Propriety be damned, we’re allowed to feel a faint twinge of regret, right? Please take it upon yourselves to determine exactly which of last Sunday’s major news events I am referring to.
Anyway, given the fact that the world’s digital infrastructure appears to have decided to fall over this morning and that therefore a lot of you might find yourself in a position where…everything…takes…forever…thanks…modernity…fcuk’s…sake, I’ll keep this short and instead proudly present to you this week’s selection of freshly-slain links, harvested at no small personal cost by me, for you, just you, always you.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can already taste that first pint, can’t you, I can tell.
By Reuben Negron (all pics this week lifted from TIH)
THE SECTION WHICH WAS ASKED BY A STRANGER IN CENTRAL LONDON LAST SUNDAY IF I HAD ‘ANY BUGLE’ TO SPARE, WHICH STRUCK ME AS BOTH DELICIOUSLY RETRO AND WILDLY OPTIMISTIC ON THEIR PART, PT.1:
- What Beats Rock: We are officially in THE TROUGH OF DESPOND when it comes to AI (no, really, Gartner have said it and everything), but if you’d like something to remind you of how it can be FUN and SILLY it can be (leaving aside any momentary worries about how exactly we’re planning on cooling all these datacentres) then you could do worse than spending a few enjoyable minutes playing ‘What Beats Rock?’, a game which asks you the fundamental question ‘which of these two objects, or even abstract concepts, is more POWERFUL than the other?’. You start with paper – your only task as a player is to think of something that the system agrees will ‘beat’ the substance in question, with the LLM that sits behind all this being in charge of deciding whether or not it agrees with you. The obvious – boring, normie! – pick is of course ‘scissors’ – but get creative! Why not try ‘fire’? Or ‘paper-eating termites’? Or ‘a holepunch deployed with repeated aggression’? SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES! If you submit a response that The Machine deems acceptable, you’re onto the next round and charged with trumping your previous suggestion – so you can’t go big too early or you’ll be left thinking ‘hm, ok, what beats ‘the concept of time’?’ and coming up with empty hands. The game ends when you’re unable to come up with a workable suggestion, with the aim being to get as high a score as possible by keeping the chain of ridiculousness going, and, honestly, this is FUN and absurd and while we may not have yet come up with compelling reasons as to why it’s been worth investing all this money in spicy autocomplete (trust me, though, the ‘compelling reason’ is ‘reduced operating costs when it comes to staffing’ and it always has been!), this feels like as good a rationale as any.
- Jars: One of the great hopes of generative AI to date, of course, has been the prospect of INFINITE CONTENT – fcuk the quality, feel the width! While we are, per Curios passim, a LONG way from these systems being able to produce anything much more than curious nonsense or total dreck, it hasn’t stopped people from ploughing what I assume is a reasonable chunk of idiot VC money into stuff like Jars – an ‘infinite’ series of AI-scripted and fronted ‘tv shows’ which you can view through the website here linked. There are DOZENS of these, with talking head avatars burbling on about topics as varied as, er, ‘would you have a penguin as your vice president’ and Jeffrey Epstein (OF COURSE!)…why? There’s a degree of interactivity available with this stuff – per other ‘AI TV’ setups, you can theoretically direct and influence the chat through comments…but noone’s watching, so this is just The Machine burbling to itself, into the void, forever. I am genuinely baffled by this – firstly, which purse-string holder was duped into thinking that there is ever going to be an audience for ‘computer generated characters have stilted conversations in which they pretend they are in Love Island’ (because of course that is a channel), and secondly ‘how much is this costing?!?!’, given there are several dozen channels, all running seemingly 24/7. Anway, if you fancy checking out what is almost certainly NOT the future of entertainment, Jars is here! I have just found one channel that apparently has 7 concurrent viewers at the time of writing, and all I can think is ‘who are you, and how do you not have anything better to do with your time?’ (swiftly followed by ‘I am in no position to mock or deride, what is become of me?’).
- Eggnog Infinite: Seeing as we’re doing ‘supposedly infinite content that noone in their right mind is ever going to consume more than once’, here’s another attempted variant on the whole ‘user-directed, AI-generated storytelling’ thing! This is ‘Eggnog’, which is a platform trying to do the whole ‘give us a skeleton of an idea and we will turn it into a storyboard for you’ thing, and which is marketing a feature it’s calling ‘Eggnog Infinite’ where you can watch entire ‘series’ of AI-generated pseudovideo. I have no idea AT ALL who has made all these things – I presume they have been prompted into existence by ‘the community’, the only explanation I can imagine for the VERY COPYRIGHT-INFRINGING material here collected. Would you like to ‘watch’ an incredibly-stilted reimagining of ‘Bridgerton’ (called, for avoidance of doubt, ‘Bridgerton’) delivered via the medium of 20s AI-generated clips? No, of course not! The same almost certainly applies to ‘Breaking Bad: Maldives (no, really) although, honestly, I do rather recommend delving into the mad Epstein or the jaw-droppingly poor ‘Sex Education at Oxford’ clips. Each ‘series’ has a vague ‘choose your own adventure’ vibe, so you each episode ends with a binary branching choice – this is like ‘interactive televisual entertainment’ as reimagined by someone who’s either totally unfamiliar with the concept of ‘entertainment’ or who has recently enjoyed some sort of blunt-force cranial trauma.
- YouSim: Another rather fun AI sandbox toy, this, in similar vein to ‘SIMULATE THE WORLD’ tools I’ve featured previously – with YouSim, the gimmick is that you can ‘summon’ and interact with anyone you like (to be clear, this happens via the medium of ‘typing with your fingers’ rather than through any kind of occult process – sorry to disappoint), just to see what happens. There are various commands you can experiment with – so you can summon Frida Kahlo, say, and then get the simulation to imagine that she’s just taken ayahuasca and is seeing totally new colours, and then perhaps summon Aleister Crowley to tell Frida about his murderous mountaineering exploits, and then tell the simulation to make Frida angry and see whether you can get her to clock Aleister around the head for his satanic ways…basically it’s like a text-only doll’s house/dress-up box, and with a bit of imagination and effort there’s something rather wonderful about the ways in which you can end up in some very odd, and pleasingly ‘imaginative’, places.
- Follow The Crypto: Thanks to the increasingly-likely prospect of a Trumpian second term (a sentence which 2015 Matt finds risible in the extreme – 2015 Matt was a fcuking d1ck with no idea at all what was going on or what was going to continue going on, turns out!), crypto is once again a bull(ish) market – WE’RE SO BACK, BABY! With all the usual suspects weighing in behind the Republican campaign in the past week – Thiel, obvs, but Andreessen and others – there’s a real sense that a certain portion of the world sees Donald 2.0 as a Big Business Opportunity. Should the fact that this portion is also the portion which is all-in on incredibly grifty sh1t like crypto give us pause for thought? You’d have to be a fool or a communist to suggest so! Anyway, as the bubble reinflates, even if temporarily, we have a new project by Molly White (of Web3 Is Going Great fame), this time attempting to the amount of crypto-adjacent money that is being funneled into the US Presidential race via PACs and SuperPACs and the various other complex financial instruments that makes American Democracy such a joy to behold. Of interest mainly to keen observers of US politics and who exactly is trying to influence it and how, and anyone who wants to get a tiny, tiny glimpse into the mindfcuking amounts of money involved.
- The BBC Computer Literacy Project: Oh God, there is a certain type of middle-aged (and older, tbf) UK-based nerd for whom this is going to be Proustian in its ability to take you back to a specific time – return, if you will, to an era in which computer software came on tape or floppy discs (they really used to bend!), in which screen resolutions were such that digital bongo was the very definition of ‘a challenging w4nk’, and in which you were seemingly only allowed access to one if you had a cardigan and elbow patches – HERITAGE! “In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program. The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders. This site contains all 146 of the original Computer Literacy Project programmes plus 121 related programmes, broken down into 2,509 categorised, searchable clips.” This is HISTORY (and will be useful should you have unaccountably put ‘learn BBC BASIC’ on your ‘ways to fill the days between birth and death in 2024’ list).
- MorseLaptop: Code which lets you communicate in Morse via the simple medium of opening and shutting your laptop (click the link and watch the demo vid, it makes sense, honest). I am less enticed by the laptop hack here than I am with the possibility to setting something like this up on a door in an office or public space somewhere, and translating the ‘long open/short open’ movements into Morse which then get communicated somewhere, like some sort of ongoing, randomised, Dada-ish ‘poetry of movement’. Which is almost certainly the w4nkiest thing I am going to write ALL DAY, and it’s only 751am so well DONE Matt!
- Snort & Paste: One of several links lifted from B3ta this week, this is a very silly gimmick which lets you erase text from a webpage by hoovering it up with a big digital nose JUST LIKE DRUGS, DO YOU SEE??? Extra special bonus points for the ‘clear your nostril to expel the cloggage’ functionality which is an admirable commitment to the gag.
- Does It Glider?: Are you still playing Wordle (or similar daily word puzzle, ideally one which, like Wordle, presents you with a daily grid-based scorecard at the end of each game)? Would you like something new to do with your completed Wordle grid once you’ve solved it and are basking in the glory of your fantastic verbal prowess? Well why not copy the scoreblocks and paste them into to this webpage to see whether or not your day’s performance would cut it in the digital petri dish that is Conway’s ‘Life’ – this takes the Wordle scoregrid and asks ‘yes, fine, BUT HOW LONG WILL IT LAST AS A SELF-REPLICATING SIMULATED ORGANISM?’, which, frankly, is the question we should ALL have been asking for the past few years.
- Font Interceptor: MSCHF released a bunch of new things in the past week or so – this is the first of them, a website where you can plug in the url of ANY OTHER website to let you steal ALL of the fonts used on said site. Caveat – I haven’t actually tried this out, given I have no particular need to grab a bunch of fonts, but, presuming it works, then I feel I ought to also say ‘stealing is bad’. That said, I have a vague recollection that the whole font industry is something of a cartel/racket and, honestly, who can afford to pay for serifs in THIS economy? NO FCUKER, etc. There’s a little Q&A on the homepage talking you through the morality of when one should and shouldn’t steal a font – basically if you’re a povvo you’re fine, and given you’re reading Web Curios I’m going to assume a degree of spiritual/emotional poverty and therefore I officially say it is OK for you to use this with impunity.
- Project Gucciberg: MSCHF drop of the week #2 is this fun little exploration of copyright law – is it legal to create a selection of audiobooks which take public domain books available via Project Gutenberg and then has them read out by an AI voice model trained on the unique vocal stylings of Gucci Mane? Is it legal if the voice model is unauthorised but created from publicly available recordings? What about if it’s a non-commercial project? WHO KNOWS??? As MSCHF write on the homepage, “We didn’t write the books, and we deepfaked the voice. Is this copyright infringement? Is it identity theft? All of the training data (recordings) used to make Project Gucciberg were publicly available on the web. Gucciberg lives in that lovely grey area where everything’s new and anything goes.” I do think there’s some quite fun and interesting stuff to be done in spaces like this – there’s nothing funny about STEALING PEOPLE’S ART, obvs (he says, despite the fontstealing link he literally just posted, the fcuking hypocrite), but I think there’s space in the charitable/awareness-raising space to take some risks with public domain and what you can and can’t get away with. Leaving aside all that po-faced stuff, though, you can now download an AI-generated recording of a famous rapper reading you Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, which I think we can all agree justifies the effort, expense and environmental impact.
- Kaleidoscope: This is very simple, fine, but it is also WONDERFUL for making really quite distressing images. Plug in any photo you want and this makes a sort of looping, zooming kaleidoscope-type animation out of it – obviously you’re free to use this however you want, but can I just point out how astonishingly vile the results are if you feed it images of glistening meats? Honestly, SO UNPLEASANTLY SQUELCHY AND VISCERAL.
- Lower Silesia: A Google Arts & Culture project which looks at the Polish region of Lower Silesia and offers an overview of its architecture, regional mythologies, history, wildlife and all sorts of other things. There’s a virtual art gallery featuring works depicting the area which you can explore! There’s richly-evocative music which feels very much as though it was lifted from the ‘exploring Hogwarts at night’ bits of the early Potter films! Honestly, you may not ever have previously thought ‘Christ I *wish* there was an easily-accessible and attractively-presented guide to this otherwise-little-known area of Poland’ but you will be THRILLED to discover the existence of this one. Seriously, a really interesting introduction to a region I knew nothing about, and which I am now almost tempted to visit (but I simply don’t like pierogi enough).
- Live Near Friends: Via Elan Ullendorff’s newsletter, this is SUCH an interesting idea which I am slightly amazed I hadn’t come across before. Live Near Friends is a website based on a super-simple premise – that, given the opportunity, people would increasingly choose to live in vague clusters with their friends, and that as such they should be able to arrange things to let them do that. The site asks you to choose what sort of arrangement you’re after – multiple units within an apartment block, say, or houses in a neighbourhood, or on a street – and then helps you find areas where house prices and availability match your and your friends’ criteria…on the one hand, this makes all sorts of theoretical sense; on the other, I can’t help but get a feeling (and this might just be my innate ‘I AM NOT A JOINER’-ness at play here) that there could be some…interesting negative externalities here. What about the people in the neighbourhood/apartment block that perhaps wouldn’t be thrilled at having your entire uni mates groupchat moving in en masse? What if you and your group of friends are, not to put too fine a point on it, *d1cks*? Anyway, this struck me as both a really curious idea and the GREAT starting point for some superb domestic/community drama.
- Live, HD Stream from the ISS: I have obviously featured this sort of thing at some point before, but this is NEW and SUPER-HD, and if you have ever wanted to watch a stream of, at the time of writing, clouds over the ocean then WOW do I have a treat for you. This gives me vertigo, in a way that is very hard to describe.
- Epistolorean Club: This is an interesting idea, though details on how exactly it will work is unclear at the time of writing – from the blurb, “Epistolary books are written as letters or journals. They tell a story through the eyes the characters, capturing their thoughts, feelings, and events as and when they are recorded. The Epistolorean brings epistolary books to life. Subscribe to a book and you’ll receive emails from the characters as the story takes place. Our first book, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is currently in testing.” Except, well, Dracula is already in large part an epistolary novel, no? Anyway, no idea if this is going to be any good, but it’s INTERESTING so give it a try and stop being so suspicious.
- Years In Seconds: ‘A Year In My Life In a Minute’ as a style of video feels VERY 2012-coded, to me at least – stuff like ‘The Sartorialist’ and ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ that’s OLD INTERNET, more innocent and less corrupted…ordinarily I wouldn’t pay much mind to this sort of thing, but I stumbled across this channel this week and became slightly transfixed. This is someone called Shaun Tollerton who since 2015 has posted a ‘my year in 365 seconds’ videos – a second of video a day each day throughout the year, edited into single vids – and none of them have more than 200 views, and it’s just…perfect. Not attention-seeky, not trying to do or say anything, no big running bits or stories or revelations, just mundane, wonderful, boring, LIFE (admittedly the life of someone who I think has quite a decent job in tech and travels a bit, fine, but still). Shaun spends at least part of his life in London, so there’s a pleasing familiarity to some of the shots, but in general I am just slightly in love with the…the ordinariness of it all. No idea why this has grabbed me so, but I really, really enjoyed these and maybe you will too.
THE SECTION WHICH WAS ASKED BY A STRANGER IN CENTRAL LONDON LAST SUNDAY IF I HAD ‘ANY BUGLE’ TO SPARE, WHICH WAS BOTH DELICIOUSLY RETRO AND STRUCK ME AS WILDLY OPTIMISTIC ON THEIR PART, PT.2:
- Gaza Memorial: A site which lists the names and ages of people killed in Gaza over the past 9 months – if you have your volume up, you will hear the names being read aloud as they cycle. The voices reading the names of the deceased are other people from around the world who have contributed their voices to their project – if you’re moved to do so, you can leave a recording here.
- The Ultimate PaywallHopper: Before you all get excited, be aware that this is TECHNICAL and you will need to be comfortable fiddling with a few things on your computer to get it to work – BUT it’s not actually hard at all, and the instructions on the page are comprehensive, and, look, as previously discussed, I believe in paying for journalism as much as the next man but, equally, I am paying four figures annually for subscriptions at the moment and it’s not like my employment prospects are getting any better with the passage of time. This will get you into ALL SORTS of places, including The Athletic and Bloomberg, and is a fcuking GODSEND.
- The Picasso Study Centre: Picasso, seen from the vantage point of 2024 – a leathery old pervert who had an indisputable way with the oils but who you probably wouldn’t necessarily trust with your wife/daughter/mum. Still, if you’d prefer your analysis of one of the 20thC’s most celebrated artists to be informed by rather more than my throwaway dismissal, you might enjoy checking out this newly-digitised set of works collected by the Picasso Study Centre – this contains 5,000 works from sketches and studies to monographs and photos and 3d models, and you could honestly lose hours to this if you’re so minded.
- Code Galaxies: OK, I can’t claim to wholly understand what it is that is being visualised here – yes, fine, ‘code’, and according to the description code which ‘visualizes dependencies among most popular package managers. Every star in this visualization represents a package’, whatever that means – but beyond that I’m slightly lost – but it’s undeniably VERY PRETTY and quite mesmerising. This site – via Giuseppe’s ever-excellent data newsletter, btw – lets you explore Rust, Python, Arch Linux and other languages in zoomy, space commander fashion, flying through the various nodes as though they were, well, galaxies. Hence the name. Jesus. Anyway, I don’t think there’s any purpose to this AT ALL from a practical point of view, but I am very keen on the aesthetic and general VIBE.
- The ABC Glossary Questionnaire: An interesting nascent project about the web and tech and language, this, in which you (yes, YOU!) are invited to submit your own new words, terms and definitions to characterise how we relate to the internet. “Welcome to the ABC Glossary* Questionnaire, an invitation to revisit your relationship to the internet and to reimagine how we collectively web through language. Below are a set of exercises to help you locate yourself within a (local area) network in order to refuse harmful computing practices and to repair our connections with/between technology, community, and nature. What words do we use to describe our electronic experiences? What terms do you associate with the internet, computing, and cyber culture? What words do we ignore? What words do we need to use in new ways? Submit a term with a newly redefined condition.* Draw an imagined map of the internet.” I mean, that sounds right up my street and maybe it will be up yours too – this is only a few weeks old and only has three entries so far, but I am hoping it will spread and grow as people engage with the idea, not least because I am increasingly of the opinion that we need new vocabulary for all of *this* as ‘being online’ and ‘surfing the web’ (LOL!) doesn’t really cut it any more.
- Make The Olympic Flag: You know what the Olympic flag looks like, right? RIGHT? OF COURSE YOU DO! In fact, I bet you remember it so well that you can replicate it digitally RIGHT NOW, completely accurately, on your first try. Click the link and PROVE IT. This is one of those things that makes you realise how appalling human memory is at detail (oh, ok, fine, MY memory) – while I had the vague shape of the rings in my head, turns out I have literally no effective retention AL ALL of which colours are involved, what order the colours go in, or indeed the correct proportions of the final design. Erm, can you all try this and reassure me that you’re sh1t at it too? THANKS!
- The Locavore: This is an NYC thing, but feels very much like it can (and should) transfer as a concept to basically anywhere else. Designed to be a directory of small, local shops in the city, this is a BRILLIANT idea – shops can self-submit, with the only criteria being: “1. Open to All – It’s important to us to highlight IRL shops with regular walk-in hours. Everyone’s welcome!; 2. Independent – To qualify, shops must have 5 or less locations and be independently owned; 3. Accessible – Shops must be easily accessible by bus, train, biking or walking within each neighborhood; 4. Old and New – We prioritize longtime community staples as well as new much needed neighborhood additions.” There’s no search function – you can browse by store type or neighbourhood, but the idea is that this is designed as much to help you learn about the shops that are out there as it is to get you a quick answer to your ‘where can I find a cobbler in Greenpoint’ query – and this feels like a SUPER initiative overall. The directory apparently now spans over 13,000 independent shops, which is quite remarkable – does this exist for London? If so, can one of you point me at it, please?
- Tinder For Recipes: Yes, I know, but it’s the app-makers’ description so I am letting that one go – it’s actually called ‘Dinners’, but wevs. This is an app for…for who? Big families with wildly-divergent taste in meals? People who want to introduce a potentially-extremely-limiting element to their domestic approach to food? The idea is that you and your fellow housemates all download the app, then get presented with various recipes – swipe left to say ‘MMM YES PLEASE’, right to say ‘I WOULD RATHER EAT MY OWN FACE’. All the recipes that you ALL swipe left on get added to your APPROVED recipebook, ensuring that you only ever cook things that you all like – simple, right? Well, yes, in theory, until you get that one housemate who only wants to eat plain rice and poached chicken breast and who therefore royally fcuks the whole system for everyone else. THERE IS ALWAYS ONE.
- Jordan Stone: I am really not a TikTok user, mainly because video is very much Not My Medium, and I am sort of grateful for that because I’m very conscious of how easy it would be to find something that scratches a very particular, personal itch and just falling into some catatonic rabbithole with it for approximately six hours or so. So it is with the work of Jordan Stone – I have never, ever seen anything on TikTok which speaks to me quite like this does. Seriously, it has some sort of very odd ASMR-type effect on my brain, like someone is stroking it VERY DIRECTLY, and it’s very hard for me to stop watching – WHY???? This is…I don’t know what it is. Memetic nonsense? TikTok slop? NO IT IS ART, ART I TELL YOU! There are only 23 videos on this channel but they are all worthy of being in the Tate, and I am not sh1tting you – watch and marvel. BONUS TIKTOK: I have no idea what the fcuk is happening here, but the chickens are magnificent and I want more.
- Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024: Our annual look at ‘photos of mad stuff in the cosmos’, now – leaving aside the fact that I am 100% convinced that one of these images is not a photograph but is in fact just a screenshot from a very heavily-modded version of Skyrim (you will know exactly the one I mean, promise), can I just draw your attention to the caption on the image entitled ‘Run to Carina’? The bit that reads “Deep in northwest Namibia, in a scorched desert where you can drive hundreds of kilometres without coming across another human, an artist is hard at work. Dotted all over the desert are numerous sculptures made of stone which blend seamlessly into the surroundings. Known as the ‘Lone Men of Kaokoland’ [as the region was formerly known], it is not clear who has put them there and where exactly they are located.” EXCUSE ME WHAT?! Why did noone ever tell me about the mysterious stone giants of the Namibian desert?! Anyway, the space pictures are ace, as always, but that detail in particular has spun me out rather.
- Beautiful AI Animations: Gerde Gotit is…a studio, I think, based in Canada, that does a bunch of work using generative AI to create animations – the main link goes to some work they’ve done creating dancing leaf sprites and the like, but you might recognise them from those videos of the dancing spaghetti which did the rounds last week, which you can see more of here. This is really impressive, particularly in terms of the way they’ve used mocapped dancers to create the movement set, and I’d be amazed if this specific technique doesn’t crop up in a TV spot sooner rather than later.
- The AI Murder Mystery: Via my friend Tom at the BBC (HI TOM!) comes this slightly-shonky work-in-progress/proof-of-concept experiment in AI-led ludic interactive experiences (catchy, eh?) – you play…A DETECTIVE! And you have to SOLVE A CASE! By TALKING TO SUSPECTS and INTERROGATING THEM! Using NATURAL LANGUAGE! Specifically, “You are Detective Sheerluck, investigating the murder of Victim Vince. The storyline, clues, and suspect alibis are all fixed, with every suspect hiding something about the case from the police. Each suspect knows important information about the other suspects, allowing you to piece together the truth through chatting. Your partner Officer Cleo can investigate locations at your request and present you with observational evidence. You can ask her to give you an overview of the case or to search certain locations for clues. Take notes from your conversations and piece together who killed Victim Vince, why he was killed, and how. When you are ready, click the End Game button to make your deduction.” This…almost works, sort-of, but what’s more interesting is the shape of the *next* thing you can vaguely see beneath its skin; we’re not yet at a point where this stuff can be considered anything other than a passing curiosity, but we can definitely also see exactly how it will work when the tech gets good enough. If you’re of a particular sort of mind, it’s also moderately-amusing to work out how you can jailbreak the characters into telling you everything straight off the bat – one for all you ‘prompt engineers’ (LOL HELLO 2022!) out there.
- Newsletters-To-Podcasts: To be clear, this is a terrible idea which won’t work at all – but that has never stopped me from including a link in Curios, and it won’t stop me now. This is a service called Jellypod, whose gimmick is that it will take all the many newsletters you subscribe to and which you don’t have time to read, and will, VIA THE MAGIC OF AI, turn them into a fully-voiced podcast, summarising all the main issues so you don’t have to do any tedious, time-consuming reading. Look, I appreciate that I am very much the last person in the world who can or should be making this argument, but can we maybe not just accept that there are real, practical limits on the quantity of information that we are capable of usefully ingesting, even if we listen to it all at 3x speed? Also, can you imagine the hideous mangling of content and meaning you’ll get from an AI summary of multiple newsletter sources? Please, can someone spend a week getting their news and information ONLY via the medium of this service and tell me how you get on?
- Underground Comix: OH YES. “The Adler Archive of Underground Comix is a collection of underground comix, books, and archival newspaper and magazine clippings on cartoonists and ephemera. The underground comix portion of the collection presented here includes ~250 items published between the 1960s and 2000s by artists such as Robert Crumb, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Aline Kominsky Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Dori Seda, Art Speigelman and many others, as well as anthology titles such as Arcade Comics Revue, RAW, Weirdo, Young Lust and Zap.” I sort of feel that every kid aged about 16 ought to get access to this, it feels like a sort of countercultural rite of passage – if nothing else, I IMPLORE you to dip in here and read some Harvey Pekar if you’ve never done so before; the man really was a genius, and, on a personal note, his book ‘The Quitter’ is the most painfully-relatable piece of media I have ever encountered in my life.
- Bookmarks: Ooh, this is a good idea I think – basically IMDB for novels, this is potentially hugely useful for anyone looking to get book recommendations from somewhere less genre-obsessed and generally mental than BookTok. “Every day, the Book Marks staff scours the most important and active outlets of literary journalism in the US and beyond—from established national broadsheets to regional weeklies and alternative litblogs—and logs their book reviews. When a book is reviewed by at least three outlets, each of those reviews is assigned an individual rating (Rave, Positive, Mixed or Pan). These ratings are then averaged into a result and the book becomes part of our Book Marks database. Each book’s cumulative rating functions as both a general critical assessment, and, more significantly, as an introduction to the range of voices and opinions that make up the world of American literary criticism. These opinions are accompanied by pull quotes representative of the overall stance of each individual review, and readers can click through to the full review at its source. Readers can express their own opinions alongside those of the critics in each book page’s What Did You Think Of… comments section.” Smart and helpful, and, coincidentally, a really good place to remind yourself of how TERRIBLE US book cover design is when compared to the variety and ingenuity you see from European and UK publishers (sorry, but it’s really true).
- Frasier Sleepers: This week I learned that there is an active community of Redditors who have come together around the shared experience of being seemingly unable to fall asleep without the comforting Seattle-based sounds of Frasier to accompany them to unconsciousness. Join them here, as they discuss hot topics such as “I find watching the first 5 seasons far more relaxing and as the series progresses so does the cameras and the sound quality become crisper. Thats not to take anything away from watching and enjoying the series over and over again in its entirety. On the dvd box set version, the microphones and cameras they use on set seem more velvety and the picture quality is creamier and less harsh and bright as in the later series.” PREACH!
- The Tokyo Toilet Map: At some point in the late-1990s, a resident of Tokyo decided to use the early internet to document the states of various public conveniences across the city. Photos of Japanese toilets from 1996-1997! Occasional images of graffiti of, inexplicably, dogs in congress! I am astonished at the fact that this is still live, 30 years after the fact – there’s an email address attached to the page, should any Japanese speakers wish to get in touch with the Yuuji Hayashi who is apparently responsible for this small slice of odd obsessiveness.
- Disk Defrag Simulator: Completely, totally and utterly pointless – EXCEPT I reckon that if you work in an office with young enough colleagues, you can reasonably open this webpage, fullscreen it, turn the sound on and then apologetically explain ‘sorry, really important IT updates, can’t do anything about it’ and just sort of go to the pub. Try it NOW while it’s momentarily sunny!
- Alien Melon Games: Dozens of weird little…games? Art projects? Code experiments? Wevs, these are ace and there are LOADS of them – you will need to download most of them to try them out, but it’s all free or ‘pay what you want’, and there’s SO much creativity and odd packed into each that it’s 100% worth bookmarking for your next bored, rainy afternoon (so in all likelihood ‘August’).
- Pippin Barr Does Greek Punishments As ‘Snake’ Variants: Pippin Barr, 8-bit game artist and fan of the classics, returns with another in his occasional series of ‘tiny games riffing comedically on Greek mythology’ with a small series of variants on the classic Nokia ‘Snake’ gameplay model, each tweaked to represent one of a selection of Greek punishment myths. Play ‘Snake’ as Sisyphus allegory! Play it to be reminded of Prometheus! Or Tantalus! Ok, so these are single note gags which you will probably get very quickly, but, equally, they are FUNNY and I am always a sucker for medium/message stuff like this.
- The Coin Toss World Cup: Finally this week, this is literally a piece of branching interactive fiction about tossing coins – BUT it is VERY FUNNY and I promise you that you are going to want to keep playing to because the writing here is far, far better than it needs to be. Although, be warned, I believe that the probabilities here are accurate and so you might want to clear the remainder of the century if you’re going to beat this without brute-forcing the whole thing in some way.
By Mark Forbes
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- PicVoid: This Tumblr is very much ‘a vibe’; not necessarily a good vibe, but very much a vibe nonetheless.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Morgan Leigh Meisenheimer: How full of cows is your Insta feed? NOWHERE NEAR FULL ENOUGH! Rectify that immediately with this Insta account, run by animal photographer Morgan Leigh Meisenheimer, whose photos of LOVELY BOVINE LADS are really very good indeed, and made all the better by the number of said BOVINE LADS who have clearly just received a really comprehensive shampoo, condition and possibly blow-dry and are, by the standards of dairy cattle at least, remarkably glam as a result.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Flattening of Everything: Or ‘what the attempted assassination of Trump tells us about how the media/social media nexus works, or doesn’t, in 2024’. The main link here is to Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic, and it’s a decent precis of how news doesn’t really work anymore, or at least not in the way we were all sort of used to it working for about 8 years or so in the post-social media 2010s, and how we have ended up at a point where the shouting and the uncertainty and the dreadful grifters are just as much the product as a side-effect of the product. “Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired”. If you want more on this, then Slate has a similarly decent overview of how the memetic layer which used to be the dessert with which we’d reward ourselves for engaging with THE ROUGHAGE OF NEWS is in fact the main meal nowadays, our informational gut health be damned (sorry, that analogy really fell apart halfway through, didn’t it?); as is often the case, though, the most accurate-feeling assessment of All Of This comes from Ryan, who writes “The 2010s populism wave which Trump rode to victory in 2016, which guys like Andreesen, Musk, and Thiel are clearly trying to emulate, was dependent on a still-exciting digital public square, made up of millions of disparate groups using it to communicate. And what we were all posting only became Real News thanks to a still-relevant mainstream media that was able to curate it to something that felt it mattered. But normal people don’t use social media to communicate anymore. They use it to watch videos. And those videos don’t mean anything because the apps that want us to watch them want us to watch them constantly. But those videos did replace television. Which is a problem because now there’s no way to elevate the insane chatter that some users are still putting online. So now we’re left with an internet that is constantly screeching at us, but none of it can actually break through into culture.”
- Austerity, Vulnerability and Populism: This is a link to a full academic paper, so I appreciate your appetite to click and read may be…limited, but I promise you that this is both interesting and, I think, a useful thing to know about. Basically, what this shows is that there is a strong correlation between ‘countries which embraced policies of austerity in the 2010s’ and ‘countries which are now seeing a marked rise in appreciation for populist figures’ – the causative conclusion drawn is that “the success of populist parties hinges on the government’s failure to protect the losers of structural economic change,” and that “the economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies.”
- Ads In The UK Election: This is a post by Who Targets Me?, literally the only organisation which has anything resembling a handle on how much is being spent on social platforms when it comes to electoral advertising, looking back at what conclusions can be drawn from spending on Meta/Google ads in the UK general election just gone – an election in which over £11m was spent with a pair of companies who aren’t *great* at paying tax in the UK, as a rule. This is smart and sensible and worth a read if you’re interested in how campaigning works – and should, ideally, work better.
- Minority Report Policing: Apologies for yet another academic paper, but I hope you’ll forgive me when you read the precis: “Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may “bake in” bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits.” Is…is that the sound of a massive ethical can of worms being ripped open? I THINK IT IS!! It’s not possible to read this, I don’t think, and not feel a tiny bit trepidatious about this stuff being rolled out in real life.
- Devilish: Bruce Sterling writes about the unique cadence of AI-generated copy, a phenomenon he has chosen to term ‘Delvish’ after the propensity of the systems to inject the word ‘delve’ into copy. This is a nice overview of the way it *feels* to read machine-created prose, that odd uncanny valley of prose that it almost always inhabits, and comes with a nice glossary of the most overused turns of phrase employed by The Machine (at least as of July 2024).
- A Big Chat About The Metaverse: No, wait, come back! It *IS* still a thing, honest it is! Or at least so hopes Matthew Ball, who very much became The Metaverse Guy c.2020, and who now has a book coming out about the whole thing which his publishers, I imagine, are starting to wish they had never paid the big advance for. Anyway, this is Ball in conversation with Epic Games Founder/CEO Tim Sweeney and Author/Entrepreneur Neal Stephenson, and this is, honestly, a really interesting read – particularly for all those of us who spent a significant proportion of 2020-1 saying things like ‘the metaverse sort-of exists already, it’s videogames ffs’. This covers Fortnite, Roblox, hardware, software, user behaviour and barriers to entry, as well as touching on AI towards the end – on the one hand, at least two of the parties in volved in this chat have a vested interest in making The Metaverse happen in some way or another; on the other, I am still long-term bullish about the idea of fluid, interoperable digital identities and experiences, etc, even if the idea we’re all going to be wearing a fcuking Oculus to do it was always bunkum.
- The Hamster Kombat Explainer: In case you have heard the term but lack context, here you are – basically all you need to know is: a) clicker game; b) on Telegram; c) linked to crypto; d) requires players to shill for the game to boost their chances of getting rewards. So, VERY BASICALLY, this is Farmville reworked for 2024 (it’s not, obvs, but, equally, I am not totally wrong either). If you have kids it might be worth reading this, though, as it feels like exactly the sort of thing that a 13 year old boy might get unreasonably invested in.
- Roxane Gay on TikTok: This is SUCH a good piece of writing – or at least it is in the parts where it doesn’t reiterate, for the nth time, ‘TikTok has an algorithm!’ and ‘once upon a time there was an app called Vine!’. The bits where it shines – and it really does shine – are those sections where Gay just talks you through The Feed, the dizzying carousel of videos and people and experiences that you can just flow through, zenlike, dipping into and out of the river of human experience (yes, it’s a river, I have decided, what of it?), partly at will and partly guided by the algocurrent. I would honestly happily read an entire piece riffing in that style, or a prose poem, should someone fancy spending an awful lot of time and effort writing something specifically for my enjoyment.
- Imagination vs Creativity: As a general rule I’m not particularly interested in ‘I think like this therefore…’ or brainhack/method type pieces, but I thought this essay, by Venkatesh Rao, was an interesting look at the conceptual distinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’, what each is ‘for’ and how to go about encouraging both different forms of thought. This feels very much like the sort of thing that those of you with collarless shirts, black, thick-rimmed glasses and those annoying fcuking fishermen’s knit beanies paired with wide-legged artists’ trousers will enjoy – and I mean that EXACTLY as disparagingly as it sounds. More seriously, though, as someone who is occasionally moderately creative but who has no imagination AT ALL, this was both depressing and oddly-helpful, so maybe some of you might find it speaks to you as well.
- The Greater London Project: This is interesting – a new project by Sam Bowman and Joe Hill, seeking to solicit and explore ideas on how to Make London Good Again (my term, not theirs). I don’t know either of these people, but Sam Bowman on Twitter is a slightly-weird combination of vaguely-economically-libertarian policy chat and light trolling – this, though, seems sincere, and while there’s a lot of stuff in the initial introductory post which strikes me as…well, silly tbh, there’s also enough that makes me curious to see what sort of other ideas might get explored. Obviously this is all utopian, with no mention of how any of it might be paid for, but if you’re curious about how one might think about creating better urban spaces – specifically, better urban spaces that will likely benefit me, the author of this newsletter, then you might want to have a read of this.
- Bitcoin Mining Is Bad For Your Health: A cautionary tale from Texas, where it turns out that the noise of a million computer fans whirring 24/7 as they do the hard compute on Bitcoin mining does Bad Things to people over time – this gets more and more unsettling as it goes on, and left me with two lasting impressions: 1) fcuk me does Bitcoin have an astonishing number of negative externalities; 2) turns out that having regulation around what people can and can’t in pursuit of money do IS occasionally a good idea, whodathunkit?
- Vegetarians Only: Sara Ather writes for Vittles about the ways in which vegetarianism is being weaponised against India’s Muslim community as part of the Modi regime’s ongoing demonisation of them as a group; specifically, landlords are using diet to restrict the supply of homes to Muslim families who, in contrast to mostly-vegetarian Hindus, are more likely to eat meat. “The concept of ‘purity’ that is embedded in the Hindu caste structure – espousing vegetarianism and demonising meat, especially beef – is consistently used to enforce hierarchies and to control the movement of Indian Muslims, preventing them from finding comfortable homes. In 2021, Mohsin Alam Bhat reported that a Hindu broker in a suburb of Mumbai found that ‘the right way to refuse people’ was to ‘simply [tell them] that he only has houses for “veg families”’, while a recent study found that being a meat-eater or ‘non-vegetarian’ made house-hunting a significant challenge for people moving to a new city. Over the last few decades, the policing of tenants has also extended into the online realm: Facebook groups frequently include dietary requirements in their listings, subtly discouraging Muslim applicants from searching for a home in neighbourhoods of mixed faith.”
- The Mayor of Amsterdam: A fascinating interview in the FT with the Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, in which she talks with refreshing openness about how she is attempting to manage the city’s drugs policy, where she wants to take it, her work to modernise and relocate the red light district, and the particular, peculiar challenges of running a place which, for better and worse, has been a byword for ‘liberalism’ for the past 70-odd years but can’t really keep going as it is for that much longer.
- The Mayor of Mexico City: Not an interview this time; instead, this is a short piece looking at the ‘UTOPIAS’ created by incoming Mexico City mayor Clara Brugada developed in her previous mayorship in the less-storied territory of Iztapalapa – UTOPIAS are basically mixed-use public spaces which she established across the province, reclaiming old buildings and spaces to create areas which can be used for community projects, education and the like. There’s something so refreshing about reading about an elected official with an appreciation of the importance of ‘third spaces’ and community hubs, something which I have really started to notice the absence of in London in recent weeks – this is the sort of thing you read and think to yourself ‘well OBVIOUSLY everyone should do stuff like this, makes total sense’ and then get slightly depressed when you realise that without committed, dedicated work from people significantly better than me, stuff like this simply doesn’t happen.
- Offline Is The New Online: Look, I don’t know who the author of this is or why anyone should listen to them -BUT I wanted to include this just in case it turns out to be the most incredibly prescient essay of the year. YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: “Who is going to be online in 2027? Less than 15% of the population. Remember the early days of the internet, when it served as a secret corner for all sorts of freaks and outsiders with niche interests to unite? People from small towns could connect with like-minded individuals across the globe, overcoming geographical barriers and finding solace in a sense of community. People in big cities could start companies from their basements and get venture funding if they understood how the internet worked. You didn’t need a degree, and you didn’t need a sponsor. You just needed to be interesting. Wake up. The world that once welcomed outsiders and eccentrics is gone. We’ll spend the next few years reminiscing about it with nostalgia, never quite capturing the same feeling. Offline is the new online, and we’re currently at the beginning of a drastic shift in how we socialize. By 2027, less than 15% of the population will actively participate in the digital world unless it’s for work.” I don’t think this is true, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a sickos.jpeg part of me that really wants it to be.
- The Origins of the Broccoli Perm: I AM CALLING BULLSH1T ON THIS ESSAY! This is in GQ – US GQ, I think – and it focuses on the ubiquity of the ‘short on sides, permed on top’ cut so popular amongst so many young men (see also: tiny little gak satchel), and it traces its surge in popularity back to one Dylan Lathem on a TikTok from 2020…NO! THIS IS NOT TRUE! I posit that the genesis of this cut’s popularity can in fact be traced back to Little T and the Blackpool Grime massive, as rendered famous in the mid-00s (see 7:50 in this video), and that in fact it was originally referred to as the ‘meet me at mcdonalds’ for reasons that I can’t for the life of me recall. NO MORE LITTLE T ERASURE! Whatever happened to Little T, anyway? I hope he’s ok.
- Auramaxxing: This week’s completely-made-up online trend comes in the form of Auramaxxing, or, per this piece, “I feel like it’s a new term for being cool,” …Auramaxxing is just taking care of yourself and also knowing who you are as a person first before you try to show other people.” Which is obviously very silly, but, equally, I do see this as part of the broader post-austerity / post-2013/4 trend for witchcraft and woo and astrology and witches, which is less about a resurgence in beliefs in the occult and, to my mind at least, far more a reaction to everything being sh1t and hopeless and largely out of our control, and therefore this sort of rubbish being seen as more legitimate given the lack of actual, sensical things that anyone can practically do to ameliorate things (that’s just my theory, though, you are welcome to develop your own should you so desire).
- Wealth Creation Machines: Ooh, I like this – an odd little essay looking at mythology around machines to make infinite wealth arising in different cultures, the names given to those machines, and the businesses that have adopted those names in an attempt to, I don’t know, hopefully apply a degree of nominative determinism. Contains a ‘Fruit of the Loom’ observation that BLEW MY MIND, and well do the same to you.
- Making A Generative Documentary: I was vaguely aware of there being a forthcoming documentary on Brian Eno, but hadn’t realised that, in typically Eno fashion, it’s all GROUNDBREAKING and sh1t. The gimmick is that the doc is generated anew each time from a central corpus of footage, effectively Frankensteined into being anew at each screening from a sort of central skeleton, with the flesh being different each time. This is a really good explanation of How It Works – certainly better than my typically cack-handed attempt – and the sort of thing that ought to give anyone still believing in the idea of ‘ads as a craft medium’ significant pause for thought, because if you can do this for a doc and make it good you can certainly do it via The Machine for an infinite set of adverts for protein powders.
- The Best Books of the 21st C: …according to the NYT, at least. I think…I think this is a pretty good list! There’s nothing too obviously ridiculous on there, it’s not TOO uniquely Americentric (though it is a bit), it’s not TOTALLY blind to authors who don’t write in English (though it is a bit), and it gave me a prod to add a couple of overlooked biggies from the early part of the century a try (although I confess to finding the love for the ‘Oscar Wao’ novel utterly fcuking baffling). BONUS POTENTIALLY-ENERVATING BOOK RANKINGS! This is Esquire’s ‘Best 75 SciFi Books EVER’ list which I am sure will render a certain type of person apoplectic.
- The Unexpected Poetry of PhD Acknowledgements: A paean to the beauty found in the acknowledgements section of people’s PhD theses, and all of the worlds of struggle and sacrifice and solitude and skull-crushing tedium that a doctorate entails (honestly, so much respect for people with the dedication to pursue one). There are some lovely examples in here, sort of the equivalent of discovering humorous marginalie in a library book – GENTLE HUMOUR AND WARMTH of the best sort, and that’s not always something you get in Curios so, you know, BE GRATEFUL.
- Blood In The Water: Weirdly this is the second consecutive week I’ve featured something about dead whales – this piece is a fascinating (but, be warned, a touch bloody) article about the tradition of the grindadráp, the Faroese whale hunt, and the international protestors trying to put pressure to bear on the islanders to make the practice history. Largely dispassionate, it features some great writing, an excellent sense of the oddity of the Faroes and just how insanely remote and far away they are, and a few pictures of dead whales which I had to scroll past quite quickly – although the photos of the sea turned blood-red from, well, actual blood are astonishing.
- On Delivery: Snapshots from the frontline of the opioid crisis in the US, written from the perspective of an aid worker whose job it is to keep addicts on the streets from dying. “MY 10-YEAR-OLD SELF, learning the language of recovery during his father’s brief stint in AA, would think I’ve become the second-worst kind of person: an enabler. I have no defense except to say, like a parent to a child, that stuff gets more complicated. On deliveries, we don’t try to get people sober. Sobriety is beside the point. We offer resources if they ask, but we never push it. We never even mention the idea of getting sober unless they bring it up, because otherwise they wouldn’t trust us. We are, for many people, the only service they receive that doesn’t try to make them do something, that doesn’t demand shame as the price of care. So we are uncompromising enablers. We deliver to people at homeless shelters, knowing that if they are caught they’ll be kicked out. We deliver to people on parole, knowing that drug use could send them back to prison. We deliver to people in the dark corner of the parking lot outside the rehab facility, where they once hoped to get sober.”
- Letters to My Ex-Metamour: As a rule, I am largely of the opinion that there is literally nothing less interesting than hearing to someone talk about their polyamory (apart from hearing people talk about their dreams, obvs) – POLYAMORY IS JUST LOGISTICS WITH ADDED MUCUS FFS, IT IS NOT INTERESTING. I will, though, make an exception for this essay by Allison Darcy, which takes the form of fragments of notes written to her ‘metamour’, which I this week learned is the term given to the other person with whom you share a partner – this is, per everything to do with poly stuff, at times infuriatingly self-absorbed and self-indulgent, but I forgive it because some of the writing really is excellent.
- Daisy Chain: Finally this week, a lightly-interactive scifi story – you ‘play’ it, but it’s a linear (ish) narrative; think of it a bit like a short story delivered in a vague-graphic-novel-y way. I really, really enjoyed this – the form makes a genuine difference to the heft of the narrative – and I think you might too.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: