I had something of a new professional nadir this week which I feel it might be cathartic to share.
So I was booked to appear on some panel thing by a very corporate company, to talk about AI (I was asked as a result of one of my ‘actual jobs’ – rest assured I wasn’t introduced as ‘Matt Muir, author of a miserably-unpopular newsletter no cnut has ever heard of’). I would like to, in order, apologise to: a) the person who booked me, the brother in law of some good friends of mine, whose career I feel I may have irrevocably fcuked; b) everyone in the audience who perhaps wasn’t expecting one of the panellists to attempt to break some sort of record for uses of the word ‘fcuk’ in an ostensibly-businesslike 45-minute panel discussion; c) everyone in the audience who I managed to inadvertently imply had never done anything in their careers that could be considered better than ‘average’ (and that even that, frankly, was perhaps being generous to them). I am sorry to all of you. There is possibly a lesson to be taken from this, but I have spent the past three days attempting to drink the memory away and so it’s probably lost to me by now.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably wondering whether I am available to speak at your event and the answer is a resounding ‘yes’!
By André Palais
THE SECTION WHICH MET JOHN PRESCOTT (RIP) ONCE, MANY YEARS AGO, AND WHICH WAS SUBJECTED BY HIM TO ONE OF THOSE WEIRD CHEEK PINCH THINGS THAT GRANDPARENTS DO, WHICH WAS FRANKLY QUITE WEIRD AS I WAS 22 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME AND WE WERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT, PT.1:
- AI Shopping: Another week, another edition of Curios in which I feel compelled to lead with an AI thing (SORRY) because, well, I think it’s more interesting than wanging on about that fcuking car rebrand. Perplexity very quietly this week announced something that feels…quite ‘disruptive’ (lol) – in-app, one-click shopping! Users in the US can now (well, now-ish – I’m not 100% sure if this is live live, but it should be imminently) not only ask Perplexity’s AI search engine to recommend products – it can now give them the opportunity to buy said recommended products directly through the Perplexity interface. Which, let’s be clear, is quite astonishing and does rather scream “YOUR DAYS ARE FCUKING NUMBERED, KIDS” to the entire SEO industry as it currently exists. There is, of course, no detail whatsoever about exactly how The Machine is going to decide upon which products are worth your dollars – there’s talk on the page here about them pulling in data from ‘sources’ to inform recommendation decisions including ‘reviews from all over the internet’, but there’s no indication of which, or weighting, or basically anything that will let manufacturers know how the fcuk to best induce the unknowable abacus within the black box to recommend *their* widget over their competitors’ (there’s a specific reference to Shopify data here, but it’s one vector of many I think and there’s nothing beyond that to draw conclusions from). Welcome, then, to an exciting new era in which a) entire consumer trends are set to be driven by invisible maths; and b) a whole new industry of appalling LinkedIn cnuts will emerge, promising to get YOUR products and services primacy within the great AI recommendation lottery. WHAT A GLORIOUS FUTURE! Also, should any of you choose to pursue option b) then please know that I think significantly less of you (and would also like a small cut of future profits thanks).
- A Better Version of the Coca Cola Christmas Ad: So aside from That Fcuking Car Rebrand, the other big advermarketingpr discourse of the past week or so has revolved around the world’s premier brand of sugarwater deciding to phone it even more than usual with its festive ad campaign and have the whole thing cobbled together via AI – if you’ve not seen the original aberration you can view it here (but seriously, don’t – it commits the cardinal sins of being not just ugly (cf the aforementioned AI) but also dull as fcuk, given that literally all they did was replicate every single ‘festive coke’ trope, but, well, badly), but rest assured that the version in the main link is SIGNIFICANTLY better, not least as it leans into the weird, facemelting properties of the video for good effect. Anyway, this is a nice, clear example of why this stuff isn’t ready for primetime yet – because, in the main, people fcuking hate it when they see it (so, er, just wait a year or so ;til consumers won’t be able to tell the difference any more and then plough right ahead!).
- Inside Kristallnacht: In the month of the 1938 pogrom which saw Jews across Germany targeted, this site commemorates the events and the stories of those who experienced them through the eyes of Dr Charlotte Knobloch, six at the time of the events. This is a beautifully-made website about a famously bleak moment in the 20thC, comprising an interactive documentary voiced by Knobloch (I think there may be a VR component to this as well if you happen to have the kit), and the ability to ask her (or rather a well-realised avatar of her) questions about her memories and experiences. This is something you watch and sit with rather than play with and bounce off – it’s very, very well-done, historically-resonant, and, obviously, very moving. It also makes an absolute mockery of people attempting to use the word ‘pogrom’ to describe recent events in Amsterdam, to a degree which should feel shameful.
- Virtual St Peter’s: A big few weeks for Vatican Digital (I like to imagine that Vatican Digital is like a small, ‘agile’ agency within the wider monolith of the Holy See, with younger, funkier cardinals in streetwear) – not only have they had to cope with the continuing flood of smut generated by the internet around recently-revealed anime-style mascot Luce, but now they’ve launched this frankly incredible ‘visit St Peter’s from the comfort of your own desktop’ site which lets you, er, do exactly that via the medium of some quite astonishing composite images which have been somehow magicked together by AI (I confess to not having spent too long perusing the tech specs here) into a form that lets you take a virtual tour. Be warned – this REALLY fcuked my laptop something chronic (to the point where I just lost three minutes having to reboot the bstard thing), but I concede that might just be down to my tech being sh1t rather than the weight of the webwork here. Once you get in, though, this really is quite beautiful – St Peter’s really is an astonishing piece of architecture, aside from the religious significance, and while nothing can quite communicate the scale of the place like standing inside it, this does a reasonably good job at communicating how mindfcukingly big it is. Oh, and do make sure you take a moment to use this to check out the Pieta’ by Michelangelo in one corner of the Basilica which, fine, is a great sculpture but one on which he has totally and utterly fcuked the proportion of Christ’s thighbones (he really has!).
- IMG_001: A beautiful example of how modern digital conventions can in small ways shape the world. Per a post by Riley Walz, “Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.” This website pulls from a database of 5million of those videos, presenting a seemingly-infinite stream of videos that noone ever expected to see – videos that don’t matter, that don’t capture magical, marvellous moments, that aren’t beautifully-shot or emotionally-resonant, but instead which are just…life, just odd fragments of footage existing free of context in the great online soup. These are, obviously, mostly entirely banal, but it’s that banality that renders them compelling – that and the randomness of the content, caroming you from place to place, language to language, year to year – and, honestly, it’s all I can do not to just down tools (or, more accurately, rest my weary fingers in some sort of restorative waterbath) and just watch the stream forever. A slightly-bittersweet link, this one – on the one hand, it’s a great project! I like it! On the other, it’s exactly the same as something I featured in Curios two years ago called Astronaut (in this edition, should you be curious) and which made me briefly think ‘oh ffs there is nothing new under the sun, perhaps I should just die’.
- Tee Hee: Ok, this is both AI *and* a tiny bit crypto so I could forgive you for just skipping on, but COME BACK! Tee Hee is another AI agent let loose on Twitter – or at least it purports to be. This is another in the same sort of ecosystem as the crypto-trading bot that’s been juicing the $GOATSE memecoin over the past month or so (a sentence which I am slightly horrified to find makes something resembling actual sense to me) – while I have no interest whatsoever in the strangely-cultish community that’s building up around the idea of autonomously-trading cryptobots, I am VERY interested in AI agents and where they end up and what they get used for; it does feel, to me at least, like next year’s going to be interesting in ways we’re not entirely prepared for when it comes to this sort of thing. Anyway, if you want to read a bit more about the how and the why behind the project you can do so here – there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here about the ‘architecture’ of the autonomy being employed here, should that be the sort of thing you’re curious about.
- Times New Dumba$$: On the one hand, I am increasingly disinclined to give Horrible Apartheid Toad any more publicity than he currently commands (I can only imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth); on the other, how could I resist an email to me which explains “Thought you might appreciate this: Elon does this stupid “X” jump all the time. So we took one of those pictures and warped it into every letter of the alphabet. Now it’s a free font, available for download.” So if you’d like to download and make free use of a font depicting the world’s richest cnut looking like an idiot, now you can! It won’t lessen his increasing stranglehold on much of our world, but, on the plus side, look how silly he looks! Does that make it better? Hm.
- Dustin Brett: OOH this is a GOOD ONE. Dustin Brett is obviously *quite* a talented programmer who’s decide to make his personal website a brilliantly-realised virtual desktop, giving the illusion that you’re effectively inside his computer and browsing his stuff. There are blogs and photos and some soundfiles and some videogame roms and, honestly, this is SO nice to just wander around and explore; there’s something about the desktop interface that lends a pleasing intimacy to what is, at heart, some bloke’s largely-unremarkable webpresence, and there’s a pleasing commitment to the whole thing which means it goes far deeper than it really needs to. Oh, and you can play Doom through it, which should be reason enough to log on for five minutes and shoot some imps.
- Algorithmic Frontiers: I confess to finding this a bit frustrating – I really *wanted* to like it, being as it is at the intersection of AI and fine art, and I do think some of the works here are potentially-interesting, but FCUK ME is this a horribly-designed website and a generally unpleasant navigational experience. This is, basically, a showcase of a dozen works by a dozen artists, each exploring the intersection of AI and creativity and asking questions around representation and bias inherent in all of these nascent systems – per the curatorial note, “The Algorithmic Frontiers includes 12 Digital Stills. The art pieces explore algorithmic art, inspired by data contributed by women/womxn from over 40 countries. The goal of the Exhibit is to counter gender, racial and cultural biases in AI and engage a broader public in conversations about the ethical, legal, cultural, economic, and political implications of Generative AI. It also aims to facilitate the understanding of both the technical and the social policy implications of Generative AI, using a critical approach to AI Art and leveraging it as a civic engagement medium. It is designed to improve confidence in our collective power to intervene in the socio-technical pipeline of AI development and governance.” Which, to be clear, is right up my street! Interesting! Good! But, seriously, click the main link and try and work out what the everliving fcuk is going on here – there are approximately seven different calls to action on the landing page, there are a bunch of different sections which may or may not relate to each other, and significantly more on-page real-estate gets given over to textual analysis of the works versus images of the works themselves, which feels…backwards. Basically this is conceptually-interesting (and several of the resulting images are rather good imho) but an absolute fcuker to navigate, which is something of a shame.
- Peer Review: An excellent little bit of dataviz democracy (well, democracy-ish in this specific case) work by Tortoise here – this is an interactive exploration of the different members of the UK’s upper chamber, the House of Lords, specifically looking at the different archetypes that the peers can be grouped into based on their attendance, voting records, donor status and the like – you can also see details on individual peers’ registered interests, their holdings and any additional paid positions they may have, giving you an easy way of seeing whether or not, for example, they might have a personal vested interest in, say, matters regarding reform of landlording legislation. Of course, what with it being the unelected Upper Chamber there’s actually fcuk-all you can do with any of this information beyond letting it make you a bit angry – you can’t vote the cnuts out, you can only wait for them to die (or for the increasingly-unlikely reform of the bicameral system, but tbh I wouldn’t hold your breath on that front) – but it’s good to have another set of data which you can use to raise your blood pressure should you desire it.
- The Big 3d Bluesky Firehose: Things I learned this week about Bluesky – it is very much in that stage of social media platform growth where users of the platform REALLY like talking about the platform they are posting on. As such, this link was EVERYWHERE this week – it offers you a (really quite dizzying) realtime feed of everything being posted on Bluesky presented as though you’re sort of falling into it (text-only, so no fear that you’ll have a massive furry c0ck hurtling towards your field of vision, fear not), and it’s mesmerising in that familiar, ‘oh my god the sheer weight of people and thought is dizzying’ way (and, in general, there’s something very funny about some of the occasional phrases that get thrown at you – I just opened it to check and saw “tears for breakfast again” scrolling towards me and, well, what can I say, it made me laugh). Oh, and seeing as we’re doing ‘fun things on Bluesky’, here’s all the emoji being posted on the platform, as rainfall, in realtime, and here is a truly heroic build which isolates and reads out every single English language swearword posted as it happens (honestly, I can’t stress how deeply, childishly funny it is to have this open in the background and to have your work soundtracked to the occasional frustrated cry of ‘fcuk!’ or ‘tits!’), and here’s a thread of other examples by Andy Baio which contains a selection of other fun, pointless visualisations you can enjoy while you convince yourself that it’s 2012 all over again. Finally on Bluesky (because, honestly, I really don’t want to hear about it anymore – let’s all use it and SHUT THE FCUK UP ABOUT THE FACT WE ARE USING IT), should you be interested in making bots on the platform then you might want to check out the Bluesky version of Cheap Bots Done Quick, a simple and easy way of spinning up an automated feed from basically nothing. Go! Play! Have fun! BUT PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW COSY AND NICE IT FEELS IT MAKES ME HATE YOU AND WISH PAIN UPON YOU AND YOUR FAMILIES.
- Delete All Your Tweets: Lol, it’s too late, they’ve all been scraped and ingested into Grok. Still, if you’re a code-happy sort and want to expunge all evidence of your presence from Elon’s Nazi Playground then you might find this Github repo useful. Oh, and this lets you port all your tweets INTO Bluesky, although, let’s be clear, this strikes me as quite an astonishingly-hubristic step (“no, they are like the library of Alexandria and I cannot risk this patrimony being lost to humanity”).
- Donate A Poem To Bremerton, Washington: OH GOD I LOVE THIS. Per the form, “My small town of Bremerton, Washington installed this “Leave a Poem, Take a Poem” box during the pandemic, but every time I check it, there’s nothing in there! Let’s change that! Using this form, submit some of your OWN POETRY. I will do the work of printing it out and then head down there to fill the box with your words!” This is so lovely and so pure that I am not even going to attempt to subvert it by submitting my revolutionary work of survivor affirmation “I’m your fcukbucket” for consideration (I feel, on balance, it may not be tonally apt), but I would encourage all of you, talented versifiers, to get your verses in. Who knows, this could be your passport to a life-changing degree of very geographically-specific microcelebrity! In my head this is now the setup for a Hallmark Christmas film in which a struggling poet becomes an unwitting celebrity in a small town half a world away, connecting with the love of his life through the medium of his heartfelt verse (needs work, but, honestly, I reckon there’s a solid 70 minuter in this).
THE SECTION WHICH MET JOHN PRESCOTT (RIP) ONCE, MANY YEARS AGO, AND WHICH WAS SUBJECTED BY HIM TO ONE OF THOSE WEIRD CHEEK PINCH THINGS THAT GRANDPARENTS DO, WHICH WAS FRANKLY QUITE WEIRD AS I WAS 22 YEARS OLD AT THE TIME AND WE WERE IN A PROFESSIONAL CONTEXT, PT.2:
- The Sounds of Disneyland: Web Curios, famously, does not judge its readers, does not look upon your proclivities and perversions with disgust or censorious eyes – wherever you get your jollies is, broadly, fine by me.That is except for those of you who despite being grown adults still fetishise the entertainment products of the Disney machine – you I do judge, plentifully. Still, in the spirit of end-of-year rapprochement I present to you this collection of what I presume is the ambient music that gets piped around the parks, should you want to recreate the vibe in the privacy of your own home/sanatorium – know, though, that I think you are WEIRD.
- Exoroad: An interesting data-led map of the US, which lets you adjust a bunch of sliders and settings to identify which parts of the country meet specific criteria you’ve specified – so house price ranges, say, or crime rates, or population density or…oh, or ‘ethnicity’, which all of a sudden feels…less good, frankly, and makes me think this is just designed to be used by people who want to live in places where they know they can exclude both the poor and those they find ethnically distasteful. So, actually, on further reflection I sort-of feel bad about linking this, but on the flipside it’s a really interesting combination of different datasets which, if you squint, probably aren’t *definitely* going to be used to perpetuate regional segregation. Probably.
- Memento Movi: Want to have the inevitable fact of your own mortality communicated to you via the reassuring medium of your favourite films? GREAT! Memento Movie asks you to tell it your age, to pick a movie (from an annoyingly uncomprehensive list), and to guess at your likely lifespan (ngl, this question spun me out slightly – are we talking what I *think* I’m going to get to? Or what I get to given the choice? Because let me tell you there are some VERY different numbers at play there), and it will then, with nary a second’s thought, present you with the EXACT frame from said film which corresponds to where you are in the Great Journey of Life. Apparently I am currently at a relatively nondescript scene about ⅔ of the way through The Princess Bride, which feels about right tbh.
- Terms of Service: A USEFUL AND POSITIVE USE OF AI THAT FEELS LIKE A NET BENEFIT TO PEOPLE! I know! Amazing! This is actually a really, really good idea and feels like something that might usefully be lifted by a ‘consumer champion’ brand anywhere in the world because, well, it’s just a good and useful idea. The website’s actually called TOSAbout (but that’s a horrible name, so let’s not mention it again), and exists to offer an easy-to-parse overview of the terms of service of a selection of major tech platforms, from Adobe to Zoom and everything inbetween – said terms are given a topline rating from 1-7 (7 being ‘amazingly not totally cnuty’ and 1 being ‘by ticking the checkbox you have surrendered your rights in this and three subsequent lifetimes, and your offspring will be used for glue’) and for those who want more detail as to the specific iniquities being foisted upon the user there are also AI-generated summaries giving an overview of the (rarely) good, the (far more prevalent) bad and the (inevitable) ugly. Smart, useful, helpful, and a near-perfect use of LLMs which I am slightly disappointed with all of you for not having come up with already tbqhwy.
- Jamcorder: Ooh, this is an interesting idea – I am negatively-talented, musically-speaking, so have no idea whether this is actually something useful or not, but I am intrigued by the concept. The Jamcorder (can we maybe rethink the name though lads? It’s…well, it’s sh1t isn’t it?) is a small device that’s designed to attach to your keyboard via the MIDI socket and which basically transcribes EVERYTHING you play in hypercompressed format, meaning you can record, they say, 25,000 hours of music on one device. That is…a lot of keyboard noodling. While it’s fair to say that not EVERY one of those 25k hours will be packed with Beethoven-level output, for anyone whose musical working practice is basically ‘sit at the piano and fcuk around’ I can imagine this being an invaluable way of mapping and tracking the creative process and ensuring that your ‘notes’, so to speak, are never lost.
- Words Like This: Another poetry-related Curios, this is a lovely little site put together by…two people in Australia (hello, mysterious pair of Australians, should you ever see this!) which is designed solely to present poetry they think is good, simply and appealingly, in a manner intended to let the words and the work speak for themselves, The presentation is simple – nicely-arranged text on block-colour backgrounds, a different background colour for each poem – and for reasons that escape me it really works presentationally and contextually; I think this is a lovely way to read verse, and I enjoyed the ‘about’ section, where they talk about the project and why they do it, very much indeed: “Words Like This presents beautiful passages of poetry in a beautiful, contemporary way. There will be no use of technical terms like ‘personification’ or ‘quatrains’ here. No lengthy analysis or historical perspective of the poetry or the poets who wrote them. Sure, context can be important in helping to understand a poem, but that removes from the visceral or primal (two other good words) response that we have to hearing our language spoken out loud or in our minds. Poetry is really just about words like this.” LOVELY, and I mean that is a nice rather than ‘damning with faint praise’ sort of way.
- The COlour Literacy Project: Do you want to know more about colour as a concept, and to get better at exploring what it signifies, communicates and connotes? OF COURSE YOU DO YOU ARE NOT MADE OF WOOD FFS! “The Colour Literacy Project is a 21st century initiative that recognizes colour as a meta-discipline. Our mission is to provide state-of-the-art educational resources that strengthen the bridges between the sciences, arts, design and humanities in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. Fluency with the language of colour sharpens our visual intelligence, expands our perceptions, and enhances our ability to communicate.” This feels very much aimed at the artistic educational establishment, or at practitioners looking to deepen their appreciation of colour and how to work with it – there are a LOT of exercises and resources on here.
- Dear Photograph: HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE??!?! This is an artefact of the pre-social web (or, more accurately, the very early social web, where we all used our Facebook pages to share interesting links about things we cared about rather than it instead being yet another incessant hose of low-quality moving picture pabulum fired into our eyeballs at the rate of violence), dating back to…Jesus, some time in the mid/late-00s I think, and…God, there’s something about this that just *feels* of the past, even though there’s nothing necessarily retro about the project or its scope. Dear Photograph is a website which collects photos of people holding photos of the place they are photographing – a description which I appreciate makes NO SENSE, but which you will hopefully forgive me for when you see the recursive nature of the project. Each picture is accompanied by a short text recounting the memory that’s being recovered in each case, and the whole thing is a small, poignant series of vignettes which touch on place, recollection and the general inevitable truth that all things must eventually pass.
- The AI Soul Imprint Generator: Via Jan in the Czech Republic (HI JAN!) comes this project by Charles University in Prague, which invites you to answer a series of questions and which will then, based on your answers to said questions, SHOW YOU WHAT YOUR SOUL LOOKS LIKE! What your soul will probably look like – SPOILERS! – is an artlessly-composed bit of AI slop, but I quite like the disconnect between the slightly-portentous vibe of the questionnaire and site and the outputs, which inevitably look quite a lot like the sort of poorly-photoshopped tribute pages of the 2012-era web. Interestingly this is part of a wider body of work investigating some..,not-insignificant questions around technology and theology being investigated by the Theology and Contemporary Culture Research Group of the Protestant Theological Faculty of Charles University in cooperation with Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, Multidisciplinary working group AI in context and Monastery of the Infant Jesus of Prague. So expect someone to come up with an answer to the vexatious question of ‘does The Machine have a soul’ sometime next week.
- Daisy The AI Anti-Scammer Granny: This has annoyed me quite a lot over the past week or so, so I will keep this short – briefly, this is a (very nice, very smart, very well-done and very successful) bit of PR by O2, in which they have claimed to have ‘invented’ an AI system that will thwart phone scammers by keeping them tied up on the line; this has been covered EVERYWHERE thanks to its (again, smart) mix of zeitgeisty elements (old people being scammed! AI!), but two things in particular have rather boiled my p1ss about it that I want to get off my chest. 1) IT IS A FCUKING PR STUNT THIS IS NEVER, EVER GOING TO BE AN ACTUAL THING THAT O2 DEPLOY; IT WILL HAVE EXISTED AND BEEN LIVE FOR EXACTLY AS LONG AS IT TOOK TO JUSTIFY THE EXISTENCE OF THE PRESS RELEASE WHY THE FCUK IS IT BEING WRITTEN UP UNCRITICALLY AS THOUGH IT IS A REAL THING FFS YOU ARE SH1T AT YOUR JOBS TECH JOURNALISTS!; 2) this is basically a riff on something that was in Curios about ~6m ago which I distinctly remember flagging as ‘something worth ripping off’, so basically I am just salty that I am not getting any (completely undeserved, to be clear) credit here.
- Hip Hop English School: Ok, unless you speak Japanese you’re probably unlikely to get a vast amount out of this, but it really makes me happy that it exists – HipHop English School is a Japanese podcast in which the hosts use a different hiphop track or artist each week to help teach its listeners English – some of the episodes are just breakdowns of specific songs, line-by-line, while others are interviews with artists who happen to be touring Japan…honestly, this feels like SUCH an easy, replicable format for (say) K-Pop, or Reggaeton, or any other genre of music where lyrics tend not to be in English, so, well, go and steal.
- Roots: I am pretty sure that if you’re the sort of person who feels the need to put usage limits on your phone you’re already well-versed in all the different apps and tricks and tools you can deploy to bolster your nonexistent willpower – should you be in the market for another, though, Roots looks like it has a comprehensive featureset and (and this is the bit I think is a bit gross if I’m honest) a huge fat layer of GAMIFICATION atop said featureset. Earn badges! Compete in challenges! Badges and challenges which only really exist…in your phone! Do you see the…slight disconnect?
- 100s of Beavers: Thanks to Lisa Schmeiser’s excellent newsletter I was introduced to this film, which I had never heard of before but now I feel I really must see. I don’t want to explain or describe it – just click the link and watch the trailer, and know that you will never, ever have seen anything quite like this before.
- Pi Test: How many digits of Pi can you recall from memory? PROVE IT THEN YOU BRAGGART!
- Handyfotos: Via Kris comes another decade-old web project which is SUCH a perfect slice-of-life website that I have fallen slightly in love with it. Photos and videos presented in a grid, filterable by various tags (location, what’s in the photo, etc) but otherwise presented entirely without context. There’s some minimal explanation, but, honestly, I quite like not really knowing more than this: “The Marco Land Handyfoto Foundation (est. 2014) is a sustained media archive of moments. A Handyfoto — or mobile photo — captures mundane objects or situations as a photo or video. It is the unexpected synergy between two unharmonious elements. The MLHF defines Handyfoto also as a way-of-seeing, a sacred practice: unplanned, observant, and attuned to life’s subtle humor and charm.” Beautiful, mundane digital life shards.
- The Arts Grant Guru: THIS IS A FCUKING SCAM. You, clever Web Curios readers that you are, would obviously arrive at that conclusion without my guidance, but I think it’s worth sharing because I get the impression there are at least a couple of people who work in the arts who read this and I feel the community as a whole should be on the lookout for nakedly-grifty sh1t like this. In an environment in which arts funding is more contested – and harder to come by – than ever, a service which purports to use THE MAGIC OF AI to help you craft better grant applications could be seen as a helpful service; this, though, is a naked fcuking scam, charging users a fee to perform tasks that could reasonably be achieved with the free versions of most of the large LLMs (and, if not, can DEFINITELY be achieved with the £20 a month pro versions, which is still less money than these cnuts are trying to charge for what is literally just a layer on top of (I presume) GPT. Honestly, this is gross and makes me really quite annoyed, so please do tell anyone you know who works in the sector to please not fall for sh1t like this? Thanks.
- Source Plus: Ooh, this is interesting – for artists working with AI who would like to be able to train their own local models on datasets that have been cleared for that express purpose, Source Plus offers a series of downloadable imagesets which have the full approval of their creators and copyright owners to be used for model tweaking. Useful for anyone working in this space who’d prefer not to feel like they were thieving from the mouths of the STARVING ARTISTS.
- Friend: Oooooooooooooh this is an odd one. Friend is a forthcoming AI companion service whose BIG THING is the idea that your companion, your ‘friend’, will live in a physica pendant-style device and effectively become a forevercompanion, remembering you and your life and what you do and what you say and being, basically, your always-there-pal who’s fun to be with! Or at least that’s the theory. In practice, now that the web version of Friend is live, it feels…quite different to that. Load up the website and you’re thrust straight into conversation with one of these ‘friends’ – you don’t get to choose which ‘companion’ you’re paired with, although you can refresh the page to get a new one – who starts your chat with a prompt and…the prompts are all FCUKED. My first one opened with “i’m texting you from my friend’s couch lol, him and his wife are fighting I’m just here in the corner”; the next one with “my kid’s in the hospital after a car crash and i’m a mess, pretending to be strong is exhausting” – hang on, what? WHY THE FCUK WOULD I WANT TO HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH THE IMAGINARY MOTHER OF A CARCRASH VICTIM? There doesn’t seem to be any version of these that *doesn’t* have one of these fcuked-up, ‘provocative’ openings, which does rather lend one to wonder…what’s going on here, why is this designed like this, and is there a bigger, more interesting story being alluded to (which, to be clear, would be sort of cool and interesting)? Katherine Dee at Default Friend thinks not, but I am VERY INTRIGUED by this and will keep an eye out for subsequent developments.
- Free Billionaire Sperm: Are YOU a woman who might want to bear a child? Are YOU struggling to conceive? Do YOU need access to some high-quality sperm? Would YOU like said sperm to be ABSOLUTELY FREE? Well lucky you, today’s your lucky day – presuming, of course, you’re able to get yourself to Moscow, because that’s where Telegram founder Pavel Durov has decided to make his seed freely available to whoever wants some (I presume there’s a finite supply of DurovJuice rather than him spending half his life strapped into some sort of unholy prostate milking machine but, honestly, who knows?). Durov’s previously boasted of already having fathered ‘100s’ of children via similar means, but it’s good to know that he’s not stopping there. I don’t know about you, but I am not entirely convinced that the reasons behind this are *wholly* benign, got to say (have any of you read ‘Rant’ by Chuck Palahniuk? Just saying, is all).
- Nomido: Find ALL THE WORDS that can be made from each day’s fragments – this is, annoyingly, far harder than I thought it was going to be (or I am losing IQ points by the day, either/or).
- Procjam: Another great set of tiny games via Lynn Cherny – these are the entries to the recent Procjam game development festival, and features dozens of small, cute, fun exercises in procedural generation, from a bonsai growing simulator to some rather fun sandboxes, many playable in-browser.
- OpenRA: Finally this week, the sort of thing that may make middle-aged Curios readers’ weekends – want to play Command and Conquer: Red Alert in a version that’s all updated and compatible with modern computers and stuff? OH GOOD HERE YOU ARE.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Fersetid: Oh this is BRILLIANT. Films (and occasional other media) reimagined as PS1-era videogames. The American Psycho clip in particular is just supremely chilling.
- Ben G Tibbert: Exceptionally-unsettling AI art and animation; this is very, very good indeed, and reminds me quite a lot of Cool 3d World in terms of overall aesthetic.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- A Letter to Elon Musk: I have to say, were my name to have become something of a byword for late-20th-Century liberal hubris I would probably have retired entirely from public life, so credit to Francis Fukuyama for taking all the decades-long ‘end of history? LOL!’ ribbings in his stride (this is possibly why he continues to be a respected and renowned thinker and I, charitably, am…not so much). This is an ‘open letter’ to Apartheid Toad explaining why, contrary to what a succession of galaxy-brained sycophants (and Dominic Cummings – on which note, have you happened to have checked out his Twitter feed of late? I can’t tell whether he’s just abandoned any remaining shred of self-respect to play the part of ‘pick me!’ boy to Elon, or whether he’s halfway down a Goodwin-esque slippery slope, or whether in fact it’s both) might currently be claiming, ‘reducing government bureaucracy and making everything more efficient might in fact be a *bit* harder than just ‘sacking everyone whose jobs I don’t like the sound of or really understand’, and that the intensely-concatenated nature of government means that casually shutting down one seemingly-insignificant bit might actually have some…quite big consequences down the line. Smart and practical and certain to be ignored by its intended audience!
- The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires: This has received a LOT of love online this week – I personally found it a touch on the noddy side, but I appreciate that it might equally serve as a useful primer to all sorts of ways of thinking about ownership, means of production and the like and as such will happily include it (also, everything it says is right and true). This (very long, be warned) piece uses the classic ‘stone soup’ story (you know the one – and if you don’t it’s neatly explained at the start, thus neatly sparing me the requirement to outline it, thank fcuk) and how it’s neatly-analagous to the way in which billionaires (and the general ruling class) are able to claim credit for achievements which in fact are born of the collective rather than the individual.
- On Millennial Snot: This came via Helen Lewis and I am annoyed I missed it when it was published last month because DEAR GOD does it perfectly articulate something I feel very strongly indeed (and also, perhaps unfairly, characterises quite accurately how I feel about the general vibe on Bluesky). Honestly, you will read this and you will nod and you will then notice it EVERYWHERE – this transcends geography, and to a certain extent transcends language (I can recognise this register in Italian, for example) and it is HATEFUL and, hopefully, we can consign it to the dustbin of the first quarter of the century and move on. “These are middle-aged PhDs with prestigious careers, talking like snotty teenagers or sassy black drag queens. Note the overuse of sarcasm, emphasizing asterisks, exclamation points, and pregnant pause ellipses to denote how “over it” they are. They all speak in the dramatic tone of the mean girl – “History PhD here, and uh, this thread is…a lot!” – You see this language, and these people, everywhere today. You know them by the “fluent in sarcasm” in bio. The PhDs, the columnists, the policy wonks and Wonkettes, the assorted professional quippers and clappers back – public intellectuals did not talk this way twenty years ago. Lionel Trilling did not call things “brat.” This is new. Yet this bumptious patois is how our ascendant elites talk now. I call it “Millennial Snot.””
- The Self-Care Boom: Or, “beware brands trying to use the fact that everything feels terrifying and jagged and generally fractious to sell you more tat that you neither want nor need under the banner of ‘self-care’”. Taking Audrey Lorde, this feels VERY TRUE: “I can’t say what Lorde would make of the surface-level “self-care” the beauty and wellness industries promote today, since it only rose to popularity in 2016. Following the (first) election of U.S. President Donald Trump, activists circulated the above quote from Lorde to emphasize the importance of tending to one’s needs in times of political upheaval. Cosmetic companies slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin”. Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant collagen levels when she preached about preservation! — because people were tired, and applying eye cream is easier than engaging in political action. Over the next year, skincare became the fastest growing market in beauty, amassing $5.6 billion in sales and totaling 45% of the industry’s growth. And over the next eight years, every failure of care by the government created another opportunity for Big Beauty to expand the reach of its narrowing standards, all under the banner of wellness.” SEE ALSO: this excellent piece on the fantasy of ‘cosy tech’, and, again, the idea of being sold stuff as a coping mechanism against the iniquities of the world.
- Inside the Jaguar Relaunch: Oh, OK, ONE article about the fcuking car rebrand. ONE. This is good because it demonstrates exactly how fcuking wrong-headed it was to invite a bunch of fcuking car journalists to an event that did not, in point of fact, feature any vehicles they could actually write about – honestly, if you have aver worked in advermarketingpr and any where near the horror that is BRAND STEWARDSHIP there will be so much of this that both rings true and also makes you want to curl up and die like some sort of woodlouse of humiliation. Oh, fine, seeing as you’re here and you’re reading this, you might also enjoy this video of brand director Santino Pietrosanti (THE most Southern Italian name in the world btw, congratulations) talking about the forthcoming rebrand work at a recent event, where a) he seems to indicate that this is entirely sincere; and b) does that hilarious thing where he talks about ‘fearless creativity’ and ‘breaking down barriers’, all in service of a brand ad that literally looks like an AI-generated parody of every single car ad of the past 5-6 years, down to the boilerplate bullsh1t two-word brand bromides like “believe more” and “imagine suppository” (ok, I may have made the latter one up, but you get the idea). WELL DONE SANTINO, YOU MADE THE MOTHERLAND PROUD!
- The Long Context: This is long, and a *bit* involved, but it’s a really interesting exploration of using LLMs to turn texts into interactive fictions, which goes through the process of explaining how context windows and ‘memory’ work in an LLM, and which, per the best sort of writing on these topics, contains all sorts of smart ideas about how and where you might want to apply the principles described in the essay in more practical scenarios. I am feeling VERY STRONGLY at the moment that there is a massive gap between ‘what LLMs are actually capable of with some creative thinking’ and ‘what people are actually doing with them’, and I reckon there’s quite a bit of competitive advantage to be found in that space.
- Niantic Owns The World: Or at least the digital representation of our physical reality. Regular readers may recall that I have for a few years now been interested in who’s winning the battle to effectively create an accurate digital twin of THE ENTIRE PLANET – turns out, based on news this week, that is Niantic, who thanks to the magic of all the millions of people playing Pokemon Go! have managed to basically get to the very front of the queue when it comes to data about the physical topography of the planet. “As part of Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), we have trained more than 50 million neural networks, with more than 150 trillion parameters, enabling operation in over a million locations. In our vision for a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), each of these local networks would contribute to a global large model, implementing a shared understanding of geographic locations, and comprehending places yet to be fully scanned. The LGM will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.” What does this mean? Helpfully, 404 Media has the jargonbusting rundown, which can basically be summarised as ‘they will sell access to this data to whoever wants to use it!’. This is going to be an incredibly important part of the next wave of tech, imho, and it’s worth spending a few moments thinking about all the incredible (terrifying, mad) applications for ‘an entirely accurate map of the entire world, existing digitally, which can be worked on and interpreted by AI’ (there are lots).
- AI Poetry Is Sh1t, Actually: You may have seen breathless headlines this week proclaiming that studies have shown that people actually prefer AI-generated poetry to the real thing, and that in blind studies respondents picked The Machine over Shakespeare and others…well this paper neatly explains why those headlines were bullsh1t, why the original research wasn’t perhaps QUITE as conclusive as those headlines made it sound, and, best of all, offers download links to the actual poems generated by the AI in question – because I’m nice I’ve uploaded them here, so you can see a) exactly how bad the AI stuff is (seriously, it really is atrocious) and b) that noone in their right mind could possibly think that any of these examples are better than…well, Pam Ayres, for one, but Shakespeare? Fcuk off.
- We See Too Many Hot People: Is this true? I have no idea, but it FEELS true and, per the tried and tested vibes-based curatorial policy here at Curios Towers, that’s enough for me! This article argues – I mean, that’s a bit strong, it’s not really so much an argument as an assertion it’s quite hard to dispute – that one of the reasons dating is so fcuked is that everyone is presented with such an incessant cavalcade of impossibly-pulchritudinous flesh every waking minute of every waking day via the socials and the apps and the telly and and and and, and as such we now expect EVERYONE to look like this, regardless of the fact that the mirror might tell us we’re letting down our side of the bargain. And so, everyone is unsatisfied at how imperfect their irl date is and would seemingly prefer to spend another evening gazing at the poreless features of yet another egirl/boy. The piece puts a lot of the blame on bongo, which, honestly, feels about right, but I do increasingly wonder about the effect that being brought up on videogames and anime has also had on a generation’s beauty standards (this is an argument I will HAPPILY get drunk and opine on for hours, I warn you).
- Dating With AI: What’s it going to be like when we outsource the labour of dating apps to AI agents made in our image? Well, according to this article it’s going to be…sh1t! Honestly, this entire piece made me feel desperately, deeply sad, and tired, and like I might just walk into the Thames with rocks in my pockets because honestly why bother. SEE ALSO: the inexorable rise of the ‘situationship’, which explores why it is that so many 20- and 30-somethings seem to be embroiled in inchoate, unsatisfying non-relationships which, per my reading of this article, seem to afford a lot of the downsides of a relationship with none of the upsides (apart from the boning, I presume, though tbh the article does rather give the impression that all the people interviewed are far too busy being neurotically unhappy to find time to actually fcuk). More than anything though it was another piece of writing that contributed to the general impression of risk aversion being perhaps the greatest handicap afflicting the youngest adults in society – does this feel like a semi-reasonable take? I have no idea, I tend not to hang out with that many 20 year olds tbh.
- Camera Rolls: I am such a miserably non-visual person that my cameraroll is a largely barren affair – it simply doesn’t occur to me to take pictures most of the time, which is why (perhaps sadly – is this sad?) my memories tend to be associated to things I have read, or Curios I have written (yeah, ok, that is fcuking tragic, let us never speak of it again), or meals, but rarely, if ever, images. That said, presuming you’re less of a sensory oddity than I am you will probably find a lot in this piece that resonates, and I particularly enjoyed the speculation about the significance of images decoupled from context and meaning: “Unlike social media, the camera roll is a private collection of images for your eyes only. When you look at all of them together, the reasons as to why you took one, what’s in it, or the question of its quality almost falls away. In the camera roll, the virtue of the image is completely reframed. A picture is no longer held to the rules of being good or bad, powerful or insignificant, evocative or dull. Rather, the photos maintain their own separate life within us, casting a gaze and a pressure of their own. Instead of possessions we have images; instead of memories, we have castoff snapshots.”
- Designing Baba Yaga: Ok, this is very much NOT a typical Curios longread link – this is instead the final paper of one Ariel Adams of the University of Tennessee, who has completed a course on 3d model making and, as part of that, designed and printed a high-quality model of Baba Yaga from scratch. This paper basically explains how you go about doing this sort of thing, the things you have to think about, how the production process works and, honestly, this FASCINATED me – seriously, this is SO interesting in a really unexpected way, I learned loads about manufacturing, and the model Adams ends up with is *so* impressive; honestly, this made me want to get a 3d printed (and a fcuktonne of talent, obvs) and get busy.
- Sara Jakša: This is another slightly-atypical link – I featured the ‘People and Blogs’ newsletter in here a few months ago (in case you’ve somehow forgotten(!), it’s a series interviewing people who blog about how and why they do it), and this is the latest post, interviewing Sara Jakša about their writing and practice…look, I can’t quite explain this one, but there is something about the tone of Sara’s writing, the register of their written voice, that I find utterly, completely charming; I am not joking when I say I could read this for DAYS, it’s like some sort of textual ASMR (I think that Sara is Finnish, which goes some way to explaining the rhythm and cadence). The interview covers their life, their work, their interests…it’s not revelatory, doesn’t contain any ‘stories’ that I could point you at, but, as a piece of writing and as a voice it is, to me, beautiful, and I fell slightly in love.
- Elden Ring: Elden Ring, a game that came out in 2021, is widely considered to be one of the greatest ever made – this article by Gabriel Winslow-Yost is, fittingly, one of the greatest pieces of writing about a game (and indeed games as a medium) I’ve ever read in a ‘proper’ magazine (in this case Harper’s). If you play games this will please you immeasurably (and you don’t have to have played Elden Ring to enjoy it); if you don’t, this is perhaps the best essay I have ever read in terms of explaining why they can be beautiful and why you should care about them as a medium.
- Sports Betting in the US: As I might have previously alluded to in Curios, I have found the past year or so’s ‘hang on…there may be some negative externalities to this ‘gambling’ hobby!’ realisation from the US media slightly astonishing (lads…THE CLUES WERE THERE!), but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy pieces of classic big-ticket US magazine journalism like this one in Rolling Stone, which does the brilliant thing that I only really ever seem to see writers in the States getting the space to do in this style, taking a bird’s-eye view of the whole industry and speaking to players up and down the food chain to bring the mad, teeming ecosystem of gamblers, grifters, regulators and mooks into focus. Really, really good.
- That Vanity Fair Piece About Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Muse’: Honestly, if you want a good cultural weathervane as to the degree to which we’ve done something of an attitudinal 180 on certain issues over the past few years this is a pretty perfect example – Vanity Fair gives Vincenzo Barney (more on whom later) a LOT of space to write about how actually Cormac McCarthy, aged 42, seducing and sleeping with a 16-year-old girl is actually fine and good because, you see, she was his muse, and, you know, great men and art and stuff, and WOW is it a thing. Where to start – the lack of any sort of real critical eye applied to the relationship? The wildly overwritten prose (and yes, I know, but it takes one to know one)? The fact that there are a…lot of assertions by the article’s subject, Augusta Britt, which…don’t seem to have been factchecked that well? The fact that Barney (who, to his credit, does ‘smouldering byline photo’ very well, lucky boy) has a novel coming out soon, and so therefore is basically yet another man using Augusta Britt to further their own career? TAKE YOUR PICK! The fact Barney’s been reposting much of the (sizeable) criticism this piece is receiving on Twitter suggests that he’s preparing to ride this particular wave as far as it will take him which, on a personal note, I hope is straight into the mouth of a waiting shark.
- Gutted: Janis Hopkins again, this time writing about Twitter, migrating to Bluesky and the horror of one’s own social media presence (and about a medical procedure, but its not really about that at all). Once again, this is very good writing: “Every day my girlfriend would visit and spend some time with me, try to get hold of updates on what was going on. I was often on a lot of morphine (they let me control it with a little button, I learned to count down the seconds until it would let me push it again) and not especially communicative. So too with my parents or friends, who I would chat to for a bit and then wait for them to leave. Hospital visits often have the same character. Awkwardness at being in such an ugly space, around the sick and the miserable. A kind of enforced jollity, a pretence that you don’t look ghastly. There’s nothing to do and small talk runs dry. I felt the awkwardness of my own presence and wanted to spare them from it. If this seems ungrateful, it is. And perhaps another person might have felt more lonely, more isolated, more desperate to have their loved ones around them. Not me, though. Because I was on Twitter.”
- How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art: Part of me is including this because it is a genuinely interesting essay offering a provocative position on the past decade or so’s shift in contemporary curatorial practice, and the extent to which the rush to elevate and promote marginalised practices and communities has led itself to a certain stultifying homogeneity of aesthetic in the contemporary museum and gallery scene; other part of me is including it because it contains what may be my favourite opening paragraph of the year. Both are good reasons.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: