HELLO I AM BACK HELLO!
What have YOU done with the past few weeks of your life? I have singularly failed to take a holiday of any sort (how does one take a holiday from oneself? No, not ‘acid’, tried that), or indeed to really stop looking at the internet, but I have caught up on some sleep and, I think, just about managed to muster the enthusiasm to get to the end of the year without risk of (additional, ulterior) breakdown, so WELL DONE ME!
Anyway, as I type it’s vaguely-sunny out, and in a desperate attempt to expose my bone-white epidermis to a few rays before the sun disappears for six months, I am not even going to bother pretending with the intro this week and will instead crack right on with the links, not least because I imagine you’re having some pretty chronic url withdrawal symptoms right now (do not tell me you found another dealer, do not tell me you found another dealer, I will CUT YOU).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are glad to see me, I can tell (LOOK AT ME).
By Paul Ranson (pics via TIH)
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST TO ANY OF YOU WHO ARE IN LONDON AND WHO HAVE A BIT OF SPARE TIME OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AND WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH SOMETHING GENUINELY INTERESTING AND COOL AND FUN AND CREATIVE TO CLICK THIS LINK AND SIGN UP AND LEARN MORE, PT.1:
- Greenwich: This is a lovely way to return to the internet (I have obviously not left the internet, I have just been…less assiduous about tracking its movements. INTERNET I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU, etc etc) – Greenwich is the latest in the seemingly-infinite series of attempts to create an additional sort of semi-social layer over the web, which in this instance means ‘install this Chrome extension and it will let you both add hyperlinks to any bit of any webpage you like, but will also grant you the ability to see the hyperlinks others have added, meaning you start to build up a lovely network of ‘oh, this made me think of that’ links between sites created solely through others’ personal associations’ (as you can see, I’ve spent the past fortnight honing my prose to a fine point). Obviously this lives and dies by the number of people using it, and obviously there are about three people currently so doing, but I have a real soft spot for this sort of concept and the idea of mapping these loose thematic connections between places on the web. You can read a blogpost about the project here, and there’s this page which tracks all the different connections between sites that people have made with the software – sadly there doesn’t appear to be any sort of explanation to be found anywhere about why the everliving fcuk the person behind it chose to call it ‘Greenwich’.
- The Syllabary: Oh this is GORGEOUS and not a little hypnotic: “The Syllabary consists of 1319 empty sounds and 2281 spoken parts of 1 to 37 lines in length, each based on a cluster of between 1 and 47 monosyllabic words. The program chooses an initial text at random and leads the viewer to the next in any of three directions through some 15013 lines of verse.” Basically this is basically randomised-poetry-by-way-of-maths – just click the link, hit the ‘play’ icon and let yourself be transported. Whoever they have doing the voice over for this has an almost criminally-soothing tone and frankly I could listen to them intone vaguely-nonsensical iambs at me for days.
- This Compliment Does Not Exist: A tiny, frivolous webproject by Fred Wordie, who has spun up this site to offer compliments to YOU, internet stranger, should you be feeling that the universe isn’t demonstrating quite the adequate degree of appreciation towards your being. Click the button, get a compliment, generated by (I presume) GPT and voiced by Elevenlabs – absolutely no idea why Fred has decided to choose ‘the leprechaun from the Lucky Charms adverts’ for the voice model here, but he does and so we’ll just go with it.
- Bop Spotter: This is very much a link that falls under the heading of ‘yes, I know you’ve seen this, I know it’s a few weeks old now, but I need to include it in Curios otherwise I will forget it because honestly I have just cyborged my memory to the point of codependence at this stage and perhaps that is why I can never stop’ – Bop Spotter is that project by the guy in San Francisco who’s placed a bunch of mics on telephone poles, all of them linked to Shazam, to get an ambient sense of the music that people are listening to in the city in realtime, and it is SUCH a nice idea and feels like the sort of thing that there are at least 17 different ‘urban surprise and delight activation ideas’ that a motivated team of annoyingly-tattooed creatives might excitedly come up with to attempt to shill more IPA. So far it’s detected over 1500 songs – you can listen to the selection via an embedded player on-site, but I quite like the idea of taking this sort of data and making a ‘sound of X city’ streamable radio station on a 24h delay, so if someone can just go and make that happen that would be ace thanks.
- A Live Map Of Trains In England RIGHT NOW: It’s that time of the year again when people’s thoughts start to turn to the festive season (sorry, sorry, I know, TOO EARLY) and the massive fcuking schlep they will have to do to be reunited with their loved ones for a few days of bitter familial wrangling, and for those of you in the UK I think we can all confidently predict that you’ll end up spending at least an hour, possibly three, sat in the weird no-man’s-land between carriages while increasingly drunk people spill lager on you on their trip back from the buffet car (“the kitchen’s closed, but we do have a seemingly-infinite quantity of Beefeater in cans”) – or that the train you thought you were going to get simply…doesn’t exist! To reassure you that the UK does still seemingly have at least one or two working examples of rolling stock and that some trains are apparently still moving around the country, why not enjoy this LIVE MAP OF TRAINS, ALL MOVING AROUND THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW. Aside from anything else it’s a decent realtime look at the varying quality of the service across the country – man does the North West look like it has some issues.
- HTML For People: This is fcuking great and I love it. HTML For People is a site designed to explain code in a way that makes sense to actual human beings who don’t think in maths (ie people like me). Honestly, I can’t stress enough how approachable and clear this is – if you’re interested it will take you through every single step of building a website, explaining to you along the way what each bit is and why it exists and how it relates to the other bits…honestly, I can’t stress enough how good a resources this is, and even if you have no interest of actually getting your hands dirty with code this is worth looking at to get a better understanding of why, basically, everything is at heart a spreadsheet. Here’s the blurb – really, though, this is very good indeed. “HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on. I’m Blake Watson. I’ve been building websites since the early 2000s. Though I work professionally in the field, I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.” THANKS, MYSTERIOUS BLAKE WATSON!
- Height Hunt: Someone has decided to make and maintain this website which exists to collect ALL (probably not all, but significantly more than you might expect tbh) the ‘beware, height restrictions!’ road signs around the UK – you know, the ones which get amusingly ignored by HGV drivers once a year, resulting in a stuck lorry and several palettes worth of FMCG products scattered underneath a semi-rural railway bridge. This is the work of one Adam Townsend – THANKS ADAM! I was particularly taken with the ‘about’ page, which I thought might give me a clue as to why Adam was undertaking this…very specific endeavour, but which instead just told me about the UK’s road signage protocols in quite a lot of detail. I respect that.
- AI Storymaker: Ok, this link feels like a BIT of a cheat, because it’s neither to a FUN AN EXCITING CREATIVE WEBPROJECT or to something that actually exists, BUT it’s SUCH a lovely piece of design prototyping and such a clever proof of concept that I hope you won’t mind. You sort of have to click the link to get the idea (because, per 12 years of this stuff, I can’t write for sh1t), but basically this is a proof-of-concept prototype of a kids’ block-building/storytelling set; each of the different wooden blocks/characters is embedded with an RFID chip, which in turn is linked to a different GPT model representing different characters, and (basically) placing the different wooden toys in different configurations and combinations will result in different combinations of characters and settings, which in turn will cause an ENTIRELY NEW story featuring said characters and settings to be spun up by The Machine. Now, obviously there’s a lot of theory here, and anyone who’s played with ‘AI Storytelling’ will know that the resulting stories will be fcuking soulless dreck, BUT I hope you can get at least a tiny frisson of possibility and excitement from the base concept here, because this feels like quite a fertile area to create in, and, again, the sort of thing that might reasonably be used as INSPIRATIONAL FODDER (you can totally steal this imho).
- The Future Timeline: Do you…worry? Are you perhaps a touch concerned about what might be going on? Well don’t! There’s no point! There’s literally fcuk all you can do about almost anything that’s going to impact your life – all the really big stuff is, in the main, out of your hands, so why bother fretting? Also, as the information contained within The Future Timeline demonstrates, SO MUCH WEIRD SH1T MIGHT BE ABOUT TO HAPPEN ANYWAY that there’s not really any point making plans. The Future Timeline has been running for YEARS, seemingly the work of only one man – “London-based writer and futurist, William James Fox, started Future Timeline back in 2008. It began as a relatively small and obscure website with a brief list of future predictions. Over the years, however, it expanded to form a lengthy and detailed timeline – running from the present day, through the next century and beyond, all the way to the end of the universe itself.” This is utterly fascinating, and the sort of thing you could lose an afternoon to quite easily – I flit between the sections imagining the immediate future (you may be reassured that the period 2025-2050 is summarised neatly with “Technological unemployment is rising rapidly”) and the 2200s, when apparently we’ll have sorted the arcologies out and be living our best Sim City 2000 lives. So, so so interesting, if obviously all totally speculative – if nothing else, though, it rather reinforced by general feeling about the overall arc of stuff being positive but the next 50-100 years or so being…somewhat choppy for us as a species. Let’s see (I won’t, I will be SO DEAD, thank fcuk).
- 5 Million Devs: What would DO do if your platform for developers hit the (honestly impressive) milestone of 5million people using it? Well, if you’re Netlify (no, I don’t know and I don’t care, don’t tell me who they are or what they do) what you inexplicably decide to do is build a web experience which lets visitors play an honestly-surprisingly-shiny little Marble Madness clone while learning ‘facts’ about the company’s journey to this point. This is, objectively, a terrible, terrible waste of time and money, but I can’t help but admire the commitment here (and, honestly, there’s something kind of satisfying about the marble-y-ness of the whole thing). No fcuking idea AT ALL how you measure the, er, ‘value’ of this to the business, mind.
- Microphotography: The 50th winners of Nikon’s ‘Small World’ microphotography contest have just been announced! Look at some incredible images of very, very small things! The winning pic of mouse tumours is sort-of amazing (don’t worry, you can’t tell it’s the cance), but my personal favourite is the one of the cannabis plant because 15 year old me would have been inordinately excited about the trichomes (15 year old me didn’t know what a tricome *was*, to be clear, but was aware that they were in some abstract way ‘good to have’ when it came to weed. 15 year old me was largely intolerable, I’m sorry to say).
- Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Ok, so, per Wikipedia, “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours is a book of named colour samples compiled by Abraham Gottlob Werner, and subsequently amended by Patrick SymeThe book, first published in 1814, was used by Charles Darwin in his scientific observations. Werner’s Nomenclature can be viewed as a predecessor of modern named colour systems such as Pantone” – this website is a digitisation of that book, by one Nicholas Rougeaux, which lets you explore the colours Werner identified, the names he gave them, examples of the colour appearing in nature…as someone who doesn’t really have an iota of artistic talent in their body, this is a bit magical, like having someone slowly and patiently explain, I don’t know, the concept of ‘numbers’ to me, and the general site design here is pleasing insofar as, for whatever reason, it very much has the sort of general feel and vibe of a book full of watercolour sketches. This is really rather lovely and soothing.
- A Clarins Metaverse: There was a piece that did the rounds the other week about how all the people who a few years ago were glorying in the title of ‘Chief Metaverse Officer’ have now moved on to become Chief AI Innovators instead, but on seeing this website this week – all you need to know about it is that makeup brand Clarins got absolutely fleeced by some ‘3d world’-peddling third-party platform and have shelled out for AN Other generically-branded ‘metaversal space’ where you can, I don’t know, jump off a lipstick or watch an ad for some concealer (after it’s finished buffering) – it made me think that there are perhaps some companies where signoff process are so slow, where compliance is so rigorous, that they might only now be coming to the end of a long and arduous metaverse building process, whose project teams are only now emerging blinking into the cold, hard light of the future, clutching their newly-birthed IMMERSIVE 3D BRAND SPACES to their chests, only to find that…the world has moved on and noone cares and oh by the way we shut down the team and you’re unemployed, sorry, Anyway, BRANDED VIRTUAL CLEANSER EXPERIENCES!
- Natural Landscape Photography Awards 2024: There are LOADS of gorgeous images of the natural world here – I’m particularly taken with the abstracts, as ever, but a special mention also for Felix Wesch’s portraits of birch forests where the colours and lighting are just insane.
- After: ANOTHER dating app! I was thinking about this the other day – even if I wanted to dip my toe into the thick, somewhat…coagulated waters of the online dating pool, I simply wouldn’t be able to because I don’t own ANY photos of myself (I think in total I have approximately three from the past two decades of my life). Obviously this is an INSURMOUNTABLE issue, so, well, that’s me done! Anyway, ‘After’ is a new dating app – I think it’s only launched in a limited number of cities at the moment, possibly US-only – which as its gimmick has chosen ‘we’re fixing the problem of ghosting!’, which, honestly, feels like a reasonable ‘enemy’ for the brand to choose. The way this works is that if you message someone and have a conversation but decide that you don’t want to take it any further, you have to actually tell the person why (I presume it can be euphemistically gentle and doesn’t require the brutal honesty of, say, “the way you breathe makes me homicidal”, or “I could never respect, let alone love, someone with your approach to spelling”) or the app will remove your matching privileges – which, honestly, feels like a bracingly strict approach that might have benefits.
- The Living Museum: An interesting way of exploring the British Museum’s collection, this – an LLM layer over the top lets you ask natural language queries of the interface, which thanks to the GPT-ing has a certain fuzziness in its understanding of the catalogue and which in turn means you can ask it to search for ‘sexy statues’ and it will sort-of understand (this is a VERY loose definition of ‘sexy’, unless your tastes are spectacularly-niche). On the one hand, I like this way of using the tech to open the collection, and the interface is really nice – on the other, there’s something…odd about AI curation, insofar as there’s no ‘curation’ happening other than ‘vaguely-linked datapoints in latent space’ and…I don’t know, perhaps I miss the intentionality of a human aye in pulling together a collection, but I increasingly find with projects like this that the breadth and scope is impressive but there’s not actually that much meaning being delivered when you look closely. Anyway, see what you think.
- TypingBowl: Do YOU think you’re a good typist? Would YOU like to test your typing skills by going head to head in LIVE TYPING CHALLENGES against strangers from across the web? Are…are you always this competitive? Anyway, should you wish to see whether YOU are a better touch-typist than some other webmong somewhere in the world then WOW will you enjoy this.
- Musicleague: Ooh, this could be fun – if you’re in a particularly-musically-focused friendship group or groupchat I could see this proving quite popular. Musicleague basically works a bit like fantasy sports (except it doesn’t really) – you form a league with whoever you want; you play in ‘rounds’ and each ‘round has a theme, players submit songs for each round that fit the theme, everyone listens to the songs and then votes and comments on their favourites (the ‘comments’ functionality is a genius build I think), the person whose selection got voted the best wins…nonspecific friendgroup kudos! This, honestly, could be a lot of fun with the right group of people (and incredibly annoying with the wrong one, so CHOOSE WITH CARE).
- Defunct Website: A service allowing you to specify when you’re website is dead, defunct, an EX WEBSITE. I rather like this – it removes ambiguity, and there’s something rather cool about having a definitive endpoint to qa webpage or project. In fact, can we make this an accepted part of webdesign and online etiquette, that every website has it’s ‘go live’ and ‘shuttered’ dates recorded on its homepage URL at the point of its abandonment via some sort of service like this? Great!
- The Best Active Internet Forums: This list has done the rounds a bit over the past week or so, but it really is worth bookmarking – forums have always been, and will always be, the best of the web (I am right about this), and this piece is a list of some of the best ones still active, covering a huge range of topics from drugs to miniature ponies. This made me quite annoyed at Google shutting off its specific forum search product about 12 years ago, which really is something I should have gotten over by now tbh.
- Death and Hell: Ok, yes, I know that the title doesn’t *sound* promising, and I concede that, yes, this is once again one of those ‘borderline’ websites where I was debating whether it was ok to feature because, well, there’s that whiff of schizophrenia about it, but I came down on the side of inclusion because it’s OLD and I am not convinced its author is still about, and because, well, MY GOD this is very deep and very weird and VERY esoteric, and there’s some VERY old testament ish vibes to the whole thing, and, well, here’s an example of the sort of prose you can expect to encounter in the many, many hundreds of pages buried here: “Sub-humans have also been targeted for “transformation” by lycanthropic paramilitary units using very sophisticated memetic warfare systems, hybridized tectonics with a subliminal interface and have set up these events beyond space-time referred to as: “Temple Dahmer Initiations.” Are YOU Tired of the Health Risks involved with Bloodborne Pathogens?” WELL, ARE YOU?
By Alma Haser
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST TO ANY OF YOU WHO ARE IN LONDON AND WHO HAVE A BIT OF SPARE TIME OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS AND WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED WITH SOMETHING GENUINELY INTERESTING AND COOL AND FUN AND CREATIVE TO CLICK THIS LINK AND SIGN UP AND LEARN MORE, PT.2:
- IOGraphica: Oh this is WONDERFUL! Have you ever thought ‘God I wish I could turn the pointless movements made by my mouse cursor as I once again waste my life through screen-based interaction into BEAUTIFUL MONOCHROMATIC SEMI-ABSTRACT ART!’? No, it strikes me as unlikely, but that is EXACTLY what you can do with IOGraphica, which is a bit of software which tracks your mouse movements and turns them into gorgeous visualisations. So so so beautiful.
- Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024: Critters! Yes, ok, fine, and some landscapes, but it’s mostly about the critters! As ever, important to note that not all the aforementioned critters on display here are, er, alive, but as long as that doesn’t put you off then you can rest assured that these are all astonishing in various ways – I personally was charmed by the one featuring toad-on-toad violence (you’ll know it when you see it), but every single one of these pictures is glorious. BONUS PHOTO CONTEST: seeing as you’re here, you might want to check out the winners of this year’s ‘Panoramic Photographer of the Year’ contest which are also lovely (but, well, WIDE).
- Wes Cook: This came out of one of the talks at this year’s XOXO Festival, and having read about the project and watched the associated video (which, honestly, I can’t recommend enough) I was UTTERLY CHARMED and you will be too. Wes Cook was an artist operating in the US in the 20th Century, working across a frankly insane range of projects from theme parks to film studios to theatre design. On a roadtrip, Cabel Sasser encountered his work, and became obsessed. Per Cabel, “Wes Cook died in 2004. He had no heirs, no family. His life’s work was left in a storage locker that went unpaid, eventually being sold at auction. I purchased all I could from the person who bought his storage locker, until I basically ran out of money. Oops. He deserves to be world famous. Maybe it’s not too late.” This website hosts the archive of Wes’s oeuvre, the video of Cabel’s talk, and I promise you that after you’ve watched the talk (WATCH THE TALK) you will fall slightly in love with this.
- Letterboxd Besties:So apparently if you’re a Film Person (it feels the capitalisation is important here) and you use film rating site Lettrboxed it lets you pick your TOP FOUR FILMS EVER by which to define yourself to the rest of the cinephile community – this website lets you put in your username and see if anyone else in the big wide world has the same UNIQUELY-RAREFIED TASTES as you do. Honestly, this feels like a near-perfect extension for a dating app, no? Also, based on this, I wonder what the most ‘basic’ top 4 is? Shawshank, It’s A Wonderful Life, Elf, Back To The Future? A Fiat500 selection for the ages!
- Laid Off Overlays: Look, I appreciate that there is nothing funny about being out of work and being worried as to where money’s going to come from, and the modern charade of having to digitally caper in the shop window in the desperate hope that some passing suit chooses YOU to bestow the temporary gift of employment on is particularly miserable and horrid, but, also, I found this website – which lets you create your very own ‘Twibbon’ (remember them!?)-style graphical overlay to add to your profile on LinkedIn in the style of the ‘Looking For Work!’ badges popping up all over the place over there. Want to create a badge that says “I Need The Money But I Promise I Will Never Care”? How about “No Major HR Grievances”? “Look Into My Eyes Before You Scroll Past Me And Condemn My Kids To A Present-Free Christmas”? The choice is yours. This is…this isn’t actually funny, is it?
- Crayon Town: Another ‘infinite canvas on which the entire web can draw simultaneously’ project, with the unique gimmick that the graphics are done to make the whole thing look (convincingly, I must say) as though it’s been drawn in crayon. Which might lessen the horror when you stumble into the inevitable ‘swastika corner’ (to be clear, I have not found ‘swastika corner’ and there’s no suggestion that it does in fact exist – I did though just scroll around for a minute and saw someone had written the simple phrase ‘gay wand’, which has really made me laugh for some reason).
- Pictures Of People Taking Pictures: I feel that this ought to be a bigger thing than it is. You can contribute your own, should you so desire (you should).
- Cartographist: Ooh, this is interesting – it’s a Github repo so you will need to be able to wrangle the code, but this is SUCH a cool twist on the standard browser/tab design – created by Szymon Kaliski, who describes it thusly: “Cartographist is an experimental web browser optimized for rabbit-holing. Instead of opening new windows (with cmd-click), Cartographist spawns horizontally scrollable panes.Instead of forcing you to find things in a linear history, Cartographist shows a tree-structured outline of your browsing. Instead of always starting fresh, Cartographist can save, and load “trails” – the exact state of the session you’ve left – supporting researching topics over long periods of time.” If you click the link you can get a better idea from screenshots (or you can see some video of it in action here), but this strikes me as SUCH a clever way of rethinking the way in which we move through webspace.
- Watch Frame By Frame: Would you like to be able to quickly and easily scrub through a video frame-by-frame? Er, why? Nevertheless, this webpage will let you do just that with any YouTube or Vimeo url, presumably for the purposes of spotting, I don’t know, scene anomalies, or for investigating whether something’s been a edited in certain ways, or, if you’re a pervert from 1983, for catching snatched glimpses of fleeting nipples and pubes from old films. You do you!
- Films In Airplane Toilets: A reader writes! Peter Brooke Turner, to be precise, who emailed me with the following “I’m a touring musician who has started my own theatre company @attcthe which makes films in airplane toilets and which might be of interest to you?” To which my immediate answer was ‘YES PETER THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF MAD SH1T I AM INTO WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?” (I was more polite than this). Honestly, these are…very weird, but also really inventive and fun and creative, and as a way of spending time when you’re bored on a poky Airbus this feels like something more people should possibly get into (also, this feels like a GREAT music video concept waiting to happen, no?). There’s one in which someone’s filming in a tux, which strikes me as quite a strong commitment to the bit – WELL DONE PETER THIS IS VERY WEIRD.
- Jars: A whole bunch of AI-generated TV channels – AI presenters, AI voices, AI scripts, all utter gibberish, obviously, but sort-of entertaining, a bit like watching Furbys talk to each other. These are all vaguely themed around ‘formats’ – so there’s AI Dragon’s Den (sorry, ‘Shark Tank’), AI cooking…actually I have become slightly captivated by the cooking one, it’s like some sort of weird fever dream where there are near-edible recipes being described by someone who’s being hand-operated by a trainee at the Henson workshops, and where every single sentence ends ‘YES CHEF!’ regardless of whether that makes any sense or not. This might actually be brilliant, not quite sure.
- Hots & Cots: This is basically ‘Tripadvisor for the US Military establishment’, a website where serving members of the US Forces can post photos and reviews of the food and accommodation they’re given by Uncle Sam in exchange for acting as IED fodder a few years down the line. Obviously the quality of bed and board varies drastically from place to place, but a few observations: 1) based on the diets these people seem to be eating, WHERE IS THE FIBRE???; 2) portion sizes are…variable; 3) I’m sorry, if this is your writeup of the food then you have no reason to complain about anything: “This brunch smash burger was amazing. Hash brown, fried egg, caramelized onions, and maple ketchup. So delicious. They also had a section that was doing fresh pasta dishes too.” MAPLE KETCHUP? A FRESH PASTA STATION? You didn’t get this sh1t in Full Metal Jacket.
- Bookloop: Vinted, for books. Yes, I know, lazy, but a) I am running SO LATE; and b) that is literally what it is, deal with it. Scan your books’ barcodes or enter the ISBN and the site will give you a valuation for them – you can then trade them in for credit on Bookshop.org, thereby supporting indie booksellers when you spend said credits. All in all this just seems like a great setup and something that’s worth signing up for if you possibly ought to get rid of one or two tomes but can’t quite bring yourself to conduct the ceremonial burning this year.
- Design Playlists: Do you DO DESIGN? Do you like to listen to music while you do so? Would you like to listen to music selected by OTHER DESIGNERS that they think helps them DO DESIGN BETTER? Great, you’ll like this site then, as it collects, er, playlists compiled by designers to listen to while they design, to be listened to by other designers while they, in turn, design. DESIGN MORE AND FASTER, YOU FCUKS. What do you imagine all the music in these playlists sounds like? Go on, just have a guess. YOU’RE RIGHT!
- Chess Grid: Make a downloadable black and white artwork based on the chess grid – the nice gimmick here is that you can enter the specific moveset from a single match, or passage of play, and that will be reflected in the resulting piece that’s generated. Even those of you who don’t revere Magnus Carlsen might find something to love here – the aesthetic of the generated works is very strong indeed to my mind, these would make glorious prints in the right environment.
- Frankenstein: SUCH an interesting way of exploring a text, this, specifically of seeing the ways in which the text was altered between different editions of the same work. This is the Frankenstein Varorium, an online tool which allows the user to explore the text through its various incarnations, allowing you to select individual passages and see how they have evolved through different revisions of the work. ““In the case of Frankenstein, the substantive changes that MWS made in her revised edition are so extensive that many teachers and students of Frankenstein consider 1818 and 1831 as two different novels.” Scholars do not agree on a single authoritative text, though the 1818 edition became more available from the 1990s onward in teaching editions, reflecting increasing interest in the earlier versions of the text. With this project, we offer a way to explore not just two but five distinct moments in the novel’s writing and re-writing, and they do not proceed in orderly stages. The following diagram summarizes the relationships among the manuscript and published versions of Frankenstein composed between 1816 and 1831 that we worked with for this variorum project.” Obviously this is mainly of use and interest to people who, er, really want to get deep into Frankenstein, but if you’ve even a passing interest in information design then this is worth exploring because the interface is really, really nicely done.
- Weather Landscapes: Another link to something you actually need to be able to code to do anything with – SORRY SORRY SORRY – but I think the fact that this is yet ANOTHER eminently-thievable idea should be enough for you to forgive me (all I ask is absolution, and only for some of the sins). This, basically, outlines how you might go about knocking up a realtime weather data display that, rather than showing you the temperature and precipitation probabilities in boring textual fashion instead does so by rendering it as a kids’ drawing. Honestly, this is SO CHARMING and I would 100% applaud anyone pitching this sort of thing as some sort of public installation or similar – please please please can one of you do something with this?
- Street Nuns: The only thing not to love about this site is that, in the specific context in which it is here being used, ‘street’ connotes ‘walking around on the pavement’ rather than ‘incredibly streetwise and not a little threatening’. Otherwise, though, this is a perfect website – photos of nuns, out and about. As someone who had literally the most miserable 18 months of his life in Rome, I can honestly confirm that there is no set of personal circumstances so bleak that your life won’t be instantly improved by just seeing a nun, on a bus.
- Doubles: Can you multiply a number by two? Can you do it again? And again? Can you do it AGAINST THE CLOCK? This game has made me feel more stupid than almost anything else I have done this year, which is no small feat.
- A Selection Of Excellent Tiny Browser Games: The link takes you to the webpage for a recent weekend game jam – scroll to the bottom and there’s a selection of a dozen or so browsergames which I can highly recommend as an afternoon pastime, the stuntbike game in particular being INCREDIBLY ‘one more go’-ish. ENJOY!
OUR FINAL PLAYLIST THIS WEEK IS THIS SELECTION OF ‘SONGS THAT HAVE DEFINED THE DECADE SO FAR’, WHICH HAS BEEN COMPILED BY A BUNCH OF EX-PITCHFORK STAFFERS WHO THIS WEEK LAUNCHED A NEW MUSIC MAGAZINE CALLED HEARING THINGS! (WHICH YOU CAN CHECK OUT HERE)
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Diamond Geezer: Not in fact a Tumblr at all! Instead, this is a VERY oldschool blog, in which the titular Diamond Geezer writes…not very geezerishly at all, actually, all about London, its streets and boroughs and history. This is very much an urbanist nerd’s paradise, and if you’ve any interest at all in the city now and as it was then you’ll adore this – even better, it’s been going for 25 years!!! TWENTY FIVE FCUKING YEARS! I will never, ever cease to be amazed by people’s indefatigability and passion, and I will never again think that Curios is in any way ‘special’ or ‘noteworthy’ (lol of course I will, it is my baby and I love its hideous countenance and the strange, wet noises it makes).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Servilletas: Images of paper napkins from bars, cafes, bakeries and restaurants in Spain (I think). Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT YOU INGRATES.
- Ethos, Austin: A restaurant in Austin, Texas, sharing images of its food. Except the food is all AI, the images aren’t real, the restaurant doesn’t exist…but it does have a website! And, perhaps more understandably, a merch shop! I am confused about this – not about the fact that someone’s spinning up AI images of food, more about…why? Why the website? Is this a teaser for something else? See, this is the problem with AI stuff – IT MAKES EVERYTHING CONFUSING AND UNKNOWABLE.
- DJ Ag: I love this – turns out I have actually seen DJ Ag out and about in South London before, and but this is his Insta which showcases his habit of just setting up some decks, an amp and a mic on the street and letting people come and MC with him. Some of the resulting performances here are ACE, and in general this is just one of those ‘see, this is why living in a big city is awesome and why people are at heart sort of brilliant’ things that we can all get behind (until some brand decides to make Ag the cornerstone of their next ‘activation’ and the whole thing dies a miserable death).
- The Savalavada: This is interesting – India has its own version of The Onion! Ok, fine, I’m sure India’s had a fcuktonne of satirical, humorous outlets mocking its politics and culture, but this one’s new and feels more…Onion-y. It only exists on Insta, and I confess that a lot of the humour went right over my head, but I did very much enjoy a recent headline celebrating “International Day for Really Close Female Roommates” and so I am recommending it on that basis alone.
- Insta Repeat: Thanks to Kev Lloyd for sending this to me – an insta account highlighting the inherent aesthetic sameness of shots on the platform via the medium of collages which neatly point out exactly how fcuking banal everything in your ‘September’ dump was.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Machines of Loving Grace: I am not, if I’m honest, really expecting many (any?) of you to read all of this – it is, after all, a 15,000 paean to the future benefits of the glorious AI future, penned by a man with a vested financial interest in as many people as possible believing VERY FIRMLY in the validity of that future – but I would say that it’s worth a look if you have a passing interest in the general ‘so, where have the plutocratic tech fcuks decided is the future this week?’ question. This is Anthropic’s Dario Amodei waxing (VERY) lyrical about What This Will All Mean and Where We Will All End Up, and – SPOILERS! – we don’t have to worry, it’s all going to be great! This is a nice companion to the (far shorter, thank fcuk) Sam Altman piece from the other week – the contrast here comes with Amodei seeming to think somewhat more deeply about how this stuff might play out…although, to be clear, nowhere near deeply enough. So we get the fat end of 15,000 words on the amazing advancements in longevity and medicine and science that we can all expect, and the promise that ‘powerful AI’, smarter than a Nobel Winner (lol at the Hinton shade!), could be here as soon as 2026, and that is going to make EVERYTHING BETTER! It also, though, relies on a lot of this sort of thinking – “Diseases have been eradicated and many countries have gone from poor to rich, and it is clear that the decisions involved in these tasks exhibit high returns to intelligence (despite human constraints and complexity). Therefore, AI can likely do them better than they are currently being done.” – which…doesn’t feel *hugely* robust, intellectually-speaking, and, as ever, there are gaping holes where the sections on ‘negative externalities’ might be expected to sit, or indeed what we’re meant to do about the fact that, per Dario, we will soon reach a point where “our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organised.” What might that conversation be? How might that work? Dario? DARIO????? Oh well, no need to think about that just yet, eh?
- Death of Memory: A brief blogpost from Matt Webb next, in which he speculates idly about the potential ulterior motives behind attacks on the Internet Archive. Webb’s not being entirely serious here, I don’t think, but I did think there was something interesting at the heart of what he writes and which gets to the core of much of what is making me uneasy about the proliferation of AI slop everywhere – we’re back to the pollution of the informational water table again, kids (I WILL MAKE THIS ANALOGY CATCH ON IF IT FCUKING KILLS ME, I TELL YOU), and how, after a while of this, you won’t ever be able to remember a time before the streams weren’t all brown and unpleasantly-faecally-scented. Anyway, this is a great writing prompt for a scifi short if nothing else.
- Risks and Harms and Kids and Social Media: An excellent piece of writing by Danah Boyd, capturing much of the current panicked zeitgeistvibe about kids and phones and social media – on which note, man does the stuff coming out of the TikTok case in the US make for uncomfortable reading for TikTok! – and arguing sensibly and cogently that we should approach the question in terms of risks and harms, and that as such we should think more in terms of working to minimise risk via design and education rather than attempting to ‘ban harms’. This really is worth reading in full – particularly if this is a question that you’ve been wrestling with as a parent or guardian – but this is a decent little precis: “Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes. Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are.”
- Plutocrat Archipelagos: On the very, very rich. Jack Self writes about spending time in the company of the plutes, about the rarefied air up there, about the oddity of existence in a world whose contours are continually being smoothed to your exact specifications. The prose here is delightful: “In desert gated communities, time is drawn out as thin as the air. The world attains a kind of placid stasis. If we are to believe Borges, as empires rise they generate maps that become coextensive with their territories. And as empires collapse, these maps burn, until the only scraps that remain are in the desert; a confetti archipelago of defunct ideologies, strewn amongst the sand and rocks. We are living through a period of societal collapse. This isn’t a factual statement, but an emotional one. It feels like we are approaching the end of a specific social contract. Modernity is a project founded on patriarchal domination, on linear time, infinite extraction and unstoppable accumulation. In its five centuries, it has evolved into such an unnatural paradigm that it now only survives through extreme and perpetual violence; perpetrated indifferently against both humans and non-humans alike.”
- Culture Isn’t Stuck, Actually: A counterpoint to the recent spate of ‘we have stopped producing anything really new, culturally-speaking’ pieces, Katherine Dee here suggests that the difference is simply that you can’t see culture anymore, or at least anything resembling a truly representative slice of it, and as such it’s perspective that is screwed not the production of new culture itself. Part of me definitely buys this – specifically, I buy this from the point of view of a 45 year old man who really *shouldn’t* feel like they have any sort of finger-on-the-pulse view of culture, otherwise something really has gone very wrong indeed – although equally I am not sure I 100% buy the following as an example of true ‘newness’ because, well, this doesn’t exactly feel revolutionary: “The social media personality is one example of a new form. Personalities like Bronze Age Pervert, Caroline Calloway, Nara Smith, mukbanger Nikocado Avocado, or even Mr. Stuck Culture himself, Paul Skallas, are themselves continuous works of expression — not quite performance art, but something like it. They may also be influencers, or they may not be, but the innovative aspect isn’t that they’re promoting a brand or making money from their venture. It’s not about their single tweet, self-published book, or video. The entire avatar, built across various platforms over a period of time, constitutes the art. Their persona must be enjoyed in the moment, as it reveals itself on the platforms; the audience response is part of the piece. The way their audiences start to speak like them, the aesthetics they inspire, and the way they shape headlines — this is all social media born culture.” Sorry, Leigh Bowery would like you to acknowledge them please.
- The Tesla Thing: If you care about the Tesla robotaxi event thing, chances are that you will have read all you need to about it – if you don’t, you probably don’t care to read anymore. That said, PLEASE take a moment to enjoy this short writeup of the event by Jonathan Gitlen, which is a beautiful example of how to take a gag and work it repeatedly, and which does a neat job of skewering exactly why people should stop listening to that horrid apartheid toad (although I can’t help but be impressed by the rockets, albeit grudgingly).
- Why Boys Don’t Go To College: Sorry, I should probably have de-yanked the English there – “why young men don’t go to university”, then. I mean, obviously they do, but there’s data from all over the place suggesting that young women are significantly more likely to enter higher education than young men in 2024. Here, Celeste Davis wonders why, and runs some numbers that suggest there’s an interesting – and frankly a bit miserable – fact underpinning this, to whit ‘when groups become minority-male, men tend to abandon them wholesale’. That’s right, the data suggests that one of the reasons that young men aren’t going to university so much is…too many women! Davis explains the concept of ‘male flight’ – wherein beyond a certain tipping point, topics or subjects become ‘female-coded’ in the mind of men, who therefore see them as ‘lower status’ and who therefore avoid participating in them. This is INCREDIBLY miserable – and, honestly, not a little embarrassing tbh, what the fcuk is WRONG with us?! – and yet feels…true? Anyway, this really interested me and wasn’t something I’d ever really considered before. There’s definitely some nudge-adjacent purpose work you could squeeze out of this, with a bit of thought.
- Netflix’s Endless Library: This is a couple of weeks old and so you might well have seen it – SORRY, NO MORE BREAKS FOR MATT, BAD MATT! – but in case not it’s definitely worth reading – the New York Times goes long on the current state of the streaming economy and how the past decade or so’s approach to the production and distribution of TV has led to the weird situation of there being an infinite amount of it and yet, simultaneously, nothing to watch, and why there are so many shows that seem to exist without anyone ever having seen them (we’re back to the ‘culture is still happening, you just can’t see it because it’s now too big to fit in any single person’s eyeline’ argument again), and how this all links back to…venture capital and modern finance! Funny how whichever way you slice it the general ensh1ttification of so much of modern experience can be blamed squarely on those cnuts, isn’t it? By which I mean, enervating and infuriating!
- Taylor Lorenz and Modern Media: Depending on how interested in media and media personalities you are, you might have missed the news that Taylor Lorenz, probably the most famous tech/digital culture journalists online right now since we collectively realised that Kara Swisher…wasn’t actually doing a very good job, has quit (or been quit from, unclear tbh) ‘mainstream’ media and is setting herself up as a one woman media vertical (…node, anyone?)…anyway, whether or not you care about that I think this is an interesting profile/interview which covers a lot of interesting ground about the extent to which the ‘mainstream media’ (Jesus I hate that term, I really do – it *reeks* of the worst of the web) has dropped the ball when it comes to ‘online reporting’ over the past decade or so, the growth of independent, narrow-focus new media brands and projects, the idea of the ‘personal brand’ in the workplace and all that sort of jazz. I think Lorenz is very good at what she does and wish her the best, but I can’t deny that my heart sank when I got to the bit about her not wanting to JUST be a journalist but instead aspiring to be a ‘360 degree online personality’ because…a) that isn’t how good reporting happens! b) that doesn’t seem to tend to end well for the ‘360 degree online personalities’ in question! Still, more power to her.
- The Disappearance of an Internet Domain: In that brief 48h period a few weeks ago when a bunch of red-faced conservatives in the UK had to pretend to both be aware of, and to care about, the UK’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands (and the fact that said sovereignty was being handed over to the bloody foreigners, WHERE IS OUR EMPIRE, etc etc, one element of the story that was criminally-overlooked was the impact it would have on the world’s websites, who will shortly no longer be able to avail themselves of the .io suffix – because that was attached to the Chaygos Islands, which will now be part of Malaysia, meaning the domain is being retired. This is SO INTERESTING – the links between physical borders and digital domains is always fascinating, conceptually, and this hints at a whole weird alternative world of international geopolitics based around domain-based interest groups which I now want to spend the afternoon daydreaming about.
- Frieze: Web Curios favourite Clive Martin visit the Frieze Art Fair, which has just departed London, to give his thoughts from the frontline of artcapitalism. I have long had a soft spot for Frieze – I worked for an agency that did its PR for a new years c.2005ish, and going to the opening party on the Wednesday was always one of the most incredible experiences, not least because it remains one of the only places in the world I’ve ever seen real people in ‘real life’ wearing actual catwalk couture like it was in any way normal – but I confess to looking at the pricetag this year (I long ago slipped off the freebie list, chiz chiz) and thinking ‘yeah, no, you’re alright mate, £70 to stand in a tent is not actually that appealing ta’. Still, Clive does an excellent job of giving you the vibe – his writeup is very much about the people and the commerce and the *feel* of the whole thing rather than the art itself, which, frankly, is pretty much the perfect analogue for Frieze itself. Also, this is written in the second person and you are a SUCKER for things written in the second person.
- Spotting Gators With Lana Del Rey’s Brother-in-Law: This piece is SO MUCH FUN! Honestly, possibly the most enjoyable read in this week’s Curios, I was grinning throughout. You may be aware that Lana DeL Rey recently got hitched to some random bloke from Florida – it turns out that Mr Del Rey is one of the proprietors of a company that does tours of the alligator swamps for tourists, and so OBVIOUSLY Ock Sportello (can I just say, by the way, that this is possibly the greatest name I have encountered in 2024? Go on, take a moment to roll it around your mouth, it is BRILLIANT) decided to go down and check it out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Del Rey doesn’t show up to work much any more, but this piece doesn’t suffer from the lack of any meaningful celebrity-adjacent content – it’s just funny and interesting and personal, and does that lovely thing where the writer evidently realises on starting to research the piece that they are not going to end up writing the article they thought they were going to be writing, but that what they will end up writing will be better than what they had planned. You will grin throughout this, I promise.
- Nardwuar: Do you know who Nardwuar is? I have mentioned him a few times before, I think – and apologies if you do, and this is all old to you, but I have genuinely no clue how famous he is – but to give you the brief synopsis: Nardwuar, otherwise known as ‘Nardwuar The Human Serviette’ (no, no idea) is possibly the greatest music interviewer in history. He has interviewed EVERYONE, and his schtick is basically: a) earnest – Nardwuar is never ironic, never cynical, never anything less than 100% enthusiastic; b) informed – Nardwuar knows EVERYTHING. Seriously, each interview basically features the musicians becoming slowly more and more freaked out by the insane, almost stalker-ish, level of knowledge about them that Nardwuar displays, from their tastes to their hates, their history and their records. He might be the greatest living scholar of modern musicians, no sh1t; c) indefatigable – Nardwuar always plays it straight, even on those occasions when SOME musicians (naming no names but I think I decided that Blur were, in the main, total cnuts when I saw how they treated poor Nardwuar) decide to be mean to him, which makes some of his interviews almost unbearably poignant to watch. ANYWAY, Nardwuar is a treasure and a delight, and this chat with him about his favourite ever interviews, is just pure and gorgeous and will make you happy, I promise. Also, it is an excellent excuse to explore the Nardwuar back catalogue if you’re yet to experience him, because honestly he is a…unique talent.
- The Thirty-Two Fouettes: A short story by Dwight Curtis about…well, sort of about ballet, but not really about that at all. I found this fascinating – I don’t know that I *liked* it, entirely, but I have reread bits of it over and over again this week and it’s stuck with me. Something very…nasty about this, in a very subtle way, and I think that’s what I am enjoying.
- Icarus Also Flew: From the latest issue of The Fence, this has rightly been lauded as a brilliant piece of writing – Ella Fox-Martens writes about moving in with someone you’ve never met. This does not, I promise, go where you expect it to, and it is so much better for not being the piece you think it’s going to be when you start reading it.
- The Manifesto: Last of the longreads this week is this superb short by Ilse Eskelen, about a young woman who wants to impress a boy, and it is very funny indeed and you should make yourself a cup of tea and read it right now.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: