Webcurios 24/11/23

ONE MONTH TO GO! ONE MONTH TO GO!

Of course, if you’re in North America right now you’ll already be in the middle of an extended period of having a bad time with people you don’t like who you’re nevertheless compelled to spend time with by accidents of birth, but for the rest of us we’re into the FINAL COUNTDOWN to the festive season and that weird period of time when everyone loses the ability to imagine that life will continue after the holidays (I feel the whole November/December period of work is the real-life embodiment of the sowing/reaping meme, basically).

Effectively what I’m saying is that you’re entirely-entitled to down tools from hereon out – noone’s going to notice, and according to Rishi the economy’s going really well ACTUALLY and so we can probably all rely on things just sort of magically picking up next year…so click ALL the links in this week’s issue because, honestly, who the fcuk cares anyway?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you have my permission to open the Bailey’s and drink so much that you see God.

By Seth Becker

(images as ever via TIH)

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH THE RETURN OF MY PERSONAL FAVOURITE PURVEYOR OF MIXES, SADEAGLE, WHO HERE PRESENTS JUST UNDER TWO HOURS OF SELECTED TUNES FROM ACROSS AFRICA, LITERALLY NONE OF WHICH YOU ARE LIKELY TO HAVE HEARD BEFORE BUT ALL OF WHICH ARE SUPERB! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY ISN’T LOOKING FORWARD TO CONOR MCGREGOR’S INEVITABLE SECOND-ACT POLITICAL CAREER, PT.1:  

By Katrien de Blauwer

NEXT UP WHY NOT RELAX WITH THIS AUTUMNAL SELECTION OF FOLK-Y TYPE TUNES PICKED BY PAUL HILLERY! 

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY ISN’T LOOKING FORWARD TO CONOR MCGREGOR’S INEVITABLE SECOND-ACT POLITICAL CAREER, PT.2:  

• The Fine Water Academy: A few years ago I featured a longread in Curios all about the very specific and rarefied world of the water sommellier and the luxe H20 market – now I am proud to present to you the world’s PREMIERE organisation for the accreditation and recognition of aquatic expertise! The Fine Water Academy is a VERY SERIOUS institution, consisting of two water experts who are willing to share their hard-won expertise on all things watery…for a price. “We have been asked many times in the past to share our knowledge and excitement about Fine Waters. We have both done this through all possible media channels, from tastings to seminars, speeches and training. We both have an extensive online presence and knowledge base as well as and a large audience. The Fine Water Academy LMS (Learning Management System) will now allow us to do this in a structured way and educate and certify the next generation of Water Sommeliers and train HORECA for a proper water service. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.” Leaving aside the…slightly sinister vibe given off by the last three words there, and the frankly-risible concept of a somehow-bespoke ‘learning management system’ for, er, what water tastes like, this all seems like good, clean fun – for just $120 you can take their ‘Fine Water 101’ class, while a Water Service Certification is just a shade under $500. Prices to get certified as a Fine Water Sommelier (what do they wear instead of the grapes, do you think? A small silver water molecule?) are on application only, but, frankly, WHAT PRICE THAT SORT OF EXPERTISE?!?!
• The Social Justice Kittens Calendar 2024:I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t feel to me as though the festive season has really started until I see the first mention of the Social Justice Kittens calendar for the coming year – 2024’s selection of cats saying preposterous things is a classic bunch, and I am already looking forward to enjoying next December alongside a sad-eyed kitten bearing the legend: “I exist in the space beyond your expectations. My queerness threatens your hierarchies”.
• Dear AI: A personal, small, modern bugbear of mine – the death of epistolary correspondence. I don’t mean physical letters – there is literally noone left alive under the age of 50 with hands strong enough to compose more than approximately three lines of cursive, based on my own personal (painful) experiences last time I was forced to write anything in longhand – but even just the habit of long, rambling, one-side-then-the-other email chats has sort of died down. Or maybe I’m just a really fcuking boring correspondent, I don’t know (but if you *do* know, please don’t tell me). Anyway, if you need to write someone a letter or ‘proper’ missive, one that requires you to use all the letters and none of the emoji and to write in full sentences, then why not…outsource that to AI! Obviously this is a useless service that is just a GPT addon and which won’t exist in a few months’ time, but I found quite a few things to be sad about and hate here which I want to share with you because, well, that’s what I do.  The idea that you can ‘add a personal touch’ by integrating the recipient’s social channels into the response is SUCH a risibly bad and clunky idea – you just know that you’ll end up with something like “I find you so inspiring, like that post you made on Instagram about flowers!” – but the real, proper ‘oh god this really is so bleak’ moment came when I looked down the page at their proposed ‘coming soon’ features and discovered the promise of ‘Fully Automated Correspondence’, described as “Our AI agent learns who and what is meaningful to you and preemptively writes and sends letters without you having to lift a finger. So you can focus on what’s important to you.” So, er, WHAT IS THE POINT OF ME, THEN?! Does anyone really *want* a future in which The Machine does all the heavy lifting of, you know, communicating with the other people in one’s life? Eh? Oh, ok, fine.
• TIME’s Top 100 Photos of 2023: TIME Magazine’s annual roundup of the best photojournalism from the past twelve months – these selections are always rather wonderful (if quite dizzying), and the range and breadth of topics and subjects covered this year is no exception. There’s a predictable quantity of human suffering on display – you may have heard, there are some wars going on – but many of the best shots are smaller and quieter; grapefruits split from crates in an earthquake’s aftermath, people watching Pride in New York, bulldozers moving in to level a German town…being alive is, mostly, maddening and awful and confusing and a bit scary, and these images capture all of that.
• X100: Do you feel that there’s something holding you back from achieving your personal fitness goals? Is that something…COUNTING???? Well FEAR NOT, as x100 is here to help – never again need your prsuit of MASSIVE GAINS be stymied by pesky contiguous numbers! X100 is an app which, er, counts your reps – set it up so your workout station is within your phone camera’s field of vision, tell it how many lifts or squats or prolapses (can you tell I don’t gym?) you want to achieve and then OFF YOU GO, focusing on your posture and your technique and on not tearing anything and letting The Machine take care of the tricky business of remembering what comes after ‘17’.
• Code For Text: Yes, ok, that’s not technically what this is called, but it doesn’t seem to have a proper name and it’s quite hard to describe and…you don’t care, do you? You just want me to get on and tell you what the fcuk this is, and stop with the tedious stream of consciousness authorial schtick? OH OK FINE. This is a link to a code project which basically exists to let you run analysis on words – to quote the project, it’s “a set of tools and standards -to mess with text. like a crowbar, for words. pull a chunk out- and get something back from your text.” So this will let you easily sort the adjectives or verbs from a corpus, say, or isolate sentences of particular length, or all sorts of other clever things which would otherwise be tricky or time-consuming – and none of which, fine, I can think of any practical NEED for, but I really like the idea of being able to have a setting on a website which (for example) removes all the adjectives at a click, to give you the most pared-back explanatory experience, say (actually that’s not a wholly terrible idea for a particular sort of company). If you do anything that involves wordwrangling then you might find this curious and vaguely-inspiring.
• Italian Poetry: Via Giuseppe, Italian Poetry is a lovely little project by a MYSTERIOUS PERSON WHO LIKES POEMS and which self-describes as “my answer to the question: “If I were an English speaker trying to get an idea of how Italian poetry sounds, what tool would I like to have?” Well, I would like first of all to hear the poems recited out loud. Then I’d like an easy way to go back and forth between English and Italian without opening a dictionary. Also useful: some context on the choice of vocabulary, and maybe a guide to the most salient technical aspects of the Italian language.” The site presents a selection of poems which you can listen to and read along with – the words are highlighted as they’re spoken, making this helpful not only for poetry enthusiasts but also for anyone learning Italian and wanting help with listening comprehension or pronunciation – and the site’s seemingly updated regularly with new verse; this really is rather lovely.
• Eternal Sunset: This is a nice idea which almost feels like it could be bigger – the website’s basic premise is that whenever you log on it will display a livestream of a sunset happening somewhere in the world (at the time of writing I’m enjoying a slightly-underwhelming one over Taipei, albeit one with a very pleasant lounge jazz soundtrack), but I would quite like to see this jazzed up slightly and, I don’t know, used as a premise for a wall in a bar or a meeting room or something. In fact, what this reminds me of most is an exhibition I saw at MOMA in San Francisco in about 2011 which pulled images of sunsets from Flickr – GOD I AM OLD. Anyway, this is pleasing and who doesn’t like a sunset? NO FCUKER, etc! This came via perennially-interesting Nag, btw.
• Choose Your Own Threadventure: One of the curious things of having been A Weirdo Who Spends Far More Time Than Is Healthy Online for more than a decade now is that I am now starting to see past internet trends coming round for the third or fourth time (and this is one of the many, many reasons why I don’t want to live until I’m 100+ – can you imagine how incredibly fcuking tedious it must be watching the same arguments and conversations and trends and themes come back over and over and over again? It’s…it’s almost like we’re moronic hairless apes who will never learn!) – I’ve recently seen a spate of pieces talking about the TREND for old influencers on TikTok, just like we did on Insta in about 2012, and moral panics over THE KIDS and social media, just like we’ve been doing…well, annually, since about 2006 tbh, and here we have someone doing a Choose Your Own Adventure game… on Threads! Just like what we used to do on Twitter in 2015! And on YouTube in 2009 (RIP annotations)! Anyway, this works in exactly the same way as they did on Twitter, and it’s a gentle 5 minute timewaster with nice little graphics to accompany it, and if you’re in the invidious position of having to be in charge of some awful company’s pointless Threads presence then here’s an idea you can lob at your paymasters in order to maybe leaven the dreadful tedium of your professional existence for a few seconds.
• The Ship Handling and Research Training Centre: I don’t mean to laugh at this – I don’t, really – and this is obviously no particular shade on Poland as I imagine that actually this is a pretty standard way of training ship’s captains in-waiting about the basics of maritime safety and seafaring, and I appreciate that this may still be the best way of doing this sort of educative work…but, also, just take a moment to imagine what you THINK a nation’s centre for training its future naval captains might be…are you imagining? ARE YOU? Good. Now click the link, Now click around the site. Now…now try not to laugh as you understand the scale at which this is all operating at. Honestly, I have cried actual tears of laughter every time I’ve clicked on this.
• Nights on Earth: This is SUCH a great website, and is definitely worth bookmarking if you’re the sort of person who likes craning their neck to look at the sky at night – Nights On Earth is a calendar website which, based on where it thinks you are, will give you a reasonable idea of what sorts of things you might expect to see in the firmament (presuming you’re living somewhere without light pollution, or clouds). If nothing else it’s worth looking at before you go on holiday – you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know you or indeed your level of familiarity with astrology, who ARE you?) at the frequency with which visible meteor showers happen in parts of the world that aren’t the UK (although apparently we might be able to see shooting stars in London on Tuesday, so shut my face).
• Closer: With the holiday season coming up, those of you whose relatives aren’t all mostly dead will likely be spending it with family – if you’re after a game to play which might BRING YOU CLOSER and HELP YOU LEARN AND GROW then, well, you’re a very different sort of person to me and we probably wouldn’t really get on, but, also, you might like Closer, a card game which is designed to, er, bring its participants closer (DO YOU SEE?) via the medium of asking everyone playing to share personal stories based on prompts and themes suggested by the cards – players vote on which stories were ‘best’ to add a small element of competition to the whole affair, but as far as I can tell this is mainly about giving everyone an opportunity to share stories and REFLECT and stuff like that. I would imagine that the likely appeal of this will be split pretty much along national lines, with North Americans (and frankly most of the rest of the world) approaching this with healthy interest, and the English instead thinking ‘the only way I could possibly countenance playing this is if I were very drunk, and if that happened it would inevitably end in murder or divorce’, but see what you think.
• Retro: YES I KNOW NOONE WANTS ANOTHER PHOTO SHARING APP…but, in its defence, I think Retro looks reasonably interesting. As far as I can tell, its particular gimmick is that it encourages you to upload photos into weekly albums which you can share with friends and family – it’s designed to be a known-network rather than a ‘strangers and the world’ platform, and there’s something rather nice about the idea of using it as a small, shared visual diary and a light-touch way of keeping in touch. Admittedly there’s little here that you couldn’t probably also achieve with a bunch of other existing apps but, well, I quite like the feel of this for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
• Plotthread: You know the ‘Wall’ game from Only Connect? Or, for the arrivistes among you, the NYT’s daily ‘Connections’ game? Well it’s that, but for films – you have 16 films each day and you need to group them by common plot thread. Given my previously-chronicled lack of interest in cinema this is basically the quiz equivalent of quantum physics for me, but you may have more success.
• DoodleRiddle: This is an interesting idea – the game here is to draw something, anything, which is then compared against what that day’s target object is. How much does The Machine think the thing you have drawn looks like the thing it wants you to draw, and can you use that information to get closer to drawing what it wants you too? Which, dear Christ, is a truly appalling attempt at explaining how the fcuk this works. Sorry. You’ll just have to click the link and play – it’s fun, promise, although it’s also totally fcuking impossible if you ask me.
• The Roottrees Are Dead: Ooh, this is fun – and has a slight whiff of cult 90s police procedural videogame (and covert recruiting device for the LAPD) Police Quest for good measure. In The Roottrees Are Dead, you play as a detective investigating the demise of the titular family – your job is to examine the evidence, do some light sleuthing and piece together the pieces of the mystery to discover what happened. “The year is 1998. A private jet belonging to the Roottree Corporation has crashed. On it were The Roottree Sisters and their parents. Combined, they were worth over a billion dollars. Now, due to the eccentricities of their great, great grandfather, Elias their money must be redistributed to the rest of the family. But who’s actually a BLOOD RELATIVE? That’s where you come in. Armed only with the power of your mighty dial-up modem, you’ll scour for photos, books, articles, and other evidence. Then, you’ll make connections and deductions based on the family relationships you uncover. With every spot on the tree you fill in correctly the names and photos left in your possession will have fewer and fewer places to go, but the evidence will also be harder and more obscure to find.” This really is very good indeed, and suprisingly involved – I won’t say it’s hard, exactly, but I had to think more than I have had to do in most white collar desk jobs I’ve ever had.
• A Bull In A China Shop: You are a bull, You have 20s to smash as much crockery as you can. BULL SMASH!
• Dr Ludwig and the Devil: The winner of this year’s Interactive Fiction Contest (which I seem to have unaccountably missed, FFS Matt!) is this charming and very funny text adventure in which you play Dr Ludwig who has, possibly unwisely, summoned the devil. “Join esteemed mad scientist Dr Ludwig as he faces the greatest challenge of his nefarious career: making a deal with the Devil and coming out on top. Research demonology! Read legal documents! Face off against the world’s least effective torch and pitchfork-wielding mob! All this and more!” This is excellent, and the amount of attention to detail alongside the quality of the writing make it a real gem, even if you’re not a particular fan of IF and text adventures as a rule.
• Dreamcore 95: Finally this week, an idle clicker game of genuinely exceptional quality – it has a soundtrack! It has actual, light gameplay elements! It has penguins and dolphins and palm trees, and a genuinely-soothing vaporwave aesthetic! It’s basically a bit like a bath bomb for your brain, except with the added benefit of not smelling like the inside of Lush!

By Boris Pelcer

OUR FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS BY THE STUPENDOUSLY-NAMED EDER DISCOTECA AND IS AN ODD-BUT-GOOD COLLECTION OF PSYCHEDELIA, BALEARIC, PSEUDO-DUB AND A BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO ATTEMPT TO CATEGORISE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

• ArcX1000: I don’t tend to feature meme or ‘aesthetic’ accounts on here, but I will make an exception for this, partly because I just like the vibe and partly because of this specific image which speaks to me in ways I can’t adequately explain to you.
• PaperMeister Hackney: The Insta feed of a bloke in Hackney who has, apparently, the largest rolling paper collection known to man. Why? I HAVE NO FCUKING IDEA WHY NOT ASK HIM? Lots of photos of obscure international rolling paper brands interspersed with unremarkable photography of Being A Young Man In Hackney makes this feel weirdly like a fashion lookbook, and I rather like it.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

By Lui Ferreyra

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: