Webcurios 26/05/23

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HELLO EVERYONE WELCOME TO WEB CURIOS IT IS FRIDAY HOW ARE YOU?

Oh. Sorry. Still, for those of us in the UK it’s yet another three-day weekend (as I believe it is for those of you residing in North America), so hopefully the illusion of freedom will cure at least a bit of what ails you.

I’m off to Brighton for the rest of the day, so will leave you with this week’s crop of words and links and pictures and music and wish you a genuinely wonderful weekend. Have fun, and try not to die if you can help it (but, if you must, do so SPECTACULARLY).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably go to the pub RIGHT NOW.

By Albert Reyes

OUR FIRST MIX THIS WEEK IS BY JOE MUGGS AND IS A PERFECT BALEARIC ACCOMPANIMENT TO WHAT MIGHT IF WE’RE LUCKY ACTUALLY BE A SUNNY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY REMIND YOU ALL TO PUT ON SOME SUNSCREEN THIS WEEKEND, PT.1:  

  • Rio: This felt, honestly, a bit like magic when I tried it earlier this week. Rio is a new product by a company called Curio (I know, I don’t like it either, how DARE they, it’s MY word) – they’ve existed for a while, seemingly, with a subscription service that lets you listen to the news from a variety of top-tier publications being read out by a bunch of actors. Rio is their first foray into AI – you can play with it for free, and whilst it’s still in beta and all the usual caveats apply, it’s also quite an astonishing thing. Basically you just type in the topic you’d like to learn about and (using what I presume is a combination of GPT and a text-to-voice model) in no time at all you’ll be presented with an audio file of a machine-generated radio show/podcast-type-thing, on the topic you requested. The smart thing about this is that rather than just making stuff up in the now-classic manner of LLMs, Rio is instead drawing its information from the corpus of extant real journalism that the company’s built up over the years, so you’re mining a curated archive of information that you can ‘trust’ (do not trust anything The Machine tells you, it is not your friend). Honestly, as a way of spinning up a low-level primer on a particular factual topic this is REALLY, really good (obviously you’ll have to have a reasonably-high tolerance for the flat, affectless text-to-speech narrator, but, come on, it’s a small price to pay for all this FUTURE) – it will almost certainly have all sorts of blind spots, but this feels like something that the BBC could take and iterate on and make genuinely AMAZING.
  • The Assassination of Shinzo Abe: Japan isn’t, as a rule, a country one associates with gun violence or political assassination, which made the news of the assassination of its former Prime Minister last year so especially shocking. I confess, though, to being somewhat…puzzled as to why Japanese broadcaster MBS has, nearly a year on from the event, decided to create this website which lets you relive (is that a poor choice of words for an assassination? It feels like it might be) the event from a variety of different perspectives, rendered in ever-so-slightly-shonky CG. You can experience the assassination from the point of view of the assassin themselves, from above, or focused on Abe himself…honestly, this is very, very weird, and feels not a tiny bit macabre.
  • Subgames 2023: Here’s one for those of you eking out a living at the advermarketingpr coalface! Subgames is a project by Extinction Rebellion, encouraging anyone who fancies (but, specifically, people who do this stuff for a living) to create ads and posters and billboards highlighting the need to, you know ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING about the environment, and to put them up in the real world and share them on the site and elsewhere. Per the site, “Groups have been on the streets offering a public service by subvertising the corporate agenda and their greenwashing that encroaches into our public space with their visual pollution. SubGames is an invitation to celebrate this subversion of advertising. Throughout May in Round One of the games you can enter all the subvertising pushing the boundaries of creativity you can find. There are 8 categories they can be entered into to be crowned winner and receive awards.” This feels both like a fun use of your creative juices and a nice antidote to the fact that, in all likelihood, your job involves promoting stuff that is, in various ways, fcuking us all and our futures (don’t feel bad, most of my work involves that too. OH CAPITALISM!!!).
  •  GenZSpan: This is a cute idea – encourage kids to watch the news (in the US, at least) by running a TikTok account that is streaming cable news network CSpan in split-screen format with a bunch of unconnected random content in the now-iconic CoreCore style. Or at least that’s what it was doing earlier this week – as of 728am, they’ve had some sort of technical fcukup which means that the CSpan part of the stream isn’t in fact working (but you can still watch the bottom half of the channel which is currently showing a man washing his drive). Still, it’s a nice gimmick, and introduced me to the people behind it who call themselves ‘Brain’ and who are literally ripping off the MSCHF schtick wholesale – secrecy, arty ‘drops’, it’s a direct lift. Still, they’ve obviously got an eye for an idea (their first and only other project involved making emo vinyl with the artists’ tears – Crynyl! – which is the sort of silliness I can very much get behind).
  • A Sign In Space: OK, this is quite techy and geeky but also REALLY interesting. What would happen if the aliens decided to finally get in touch? Aside, obviously, from all the crying and wailing and worshipping and End Of Days-ing. A Sign In Space is a project being conducted by various European space research bodies, simulating a first contact scenario – yesterday, “the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in orbit around Mars transmitted an encoded message to Earth to simulate receiving a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.” Which in itself is pretty cool, but the REAL game begins now – the idea with the project, by Italian artist Daniela De Paulis, is that any contact we receive from extraterrestrials wouldn’t necessarily be immediately comprehensible to us; as such, A Sign In Space asks people around the world to collaborate to decode the fake message sent yesterday in preparation for one day having to make sense of actual, real-life alien ramblings. This is basically an ET-themed ARG with scientific knobs on it, fine, but if you’re the sort of person who really enjoys a bit of amateur cryptography and fancies downloading a bunch of data to see if you can scry any meaning from it alongside a bunch of other space obsessives worldwide then WOW are you in luck! I have had a bit of a dig through the supporting materials here and, er, unless you’re reasonably confident with radiowaves and the like then this will probably be beyond you (I barely understand ANY of this, but I am willing to accept that most of you are smarter than me and might find this less baffling).
  • Project Ring: Another fun hacked-together AI toy, this answers the question that has been on the minds of humankind since we first dragged ourselves bipedal – specifically, “what if we had an eye on the end of our finger, and what if that eye could talk to us and tell us what it sees?”. This is very cool – it’s cobbled together from machine vision and text-to-speech and some LLM, and, even more astonishingly, all the code was written by GPT4. Its creator, Mina Fahmi, demonstrates how it works in an on-site video, but basically it lets him point at stuff and have the device decribe what it’s ‘seeing’ and answer questions about stuff in its field of vision – from “do you think it’s going to rain?” to “how many cows are there?” Hacky and homemade, obviously, but I find things like this useful in terms of helping conceive of some of the inevitable ways in which all this tech is going to start being used in meatspace applications.
  • DragGAN: This is just a link to some demos and technical documentation, fine, but there are videos of the tech which are worth watching just to see how insane image manipulation is going to become very, very shortly. DragGAN is an interface for AI-image generation (GANs, DO YOU SEE?) which basically lets you easily and quickly move elements of an image around and uses said GAN to fill in the resulting gaps in plausible fashion. Which, obviously, is a typically-ham-fisted attempt to explain a visual concept, so I strongly suggest you click the link and watch a few of the clips – between this and all the Adobe things being announced at the moment (more of which a bit later on), it feels like visual design is going to have something of a step-change in the next 12-24m; this stuff will be both GREAT for graphic designers (more power! More speed) and genuinely awful (lol if you think your bosses and clients aren’t going to expect you to become literally 3x as productive and fast thanks to all this tech!).
  • Find Work Happiness: Firstly, LOL! Secondly, this is ANOTHER soon-to-be-published book with a remarkably-whizzy website to promote it. Have…have I been getting publishing wrong all these years? Is selling books in fact a startlingly lucrative profession? Actually, digging into this a bit it seems that the whole site is designed and built by the book’s author, one David Lubofsky, who’s a seemingly-polymathically-talented person – whilst I personally have less than no interest in reading a book about ‘work happiness’ and ‘how to be a better and more empathic leader’, I very much enjoy the effort that’s gone into making this interactive promo for it, with lovely illustrations and some really nice scrolling and interactivity, and a summary of each chapter…I know, obviously, that the relative benefits of ‘paying some BookTok influencers to talk about a new title’ vastly outweigh the potential worth of ‘building a whole promo website to try and flog a dozen more copies’, but I really do like book websites and would like to see more of them please. Er, so, as ever, I’m asking one of you to make some for me. Go on, get to it.
  • The Mini Moog Factory: Despite having approximately the same amount of musical talent as, roughly, a bagel, and despite the fact that I have never, ever, owned a keyboard or anything, I’ve got a weird memory for the names of synths and sequencers and the tools of the electronica trade (I think I misguidedly thought that knowing things like ‘what a Roland sh-4d is’ would render me irresistible to women – it did not). Which is why, despite never having touched one, I have a strange affection for the Mini Moog, and why this site, which celebrates it, pleases me so. “This new digital experience celebrates synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog’s legacy and the recent return of our beloved Minimoog Model D.Drawing inspiration from ‘90s video games and websites, this interactive experience is designed to give you access to the rich history of electronic music through the lens of the Minimoog Model D. Discover the amazing musicians, songs, stories, and sounds that have shaped generations of music through apps and activities inspired by this iconic synthesizer and the artists who have embraced it. Each facet of minimoogmodeld.com was designed to bring visitors a joyful experience behind every digital door that leads to each new section of the site.” You can play with a digital version of the keyboard, exploring the styles and sounds and presets that you’ll recognise from some genuinely classic song, you can watch archive videos about the instrument’s genesis and legacy, there’s even a Moog-related AR filter if you’re that way inclined…this is LOVELY, and generally just a cheering bit of webwork all round.
  • Poor Man’s Rembrandt: The Dutch arts institutions are great, aren’t they? Or at least they look great from the outside – I have no doubt that in real life and up close they are, like all arts organisations everywhere, suppurating repositories of insecurity and bile and pretension and passive-aggression. Still, they do things like this – a project where, for a week in June, a selection of high-profile tattoo artists will be offering their services to visitors to the Rembrandthuis museum, letting visitors who’ve booked a slot and paid a deposit get an actual, real-life Rembrandt-inspired tattoo done by a genuinely-good artist. This runs from June 19-25, and whilst, obviously, you have to make it to Amsterdam, and you’ll have to pay for the tattoo and a ticket to the exhibition, it sounds like a GREAT deal and an opportunity to get some ACTUAL ART on your skin.
  • Anna’s Archive: I’m slightly disappointed in myself that I didn’t know about this already – Anna’s Archive is a ‘shadow library’, “a non-profit open-source open-data project with two goals: Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity; and Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.We preserve books, papers, comics, magazines, and more, by bringing these materials from various shadow libraries together in one place. All this data is preserved forever by making it easy to duplicate it in bulk, resulting in many copies exist around the world.” This is, obviously, not wholly legally compliant, but it’s also an incredible and scattergun resource; there’s no obvious index, but the search function seems to work pretty well and as a resource for the generally-curious it’s pretty much unbeatable. Bookmark this and stop by next time you need to research something; it’s likely that you’ll be able to find at least something useful among the digital stacks.
  • Rekt: This is a GREAT online radio station – it’s currently playing Count Basie, but throughout the week it’s been a stellar and eclectic mix of all sorts of styles and genres, and I really like the old school BBS-style aesthetic of the site that houses it. “Tune in to high-quality, 320kbps electronic music including Dubstep, DnB, Synthwave, Chillsynth, Datawave, Darksynth, Cyberpunk, Midtempo, EBSM, Industrial, Dark Techno genres and much more. Enjoy live DJ sets, artist interviews and livestream concerts. Engage with the community in real-time via our web chat and Discord server. Catch up with previous shows via our archives.” I know that we all just let Spotify mandate our listening these days via THE ALGORITHM, but it’s occasionally nice to remind yourself of the pleasure of human-curated playlists and having an actual DJ in charge (and there are some nice retro visualisers on there too, if you like that sort of thing) (which I personally do).
  • Newsreels: SO MUCH OLD NEWS! What an archive this is – the Hearst Newsreel Collection is an online repository of news broadcasts shown in North American cinemas in the mid-20th Century; the whole archive is in the process of being digitised and taxonomised and rendered fully-searchable, but there’s enough already online to enable you to have a genuinely wonderful time travel experience. You can select by year (there’s stuff on here from 1929-1967), search by keyword, and any title that shows up in red is a clip that you can stream on the site…honestly, there’s something genuinely addictive about this, and it really does feel like going back in time; also, there’s something undeniably-compelling about the sheer REVERENCE with which the news is presented in this format, which is an interesting contrast to the slightly-enervated nature of modern broadcasting.
  • The Steak Detective: Via my friend Ben comes this very weird site which combines an odd sense of WWII nostalgia with, er, a business selling military rations. I think this might be THE most Brexit-smelling website I have ever featured in here, but, equally, there’s nothing to suggest there’s anything weird or racist about it so let’s just take it at face value and presume that it really is just run by people who are inexplicably enthusiastic about the possibility of rehydrating dried meatballs in a military-style pouch, or who want to buy some extra-hot mustard which is unaccountably named after Field Marshal Montgometry.

By Jaehoon Choi

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THIS NEXT SECTION WITH AN EXCELLENT SELECTION OF WHAT I AM RELIABLY-INFORMED IS A MIX OF DARK BREAKS AND DIRTY FUNK?  

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY REMIND YOU ALL TO PUT ON SOME SUNSCREEN THIS WEEKEND, PT.2:    

  • You, In Data Breaches: A nice little interactive explainer about data breaches and the sale of personal information online, which uses your email address and public records from places like HaveIBeenPwned? to give you a neatly-personalised overview of the sorts of datapoints about YOU that might currently be floating around the web’s dark marketplaces. Presuming you’re not a total infosec moron this shouldn’t be particular news to you – but, er, CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS, KIDS! – but the way it uses personalisation to communicate what’s otherwise a slightly-dry bunch of information in marginally-more-engaging fashion is a nice touch, and the whole thing’s a decent bit of educational explainer work by ABC Australia.
  • Absolut NFTs: I know, I know, NFTs? What is this, 2021? Still, this sparked momentary interest in me, not because I think it’s anything resembling a good project but because various business commenters have been gently talking up web3 and NFTs again, in the wake of Nike’s Swoosh project doing better-than-expected numbers for its first digital sneaker drop (fwiw, I think this is a classic case of it being very, very important that you don’t use one of the largest and best-loved brands in the world as any sort of representative case study for the general appeal of this sort of sh1t), and so I thought I’d take a look at Absolut’s latest foray into the world of digital lies and snake oil. Unsurprisingly, it’s a mess! Specifically, it’s effectively a collaborative limited-edition merch drop, in conjunction with Italian designer Seletti, who has designed a…a lamp? Is it a lamp? Fcuk knows, honestly…anyway, they have designed something in conjunctgion with Absolut, and there are a limited number of these real-life things that you can get hold of…but to do so, first you need to mint an NFT of a digital version of one! And then redeem that digital version for the IRL one! WHY?!?! WHY DO I NEED TO DO THIS?!?! WHY THE DIGITAL STEP?!?!? Once again, an NFT-related activation that serves to prove, in the main, that there is STILL no use case whatsoever for a link to a jpeg, however much Ethereum you tell people it’s worth.
  • QR Draw: Create a QR code in the image of any photo you choose – this is, I think, possibly about 15 years old, but it’s FINALLY RELEVANT now that we live in an age in which people know what QR codes are and, occasionally, even scan them. If nothing else I reckon some QR codes designed up using the right people’s faces, stuck up in public places, guerilla-style, would get pretty decent traction. Depending on whose fizzog you choose to use and where you choose to put these, I think you could have rather a lot of fun – or, depending on how evil you’re feeling, run a very efficient phishing scam.
  • Motion Design Principles: Oh this is SUCH a good site – an interactive explainer with beautiful scrolling animations and, as you’d expect, stellar motion design, which gives you a comprehensive (well, comprehensive for me at least; those of you who are less visually-inept may find it a bit thin) overview of why motion design is an integral part of overall webdesign, and how you can use specific techniques to direct users’ attention and gaze, and how specific effects and bits of motion elicit particular feelings, and how those can and should be used to communicate more effectively online…this is stellar, and SUCH an appealing piece of design work in and of itself. Built by Zajno, a digital studio in California who are obviously very, very good at what they do.
  • The New Photoshop Stuff: So this is a demo video by Adobe showing off all the new stuff that is coming to photoshop (NO CAPITAL ‘P’! NO ‘™’! FCUK YOU ADOBE YOU APPALLING CNUTS! FEEL THE FORCE OF MY IMPOTENT RAGE!) imminently, and which is, as with so much of this stuff, borderline-magical. Or at least it looks borderline magical in the demo – basically this integrates all the fancier GAN image-AI techniques (autofill, autoreplace, that sort of thing) directly into the photoshop product, so you can (for example) replace my horrible, tired eyes that look like two p1ssholes in snow with some far more appealing peepers in a couple of clicks and a few keystrokes. The theory here is dizzying, although in reality it’s probably going to look a little more like this example than the hyper-polished demo suggests. Oh, and while we’re doing mad AI editing stuff, this is another impressive demo demonstrating how simple it is to swap out one person for another – although it’s depressing that as ever with this stuff it features nearly-naked women (ffs, developermen, can you maybe not?), for which my curatorial apologies.
  • AI, Adverts and Hyperpersonalisation: I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but about 5 or 6 years ago a friend of mine asked me to do a panel at some marketing conference in London about creativity and digital technology; I shared a stage with people from Twitter and Google and I made myself very, very unpopular by basically telling the assembled audience of generic media w4nkers that there would come a point in the not-too-distant future where the lowest tier of ad creation would be automated to the point of rendering about 60% of them otiose – the machines would smash together an infinite number of creative variables (copy and image) and automatically A/B test them to fcuk, and determine the most effective creative, and buy the inventory, all without needing more than one or two actual people’s involvement. And lo! IT IS BASICALLY HERE!  Click the link and watch the (admittedly slightly annoying) TikTok hustle guy demonstrate how AI can be used to create literally millions of hypertargeted, hyperpersonalised ads with limited effort – and know that, whilst they look crap now and probably wouldn’t work, THAT THESE ARE THE SH1TTEST THAT THEY WILL EVER BE. If you can look at this and not think ‘hm, I don’t foresee great career prospects for the people who design and make the sort of crap, low-margin, high-volume ads like this’ then, well, you’re either a moron or VERY optimistic – but, either way, I strongly believe you are wrong.
  • AInsights: ‘Insight’ – the very WORST word in agencyland! So meaningless! So traduced! So vapid! Still, if your job involves having to come up with spurious REVELATORY TRUTHS which you can then deploy to sell more plastic tat to people who by now should know better, you will know the particular tedious pain of having to read seventythreemillion vaguely disparate sources about a sector or industry and cobble them into a coherent six-slide upfront before the ‘creative’ people get to talk. This website – called, upsettingly, ‘Glasp’ – offers you help with that. This is, I promise, actually quite interesting – feed it a bunch of sources and it will basically make connections between them, draw parallels, extrapolate links and generally attempt to create a plausible narrative. Whilst it’s unlikely to deliver the KILLER INSIGHT (sorry) that will lead to you being garlanded with laurels and paraded through the streets like a victorious Caesar, it’s a useful way of testing theories and getting some initial light thinking done, and it’s the sort of tool that I can imagine being particularly useful to junior planners or strategists as a way of helping them think about stuff.
  • Mind Video: Another SUPER SCIFI link, this time technology which literally reconstitutes video imagery from brainscans and offers the tantalising possibility of being able to watch other people’s dreams (we’re only about a decade from Strange Days FINALLY being a reality, which, on reflection, perhaps isn’t the cause for celebration I might have initially thought). This is dry and technical but also, frankly, utterly amazing and another ‘crikey, I did not think of this as a potential use-case for GANs’ thing that, I find, is helpful in maintaining a sense of wonder and positivity about all this moderately-terrifying AI progress.
  • Search Gizmos: As previously discussed here, search is currently a bit broken – Google’s gone to sh1t, the new Bing is, despite all the AI gubbins, still as sh1t as it ever was (you can have all the conversational features you like, but if the search product the bot is using is as fundamentally second-tier as Bing is it’s unlikely to deliver many real benefits), and we’re still waiting to see whether AI integration will make a meaningful, positive difference to the way search in general functions (I am…unconvinced, personally, but then again I am a know-nothing bozo with a spectacularly-unpopular internet newsletter and Google is, well, a bit more successful than me, so perhaps I should just listen to Sunder). In the meantime, you might find this website (compiled by Tara Calishain) helpful – it contains a bunch of useful tools and tips and tricks to make Google work better, and to search Wikipedia more effectively, and links to all sorts of other useful search tools, and frankly this is probably the most useful link in this week’s Curios and YOU ARE WELCOME!
  • Design Life Cycle: This is interesting: “Designlife-cycle.com is a work-in-progress project by design undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis – Department of Design.  Designers and consumers should have quick access to full information about the full life-cycle and embedded energy of common design materials and products. Without having this information at our fingertips, efforts toward sustainability are seriously hampered, if not an outright sham.  What are the things we use every day made of? Where do the materials that make it up come from, and what steps do they undergo in their processing to become the things we use?  How are they disassembled and recycled, and where do the materials go after use? How much energy is involved in this process at every step of the way, not just when we plug something into the wall to charge it?” This contains a LOAD of student work, looking at individual products and how they are made and what the externalities of that making are, and where the waste goes…in part just fascinating about modern manufacturing and capitalism in general, in part a bit of a worrying environmental reminder about just how terrible all this relentless consumption tends to be for the planet, this is also a useful place for product / category research, should you ever be in the market for it.
  • Vacation With An Artist: This is odd. Vacation With An Artist is an initiative that in theory lets anyone book a ‘holiday’ with an artist somewhere in the world – you pay a fee for their time, for the use of their space and for materials, and for the duration of the experience you will effectively be apprenticed to them, learning their practice and craft and (so the blurb goes) developing your own skills unto the bargain. You obviously still have to stump up for travel, food and accommodation, but there are some genuinely interesting people who you can go and stay with if you’re so inclined (part of me wants to just go and hang out with bespoke cobblers Deborah and James, wherever in London they might be – they just look nice, don’t they?). My only slight cautionary note is based on the fact that the majority of artists I’ve met in my life aren’t *necessarily* the most garrulous people in the world, and I’m not 100% certain that they’d be able to maintain the requisite veneer of sociability, but that might say more about the calibre of person I associate with than artists in general. I am now slightly obsessed with the idea of spending 4 days in Catania learning how to restore wood – there are some really cool-sounding things on here, it’s worth having an explore.
  • Kenny Logins: A password generator which uses the lyric book of 1980s American rocker Kenny Loggins, the man whose vocals soundtracked Top Gun amongst other things, as its source material. A single-note gag, but a pretty good one.
  • Sunstream: THIS IS SO SO SO BEAUTIFUL. “Sun Stream is a digital clock in the form of a 24-hour song that shifts based on the amount of a visitor’s “available light.” Loosely inspired by the concept of Circadian Rhythms, 14 sun positions are mapped to 14 audio loops. Additional sound layers are generated in real time, while bells softly mark the passage of hours.” I can’t stress enough how much I think this sort of design – temporal, environmental and reactive – feels underexplored, and a hugely-fertile area to think about in terms of creative work. But, er, please don’t fcuking ruin it by using it to sell orange juice or something.
  • Warms: This is rather lovely; it looks a bit like a ‘Life’ cellular simulation, but it isn’t one – instead, draw linear shapes and watch as they then animate, based on rules derived from their length and the curve and direction of the lines. Simple but really rather lovely.
  • Doom In Teletext: You’ll need to be technically-minded to make this work, but if you’d ever asked yourself ‘I wonder if it is technically possible to make Doom run on ancient UK text information service Teletext’ then you will be thrilled to know that the answer is “YES YOU CAN!”.
  • Puzzlemoji: Can you communicate the title of a film using only three emoji, in such a way that a GPT can correctly guess the movie in question? Yes, you probably can, you are after all smarter than The Machine (still, just), but that doesn’t stop this daily puzzler from being pleasingly-fun.
  • TimeGuessr: Ooh, this is a good one – guess the geographical location AND the year in which a bunch of famous photos were taken. This is really addictive, I warn you.
  • DayBrix: The latest game from Matt Round over at Vole, this is DEFINITELY NOT Tetris, and DEFINITELY DOESN’T draw any inspiration from it whatsoever – it is, fine, a game in which blocks fall from the top of the screen and you, the player, is tasked with arranging them into lines, but it is DEFINITELY NOT Tetris. It is DayBrix, and it is a lot of fun (even though I am really, really sh1t at it) – there’s a daily challenge, and an arcade mode, and the music in particular is far, far better than it needs to be.
  • Screwball Scramble: OH MY GOD THIS IS A HIT OF PURE UNCUT NOSTALGIA RIGHT INTO MY VEINS! Screwball Scramble, for the uninitiated, was a motorised game released in the 1980s in which you had to get a ballbearing across a bunch of different obstacles, each controlled in its own way with a level or slider or button; the game required concentration and patience and skill, all the sorts of things that kids naturally lack, and as such was both INSANELY FRUSTRATING but also the coolest thing in the world re it basically being an IRL version of something like Marble Madness. And now it’s BACK, rendered in genuinely-gorgeous CG which really LOOKS like the cheap plastic that the original was made from, and which neatly recreates the insane anger you will feel as your ball caroms off the penultimate obstacle and you’re forced to restart the whole thing. I promise you that you have NO IDEA of the effort of will it’s currently taking for me not to sack off the rest of this and just play this for the rest of the morning (SEE MY STAKHANOVITE DEDICATION AND MARVEL!).

By Jérôme Masi

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS CRACKING CROSS-GENRE MIX OF SUNSHINE-APPROPRIATE BANK HOLIDAY BANGERS BY SAIGE SOUNDS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Airplane Facts With Max: Max is an airline mechanic, who makes videos on his Insta feed about planes that aren’t really about planes at all. Max’s delivery is VERY deadpan, which makes these videos 100% funnier than they would otherwise be.
  • Barry Webb: Barry takes macro photographs of very small things – these are GORGEOUS, particularly if you’re a mycology fan (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc etc).
  • Cooking For Bae: Bad food, photographed badly. You know what you’re getting with this, fine, but WOW is there some stellar content on here. There’s one shot of a battered sausage, chips and mushy peas which contains foodstuffs of a colour I have genuinely never witnessed before.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • NatCon London: Peter Geoghan in the LRB writes about last week’s festival of National Conservatism here in the UK, with a smart and reasonably-comprehensive bit of ‘how we got here’ writing about how it is that an event which a few short years ago was the preserve only of the looniest of fringes, attendance at which would have been considered career-limiting for anyone with serious frontbench aspirations, now attracts the actual Home Secretary and swathes of interested coverage from the always-fash-adjacent Spectator magazine. The answer? Shadowy money, much of it from the US, and the vague hand of the everpresent eminence grise of the right-wing brains trust Peter ‘Definitely Not A Vampire, Honest’ Thiel, a man who I have for years been banging on about to anyone stupid enough to listen to me and whose fingerprints can be seen all over SO MUCH of what is culturally and politically troubling about The Now. I personally remain skeptical that the hard–right culture war stuff can be a votewinner in the UK (I think, aside from anything else, we’re not religious enough vs, say, Italy or the US), but Geoghan sounds a cautionary note towards the end of the piece: “In opposition for the first time in fifteen years, it isn’t hard to envisage Tory MPs, not to mention the party’s geriatric membership, indulging their nativist fantasies. They wouldn’t need to be popular, merely lucky, to win a first-past-the-post election five years down the road. And once in office they would inherit a Westminster system that has few checks and balances on executive power.”
  • They’re Not Tweets, They’re Thoughts: This is about Twitter, fine, but it could frankly be about any social network to an extent. This is a great piece of writing on what it is that we are doing when we share and when we post, and what we are losing by so doing. “Your thoughts are more sacred than Tweets. And if you are aware that your Twitter habit is a lowly manifestation of your selfhood, then what do you think you’re experiencing when you scroll endlessly through the Tweets of others? The newsfeed toys with your desire for connection by utilizing slivers of real people to activate human curiosity. It offers you glass after glass of sea water, which feels like the real thing but never satisfies, leaving you thirsty no matter how much you consume, killing the complete dynamism that makes you human, strangling the complexity in your appraisal of others.”
  • Governance of SuperIntelligence: It should have come as no surprise to seasoned watchers of the tech industry over the past few years that Sam Altman’s embarked on the now-customary world tour, telling governments across Europe and in the US that someone REALLY needs to regulate the AI industry. But not, as you can see from this blogpost that OpenAI published this week, the CURRENT AI industry – no, that’s fine, and should DEFINITELY NOT be hampered by punitive laws (although if government wanted to, I don’t know, raise the barriers for new market entrants that would probably be ok)! Instead, OpenAI is calling for regulation of the prospect of some sort of future hyperintelligent AI – because, of course, there’s literally NOTHING about the current state of the market that could use any government intervention whatsoever. Honestly, this line made me actually guffaw: “Today’s systems will create tremendous value in the world and, while they do have risks, the level of those risks feel commensurate with other Internet technologies and society’s likely approaches seem appropriate.” You honestly think the likely economic impact of these current technologies is ‘commensurate with other internet technologies’? You honestly believe that voice and image-spoofing techniques that are emerging every day don’t constitute a massive step-change in what can be done in terms of fraud and misinformation? You don’t think, at the very least, we might have to reconsider the whole concept of ‘copyright’?! Pull the other one, Sam, it has (robotic) bells on.
  • Generating Harms: This is VERY LONG, and unless you have a specific interest in risk mitigation and negative scenario planning around AI then you can probably skip it – that said, it’s a really wide-ranging and comprehensive rundown of the various ways in which the current wave of AI tools could create harms – from misinformation to IP protection, labour manipulation to data security, this is a really useful guide to Stuff You Might Reasonably Want To Think About if you or your business is going to be interacting with AI in any meaningful way.
  • No More ‘I’: This is an interesting essay and perspective from Kevin Munger, who writes about how it might be worth thinking about coding LLMs to ensure that they do not use personal pronouns when producing written copy; the article’s smart and worth reading in full, but the baseline argument can be summarised as follows: “To get more specific on what I mean by “writing”: when we “talk to” Google search, we use words, but it’s clear that we aren’t writing. When it provides a list of search results, there is no mistaking it for a human. LLMs are a potentially useful technology, especially when it comes to synthesizing and condensing written knowledge. However, there is little upside to the current implementation of the technology. Producing text in conservational style is already risky, but we can limit this risk and set an important precedent by banning the use of first-person pronouns. As an immediate intervention, this will limit the risk of people being scammed by LLMs, either financially or emotionally. The latter point bears emphasizing: when people interact with an LLM and are lulled into experiencing it as another person, they are being emotionally defrauded by overestimating the amount of human intentionality encoded in that text.”
  • Writing With AI: Sudowrite was one of the first AI-enabled writing assistants I played with a year or so back – the sort of writing I do (bad writing, mainly) doesn’t lend itself to the sort of assistance it provides and so I bounced off it never to return. It’s continued iterating, though, and recently released a bunch of new features which are meant to make the process of writing fiction simpler and faster – in this article for The Verge, Adi Robertson plays with the latest version of the tech to see if it can help them write a novel, and…it can. Not a great novel, but a novel nonetheless. It’s been interesting watching this conversation slowly drift across The Authorial TL in recent weeks, and seeing the tenor of the conversations shift from ‘this stuff is crap, I am not afraid’ to ‘READERS PLEASE STAND UP AGAINST THE INEVITABLE TIDE OF AI DRECK AND DEMAND BETTER!’ – and yet, as we slide ever-deeper into the Era of Good Enough, chances are that they probably won’t.
  • The Cost Of Your Dream Lifestyle in 2023: This is, fine, a sickeningly-NYC-centric piece, but I was interested in it partly because I would imagine that the phenomenon here described is replicated in pretty much every tier-1 city worldwide, and partly because it made me wonder what happens when the gap between what you’re sold and what you can ever actually buy becomes this big, like some sort of late-capitalist purchaser’s anomie. The piece interviews a bunch of young New Yorkers about the sort of lifestyle that they imagine themselves having in their grown-up futures, and finds, unsurprisingly, that the aesthetic that they’ve been sold by The Feed has a heftier pricetag attached to it than they’re ever likely to be able to afford.
  • The Rise of Online Puritanism: Another piece about changing culture and mores where you really don’t have to look hard to see the hand of Peter Thiel – I’ve been wanging on for years about the tradcath-to-fash pipeline and how the whoel tradcath thing has been boosted by some serious Conservative money in recent years, and the current weird puritanism that you see being exhibited by certain groups of kids online (although it’s important to remember that JUST BECAUSE YOU SEE SOMETHING ON TWITTER DOESN’T MEAN THAT ACTUAL, REAL PEOPLE THINK OR BEHAVE THAT WAY) feels very much like a natural progression for the long-running ideological experiment that Cuddly Pete and his plutocratic friends are conducting on us all. This is a bit of a dry piece – classic Vox! – but the subject is interesting and, I think, important in terms of (as ever) why is this happening and where is the money coming from, and how does it connect to darker, creepier things like the increasing demonisation of non-het sexuality across much of the web and media over the past year or so.
  • Kissinger at 100: Henry Kissinger continues to avoid the attentions of the Grim Reaper, but it’s fair to say that there’s going to be some serious celebration around the world when the 20th Century’s most influential diplomatic figure finally shuffles off this mortal coil. This piece in Mother Jones looks back at a selection of his greatest hits (and it doesn’t even mention his involvement in questionable political activity in Africa, his propping up of apartheid, or a bunch of other things), including his involvement in attempting to destabilise socialist leaders in South America (including plotting to have Allende assassinated), his effective sanctioning of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hindus in 1970s Bangladesh…it’s a staggering CV, frankly, and makes one rather hope that there is a hell so Henry can enjoy some retributive, pitchfork justice for eternity upon his inevitable demise.
  • An AI Companion In Skyrim: It is apparently now possible to mod venerable roleplaying game Skyrim to include a companion you can command via GPT – so PC Gamer tried it out to see how it works. “It doesn’t, really” is the basic upshot, but it’s an interesting read in terms of what is currently possible (and which also neatly demonstrates exactly how different what an  LLM does is to ‘thinking’ in any meaningful sense).
  • Terrible DJ Names: In the early/mid-90s it was fairly commonplace to while away dull lessons making up DJ names for yourself; by the time the late-90s/early-200s rolled around, seemingly every single fcuker in the UK was a DJ and so you’d see a lot of people on listings for clubs and festivals who had seemingly just used one of the suggestions scrawled on the inside cover of their Year 10 maths book (although special shout out to the techno night ‘Havok’ in Manchester who, regardless of who was actually playing, used to list incredibly childish riffs on famous DJs on their flyers and posters – “Josh W4nk”, “Fanny Rampling”, “Judge Poos”, that sort of thing. Also a shout out to my old friend Paul who once – and only once – used the name ‘Badly Dressed Boy’ which I always thought was rather good). Anyway, here we are in THE FUTURE and, having run out of DJ names which are cool or funny, there are now a bunch of artists choosing deliberately terrible names like, er, “DJ Fart in the Club”, or “DJ Fcukoff”. I very much enjoyed this – partly because the kids evidently do not take themselves very seriously, and partly because it’s a nice antidote to the slightly-po-faced and too-cool-for-school vibe that dance music very much fostered back in my day. Also, the story behind DJ Fcuks Himself is genuinely very funny.
  • The Tyranny of ‘The Best’:  Or ‘and here’s another way in which the tyranny of data is not in fact necessarily making things better’ – this is an NYT piece all about the particular obsession that some people have with having THE BEST THING, and therefore with scouring review sites and recommendation portals to ensure that they buy the VERY BEST rice cooker or bunion spoon known to man and don’t have to suffer the indignity of a second-tier product. Look, fine, I appreciate that having more of an idea of whether something is good or not before you buy it is, on balance, A Good Thing, but also there is something so tiring and so fundamentally-joyless about the application of min/maxing to every facet of life, and the way in which literally everything that can be measured and ranked must be measured and ranked and…oh, God, I am shouting at clouds again, aren’t I?
  • South Korean Culinary Diplomacy: I have mentioned here before on a few occasions that I find the concept of ‘culinary diplomacy’ absolutely fascinating – this is another example of a country deciding to make its cuisine internationally popular and then going and doing exactly that through the power of marketing. Similar to the explosion of Thai food across the world in the early-00s, the past decade or so has seen the Korean state plough tens of millions of dollars (frankly I would have expected more tbh) into making the national cuisine an object of curiosity and desire worldwide – did you know that they paid for a bunch of kids called the Bibimbap Backpackers to travel the world doing cooking demos back in 2011? SO SMART! Also, I would LOVE to read an interview with one of those kids, I bet they had an amazing time. This is so interesting, and I am fascinated to see how they evolve the Korean food brand over the coming years in an attempt to hit their goal of being the 15th-most popular country for investment and travel (they’ve risen 10 places in the past decade or so since they began the campaign, apparently).
  • Life On Sark: The island of Sark of the English coast is a weird little place, which in recent years has been notable mainly for the insanely bitter conflict between the island’s residents and the Barclay Brothers, proprietors of the Daily Telegraph newspaper and famously-unpleasant weirdos (but, I hope, not litigious weirdos who Google themselves) – it’s something of an odd throwback, as this excellent article in the LRB details, and its history is characterised by eccentrics and crooks and a weird local version of democracy, and the way it’s described here makes it sound like a sinister cross between something from the films of Ben Wheatley and an Ealing Comedy.
  • The TV Food Man: OH GOD THIS IS SUPERB. Ruby Tandoh writes for Vittles, about a certain type of man who you will be familiar with if you’ve ever watched a food or cooking show in the UK – this is laceratingly good prose, and very, very funny, and probably makes for quite painful and upsetting reading if you happen to be a bespectacled former costermonger called ‘Gregg’ (“It’s TWO ‘g’s, love, TWO ‘g’s”). A note to all non-English people reading this – even if you have no idea about British food TV and don’t know who Gregg (“TWO FCUKING “G”S!”) Wallace is, I promise you that this is a superb and verfy funny piece of writing.
  • The Comedy of Martin Amis: I am a 43 year old English man and as such it is the law that I adore Martin Amis’ writing (oh, ok, mostly the early stuff, although I did very much enjoy The Zone of Interest); I was genuinely sad to hear of his death last weekend, and received more messages than I care to mention which simply read “Darts, Keith” (if you know, you know) – author John Niven was, it’s fair to say, a PROPER Amis fan, and here he writes about his work and why he was so great (he nails the point about italics, which Amis use with such exquisite precision and power) and I am totally going to reread London Fields for what will almost certainly be the 30th time this weekend.
  • The Art Of Fiction: Amis: This is from the Paris Review’s ‘Art of Fiction’ interview series – in it Amis talks about how he writes, the craft of writing, and his relationship with his father…I adored this, not least because Amis is laconic and arrogant and you can basically see the cigarette dangling between his fingers as he drawls his responses. Incidentally, my personal favourite Amis story is the one about the New Statesman running a competition for people to come up with the world’s least likely combination of author and book title – the winner was “My Struggle”, by Martin Amis.
  • Dinner With Martin Amis: In which the dinner doesn’t happen and Amis barely features, but the idea of him – a sort of masculine 80s literary energy – dominates regardless; I really enjoyed this piece, again from the Paris Review, in which Julia Bell eschews dining with a literary figure in favour of doing skag in her room instead; it does a really good job of capturing the weight of him on the landscape of the English novel during a specific period.
  • Hating It Lush: Finally this week, visiting Tel Aviv as a Palestinian and reckoning with Palestinian identity and sex and sexuality and the occupation and the weird Israeli obsession with psytrance…this is a superb piece of writing which feels like it could unfurl into a novel given the space.

By Dolf Kruger

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