Webcurios 22/09/23

I was going to try and write the intro in the style of Russell Brand this week as a sort of ‘topical’ riff, but then I realised that a) that wouldn’t actually be funny in the slightest given the horrible stuff he’s alleged to have done; and b) that the rest of Curios is already written in a style that might best be described as ‘somewhat overdone’ and that you probably didn’t need me doing a tuppeny-gorblimey act on top of all the garbage that is to come. You should be grateful, really – think how much WORSE this could have been!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you shouldn’t EVER trust ANYONE who wears trousers that tight.

By Julie Tuyet Curtiss

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC WITH TYCHO’S SUNRISE SET FROM THIS YEAR’S BURNING MAN, WHICH AS IT DOES EACH YEAR MAKES ME BRIEFLY THINK THAT IT MIGHT BE QUITE NICE TO GO BEFORE I THINK A BIT MORE AND REALISE IT WOULD IN FACT BE DREADFUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOUR FIRST RESPONSE TO THE BRAND STUFF IS ‘YES, BUT HOW CAN I USE THIS TO FCUK THE BBC?’ THEN YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, PT.1:  

By Virginia Villacisna

OUR NEXT MUSICAL DELIGHT IS THE POSTHUMOUS ALBUM BY ONE OF MY FAVOURITE EVER BANDS, SPARKLEHORSE, WHICH IS SAD AND BEAUTIFUL AND VERY VERY GOOD! 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF YOUR FIRST RESPONSE TO THE BRAND STUFF IS ‘YES, BUT HOW CAN I USE THIS TO FCUK THE BBC?’ THEN YOU ARE A BAD PERSON, PT.2:  

• Stained Glass: I’ve always thought that I’d quite like to spend a few days making stained glass – getting high off the lead fumes, maybe illuminating some manuscripts in my spare time…sadly I am yet to receive the call from the Abbot (that’s how it works, right?), and so I’m having to make do with this digital version, which is very pleasing indeed and which lets you click to create your own variegated glass masterpieces, and which I highly recommend you use with the volume up as the sound of breaking/snapping glass that accompanies your every click here is just *delicious*. This is very, very therapeutic, so maybe save this for Monday morning when you might need it a bit more.
• The Vulgar Wave: This is a couple of months old now, but it did the rounds again this week in the wake of the Brand stuff and the reevaluation it seemed to spark amongst the British media of the 00s and the very particular way in which popular culture manifested itself across media for a good five years or so – specifically, the way it was characterised by prurient sexuality and a sort of general grubbiness. The link takes you to a Twitter thread which pulls together various examples of The Way Things Were Then and WOW do some of these hit differently at a distance of 15 years or so – any of you who aren’t from the UK really should take a moment to enjoy this selection of clips from TV shows, old adverts and the odd music video, which really give you a feel for the prevailing mood of the era. This is a hell of a selection which runs the gamut from accepted classics of the genre (Rebecca Loos masturbates a pig to happy completion on English TV!) to deep cuts (an advert featuring an unpleasantly-sexualised talking boiler!) and gives a pleasingly-lumpy picture of the odd cultural topography of The Past (and, possibly, a clue as to why the generations that grew up during and immediately after this period are perhaps a touch more censorious than their forebears).
• All The Poe: This is a great resource – all Edgar Allen Poe, all in once place, pulled together by one Joshua Maldin, who writes: “This is a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, some 130 pieces, presented with optimized legibility and no ads or trackers.” What more could you possibly want? If nothing else this site looks sufficiently sober that you could probably get away with spending a significant chunk of the day just reading Poe short stories in the office without anyone realising.
• Couture To The Max: What were YOU doing at 7? I expect you can’t remember, what with it being a fcuking AGE ago (so OLD, so decrepit, so close to death!), but I’d hazard a rough guess that it probably involved a bit of school, a bit of playing, and an obsessional interest in something like dinosaurs or Polly Pocket – which, frankly, demonstrates exactly the sort of crippling lack of ambition and long-term goal setting which has seen you end up where you are. Contrast yourself with Max Alexander, who at the tender age of not-even-8 has already, er, established himself as an actual fashion designer and had a runway show in LA. This is Max’s website, which I am sharing with you because…well, in all honesty, because there’s something sort of wildly-sinister about the whole thing. I mean, just read this: “Max Alexander was born in 2016 in Los Angeles, California to a Canadian father and American mother. He graduated from Little Dolphins by the Sea, an arts-based preschool, in 2021. During his time there, he was heavily influenced by the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Yayoi Kusama, Frida Kahlo and Alexander Calder. Max announced to his family in 2020 that he was a dress maker. Encouraged by his mother, also an artist, Max began designing, draping and sewing, and launched his Couture to the Max label in 2021.” I mean, fine, it is of course entirely possible that Max is an intensely-precocious genius and that he really WAS influenced by the luminaries there named; it’s, er, at least *equally* possible, though, that his parent(s) have seen an opportunity here and have grabbed it hard with both hands while their eyes do that creepy Scrooge McDuck dollar signs thing. The quote from People Magazine – “Boy, 7, Who Says He Was Gucci in a Past Life” – doesn’t *scream* ‘normal child’, and if you scroll down to the bottom and see Max’s designs you may be…confused as to the adulation being apparently bestowed upon him. Still, whatever is going on here I think it’s fair to say that it’s unlikely that poor Max is the driving force behind it, and as such let us wish him well in his pursuit of couture glory (and in the inevitable, messy process of divorcing his family which I predict will kick off around 2029).
• Antique Book Patterns: Via Kottke, these are lovely – a Flickr album, compiled by the University of Bergen in Norway, which compiles the patterned endpages of a selection of books published between 1890-1930. Which, fine, you might not immediately think of as being a gorgeous aesthetic treasure trove, but you would be WRONG because that is exactly what it is. SO much excellent design inspiration in here for any of you who are interested in that sort of thing.
• Simulation: This is interesting – you remember that ‘AI Showrunner’ from a few months ago, that software which purported to let anyone spin up an entire AI-generated episode of a TV show based on a few simple parameters? OF COURSE YOU DO! Well the company behind the tech has been doing some press this week, which is how I stumbled across its website, and WOW is this simultaneously very scifi and also very creepy and pretty unbelievable! The pitch the company’s making is effectively that it can create AI ‘agents’ which can operate with a degree of autonomy within a defined virtual environment – so you can effectively set up your sandbox, invent your principal players, wind them up and watch them go. “At Simulation Inc, we’re redefining the contours of existence, conjuring a universe where the line between the physical and the virtual blurs into oblivion. Our mission, as audacious as it is intriguing, is to birth a new kind of life: the world’s first genuinely intelligent AI virtual beings. Each one, a mirror of the human psyche, navigating the tumultuous seas of emotions and experiences in a digital cosmos of our creation.” Exactly how The Simulation think that that is going to magically going to result in compelling narratives that people actually want to watch is, at present, unclear, but it’s worth watching the videos on the website landing page to get a feel for the madly-overblown way they talk about the simulated agents and their ‘freedom’ to act independent of direction – scroll down to the bottom of the Page to discover the three formats that the company is apparently working on right now, which run the gamut from, er, space scifi to space cowboy scifi to ‘planet of the apes, basically’ scifi, and sigh quietly as you realise that we are apparently condemned to consume the same media forever (just AI-generated and, probably, worse).
• Nuclear War Simulator: Have you ever wanted to run an incredibly-detailed simulation of what exactly would happen if the people with access to the nuclear buttons all simultaneously decided to say ‘oh, fcuk it, we’re all screwed anyway, we may as well use these fcuking warheads’ and set them racing across the skies? GREAT! Nuclear War Simulator lets you do exactly that – it’s a PROPER piece of software and as such requires a download, but once you’ve installed it you have SO MUCH POWER at your fingertips! “Nuclear war simulator is a detailed realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the questions: what will happen if Russia and the United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals? What will happen to the population of a country in a nuclear war? What will happen to me and my family? You can design warheads, missiles, and carriers, place them on the map and execute attack plans to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what the consequences are. Using a high-resolution population density map and realistic weapons effects like blast, heat, and radiation you can make an estimate of how many people will die in a conflict. Individual humans can be placed on the map, travel, and take shelter to analyze the effects and estimate injuries and survival probability.” You might argue that this is all a bit macabre – and you’d probably be right, but, be honest, who hasn’t wanted to make the massed ranks of the world’s populations run for cover, like ants from the glare of a magnifying glass, as terrifying thermonuclear death rains from the skies? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Are You A Voicecel?: No, you are not, because it is a made-up concept that doesn’t exist! Still, if you are a man and want another reason to feel slightly-inadequate then why not upload a clip of yourself speaking to this website which will apparently then analyse your voice and tell you whether or not it is ‘squeaky and unaesthetic’. This has obviously been made by some very confused young men and as such one probably shouldn’t point and laugh but, well, LOL! LADS HAVE YOU EVER ACTUALLY HEARD FAMED INTERNATIONAL SEX SYMBOL DAVID BECKHAM SPEAK? Anyway, try it out for yourself and see if you too can attain the exalted status of ‘certified chad’ based on, er, having a deep voice. Dear God I am SO GLAD I am not a teenager in 2023.
• The Metamorphosis: Or, specifically, ‘a not particularly good attempt at creating a short film based on Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ using text-to-video AI tools’ – this is obviously a complete mess because, well, the tech is nowhere near good enough to produce anything other than a hideous, inchoate mass of indeterminate shapes, but at the same time there’s the odd frame here and there among the five minute runtime that hints at some sort of potentially-interesting aesthetic and stylistic possibilities beginning to be thrown up by these systems – quite a few of the shots have a very distinct ‘cut scene from a late-90s PC game’ feel to them which I find oddly appealing.
• RailCams: Do you like trains? Do you like trains A LOT? Frankly if the answer is ‘yes’ then it’s entirely possible that you’ll already be aware of this site which is an INSANELY comprehensive directory of train-related webcams from around the world, over 450 of them to be precise. Want to watch freight trains slowly moving backwards and forwards just outside Zurich? OF COURSE YOU DO! Want to spend a bit of time checking out what’s happening on the platforms at Riomaggiore in Italy? I MEAN, YES! My word, then, is there a set of train-based treats in store for you.
• Unusual Internet: I really like this – Unusual Internet is a site that collects examples of less-than-typical user interfaces, displaying them in a manner that itself is somewhat unusual: “The interfaces of most websites follow the same design principles over and over again. In short, websites tend to look the same. The interfaces are simplified, the design is standardised. We rarely come across provocative or unusual interfaces. Designers should experiment more and try something new. Out of the comfort zone and into the unusual. To achieve this, the »Unusual Internet« course took a close look at UI elements (buttons, typography, scrolling, etc.). Students experimented with these elements on a weekly basis. A selection of the experiments can be seen here.” There are some lovely examples buried in here – you have to click around a bit, but there are a few wonderful examples of interesting and unusual webdesign to explore (including this one, which is my personal favourite I think).
• Interpreted: Ooh, I really like this – an art project which combines the analogue and the digital to rather beautiful effect, with artist Jonny Scholes creating woven tapestries depicting an entire day’s news as interpreted by an AI: “Drawing on a decade of experience as a software developer, Scholes has created an automated program which continually reviews all news articles as they are published around the world. An AI tool is employed to create a single image that represents each day. Using generative art techniques, the days are collected into months, and incorporated into a unique tapestry design. The result is autonomously sent off to be woven and eventually delivered by post to Jonny Scholes’ studio.” The resulting tapestries, which you can see on the site, have a wonderfully deep-fried quality which links them back to the digital materials that were the starting point for their creation, and there’s something rather beautiful about the oddly-70s-ish aesthetic contrasted with the modernity of the tech at play here. Some of the work’s available for sale, should anyone fancy saying thanks for a decade of words and links by buying me a lovely tapestry gift.
• Timelineify: Listen to an artist’s catalogue in chronological order thanks to this Spotify tool – NO, YOU’RE WELCOME!
• Learn To Code With LinkedIn: We are, thankfully, now at a distance of a decade from the boom in ‘LEARN TO CODE!’ exhortations, and people are now a little more realistic about the employment prospects available to you as a result of your being able to code some basic HTML and Java – what with the imminent AI-ifinication of a significant proportion of the bottom end of the dev market it’s perhaps not QUITE the career silver bullet you might have been sold back in the day, but, equally, having a basic working knowledge of How Some Of This Stuff Works is genuinely useful (I say that as someone who can’t write a fcuking line, by the way, but who can just about understand the principles behind it). Should you have decided that NOW IS THE TIME for you to finally master the Dark Arts (not THOSE ones ffs) then you could do worse than check out this selection of free learning resources available of the world’s worst social network – this is available til mid-December, so there’s plenty of time for you to give it a go.
• A Trillion Tiny Little Poems: This is rather lovely. The developer describes it as such: “a trillion / quite tiny / little poems generates untold billions of quite tiny little poems in a miniature haiku format of 4 then 3 then 4 syllables…or at least it tries too but sometimes the source poems get their meter completely wrong for reasons i am simply unable to explain (reason/explanation: i am quite poor at poems)…rather than a trillion tiny poems there’s only 5,268,024, but maybe 5,268,024 is the secret definition of a quite tiny little trillion or somethging, maybe, perhaps, possibly. anyway occassionally it blurts out something surprisingly beautiful though more often as not it just churns out rubbish” Many of these are gibberish, but that makes the occasional glimpse of meaning that crops up even more special – I just got this, and may now get it tattooed somewhere intimate: “some poems were / bleak roses / quite the relief”
• The British Seaside Simulator: Published just too late to make last week’s Curios, this is the latest bit of silliness from Matt Round who has coded a web EXPERIENCE that lets you enjoy the peculiar purgatory that is the British seaside – specifically, the British seaside as experienced from the inside of a slightly-too-warm estate car in which you are having a desultory ‘picnic’ (limp, sweaty cheese sandwiches on wholemeal bread) as the horizontal rain beats across your windscreen and the sound of a provincial radio DJ whimpers tinnily into your ears. This is really beautifully-observed (the radio stations in particular are a lovely touch), although it’s so intensely well-realised that you might find it…a bit depressing tbh.
• Fridge Floppers: Move the fridge. That’s it. No more, no less. MOVE THE FRIDGE! This is a very enjoyable little puzzle game which has a pleasingly-kinetic feel to the controls and movement.
• Pacman The Roguelike: What might Pacman look like were it designed now, and had all the needless bells and whistles of the modern triple-A game experience grafted onto its basic gameplay? It might look a little like this tbh – a really smart play on the traditional Pacman which adds pointless joke mechanics like ‘companions’ and ‘crafting’ and ‘levelling’ which initially feels like a simple gag but which you realise as you play actually creates a pretty interesting new play experience whilst also working on some level as SATIRE. This is far better than it needs to be, and a really fun way of killing 30 minutes before you can get to the pub/back on the pipe (delete per your personal preferences).
• Connections: You know the Only Connect ‘wall’ game which the NYT ripped off earlier this year? YES YOU DO STOP LYING TO ME! This website lets you make your own, bespoke versions of the game to share with friends – select your categories, select your words, and then share the link with anyone you fancy to see whether they’re smart enough to crack your doubtless-fiendish conundra. If any of you fancy making one of these and sharing it with me, I can chuck it in next week’s Curios for THE COMMUNITY to test themselves against.
• A Little Game Called Mario: This is an interesting idea – a collaborative project to create a fan-made Mario-a-like game, with the twist that the code repo is open which means anyone can go in and tweak the gameplay, level design, etc, making the whole thing a massively-collaborative endeavour. The resulting title is a messy combination of trad Mario mechanics and a lot of VERY HARD platforming bits (and, bizarrely, a level that appears to have been inspired by Dance Dance Revolution) including quite a lot of bullet-hell-style bits; basically this is an exercise in level design sadism and experimental, barely-functional mechanics, but it’s fascinating to see how the different people across the community approach level creation. There are LOADS of different examples of creative design in here, so it’s worth having a bit of an explore and a play with a range of different levels to get a feel for it.
• Ad Nauseam: Finally this week, via Rosie & Faris, comes this rather fun little platformer themed around working in an ad agency. SHOOT THE CLIENT! DODGE THE FEEDBACK! SEE IF YOU CAN LEAVE THE OFFICE BEFORE MIDNIGHT DURING A PITCH WEEK! This is rather good, and you should 100% dedicate 20m or so to trying to complete it.

By Jonas Örtemark

WE CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS FRANKLY-UNSEASONAL BUT STILL VERY GOOD SELECTION OF DISCO-Y-FUNKY-HOUSE-TYPE NUMBERS MIXED BY FLAMINGO PIER!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Supinatra: Impressive-if-creepy-and-a-bit-body-horror-y makeup and accessory design by Russian artist Maria Luneva (via Blort).
• Surface of Wikipedia: Created to act as a sort of a negative impression of the storied ‘Depths of Wikipedia’, this Insta account instead celebrates the incredibly mundane on Wikipedia – you will be genuinely amazed at some of the things documented here that apparently have Wikipedia pages (the concept of ‘something’, for example – WHY DOES THAT NEED A WIKIPEDIA PAGE?), and this is another in the long, long list of reasons why Wikipedians are, honestly, some of the most magically-peculiar people on the planet.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Seth Armstrong

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: