You know, I haven’t felt nostalgic for the experience of attending political party conferences for…well, never, as it happens, they are fcuking AWFUL things. If you accept that ‘politics is rock and roll for ugly people’ (and it really, really is), then Conference is Glastonbury – gossip and hedonism and the opportunity to spend four days fcuked off your tits in a cloistered environment almost-entirely divorced from reality, and, in general, unless you’re a particularly-politics-poisoned sort there is literally no worse experience than having to spend 96 hours breathing the same air as people who have STRONG FEELINGS about fringe meetings and how best to organise a truly democratic leadership process.
This year, though, I wouldn’t actually mind attending Labour Conference, mainly because there’s something almost…fun about these events when they’re overtaken by the scent of blood in the water, very much the case now with the Burnham wagons being mobilised and Bad News coming left, right and centre (on which point, does anyone else feel that it’s…coincidental how many unhelpful leaks there have been about people in Labour’s inner circle since the unfortunate business of Lord Mandelson and the Epstein Files? No?), and I think that this weekend is going to see some deliciously-poisonous gossip and some pointed positioning as the jockeying for next June’s seemingly-inevitable leadership contest begins in earnest.
Then again, I also remember the moment when I realised definitively that I had to quit the lobbying industry before I murdered someone – it was at Labour Conference in 2004, at about 3am, annihilated on booze and alone in some bar, watching as Oona King and, yes, Andy Burnham sang a karaoke version of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and I realised that I hated every single person I was currently sharing air with with a passion that was bordering on dangerous. A month later I had handed in my notice, and now here I am writing a newsletter about ‘stuff on the internet’ to YOU, dear anonymous reader. So, in some small way, Web Curios is Andy Burnham’s fault. FFS Bambi, you cnut.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios. and you probably didn’t want to read the preceding three paras about UK politics but you should know by now that what you want matters to me not one iota.
By Maud Madsen
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT ALL OF YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE UK ID CARD STUFF TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER EXACTLY HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT THE UK GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO BE ABLE TO DELIVER A COMPLICATED, CONTROVERSIAL, UNPOPULAR IT PROJECT WITHIN A SINGLE PARLIAMENT, PT.1:
- Pink Website: You don’t, if you ask me – I appreciate noone did, but it is 704am and I am sleepy and I hope you will forgive me this slight bit of authorial sleight-of-hand as I attempt to muster up the motivation to write this fcuker rather than just going back to bed where it is warm and safe – see enough truly baffling websites anymore; ok, fine, I know I regularly feature things in here where my overriding descriptor is basically ‘I don’t really know what’s going on here’, but that, if I’m honest, is more to do with me being a lazy and ineffectual Virgil than it is the true inscrutability of the webproject in question. Not this time, though – Pink Website is a WONDERFUL, curious, mysterious and CREEPY little throwback to a time of ARGs and curious, fictional rabbitholes, a website which is also a portal to a strange, unsettling and, yes, fine, not a *little* bleak bit of storytelling about the end of the world (or is it?). Click the link and you’re taken to a countdown to the end of the world – from there…Gah, no, I don’t want to tell you much more about this, it’s far more interesting if you just feel the shape of it yourself. You won’t know what to do, but that’s ok – just…click around, is the only advice I can give you. Eventually the bones of a story will emerge, about DreamLucy and the apocalypse, and you will start to get a feel for the particular tone and vibe of the piece – this is creepy and sad and confusing and sort-of beautiful, and I really really like it a lot.
- NobleMobile: What, do you think, would convince you to spend less time on your phone? Legislation? Threats? The sudden and inexplicable overnight loss of all your digits? How about MONEY??? Should the answer very much be the final one of those, you might be interested in the Noble Mobile proposition, a US proposition which offers Americans the chance to sign up to its network and, er, earn money back based on how little data they use each month, the idea being that this incentivises you to spend less time on your mobile scrolling through ephemeral bullsh1t and more time, I don’t know, observing the slow erasure of your country’s democratic institutions and processes by a lunatic demagogue. This, honestly, feels like a genuinely-dumb idea – if nothing else it feels like QUITE an easy thing to scam simply by ensuring you use WiFi or just get hotspotted by your mate with an all-you-can-eat dataplan, but I am going to assume that the people behind this aren’t total morons and that the $50 a month basic plan includes a LOT of fat, and the discounts are pretty small to ensure there’s a minimal profit margin baked in to the offering regardless of how little data people do in fact end up using. Basically I don’t think this is ever going to a) catch on; or b) make any sort of meaningful difference to the way that anyone actually uses their phone (after all, people who are addicted to something famously tend to keep on seeking out the thing regardless of financial benefits/disbenefits to themselves – demand for skag from heroin addicts tends to be fairly price-inelastic, you may have noticed), but it’s an interesting idea which I think probably has a few pivot-y usecases which it might be interesting to explore.
- The Ig Nobel Winners 2025: This feels like I am a week late – which, fine, I am, but these came out a week ago and JUST too late for last week’s Curios, so this is basically the linky equivalent of me sheepishly offering you a slightly past-its-best carrot or stale biscuit or something. BUT! What a tasty carrot-slash-biscuit this is, regardless of freshness! The 2025 crop of winners of he Ig Nobel award for the most pointless-sounding piece of scientific research of the past 12 months is, as ever, a wonderful testament to both human curiosity and the generally-accommodating nature of academia; I do wonder whether by this point every single research scientist in the world is allowed to undertake one project solely for the purposes of securing an Ig Nobel nomination, because otherwise I am baffled as to how any of these got signed off. Is there any conceivable scientific reason as to why any researchers would need to spend time investigating whether “from an engineering design perspective, how foul-smelling shoes affect the good experience of using a shoe-rack”? Also, what the fcuk does that even *mean*? Anyway, there are some lovely, dumb-sounding pieces of academic work referenced in here (which are also, obviously, SERIOUS AND COMPLEX EXAMPLES OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD), although I refuse to believe that the project looking into cheese clumping in the making of cacio e pepe is anything other than a vital contribution to human knowledge.
- Find My Parking Cops: In more ‘America is sh1t these days’ news, this project was sadly only live for about 24h before getting comprehensively-nixed by The Man – still, it was a lovely idea why it lasted, and it’s worth sharing even in its now-mothballed state. Find My Parking Cops was a project by Riley Walz, whose work I have featured in here before, which used live data made available by the city of San Francisco to track the location of the various traffic policemen wandering around dispensing tickets, not quite in realtime but by noting the location of their last logged fine – if you want a proper explainer as to the ‘how’ of all this you can read one here, it’s a really smart piece of deduction and implementation. Anyway, it doesn’t work anymore because within a day the city changed something in the way its systems functions and the data that it’s possible to pull, but it’s a glorious idea and it was fun while it lasted. BONUS FUN URBAN TRANSPORT FACT! If you ever happen to go to Rome, you *probably* don’t need to buy any bus tickets; you can just walk on to any bus in the city and, while you *technically* need a ticket to access the network there are in fact only about 30-odd ticket inspectors working across the whole of the city and (and this is the best bit) THEY NEVER ALL WORK AT THE SAME TIME, meaning that your statistical likelihood of getting caught is pretty much close to zero (NB – Web Curios is in no way advocating theft, and is also not going to take ANY responsibility should you get your collar felt by a buscop when you’re bumping merrily along Via Del Corso).
- AI Red Lines: So, three years into the whole generative AI thing – is it a boom? Is it a bubble? Is it going to change EVERYTHING FOREVER? Er, yes! – and despite various petitions and INTERVENTIONS and interviews and doom-laden predictions from scientists and THINKERS and, frankly, any cnut with a public profile and a desire for a bit pf publicity, we’re no closer to any sort of collective agreement as to how best to seek to ensure that whatever we do with this tech doesn’t end up fcuking us in half as a species. BUT! Surely this time it will be different! That, presumably, is the hope for this latest…what, document? Manifesto? Set of loosely-expressed hopes? Anyway, the AI Red Lines here presented are described as “specific prohibitions on AI uses or behaviors that are deemed too dangerous to permit under any circumstances…limits, agreed upon internationally, to prevent AI from causing universally unacceptable risks.” All sorts of FAMOUSES have signed – oh look, it’s Geoffrey Hinton, a man with a seemingly-insatiable desire to be talking head on this stuff despite his ‘interventions’ amounting to nothing more than a lot of vaguely-worried handwaving! – and they are calling for these RED LINES to be agreed upon and implemented internationally by the end of 2026…look, I am not suggesting that having some sort of collective view of How Best To Proceed With This Stuff isn’t a good idea, but, equally, I am not sure exactly what the fcuking point of an OPEN LETTER which basically says ‘yeah, so we need to agree on how to do this so we don’t absolutely banjax ourselves as a species…what? Ideas? No mate, you’d have to ask someone else, we’re only here to make vague requests and garner some media attention’ is. I mean, read this: “The red lines could focus either on AI behaviors (i.e., what the AI systems can do) or on AI uses (i.e., how humans and organizations are allowed to use such systems). The following examples show the kind of boundaries that can command broad international consensus.Note that the campaign does not focus on endorsing any specific red lines. Their specific definition and clarification will have to be the result of scientific-diplomatic dialogues.” Yeah, this is DEFINITELY going to save us all from a rogue machine future. FFS.
- Dial-A-Poem: Oh, this is lovely! “First launched in 1969 by poet John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem began as a radical experiment: pick up the phone, dial a number, and hear a poem. Today, it’s a global network. Working with partners around the world, Giorno Poetry Systems records contemporary poets reading in their native languages and makes their work available through freely accessible local phone numbers. This website brings together Giorno’s original recordings alongside those from each international edition in one accessible space. Click the phone to pick it up and hear a poem. Click again to hang up. Click again to hear another.” You heard them, CLICK AND LISTEN TO POETRY!
- The Dig Archive: Ooh, this is fun, a personal library of…stuff, collected over the years by one Lee Tusman, comprising things that they have found interesting and wanted to preserve and share with others. There’s something so…generous about this, and it made me think that there’s something lovely about the idea of a networked of these sorts of collections, like an infinity of tiny libraries or galleries presenting a snapshot of the culture and artefacts that have shaped a life. What’s in here? WELL I AM GLAD YOU ASKED! “There are the informal rules of composer/musician John Zorn’s improvised “game pieces” that are handed down from musician to musician. There are coloring books and manuals, as well as half-manuals/half-coloring-books from virtuousic psychedelic synth designer Peter Blasser. There are whole books, like the New Art/Science Affinities, a book on the intersection of art and technology, with big photographs and strong artist profiles, which I assign to students in my classes to read but had disappeared from their original website years ago. There are exhibition catalogs, such as for the exhibit FOOD about the same-named artist-run restaurant that included Gordon Matta-Clark within its community. There are teaching activities on the Gee’s bend quilts, from the Philadelpha Museum of Art; conversations on self-hosted feminist servers; user guides for old game-making software Klik and Play; a slide show by artist and graffiti writer Barry McGee; and photographs of the funeral of Kazimir Malevich, which included a truck affixed with the black square to its bumper.” WONDERFULLY random and disparate – one of the documents on here is a very old document explaining how to build a mattress from scratch, and if that doesn’t recommend this link to you then, well, check your fcuking pulse is all I can say.
- Weight Rocks: I don’t…I don’t quite get this, it’s fair to say, but I would quite like one of you to dig around and find out and perhaps to try and explain it to me at some later date. The site basically lets you, er, buy rocks. There’s nothing special about any of these rocks, as far as I can tell – they don’t appear to be particularly pretty, or to have INTERESTING GEOLOGICAL ELEMENTS, or to have any sort of value whatsoever other than that conferred to them by the website, which is selling them for $50 a pop. Why would you pay $50 for a rock? I DO NOT KNOW. Pay them money and you will receive your rock, as well as a certificate telling you its “exact weight (documented to the gram) and sequential number (#000001, #000002, etc.)”. Oh, and you will also be able to “access link to your rock in our database”, which I can’t pretend didn’t send me down a pleasingly-silly ‘AUTHENTICATED ON THE ROCKCHAIN’ mental rabbithole. Why? WHY NOT BUY A ROCK, LIVE A LITTLE. Shipping will begin on 1 November, apparently, so if you’re in the market for a unique Christmas gift then, well, look no further.
- Beads: Would you like a website that lets you create geometric arrangements of digital glass beads in a sort-of square lattice pattern? No? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Look, *you* may not think you need or want this but you are mistaken and so I am, with all respect, going to give it to you anyway. CLICK THE LINK, MANIPULATE THE SOOTHING BEADS.
- Will It Lamp?: My maternal grandfather was in many respects a curious man, with some unusual pastimes and qualities – some more acceptable, like making homemade cobnut booze, some less acceptable, like his steadfast refusal to abandon fascism as his political ideology of choice long after the Second World War had ended – but one of the more benign was his compulsion to make lamps out of anything he could get his hands on (he went through a period around the Italia90 World Cup of making lamp versions of the weirdly-cubic tournament mascot Ciao, which drove my grandmother fcuking insane). Anyway, my granddad would have been deeply confused by and suspicious and social media, though I have a sneaking suspicion that he would probably have quite liked the unprecedented quantities of near-naked female flesh it gave him access to via his phonescreen, but he would have LOVED this TikTok account in which people attempt to see if they can, er, make a lamp out of various things. SPOILER: you can basically make a lamp out of ANYTHING with a plug, a bulb and some wiring, so this isn’t exactly laden with tension, but it’s nice and craft-y and sort-of soothing, and you might enjoy it if you’re the sort of person who likes to spend their weekends Making Things rather than cycling frantically between the twin state poles of ‘drunk’ and ‘wanting to cry’.
- Jelly Gummies Gifs: The Giphy page of a digital artis working under the moniker of ‘Jelly Gummies’, who makes grotesque animations that look as though they feature creatures that have been crafted from that expanding foam that you often see used in cavity walls. Yes, I know, but it WILL make sense when you click the link, I promise you (it might also make you feel a bit queasy, but that’s your problem rather than mine).
- Bluefacts: Would YOU like a lightweight profile-analysing tool for increasingly-moribund-feeling lefty bubble platform Bluesky? GO ON THEN HERE YOU ARE! Plug in any account name you like and you will get served a bunch of data about said account – its relative popularity in the grand Bluesky scheme of things, famous or influential accounts that follow it, etc etc. This site is where that ‘ranking of most-engaged-with accounts on Bluesky’ screengrab that did the rounds this week came from – the one which proved that a significant proportion of the site is made up of annoying ‘RESIST’-style US liberals – and you can also get information about the fastest-growing new profiles, and see the ‘top posts’ of the past 24h…the last of these is an interesting and illustrative snapshot of why the site is, in many respects, as po-faced and annoying as its detractors say it is (sample high-performing post at the time of writing: “I miss the days when Obama could just post his summer playlist instead of dire warnings” OH GOD JUST LET THE MAN GO FFS IT IS IN THE PAST HE AND IT ARE NOT COMING BACK), but it’s also a nice reminder that, if you use it smartly and curate your feed, you can basically ignore all of the predictably-tedious US politics stuff and actually still have quite a nice time.
- TwoSlice: A font! Which is TWO PIXELS HIGH! And, weirdly, somehow still just about readable despite that. I challenge any of you with admin access to a significant website to install this across the whole thing and leave it like that til Monday. GO ON LIVE A LITTLE.
- Jan: One for the techiest amongst you, or those who REALLY want to mess around with LLMs in a semi-serious way; Jan is an interesting project which basically offers a wrapper for all sorts of different open source LLMs, from Meta’s LLAMA to Mistral and beyond, or a way of pulling in GPT or Claude, all running locally on your machine, all within a seemingly-pleasant-looking interface. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on here about what you can do to integrate Jan with your email systems and your on-device files, and, if you’re serious about tinkering with The Machine in a more practical and direct way than just asking it to write you a story about ‘sexy bake off’ (I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LIKE) then this might be worth looking at.
- Pointcloud Garden: Oh, I really like this! Basically this lets you select from a dropdown to pick one of a selection of different garden views, which are then rendered in your browser in a sort of Kinect-ish, pointillist abstract multicoloured cloud (which is still semi-recognisably a garden). There’s something both weirdly-retro about the look of this, reminiscent of a certain style of game art from the 90s, and also oddly soothing; I could honestly look at these twinkling pixel gardens for hours (so tired, so very tired).
- Niche Design: A reader writes! Specifically Itay Dreyfus, who emailed me to say “Just released a new project of mine…It’s a self-published project exploring where design flourishes in the age of sameness. It’s a mix of essays and interviews with the (poetic?) web people like are.na, Kinopio, mmm.page, Light Phone, and many more.” Ok, so this is an ACTUAL THING YOU HAVE TO BUY but, well, I am a sucker for this sort of small publishing project, and I think there might be a few of you who might be in the market for “A zine for designers and product makers seeking meaning beyond metrics, inviting you to rethink our culture through the ways we design.” See what you think.
- Yamanotes: OH THIS IS LOVELY! I was hitherto-unaware of the fact that the each station on Tokyo’s Yamanote line (and, presumably, all the other lines of the city’s train network) has its own special melody that plays when trains depart the station; this site, which was apparently created as a companion to a train driving game set in Tokyo, lets you play all the different little melodies at will. Why? WHY NOT YOU JOYLESS FCUK??? Click the link, play around and then spend some time thinking about what sounds would be most appropriate to signal arrival or departure at YOUR local station! Actually, fcuk, this feels like a GREAT little digital project you could do with the tube map and the ability to upload audio files; anyone want to make this? ANYONE??? Christ.
- Birds’n’Bass: Ornithology and amens, united at last! A TikTok account that combines footage of birds with drum’n’bass to surprisingly-effective ends. Click the link and realise for the first time how much an avian aesthetic would add to your next rave.
By Robert Euwe
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT ALL OF YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE UK ID CARD STUFF TAKE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER EXACTLY HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT THE UK GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO BE ABLE TO DELIVER A COMPLICATED, CONTROVERSIAL, UNPOPULAR IT PROJECT WITHIN A SINGLE PARLIAMENT, PT.2:
- Dopeloop Beatmaker: Ok, fine, I appreciate in-browser drumloop makers are not exactly a rare commodity online, particular in the era of the stellar 10k Drum Machines project, but it’s rare to come across one that is as simple and satisfying to use as this particularly example; apart from anything else, I spent a good 15 minutes playing with this earlier in the week and wasn’t ONCE able to come up with anything that sounded awful or arrhythmic (ok, fine, that’s literally impossible based on the software) or that wasn’t basically…quite good? Effectively I think that if you have even a modicum of musical talent – and, quite possibly, even if you don’t – this is a foolproof way of making some pretty decent drum loops in doublequick time.
- Generativ Design: No, it’s not a typo ACTUALLY, they have decided to leave off the ‘e’ and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc etc. Generativ Design (Christ but does it upset me misspelling it like that, though – oh, hang on, it’s because they couldn’t buy the domain with the proper spelling, fine, I forgive them) is a nice set of little digital design toys which let you create different sorts of graphical and textual designs; rotating word grids and geometric patterns and gradient wave lines and and and…Per the blurb, “This site is a preliminary research prototype that combines a technique called generative art, which draws graphics using code, with practical applications for visual identity.” There’s LOADS of little toys on here that you can use to make pleasant visual objects with, each playing with a particular on-page element, and if nothing else this is probably quite a useful resource for inspiration around graphic design and typography and the like. Although, honestly, like I’d fcuking know, I haven’t had visual inspiration since approximately 1983.
- The Brown Bear Salmon Cam: London right now is COLD and GREY and URBAN, and if I look out of my kitchen window to my right I can see SLATE-COLOURED SKY and some pretty-unprepossessing South London rooftops (oh Christ, and the bloke whose flat backs onto mine getting dressed, CLOSE YOUR CURTAINS FFS MAN)…which is why it’s all I can do not to click this link and get transported to Alaska to watch a feed of brown bears fishing for salmon and generally just hanging out in the great outdoors. Ok, so at the time of writing it’s actually nighttime and as such they’re showing a highlights reel, but come back later and see if you can see some fish getting eviscerated by some lovely, cuddly predators! This crossed my field of vision due to its connection to FAT BEAR WEEK, which I have featured in Curios for MANY years and which has rolled around once again (as befits its rotund nature) and which you can learn more about here should you so desire.
- Tinter Battles: What do you DO for a living? Now I come to think of it I am genuinely curious – who ARE you? Seriously, if any of you read this and don’t mind indulging my curiosity I would love to know what it is that you do to keep the wolf from the door and a roof over your heads (presuming of course that you’re not reading this while sleeping rough and starving – and, er, if you are, please also get in touch because, well, I feel the least I could do is offer to help), and whether or not your career is the sort of thing which can be turned into a COMPETITIVE SPECTATOR SPORT. Many can’t – I struggle to imagine how exactly one might turn public relations into a high-octane contest, for example; head-to-head press release writing? A points-based crisis comms battle? Dear Christ what a miserable thought – but some professions seem TAILOR MADE to be turned into televised entertainment, such as the storied vocation of, er, WINDOW-TINTER! If you’re not certain what the fcuk that actually means, I’m talking about the people who are employed to attach microthin layers of tinted plastic to glass to act as a shield against glare, light, etc, and who, according to this AMAZING TikTok account, occasionally engage in PITCHED BATTLES to see who is the best at, er, affixing very thin sheets of plastic to glass. Look, you may not think that this sounds compelling, but click the link and come back to me sweaty-palmed after enjoying the nailbiting spectacle of two midwestern men pushing some coloured film REALLY tightly into the corners of a patio door. I feel that if I went to a certain type of bar in a certain type of semi-rural town in the US I would 100% see this on a bunch of TV screens while I drank.
- Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025: SO MUCH DAMP BEAUTY! The annual celebration of excellence in underwater photography returns for its 2025 edition, with, as ever, some truly spectacular shots which are slightly-diminished by the fact that the website makes such a pig’s ear of presenting them – the navigation is horrible and requires TOO MANY CLICKS to see all the images, which, fine, is a pathetic and entitled complaint but also, look, I see a LOT of websites and we’ve been doing this stuff for 30-odd years now and I sort of think that in grand old 2025 you should probably have at least one of your fingers snapped if you let a site ship with this sort of UX (other oddly-violent and borderline-fascistic opinions are also available!). Anyway, my personal favourite is this one, partly because I am quite sleepy (did I mention I am quite sleepy) and I want to bury my face in it something chronic (inevitable piscine smell be damned).
- Guardian Haiku: A cute project which attempts to pull haikus from headlines on the Guardian newspaper’s website – except there’s something a bit screwy in the code, which means that a lot of these are all wrong, syllabically-speaking. Still, it feels churlish to complain about something fun that someone has made that is fun and frivolous and so, well, I shan’t.
- The World Map of Food: Ooh, I am a sucker for a hubristic, doomed attempt to create a definitive global guide to stuff! This is the attempt of one Djour, who I think lives in Philadelphia and works in food service and who, per his explanation, ‘hates food map ratings’ and so has created a map of what HE considers to be the best food in Philadelphia (and New York, and Jersey), and is now expanding to create a map of the best food EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD! This is a…well, it’s a frankly mad and impossible endeavour, leaving aside the subjectivity inherent in ‘best’, but hats off to the man for trying; the world map sources information from a bunch of different places, cross-referencing to come up with some sort of attempted definitive list; as ever I ‘tested’ it by looking at London and, honestly, it’s an interesting if VERY partial selection of places; wherever he’s sourcing this stuff from is an odd mix of the very fancy and quite new (Row on 5) and the…weird (Bradley’s Spanish Bar?!), but I quite like the fact that it feels oddly, idiosyncratically different, and so as such this is possibly worth a bookmark for next time you travel somewhere new and want to let some bloke from Philadelphia guide your culinary decisions.
- Peak Jut: A website helping you find the mountains around the world with the biggest ‘jut’, which, look, I can’t help but parse as…a bit rude? Christ, I have been online TOO LONG. From the homepage, “Jut is a measure of a mountain’s rise above surroundings and impressiveness, considering both its base-to-peak height and base-to-peak steepness. Jut reveals dramatic landforms that traditional metrics such as elevation and prominence don’t do justice to—huge mountain faces, towering spires, sheer cliffs, deep canyons, and more…” So basically this is a ranking of how impressive-looking mountains are, which, on balance, feels like quite a cool way of thinking about it; fcuk height, fcuk ‘how hard is it to summit’, let’s just worry about ‘how mountain-y does it look, and how COOL?’.What’s reapply impressive about this – pointless, but impressive! – is the map which lets you click ANYWHERE in the world and get details of that location’s, er, ‘jut’ (nope, still sounds rude, can’t help it); no idea why you would want or need this, but, well, here it is!
- Hallowe’en Radio: Ok, it’s a month early but it feels FCUKING AUTUMNAL and I am cold and so I feel justified in preemptively bring you this site which offers a bunch of different hallowe’en-themed radio stations offering ‘spooky’ music, old stuff, music from scary films…you get the gist. The site’s not been updated for a year or so but it still works – at least it does at the time of writing – so feel free to have a play (if nothing else the ‘atmosphere’ channel is something you could very easily unsettle friends and family with should you have access to a concealed, internet-enabled speaker and some gullible people in your life).
- Blippo: Ok, this is once again an ACTUAL THING YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR – equally, though, it’s only a tenner and it’s REALLY interesting from the point of view of storytelling and narrative design, and I think a lot of you might find it curious enough to warrant a punt. Blippo is a…I want to say ‘game’, but it’s not, not really because the interactive ludic elements are very light; instead, it’s morelike a sort of sketch show or, maybe a semi-ARG, presented as a series of TV programmes from a strange alien universe, which, by watching, let you into a separate, parallel narrative world. Look, this is REALLY hard to explain – or at least it is for me – but despite the fact that I am really not interested in telly AT ALL I have really enjoy experiencing this this week; it feels to me a bit more like theatre or sketch comedy than it does anything else, and there’s something SO pleasing about the general vibe of all of the shows, and the performances are charming and fully-committed, and…Christ, look, why don’t you read this excellent…review? Explainer? Whatever, just read this and then see what you think.
- Super Mario Bros Remastered: This requires you to DOWNLOAD STUFF – the original Super Mario game ROM, and then this ‘remastered’ filepack – and as such is *moderately* technical, but, honestly, this stuff is really easy these days and it feels worth learning about in order to access this EXCELLENT reworking of the original NES title; with it you can play the original Mario but with FUN NEW BELLS AND WHISTLES – the ability to pick different graphical styles, new playable characters, whole new sets of levels, A LEVEL EDITOR…! Look, if you have any sort of nostalgic tie to the original SMB then this will be catnip to you, I promise.
- Colourmuse: Ok, this is HARD – too hard for me, with my old person’s reflexes and slow fingers – but you may find you have more success with this nicely-executed and conceptually-fun take on the bullet hell shooter; it does that whole ‘change the colour of your ammo to damage different enemy types’-thing which this genre loves and which to me always feels a bit like the ludic equivalent of rubbing one’s tum and patting one’s belly at the same time, but, per my earlier comment, I am sh1t at these sorts of games and always have been and you may be less of a malco loser than I am (but, if you are, please don’t gloat, it’s unseemly).
- Bloquecitos: A nice, simple, ‘merge the pieces’ game – match tile groupings based on their patterns, try and keep going for as long as possible til the screen clogs up. This is very gentle and soothing and the music is just LOVELY, and you can happily lose 15 minutes on this so why don’t you go and take a break and I will be here waiting for you. No, really, I will.
- Knotilus: Fibonacciplay! Per the explanation, “find the three solution sequences using any of the 12 numbers in the puzzle, where each number is the sum of the two preceding it as in the fibonacci sequence”. Which, now I read that back, is a HORRIBLE explanation for what is in essence quite a simple game, so why don’t you just work it out yourself? I have faith in you.
- Jelly Well: Drag the jellies into groups of five or more to make them disappear. The physics in this is REALLY satisfying, but the best bit by miles is the sound effects. LISTEN TO THE ADORABLE JELLY SOUNDS!!
- Mot’s Grand Prix: Jesus, someone’s actually built a full-on mini F1 game in Pico8, which feels like an insane achievement. This is far, far too hard for me – I have no idea what is going on, I can’t take the corners and I have no idea how the fcuk you’re meant to know when the turns are coming up because the resolution is so low you can’t see more than 10 ahead of you – but if you’re less ludicly-incompetent than I am then you may have more success. I am slightly in awe that this exists.
- Chark: Finally this week, “what if chess, but a roguelike card game?” WHAT INDEED???? This shouldn’t really work at all, and will obviously upset chess purists no end, being as it is a horrible bastardisation of the classic game, but, equally, it’s quite fun and I found myself coming back to it again and again this week when I was meant to be writing an article about UK AI policy which, fine, may not be a HUGE recommendation (I would, honestly, probably have taken to grating my patella as a way of avoiding that particular task) but it’s all I have for you. No, come back, this is good, honest!
By Roger Ballen
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Craigslist Horses: Via Laura Olin’s excellent newsletter comes this Tumblr, which is about horses and, specifically, about ads for horses on Craigslist which apparently often feature horses with INCREDIBLY ODD PROPORTIONS. Could one of the Curios horse enthusiasts (you must be out there) please explain what this is about, please?
- Context-Free Patent Art: “Art culled from a wealth of video game and tech-related patents and patent applications, presented without explanation.” This is baffling in every single conceivable way. WHAT ARE THESE PATENTS FOR? WHAT DO THEY DO? WHY DO THEY LOOK LIKE WEIRD ALIEN SIGILS?
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Rascal Salvage Vintage: The Insta feed of a junkyard in New Jersey, which occasionally features some EXCELLENT odd stuff; this week’s highlights include the head of Falcor the luckdragon from the Neverending Story film adaptation and an EXCELLENT giant fibreglass (I think) Batman head.
- AI With Glock: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a good ‘weird/horrible AI stuff’ instafeed, so let me correct that with this one – there are lots of nice (horrible) little corners of latent space here, my personal favourite being ‘homunculi made of food, eating themselves’, but see which you like (hate) most!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Boriswave: An excellent piece in the Guardian, this, explaining the relatively-recent introduction of the term ’Boriswave’ into the mainstream political discourse of the UK thanks to Nigel ‘for someone who isn’t a racist myself, I sure am popular with a lot of people who really are very fcuking racist indeed!’ Farage and his ‘send ‘em all back!’ rhetoric from the start of the week, and what it can tell us about the way in which far-right online terminology and thinking get trojan horsed into the mainstream via the increasingly-unhinged frothing of columnists in the Telegraph and the likes of this frog-faced ambulant tumour. The main point to take away here is that the use of terms like this in actual, real-life political discussion offers you a very real example of how the right (in the UK, but also internationally) is now openly taking its positions and language from actual, proper bigots and racists and borderline-nazis on the web, bringing them into the mainstream and, by so doing, shifting the overton window even further towards the point whereby someone tries to throw all the foreigners out of it. This is depressing, but it feels like a really important point is being made here that isn’t really being discussed as openly as it ought to be.
- Fascistic Dream Machines: Claire Wilmot writes in the LRB about the use of AI in the propagation of right-wing narratives online, and the way it is being used not to fool people into believing in spoofed video but instead to create visual proof of ‘what people feel’. The videos of hordes of threatening looking men arriving in massed ranks on British-looking beaches aren’t real and they’re not meant to be seen as real; they’re a vehicle for feeling, in much the same way in which racist cartoons or caricatures might have been 20 or 40 or, er, 110 years ago. I thought this paragraph was particularly telling: “This year, in the run-up to the 13 September rally, I spoke to new recruits on far-right Telegram channels. A woman from Norfolk explained that she shared AI images of young white women cowering under the gaze of leering migrants because ‘you can’t photograph them, or they’ll call you racist.’ A man in Leeds said he was creating images of blonde children smiling and holding signs that read ‘send them back’ because ‘this country belongs to our children, and they can’t speak for themselves.’ A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe ‘because of migrants’ told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren’t real, but I was missing the point: ‘It’s about us showing everyone what’s really happening.’”
- The Silicon Valley Politics Shift: Or, ‘how they all stopped pretending that they cared about anything other than money’, or ‘how actually social mores and prevailing attitudes are important because they can occasionally act as shame-based constraints on people who would otherwise, it turns out, fcuk the world in half in exchange for another few points on the stock’. This piece in WIRED by Steven Levy probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know in terms of the shift in apparent political leanings undergone by Zuckerberg and the rest over the past few years, but I did think that it was interesting tonally, partly because of the fact that Levy, who’s been covering this stuff for AGES and knows these people reasonably well, gives them a pretty easy ride throughout and, as far as I can tell, seems to think the only reason that their current position and quisling attitude towards the existing US regime is wrong is because it might not be great for business long-term (morals? PAH!). The other thing that struck me about this was the complete unwillingness of Levy to at any point acknowledge that the tendency of outlets such as WIRED to treat these people as genius magic wizard savants over much of the past 15 years might *possibly* have also meant that their motives and behaviours weren’t scrutinised as much or as closely as they might have been because people exactly like him were too busy clapping like seals at how SMART and AMAZING their special billionaire tech pals are.
- The Rise of the User: The third and final part of Ars Technica’s history of the web, this takes us through what we would probably recognise as the ‘modern’ web, the bit that we recognise from the late-90s onwards, and the various shifts in ethos that saw us move towards the concept of a user-centric, and user-defined, web experience; again, none of this will be new to you if you’re as online as I sort-of suspect your probably are, but it’s a really neat and usefully-concise potted history of How We Got To Here (sort-of), and makes you realise what a compressed timeframe this has all operated within; I know we’re all sort of vaguely aware of it, but it’s honestly mad to think that online video has only been a thing for 20 years.
- Huawei’s AI Ambitions: A good piece in Rest of World on how Huawei is looking to take Chinese AI to (certain parts of) the world, positioning itself as the NVIDIA of the Other Bloc, and how it’s going to leverage the past few decades of Chinese penetration into Africa and other markets to effectively push their tech (and, by extension, to push OUT US tech). This is part of the broader conversation about how AI is very much becoming a new tool of power for the world’s major players, and that we’re seemingly pointed at a pretty binary state of affairs where you’re either on the US stack, signed up to Starlink offshoots per our own glorious recent deals with the Americans (weird how Mark Francois isn’t shouting about ‘vassal state’ now when he couldn’t stop saying that fcuking phrase during fcuking brexit), or you’re instead locked into Xi’s AI world. Is this good? What do YOU think?
- A Profile of Ed Zitron: Regular readers of this newsletter will be aware I am not a huge fan of prominent AI naysayer Ed Zitron, mainly because I very strongly believe he’s audience captured himself into a state of tediously-repetitious fan service; still, I found this profile of him in the FT interesting, partly because of what it says about power in the new media ecosystem (say what you like about him, but this is an impressive degree of clout for someone who’s literally just spaffing out poorly-edited, self-indulgent 10k newsletters each week – WHERE THE FCUK IS MY PROFILE, FT, YOU CNUTS????), partly because the interviewer shares some of my misgivings about the author’s relationship with the subject matter and his audience, partly because it alludes to the fact that his PR company LITERALLY HAS AI CLIENTS FFS, and partly because it paints a picture of someone who really, really wants to be listened to and SEEN, something which was obvious a decade ago back when Zitron was just some English PR guy on Twitter who was mainly known for being an obnoxious d1ck who got into online spats all the time. An interesting character study.
- India and Nano Banana: A Techcrunch piece about how India is leading the way in terms of usage of Google’s latest image generation technology; this is neither brilliantly-written or a stellar story, but it IS interesting in its depiction of different, specifically non-Western, attitudes towards AI tech; as ever with this stuff I am struck by the extent to which the discourse I am exposed to on the English language web is, in all likelihood, not that which is going to determine the eventual usage trajectory and future direction of this tech because, bluntly put, it’s the huge mass of people in India and elsewhere who are likely to matter more in years to come. Just because Bluesky hates it doesn’t mean d1ck, basically.
- Tony Blair and AI: A good piece in the New Statesman looking at the Tony Blair Institute (the ‘think tank’ – or, more accurately, ‘thinky agency’ because they will literally do the bidding of whoever’s paying them) and its ceaseless promotion of the brilliance and importance of AI to the UK government, and the almost-certainly-coincidental fact that the TBI has also been funded to the tune of a quarter of a billion quid by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, someone who may just have one or two vested interests in ensuring tech that his company has a foundational interest in gets embedded at the very heart of government. This is excellent reporting, although I am honour-bound to point out that Private Eye have been writing about the Ellison>TBI>Govt links for two years now and so anyone who’s been reading that would know most of this already (so, er, get a subscription! Please!).
- How You Make A TV Ad With AI: This is actually a case study by an agency called Tool, all about how they made a 45s ad for Land Rover using AI – what I like about this is that they talk you through what they ACTUALLY did, practically, step by step, and explain where AI was used, and how, and where it wasn’t good enough, and the work that needed to be done to bridge the gap between The Machine and the actual video footage; if you’re involved in ‘making content’ and you have people hassling you about AI and what you can do with it and how you can do everything 10x faster and cheaper if only you used The Machine PROPERLY, then you might want to keep this and share it with whoever’s doing the hassling by way of explanation that it’s not actually that simple.
- How AI Is Fcuking Dating: As if it needed fcuking any further, but this is a compellingly-horrible portrait in New York Mag about all the ways in which people are (mis)using The Machine in their pursuit of someone to exchange mucus with – I can’t speak for you, but there are a couple of friends who keep me regaled with their Tales From The Apps (both women fwiw), and they have both shared examples of chats in which their interlocutor has CLEARLY been LLM-juicing their responses; in one particular instance it looked like the aspirant suitor had run my mate’s whole profile through Claude and was using it to lie about books that he had read, which is I suppose at least admirably thorough. It’s hard to know what to think about this – other than, you know, ‘this is bad!’ – because in theory the idea of talking to someone and getting advice about how to behave towards the potential object of one’s affections is…not per se bad! And yet as soon as that ‘someone’ becomes a black box token prediction engine, it feels…terrible! Still, I am slightly amazed that three years into this whole thing we’re yet to see (or, more accurately, I’m yet to see) anyone going full Diceman and entrusting their whole romantic existence to The Machine – if anyone fancies trying and writing up their experience then, well, you know where to send the link.
- Building The Mr Beast Empire: I continue to be grimly-fascinated by Jimmy ‘Saddest Man Alive’ Donaldson and his seemingly-joyless pursuit of YouTube numbers and plutocracy (if you have yet to see the clip of him being punched by Mike Tyson, and exhibiting actual human emotion on-camera for the first time in his career, then you need to rectify that now), and this is a really interesting profile of him and, to a greater degree, his business operation, and the man he’s brought in to effectively be the ‘grownup’ and to maybe curb some of the mad spending and generally professionalise the whole setup. One of the oddest things, to my mind, about the manner in which fame has evolved in the 21stC is the extent to which it is no longer enough now to ‘merely’ be globally-renowned, you also need to exhaustively, exploitatively monetise every aspect of that renown across as many verticals as you can get away with; there are kids today whose greatest ambition in life is to be a globally-recognised brand which operates across multiple touchpoints (and you can guarantee that THEY WILL KNOW WHAT THOSE TERMS MEAN), which…I don’t know, feels bad?
- A Massive Prototype Plane: Ok, this is a BIT dry, but I was slightly staggered by the fact that there is apparently a type of aeroplane in development which will be about a kilometer long (at which point I think we’ll all be forced to confront the fact that everything we know about physics is a lie, because there is no fcuking way in hell that something that size should be able to get airborne) and which will be used to transport wind turbine blades around the world, to unlock the ability to create even larger sources of energy. Which, you know, feels like a good thing! If you discount the massive energy cost of getting the fcuking plane in the air and across the world, but let’s presume that those will be amortised by the lovely green electricity generated by the megaturbines. This is honestly mad, and quite a large part of me expects that we never hear of this project ever again because it sounds simply too improbable for words.
- The World Tramdriver Championships: Holly Gramazio writes in her newsletter about visiting the recent World Tramdriver Championships in Vienna, which, honestly, sounds like a CRACKING day out (also as a regular reader of Jana’s Zuckersüß newsletter, it looks like Vienna has some truly spectacular places to eat and so I have decided that I am going to visit at some point in the next six months because I really want some top-class cake). Anyway, this is charming and enthusiastic and gives you a real sense of BEING THERE, which is all you can ask for of an account of an eccentric, slightly-pointless event.
- London’s Pigeon Rescuers: A really cute piece in The Londoner about the volunteers who spend time fixing the fcuked pigeons of the city. As someone who temporarily adopted a pair of feral little skyrats over lockdown, when they nested in my horrid, barren windowbox – I MISS YOU CASILLERO AND DIABLO COME AND VISIT ME ONE DAY – I have a possibly more tolerant attitude towards the vermin than most Londoners do, but even with this broadly-pigeon-friendly attitude I struggle to imagine doing as the people profiled in this piece do and giving up my time to tend the bloggers. Still, one of you may find yourselves INSPIRED to become some sort of avian Samaritan as a result of this, so, well, you’re welcome!
- Gilbert & George: I feel like I have read a lot of profiles of Gilbert & George over the years, and as such some of the details of their life/work (it seems silly to use two separate terms, and it feels like there maybe ought to be a different, third word to connote a life that *is* the work) are etched into my memory; the habits, the suits, the assistants, the unshakeable air of Tory that the pair project, regardless of the nakedly-transgressive nature of much of their work over the years (however safe and establishment they might feel now), and yet I will never tire of reading about them, perhaps because theirs is a practice that feels very much of the 20thC and therefore very much something whose like we will never see again; people who make their life their performance their work, yes, but perhaps never people who will do so in such a weirdly-situational, isolated way. You don’t get G&G in a post-web world, is what I’m saying. I met them once on a Eurostar, when I found that I was sitting in their seats due to a mixup with the tickets; they were very nice about it, but I couldn’t help but feel that I had participated in a small, temporary installation and I ought to have been remunerated in some small way for my time.
- After The Summer of Oasis: So after a whole three months of 90s nostalgia revivalism and a surprisingly-small number of deaths (although I still maintain that they’re simply not talking about a few dozen gak-related heart attacks), Ed Gillett in The Quietus looks at What It All Meant. This isn’t hugely-revelatory, but Gillett’s an excellent writer and there are some very good lines throughout the piece – the closing para acts as a nice encapsulation of the whole piece: “There’s a tragic circularity to all of this. A band rightly celebrated for their raucous working-class ideals and radical energy a generation ago are now content for a multinational ticketing company to price-gouge their fans to previously unprecedented levels. A pair of brothers famed for their straightforward common sense have seen that principle curdle, forming a rot at the heart of British life. Stunning songs about escape and transcendence are performed to an audience who’ve watched those same notions ground down to a nub, in a Britain unable to look beyond its own shadow. We dream, for two hours a night, of a world that we were once promised: a brief glimpse of what might have been, enabled and perpetuated by the very same forces that ensure those aspirations will remain forever unfulfilled.”
- The AI Kids Take San Francisco: After last week’s piece on AI being THE ONLY GAME IN SF and all the kids doing the hustle and the grind, this is basically the same piece except more fun – this is a LOT more about some of the kids in question, who they are and what they want, and what they are doing and why, and while it won’t necessarily make you feel any better about anything (and while it REALLY feels like there are some quite strong gold rush parallels here, and we all remember how well that worked out for 99% of the people involved!), it will make you laugh a lot – crucially, and not something you can always say about pieces like this, it feels affectionate and kind throughout, and not like it’s mocking its subjects (so you don’t have to feel bad AT ALL for laughing at them).
- Jump In: A short story by Kimaya Diggs about self-harm, sadness and eventually feeling better, this is honest and about as unplatitudinous as you can make something about depression and coming out on the other side(ish). This felt quite familiar in places, and it may feel the same for you too (this can be true even if you’ve never sliced at yourself with anything).
- Happy Endings: Ok, this isn’t a GREAT piece of writing (I feel a bit bad saying it, but it’s not exactly the usual sort of thing I put in Curios, basically) but I really enjoyed it and thought it was a weirdly-joyful and hopeful-feeling piece of writing. In it, Gail Rice talks about her experience of hiring a male escort for her 70th birthday; this is the second part of this story, after her first attempt proved…unsatisfactory (the original essay is linked from this one, should you want to read both), and, honestly, it’s a really lovely thing to read (and I appreciate that that possibly sounds condescending, but I really don’t mean it to be – it is honest, it’s funny, it’s self-aware and it’s beautifully human).
- Hanging With Dwayne Johnson: Blah blah blah I don’t watch films blah blah. Anyway, despite that, I OBVIOUSLY know who Dwayne Johnson is – while I don’t care one iota about the man’s cinematic output or indeed his previous wrestling career, I am a sucker for a well-written, high-access actor profile and this is an EXCELLENT example of the genre by Sam Anderson, who writes superbly. Obviously this is part of the promo machine for Johnson’s new film about wrestling – a SERIOUS film, about PAIN, that requires REAL ACTING and, accordingly REAL PROFILES that deal with SERIOUS ISSUES – but it’s SUCH a good interview, from structure to individual sentences, and the subject is an undeniably charismatic character. One thing, though – I did literally say ‘oh fcuk OFF’ out loud at the point where Johnson nopes out of the politics question, because, well, if you’re not a borderline-fash cnut in the US at the moment I think it’s probably quite important you use your massive public platform to say so, and if you don’t then it makes me think that either a) you are in fact a borderline-fash cnut; or b) that you are too concerned at preserving your bankability with the percentage of the country that are borderline-fash cnuts, neither of which strikes me as particularly cool.
- The Living Phase:Ok, this is quite a hard read, and I appreciate many of you may not be particularly in the market for an honest, unflinching account of what it’s like taking care of a parent while they die of something slow and debilitating, of all the medical crap you have to deal with, and of managing carers, and dealing with hospices, and injecting the fentanyl and all of that fun stuff – don’t worry, you can skip this one and go straight to the end. If, though, you have any personal experience of managing someone’s death then I can’t recommend this essay by Dana Barnes enough; it is remarkably clear-eyed and it had me in pieces at various points, but it’s also the truest and most-relatable account of this process that I have ever read, and I think it’s a brilliant and brave piece of writing.
- The Good Pervert: Finally this week, a gorgeous piece of writing by David Velasco about their remarkable friend, his life, his death, the art world, queer life and culture, decorum, gossip, society, snobbery…oh God, this is SO good and I want you all to read it. It has a particular chilly beauty I associate with Capote, which you may or may not get, but, regardless, it’s an exceptional piece of writing.
By Oana Stoian
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: