Webcurios 14/03/25

I went to see Cabaret in London this week with an old friend, and to my surprise really enjoyed it (do go if you can, it really is very good) – but, also, fcuk me does it hit differently in 2025! Also, per my comment about Oedipus a few weeks ago, HOW IS IT THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE GOING TO WATCH ‘CABARET’, AN ADAPTATION OF A FILM FAMOUSLY ABOUT THE WEIMAR YEARS AND THE RISE OF FASCISM BEING FACILITATED BY DECADENCE, WHO ARE MOVED TO GASP IN SHOCK AT THE REVELATION THAT THE NICE YOUNG GERMAN MAN IS IN FACT AN ACTUAL NAZI????

Anyway, this week I didn’t have to take my trousers off in front of ANYONE, and so as such I think we can consider it, broadly, to have been a success. Also, someone responded to last week’s Curios telling me that this newsletter is ‘positively libidinal’ and that I might be ‘the kinkiest human being they have never met’, which, honestly, is not something I would ever have expected to be told for writing a newsletter about Occasionally Interesting Links but, well, thanks!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are wrong, I am actually tediously vanilla.

 By Nicholas Osborn https://www.instagram.com/boatlullabies/

WE BEGIN BY RETURNING TO THE RECORD COLLECTION OF TOM SPOONER, WHO HAS COMPILED THIS SELECTION OF OLD TRACKS WHICH RANGES FROM FOLK TO PSYCHEDELIA AND EVERYWHERE INBETWEEN!  

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE WHOLE ‘TEST YOUR LINKEDIN POSTS ON VIRTUAL BUSINESSMONGS’ THING MIGHT BE THE MOST DEPRESSING LINK OF THE YEAR SO FAR, AND I INCLUDE THE TWO-HEADED BONGO FROM LAST WEEK IN THAT ASSESSMENT, PT.1:  

By Laurie Lipton

NEXT, ENJOY A CRACKING SELECTION OF TRACKS CELEBRATING ONE OF THE ALL-TIME GREAT HIHOP LABELS, DEF JUX!    

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE WHOLE ‘TEST YOUR LINKEDIN POSTS ON VIRTUAL BUSINESSMONGS’ THING MIGHT BE THE MOST DEPRESSING LINK OF THE YEAR SO FAR, AND I INCLUDE THE TWO-HEADED BONGO FROM LAST WEEK IN THAT ASSESSMENT, PT.2:

• Status: It was Charlie Brooker, I think, who first popularised the whole ‘Twitter is better if you think of it as a videogame and treat it as such’ line of thought – taking that to its logical conclusion, Status answers the question ‘what if you could play social media as a no-stakes pointscoring exercise?’ Which feels a bit like it has already been answered – ‘that is literally how you should use real-life social media ffs’ – but, anyway, thanks to Status you can now ‘enjoy’ all the fun bits of social (the posting! The dopamine buzz from likes! The interactions!) except IT IS ALL FAKE. Status does something similar to the flurry of ‘social media but populated by AI characters!’ apps which cropped up last year, but leans harder into the game aspect of it – there’s a clear ludic element here based around racking up points for roleplaying, getting fans, etc etc. The smart thing is the way you can choose to inhabit different sorts of personas, adding a light RPG-ish mechanic – do you want to see you you can become QUEEN BEE of a fictitious stan army? Do you want to try and navigate the complex world of the controversial podcasting edgelord without being hounded off-platform? SO MANY POSSIBILITIES! I briefly had a play with this earlier in the week, and while it is not for me it is genuinely quite a clever and interesting – and, crucially, addictive – mechanic which I can imagine getting moderately-popular. Equally, though, if you stop to think about it for longer than about 30s it becomes VERY DEPRESSING, so, er, maybe don’t do that! SMOOTH BRANE 4-EVA!
• One Post Wonder: ANOTHER attempt to recast social media as anything other than a miserable horrorshow! This new variant – in beta, but you can submit your email and be alerted when it opens up – tries a minimalist approach, with the idea being that posting is restricted to once a day, for everyone; as they put it, “One Post Wonder is a social network where everyone posts no more than once a day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cat picture, a duck joke or a column worthy of Alexandra Petri. One Post Wonder features a rich set of privacy controls that allow you to carefully control who can see your posts, a design that emphasises content with minimal distractions, and a sustainable business model that puts the focus squarely on user satisfaction.” Which, you know, sounds lovely, should enough people sign up to it to make it a workable space – so give them your email and wait for an invite, because MAYBE this will be the halcyon digital space we have all so longed for! STILL WE HOPE! You can actually get a peek at what the beta looks like here and…you know what, I quite like the vibe. MAYBE IT WILL BE GOOD!!!
• Eyes on Asteroids: Via my friend Adrian (W_W) comes this lovely site by NASA which lets you look at ALL OF THE ASTEROIDS and zoom in on them and spin them around and, yes, ok, when it comes down to it these are just lumps of rock and so not hugely aesthetically pleasing but THEY ARE FLYING THROUGH SPACE RIGHT NOW which is, you have to admit, just sort of amazing. Also it’s a nice reminder of the fact that there is ALWAYS loads of stuff whizzing past us at pace, and that most of it doesn’t hit us, and that despite the slightly troubling asteroid-related news rumblings earlier this year it is still VASTLY more likely that you’ll die of cancer or because of some sort of trivial, stupid human error than it is that you’ll be wiped out by several tonnes of rock hurled at you from the other side of space. RELAX!
• Breakbeats: It’s been a VERY good year so far for huge repositories of musical samples, and here are EVEN MORE! Per the mysterious collector: “Here is my collection of vintage funk/soul breakbeats. All loops in wav quality (and not converted from mp3). Every break manually sliced (rex2), some breaks have 2 or more versions, for example, cd and vinyl. Click right mouse button and select “save as” for single file download.” CAVEAT: I DO NOT THINK THAT THESE ARE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND SO AS SUCH THERE MIGHT BE SOME, ER, ISSUES AROUND USING THEM COMMERCIALLY. Also you can’t preview the files before downloading, so it’s a bit of a lucky dip. BUT! There is SO MUCH in here, and the couple I have downloaded as a test are great, so fill your breakboots.
• The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year: When I first saw this link I was a bit sniffy about the photos here, with my (incredibly insistent and VERY annoying) internal monologue complaining about ‘too much HDR effect’ and ‘too much post-production’. Then on Wednesday I saw my friend Lisa who was in Norway with her family earlier this year and skied under the Northern Lights and whose phone photos looked basically like this, so, actually, it turns out that this is just what they look like and I should wind my neck in. ANYWAY, these are some VERY COLOURFUL photographs of lights in the sky, and they are proof that in some instances nature is a gaudy little bitch, basically. This came to me via Jodi Ettenburg’s excellent ‘Curious About Everything’ newsletter which is a consistent source of great reading every month and which I recommend unreservedly.
• A Weird ASCII Coding Playground Thingy: Ok, I don’t wholly get how this works – it’s basically a little code playground/sandbox which lets you experiment with meddling with fun ASCII-animating code, but exactly HOW you do that requires approximately 100% more of an understanding of coding than I possess. BUT! Even a total fcuking digimong like me can appreciate the beauty of the animations which you can explore using the menu on the right-hand side – also, some of them are very much the sort of thing that you could lose a few hours staring at at 4am under the right conditions. For those of you less preposteriously-useless than me, though, who understand the STRANGE MAJICK of computerspeak, there’s probably quite a bit of creative fun to be had here exploring how you can tweak and manipulate the examples to your own ends. Per the dev, “This playground is an attempt of a browser-based live-code environment with text-only output. It is born from the joy and pleasure ASCII, ANSI and in general text-based art can give and it is an homage to all the artists, poets and designers which used and use text as their medium. From the design perspective it is also an exercise in reduction: there is almost no interface, just a preview window and a code editor; margins and line numbers are removed as well.”
• The News As Comics: This is, to be clear, horrible. What would happen if you took the day’s headlines, fed them to an LLM to turn said headlines into a three-panel comic and then got The Machine to illustrate said three-panel comic? THIS! This is what happens! A horrible, miserable, idiotic attempt to reduce everything happening to a three-line summary with no depth or meaning or nuance! Honestly, I spent some time this week going back through these to see if they were ever anything than awful, and, seriously, it made me feel like I was losing approximately one IQ point per second I spent staring at them. This is ugly and sad and stupid and I hate the fact that this is what we are going to do to all information eventually because we’re all going to forget how to fcuking think at some point in the next 10 years.
• Seven39: Yes, I know that that’s an incredibly irritating way of writing 739, but it’s their website and I have to respect their wishes. Unnecessary whinging about nomenclature aside, I do rather like this as a concept. Seven39 (and that’s the last time I am typing it out like that) is ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK but one with quite a clever gimmick, I think – it is only live, and you can only post to it, for three hours per day, from 7:39 (EST) to 10:39. That’s it – that’s your window, no negotiating. There’s something interesting about creating a time and place for conversation, like a sort of digital happy hour of sorts (and yes, I know what a horrible and meaningless concept that is, forgive me). Sadly the time difference to the UK means that I would have had to post from midnight to 3am to test it out and, well, I simply don’t care that much, but if you’re in a more forgiving timezone then I would suggest taking a look at this in case it’s FUN AND VIBRANT (or in case it’s just full of weirdo perverts, which can also be interesting in its own way).
• A World Map of Female Composers: This is a page on the website of Sakira Ventura, who, per her bio, is a researcher and academic (I think) with a specific interest in the history of women in music, and who created this wonderful interactive map showing all (obviously not ‘all’, but a significant number) of the female composers of note throughout history, located geographically based on their nationality. Which is lovely, and I am glad it exists, but I have just realised that all it shows you is their name and image and now I am churlishly annoyed that it doesn’t also feature links to their works – so, er, if someone would like to somehow magically make that a reality that would be great, thanks!
• The British Voter Bot: Slightly depressing, this one – a Bluesky bot which shares actual voter profiles from the British Election Study conducted last year (in case you’re not already aware, “BES surveys have taken place immediately after every general election, providing data to help researchers understand changing patterns of party support and election outcomes. They also take place between elections, with 26 (by May 2024) large 30,000 person online panel surveys conducted by the present team, since 2014”) and which means you’ll occasionally see things like “I’m a white British Anglican male, 67 years old, and my main electoral priority is immigration” (lol seemingly that comprises 70+% of the surveyed people, judging by the stuff I have seen so far) floating across the TL. It’s interesting, but after a while does leave one with the overwhelming impression that…man, Britain is significantly less tolerant and welcoming, and significantly more scared and racist, than we (ok, ok than *I*) tend to like to think.
• Able To Play: Oh this is a great initiative – Able To Play is a service which helps you see at a glance whether a game has accessibility settings which enable you to play it or not. Create a profile, list your accessibility needs and preferences, and the system will let you know which titles fall within the broad range of ‘stuff I will be able to engage with, regardless of any conditions I might have’. Honestly, if you or someone that you know has particular accessibility requirements this is a hugely-useful resource, and it feels very much like A Good Thing.
• 3d Earthquake Map: I’ve featured realtime maps of quakes on here before, but I think this is the first one that shows you how deep the quake is on a 3d globe. This is, as ever with this stuff, mildly terrifying at first as you realise quite how much mad tectonic activity is happening beneath our feet ALL THE FCUKING TIME, but then quite addictive – it’s nice to keep it open in the background, because it will ping when a new quake has been detected and you can just tab over to that it is in fact displaying the hopefully-reassuring legend ‘Tsunami Risk: NO’ (I can’t imagine the genuine horror of seeing the opposite message, and so am going to navigate away from this website before my brain forces me to imagine some sort of horrible vertical, watery armageddon).
• Theremin: OH GOD THIS LETS YOU PLAY THE THEREMIN IN YOUR BROWSER WITH YOUR HANDS LIKE SOME SORT OF MAGICAL SOUND WIZARD! This is great, seriously, and you will grin like a moron the first time you try it.
• Quickflip: ANOTHER DAILY WORD PUZZLE! This is REALLY infuriating, fyi – or at least it has been for me, because I have a seemingly-unerring ability to pick the wrong option. The way this works is simple – each day you’re presented with 8 tiles, each with a letter on; each tile can display one of two letters, and you can toggle between the two by clicking. There are TWO potential words that can be spelled each day – ONLY TWO – and one is the RIGHT word and the other is WRONG, and your task is to flip the letters in such a way that you arrive at the right word rather than the wrong one in the fewest number of flips possible. I have got it wrong every day this week and, honestly, feel quite grumpy about it.
• Posters Out Of Focus: Leaving aside the unfortunate url, this is a decent little daily puzzle for the cinephiles – each day, guess which VERY PIXELLATED film poster is being shown; with each incorrect guess the poster becomes slightly higher-res and additional clues (year of release, star, genre, etc etc) are revealed and if you’re slightly less clueless when it comes to the culture of the moving image than I am you might find this a fun addition to the daily rotation.
• Type Help: I was going to feature this a few weeks ago but I rather bounced off it and didn’t feel I could wholly recommend it without understanding it better – then Adrian Hon wrote this excellent explainer about the game and how it works, and I figured that I could just let him tell you about it and you could decide if you’re into it or not. Basically this is VERY text heavy and will possibly require you to make a spreadsheet, so that should give you a rough idea of whether this might conceivably be ‘fun’ for you or whether you’re a bit more like me and consider stuff that requires excel to be pretty much the antithesis of fun. Here’s the opening of Adrian’s explainer – see if this makes you go ‘ooh, interesting!’ or ‘jesus, fcuk off’: “In an age of non-descriptive game titles, Type Help may win the championship belt. Far easier to cite its inspirations – Return of the Obra Dinn, Her Story, Unheard and The Roottrees are Dead – all members of the burgeoning genre of deduction games, where players piece together a tragic mystery from audio or video or static tableaux. The only time you type “help” is at the beginning of the game, where it’s explained you’ve come into possession of a computer containing the investigatory records of a long-ago mystery. The Galley House was discovered with a number of dead bodies and no clear culprit; all you have are transcripts of audio from its inhabitants, divided by room and by time period. Transcripts have filenames like 02-EN-1-6-7-10, which can be decoded as: 02: The second time period of the mystery. There are 26 in total, and they can be as short as a few minutes or as long as several hours.EN: Entrance, i.e. the room the transcript is from. There are lots of rooms.1-6-7-10: The people present in the room during this time period, in this case, the persons designated 1, 6, 7, and 10. An early task is assigning names to numbers. Because there’s no list of filenames, your primary goal is to find as many as you can in order to learn the full story. This is as straightforward as making deductions and guesses based on what people say and do, and then typing in the resulting filename.” Basically if you like logic puzzles then this may scratch a similar itch.
• Orisinal: This is SUCH a treat! For webmongs of a certain vintage, Ferry Halim is something of a legend – when I was but a scrap of a thing, sitting in an office in Victoria wearing a suit and learning very quickly that I was not, in all likelihood, going to have a career as a corporate lobbyist, one of my favourite ways of passing the time (outside of browsing BMEZine and googling “how to buy weed online uk”) was playing the beautiful, pastel-coloured, relaxing and fiendishly-addictive browsergames made by the mysterious Halim and posted on his website Orisinal. Then Flash died, and so did the website…but now, thanks to Flash emulation code it is BACK! And all the old games are back too! INCLUDING THE ONE ABOUT STACKING THE PIGS, WHICH I LOST LITERALLY A WEEK TO C.2003! I am so so so happy that this has been resurrected, it is a part of (my) web history. Oh, it’s not the fastest to load, so be patient.
• The Roy Orbison in Clingfilm Adventure Game: I have, I think, mentioned Michael Kelly on here before, and linked to his odd little stories about a German man whose singular erotic obsession is the concept of Roy Orbison, naked and wrapped in clingfilm, but I had totally forgotten he made an ACTUALTEXT ADVENTURE GAME out of the concept. Look, this is…niche, I appreciate, but equally I find this almost terminally funny – I don’t quite understand why, but there is something about the style and tone and premise that absolutely fcuking slays me. Seriously, I just spent 5 minutes clicking around and laughed out loud three times – please indulge me for a few moments and give this a go, if you laugh too then maybe we can be friends (but I promise I will never try and wrap you in clingfilm for erotic or even non-erotic purposes).

By Thérèse Mulgrew

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS VAGUELY-LATINATE=FLAVOURED SELECTION OF HOUSEY DISCO-Y LOUNGEY TRACKS COMPILED BY SASHA CHADAEV! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Claw Craziness: Oooh, this is fun – this Insta feed posts behind the scenes footage of an incredible-looking setup where someone’s got a bunch of fairground claw machines set up in a room somewhere, all of which are playable remotely by people online…and yes, fine, I know that sounds both weird AND banal, but it’s not, ok? FFS.
• What I Think Might Be The Worst Poetry Ever: Look, as a general rule I try not to feature stuff in Curios that I don’t like because, well, it feels mean to point at something that someone has made and tell them that I think it’s sh1t (unless it’s corporate webwork; corporate webwork can, in the main, fcuk off). This week, though, I am making an exception for the Insta account of one 7SoulsDeep, because I was walking blamelessly through Soho the other week and was confronted by some of this person’s ‘verse’ scrawled on a pavement and, well, if you’re going to force this sh1t into my head, 7SoulsDeep, then I can tell the world that you are one of the worst examples of instapoet faux-profundity that I have ever read in my life, and if I hear a more appallingly, clunky and adolescent line in 2025 than ‘I made her mind wet’ then, well, something very weird is likely to have happened. The fact that this account has over 70k followers makes me feel marginally less bad about the likely extinction we’re racing towards at speed.
• Bad Wiki Photos: Terrible photos of famouses from their Wikipedia pages! Why? Because they’re comically bad. Seriously, the Venus Williams pic in particular is amazing – like, there are a LOT of photos of Venus Williams out there, why use *that* one?

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG (ALSO WHILE WE ARE HERE IT TURNS OUT THAT 12FT.IO IS WORKING AGAIN SHOULD YOU NEED TO JUMP PAYWALLS FOR ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW)!

By Dan Balestrin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: