I ought to be in Slovenia right now, hanging out with nice internet people and thinking about nice internet things, but instead I am in my kitchen in London, in my pants, a bit tired and hungover and generally feeling quite resentful at the fact that things like ‘needing to earn money to eat’ have prevented me from travelling to Naive Yearly. To all those of you who are there today, I hope you have fun – but not too much, so as to assuage my feelings of bitter jealousy and mild resentment.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you could at least pretend to be grateful that I’ve spaffed out yet another one of these for your delectation (what do you mean ‘I didn’t ask for this, why must you continue to foist this sh1t on me?).
THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS YOU ALL USE THE FACECAM LINK BELOW TO MESS WITH THE HEADS OF ANY ELDERLY RELATIVES YOU MAY HAVE LEFT UNDER THE GUISE OF ‘TRAINING THEM TO SPOT SCAMS’, PT.1:
- Social AI: So I have to confess that this is a link I haven’t *actually* tried myself, what with it being an iOS-only app and me being the sort of person who, if I’m honest, finds the whole ‘cult of Apple’ thing deeply distressing and who therefore has a personal ‘no, fcuk off, I am not joining your weird fetishistic club’ policy to all of the company’s devices. Still, I feel confident in saying that it is EITHER a brilliant piece of satire on the self-obsessed social media age of personal branding OR simply the saddest app that has ever been conceived of – YOU DECIDE! Social AI is another ‘social media, but the profiles are AI’ app – except this one’s seemingly JUST FOR ONE USER. You create an account, you post your updates…and all that happens is you get a seemingly-infinite stream of LLM-generated responses from a seemingly-infinite collection of fake profiles. I think it’s worth reproducing the ‘features’ list from the App Store page in full, because it really does give me the fcuking fantods (NB: ok, the exclamation marks between these are my own addition, but I think it really helps bring home the horror): “Post status updates and get infinite replies from millions of AI followers! Enjoy your own private space for reflection and feedback, like you’re the main character! Experience AI conversations tailored to your mood and thoughts! Use SocialAI as a tool for therapy, journaling, or simply feeling heard! Receive helpful insights and AI-generated support in real-time! Feel the boost of always being surrounded by your AI community! Explore a new kind of social engagement where it’s all about you!” Just take a moment to go back through that list of ‘benefits’ again – yes, that’s right, ‘feeling heard’. MY HEART, IT BREAKS! This…this has to be satire, because the alternative is simply too bleak for words. You can, should you desire, read a bit more about the experience of using the app here, but on one level I think this is a quietly brilliant piece of art.
- FaceCam AI: I think I featured the code on which this obviously based a few months ago, but rather than being on a Github repo and requiring you to actually, you know, be able to run code for it to work, now you can do live, AI-powered faceswapping in-browser! This is pretty impressive – the base-level, free service lets you do the standard, gimmicky thing of swapping your face out for that of a selection of generic international famouses – a Kardashian! That awful South African racist! Leo Messi! – but the real draw comes with the subscription-tier product, which lets you do the same but for ANYONE’s face. All you need to do is upload a single pic, and FCUK ME does this do a surprisingly good job of mimicking said face in a live video feed, which you can record and download so you can use said video for whatever purposes you fancy. This is VERY CLEARLY a fcuking goldmine for scammers – it’s not hard to imagine a wide range of potential ways in which this could be used to extort money from people who are perhaps…not that tech-savvy, and it’s yet another step towards the soon-to-arrive future in which, unless you can physically grasp the person you think you’re talking to and palpate their face, you shouldn’t really ever believe that who you think you’re speaking to is in fact who you are actually speaking to. Is that a good thing? It doesn’t *feel* like a good thing. Have a play with this – it really is quite distressingly impressive.
- All Text NYC: This is quite amazing, and feels very ‘imminent future’. All Text NYC is a really, really clever project (by Yufeng Zhao, to whom huge kudos) which basically lets you do text search on a whole raft of images of the streets of Brooklyn (other NYC boroughs will be added in due course, apparently). Here’s the blurb: “all text in nyc” is a search engine that enables exploration of New York City’s urban landscape through text. Using optical character recognition on street-level imagery, this project creates a unique digital archive of Brooklyn’s typography. Users can search and visualize every sign, notice, and street art captured in street images.This tool offers a new way to interact with the city’s textual environment, bringing often-overlooked elements of the cityscape into focus. Researchers can study urban signage, artists can seek inspiration, and curious minds can discover the words that surround city dwellers daily.” I presume that all the images here are ripped from StreetView, but there’s something genuinely amazing about being able to type in anything you can think of and seeing what crops up – this recognises words on street signs, shopfronts, stickers on cars, urban graffiti…it’s frankly AMAZING, and testament to how good text recognition has become in the past few years, and I love the fact that all the results link you back to their location on Google Maps, meaning that if you REALLY want to make a pilgrimage to every single instance of the word ‘fcuk’ daubed on the walls of NYC (or at least a certain bit of it), now you can! We may be fcuking the planet left right and centre, we may be careening towards some sort of horrid, tech-accelerated societal demise, BUT LOOK AT THE PROGRESS WE’RE MAKING ALONG THE WAY! Also, a special shout out to the one business in New York I have just learned has the word ‘wank’ in its name.
- Odyssey Works: Look, I know that none of you are actually my friends; I am aware that this is not the sort of newsletter project that engenders parasocial feelings between writer and reader, and that we basically hold each other in some sort of weird mutual contempt, and that we both sort of wish we could just, well, stop. BUT! In the vanishingly-unlikely event that any of you feel like clubbing together and getting me some sort of intensely-personal gift for all my many, many years of webmongery and digital service, then might I point you to Odyssey Works and their Experience? I think I featured a longread about these people about 10 years ago, and since then I have been desperately trying to find them again – then this week I stumbled across this link and I am now slightly obsessed again. Odyssey Works is…I suppose they’ve morphed into a sort of consultancy (EVERYONE IS A FCUKING CONSULTANT), but the core of how they began is the creation of ‘experiences’ – effectively immersive pieces of theatre, designed bespoke for a single individual, like a non-terrifying version of ‘The Game’ (which, if you’ve never watched it, you really should watch asap because it is a GREAT film). They only seem to do one every year or so, and I imagine that they cost a TERRIFYING amount, but I recommend you go to the appropriate bit of the website and read through some of the short synopses of previous Experiences designed for others – honestly, these sound INCREDIBLE and I would give one of my increasingly-ropey kidneys to be able to experience something even 10% as cool as this.
- CrowdWave: My friend Ben spotted this on HackerNews this week and while he was…slightly underwhelmed by the concept, I confess that I have become slightly addicted to it over the past 24h. CrowdWave is a very simple website – you can read the dev’s post about its genesis here, should you desire – which is, per the creator’s notes, ‘like Twitter, but every post is a voicemail’. Go to the site’s homepage and you are presented with a list of posts, every single one a voice note – anyone can record anything they want simply by hitting the big ‘record’ button on the homepage, and if you so desire you can tag your post appropriately to situate it in a particular section of the site. This is…unexpectedly, oddly, lovely, I think – there’s very little rhyme or reason to what people are recording and posting (I have just listened to someone singing in…I think Chinese? And the dev’s 100-second monologue about the business genius of Scrooge McDuck. And someone asking Bob to pick up some milk), but I am slightly obsessed with the mundanity and genuine randomness, and I like the fact that it *feels* a bit clunky and semi-analogue, not least because of the ‘click-clunk-beep’ that each message starts with, just like it’s being cued up on an old ansaphone. I don’t think that this is ever going to ‘catch on’, so to speak, but I am thrilled that it exists, even if only briefly. Thinking about it there’s almost certainly some sort of extended narrative BIT you could do with this via the medium of short voicenotes, although I can’t imagine it would reach an audience of more than approximately eight other internet weirdos (IT IS WHAT YOU ARE DO NOT FIGHT IT).
- The Ig Nobel Prize 2024: This dropped a week ago and so is OLD NEWS (sorrysorrysorry), but it’s that time of year again – as you all doubtless know by now, the Ig Nobel exists to celebrate the most pointless, silly-sounding academic research projects to have been undertaken anywhere in the world, and this year’s collection is *particularly* mad. I strongly advise you to click through and enjoy the full selection, but my personal favourites this year include “experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles”, “demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout”, and, perhaps the most baffling of all, an experiment which involved “exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk.” HOW DID THEY MAKE THE CAT STAND ON THE COW THOUGH? As soon as I am finished spazzing out this fcuker I am 100% seeking video evidence of this.
- Scaniverse: This is interesting. I’ve been wondering for a few years now who’s got the jump on the whole ‘scanning and creating a digital representation of the actual, real 3d meatspace world’ thing – it’s either going to be Google, or Meta, or, possibly, Niantic. Should you wish to help the third of these companies in their mission to create a fully-rendered 3d digital twin of the planet, why not download their Scaniverse app (iOS and Android) which lets you use Gaussian Splatting tech (look at me, deploying that term casually like I have the first fcuking idea what it actually means!) to create quite amazing 3d renders of anything you care to capture with your phone’s camera. What’s more interesting, to my mind, is the feature that allows you to append said scans to a real-world map, thereby building up that aforementioned ‘digital twin of meatspace’ picture one landmark, tree or building at a time – I think there’s something quite cool about the idea of this as a collaborative knowledge/datagathering project, although it’s significantly less cool that it’s all being done in service of a private company that wants to EXTRACT SHAREHOLDER VALUE from the labour. Still, per their blurb, it’s for the public good! “When you share splats, you’re not only inviting people around the world to explore interesting places. You’re adding building blocks to a spatial platform for amazing new games and apps.” See? It’s not JUST about boosting the value of the business to ensure continued rewards for a bunch of faceless shareholders!
- Make Your Own Diamonds: To be clear, in order to ACTUALLY be able to make your own diamonds you’re going to have to fork out at least £200k (possibly more; it’s unclear whether the supplier in this case will honour single orders) and will require a decent amount of carbon for you to feed into the gigantic pressure squisher (this is the technical term). Still, this will probably pay for itself in, ooh, a couple of years, so I can see NO potential downsides in remortgaging the house and going right ahead with your single-handed attempt to break the De Beers/Hatton Garden monopoly. Also, I now want to know exactly what you are meant to feed the machine – diamonds are obviously just highly-compessed carbon, and everything currently living on earth is *sort-of* carbon-based, so could you, I don’t know, make diamonds out of London’s massive rat population? TWO BIRDS, ONE (PRECIOUS) STONE!
- Text-To-Video API: A bit boring and a bit technical, but, equally, potentially interesting in terms of what you might be able to do with it – Luma (the people behind the Dream Machine TTV platform I featured here a few months ago) now have an API, so if you want to integrate TTV functionality into your website or app or whatever then, well, now you can! Why? I don’t fcuking know, you think of a reason ffs.
- The Daily Tism: I appreciate that this is possibly an…unpopular opinion, but I don’t care – I am increasingly annoyed by the proliferation of people self-describing as ‘autistic’, packaging it up as a ‘kooky’ personality trait, using it as a catch-all rationale for fcuking EVERYTHING THEY DO, like it’s some sort of Swiss Army Knife justification for any fcuking thing whatsoever, all the while making a preposterous and unearned equivalence between themselves – functional humans who can exist in the world – and people who exist on the more extreme ends of the autism spectrum and very much not able to exist in the world without quite a lot of help and not insignificant difficulty and distress. As such I was prepared to really hate this website, which is, VERY basically, ‘The Onion, but where all of the jokes are about being on the spectrum somewhere’, but, well, it’s genuinely quite funny and so I couldn’t hate it at all. I have no idea how ‘relatable’ this will be for any of you who are to some extent autistic, but this particular article fragment is representative of the vibe and made me laugh quite a lot: “An autistic woman whose birth certificate claims she is 36 is actually several thousand years old in autistic years, researchers have discovered. Olivia Buckingham, 7543, reportedly experiences time in what scientists are calling an “eternal relentless slog continuum”.”
- Species of the River: An interactive exhibition experience thing, “Species of the River is a collaborative research project developed in 2023-2024 between Yaqui architect Selina Martinez and the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum. The project examines questions about territorial identity, dispossession, community memory and storytelling, exploring the Yaqui collection and the connection between culture and design in the Yaqui communities on both sides of the present-day US/Mexico border.” This is quite a simple site at heart – you scroll, you get taken along a riverside path in the rain, with the opportunity to learn more about specific flora native to the Yaqui territory and the tribe and their history – but there’s something genuinely soothing about the graphics and audio which imho elevate this into something rather lovely.
- FPL GPT: I don’t do Fantasy Football, but I appreciate that for some people it is basically akin to religion – should YOU wish to get the jump on the other people in your league, then perhaps you might find this useful. This is ChatFPL, a prototypical service offered by some ‘optimise your FPL team’ service, which you can use to chat through your team selections, get advice on the best Captain for the weekend and related team selection conundra – I have no fcuking idea whether this is any good, or how they get around the inherently-unreliable nature of anything an LLM spits out, but if you feel a desperate need to get a small advantage over Deano, Baz and the rest of the boys (I don’t know why, but this is what I imagine men who play FPL are called) then this might be useful.
- Baukunst: I confess to not *entirely* getting what this is, but I *think* it’s a VC fund specifically for investing in cultural tech projects, which makes me think that there’s an outside chance that they might want to chuck one of you a few quid. Per the info-light homepage, “Baukunst is a collective of creative technologists advancing the art of building. Our inaugural $100M venture fund is dedicated to leading pre-seed investments in companies at the frontiers of technology and design.” Although now I’ve looked at their list of active investments – they did their first round in February, I think – it looks a lot more like, well, just another fcuking bunch of VC. Still, should you have a BRILLIANT, tech-led, vaguely ‘cultural’ business idea that you think deserves the backing of a bunch of sociopathic, lab-grown international-rich gilet wearers (yes, I have worked with VC before, why do you ask?) then you might find this useful.
- Cheap URLs: I LOVE THIS SERVICE SO MUCH. “Nowadays, when people need a website, they often are forced to turn to big, nasty companies who charge them a subscription fee. Professional designers often are expensive and out of reach for just a simple personal site, and the only other cheaper option requires you to take up web development as a hobby. Who has time for that? There is an easier way: give me $15 dollars, and I’ll give you a clean, fast, stable website that lasts forever. It’s that simple.” I think this is BRILLIANT, and I adore it, and I am sad that this is exactly the sort of cool, helpful little service that AI is going to fcuk into the sun in a few short years.
- Radio Static: A website which lets you flip between different online ‘radio stations’ that each plays a different type of white noise/static. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS QUESTION EVERYTHING YOU INGRATE STOP STARING INTO THE GIFT HORSE’S MOUTH.
- A/B Tests: Would you like a website which does nothing other than collect examples of A/B tested content, subdivided by type of email – so, for example, ‘onboarding’ or ‘sales’ – which, if you’re the sort of person who regrettably has to do things like ‘pretend to care about open rates’ you might well find useful (it’s stuff like this that makes me grateful for Web Curios’ complete absence of any sort of backend analytics whatsoever – honestly, caring about this stuff looks MISERABLE. Have I ever mentioned my deeply-held conviction that, at heart, ‘trying is vulgar’? It’s basically the closest thing I have to a motto).
- GrowPi: This is BEAUTIFULLY pointless – visit the website, click the button to add an extra digit to Pi (currently standing at 18,974) and watch the visualisation of Pi change imperceptibly with every additional decimal point. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT I TOLD YOU ABOUT JUST ACCEPTING THIS STUFF AND ROLLING WITH IT FFS!
By Randy Ortiz
THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS YOU ALL USE THE FACECAM LINK BELOW TO MESS WITH THE HEADS OF ANY ELDERLY RELATIVES YOU MAY HAVE LEFT UNDER THE GUISE OF ‘TRAINING THEM TO SPOT SCAMS’, PT.2:
- Non-User Events: I LOVE THIS IT IS PROPER INTERNET ART. “(non-)user events is a collaged interface that navigates personal internet experiences by quoting and close-knitting HTML elements from Polina’s browsing history. These elements, gathered from sites she visited in June 2024, are entangled in a grid-like structure, searching for areas of friction and excess, inviting viewers to move beyond seamless user experiences into poetic space where new meanings are possible. Polina views HTML elements as events that unfold through time, knitting the practices of our daily lives. What world does each element create when we return to it day after day? (non-)user events is part of Polina Lobanova’s computer is a feeling journey, where she asks herself and friends what “computer-feeling” is and what it could possibly be, focusing on intimate experiences with computing devices.”” Honestly, there’s something weird and poetic and strangely…lonely? about this, the rendering of semi-familiar webcopy in this disassociated format, and it made me think that it’s weird and, frankly, disappointing, that so few artists working in the space around our relationship with the web, and html, get the attention and recognition they I am personally convinced they deserve.
- Small World In Video: I’ve regularly featured Nikon’s Small World photo contest – awarding prizes to images capturing REALLY SMALL ORGANISMS – in Curios over the years, but in recent years they’ve expanded the contest to include videos of said REALLY SMALL ORGANISMS, and I am personally FASCINATED by this stuff – the second-placed film shows individual water droplets evaporating off a butterfly’s wings, and I am personally incapable of believing that it is real and not CG footage. SO INCREDIBLY SMALL!
- Little Planets: Look, I’m not going to ask questions about why you might want to create a private, non-logged, entirely-ephemeral web-based chat space which will vanish forever, leaving no trace, after 7 days or when you decide to kill it (whichever comes first); I am not suggesting that the only reasonable need you might have for this sort of thing is if you’re doing something very, very illegal or likely to very much upset someone; I am not for a SECOND implying that only some sort of adulterer or crimmo might be the only viable target market for a service like this. That said, be aware that if you bookmark this I will judge you (I mean, I’ll never know, but you get the idea).
- Courts: I don’t quite understand WHY the lovely dataviz wizards at The Pudding have created this, but it pleases me immoderately that they have. Courts is their latest webproject which, for reasons that remain unclear, collects aerial images of every single basketball court in the US; you can search by specific location, or sort by the colour of the court, or just scroll around and look at the 50,000+ courts here listed…having said I didn’t understand why this exists, it turns out I just didn’t pay attention when I found this earlier in the week; the idea is that the project will collect stories, anecdotes and memories about each of the courts, in theory building up a picture of the communities that exist around public spaces like these and how each court is its own social space with its own history and mythology and heroes and villains, and that feels like a wonderful and generally laudable idea, and something which, honestly, the FA could do worse than look at and copy for football pitches in the UK because, seriously, I think that could do rather well.
- Take A Selfie With Your Herbs: A website collecting images of people that they have snapped with herbs. Want to look at a bunch of (presumably) total strangers, posing happily with, say, basil? OH GOOD! The photos suggest it’s mainly a small group of friends participating in this, but there’s an email to submit your own herb-related selfie at the bottom of the page so I look forward to checking in in a month or so’s time and seeing a bunch of YOU on there, brandishing some tarragon and grinning wildly (should you decide to participate in this, please do try and squeeze in some small reference to Curios in your photo, maybe by, I don’t know, inking ‘Web Curios’ onto your forehead in permanent marker).
- Selleb: This is very much ‘not really my sort of thing’, but I am intrigued by its existence and how it speaks to the very much growing trend of ‘shopping curators’ as a newsletter niche – Selleb is literally a newsletter which exists to show you what ‘cool’ people have bought recently. That’s it – it’s like digging through the bin receipts of a niche subset of internet hipsters, and, if I’m honest, the naked, shallow consumerism here makes me feel…quite queasy, but then I am very much NOT the target audience for this and I am sure that the creators would find Curios a baffling and pointless endeavour were they ever to stumble across it, so. Here’s the blurb, should you want a better idea of the sort of vibe you’re getting here: “Selleb is a discovery app (currently in beta) where you can snoop on what the coolest people on the internet are ACTUALLY (!) buying/loving/consuming — with receipts to prove it. Call it (rear) window shopping on steroids. If you’re subscribed to our newsletter, you’re also automatically on the waitlist for app access. We hit your inbox twice a week. The Sunday edition serves up anything from travel to fashion to skincare to restaurants. The Wednesday edition features 5 tastemakers sharing receipts of things they’ve recently bought and the juicy stories behind them. Past guests have included Serena Kerrigan, Willa Bennett of Highsnobiety, Throwing Fits, Junia Lin, tinyjewishgirl, sssssoupsssss, Susan Alexandra, Jason Diamond, ellapottersays, Gia Kuan, Jeremy Cohen, hellotefi, dadaeats, the creators of Industry, the founders of MSCHF, StockX, Vine, Siberia Hills, etc…” – ngl, I have no fcuking clue who any of those people are other than Vine and MSCHF, but, well, maybe you’re younger and ‘cooler’ than I am and this speaks to you on a deep, spiritual level.
- Cat Bounce: This feels like a weird throwback to c.2003, but is seemingly not actually that old – anyway, this is a webpage where a bunch of cats drop from the top of the screen; they bounce. You can grab them, and throw them, and, well, that’s it, but who doesn’t want the opportunity to hurl digital felines around a browser window? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Love Me Or Not: Another link from Kris, Love Me Or Not is a sort of digital poem by Alicia Guo – taking the ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ petal-picking game as a conceptual starting point, the user is invited to answer a series of questions and prompts, which over time resolve themselves into a kind of verse; each question you’re asked and choice you make leaves its vague memory on the page, like discarded petals, and there’s something gorgeous about the way each person to experience this will create their own unique poem as they move through the site.
- Nothing: A website to encourage you to do, well, nothing. I’m going to reproduce the blurb here in full, because, well, it explains everything far better than my mangled prose would: “Nothing—a timer that tracks your intentional choice to do… nothing. No goals to chase, no notifications clamoring for your attention, no pressure to fill the silence with productivity. It simply exists, quietly counting each second you allow to pass. This is a space where inactivity is the point—a digital oasis amidst the chaos of endless tasks and to-dos. Yet the essence of Nothing isn’t about fixating on your screen, though you’re welcome to if you wish. It’s about setting aside your phone or computer, taking a step back from the relentless grind, and reconnecting with the world around you. Nothing is more a concept than an app—a quiet reflection rather than a tool to be used. It stands as a gentle rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action. Stay as long as you like, watch the seconds tick away, or let your gaze wander elsewhere. There’s no reward for lingering, just the peculiar pleasure of simply being. Sometimes, the most profound act is to pause, breathe, and do nothing at all—a reminder that it’s perfectly acceptable to embrace stillness and just… be.” Ngl, I just lost 72 seconds to this and it was quite a struggle to drag myself back to the GDoc and continue spaffing out the words (it is 0913am and I am FCUKING TIRED).
- Alien Project: Another in the long list of ‘links I have featured in Curios that I genuinely don’t really understand but which I am including in the vague hope that maybe one of you will be able to make sense of’, Alien Project is software which will apparently let you ‘simulate’ digital organisms. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA! Still, I very much enjoy the feature list, which I will reproduce here for your enjoyment: “Interactive physics simulation of damageable and glueable soft bodies and fluids! Genetic system and neural networks for simulating digital organisms and evolution! Built-in graph and genome editor for designing own agents and environments!” GLUEABLE SOFT BODIES AND FLUIDS! I mean, I have literally no clue what that practically means (or what a ‘gluable body’ might in fact be) but now I really want to find out. As far as I can tell from watching a few of the (rather beautiful) videos, this basically lets you simulate microorganisms, but, honestly, your guess is as good as mine – that said, the video I just watched contains a subtitle reading ‘some of them have developed extremities to capture fast-moving competitors’, which has now put me in mind of bioengineering some sort of mad bacteria and sounds VERY cool indeed.
- My Outdoor Archive: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but that of one Daniel Ding, who is using this page to record every hike he does; details of where, a few photos, a link to the specific trail taked on Alltrails…I really like this, just a small, simple record of Stuff Daniel Has Done, not through Strava or some sort of mediated dataharvesting portal but as a personal webproject showing a small sliver of his life. More of this sort of thing, please – actually, as an aside, it does feel rather like the past year or so has seen a small uptick in the number of projects like this, people just recording ostensibly-mundane elements of their life, or their hobbies or passions, on non-standard platforms; the sort of thing which maybe a decade ago people would have put on Insta, but which doesn’t necessarily feels like it has a some on the socials anymore.
- Scrambled Maps: This is a VERY simple, stripped-back experience but it’s quite a fun addition to your daily puzzle routine – Scrambled Maps asks you to rearrange a selection of 18 tiles so as to recompose a section of map somewhere in the world. This is…quite annoyingly hard, actually, but surprisingly satisfying.
- Eightile: ANOTHER daily puzzle, this one based on anagrams – the game is very simple, described on the homepage as “Make words using all the letters. Each right answer adds a letter. Find the 8-letter word to win.” There’s a time limit, and while it starts (obviously) very easy, I found myself struggling a bit during the later rounds which proves exactly why my ex used to beat me at Scrabble every fcuking time we played.
- Limbo Today: This is GREAT – utterly pointless in the best way. Limbo requires you to do ONE THING each day – to guess the lowest number that NOONE ELSE will guess. That is literally it, and I love it (although I would like them to implement a feature that will ping you with that day’s result, please, thankyou).
- Croquet Conundrum: A puzzle game which requires you to get the ball through the croquet hoops in a certain, limited number of hits, and which starts easy and (far too quickly for my liking if I’m honest) quickly becomes incredibly fcuking frustrating to the point where I had to click away before I did some sort of frustration-related damage to my laptop.
- 50/50: Do you remember the early days of the iPhone, when things like this app were literally the most exciting thing EVER, and people were tapping away at Cut The Rope and Fruit Ninja as though their very lives depended on it? Wouldn’t it have been nice if we’d just sort of stopped the smartphone thing there and then? Anyway, 50/50 reminds me of that era of games – it has one simple premise, to whit ‘divide the object in half as exactly as possible’ and, well, that’s it, but it’s strangely-compelling and has a very ‘one more go’ feel to it (or at least it definitely does when, as I did, you have some incredibly fcuking tedious work to do and literally anything is more appealing than ‘messing around with Mailchimp’).
- Cosmobeat: OH GOD THIS IS BRILLIANT. Seriously, this is VERY fun and clever and also a complete fcuking nightmare to control, which is part of the charm. Do you remember QWOP? Of course you do! This is basically like that, but for dancing – your job in this browser-based demo for a forthcoming full game is to DANCE YOUR FCUKING SOCKS OFF, scoring points for your moves and being on-beat and all that jazz, with the gimmick that you control your dancer using six separate keys, each corresponding to a limb, their torso or their head, which leads you a brilliant, weird, mess of fingers as you attempt to make your avatar move in vaguely-rhythmic fashion and score points. Honestly, this is SO MUCH FUN and really quite addictive, and the dancing looks and feels WONDERFUL (I am possibly enthusing about this so much because in real life I dance like someone who’s in the early stages of Guillain-Barré syndrome). This is very hard – another game that feels weirdly like rubbing your belly and patting your head simultaneously – but SO nicely-designed and generally just a really enjoyable way to waste 20m.
- Play DOS Games: Finally this week, ANOTHER website offering you a ridiculous selection of old PC games from the 80s, 90s and 00s in your browser – this one, though, is distinguished by how fcuking obscure a lot of the titles here are, things I have never previously heard of, a bunch of old shareware titles from Apogee and the like alongside some old boomer-shooters and VERY shonky sports titles and, honestly, this really is a strange little corner of games from THE PAST and will trigger some really quite forgotten memories if you’re of a certain vintage (ie if you are me).
By Yoon A Mi
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Pretty Colours: This might be a perfect website – a Tumblr which does nothing but post single colour blocks that the curator thinks are aesthetically-pleasing. Why? WHO THE FCUK CARES THIS IS ART.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Dummy Creation: A feed of AI images – yes, I know, I know, but whoever’s doing this has quite a nice eye and a degree of control over the corners of latent space they’re spelunking in, and while, yes, these all have the familiar patina of Midjourney/Flux, there’s something pleasingly-malevolent about the overall vibe here.
- Andy Thomas: Andy Thomas is a digital artist who makes all sorts of different types of work which he then posts on his Insta feed – he’s currently doing something involving creating digital visualisations of birdsong and the resulting videos are GORGEOUS and I can’t stress enough how much these just WORK and how beautiful they are, and how once you’ve seen one you will sort of have this in your head as the default way in which all birdsong should be visualised for evermore.
- Afffirmations: Motivational images and phrases to make you feel better about the slow, ceaseless trudge towards death!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Stop Drinking From The Toilet: A frankly terrible title for a piece that neatly articulates something I’ve tried and failed to make a ‘thing’ for over a year now (ffs!) – to whit, the idea of an ‘informational water table’, and the fact that ours is being (perhaps irredeemably) polluted by an awful lot of sh1t. Here Judy Estrin articulates the argument significantly better than I’ve apparently ever been able to do (again, ffs!), and covers a bunch of interconnected issues that cover the web, social media, AI-generated rubbish, critical thinking, algorithms and a lot more besides. The opening is a neat precis of the piece as a whole, but this really is worth reading all the way through because, well, it’s true and she’s right: “We can’t live without air. We can’t live without water. And now we can’t live without our phones. Yet our digital information systems are failing us. Promises of unlimited connectivity and access have led to a fractionalization of reality and levels of noise that undermine our social cohesion. Without a common understanding and language about what we are facing, we put at risk our democratic elections, the resolution of conflicts, our health and the health of the planet. In order to move beyond just reacting to the next catastrophe, we can learn something from water. We turn on the tap to drink or wash, rarely considering where the water comes from–until a crisis of scarcity or quality alerts us to a breakdown. As AI further infiltrates our digital world, a crisis in our digital information systems necessitates paying more attention to its flow.”
- How To Think About Politics: This is a timely piece given this week’s widespread disappointment at the fact that, it turns out, Keir Starmer is JUST ANOTHER FCUKING POLITICIAN WHODATHUNKIT? As an aside, I think I can now say this openly with total impunity – I personally lost any hope in the ‘transformative potential of a new Labour government’ in approximately 202…1ish, when I learned that Sir Keir and Ed Miliband held a meeting with the country chair of Shell UK and reassured him that he didn’t need to worry and that the party would 100% be rolling back all its commitments around environmental legislation by the time they inevitably got into government – and lo, did it come to pass! Anyway, this is a helpfully clear-eyed article by Hamilton Nolan, written from a US perspective but universally true regardless of where in the world you may be and which selection of egotistical narcissists (honestly, they are ALL egotistical narcissists, without exception) are in charge: “ For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests. Embrace the idea that we are simply pushing to elect the cowards, rather than the enemies. Why? Because the true work of political action is not to identify idealized superheroes to run for office. It is, instead, to create the conditions in the world that make it safe for the cowards to vote the right way.”
- Inside GB News: Probably only of interest to the Anglos, this one, but this FT piece, which spends a month or so deep within the bowels of the GB News machine is both very funny and, inevitably, a touch dispiriting. It takes you from early June, post the election being called, through election night and beyond to the riots (which were definitely, 100% NOT a result of media exactly like GB News spending every single moment of every single day peddling the rhetoric that everything that is wrong with the lives of the poor and disadvantaged in the UK can be blamed squarely on…even poorer and more disadvantaged people from other countries, many of whom coincidentally happen to have brown skin!), and is probably the most revealing portrait of how the whole thing ‘works’ (I use the term advisedly) I’ve read since the channel’s inception.
- Being An Asylum Seeker: A genuinely great piece of journalism, perhaps somewhat surprisingly in The Face (he said, snobbishly – sorry, The Face), in which Clare Considine spends some time with a group of young men currently awaiting the result of their asylum claims in Kent. It is SO NICE to read a piece which focuses on the fact that these people are, you know, actual human beings who in the vast majority of cases are here because they really, really need to not be in their country of origin; equally, it’s slightly enraging to read an account of a system that feels like it really isn’t trying hard enough to help integrate people who (again, in the vast majority of cases) seemingly just want to get a job and make a life and not have to live in fear of being, I don’t know, beaten to death for being gay.
- The Archival Look: Culture whisperer/trend predictor Sean Monahan opines on the current wave of aesthetics, specifically on the evolution brought about by the proliferation of AI imagery onto everyone’s TL, and the shift from what he terms the ‘slick horror’ look of the past year or so towards something he terms ‘the archival look’. I am, quite obviously, not a fashion-y or visual person whatsoever, and what I can tell you about aesthetic trends can be succinctly communicated in a two-word phrase (that phrase being ‘fcuk all’), but here’s Sean’s thesis in case you find it chimes with your observations: “Flat and slick is being replaced with archival graininess. Photorealism is being modulated with the illustrative. The Archival Look is exceptional artifice, an attempt to rescue aura from techno-sterility. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of digging through your flatscreen’s options menu to turn off ‘auto-smoothing’—that annoying preset that makes everything you watch look like Masterpiece Theatre.The use of the word archival here is intentional. I’m borrowing it from the fashion world’s vocabulary. Archival in that context is the fulfillment of a certain idea of luxury where brand imbues a quasi-mystical power to a garment. One feels as if one is buying a real thing. The luxury object doesn’t lose its shine, but rather increases in curiosity and reverence over time. In short, it attains an aura.”
- The Mr Beast Document: Thanks to my friend Nick for sharing this with me earlier in the week – this is that ‘How To Succeed As A Mr Beast Employee’ document that has done the rounds this week, and it’s a genuinely fascinating read (if you ignore the prose style which gives me a genuine tension headache – now I know how you all feel lolzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz). It basically details what Mr Beast requires from staff who come and work on his productions, and it is a LOT – but, leaving aside the aforementioned tone and the general YouTuber-y vibe of the whole thing, it doesn’t strike me as wildly unreasonable. Ok, so it’s all couched in ‘YOU WILL HAVE TO WORK SO FCUKING HARD’ terms but, well, I imagine that you DO have to work incredibly fcuking hard to produce the best-performing YouTube content in the entire world, and I don’t quite get some of the pearl clutching that this appears to have elicited from people who seem to think it is somehow ‘abusive’. What it does do, though, is reaffirm my longstanding belief that Mr Beast is a very, very damaged individual who is pretty much an object lesson in ‘be careful what you wish for lest it become a terrible foreverprison of your own making’; as Nick, again, pointed out to me, it is literally impossible to find a picture of this man where he looks like he is smiling with his eyes – THIS IS 100% TRUE I CHALLENGE YOU TO PROVE HIM WRONG.
- The Death of Google as a Verb: I mean, not quite, obvs, it’s not like they’re emptying the offices over there in Mountain View – still, this is an interesting (if a *bit* anecdote-y) piece about how Google’s once-unassailable dominance over the global information market is being slowly but surely undermined by the fact that younger people are increasingly inclined to go to other places first to find information – specifically TikTok, but also YouTube, Amazon and even LLMs. This is in part a predictable reaction to the fact that Google’s destroyed its core search product over time, but also a further example of the video-first preferences of under-30s, and the fact that given a choice between ‘reading stuff’ and ‘having someone just tell you things while you stare at them through your screen like a slack-jawed yokel’, younger people will invariably choose the latter (can you tell that I am not a fan of this development? Fcuking wordcel that I am).
- Snapchat Revamp: I don’t have to pretend to care about social media for professional reasons anymore, and as such wouldn’t ordinarily include a link like this one because, well, give a fcuk, but I thought that there was an admirable clarity to the company’s explanation of what its core product is for, specifically “Chatting, Snapping, and watching entertaining videos.” Simple, easy to understand, and makes sense from a user need/want point of view, and gets to the heart of what makes the app and how it balances the ‘create vs consume’ thing. Neat.
- The Sociopaths of TikTok: Apparently there’s a corner of TikTok in which people claim that they are sociopaths and talk about how amazingly, er, sociopathic they are, and how they, I don’t know, DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYONE OTHER THAN THEMSELVES and, God, I found this somewhat disheartening because a) I am not 100% certain that every single personality trait on earth need be presented as in some way positive; b) it is not a coincidence that everyone who they feature in this piece is a white, conventionally-attractive young woman who appears to have found a neat way of standing out from the millions of other white, conventionally-attractive young women seeking to succeed in the cReAt0r eC0NoMy.
- How Archivists Work: I appreciate that it’s unlikely that any of you woke up this morning with a burning desire to get REALLY granular information about the way in which archivists package and store physical materials, and how said archival practice varies between the UK and the US, but I promise you that this really is significantly more interesting than it probably sounds as I’m describing it to you (but, to be clear, also VERY mundane, which imho elevates the whole thing). Did you know that in the UK things tend to be archived flat, whereas in the US they are archived vertically? I BET YOU DID NOT! See? Web Curios EDUCATES and INFORMS!
- Notes From My Dead Dad: This is quite amazing, and has sat with me this week long after I finished reading it – partly because of the poignancy of the subject matter, partly because it opened my eyes to a whole new world of coming fraud and confidence trickery, and partly because it feels like very fertile creative territory for a novel or short story – this is Benj Edwards’ account of how he used image-generating AI Flux to create a model of his dead father’s handwriting. “Growing up, if I wanted to experiment with something technical, my dad made it happen. We shared dozens of tech adventures together, but those adventures were cut short when he died of cancer in 2013. Thanks to a new AI image generator, it turns out that my dad and I still have one more adventure to go. Recently, an anonymous AI hobbyist discovered that an image synthesis model called Flux can reproduce someone’s handwriting very accurately if specially trained to do so. I decided to experiment with the technique using written journals my dad left behind. The results astounded me and raised deep questions about ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the personal meaning behind handwriting itself. Beyond that, I’m also happy that I get to see my dad’s handwriting again. Captured by a neural network, part of him will live on in a dynamic way that was impossible a decade ago. It’s been a while since he died, and I am no longer grieving. From my perspective, this is a celebration of something great about my dad—reviving the distinct way he wrote and what that conveys about who he was.” I’m…unsure how I feel about this, but it’s a fascinating wrinkle in the current AI boom which hadn’t even begun to occur to me.
- Walking the Faroe Islands: This is actually the second in a two-part writeup of Chris Arnade’s recent trip to the Faroe’s, and it focuses on what it’s actually like to live and hang out there, and, honestly, it’s fascinating – I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a proper ‘living on a very remote bunch of islands in the middle of the Atlantic’ piece before, and this really is fascinating and full of interesting details (and some really nice photos too). I think, on reflection, that growing up in the Faroe Islands must be a very particular torture – read this and try and imagine being 15 years old and stuck there.
- Butler School: I’ve been thinking of late what exactly I’m going to do with myself, professionally-speaking, over the course of the next few years – it does rather feel like the agency market isn’t quite healthy enough to really be interested in someone who can at best be charitably described as a ‘luxury hire’ (I like to think of myself a bit like Matt Le Tissier – extravagantly-talented, almost-preposterously lazy and quite odd-looking, basically), and I probably ought to consider learning a trade. I was considering waitering, but on reading this piece perhaps I should consider butlering (buttling?) instead. This account of what it’s like to train at one of the world’s few official schools for butlers is…I mean, it’s frankly mental and sounds HORRIBLE, as does the reality of the resulting employment within the bosom of the world’s most plutocratic plutes, but, equally, sort-of fascinating. So, er, if anyone fancies clubbing together to get me the £16k required to attend, that would be ace.
- How To Avoid Hating People Even If They Wear The Wrong Colour: This is a rare example of an OLD LINK – a piece written, slightly-astonishingly, in 2012, by Tim Rogers; Rogers (who I’ve featured in here before a few times) is a famously-prolix writer about videogames, and this is a typically long piece, and, yes, it’s quite videogame-y, but the real point of the article is Rogers getting a bunch of stuff off his chest about the videogame community and certain ‘masculine’ tropes and stereotypes that even 12 years ago felt like they were getting…a bit much, and in the decade anniversary of Gamergate I thought it was fascinating to read something from two years prior which pretty much exactly nails what would end up happening and why. It’s also not a little depressing that you can read it without looking at the date and it would feel entirely contemporarily relevant.
- Crisps of Madrid: Vittles doing the deep-dive I never knew I needed into the artisanal crisp makers of Madrid, which goes some way to explaining the insane boom in exotically-flavoured Spanish fried potato products in the UK over the past couple of years, and which will REALLY make you want a very cold beer and a crunchy spud as you read it (consider this me officially giving you dispensation to crack a Madri – lol! – and open a pack of those incredibly expensive truffle-flavoured ones, you’re worth it!).
- Phantom Attachments: A review of a film that I haven’t seen and am honestly unlikely ever to, which I’m linking to because I *really* enjoyed the writing; this is Guy Lodge writing about the recent Paul Mescal/Andrew Scott film ‘All Of Us Strangers’, about gay love and alienation and loneliness and cities and and and and. Gorgeous.
- The Department of Everything: OK, so fcuk buttling – THIS is the job I want. Except sadly it doesn’t exist anymore – THANKS TECHNOLOGY YOU FCUKER – and so all I can do is read this article and wish that I had been born ever so slightly earlier. “How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me. From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions.” Honestly, I would LOVE to do this; does anyone need a pet Google monkey? Anyone? Oh.
- Divorce Tapes: A hell of a story, this, which starts out being about the author’s paranoid father, who recorded their mothers’ phonecalls to find evidence of an imagined affair, and becomes instead a story about rape, and omerta’, and how families close ranks. Secrets and lies, secrets and lies.
- Too Late: Not entirely sure why, but I’ve been somewhat…emotional this month (actually I do know why – September is a fcuking horrorshow, memory-wise), and this piece in the New York Times absolutely devastated me when I read it so, er, I am obviously sharing it with you. A story of a friendship that should probably have become a love affair, but which never did, until, by then, it was far too late.
- Chicken Crazy: Finally this week, a brilliant, strange little essay in Granta by Thom Sliwowski about getting high off chicken (no, really), and polyamory (but not in an annoying way, I promise), and Berlin (also not annoying, honest!) – this is sad and funny and odd, and really very good indeed. .
By Jess Allen
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: