid and…LOOK IT IS GOOD OK IT IS NOT MY FAULT I AM TERRIBLE AT DESCRIBING THESE THINGS. Just click the link ffs.
- Doctor Who Scarf: Is Doctor Who good or bad at the moment? Has the series been KILLED BY WOKE or has it NEVER BEEN BETTER? I can’t tell at what point in the seemingly-constant WHO QUALITY DISCOURSE the fandom finds itself (and, honestly, nor indeed do I particularly care – it is a children’s TV programme ffs), but hopefully one thing that EVERYONE can agree on is that a stripey scarf is, at heart, an excellent thing to be celebrated. And so it is with this site (SEAMLESS!) which exists specifically to chart the different scarves worn by Tom Baker, a past Doctor from…what, the 70s? 80s?…per their description, “Tom Baker wore several scarves during his seven series as the Doctor. Each one had its own unique characteristics. Select the links above for detailed information about each scarf including patterns, knitting specifications and yarn suggestions. There are also sections featuring the history of the design, tips for scarf construction, a gallery of scarves knitted by fans (and me) plus some fun ephemera.” FUN SCARF-RELATED EPHEMERA – WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FOR?!?! I jest, Whovians, I jest, enjoy your scarves.
- Bird1000: A game! Promoting an album! Which has, honestly, one of the most utterly-batsh1t soundtracks I have heard in…dear God, in quite a while. This is a sidescrolling platformer – simple but quite shiny-looking – which is part of a wider multimedia arts project to promote a new record by Armenian artist Tigran Hamasyan. “The transmedia project The Bird of a Thousand Voices is the first of its kind to bring ancient Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul to life. Armenian composer & pianist Tigran Hamasyan and Dutch filmmaker & visual artist Ruben Van Leer are joining forces for a new live staged production that had its world premiere at the Holland Festival. The mythical bird – whose thousand different songs travel the world to spread harmony – comes to life in an intriguing new kind of music theater, an online game, a kinetic art installation and a series of films.” This is…this is quite overwhelming to be honest, and I am not joking when I say that the music really is like nothing I’ve ever heard before, sort of intensely melodic and a wonderful mix of Eastern and Western, but also…quite fcuking mental. I really really enjoyed this – three minutes of very weird, quite dazzling fun,
- Skeal: Last up in this section is a game which I am slightly amazed I haven’t linked to in the past – this is PERFECT for December (and, honestly, any time of the year, but most of all December). It is short, it is silly, it will make you grin from ear-to-ear, and you need to turn your sound up. ENJOY!
By Zoe Hawk
OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS AN HOUR OF TOP-NOTCH JAZZ SELECTED AND MIXED BY MAARTEN GOETHEER!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Tumblr Communities: This is a really interesting development by Tumblr. Yesterday it rolled out its ‘Communities’ feature to everyone, having previously been testing it in beta since earlier this year, which basically functions a bit like subReddits or forums – anyone can create a ‘community’ around anything they like (presumably within reason – no ‘recreational self-harming’ allowed, I would imagine), within which people post content on which others can comment…yes, it’s yet another reinvention of the base concept of ‘the forum’ (which I think after a few decades we can now all basically agree is the platonic idea of digital platforms, amirite? Eh? Please yourselves you fcuks)! But given the intensely-culturally-specific nature of Tumblr communities and the way fandoms congregate there seems to make perfect sense, and which makes this something that I am holding out hope is going to reinvigorate the platform a bit. It’s all a bit thin at the moment, the discovery functionality is, to be polite, dogsh1t, and there’s a general air of ‘featureset 1.0’ about the whole thing but, equally, it’s very early days and, who knows? If you’re really into, I don’t know, Taylor/Charli slashfic then perhaps this will be your new online foreverhome? Also – and this, I have to say, pleased me no end – THE OTHERKIN ARE THERE!!!!! No, I am not linking to their space, let them believe they are goblins in peace.
- Flag Stories: Do you like flags? Would you like a LOT of information and data about flags and how their designs and design elements compare? Good, because FCUK ME does whoever runs this page share that enthusiasm and then some.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- UKSnack Attack: Imagined snack foods that don’t exist but which the creator of these mockups and several hundred thousand people who follow the account very much wish did. This doesn’t wholly do it for me, but it’s entirely possible that you will all be less pathetic food snobs than I am – either way, the photoshopping here is TP NOTCH, so well done to the kid behind it.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Gisele Pelicot: There’s no way to describe Janice Turner’s reporting of the conclusion of the trial of Gisele Pelicot other than ‘very distressing’, but, equally, it feels like it ought to be required reading – aside from the most obviously-horrific elements, there’s something particularly chilling, which Turner grapples with, about the self-image of the men involved, about how a sexual culture can be allowed to persist which allows men like the perpetrators to somehow doublethink their way into somehow not believe that they were committing rape…It’s impossible to read this without feeling quite sick, but it’s also quite important that we do, I think. One thing, though – I’ve found some of the commentary around ‘French culture’ and ‘French sexual / social mores’ in the reporting of this case somewhat blinkered and pathetic. GYAC everyone, this is not a country that is significantly more sexually-enlightened than anywhere else, regardless of what the English might want to believe of themselves, and to pretend otherwise is to ignore the fact that the vast majority of sexual crimes in the UK go unpunished.
- Damascus: That…that happened quickly, didn’t it? I don’t mean to be wildly conspiratorial about events in Syria, but it does rather feel like there are some…COMPLICATED GEOPOLITICAL CURRENTS underpinning the events of the past week or so, and that there are about seven layers of proxy warfare happening in the region at any given second. Anyway, this is all by way of preamble to say that I am not even going to pretend to have anything other than a pretty cursory understanding of the complexities of the overthrow of the Assad regime., but that I found this piece in the LRB a helpful and clear overview of the situation as it stands (or stood a couple of days ago, at the very least). What does seem clear, though, is that Israel looks very much like a country which feels like it can act with impunity now – which, perhaps, is exactly what it is, for better or worse.
- Parsing Luigi: I’ve been slightly disappointed at the lack of high-quality thinkpieces on the UnitedHealth CEO assassination – yes, ok, we’ve had the handwringing over the question of whether it’s ok to celebrate a death, even if the person who died ran a really horrible business in really horrible industry, but what I want to know is who’s currently running the book on ‘number of CEOs to get offed, globally, in 2025’? Because, honestly, I reckon there’s a market in that. Anyway, this piece looks at all the sleuthing that went on in the wake of his identity being uncovered – specifically his Goodreads, reading the tea leaves of his publicly-declared reads and his wishlists, scrying in the viscera of his reading history for clues as to what drove him to pursue a terminal solution to what he saw as the inherent injustice of the US healthcare system. The answer? There isn’t one, because you can tell very little about what someone is ACTUALLY like or what they actually think from the books they have performatively claimed to read on a socially-focused platform! Still, it’s interesting to speculate.
- What Happened To The Glamour of Tomorrow: This is SUCH a good and interesting essay and one of the occasional ones which I feel honour bound to recommend if you’re someone with ‘planner’ or ‘strategist’ or (lol!) ‘futurist’ in your job title. Virginia Postrel asks ‘when did we stop thinking that progress was inevitable?’ and ‘when did the future stop feeling exciting and instead become either grim or dull or terrifying?’, and, honestly, this articulates something I felt so strongly wondering round the Electric Dreams show at the Tate recently – there’s a section showing some of the works displayed at the 1970 World’s Fair in Tokyo and literally EVERYTHING about that exhibition – the design of the pavilions, the language used, the ambition and the enthusiasm on display – spoke of a world in which tomorrow was, inevitably, going to be BETTER. Now? Hm.This is long but SO smart and dizzyingly polymathic, covering design and architecture and economic theory and philosophy and taking you through 20thC modernism towards a theory of how we might once again make progress seem exciting. This links to something I read, linked to from Sean Monahan’s typically-interesing newsletter, about how one of the main problems for the left is that it lacks a progress-based vision; at the moment what it seems to be offering is a future in which, ok, things might be more equal, but, also, you won’t have any holidays or new things, and you will have to eat root vegetables for six months of the year because seasonality, whereas the right is promising spaceships and rockets and getting rich on the memecoin lottery and, well, you can sort of see the problem can’t you?
- The Creator Economy: Or, as Suw Charman-Anderson puts it in this essay, hares and lynx. This is one of the best explanations of why the economics behind the glorious ideal of THE CREATOR ECONOMY – in which everyone is selling the fruits of their creative labour to 1000 true fans and everyone’s happy and fulfilled – is a lovely concept which simply has no bearing in reality thanks to some fairly simple supply/demand logic; this is a really good, clear rundown of why it’s simply not possible for the vast majority of people to make a living ‘creating’ (at least not in the freeform way we like to think of it now), at least not in the present economic system – should anyone you know start talking about wanting to ‘pivot to becoming a full-time creator’ at any point over Christmas then I suggest that you a) share this link with them; b) maybe recommend some good plumbing courses or something.
- The AI We Deserve: I’ve been recommending Evgeny Morosov’s writing in here for YEARS, and he’s once again written a banger – on AI and how perhaps we shouldn’t ‘settle’ for LLMs, and that perhaps it might be possible to conceive of a different form/function mix for AI if we think beyond narrow neoliberal conceptions of utility, and how the history of AI research since the mid-20thC has ended up where we are now. Which, now I’m typing it, is quite heavy for 1044am on a Friday morning, but if you have any interest at all in both the history of AI research but also the broader question of the ‘shape’ of technologies and how those ‘shapes’ get determined then you will really enjoy this a lot. There’s something in here about ‘pointy, directional’ systems vs ‘wandering’ systems that I think is really rich and rather fascinating, in particular.
- The Management Singularity: I’m not linking to anything about the Casey Newton/Gary Marcus AI spat this week because I figure that if any of you care about it you’ll already be aware, and if you’re not then you don’t – that said, fwiw, my broad position is that Newton fcuked up by conflating a bunch of different AI-sceptic positions into one straw man (and an inelegantly-constructed one too) but that he is right about some things (specifically, that anyone saying ‘this stuff is useless’ doesn’t quite understand either AI or What Lots Of Companies Actually Do), and that Gary Marcus is a very smart man who REALLY loves Gary Marcus – but this piece feels vaguely-adjacent to it. Briefly, this is a decent little ‘where we are now’ article by Henry Farrell which points out that the real usecases for GenAI at the moment are to be found in boring, invisible bits of businesses rather than at the shiny margins, and that – basically the reason I like this is that it (SURPRISE!) agrees exactly with what I have been saying for 18m, to whit: “I have not seen any case studies of implementation of LLMs in big organizations. But I am prepared to bet significant amounts of money that this is going to be one of their most important uses. For much the same reason that they are excellent at spitting out ritual products, they are going to be very good at taking goals and procedures that are expressed in the language of Overall Management System A, and translating them into the terms and objectives of Sub-Management Systems B, C, an d D or for that matter, at giving Sub-Management System C a better idea of what those people in Sub-Management B are actually on about, when they use those weird words and keep on pushing incomprehensible goals.”
- How Videogames Became Addiction Technology: A piece in the NYT looking at how the game industry’s model has shifted towards live service games – those, like Fortnite, which NEVER END, and which receive regular content updates over the course of their years-long lifespan, and which as a result can be profitable to a degree unimaginable to the old ‘sell a copy of a physical product’ concept of gaming pre-web – and how that shift has meant an equal shift in game design principles, where it is now vitally important to KEEP THE PLAYER COMING BACK, and how that in turn means that games have quite a lot more in common with slot machines than they did a decade or so ago. All of which is true, and all of which feels…desperately underregulated, if I’m honest (I can’t believe I am talking positively about the regulation of videogames – Young Matt would be APPALLED), especially when you take into account these smart additional observations on How This Works With Live Data offered by Adrian Hon.
- The First AI Films Are Here: A warning – if you’re an actual, proper creative person, who makes stuff with love and care and craft and pours their heart and soul into whatever it is that you bring into the world, if you’re that sort of person then, well, this article will really upset you. 404 Media’s Jason Koebler went to a screening of AI-generated films by TV company TCL which is making them because…well, because this: “TCL said it expects to sell 43 million televisions this year. To augment the revenue from its TV sales, it has created a free TV service called TCL+, which is supported by targeted advertising. A few months ago, TCL announced the creation of the TCL Film Machine, which is a studio that is creating AI-generated films that will run on TCL+. TCL invited me to the TCL Chinese Theater, which it now owns, to watch the first five AI-generated films that will air on TCL+ starting this week.” So the endpoint is this – are you poor? Are you too poor to afford premium TV and streaming? NO PROBLEM! You can get a cheap TV and a bunch of free content! Yes, ok, fine, the free TV is cr4p, and the free content is 90% ads and 10% AI-slop, but, well, FREE MOVING IMAGES TO DISTRACT YOUR EYEPIECES! Obviously the ‘films’ are terrible, but it’s not that that’s the most upsetting part of this – it’s the clear understanding developing in my mind that, much as there’s a(n often predatory) ‘sub-prime market’ for lending to the financially at-risk, there will soon be a sub-prime market for culture, produced and marketed to people who can’t afford the ‘premium’ stuff, with all the best dataextractive ad-side services that modernity can muster. Fcuk ‘em, they’re only proles. Dear God.
- Fish Eye: Ooh, I love this essay by Amelia Wattenburger – this is both a really interesting way of thinking about looking at problems, or concepts, or information, or a text, at different levels of ‘zoom’ to extract different layers of meaning from them/it, but it’s also a really charmingly-designed webpage which features possibly my favourite ever bit of pointless-but-lovely on-page animation (you will see what I mean).
- Journalism in 2025: Nieman Lab has published its annual list of predictions about the year ahead in journalism, taking opinions from a range of people in newsrooms across North America. The results are…well, I’d say the results are ‘less-than-honest’, but I suppose you can’t really expect these people to baldly admit ‘yep, we’re fcuked, we have no idea whatsoever how we’re going to sort this so it’s basically just going to be a neverending wave of mergers and acquisitions until it’s machines as far as the eye can see’. Still, there are a bunch of quotes in here which in many cases are fleshed out into longer thinkpieces, all linked to from the main page – personally, though, I don’t think you’ll find anything much truer than S. Mitra Khalita’s observation that ““There is a single crisis in journalism, and from it all other problems emanate: money.” BONUS MEDIA CONTENT! This is Kyle Chayka’s ‘new rules of media’ which I am including because a) Kyle is always reliably smart; and b) the first point is literally “Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult.” which I have been saying for about 5 years now and which has briefly made me feel smart and prescient (it won’t last).
- The Pr0nhub Bongo Data Bonanza: Judging by the numbers in here it’s a wonder any of you can still see to read, you grubby things! The world’s premier tube site returns with its 2024 data drop – as ever, you can learn fascinating things about the particular proclivities of your nation, or the baffling extent to which certain national stereotypes really do maintain across all areas of life (although, briefly, I am going to push back slightly against people suggesting that Italians searching for Italians or French people searching for French people is nationalistic narcissism and suggest it’s far more likely to do with linguistics and the fact that not everyone wants to hear their fcuking in English), and this year’s selection of stats is no exception. I am slightly saddened to see that the global spike in trends for ‘giant pr0n’ which I think happened in 2021 appears to have been a blip, but am once again slightly amazed at how little as a species we talk about the seemingly-universal desire to crack one off to cartoons. Like, does noone else other than me think that, at the very least, there is something CULTURALLY CURIOUS about this? And how it might be linked to all sorts of interesting things such as the ubiquity of videogames over the past 30 years, and how that plays into a prevalence to a particular smooth, poreless aesthetic as classically seen in games and anime? And how that plays into real-world aesthetics and fashion, and how that spills into cosmetic procedures? Anyone? No? Ok, FINE.
- How WhatsApp Changed The World: A typically-great bit of reporting by Rest of World which looks at how Whatsapp for Business has basically become international infrastructure for ecommerce businesses across the world, particularly outside of the Global North, and how the introduction of AI (INEVITABLY) is going to potentially impact the economies that have been established around the platform and its use for customer services, etc. So so so interesting.
- Paper People: Another piece about gaming and gaming culture, this time about the growth in popularity of dating simulators aimed at women in Japan and Korea (and elsewhere, but particularly in those countries), and how this is leading to the young men who were traditionally served by the genre feeling somehow traduced or abandoned by a market that now wants to serve people who don’t have the same genitals or desires as they do. Do…do women do this if stuff they like gets popular with a new group? Because, honestly, this sort of behaviour is one of the more embarrassing aspects of my gender. Anyway, this is hugely-interesting about games and how they reflect shifting cultural attitudes and social mores, and how WEIRD fan culture is (THE EMPHASIS IS ON CULT).
- Mike Myers: A lovely interview with Mike Myers, taken from a recent appearance in LA, in which he talks about his life, his career, his work, comedy in general…honestly, Wayne’s World is obviously ace but I have no love whatsoever for Austin Powers (I once saw Austin Powers 2 in the cinema with my Mexican friend Nick who was living with me at the time – I laughed a grand total of once, at a joke about Moon Unit Zappa at which not one other person made a sound, which story I tell you not to make me look somehow ‘cool’ (I am at least self-aware enough to know it very much does not do that) but to give you an idea how far away it and I are in terms of ‘comedy taste’), I am too old for Shrek to be an overwhelming cultural touchstone in my life and SNL is a) American; and b) never, ever funny, and so I am not any sort of Myers fan, but this is SO CHARMING and SO INTERESTING and, as with a lot of these interviews with people who are obviously VERY GOOD at what they do, you will end up learning a surprising amount about ‘the craft of comedy’ (sorry) as you read.
- Rough Fish: This is very much one of those articles which I did not expect to enjoy, or even finish, and yet which I found oddly and completely fascinating – the ‘rough fish’ of the title are not, sad to say, tattooed, scarred and belligerent; instead it’s a descriptor for a class of fish generally considered not worth gutting fully when out fishing in Minnesota, and this article is how the State is slowly coming to the realisation that while they might be annoyingly-bony to eat they can still be useful and a vital part of the ecosystem. Seriously, I have never fished and am the very opposite of a nature or outdoorsy person, but this charmed me LOADS and it might do the same to you.
- War Games: Not suggesting that there’s any reason why we might want to be thinking about this sort of thing right now, but, well, what do you reckon would happen if someone got a bit nuke happy? Well helpfully someone’s already simmed it all out. “The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.” Look, this won’t necessarily fill you with Christmas spirit but it’s SO interesting, both in terms of how the ‘game’ worked and also how it unfolded – come on, tell the truth, it would be quite fun do play this over the course of a few days, wouldn’t it, drunk on the power and safe in your imagined bunker.
- Cleaning The Tube At Night: The second week in a row I’m featuring a piece by Miles Ellingham in the Londoner; honestly, though, this is another cracker, accompanying the night cleaning team of the London Underground as it goes through the tunnels as you and I sleep, cleaning the tracks and the walls and the tunnels of the detritus, human and animal and mineral, that accumulates over the hundreds of miles of track that comprise the network. Exactly the sort of storytelling you want from your city’s press, taking you into a part of the urban environment most of us don’t ever think of and will never see, this is the sort of writing the Standard *should* have been commissioning, fcuk you Evgeny and Gideon and Emily and Dylan you fcuking fcuks.
- Cymbals, Anyone?: I though this was SUCH a charming story, told wonderfully, about the moment at which Patricia Wentzel possibly might have realised they were neurodivergent – but didn’t, yet.
- Radicalised: Finally this week, a Cory Doctorow short from 2019 which, as you will realise as you read it, is not a little prescient. There’s a bit of dialogue towards the end in which an adult and a child have a conversation about ethics which is so eerily on-the-nose that it’s a wonder their not raiding the author’s house for a rudimentary Tardis. Very good indeed.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: