Webcurios 24/05/24

Are you excited? Are you tumescent with rising anticipation! THAT’S RIGHT EVERYONE, WE GET TO DO ANOTHER DEMOCRACY!!!

Thing is, my obvious happiness at getting rid of this shower of dreadful cnuts who have fcuked the country in half over the course of the past 14 years is somewhat mitigated by the p1ss-weak nature of their likely replacements and the very real fact that, for a significant proportion of those set to be defenestrated from Parliament, this will make not one marginal iota of difference to their lives and circumstances – in fact, for a lot of them, it will be a net benefit. Do you think Messers Hunt, Rees-Mogg, Shapps et al will give anything resembling a flying one when they hear the bell toll on July 4th? No, they won’t, because they and so many of the rest of these appalling, double-figure-IQ mediocrities are INCREDIBLY FCUKING RICH, and will in fact be at liberty to become considerably moreso at the point they are no longer ‘constrained’ (lol) by the fact of being, at least in theory, a public servant.

Anyway, fcuk the tories, kick them so hard they can’t get back up again for a decade or so at the very least, and pray to god that the incoming lot are marginally-less milquetoast in the face of corporate interests than I fear they will in fact be.

(a note to the non-English reading this – yes, I know you don’t give two fcuks about the democratic process taking place in a country that can best be described as ‘second tier’ (on a good day) but please indulge my momentary excitement at the thought of not having to hear from Rishi Sunak ever again. Oh, by the way, my personal money is on that stumpy little nonentity ending up at Andreessen Horowitz come August, so let’s see shall we).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I promise you will get significantly less swearing over the course of the next 10,000 words or so (sorry about the length, again).

By Jordan Bolton (images this week all courtesy of This Isn’t Happiness)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A SET BY OPPIDAN FROM TON OF BRIX IN LONDON LAST MONTH, WHICH IS AN HOUR OF PROPERLY BRILLIANT DJING AND SOME TOP-NOTCH TUNES (AND, JUDGING BY SOME OF THE FACES ON THE KIDS UP AT THE FRONT, A PLEASING COUNTERPOINT TO THE WHOLE ‘YOUNG PEOPLE ARE PO-FACED MORALISTS WHO DON’T DO DRUGS’ MYTH)!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE REALLY DISAPPOINTED IF ALL OF YOU WORKING IN AGENCIES WITH A LOBBYING OR PA FUNCTION DON’T DO SOMETHING AT LEAST MARGINALLY INTERESTING OR PSEUDO-CREATIVE WITH THE MANIFESTOS AND LLMs, PT.1:  

By Alex Eckman-Lawn

A MUSICAL CHANGE OF PACE NOW WITH THE NEW SOLO ALBUM BY BETH GIBBONS WHO REALLY DOES POSSESS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VOICES! 

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE REALLY DISAPPOINTED IF ALL OF YOU WORKING IN AGENCIES WITH A LOBBYING OR PA FUNCTION DON’T DO SOMETHING AT LEAST MARGINALLY INTERESTING OR PSEUDO-CREATIVE WITH THE MANIFESTOS AND LLMs, PT.2:    

• The Snoop Memorabilia Auction: It’s long nee known that Snoop will do seemingly ANYTHING for money – no brand collaboration too tawdry, no grift too base – so it’s no huge surprise to see him flogging off a bunch of tat for cash. If you have ever wanted to own, say, his old Death Row Records chain (current bid $1700!), or the outfit he wore at Wrestlemania 2023 ($905!) then WOW ARE YOU IN LUCK! This has about a week or so to run, so I would imagine the prices are going to rise a bit, but if you dig through there’s actually some pretty interesting memorabilia from Snoop’s golden era scattered amongst the frankly ludicrous amount of branded tie-in tat (a first edition Snoop FunkoPop, anyone?).
• The Ancient Greek Farm Simulator: This is *slightly* more interesting in idea than in execution, but it’s an interesting glimpse of one of the ways in which we’re going to see AI used more and more – this is basically a build of the quite remarkable ‘Smallville’ village simulator which I linked to last year, in which a bunch of AI agents with their own motivations, etc, were set loose in a small simulated environment to see how they interacted, developed relationships, displayed emergent behaviours, etc, except here it’s an ancient Greek farm. Meet Lycidas the goat herd and the other residents, and watch as they go about their tasks – farming, chatting, falling in love…you as the player can ‘interact’ with them, but in common with all LLM dialogue to date it’s hard to get them to say anything interesting, and I personally didn’t find I was given enough ability to see ‘inside the heads’ (if you will) of the agents as I would have liked. Still, this is a really interesting branch of AI research and investigation, and I’m fascinated to see how this sort of thing develops as the tech improves – you can read more about it here if you’re interested (there are also sims of a Roman fishing village and somewhere in Ancient Egypt, should you prefer a slightly different flavour of AI-simulated history).
• Professional Lunch: ANOTHER friend link, and one that’s probably only really of use if you live in London or come here regularly – that said, if that is YOU and you like eating at restaurants, and you’re lucky enough to be able to afford to do so, then this is GREAT. Marshall Manson is a Texan in London, and he enjoys lunch – so he has started this newsletter, where he writes twice a week about…good places to have lunch. Marshall is a significantly more grown-up and professional human being than I am, and as such he writes from the perspective of someone who’s doing ‘business lunches’ (or at least who isn’t planning on doing a three-bottler), but even if that’s not your thing he is an excellent judge of food and I can vouch for a significant number of his recommendations.
• No Web Without Women: A website celebrating innovations by women in the field of computer science, as a reminder that, despite the persistently c0ck-heavy vibe of much of compsci and webtech, a lot of it is built on the work of women. From Lovelace to Lamarr to Roberta Williams and beyond, this is a lovely and potentially-inspiring look at how various women have had a significant impact across a wide range of disciplines which are often lazily and sexist…ly (?Not a word, but it should be) male-coded.
• Maecenium: This is…weird, and I get quite bad vibes from it but I can’t quite articulate why. On the surface, it’s a charitable foundation dedicated to the promotion of STEM and to provide funding to research – per the site, its mission is “to support and promote the pursuit of knowledge and innovation in various fields of natural and social science, including but not limited to biology, personalized medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, and history. We believe that scientific research plays a crucial role in solving complex problems, improving lives, and shaping the future of humanity…One of our main goals at Maecenium is to identify and support innovative, high-impact scientific projects. We believe that breakthroughs often come from thinking outside the box and exploring new ideas. Through our rigorous selection process, we identify projects that have the potential to make a significant impact and provide them with the necessary resources to thrive. Through our support, we aim to enable scientists to focus on their research without the burden of financial constraints. We believe that by investing in scientific research, we can unlock new discoveries, innovations, and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.” Which sounds good, right? So why do I get such bad vibes from the site? I think it’s in part the name – I now get the fantods about stuff that has this faux-antiquity vibe and a near-immediate assumption that it’s trying to trojan horse some pretty fashy thinking – and in part all the AI-imagery on the site, the fact that while only talking in the very vaguest of terms about what the fcuk it is that they want to fund or do, if you dig into the site they seem to be requesting donations at a minimum of £10k…oh, and the fact that a bit of digging suggests that the founder, one Katherine Yovanovich, PhD, seemingly has no other online presence anywhere other than on this site, which feels…weird for a supposed academic. Do any of you happen to have a clue? Am I being unfair, or am I right and is this very fcuking dodgy indeed?
• The American Diary Project: Who doesn’t love reading other people’s diaries? NO FCUKER…actually, is that true or is it just that I am a terrible voyeur? Hm. Anyway, this isn’t creepy or voyeuristic at all, promise – instead, it’s a project designed to archive the personal journals of people from the US throughout history. “The American Diary Project was founded in October of 2022 with one simple vision: Rescue diaries and preserve the writing of everyday Americans. From our founder and executive director, Kate Zirkle: “One crisp fall day in October, I was updating my last will and testament when I was struck by the question of what to do with my journals after I pass. Should I leave them to someone? Should I burn them? Should I donate them? These questions lead me down a fruitless internet search—I just couldn’t find a suitable place to archive my writings in the U.S. Upon this discovery, I felt an instant, electric surge of “I WOULD LOVE TO DO THAT” and thus, the American Diary Project was born.”” It’s still pretty new, and not STUFFED with content, but there are examples of diaries from the past 300 years on the site and there is something just wonderful, to me at least, about going wandering around through the past thoughts and feelings and memories and fears and dreams of these strangers.
• The Talk: You may have seen a clip doing the rounds this week of a purported conversation between Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, about the existential horror of being alive – at one point it was being shared EVERYWHERE with all sorts of commentary about how moving it was and how DEEP, and, honestly, I don’t personally understand how the fcuk anyone didn’t see through it immediately (sorry, but I didn’t) but, obviously, IT WAS NOT REAL!!! In fact, it was an out-of-context excerpt from this series of videos, called The Talk, by Danish artist Jonas Hollerup Helle. The link here takes you to the youTube channel for the project, which features a bunch of similar imagined chats – Chris Rock and Will Smith, Cher and David Lynch, etc etc – which are produced, as far as I can tell, by editing together clips from completely unconnected interviews into a semi-coherent-seeming conversation. I think it’s worth having a think about what this implies for people’s likely susceptibility to AI content – I mean, look, just watch one of these things and it’s clear to anyone paying even an iota of attention that there is no dialogue happening, that the phrases spoken barely relate to each other, that there’s no interaction between the participants…and yet lots of people didn’t notice at all. Which isn’t to say people are stupid so much as it is to say that we simply don’t pay attention, and that that’s going to mean we’re on the cusp of some VERY interesting consequences when AI duping of faces and voices gets just a tiny, tiny bit better.
• The Communal Plot: Via Giuseppe, this is SUCH a good idea and a lovely interface/visualisation to boot. Every day, the site throws up two different questions plotted across two axes – today’s, for example, is ‘do you prefer non-fiction or mystery novels?’ and ‘do you prefer country or pop music?’ – which you’re invited to answer by placing yourself on an appropriate space on the plot. Pick your spot and you’re shown how you compare to everyone else who’s answered that day’s question. That’s it -but it’s elegant and interesting, and I really like the correlations it can occasionally throw up, and I think there’s something here which might be worth exploring further for data analysts and the like.
• Puzzle Canon: This very much falls into the category of ‘things I think are interesting but I really don’t understand AT ALL’ (it’s a big category, growing by the fcuking second) – (very) basically, puzzle canons are musical riddles, sort-of compositional in-jokes or challenges designed to test a musician’s ability to interpret clues within musical notation (I think). From the site’s own description: “”Puzzle canon,” “riddle canon,” “Ratselkanon,” “Enigmatic canon,” “closed canon,” all these terms refer to a sort of canon that is sufficiently strict that a single written melody can represent two or more performed melodies! One of these melodies might be the retrograde of the other, or upside-down, or higher or lower, twice as fast or slow. Only the imagination is the limit. many more possibilities exist. What kinds of clever things have Bach, Mozart and others tried? What other kinds of puzzle canons exist? Who are the unsung heroes of canon from Medieval times to the present? The puzzlecanon website is the place to find out!” The only issue I have with this is that it is VERY MUCH designed for real musicians – it’s all displayed as staves, there’s no audio to give you a reference as to what these things sound like when you get them ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’, and, as such, unless you can read music and ‘hear’ it in your head (which I very much can’t) it might remain a mystery to you. Can someone who understands this please explain it to me in a manner that a cloth-eared moron like me might comprehend?
• Osbcurify: Another Spotify plugin, this time analysing your account to see how obscure or otherwise, compared I presume to majority streaming habits based on raw numbers, your tastes are – it also gives you information about how this is changing over time, whether you’re tending to listen to more or less ‘energetic’ music than you used to, all that sort of jazz. Potentially interesting if you like quantifying every aspect of your life, or if you’d like to keep an eye on what your ‘Wrapped’ selection is going to look like for the purposes of gaming it to make you look more ‘interesting’ based on your taste in, I don’t know, deathcore from the Faroe Islands.
• Share Textures: ANYONE WHO DOES ANYTHING INVOLVING CG AND 3d MODELING / DESIGN – THIS IS FOR YOU! “Since 2018, we’ve been sharing textures that are free from copyright restrictions. Our collection now includes over 1500 free textures, 200 3D Models, and 50 atlases, and it keeps growing, thanks to our patrons. You don’t need to register or pay, just select an asset and click the download button. You can able to download them up to 4K resolution.” This is an incredible resource and SO GENEROUS, bless whoever’s behind it.
• Slosh: I don’t quite understand the recent American obsession with ‘hard seltzer’ – we did alcopops 30 years ago ffs, why are you doing them again but…sh1tter? – but I am slightly obsessed with the website for new range ‘Slosh’. I don’t want to drink a single one of the available flavours (they all do that very, very North American thing of having incredibly-incongruous combinations that sound…too much, something I always find on restaurant menus in the States as well – also, black cherry and lime is, objectively, a nasty-sounding mix), but I absolutely adore the frankly insane overegging of the site – there is SO MUCH going on here, from the different types of interactivity to the music to the animations to the fact that you can pick a flavour to ‘explore’ by playing an actual game of 3d ‘beer pong’ (it’s not very good, and it’s quite annoying, but WHAT commitment!). Basically this feels like the designers all got very, very baked and just went with it, which I personally think is the sort of aesthetic all digital projects should lean into a little harder.
• No Disposable Barbeques: Look, absolutely no shade to whoever is behind this campaign – I am sure there are lots of good reasons why disposable bbqs are a bad thing, from an environmental and safety perspective – but I find the single-issue nature of this Twitter account, going since 2020, genuinely amusing.
• Acousitc Location and Sound Mirrors: I guarantee you that unless you are already aware of what the words in the link refer to that you WILL NOT be able to guess the sorts of devices and contraptions that are commemorated on this website. LOOK AT THE ILLUSTRATIONS! Honestly, I cried laughing at some of these.
•  I, The Moon, The Star: I don’t quite know how to describe this – a sort of digital poem, I think – but it’s lovely. Change the words in the phrase via the drop-downs and see how the site responds – aside from anything else I really love the UI here, as well as the resulting imagery and how it fuzzes into focus.
• Sister Mary Blaze: Look, this is religious propaganda – I KNOW I KNOW – but, equally, it’s a fcuking nun on TikTok, and who doesn’t love some of that incongruity? NO FCUKER, etc! Sister Mary Blaze is…is she a real nun? I don’t want to dig into it too deeply, but she dances to popular songs – there’s a recent vid of her doing a routine to the BBL Drizzy beat which is quite the thing – and generally seems Quite Online, and I haven’t checked into the comments but I wouldn’t be surprised to see an awful lot of children in the mentions praising her for ‘serving cnut’. It’s very much THAT sort of account, and your mileage will vary depending on the extent to which you enjoy the cognitive dissonance of a woman you’d expect to be doing a rosary and maybe polishing an apse (NOT A EUPHEMISM!) doing very, very self-aware content marketing.
• J1zzy Jewellery: I’m not sure whether ‘j1zzy’ is the sort of thing that will get spam or profanity filtered, but let’s play it safe. Anyway, for clarity, this is a site which allows you to commission custom jewellery MADE FROM SEMEN (or breastmilk, apparently, elsewhere on the page) – per the vendors, “Whether you are marking your fertility journey, getting a vasectomy gift, surprising your partner or just want to be that much closer, we can turn your j1zz into a real gem! We love being inclusive over in the Trinkets world so both male and female j1zz can be used! (YOU MUST PROVIDE YOUR OWN SAMPLES)” – the last bit of that really finished me. Anyway, if you fancy spaffing into a jar and sending sad spaff to some strangers to be transmuted (via some mysterious process they don’t really elaborate on, from what I can tell) into very, very milky-looking ‘gemstones’ to hang on a pendant or wear on a ring or something then BOY are you in the right place. They’re unclear on volumes required, which feels like something of an omission (an ‘emission omission’, if you will, which I imagine you won’t – sorry about that), but this seems entirely legit (or as legit as you could ever say a business designed to sell you jewellery made of spunk could ever be) and as such, well, here you are!
• Consider The Consequences: Finally this week, a genuine historical Curio updated for the digital age – Consider the Consequences “originally published in 1930 was written by  Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins and is the earliest known published work of fiction that offers branching paths.  This style of fiction would go on to give rise to Choose Your Own Adventure books, Infocom text adventure games, and of course, the incredibly popular field of modern Interactive Fiction.”  It’s been replicated in Twine, and you can play it at this link, and it’s such an interesting look at mores and customs of a century ago, and it’s worth exploring, both because of its status as a precursor to basically any ‘branching narrative’ experience of the now and the way it shines a light on the social concerns of the interwar era in North America. Also, it’s a nice palate-cleanser after all that talk of j1zz.

By Photo in Moz

OUR FINAL MUSICAL PICK THIS WEEK IS THE MOST RECENT RELEASE FROM DAVID SHANE SMITH WHOSE ANGULAR-BUT-BEAUTIFUL SONGS I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING SINCE HE FIRST KINDLY EMAILED ME SOME IN AROUND 2008! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• Adventures in Jelly: Via Jana at Zuckerbaeckerei, this is SUCH a lovely Insta feed – would you like to see loads of pictures of moulded jelly desserts and the occasionally video of them wobbling? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! These are so, so pleasing, and while I’m conscious that there’s a vanishing number of you for whom this is likely to tickle a scratch a peculiar fetishistic itch, be safe in the knowledge that I will NEVER KNOW and can never judge.
• Museum Bums: An account existing solely to celebrate bums in museums. Genuinely astonished I haven’t featured this before, it is PERFECT insta.
• Cafe Good Day: Craig Mod is doing one of his Japanese walks again at the moment, and his daily emails from the road are just wonderful – I’m not a particular Japanophile or anything, he’s just so so so good at writing about the flow state that you get into when walking long distances, and about the people he meets and their stories, and the things he sees, and it’s just glorious. Anyway, this is the Insta feed of a small cafe that he found on one leg of his insane, 30km day yomps, and while it’s not remarkable in any way it is also just incredibly soothing and I thought you might enjoy it.
• Who Designed This Garbage?: Photos of discarded designer goods packaging in NYC. No, I don’t really understand why either.
• Turkish Sh1tposting: A window into being VERY ONLINE in another culture and language – I fcuking adore this, even if I have no idea what the everliving fcuk a good proportion of the posts mean. It’s not all Turkish – there’s some Russian stuff in there, some from Arabic nations – but the general point is ‘look at how other people do this stuff, and how it is familiar and yet very different’. Via Pietro’s always-excellent Link Molto Belli.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

By Shannon Cartier Lucy

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: