Webcurios 22/03/24

THEY MADE FOOTBALL WOKE, ALAN! THEY ONLY WENT AND DID IT!

(As ever, this is an INTENSELY-anglocentric opening line which I can only apologise to any non-UK readers for; although, honestly, for any North Americans reading this, it feels like a reasonable exchange for having to hear so much about that tedious fcuking anti-Apple case)

Yes, another week and another preposterous, confected argument about something of no consequence whatsoever to distract us from the fact that nothing works and everything is a broken mess and the only certainty we can have in these times of chaos and flux and change is that there is no prospect of it improving anytime soon.

Oh, no, hang on, there is one other certainty – Web Curios! Except, er, I am taking a week off because Easter’s coming up and it’s a bank holiday here in the UK next Friday, and I see no reason why I should get up at 6am to produce a massive, unwieldy mess of a newsletter for an audience of people who’ll be too bloated on confectionary eggs to care.

So enjoy these links – they are good ones, I promise, better than the usual sh1t I palm you off with – and enjoy whatever flavour of Paschal fun you have planned (unless you’re planning on staging an actual crucifixion – I don’t endorse that), and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Til then, though, I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might want to consider celebrating this Easter by manifesting stigmata or something.

By Brigitte Yoshiko Pruchnow (all images this week are from TIH)

IT IS CURRENTLY 659AM AND I AM WAKING MYSELF UP WITH THIS FUN HOUR-LONG SET OF JUMP-UP D’N’B AND SOME EXCELLENT MC’ING TO BOOT – YOU SHOULD TRY IT! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS INEXPLICABLY HAVING EMBARRASSING FLASHBACKS TO GOING TO MIDNIGHT MASS IN ROME FOR EASTER AS A SMALL KID AND OUTRIGHT REFUSING TO KISS THE FEET OF THE CROSS WHEN IT WAS PARADED ROUND BECAUSE EVEN AS A CHILD THAT FELT WEIRDLY-FETISHISTIC, PT.1:  

By Sarena Vand

OUR NEXT PLAYLIST IS ANOTHER ONE BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL, WHO THIS WEEK PRESENTS WHAT HE CALLS ‘HAUNTOLOGY’ AND I CALL ‘VAGUELY-SPOOKY ELECTRO-AMBIENT STUFF’! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS INEXPLICABLY HAVING EMBARRASSING FLASHBACKS TO GOING TO MIDNIGHT MASS IN ROME FOR EASTER AS A SMALL KID AND OUTRIGHT REFUSING TO KISS THE FEET OF THE CROSS WHEN IT WAS PARADED ROUND BECAUSE EVEN AS A CHILD THAT FELT WEIRDLY-FETISHISTIC, PT.2:  

• Pencilbooth: You know how we have very much reached podcast saturation point? Yeah, well, probably also newsletters too if I’m honest with you – I think I’m currently at a point of receiving approximately 35 a day at the moment, and, even as someone whos tolerance for ‘having a violent quantity of information fired at their eyeballs’ is reasonably high I think that I might be reaching my upper limit. Still, such obvious, pathetic gatekeeping aside, I appreciate that there may be some people with CREATIVE ASPIRATIONS who might still like the idea of having an occasional missive to send into the void, but who might equally have previously been put off by the whole ‘writing’ thing – well Pencilbooth is for you, in that case! This is a new newslettering platform which has been designed to be visual-first – so if you want to send a monthly email blast featuring your drawings, say, or curated works that you have found, this might be an interesting (and aesthetically-worthwhile) platform to explore. It’s paid, obviously, but at $29 a month for lists with fewer than 5000 subs that strikes me as a not-unreasonable cost (and there’s a free tier for upto 100 people, which strikes me as perfect for people who just want to keep their friends and family updated with, say, their photos or their DREADFUL INSTAPOETRY).
• GPT4All: Want to download your own LLM onto your own machine and fiddle around with the great unknowable black box that is current-gen AI? GREAT! This is a pretty good place to start if you’re curious – this is techy, but also nowhere NEAR as techy as it can be, and it’s actually pretty userfriendly from an installation point of view: “GPT4All is an ecosystem to train and deploy powerful and customized large language models that run locally on consumer grade CPUs. The goal is simple – be the best instruction tuned assistant-style language model that any person or enterprise can freely use, distribute and build on. A GPT4All model is a 3GB – 8GB file that you can download and plug into the GPT4All open-source ecosystem software. Nomic AI supports and maintains this software ecosystem to enforce quality and security alongside spearheading the effort to allow any person or enterprise to easily train and deploy their own on-edge large language models.” You will need a reasonably powerful rig to make this work without it bricking your machine, to be clear – still, if you want to futz around with making your own personal digital slave that lives on your machine and does your bidding, HERE YOU ARE!
• Make Your Pet: Oh I love this! A YouTube channel which seemingly exists for the sole purpose of helping people build their own, slightly-unsettling, 3d-printed, many-legged scuttling robot! Fine, you’ll need to be in the 0.001% of the global population that has access to a working 3d printer (remember when 3d printing was going to be a thing and usher in the first wave of post-scarcity economics? Man was I stupid to believe in all that!) and you’ll need to be the sort of person for whom the prospect of ‘soldering stuff to a motherboard’ and talk of ‘servos’ isn’t total anathema, but if you’re significantly more practical and engineer-y than, say, me, you will find a lot to love here. For the right type of person (or the wrong type, potentially, from their partner’s point of view) this is a whole new obsession waiting to happen.
• The British Wildlife Photography Awards 2024: MORE PICTURES OF THE CRITTERS! It’s quite hard to find anything to feel particularly proud of at the moment from a ‘being British’ point of view, but we do at least have some very pretty wildlife – or at least we do now, before the final sewers overflow and all the rivers are forever irrevocably bemerded. Still, while we wait for that fecal apocalypse to overtake us, why not take a moment to enjoy these genuinely beautiful pictures of local fauna – these are SUCH great photos, with a wonderful range of subjects and styles. My personal favourite is the one with the badger (you’ll know the one I mean), but they are all gorgeous.
• Flagwaver: A website which does nothing other than show you a flag, rendered in 3d and fluttering in an imaginary digital breeze – you can replace the image on the flag with an image of WHATEVER YOU LIKE, and so I am including it because I quite like the idea of using it as a way of gently trolling people who have chosen to take inexplicably-strong positions on something really dumb; there’s something quite pleasing about the idea of making a really shit ‘flag’ in MS Paint saying “NO TO WOKE FOOTBALL KITS” and flying it proudly on a digital background to point out how incredibly fcuking pathetic it is.
• Vision Unbound: This feels like a companion to the HTML review – certainly the four works collected here wouldn’t be out of place in that collection, seeing as they cover similar themes of the interplay between words and digital form. Vision Unbound is “an exhibition taking place during Women’s History Month, that honors the genius of four women—Melody Mou Peijing, Amira Hanafi, Priti Pandurangan, and Marisa Parham—whose art challenges us to rethink the possibilities of the digital medium and our perspective of the world.” Ok, so one of the works is in Arabic and as such I can only marvel at the beauty of the webwork and the script, but the other three are gorgeous (and not new – slightly disappointed in myself that I hadn’t seen them before). In particular I enjoyed the interplay between voice-over and animation in “Meghadūtam” by Priti Pandurangan, but you will have your own favourite (you’d better).
• Moai In Games: Have you ever thought to yourself “you know what? I wish someone, somewhere, was undertaking a selfless quest to exhaustively catalogue all the instances in which a Maoi – one of those massive stone heads from Easter Island – appears in a videogame?” OF COURSE YOU HAVE, WHO HASN’T, NO FCUKER THAT’S WHO! Thank God, then, for this website which is doing EXACTLY THAT – here you will find a list of seemingly hundreds of titles which at some point have featured a Maoi, even if fleetingly, along with screenshotted (and occasionally YouTubed) evidence. Why? According to the FAQ, ‘because Maoi are awesome’, which feels like all the justification one really needs here.
• Trangram: No, not a typo. My regular ‘link nicked from Giuseppe’ of the week comes in the shape of this rather useful webtool for creating simple animations in-browser; obviously this is a LONG WAY from anything I am ever going to use (images scare me, what can I say? LEAVE ME ALONE WITH MY WORDS) but it looks like it might actually be pretty flexible and useful for any of you who have the creative talent and visual acuity to actually make something.
• Nobody Sausage: I was sent this on Twitter by Paulina Mitelsztedt – THANKYOU PAULINA – and she’s right, it *is* funny. Nobody Sausage is a Twitter account (I presume it’s multiplatform, but fcukit, we’re sticking with Twitter) featuring short CG animations of vaguely-sausage-like humanoids (yes, I know, but it makes sense in context) having ‘relatably funny experiences’ which I know sounds about as likely to be my ‘thing’ as ‘taking a cheesegrater to my knees’ but whose gently-Mr Bean-ish Eurohumour (I think it’s a Spanish thing) amused me more than expected, thanks in part to the (genuinely charming) character models and animation style.
• Movie Posters Perfected: I’ve honestly never met an actual human being who owns a ‘digital display frame’, but I presume that some must exist – I can’t imagine for a second that any of them are the types of people to read Web Curios, but in the vanishingly-unlikely scenario that YOU, gentle reader, are in possession of such a thing AND you really, really like film posters from the past then BOY do I have the link for you! Movie Posters Perfected sells itself as “a curated collection of digital movie posters—from today’s blockbusters to classic films. As a live, cloud-based library, you never have to lift a finger to add new posters. The moment we add a new poster to our library, it automatically appears on your connected display”, and, well, it certainly does appear to have a lot of film posters. Apparently they’ve all been touched up and optimised for hi-def display, and given the fact that the site’s promising you access to the collection IN PERPETUITY (I do not believe this) for a mere $20, this feels like a non-terrible deal for the gadget-obsessed movie buff in your life (should you not have one of those in your life, you can probably skip this one).
• The AI Minecraft Challenge: Are any of you really into coding, AI AND Minecraft? No, didn’t think so. Still, maybe you know someone who is – I think this is a really interesting contest and I am genuinely curious to see what ends up coming out of it. “The Settlement Generation Challenge is about writing an algorithm that can create a settlement for a given, unknown Minecraft map. The challenge is to produce an algorithm that is adaptive towards the provided map, creates a settlement that satisfies a range of functional requirements – but also looks good and evokes an interesting narrative. The goal is to basically produce an algorithm that can rival the state of the art of what humans can produce. So far there have been 5 iterations of the challenge: once in 2018, and in 2019, in 2020, in 2021 and in 2023. You can watch the presentation for last years winner’s”.Now I’ve never played Minecraft and don’t have a particular personal interest in it, but I scrubbed through the 2023 winners video and the stuff being generated here is pretty astonishing and suggests that even if narrative game development’s a way away from being upended by The Machine we’re going to see some really interesting leaps in what’s possible with procgen and algorithmic worldbuilding.
• LightTwist: This is VERY beta, and there’s not an awful lot of info up on the site beyond the demo video, for which reason I’m appending a very big ‘THIS MIGHT IN FACT ALL BE B0LLOCKS’ notice to the link – still, the aforementioned video certainly *looks* impressive, and the basic premise of LightTwist (“we let you do pro-quality greenscreen work using just your phone and browser, which means that you can effectively start doing ‘studio-quality’ (hm) broadcast work from your own bedroom without a bunch of super-fancy kit”) seems like an obviously attractive one in the CREATOR AGE (so tired).
• Bad Movies: Slightly amazed that I haven’t apparently featured this before, but, well, apparently not. Still, better late than never (I am disgusted with myself) – Bad Movies is, as you might possibly have guessed, a site dedicated to celebrating films that are, objectively, bad. There are reviews, there are screenshots, there are links to buy and watch some of them, and were it not for this wonderful trove of cinephilic information I would never have learned that someone once greenlit, financed and filmed an actual cinematic release called ‘Nude On The Moon’, in which man goes to space and discovers it is covered in naked (or at least topless) women. It is FULL of this stuff, and if you’re a particular type of person I have your next ‘newsletter or film club project’ RIGHT HERE (but, per an earlier link, maybe not the newsletter, eh?). BONUS OBSCURE FILM CONTENT! This is RareLust, “a personal project started  in 2012 to keep rare flick rips alive freely and stop sellers who sell these movies at insane price”, and which features links to rips of HUNDREDS of (incredibly fcuking obscure and in all likelihood often probably terrible) films. You want somewhere to get a torrent of ‘Ninja Zombie’, a 1992 film in which “Orlan Sands is threatened by an evil spider-themed karate cult seeking the location of an archaeological dig unearthing a rare magical artefact”? OF COURSE YOU FCUKING DO!
• TokiPona: Do you speak Esperanto? No, you don’t, stop lying. Still, if you DO fancy taking up a synthetic language, and if the desperately-uncool vibes that Esperanto has always given off have put you off somewhat, why not explore TokiPona, which is not only FAR cuter-sounding but has apparently been around for a decade or so, contains only 137 words and is the work of a SINGLE PERSON! I think this is astonishing and honestly quite beautiful – leaving aside whether or not you think we ‘need’ an additional synthetic language (and, parenthetically, fcuk you and your tediously instrumental view of the world), there’s something hugely interesting about the attempt to distil meaning into a deliberately small and constrained quantity of signifiers. Maybe I’ll start offering Curios translated into TokiPona.
• List of Rejected Icelandic Female Names: I both adore this and am baffled by it. According to the webpage, “In Iceland only names which appear on the Personal Names Register are allowed to use. Other names cannot be used, but it is possible to apply to a committee for permission to use a name which is not yet listed. The committee does not accept every name. A name submitted to the naming committee for approval is considered for its compatibility with Icelandic tradition and for the likelihood that it might cause the bearer embarrassment. It must be compatible with Icelandic grammar and contain only letters occurring in the Icelandic alphabet. A name’s grammatical gender must match the sex of the person bearing the name. There are occasional exceptions, e.g. if a name has traditionally been used by a certain number of Icelanders.” This, therefore, is a list of all the rejected names, ones which you shouldn’t bother trying to register because, well, they’re already on the banned list. WHY ARE YOU NOT ALLOWED TO BE CALLED ‘KELLY’ IN ICELAND? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ‘MAXINE’? Honestly, are any of you Icelandic? Does anyone fancy explaining this to me properly, because I am honestly baffled. Oh, the root url of this webpage is a site dedicated solely to Nordic names – no idea why, but if you’re writing a scandi noir and want to make sure that all of your clinically-depressed characters have authentic monikers then this might be helpful.
• Riddler: Start with one word, get to a different word by changing each of the initial word’s letters, one at a time – this is a daily puzzle, with the challenge not so much ‘can you solve it?’ as ‘how quickly can you do it, you miserable worm?’ which adds a pleasing element of ‘against the clock’ tension to what’s a nice potential addition to the daily pre-work procrastination round.
• You Are Laika: Finally this week, a small text adventure in which you play as Laika, the first dog to be sent to space. This is BRUTAL, I have to warn you, but also incredibly effective – I know this is quite a w4nky observation, but I have a real thing for ‘interactive fictions’ which play with one’s expectations about player agency as an integral part of the narrative (sorry – I did say it was w4nky, though). But, mainly, it is utterly, utterly brutal – if this doesn’t in some way affect you then you have a heart of absolute stone and frankly I think you should possibly be on some sort of list. Many of you will absolutely bawl your eyes out at this, so, er, there’s a reason to click! Fcuking hell I am bad at this.

By Yana Olen

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS EXCELLENT AND PLEASINGLY-HARD TECH-HOUSE SET FROM MHA IRI! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Vallesia Obscura: VERY GOTH-Y HALLOWE’EN-Y AI IMAGES! Basically everything on here looks EXACTLY like the very specific sort of visual style that every single vampirey horror film seemed to aspire to in the mid-00s (that isn’t as much of a cuss as I appreciate it sounds), with a light dash of Tim Burton and that poor dead guy with all the bones tatted on his face.
• X New Worlds: “I’m Suze, a London based visual artist experimenting with surreal and absurd dreamscapes” – so runs the bio on this feed, which presents fragments of work combining AI-generated imagery with more traditional editing software to make…fcuk, I LOVE this, it is creepy and horrible, but not in the way that so much AI stuff is and therefore in ways that are INTERESTING and unpredictable, and there’s something about what’s being done with movement in these films and images that feels wrong in a really pleasing way. This is significantly more interesting than the vast majority of work being made with AI at the moment, imho at least.
• The Sketchymaker: The insta feed of an Aberdeen-based artist who makes 3d printed, or concrete-cast, models and sculptures, featuring things like LEGO minifigs, and places them around the city as public art and a general ‘here’s a surprisingly lovely thing’ bonus for residents (that’s not all he does – there’s other work there too, though it all tends towards the pop culturally-scultptural) – this is just LOVELY.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Pierre Huyghe

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: