Webcurios 24/02/23

TURNIPS! TURNIPS FOR ALL!

It would be funny were it not so spleen-fcukingly enraging, wouldn’t it? Still, it meant the Star could do a funny frontpage again so that’s ok.

Aside from anything else, Therese, when was the last time you ate a turnip? They are FCUKING DISGUSTING. Has anyone done that hilarious thing where they share an image and the pricelist for the Portcullis House canteen as a WITTY JUXTAPOSITION of the reality for these awful cnuts and that which maintains for the rest of us?

Anyway, enough of the root vegetable chat! There are links to click, words to read (or, more likely, skim over with gritted teeth while you’re trying to work out whether to click or not), music to listen to and pictures to look at – WHO NEEDS FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES WHEN WE HAVE THE WEB?!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I didn’t have ‘the return of scurvy as a medical concern’ on my “UK 2023” bingo card and yet, well, here we are!

By Mark Gleason

THIS WEEK’S AUDIO ACCOMPANIMENTS BEGIN WITH A GENUINELY SUPERB MIX OF BRAZILIAN POST-PUNK AND NEW WAVE BY ANDY CUMMINGS! 

THE SECTION WHICH, A YEAR ON FROM THE START OF THE UKRAINE WAR, THINKS IT’S WORTH DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION TO THE AP WAR CRIMES TRACKER FOR THE CONFLICT , PT.1:

By Cecilia Bonilla

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE NEXT SECTION WITH THIS HOUSE MIX BY TIM ANDRESEN? THERE IS NO GOOD REASON! 

THE SECTION WHICH, A YEAR ON FROM THE START OF THE UKRAINE WAR, THINKS IT’S WORTH DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION TO THE AP WAR CRIMES TRACKER FOR THE CONFLICT , PT.2:    

• Towns: Go on, admit it, you’d forgotten about Web3, hadn’t you? WELL IT HASN’T FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOU! The latest evolution in ‘The future of the web is transactional an on-chain’ appears to be this – Towns, a new platform which has been set up by people previously involved in Clubhouse (so you know it’s good!) and which is seeking (I presume) to capitalise on the general feeling that social media is in something of a flux and there is a bit of a platform reconfiguration going on, and that people might be in the market for somewhere new to congregate. Which, I get it, makes sense and is in general all well and good. The bit where I quite quickly start to lose interest and, frankly, the will to live, though, is when it gets into the practical details of how it’s all meant to work and the idea of being able to buy and sell communities on the chain and…no, sorry, NOONE NEEDS OR WANTS THIS. Aside from anything else, the idea of communities as tradeable commodities does to my mind rather miss the point of what a ‘community’ is meant to be (on or offline) besides just sounding like an invitation for miscreants to build up, I don’t know, an engaged community of well-off middle-class stereo enthusiasts and then sell it to one of their crypto grifter mates so that said community can be grifted into penury. I do not like this at all, basically, but am comforted by the fact that this strikes me as having approximately the same chance of any other Web3cryptoproject of MAKING IT in 2023 (to whit, approximately nil).
• Smithsonian Roulette: Are YOU on Mastodon these days? Would you like an account to follow over there which posts random curiosities from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum? MAYBE YOU WOULD. Thankyou to John Horner for sending me the first on-Mastodon Curio in the 11 years I’ve been writing this thing; consider this your Blue Plaque.
• Dimensions: Another ‘Jesus, have I really not featured this on here before? FFS Matt!’ link – but a wonderful one. Have you ever wanted an objective resource to determine how big everything is? YES YOU HAVE AND HERE IT IS! “Dimensions.com is an ongoing reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.com is a global platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.” This is simultaneously sort-of insane and equally, I presume, very useful – if you’re a designer who deals in real-world measurements then you’re probably familiar with this resource already, but, for the rest of you, welcome to the rest of your life, in which you will never again have to take ill-informed guesses as to the standard size of an army cot mattress, or the exact measurements of Blofeld from James Bond.
• SwissGL Demos: A collection of small, hypnotic and very pretty coding demos which I don’t really understand the purpose of but whose existence I am gladdened by. The Spectrogram one in particular is rather fun.
• Contact Sheets: A very rare link to Pinterest here, courtesy of Daniel Benneworth-Gray who over the years has spent time compiling this board of old contact sheets from photoshoots of the past. There are some great images here – classics you’ll have seen before, including iconic (sorry) shots of Ali and others, but also images of people you might be less familiar with, such as painter Chuck Close. It’s fascinating to see the different ways in which people approach the camera, and as a resource for learning about what makes a ‘good’ shot (and, interestingly, the difference between a photo that is merely ‘good’ and one that is ‘great’).
• The World Dataviz Prize 2023: How long has David McCandless been doing Information Is Beautiful? However long it is, it’s fair to say that McCandless has single-handedly been responsible for the elevation of datavisualisation to a near-fetish over the course of the past ten years or so, and that the increased interest in the skill (and its evolution thanks to evolutions in digital design and interactivity) has seen the quality of work in the field improve significantly. This link takes you to this year’s crop of nominees for the annual BEST DATAVIZ IN THE WORLD prize, and as you’d expect there are some wonderful and very smart examples. Personally speaking I find the almost-calligraphic design of this example particularly pleasing, but you will doubtless find your own favourites.
• Spy Balloon Simulator: Were you disappointed that it wasn’t space aliens? I confess to being a little let down by the fact that we weren’t being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences (although maybe, just maybe…), but found some solace in this website which lets anyone who might want to simulate the flight of a massive spy balloon do exactly that. Turns out that getting a balloon to end up where you want it to is…hard, frankly – but if you’d like to track some actual, real-life amateur high-altitude balloon launches (and, frankly, who doesn’t? NO FCUKER, etc) then you can also do so here. Web Curios – topical, thrilling, balloon-related content, right in your inbox. Do you get this from those cnuts on Substack? Do you fcuk.
• Verdant Futures: This made me very happy – I don’t quite know what to do with it, but I am glad that this exists and wanted to share it with you. As far as I can tell, Verdant Futures is a small collective of people based in the South West who are running a bunch of interconnected businesses and community initiatives centred around books and literature. “Verdant Futures is a Social Enterprise – an organisation that applies commercial strategies to improve peoples’ financial, social and environmental well-being. It is also a hybrid digital and physical business – a must have in today’s connected world. We sell our goods online around the world, using re-commerce strategies, while also giving our customers a high-quality retail experience through our shops and services.” So they fund their projects to rescue books through the British Book Rescue Scheme through other initiatives like selling books by the yard, they run charitable projects…this seems like an incontrovertibly Good Thing, frankly, and should any of you be based in the South West (Bath, specifically), perhaps it’s something you might be interested in getting involved in?
• Formula Generator: You may not think that all this newfangled AI stuff is for you; you may have no truck with the idea of making machines imagine Boschean horrors, or making them compose villanelles about honey-roast ham. This, though, this is PRACTICAL, it is USEFUL and if you’re still struggling to think of ways in which all this natural language AI stuff is going to change the world then maybe it will help you understand in some small way. This is a plugin for Google Sheets which lets you ask it, in normal people words, to create formulas for anything you like – AND THEN IT DOES IT! “I want to multiply all those things in that column (but not the ones that are Prime Numbers) by all the things in that row over there” – stuff like that. I am sure that for those of you who are less cack-handed with the spreadsheets than I am this won’t be quite as magical, but it’s less about that and more about what this shows in terms of use-cases. MAGIC, I TELL YOU.
• AIBert: This is an interesting idea, though I am unsure as to whether anyone will want or like it enough to shell out for a monthly fee. AIBert is basically ‘all the AI gubbins, in WhatsApp’ – you add it as a contact and you can use it either as ChatGPT or as Midjourney, sending it prompts and getting results in return. Which, fine, is literally just a bundling exercise and you could do exactly the same without paying by just using two separate services rather than one, but where’s the fun in that? I wonder how long this will keep working before its API access gets throttled or all the bits of string holding it together start to erode, but I am impressed with the entrepreneurial chutzpah involved in cobbling it together. Lol at the idea that someone would pay $27 a month, though.
• Memo: I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but when I went to international school at 15 I was suddenly surrounded by wealthy people who had largely been the product of an international education, meaning that they all spoke that very specific and peculiar brand of teenage English that you can only learn by spending your entire childhood speaking the language with non-native speakers whilst at the same time being taught almost exclusively by North Americans and consuming North American, and which basically means that everyone sounds like a super-successful Swedish music producer but with the vocabulary of a wannabe valleygirl (it was 1995, after all). Anyway, that’s by way of not-particularly-illuminating intro to Memo, a language learning app which promises to teach you the tongue of your choice via the medium of memes and YouTube videos – you listen and are asked to repeat phrases from pop culture, TV, films, sports, memetic hits of yesteryear…I am not 100% certain exactly how useful it will be to you to be able to say “Damn Daniel, back again with the X” in French, but, well, maybe it will be the breakthrough you need. Also from what I can tell there’s no suggestion that this app features an appallingly-horny cartoon owl as its mascot, so perhaps that detail will swing it for you.
• Eel Rents: So it turns out that between the 10th and 17th Centuries in the UK, property owners would on occasion charge rent in eels. As in, you (the tenant) would be required to pay a fixed sum of serpentine sea creatures to your landlord in exchange for continued use of the property. I have MANY QUESTIONS – did the eels need to be delivered alive? Were they all delivered on one day – EEL DAY! – or were they handed over as and when they showed up? Was there some sort of minimum quality or size threshold that needed to be reached for the eels to be considered viable? Sadly this website doesn’t tell you any of that, but it does confirm that Geoffrey de Mandeville of Chippenham received 1500 of the things in 1086 and for that we can ALL be grateful. Via the wonderful Blort, this one.
• Lucy Ives: Absolutely one of the best-designed personal portfolio homepages I have seen in ages, Lucy Ives is a writer of novels and short stories and essays, and this site collects various writings and information on her books and, honestly, I fcuking LOVE the way this looks and is laid out; like a series of oldschool Macintosh dialogue boxes (but, er, loads better than that, honest).
• Experiments in AI Video: A short Twitter thread showing off some of the work people have been doing using Runway ML, the AI-powered video editing tool I featured in here…last week? Christ, I have no concept of time anymore. Anyway, these are quite amazing – shonky, fine, but also astonishing when you take a moment to think of how good this is going to get in 12 months. The bits where the software takes an assembly of cardboard boxes and turns it into a cityscape with various building styles applied is…honestly, just astonishing.
• Soft White Underbelly: Soft White Underbelly is a YouTube channel featuring “interviews and portraits of the human condition by photographer Mark Laita”, and whilst you might not be interested in every single subject on display here there is a staggering breadth and range of people who Laita has spoken with and whose stories he shares here. From bounty hunters to former drug addicts, a trans child and their father to people who spend their lives hopping freight trains across the US, these are beautifully shot and generally (from the handful I’ve seen at least) sensitively handled and pleasingly-unsensationalist. If nothing else it’s an interesting look at how to apply a very specific style and tone to a video series (but, also, there are some FASCINATING people on here).
• Togetherdraw: Collaborative drawing on an infinite scrolling canvas – every simultaneous visitor to this URL gets the opportunity to scrawl and draw to their heart’s content, with the caveat that the canvas on which you draw is slowly and inexorably vanishing at the top of the screen. Pleasingly ephemeral, and there’s something particularly nice about the ‘feel’ of the brushes here (try it, I promise you’ll see what I mean). Also, on the couple of occasions I’ve tried this when someone else has been online, all the strangers have been pleasant and I haven’t seen anyone write anything horrible. Which, I appreciate, shouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy, but we are where we are.
• Date Your Cat: This is too soon for me (RIP Bowsks), but if you’ve ever wanted to go on a slightly-surreal and conversationally-unsatisfying ‘date’ with a CG animated cat, whose ‘personality’ is powered by some sort of rudimentary text AI then HERE YOU GO! This is funny, in a slightly-shonky way, but I also worry that we’re about to enter an era in which every single brand with a ‘personality’ feels the need to create a similar interactive avatar as the natural language guide to their website, like a sort of Clippy on neuroenhancing drugs, and it will be horrid. Or brilliant, it’s very hard to tell anymore.
• WTTR: I don’t know why I find this super-minimalist weather website thing so appealing, but I do. Add the name of anywhere you like after the slash to receive ASCII-ish weather predictions for the coming week; not only is this really nicely done (lightweight code, clear graphics, etc) but it is also 100% faster and more user friendly than any of the useless fcuking weather services that my sh1tty phone insists on defaulting to, so MANY THUMBS UP to this, it is great.
• Wood Wide Web: I LOVE THIS. “As part of the Poetry Games  exhibition at the National Poetry Library, Playing Poetry and Phoenix Cinema & Art Centre launched a commission to invite two artists to explore the intersection of poetic writing and game-making. Artists Mariana Marangoni and Rianna Suen collaborated over the course of two months, developing a joint practice looking at digital literacy, online communities and ecopoetics…Out of the commission, Marangoni and Suen, along with sound designer Mikey Parsons, developed a new game affectionally called Wood Wide Web. Part idyllic walking sim, part cottage-commodore-core pixel art generator, Wood Wide Web invites the player to tend to a digital world, planting seeds by writing poetic texts, which grow into trees and in turn spread to become entire forests.” Honestly, this is so beautiful and pure – just wander round and play with it, type away and see what your words become, enjoy the clues and the mystery.
• Mr Global 2023: You may have enjoyed the BAFTAs (also, if you’ve not read it, this is a superb bit of writing by Stuart Heritage on That Moment); you may be waiting for the Oscars. Know, however, that thebiggest day of awards season has already been and gone, with the annual Mr Global male beauty pageant – BUT FEAR NOT BECAUSE HERE ARE THE PHOTOS! As per every year, My Global requires participants to wear ‘typical national dress’ of their nation as one part of the pageantry, and once again the costumes do not disappoint. Come for the deep-as-the-Marianas-Trench eyes and the smouldering gazes; stay for the frankly insane spectacle of genuinely beautiful men wearing genuinely appalling outfits. WHY IS BELGIUM A GIMPWOLF? WHY IS CHILE COSPLAYING AS ELSA FROM FROZEN? WHY ARE THE COMPETITION ORGANISERS INCAPABLE OF SPELLING ‘THE NETHERLANDS’ CORRECTLY? So many questions, none of which will likely be answered by this link – still, these are VERY BEAUTIFUL BOYS, so enjoy their cheekbones (and, honestly, pity the poor guy from the Philippines who you feel must have been mercilessly ribbed by everyone else because…oh God, seriously, just click the link and GAWP). Also, hang on, WHY IS THERE NO MR UK? OR MR ITALY? Should anyone from Mr Global chance upon this, know that I am available next year and can probably fill both roles for the price of one. A
• AI Taboo: A fun little game – can you force the AI into saying specific words based on the questions you ask it? Very easy at the lowest difficulty, but troublingly-impossible (for me at least) when you whack it up to ‘hard’ (YOU try getting GPT to say ‘paucity’, go on).
• Clickwords: Finally this week, I know that you all probably have your morning word game routines worked out by now, but let me present this new variant for your consideration – I promise it has fcuk all to do with Wordle (other than the fact that you get a new puzzle each day). Instead, the setup is a bit like Scrabble; you’re given a board with a selection of letters already placed on it, and over the course of the game you’re given 60 tiles, three at a time, with which to form words on the small board and score as many points as possible. Simple but surprisingly deep when you get into it, this is annoyingly addictive and has added an additional 10 minutes to my daily ‘time it takes Matt to stop fcuking around on the web and do some actual, paid work’ (currently standing at 130 minutes, fact fans).

By Sukhy Hullait

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS CRACKING SELECTION OF AMBIENT AND DISCO AND FUNK AND ALL-ROUND ECLECTICISM BY STELLA Z! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• CreepMart: Another ‘we’ve found an interesting vector in latent space, now let’s mine the fcuk out of it!’ AI art account, this time exploring the interesting world of imaginary kids toys from a sinister, machine-imagined past. Again, these appeal to me less because of the details on the individual images (although some of them are very good) and more because of the aesthetic space they all inhabit.
• All Things Fungi: Because who doesn’t love a little bit of mycology? NO FCUKER, etc!
• Lil Hugy: Sent to me by my friend Gill, with the line ‘This person should be Adidas’ creative director’ and, well, she’s right. I don’t know who Hugy is, or why they are, or what the significance of a person in a vinyl bear’s head wearing streetwear might be, but this ‘goes hard’ as I believe the kids say (don’t worry, I am cringing even more than you are at that last line; I am going to leave it intact, though, because otherwise I will never learn).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Jesse Homer French

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: