I hope all of you who’ve sent me complaining messages about there being ‘too much AI stuff’ in Curios over the past few years are feeling suitably-chastened now that Sir Keir’s going to MAINLINE IT INTO THE NATION’S VEINS. Whether or not intravenous injection was necessarily the right analogy for the forced introduction of a potentially-nefarious technology that noone necessarily wants into the body public is…questionable, but, well, tough! You’re getting AI whether you like it or not! COMPLAIN TO YOUR ROBOT THERAPIST ABOUT IT, SOYBOY!
Sorry, not sure what came over me at the end there, it must be excitement at the coming of a new world order (suspiciously, just like the old one!) in which ‘owning the libs’ is once again the court sport of choice; rest assured that I am, remain and always will be 100% soy.
So, as we sit in the ROLLERCOASTER OF LIFE, feeling it crank up once more towards a the summit and knowing that we’re once again about to take a species-wide plunge at speed into a pit of unfettered capitalism, let me offer you up a Web Curios to take your mind off things. I hope it works it works for you, it doesn’t seem to be working for me.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t have to watch on Monday afternoon if you don’t want to.
THE SECTION WHICH WAS GENUINELY SADDENED TO HEAR ABOUT PAUL DANAN YESTERDAY AND WHICH WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL LOVE ISLAND, RIP YOU MAD-EYED SESH HOUND, PT.1:
- The Nokia Design Archive: Did you have a 3210? DO YOU REMEMBER SNAKE AND THE RINGTONE AND AND AND…look, I find retrophonenostalgia almost terminally-dull (the past was different! Technology has evolved! This is…not, in general, a hugely-interesting observation to my mind!), but it is also true that as the devices have become more technically-capable and feature complete they’ve also become more homogenous in terms of design…which is why this website is such a total joy, letting you explore the HISTORY OF NOKIA and, specifically, to do a load of digging around in their design archives so you can look through all the frankly insane scamps and draughts and vaguely-directional lookbooks that they were working through around the time they were also producing things that looked like this. There is SO MUCH STUFF in here, and if you’re someone who works in product design or branding, or who’s just generally interested in the process of ‘how people inform their design decisions’, then this will be catnip to you. The interface is simple but it works – you navigate between thematically-connected ‘nodes’, effectively, clicking into see individual elements or documents or videos, and there’s a nice interlinking of entries which creates a sort of taxonomy of Nokia design thinking, which I rather enjoy. Per the blurb, “The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.The Network view shows the archive’s contents, organised by thematic collections and displayed according to their relationships with each other. The visualisation displays the entries organised according to collection – click on them to explore and understand them and their context in the design process.” Basically it’s full of odd sketches and half-formed thoughts and notes and lookbooks and ‘inspiration libraries’, and for someone who, like me, is peculiarly un-gifted when it comes to the visual and the design-y and the like, it feels a bit like strange glyphs from an advanced alien civilisation (but also, SO Y2K).
- I Feel So Much Shame: This is a website/poem type-thing by Jackie Liu, created as part of an initiative called ‘Welcome To My Homepage’ (running for 10 years and, shamefully, entirely-unknown to me until this week, the project is ‘an international online residency program hosted by The Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX that offers artists a low-stakes opportunity to experiment and expand their practice, explore the web as a site for creative production, and reach new audiences’, which I very much approve of as a thing and feel is something other institutions might want to usefully consider; I do think ‘web as canvas’ is underexplored by Big Art, which feels…retrograde in 2025) and it is made from scanned-in risograph prints, and, basically, you just click through it, but…look, this absolutely fcuked me in half when I read/experienced it the other day, to the point of having to take an actual break and have a word with myself, so caveat emptor and all that, but I thought it was BEAUTIFUL (NB – there’s nothing horrible or awful here, honest, I am just a bundle of exposed nerve endings right now it seems).
- Free Our Feeds: This has had a reasonable amount of publicity and traction in certain corners of the web this week, and was an interesting (to me, at least) barometer of ‘how celebrity endorsements work in global media in 2025’ – turns out Mark Ruffalo gets you coverage in North America these days but not Europe, who knew? Anyway, Free Our Feeds is a campaign which is seeking to raise money to create a ‘warchest’ which will then be used to establish an independent foundation to make the AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on and is basically one of the options for the fediverse alongside ActivityPub which Mastodon is built on, independent and globally-standardised OH DEAR GOD I FIND THIS STUFF SO DULL. Sorry, but I can’t bring myself to care about the technical side of this stuff – I know, I know, I should, but I simply can’t. Basically this is a nice-sounding idea, which, still, feels a bit pointless – like, I am not convinced there are enough normal people who care about any of this to a) raise all the money they want; or b) sustain any sort of campaign to recreate a FREE AND OPEN WEB in the face of the convenience, ubiquity and massive marketing budgets of Big Tech, and, in general, the whole Bluesky vs Mastodon ‘purity of the fediverse’ debate is just too neckbeardy for me to be able to engage with, and I imagine it’s the same for the vast majority of people. So, er, fcuk knows why I have just spaffed on about it for 200-odd words. Sorry about that.
- Google, Voice and Culture: This page links you to four separate AI experiments by Google designed to explore how the tech can be used by cultural institutions to enhance the visitor experience, and these are FUN and frankly have potential applications beyond the museum and galleries sector. They’re all worth having a play with yourself, but there’s Talking Tours, which lets you wander round a venue (gallery, museum or, er, the Etihad) and get AI-generated commentary of whatever you’re ‘looking’ at in your browser; Mice in the Museum, where a pair of mice (no, me neither) give their opinions on an artwork of your choice from one of Google’s many digitised collections in, er, small rodent voices; Lip Sync, where a, er, pair of animated lips (no, again, no idea) have ‘live’ discussions on a series of prompt questions posed by artists; and Doodle Guide, which lets you draw anything you like and then get your sketch assessed by an AI voice which discusses your work, its style and execution. The last of these is by far the most fun – no, Google, that is NOT a ‘proud stetson’, try again! – but in general they’re all decent examples of how its voicemodels and multimodality are currently working, and, as with a lot of this stuff, you (or at least I) get the feeling that this is very nearly at the point of being very useful and very interesting indeed (use this phrase to beat me with in a year when this hasn’t progressed at all).
- Google Euphonia: Seeing as we’re doing Google and AI and voice stuff, this is an interesting and laudable project to file under ‘see? Some of this AI stuff is good, honest! Not all of it is going to steal your job and entrench existing power structures! Although most of it, fine, probably will!’. Google Euphonia is its project to create speech recognition software which is capable of parsing a wider range of speech types, encompassing ‘non-traditional’ speaking patterns and so designed to help those with disabilities which affect the vocal cords be understood better by The Machine. The project is currently soliciting speech samples to help train and improve its models, so if you or anyone you know has non-standard vocal patterns then you might want to upload something to this as it feels, broadly, like A Good Thing.
- Reddit Answers: THE LLMIFICATION OF EVERYTHING CONTINUES! Here we have Reddit taking the seemingly-sensible step of rendering its enormous UGC knowledge archive interrogable – so with Reddit Answers, currently in early-access (you won’t be able to use it now, but you can sign up for updates), you’ll be able to ask ANY QUESTION YOU LIKE of the Reddit corpus and, allegedly at least, get an answer back with references to where The Machine has sourced the info and links back to the original Reddit threads for investigation and future research. Which is HUGE, potentially, from an online shopping and recommendations point of view, and makes me feel that any brand that has invested time in building out a strong Reddit presence over the past few years, with a dedicated fanbase, is going to do quite well out of this (also, that ‘getting people to recommend your stuff on Reddit’ is quite an important pillar of any brand strategy, turns out). It is, of course, another HUGE warning klaxon for all those websites which have spent years amassing well-indexed articles on ‘the best handheld blenders for under £20’ which are going to see their traffic, and their income, tanked by this, after having seen their Google numbers kneecapped last year. It does rather feel like a lot of website-based stuff is going to be gurgling its last in the next year or so, much as it pains me to say so.
- Chestfaces: Bluesky is not, in general, like Old Twitter – Old Twitter was younger and more vibrant and sillier and slightly-meaner, whereas Bluesky is more mannered and more po-faced and, generally, older, greyer and sadder (as, frankly, are we all) – but occasionally you’ll find things that SPARK JOY in the old way. So it is with Chestfaces, an account on Bluesky which exists solely to post images of famous men, topless, whose naked chests have been superimposed onto their faces, giving them (YES YOU GUESSED IT) chestfaces. There are only 12 of these, and they last posted a few months ago, but fcukit, I WANT MORE CHESTFACES FFS can whoever is running this please bring it back? Thanks.
- Tony Slattery’s Funeral Fundraiser: This won’t mean anything to the non-Anglos here, I don’t think, so you can skip this one, but for anyone broadly-speaking of my generation (young GenX/VERY OLD millennial) then it might speak to you. Tony Slattery died this week, unexpectedly, of a heart attack, and it slightly floored me – I was genuinely in awe of the man as a kid, to the point where he made me doubt my sexuality…he was smart and funny and handsome and SO sharp, witty and dangerous and obviously a nervous wreck and I had never seen anyone like him on television before, obviously incredibly clever but so…smooth with it. His life ended up being sadder and smaller than anyone thought likely back then, as documented in this heartbreaking interview with him from a few years back, which is why his partner launched this crowdfunder to help cover his funeral expenses. It’s hit its target but in case any of you felt the same as I did about the man, you might want to contribute.
- Steppin: Do YOU feel like your phone has a stranglehold on you? Do YOU feel like you need to TAKE BACK CONTROL from the device? Do YOU also feel that you could possibly do with getting some more exercise in this year? Fcuk me, the January cliches! Combine all of your self-improvement goals (well, ok, two of them at most) into one simple app with this new download – Steppin is actually a pretty smart idea, the gimmick being that you ‘earn’ screentime based on your physical activity as tracked by your phone. Select which apps you want to limit, select your exchange rate (100 steps = 1 minute on TikTok, say) and off you go! I presume it’s no longer possible to fool your phone by throwing it in the air a few times and as such that this works as advertised, in which case I can imagine it working quite well for certain types of people – it integrates with a bunch of existing fitness and activity-tracking devices too, so if you’re one of those appalling self-quantifying fcuks then it will fit right into your disgustingly-optimised lifestyle.
- Undermound: Got to be honest with you here, I haven’t really got the faintest idea of what’s going on here – I *think* this is a sort-of portfolio site collecting the Canva sketches of one Stevie Pimblott, but, frankly, I’m not really sure. Just scroll, click and see where you end up (I don’t get the feeling it goes anywhere bad, but, just so you know, I take no responsibility AT ALL if it does).
- Colors: Another death this week which kicked me in the face slightly was that of former Benetton CD Oliviero Toscani, a man responsible for some of the most incredible, arresting, brave and, frankly, occasionally-borderline-not-ok ad campaigns of my early life (children, or those of you who for whatever reason don’t have an eidetic memory for this sort of stuff, let me remind you of the sort of sh1t that they used to put on billboards). What I really loved Toscani for, though, was Colors Magazine (I will forgive him the American spelling just this once) – Colors was basically the in-house magazine of Benetton’s in-house creative agency, Fabrica, and each issue was devoted to a different topic, and I first picked up a copy coming back from Italy on my own in…1993 and, muchlike Adbusters a few years later, it absolutely changed my conception of what a magazine could be, how you could be ‘political’ but also quite astonishingly stylish (to be clear – YOU could; I, as proven several decades hence, cannot), to to be informative and honest and INTERESTING, how to present information densely-but-beautifully, and the power of ugly/beautiful as an aesthetic…I am gutted that I lost the dozen or so editions of this I once owned, but enjoyed delving through this website which collates the covers of each of the issues (‘Fat’ is a particular favourite of mine) – I really, really hope that there’s going to be a proper exhibition of the archive of this, it would be ACE.
- Lumon Industries: This website’s actually a few years old – I first came across it…whenever, a while ago, but didn’t understand it and didn’t feature it because it made no sense to me. And, look, I still don’t understand it and it still makes no sense to me, but I now know that that’s because it’s based on something from the TV show Severance, which I understand is very popular and is coming back on TV soon and which it’s likely that quite a few of you watch and enjoy. So! Er, this is for you! I don’t know what it is! Oh, ok, fine – it’s basically a slightly-mysterious busywork simulator (with a nicely-fleshed-out UI) which is clearly something to do with the MYSTERIOUS BUSYWORK that the characters perform in the show…look, can one of you who knows about this email me and offer me a short explainer? I will be really grateful and possibly send you a small reward.
- Watch Duty: You will probably have heard of this app over the past week or so – it’s what’s mainly being used in LA to track the spread of the fires in near-realtime (you can see a browser-based map here should you wish). What I find interesting about it is that it’s nothing to do with the State of California – it’s an app developed by a very, very rich person who decided that he might as well do it because he had loads of money and some time on his hands. Which, to be clear, is nice of him – it’s not-for-profit, it doesn’t do anything bad with your data, and in general seems like A Good Thing! But also does feel sadly emblematic of A Lot Of Things – it does rather feel that infrastructural digital services like this ought to be the preserve of the state rather than relying on well-meaning plutes to step in and sort sh1t out.
- Deep: I can’t speak for you, obviously, but it does rather feel to me like the shine has somewhat been removed from the 1950s dream of space exploration, tarnished by interstellar travel’s now-indelible association with That Fcuking Man and indeed now MechaBezos. So, as an alternative, why not let’s explore a future under the sea? Yes, ok, I know why (SO MUCH TOOTHY AND TENTACULAR FEAR, not to mention several thousands of lbs of psi), but ignore that for a moment and instead enjoy Deep, whose mission, apparently, is ‘Make Humans Aquatic’ (I can’t be the only one seeing Ariel frantically mugging ‘NO, NO!’ in the corner of my field of vision, surely?). This is a VERY shiny website promoting the company’s undersea exploration kit, including this thing, called ‘Sentinel’, which will apparently allow people to ‘live and work undersea’, opening up the theoretical possibility of modular dwelling bunkers on the edge of the Mariana Trench for when everything up-top gets…well, a bit burny. This is VERY scifi, only-partially-believable, and feels like a series of really unpleasant disaster films just waiting to happen.
- Kudos Wiki: This is a nice idea – someone’s basically scraped Wikipedia for all the films that, per writeups on there, are the ‘best’ ever, which, turns out, gives you quite a wide-ranging and interesting new canon which diverges from a lot of ‘best films EVER’ lists you might previously have seen online. The list is available either to browse, or – and this is an interesting move which I don’t *quite* understand the licensing around – you can sign up for $1 a month and get a link to watch a different film from the list every four weeks (or indeed $12 for access to everything forever); if you’re a cinephile and want a new watching challenge/goal for 2025 this could be quite a cool way of doing it.
- All Of The Cartoon Pitches: This is an INCREDIBLE resource for anyone interested in comics and cartoons and animation and illustration – this page collates DOZENS of links to documents which were used to pitch, or write episodes for, network animated TV shows – from He Man and She-Ra to Spongebob to Ren & Stimpy, this is basically a how-to manual of how to package and sell your work, and for a very specific type of person it will be GOLDEN.
- Brand New iPhone Sexting App Just Dropped: I mean, I could have given it its full title – Exploding Messages – but frankly this does a clearer job of explaining what you’ll be using it for. Per the writeup on the app store, “Send texts and photos that disappear on iMessage. Your friends don’t need the app to view them. Screenshots are blocked too!” Which, obviously, is all fun and games, but some thoughts: 1) you have to be VERY CONFIDENT in that ‘no screenshots’ functionality; 2) if you think about it, this could equally be used to send people some pretty awful stuff, unsolicited, with complete deniability. Which, er, doesn’t sound great tbh. OH WELL NOODZ!
NEXT, ENJOY TWO HOURS OF REALLY RATHER LOVELY JAZZ COMPILED BY WINDRUSH RADIO!
THE SECTION WHICH WAS GENUINELY SADDENED TO HEAR ABOUT PAUL DANAN YESTERDAY AND WHICH WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL LOVE ISLAND, RIP YOU MAD-EYED SESH HOUND, PT.2:
- Loser Lane: Are YOU a cyclist? Are YOU annoyed by the provision of cycling lanes and other pro-bike amenities in your city? Are YOU so irritated by it that, er, you’ll go to the trouble of coding a small game about how bad cycling there is? I imagine the answer to that last one was ‘no’, but full kudos to Toronto resident Marie LeBlanc Flanagan who was so annoyed at the Mayor’s plan to close cycle lanes that she knocked up this little – to be clear, impossible – game to demonstrate what being on a bike in the city currently feels like. You can read a bit more about it here, but I am now IN LOVE with the idea of making a small videogame as protest at small acts of municipal idiocy. Can someone make a game about the bins please? Oh God, someone’s going to make one about grooming gangs aren’t they? Let me retract this idea immediately.
- JourneyMaker: Another digital arts and culture toy, this one brought to me by Ben Templeton’s excellent newsletter; the Art Institute of Chicago has built this website which lets kids prepare their route through the museum ahead of their visit by picking a selection of works that interest them – it’s a lovely interface, which does a good job of giving the illusion of LIMITLESS CHOICE while actually being relatively-tightly-constrained, and there’s something really nice about the packaging of it and the way it creates a bespoke map JUST FOR YOU detailing your route and giving you little worksheets…it’s just a nice, light-touch bit of personalisation which has the benefit of being ACTUALLY CURATED rather than being chucked into The Machine and latent-space-sliced, which makes it feel like a more crafted experience than you might get otherwise. Lovely stuff.
- The Smell of Data: ‘What if you could smell your computer?’ is a question that almost no actual consumer has ever wanted to know the answer to, but nonetheless is something which the tech industry seemingly seems hell-bent on making reality; I think it’s been 20-odd years since I first saw a ‘here’s a box that will spray relevant scents into the air as you play Call of Duty so you can actually SMELL the cordite and, er, blood as you perforate terrorists for FREEDOM!’ device – they had a bit of a resurgence during lockdown, and again during the brief metaversal spazzout of 2022, but noone’s ever REALLY wanted this to be a thing. This, though, this is ART and therefore a million times better: “The sense of smell helped early humans to survive. But now that our hunting and gathering has moved to the digital environment, our noses can no longer warn us of the lurking dangers in the online wilderness. The Smell of Data is a new scent created to instinctively alert internet users of data leaks on personal devices.” The Smell of Data is a device which you charge up with scent capsules and carry around with you, linked to your phone; when your phone connects to an unprotected website on an unsecured WiFi network or Hotspot, it will spray a puff of the scent into the air to alert you to the fact that you’re potentially being mined. This has now put me in mind of all sorts of builds on this – I quite like the idea of something like this embedded into the outsize collar of a coat or something and triggering at any point you’re in-shot of a digital camera, some sort of surveillance-watcher (impossible, obvs), but I am sure you can come up with your own.
- Hyperkinetic Art: I like this a lot. The website of someone called Simon, who makes work with a plotter pen – per their description, “I make art with maths and programming, and I have a pen plotter robot called Stephen that brings it to life with a biro…The majority of the work I produce is inspired by nature, and the pursuit of generating organic shapes in the least organic medium I can think of – a bstard fcuking computer…All of the artwork is created with javascript, rendered on a HTML5 canvas for development and then exported to polylines and curves to be plotted onto paper. I’ve built up a considerable set of tools for creating generative art in the process, and have wandered down some unexpected paths, such as implementing Newton’s laws of gravitation to manipulate particle paths.” I think the work here is LOVELY, and far more interesting than a lot of machine-drawn imagery often is – it’s a commercial site and the prints are available to buy, but if you’re not in the market for new art then you might just want to have a browse and enjoy.
- Emoticon Generator: Before the TYRANNY OF EMOJI there was the emoticon, and in the land of the emoticon the emoticon that used non-standard, non-English characters was king. This EXCELLENT little site lets you simply and easily create your very own bespoke emoticon, choosing from a selection of drop-downs to make a personalised little face JUST FOR YOU. Why not make this your kooky, whimsical digital callsign for 2025 (other than, you know, the appalling tweeness and self-regard involved in believing one needs a ‘kooky, whimsical digital callsign for 2025’)?
- Alphabetical Order: Another newsletter! This is BRAND NEW, only one issue in, and if you’re interested in music writing then you might enjoy the premise here: “Every other week, I’m going to pull a record off the shelf and write about how it affected my life in some way. Not my favorite records necessarily, or ones I even love for that matter, but albums that are tied to memories or important life moments.” This is a similar premise to Shelfies by Jared and Lavie, but for music, and I rather like this way of thinking of cultural items in relation to oneself. I can’t vouch for the quality of the resulting essays – there’s only one up there so far – but I think this is a fun idea which might be worth following.
- Vintage Bowling: Would YOU like to immerse yourself in some classic Americana, the American of diners and T-Birds and large men demonstrating impossible grace and skill when wielding a 15lb mass? GREAT! This website collects photos of old-style bowling alleys in the US and is, basically, just a whole aesthetic in itself. These are actually really quite interesting from an historical perspective, as they trace the evolution of the game from the…19th?C to more modern iterations, but the real gold here is, imho, in the 1950s-era stuff, where you can practically smell the Brylcream, the tallow for the fries and the appalling quantity of cheap aftershave worn by Spike who just won’t leave that poor waitress Jeannie alone (look, that’s where I imagination just took me, what of it?).
- Doom Running in a PDF: It’s monochromatic! It renders so painfully-slowly it’s unplayable! But! It is, definitively, the original DOOM running inside a PDF document! An achievement as stunningly-futile as it is technically-impressive, so WELL DONE to whoever is behind it, I can only applaud your endeavour.
- Wandermap: On the one hand, I am impressed by how clever this is; on the other, I think that it is likely to lead to some genuinely unpleasant travel experiences. The premise, though, is really smart – Wandermap lets you plug in any video from Insta and then parses it to pull all the destinations from it and then map them for you, giving you an instant itinerary to mimic that of your favourite shiny-toothed and floppy-haired influencer moppet. Which, to be clear, is really smart! – I presume there’s a ‘feed video to GPT, extract destinations, map to OpenStreetMap’ pathway going on under the hood, though I am guessing here – but, also, means that what you’re doing is mimicking exactly the same route and destinations as the influencer in question, leading to a) you going to places that will inevitably be fcuking rammed by the time you get there, because, well, INFLUENCER!; b) you seeing stuff that you have already seen because, well, YOU WATCHED THE INITIAL VIDEO. Although given current travel habits practiced by The Young this doesn’t appear to be something that bothers them, so, basically, I should shut up and accept that I am old and don’t understand anything anymore.
- Eyemead: Thanks to my friend Josh for sharing this with me – Eyemead is…Jesus, you know how I occasionally wang on about the fact that there are several million words of me on the web, blah blah blah? Well Eyemead is the home to ‘69 hand-coded websites by John Palmer’, started in 1998, which comprises “2,673 htm files and 6,206 images, totaling 12.92 million words and 268 Mb.” I MEAN, FCUKING HELL. This is, I think, no longer being updated – the last entries date from 2016 – but…this is SO MUCH WORK, on everything from oak trees to making haybales, Sherwood Forest to the Anapurna Circuit in Nepal…I love the fact that this exists, and I love the fact that John Palmer spent nearly 20 years building all of this stuff and that it is STILL THERE. I honestly believe – and, actually, as I type this, I realise I actually DO believe this, very firmly – that Governments ought to consider a certain personal hosting budget as a birthright, for anyone to create and host and maintain projects, and that this should extend to their posthumous preservation, because THIS IS CULTURE, however small and seemingly-marginal and frivolous it may seem, and the thought of all of this sort of thing one day vanishing into bits is…distressing to me, turns out.
- Amazon Kitchen: This is a YouTube channel promoting some fancy brand of knife or another, but the reason I am including it here is because its promos are basically lavishly-produced, vaguely-ASMR-ish cooking videos which almost EXACTLY mimic the very specific aesthetic of a specific corner of the Meta algorithm which was stalking me a few years back – there was a period of about a year or so when on the rare occasions I opened Facebook I would be confronted with an endless stream of videos of LARGE MEN, mostly bearded and often topless, cooking in outdoor settings over open flames, mostly MEAT (obviously), using lavishly-oversharpened and outsize knives. Why? NO IDEA (I am 11 stone damp and have never, ever been able to grow adequate facial hair, just so’s you know). Anyway, these videos are basically like that and I’m linking them here mainly out of some sort of weird sort of algonostalgia, which now I come to think of it is…weird. Is this a thing? Has anyone else felt like they miss an algorithm they’re no longer exposed to? Am I having some sort of nervous breakdown?
- The Missouri Marmite Museum: I don’t mean to be unfair to the state of Missouri, but I’ve never been presented with a compelling reason to visit it before (actually, speaking of being mean to States, it’s always interesting (to me at least) to ask Americans ‘if you could disappear ONE state – like, it would totally cease to exist immediately – which would you disappear?’; it’s astonishing how often the answer is ‘one of the Dakotas, maybe both’) – NOW though it’s all different. THEY HAVE A MARMITE MUSEUM! Ok, this is a terrible webpage – it’s literally just some information – but I was SO heartened to find this slightly-inexplicable piece of the UK in the US. “The Missouri Marmite Museum celebrates the world’s most famous love-it/hate-it item: a yeast extract made from the dregs found at the bottom of British beer barrels, and sold in adorable brown glass jars. The museum’s collection began with one metal-top jar purchased in 1974; today the collection is a broad spectrum of plastic-top jars, toy trucks, cookbooks, stuffed animals, thimbles, toast racks, advertisements, and wearing apparel: socks, t-shirts, aprons, and sweatshirts. Parts of the collection come from India, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, England, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Hong Kong – with the oldest item (1930’s) having been excavated from a rubbish dump in Wales. The Missouri Marmite Museum, located in Valley Park, Missouri, is open by appointment only.” I mean, that feels almost like it merits a roadtrip.
- The Coney Island History Project: Sorry, there’s a lot of Americana this week, turns out – still, this is a really interesting website collating photos and information about the history of the Coney Island fairground in New York and, best of all, oral histories with locals about their memories of the place – I’ve only skimmed this, but there are some great stories in here which are worth exploring imho (via Blort).
- The Puppets Co-Op: OH THIS IS FUN! Would YOU like to get into making puppets? Would you like a bunch of guides on how to do so, from small puppets to frankly-terrifyingly-large ones? Would you like an incredible trove of information about puppets and puppetry, all presented in an adorably-scratchy style that I genuinely adore? OH GOOD! Also there’s a section on the site about ‘puppet libraries’ where you can RENT OUT PUPPETS, which sounds like quite a fun thing to do on a rainy afternoon if you ask me.
- Musiq Is: I *think* that this is another site that has basically been spun up by AI, like some of the ones I featured last week, but I can’t be wholly certain – either way, it’s a fun series of toys/games designed to test your musical ability – so you’re tasked to maintain a series of BPMs, for example, or identifying notes of a certain pitch. Fun, although possibly less so if, like me, you’re borderline tone-deaf.
- Handcheck: Fun, pointless but also sort-of a cool proof-of-concept – the site just asks you to make and hold a series of hand gestures which it uses your webcam to track and verify…ok, so the payoff is a touch underwhelming, but there’s obviously quite a lot of uses for this; I quite like its potential as a non-traditional captcha for example, but there’s also a very childish part of me that quite wants to make a website to which access is locked until visitors make the ‘Loser’ sign on their foreheads.
- The Current Time In Morse Code: I mean, that is literally what this is, I don’t really know what else I’m meant to say about it other than that part of me would really like one of these on a very big, railway station-style clacker board (yes, I know that that’s not the technical name for them but it escapes me right now).
- Realbird Fakebird: A FUN NEW DAILY GAME! Which is nothing like, and doesn’t want to be anything like, Wordle! Actually I don’t think this is new at all, just new to me (so slow, so superannuated) – anyway, the premise is that each day you’re presented with seven things which you have to characterise as ‘X’ or ‘not-X’ – so today for example it’s ‘which of these were real, branded pinball machines?’. This takes literally 30s and is…light, frivolous, pointless fun! It still exists! Just!
- The Visible Zorker: OK, this is…VERY, very geeky, but also quite wonderful in its own way. Zork, in case you don’t know (but if you’re reading this I have a creeping suspicion that you probably do), was one of (if not THE) original text adventures from the 80s; in this version, you can play the whole game but ALSO see the code as you play, so you can literally SEE how the sausage is making itself as you eat it (so to speak – wow, that was a really horrible analogy, sorry about that). Obviously if you’re a code person then this will speak to you far more than it did to me, but as someone resolutely non-technical it’s actually a really helpful and useful way to get my head around some of the ‘how does software actually work?’ questions that occasionally flit around my head in search of an answer (you can read more about the project here if you’re curious).
- Sebastian’s Quest: A cute little Pico-8 browsergame in which you play a mouse. There is cheese. This is VERY ill-explained, but you basically have to make your way from screen-to-screen, pushing the blocks around to make a path for yourself…except you will quickly realise that there are wrinkles to the rules, and that you will have to work those wrinkles out for yourself. This is more fun than I expected it to be, though you will have to think a *little* bit.
- St Blamensir: Finally this week, something a bit lovely which I don’t want to explain too much. From the creator’s blurb: “this is my personal interactive worldbuilding project hosted on neocities which incidentally also feeds my medieval hyperfixation. It is everchanging and I have a lot more stuff planned for it.” Do you like manuscripts and marginalia? Did you enjoy the visual stylings of Pentiment? I think you’ll enjoy this, then.
By Elif Özen
THIS WEEK’S FINAL MIX IS BY BOBBY MYSEH AND IT IS TWO HOURS OF GORGEOUS, VAGUELY-80s LOUNGECORE!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Dogs Divide by Zero: THANKYOU to reader Cameron McCormic who sent this to me along with the message “Everything starts with pen/brush marker/water colour on paper. Sometime I surprise myself.” This Tumblr collects his abstract sketches which are simultaneously VERY kaleidoscopic and also insanely-redolent of a particular 1970s visual style that I can’t for the life of me name or place. I like these a lot.
- Gap Playlists: Via Simon from Unspun Heroes comes this sadly-defunct but still-great Tumblr featuring links to music that used to be played in Gap shops in the 90s and early-00s, alongside images from the period and links to playlists of the era-appropriate tracks. This is some EXCELLENT musical (and visual) nostalgia, although it did also remind me of the tedious stranglehold Gap had on mainstream daywear for a decade or more.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Aim Not Here: AI video (sorry) depicting a few nice corners of latent space – as with the more interesting projects of this sort, there’s a very clear aesthetic and vibe to these which, whilst obviously the product of The Machine, are stylistically-distinct enough to make them interesting to my mind; I rather like the ‘weird Hunterian Museum’ vibe of a lot of the stuff in here.
- MD Foodie Boyz: I post this link with NO INTENDED SHADE WHATSOEVER, but with the following comments: 1) this is the Insta feed of a podcast (I know, I know) in which a bunch of ACTUAL, LITERAL CHILDREN (‘tweens’, if I’m being generous) talk about fast food and snacks; 2) the podcast has a LOGO. I appreciate the world is very different now to THE DISTANT PAST in which I was this age, but fcuk me the degree of media sophistication at play from the kids here is impressive (if you assume that this isn’t being adult-managed, which I am going to do); 3) I have tried listening to this. WHO IS LISTENING TO THIS? The inanity – no shade! I am sure they are nice kids! I am very much not the target audience! – is astounding. WHO WANTS TO LISTEN TO THREE NOT-HUGELY-ARTICULATE 12 YEAR OLDS TALK ABOUT CHIPS??? I don’t know man, I don’t see the ‘children as pillars of the creator economy’ thing as a necessarily Good Vibe, but I suppose this is what the Rizzler has wrought and so, well, here we are.
- Marion Cumpa: An Insta feed posting what I might be tempted to call ‘erotica’ were that not such a fundamentally-awful word, there’s some photography on here but the reason I’m posting the link is because of the illustrations which I think are EXCELLENT and several of which I would pay actual cashmoneyfor should such an opportunity present itself.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Oldham: Another reminder of the importance of local journalism and why it’s vital to fund it wherever possible – this is an excellent piece of reporting by Joshi Hermann at the Manchester Mill, explaining clearly and methodically the background to the current resurrection of panics around ‘grooming gangs’ in Oldham, which does an excellent job at demonstrating that the issue is complex, multilayered and has been investigated multiply and at length, regardless of what specific, self-interested actors may currently wish people to believe. More than anything this shows that stories like this are complex, and often, at heart, slow and boring – investigations into procedures and processes and the past necessarily take time and do not necessarily provide conveniently-packaged answers or solutions, however much the nature of the crimes in question might induce one to wish they did. It’s also indicative of the degree to which people have been trying to make this story all about them for years, even before That Fcuking Man decided to opine, and how, even after years of being across the issue, it’s still hard for even the most-informed to have a clear picture of what happened, and how that is not for want of trying. Seriously, this is EXCELLENT journalism of the sort you see all too rarely these days.
- The New Tech Right: I absolutely adored this essay by Jasmine Sun – ok, in part because it articulated lots of things I already think – about the current wave of right-wing thinking currently sweeping the Valley (although one might argue, as she does and others have done, that a better framing is accel/decel rather than left/right), what it stems from, and, per Doctorow’s point in The Well which I referenced last week, how coalitions are the spirit of the new age, and how people who don’t necessarily agree with the general vibe might consider working around it. In particular I adored the ‘In/Out’ list, which felt not only INSANELY on-point but also an excellent articulation of my current BIG THESIS, to whit ‘2025 is basically going to feel like the 1980s, but compressed into a single year’.
- What The Fcuk Are We Doing Anymore?: One for the writers – LOL! IT WILL MAKE YOU SO DEPRESSED! – in which the reliably-excellent Kate Wagner goes long on the general sense of malaise felt amongst people who in an ideal world would like to exchange the writing of words for money, particularly people who find themselves (in NA, at least) on the political / social left. This is a long excerpt, but it’s worth reproducing as I think it gives a good overview of the central arguments: “Part of my ambient madness comes from what I see as an ever-emerging truth: there is increasingly nowhere to run to for stability or protection, especially political and legal protection, in the world of letters. This, coupled with the fact that social media has, in effect, become a kind of extrajudicial kangaroo court whose verdicts have dire consequences including for employment, does not bode well. While there remains a healthy culture of left-wing magazine writing, many of the old bulwarks (especially large newspapers) have either caved to power — such as the case with censorship or silence on Palestine — or have caved to the mob and seek only to frantically pander to a populism that isn’t even real because the internet has scattered us into algorithmic cesspits that are becoming more and more difficult to climb out of. (My own parents are on a completely different internet from me and nothing I produce would ever or has ever reached them “organically.”) And this is before we get into things like ensh1ttification, literary cultural decline writ large and what AI slop promises to do with the publishing industry. These developments, unfortunately, are a long time coming. For the last twenty or so years, the need to see internet number go up has destroyed countless literary lives, not to mention things like style and form, whether in terms of clickbaitiness in the Millennial mode or scandalous self-exploitative virality or through being made so afraid of backlash that one undermines one’s own argument, hands the keys over de facto to one’s enemies, writes oneself into a hole.”
- Another ‘Where We Are Now With AI’ Piece: Ethan Mollick again, giving another ‘where we are RIGHT NOW’ update on the AI landscape, particularly in the context of the next AGI hypetrain slowly picking up speed (authorial opinion: AGI is bullsh1t and anyone promoting its imminent arrival is attempting to sell you something (or fleece investors)) – his point, once again, is one which I keep on making and which I found myself repeatedly returning to during the INJECT IT INTO OUR VEINS SIR KEIR!!!!! announcement on the UK’s AI strategy on Monday – to whit, it is astonishing how little anyone understands what you can CURRENTLY do with this stuff, and without that understanding I don’t think you can have sensible conversations about the future of it, and certainly not at the level of policy. Also, from a purely UK perspective, the habit of using political correspondents to ask questions on tech announcements really boils my p1ss and should stop ffs.
- What Is Going To Happen To Search Very Very Soon: Look, I have written about this EXTENSIVELY over the past year so, presuming you actually read what I write and then don’t dismiss it out of hand as, well, b0llocks, you probably already know most of what’s in here – if not, though, this is a useful companion to that Reddit Answers link all the way back up there which explains, neatly, all the reasons why any businesses built on ‘search’ as a thing might be, well, fcuked beyond all recognition.
- Trouble Transitioning: A superb essay by Adam Tooze in the LRB, ostensibly reviewing a history of energy written by one Jean-Baptiste Frezzos but at the same time offering a really well-crafted history of the concept of the ‘energy transition’, alongside a series of explanations as to why thinking of it as a phase transition is in and of itself potentially-unhelpful. This is a very good, inevitably-sobering piece which lays down an awful lot of rather…chilling (lol the irony!) facts about our current carbon emissions and what we might need to do about them, the answer to which is, basically, ‘completely change the way we behave and interrelate as a species’ so, er, GOOD ONE! I met someone this week who works for the Carbon Trust and who was…let’s say ‘less than bullish’ about things, in case you wanted An Update From The Coalface (again, lol!).
- The Augmented City: OK, full disclosure, this is a 140-page document and I have at best skimmed it – that said, it’s a PROPER ACADEMIC THING from Cornell University and it is a really interesting central question, specifically ‘how might we think about AR/mixed reality data projects in the context of the urban environment, what benefits and disbenefits might the tech bring to public spaces, how might one consider regulating the use of this stuff, how can communities harness it for hyperlocal benefit…seriously, there looks to be some really interesting thinking in here and it’s a nice alternative to the ‘smart city’ bullsh1t that has siphoned up SO MUCH academic urbanist money in the past decade or so. I can think of a dozen brands off the top of my head who ought to be thinking at least a bit about this stuff.
- The Neil Gaiman Stuff: So I didn’t link to any of the allegations previously because, well, it was a series of podcasts, but this longread by New York Magazine is…well, look, if you’re reasonably online and you have any interest in this stuff then you will almost certainly have read it, but I am aware that there are some…less-online people among the Curios readership (this strikes me as frankly mental – like, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? – but obviously you’re very welcome) and as such they might not have seen it yet. This is a pretty unpleasant read, and it’s worth noting that it contains reasonably-explicit descriptions of what sounds very much like abuse, assault and a bunch of other things too – I’m linking to it because I think it’s quite important to share these things if people are brave enough to speak about them, and also because it’s wearily, weirdly familiar.
- Anti-DEI Is Now A Brand Position: This is an article about videogames on a videogames website, but it’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell at RPS and therefore it’s actually well-written; this piece looks at a videogame studio which is very much capturing something of the ZEITGEIST OF THE NOW with their recent statements proclaiming themselves to be ‘ethically opposed’ to DEI initiatives (which does sound quite a lot like therefore proclaiming yourself to be…a white supremacist, but wevs I guess), and how we’re likely to see quite a lot more of this sort of thing this year. BONUS LINK: Max Read treads parallel ground, writing about the recent Zuckerbergian comments and his seeming pivot to ‘vice signalling’, which is a nice term and one which we should popularise imho.
- 69 Theses: Predictions and Lessons For Crypto in 2025: To be clear, I have no personal interest in crypto beyond the general ‘wtaf this is so weird’ stuff I put in here, but I found this list FASCINATING – this is very much from a different part of the web to the one I inhabit, the part where people still diamond hand and hodl like it’s 2020, and where sh1tcoins and memecoins and AI-juiced markets are real things rather than, well, just a collection of very silly-sounding phrases. I think I understood about…OK, being charitable I’d say about 65% of this, but it is DIZZYING, like a whole parallel futurenow being built somewhere over there. This might all be bullsh1t – and I have a fairly strong belief that 90-ish per cent of it is – but it is SUCH AND INCREDIBLY WEIRD SCIFI FUTURE! Your appetite for this will depend entirely on your tolerance for sentences like this one: “There are now two categories of memecoins: A) Legacy memecoins (ie $PEPE, $WIF, $BONK, $DOGE, etc.); and B) Sentient memecoins (ie $GOAT, $LUNA, $KWEEN). One group relies on humans to spread its gospel; the other relies on machines which do not eat, sleep or urinate from biological bladders. Legacy coins must morph into sentient memecoins or retreat from relevance entirely.” I TOLD YOU IT WAS ODD.
- Hitachi and the Magic Wand: A bit of a slight story, this one, but I was, er, tickled by the revelation that Hitachi has basically franchised out the Magic Wand brand because it was too embarrassed to have a sex toy in its product portfolio.
- At The Thistle: Dani Garavelli, again in the LRB, writes about the newly-opened Thistle Centre in Glasgow, where the city’s drug addicts are able to go and safely inject in a clean, secure environment – while I appreciate not everyone is comfortable with the idea of the state effectively going ‘yeah, go ahead, shoot up, no bother mate’, the piece does a good job of explaining the rationale behind the Centre’s existence and the hope that people using it will eventually develop relationships with the staff that will see them seek treatment over time. I find this a fascinating area of policy, particularly having moved back to South London last year and currently seeing a frankly-dispiriting number of skagheads doing the ‘need/beg/score/gouch’ circuit on the streets of Oval.
- AI, The Old and Singapore: I found this almost-unbearably affecting, but in general it’s a pretty straight telling of how the elderly care sector in Singapore is increasingly integrating robotics and AI into its services – residents are apparently enthused by their new electronic companions, which is great, but it’s impossible to shake the feeling of their being something unutterably sad about hundreds, thousands, millions of people living out their last days alone but for a digital overseer emoting ‘care’ at them. Still, growth industry for anyone looking for a career pivot!
- Britain’s Car Market Is Fcuked: I don’t drive, I have had a single driving lesson in my entire life (I was 20, I think, and realised that…I simply didn’t care, and so stopped – on reflection, this was to prove a troubling indicator of the future direction of significant portions of my life) and therefore cars and driving and the general concept of ‘the motorway’ are strange and wild to me, esoteric like the magic of the Wookey Hole Witch. Still, despite my near-total ignorance of motoring and associated issues, this is a really interesting essay explaining exactly how much more expensive buying a new car (any car, including electric) has become – which, you might argue, is not necessarily a bad thing but which is…quite inconvenient in a country still very much designed for the fcuking things. There’s an interesting point at the end of the piece about how strategies employed by previous governments have led to a position that has actively harmed our chances of meeting the targets set by the same governments which, well, WHODATHUNKIT?!
- Century Scale Storage: This is VERY long, but I promise it is super-interesting – the Harvard Law Review goes DEEP on digital storage and the challenges of preserving information for the long-term, and, really, this kept me interested all the way through in a way I wasn’t expecting – also, if there is ANY part of your work or life that requires you to think about long-term storage or archiving of anything then this is probably hugely-useful.
- Kofte, Two Ways: Typically-brilliant food writing in Vittles – here Melek Erdal writes about making İçli Köfte (as they explain in the piece, that’s what kibbe ended up as when they reached Turkey). This is an excellent essay up-top about modern diasporic living and the way food travels and ‘authenticity’, followed by two recipes for the kofte, one authentic and one very much not, and the writing throughout is joyful – the tone is both super-London and (for all I know of it) also super-diasporic and it sounds like my city.
- My Machine and Me: ‘Glance Back’ is an art project by Maya Man which I featured here in…oh God, nearly five years ago, time travel back there should you wish, and which takes a photo of you from your webcam each day, with minimal warning, asking you to share what you are thinking about the moment it’s taken; these then become an archive of your thoughts and moods as you sit ENGAGING WITH THE MACHINE. This essay by Greta Rainbow is about her experience spending a year with the app and what it’s like looking back at twelve months of pictures of your face when each is tied to a written memory, and what that means (if anything) about our relationship with screens and the time we spend staring at them, and I like it very much.
- Feeding The Machine: This is a profile of Trisha Paytas, who I think I have been aware of for about a decade now and who, I think, might be one of the most thoroughly modern human beings alive today (see also, depressingly: The Paul Brothers, Caroline Calloway, MrBeast, Jake Humphrey). WHAT an incredible human being (I mean that in the most literal of senses).
- Bad Beef: A history of the rap beef, starting way back in the 80s with the ‘Roxane Wars’ and all the way through to the terminal Biggie-Tupac feud of the 90s – this is fascinating, and a nice piece of context to Drake continuing to embarrass himself all over the courts and media this week (it really is astonishing how some people, regardless of wealth and success and trappings, will simply never, ever be able to be cool – honestly, I feel we have enough very high-profile examples of this phenomenon for someone to do a proper study of it now, with Drake and That Fcuking Man as the two core case studies).
- Five Star Ratings: Or, ‘how noone in Japan would ever give a five star review of anywhere, ever’. I love this so so much – “At a soba shop near my house, low stars are given for the colour of the tempura (black), the smell (ammonia) and the presence of ashtrays (one for each table). On Tabelog, a Japanese Yelp for restaurants, if I see 3.49 stars, it gives me a little thrill. A typical review might read something like, ‘Food was super delicious. Perfect night. The server had messy hair. 2 stars.’ It’s why Shake Shack has 4.5 stars on Google and the best udon you’ve ever had in your life has 3.8: tourists love grade inflation.”
- The Ghost Coat: Our last longread of the week is by Catherine Lacey in Granta – this is superbly-written, and I was basically sucked in by this paragraph and I hope you will be too: “And while it is true that a person is always ignorant of the particular future moving toward her person, there will certainly be moments when this truth is truer than others, and such was the case as I spent several days calling all the friends who’d visited my home in the prior weeks and months to discern whether the coat was theirs; the precarity of my present was becoming truer and truer, darker and darker, yet entirely out of view. And though this story ends peacefully, I haven’t degraded that peace by entrapping it here. The moviegoer is best dropped some distance from a story’s true end, and told to walk the last mile alone.”
By Tim Barr
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- It’s only the second Curios of the year but I feel reasonably-confident in asserting this will still be one of the oddest and most-inexplicable tracks I’ve seen all year by the time we reach the end (presuming we do, of course!) – it is by Fire Toolz, the video is ACE (in a really quite sh1t way), and the song is, of course, called ‘To every squirrel who has ever been hit by a car I’m sorry and I love you’. I feel reasonably confident in saying that I think it’s unlikely you will have heard this on the radio.