Webcurios 16/06/23

It has, it’s fair to say, been something of a trying week for stumpy-fingered populists.

More than enough ink has been spilt on That Fcuking Man and the parties and the lies (and my thoughts on him remain unchanged); a similar amount continues to be spaffed on That Other Fcuking Man and whether or not he’ll end up governing from jail; and yet, because of the packed nature of the week’s news schedule, it feels like Silvio’s been rather ignored. Which, given that his CV includes (deep breath) cruise ship singing, an improbable and incredibly-murkily-financed property empire (it’s interesting to note that when Nanni Moretti made the film ‘Il Caimano’, an oddly-familiar tale about a Northern Italian property magnate who pivoted to media and then politics, all the while backed by a lot of money from organised crime, writs from Silvio there came a-none!), the literal transformation of an entire country’s media landscape and, as a result, its relationship to money and capital and consumerism and STUFF (not to mention sex), the football clubs, the whole ‘managing to get elected not once but three fcuking times’ thing (there’s a strong argument to suggest that Italians are the most masochistic of all the European nations, until one looks closer to home and realises that the English remain unbeatable), the rampant tax evasion and collusion with some incredibly unsavoury parties over the years, the friendship with Putin, the whole period where he seemingly spent every single European summit making gags about how he really didn’t want to fcuk Angela Merkel, the rampant libido (and the hookers, and the underage hookers, and the mistresses and the affairs and the open promotion to cabinet positions of attractive TV presenters for fairly transparent reasons), the messianic delusions, the constant feeling that everyone was laughing at Italy BECAUSE THEY WERE…Oh, Silvio, what you gave us!

In the main this week, though, I was sad that he outlived my mum, because she fcuking hated that cnut.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, e spero che Silvio venga inculato dal diavolo giornalmente.

By Klaus Kremmerz

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A MIX THAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS ‘ADHD HARDCORE’, AND WHICH I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY TOO MUCH ABOUT OTHER THAN SUGGESTING YOU GIVE IT A TRY AND TURN IT UP LOUD AND DON’T BE SCARED AND JUST SORT OF TRY AND LEAN INTO THE GENERAL, TERRIFYING INSANITY OF THE WHOLE THING, AND WHICH WHILST NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL ‘GOOD’ EXACTLY IS CERTAINLY INTERESTING AND WILL DEFINITELY WAKE YOU FROM WHATEVER TORPOR YOU MIGHT CURRENTLY BE AFFLICTED WITH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED THAT NOONE’S YET SEEN FIT TO MAKE AI SILVIO, PT.1:  

By Melody Tuttle

NEXT WE HAVE SOME D’N’B WITH THIS EXCELLENT EP BY ANAIS! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED THAT NOONE’S YET SEEN FIT TO MAKE AI SILVIO, PT.2:    

• Chicken Orb: With everything continuing to get, well, significantly more expensive, perhaps its time that we all became a bit more self-sufficient when it comes to our food? With that in mind, let me present to you THE CHICKEN ORB! Have you ever thought ‘you know, I’d really like to have a chicken but I just don’t know whether their foraging and general behaviour is compatible with my lovely urban garden’? WELL FEAR NO MORE! The chicken orb is, basically, a Zorb for fowl – you basically lob the bird into the spherical cage and it can wonder round freely, but it means you can more easily confine it to a certain bit of garden without the need for complex enclosures and runs, and you can also avoid chasing the s0dding thing round the garden when you want to wring its neck/put it back in its coop (delete as applicable). To be honest, I can’t really imagine any of you having a desperate desire for one of these, but I was just so charmed by the idea of this that I couldn’t help but include it. OH GOD, I just had a vision of recreating that game from old-school ITV staple Gladiators but with chickens – that is streaming content GOLD, I tell you, and I will franchise that idea to you for a cursory fee. Form a queue.
• The Brian Butterfield Diet Soundboard: Even by the standards of Web Curios (ha! Standards! lol!) this feels like…something of a niche gag, but, equally, it both made me laugh and reminded me of a reasonably-amusing sketch and so into the newsletter it goes (just in case you ever wanted a window into the…rigorous selection process undertaken round here). Peter Serafinowicz is not *just* The Tick and a recurring character in The Cornetto Trilogy, he’s also a very funny writer who briefly had his own sketch show back in the day, one of which sketches featured a character called Brian Butterfield who had a very particular diet that he was trying to sell you. A touch of Mr Creosote about this, but not in a bad way – I genuinely hope that there is at least one of you who remembers this fondly and who gets a good hour or so’s amusement out of blasting the phrase ‘PORK CYLINDERS’ from your speakers at nosebleed volume to the increasing bemusement of friends, lovers and colleagues alike – the site also features a link to the sketch on YouTube, so you can at least make some sort of vague sense of this if you’re so inclined.
• Privateer: One of the side effects of writing this rubbish for over a decade now is that you end up learning things about yourself and your obsessions – for example, I have reaslised that I have a real bee in my bonnet over the whole concept of ‘space junk’, and have over the years spent more time than was perhaps strictly necessary writing here about how if we’re not careful we’re going to wall ourselves into our own atmosphere with a mile-thick layer of discarded metal (this is hyperbole, before anyone with a significantly-better grasp of physics feels the need to explain to me why this is not in fact possible). Anyway, it seems I am not the only person who feels this way, as a bunch of rich and famous Silicon Valley types, including Steve Wozniak, have set up Privateer, which is, seemingly, a company whose mission is to work to clean up the Earth’s orbit and get rid of some of the defunct satellites, forgotten ‘we sent X to space!’ marketing stunts from the early-2010s and other junk (or, at the very least, to map and track it to make it easier to avoid). This is really interesting, and sensible-sounding, and obviously super-scifi, but, if I’m totally honest, the main reason I am linking to it is because their main corporate sponsor is watchmaker Omega and halfway down the Privateer homepage is what is, honestly, the most insanely-cheesy ad-photo I have ever seen, just slap-bang in the middle of their ‘we’re a serious company doing serious business’ pitch. Oh, and they are based in Hawa’ii, too, for which I am sure their are excellent spacefaring reasons but which also makes it sound like a *bit* of a cushy gig.
• The CopyPasta DB: I saw something floating about the web this week, inspired by the Reddit protests, that made the point about the utter ephemerality of online culture and the fact that, if you’re, say, 35 or below then a lot of the places you spent your youth online, the things that you read and watched and made and experienced, simply don’t exist anymore, and how weird that is in terms of a sense of how one came to be oneself (I am mangling this somewhat, but hopefully you get the general point) – anyway, that came to mind again when looking at the CopyPastaDB, ‘the web’s largest archive of copypasta material’, or at least so it claims and I have no reason to doubt it. Obviously you all already know this, but just in case: “A copypasta is a block of text that is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites. The block of text is not necessarily written to become a copypasta. However, the text is usually of a viral or outrageous nature, often with comical undertones. This makes them extremely appealing to copy and paste.” Longform textmemes, basically, which were often initially based around horror fiction but which now have come to encompass everything from repurposes Reddit edgelordery to a *lot* of weird Tumblr stuff. This is, basically, VERY VERY ONLINE, and hence simultaneously really interesting and also excruciatingly-embarrassing to its very core, and I love it.
• Ooakfinder: This is an interesting idea. Etsy has for a few years now felt like its rather strayed from its ‘artisanal makers and individual craftspeople’ ethos to become a bit more like what eBay ended up being – to whit, a place packed with stuff that’s actually mass-produced and being sold by larger retailers in a way that presents them as being much smaller than they in fact are’. If you’d like to try and ensure that whatever you’re thinking of buying from Etsy (or elsewhere – this seems to work with most retail sites as far as I can tell) is in fact an original piece or whether it’s ripped off from someone else, or being sold in multiple other locations online, then this site will do EXACTLY that – it’s basically just cobbling together a bunch of reverse image search stuff under the hood, but it’s no less clever or useful for that.
• Felicity Ingram: I tend not to feature fashion photography on here, not least because I don’t know the first thing about either of those two topics, but I’ll make an exception for this site which is the personal portfolio of one Felicity Ingram whose work is just GORGEOUS and whose site is such a wonderful showcase for her pictures. This is such beautiful photography and webwork, honestly.
• Slow Jamastan: I tend to be…wary of people who seem intent on setting up their own countries – they tend towards libertarianism, in my experience, and libertarians tend to, not to put too fine a point on it, be either cnuts, or morons, or a uniquely-unpleasant combination of the two. That said, Slow Jamastan – a sovereign nation apparently founded in late 2021 – doesn’t seem to bear any of the hallmarks of a mad libertarian horrorshow (in the main I can tell this because a) noone seems to be talking about crypto; and b) nowhere on the website do they talk about age of consent laws, another troubling obsession of the ‘let’s start our own nation and do what we like!’ obsessives); instead, Slow Jamastan’s politics are described as “Dictatorship (on most days – sometimes The Sultan passes the suggestion box around)” which, you know, sounds ok! This is obviously a gag, but also…not a gag, based on the amount of effort and thought that has gone into the site, and, honestly, given the past week’s activities on both sides of the Atlantic I can sort of see why running away to a micronation and battening down the hatches might seem appealing.
• RajShahi Gosford: The Facebook Page of an Indian restaurant in New South Wales, Australia. Their use of memes is…astonishing, frankly, and the sort of thing I would honestly like to see at least one of you pitching as a sincere ‘strategic pivot’ to one of your more staid clients in banking or FS. This came via Garbage Day, which I imagine you are all subscribed to but which if not you really ought to be.
• Blend: On the one hand, this new shopping app (based in the UK, and found via Martin Bryant’s rather good newsletter about new-stage UK startups) which effectively purports to be ‘TikTok, but for clothes!’ sounds like it could be very smart and with some clever tech under the hood; on the other, in an era in which everyone is fcuked for money and the world continues to buckle under the weight of all the pointless crap we insist on buying and shipping around the world before depositing it in landfill to not decay over a period of centuries…well, is creating the ultimate, addictive, infinite-swiping fast-fashion portal really a responsible thing to do? God, I know, I sound po-faced and prissy as all fcuk, but, equally, IF WE DON’T STOP CONSUMING LIKE THIS WE REALLY ARE GOING TO BE VERY VERY VERY SCREWED INDEED. Still, lovely interface and IT KNOWS WHAT I WANT so envirofears be damned!
• Hillside: This is rather lovely. Hillside was an experimental architectural project from the 60s, which was built in Montreal and still stands today – per Wikipedia, “HABITAT 67, or simply Habitat, is a housing complex at Cité du Havre, on the Saint Lawrence River, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie. It originated in his master’s thesis at the School of Architecture at McGill University and then an amended version was built for Expo 67, a World’s Fair held from April to October 1967. Habitat 67 is considered an architectural landmark and a recognized building in Montreal.” The link takes you to a site where you can download an interactive walkthtrough of the architect’s original vision for the project, designed in the latest iteration of the Unreal Engine with all of the high-end photorealism that delivers; I sadly don’t have the requisite kit to do anything with this, but the demo video looks gorgeous and I do love the use of this high-end digital rendering software to explore imagined spaces and counterfactual urban scenarios; in general, this is just a really nice way of bringing Safdie’s original vision to life.
• CPUMade: I’m slightly amazed that I haven’t seen more of these – CPUMade is a tshirt design site which is – yes, that’s right, you guessed it! – AI POWERED! Create your designs using…some GAN, it’s not a particularly amazing version, and then put them on tshirts which you can either get printed on demand and shipped to you OR which you can make available on the site for others to buy, at which point you get a small kickback. The likelihood, to my mind, of anyone ever buying an AI-designed tshirt based on someone else’s prompt-tickling is vanishingly small, but on the other hand there’s a limited amount for you to lose in spending three minutes creating some vaguely-threatening tees and hoping some moron coughs up for them.
• Landing Love: Examples of nice webdesign from all over the internet. That’s literally it – but whoever curates this has a good eye (or, at the very least, similar taste in webwork to me) and as such this is a great resource for design inspiration or some light plagiarism (also, loads of these were totally new to me, which, I promise, is no mean feat).
• Click Bath: Do you feel STRESSED? Enervated? Like Ren from Ren & Stimpy when he gets all het up and his eyes get all bloodshot and he starts twitching and fitting? Hm, maybe lay off the cheap cocaine for a few weeks, eh? If, though, you can’t blame your jitteriness on several grammes of poorly-cut pub gak (or perhaps even if you can) then you might enjoy Click Bath, a site which exists solely to provide you with a soothing sound bath (at some point in the last year or so I learned what a ‘sound bath’ is and I am genuinely angry that I have to carry that phrase in my head) – click either of the panels on-screen to produce a soothing sound which you can tweak the tone and pitch of depending on where exactly you tap. Your appetite for this will probably be closely linked to your enjoyment of incense and your ability to perform an adequate downward dog.
• Pick Your Paranoia: Make your own ‘This Is Fine’ cartoon, with the addition of one of a selection of very modern paranoias – from climate change to El*n Fcuking M*sk, to guns to AI – which you can then save and share through whatever channels you see fit. Will it make the bad things go away? No, no it won’t, but laughing bleakly about it makes it better, right? Right?
• Read Something Wonderful: This is a lovely idea – Read Something Wonderful is maintaining an archive of links to excellent pieces of longform writing, with the overarching premise that the best writing isn’t always the newest, and that someone should probably be preserving links to classic journalism or essays. The site’s very simple – there’s no tagging by topic, for example – but if you’re happy to be guided by the editorial team and just read ‘something interesting’, regardless of theme, then this is a great place to bookmark and dip back into when you’re at an online loose end.
• The Cloud Appreciation Society: Do you like clouds? NOT AS MUCH AS THESE PEOPLE DO! Still, if you’ve ever wanted to get access to a genuinely enormous collection of photographs of your cumulocirrus, your nimbus, your stratocumulus (these may not in fact be actual, accurately-named types of cloud, for which apologies), along with cloud-inspired poetry and art, and cloud NEWS and cloud FACTS, then this will be some sort of dream come true – there is also a shop on the site, and I genuinely wish I could drive so that I had an excuse to buy the ‘I Brake For Clouds’ bumber sticker. I love this with an almost sinful degree of passion.
• Wooden Cocks: As I regularly say in Curios, I genuinely have no idea who any of the people reading this are, or where you are, or what you’re into (apart from, to at least some degree, overlong newsletters) – which means that I am genuinely curious to know whether there will be one of you who, on seeing this link and clicking it and discovering that there is an auction taking place in Brighton next week at which will be sold (and I quote) “ELEVEN CARVED WOODEN PHALLUS, 33CMS LARGEST”,will think “AT LAST!” and bid to take them home. To be clear, you don’t need to tell me (and I really don’t want to know) – it’s just that I find the idea vaguely pleasing. Anyway, the lack of detail on this auction page is possibly my favourite thing about it – are the phalluses (phalli?) old? New? Suspiciously-worn? Notched? Unless you bid we will never know.
• Connections: On the one hand, the NYT’s games section has apparently just stolen the ‘Wall’ section from much-loved, super-geeky UK TV show ‘Only Connect’, which is pretty sh1tty behaviour; on the other, this is such a good game and, much like Only Connect, you will feel like some sort of intellectual colossus if you complete one (or at least you will if you’re me).
• Grimace’s Birthday: This is rather fun, by global obesity-peddlers McDonald’s – it’s an in-browser Gameboy game, in which you play as noone’s favourite fast food mascot Grimace as you skateboard around some pleasingly-16-bit-ish levels, grinding and jumping and collecting milkshakes and, honestly, this is pretty good (I have a strange feeling that they might also have produced a limited run of actual GBA cartridges for this too, although equally I might be imagining that and, honestly, I’m running a touch late this morning and don’t have time to check – wow, that was both an admission of slapdash practice AND a tedious sentence none of you wanted or needed to read – GO ME!).
• The Capcom Retro Games Archive: Capcom were my favourite ever client in videogames – fine, I had to promote some occasionally-shonky titles (noone remembers MotoGP05 with any fondness, and sadly noone remembers by accompanying PR triumph either – but I will always know that there was only one person for the Daily Sport headline ‘Bikers Have Bigger Cocks’, and that that person was ME!) but equally they were such fun to work with and let me basically do whatever I liked (possibly overstepped the mark with the Heather Mills thing for Bionic Commando, but, well, they were Different Times), and so I was charmed to see that this week they have launched Captown, a little digital museum featuring art and design and tributes to some of their best and most-loved titles…AND the Capcom Retro Games Archive, to which I have here linked, which lets you play a bunch of classic titles in-browser. Final Fight! SFII! Mega Man and Mega Man II! Oh me oh my! Honestly, this is your afternoon sorted (and, once you realise how incredibly fcuking hard these are, possibly the rest of your weekend too).

By Sanya Kantarovski

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK COMES IN THE SHAPE OF THIS SUBLIME SELECTION BY NEIL DIABLO THAT YOU COULD PROBABLY DESCRIBE AS ‘CHILLOUT’ BUT WHICH IS LOADS BETTER THAN THAT MAKES IT SOUND AND IS BASICALLY THE DIAMETRIC OPPOSITE OF THE FIRST MIX SHOULD YOU NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Amy Goodchild: Amy Goodchild is an artist working with procedural generation; her Insta feed is a lovely selection of her work which is mathematical and precise and geometric and also very, very human, in a way that this sort of stuff doesn’t always land. This is beautiful.
• Daisuke Kajima: Incredible, dense drawings of dizzingly-angled urban environments, rendered in simple lines – this stuff is wonderful.
• Books On Maps: You might need to speak Italian to get the most from this, but it’s a lovely idea – the account posts shots of pages in books referring to a particular place, alongside shots of that place. Simple, but there’s something lovely about seeing the physcial reality of the narrative suggestion. This comes from Pietro Minto’s weekly newsletter, which is in Italian but which is easily machine-translatable and is always full of interesting stuff.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Jake Kennedy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: