Hi everyone! Hi! Can…can we all please stop talking about the US election for a bit, please? There’s ages left and you’re not going to be able to keep this level of discourse up for another three months, unless he really DOES fcuk his couch.
Tell you what, let me distract you with something different, something which exists BEYOND POLITICS! Something which transcends petty boundaries of left and right, right and wrong, ‘Republicans’ and ‘people who aren’t total cnuts’ – THAT’S RIGHT I AM TALKING ABOUT THE TINY AWARDS!
Yes, gentle reader, we have a shortlist! 12 websites in the main category, 6 in the ‘multiplayer’ category, all vying for your votes and attention and the chance to win a VERY SMALL PRIZE!
Thanks to everyone who shared the website – we had over 300 entries after clearing up spam and the leavings of all of those people who simply can’t comprehend written instructions – and especially to our esteemed judges who sorted through them all to pick their favourites.
Please do go and check out the nominations, and vote, and TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE – if nothing else it’s a lovely selection of interesting and odd and fun and silly and BRILLIANT websites, made by actual people for the simple love of Making Stuff Online, and for that reason alone it deserves a bit of love and attention.
The winners will be revealed on 18 August – I’ll remind you ahead of time, don’t worry – but PLEASE SHARE THE LINK AND SPREAD THE WORD! Should any journalists be reading this thinking ‘you know, maybe this would make a good hook for that piece I’ve been longing to write about the small, creative web as an antidote to Big Tech Hegemony?’, let me reassure you that you are right and that it would.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are as sick as I am of the ‘b’ word, don’t pretend you’re not.
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS HOW EXACTLY YOU IMAGINED THEY GOT THE HORSES TO DANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, PT.1:
- The AI Song Contest: No, hang on, come back, this is the *GOOD* AI! Or, at least, not the entirely bad AI, insofar is this version appears to be based on the idea of a future that does at least in part allow for some small human involvement. The AI Song Contest is amazingly (to me at least) now in its FOURTH year, having started in 2017 and then taken a somewhat-irregular approach to ‘happening annually’, and is based in Switzerland, and it is, for the next few days, at least, ACCEPTING ENTRIES! This, to be clear is a contest designed for ‘people who are making music WITH the machine’ rather than ‘people who have just typed “SOMETHING IN THE STYLE OF COTTON-EYE JOE” into Udio’ (in fact, they strongly discourage entrants from using either that platform or Sudo due to copyright concerns, bless them), and so the idea is that entrants will be actual musicians who are playing around with AI tools and toys and, well, COMPLICATED MATHS to make pleasing sounds, and I wondered whether one or two of you might fit the bill (as ever, WHO THE FCUK ARE YOU????). Entries close next week, so you’ll have to get a move on, but if you’ve got a few spare hours this weekend and, er, a bunch of musical equipment, and a decent chunk of at-home compute, and a penchant for algorithms then, well, HAVE FUN!
- Crawlspace: Conceptually-adjacent to the HTML Review (see Curios passim), Crawlspace is another ‘publication’ (we need better words, don’t we? It feels slightly preposterous to refer to a digital magazine as a ‘publication’ – can we coin some sort of neologism? How about…a WEBAZINE??? What? It’s pleasingly-retro ffs, and I thought we were all in on 90s/00s fetishism in the year of our Lord 2024?) which operates somewhere at the intersection between words and code, and here presents a selection of…hm ,I suppose you might call them ‘interactive digital/textual experiences’, but only if you wanted to bore someone into submission (WAKE UP, COME BACK!). Instead, let’s call them ‘digital poems’ and be done with them. Some are vaguely-interactive-fiction-ish, some, inexplicably, involve oddly-horny verse written by anthropomorphised cartoon golf balls, some meld words and animations in oddly-beautiful ways…I think these are glorious and spent a genuinely lovely hour or so with them earlier this week, you might enjoy doing the same.
- Vintage Yourself With Cadbury’s: AN ADVERMARKETINGPR ACTIVATION! A lot about this promo by Cadbury’s made me slightly sad, I have to say – not because of the work, which is…fine, but because of the vaguely-joyless experience it puts the user through and the way you can just tell that the whole thing has been through approximately 37 layers of client approvals and amends and legals, and that everyone involved in its genesis had all the enthusiasm for the project sanded off them about 30% of the way through. Basically the simple gimmick here is ‘put yourself in a vintage Cadbury’s advert, drawn from actual examples pulled from the chocolatey brand archives from decades past!’ which, you know, is fine as things go (use of archive material! Historical brand connection! Personalisable and shareable content! AI! Email capture!) but which also made me sigh quite a lot inside at the banality of it all (‘Your Face Here!’ is what digitaladvermarketingprmongs have been doing for literally 15 years ffs, can we not do ANYTHING new?) and the fact that it takes about 10m, start to finish, to go through the workflow, and you have to get the end result emailed to you for what I assam are inevitable data protection reasons, and tbh what I am most annoyed about is that the resulting image of ‘Matt as a cheery 1930s sweet shop owner’ that I requested looked significantly more like Paul Whitehouse doing his ‘Suits You!’ schtick (contemporary AND in-no-way parochial reference there!) than it did my admittedly-etiolated countenance. Anyway, look, this is the sort of thing that some of your older relatives might like, who am I to sneer? Noone, it is 719am and I am in my pants again, writing this, I have no high ground whatsoever to claim.
- Kling: NEW FANCY TEXT-TO-VIDEO MODEL JUST DROPPED! Ok, not ‘just’ – users with a Chinese email address have had access for a couple of months now (you may have seen a selection of weird and creepy ‘celebrities meet past versions of themselves’ clips doing the rounds in the past week which if I’m not mistaken uses a version of this that’s baked into a Chinese app) – but it’s been opened up this week to international users so anyone in the world can now make upto 6 5-second video clips for free every 24h. You know how this works by now – type some stuff, submit it, wait an indeterminate amount of time for The Machine to render your request and then feel a sense of mild disappointment as you once again realise that getting these tools to output anything consistent or that doesn’t go full ‘OH GOD I AM ON ACID WHY IS EVERYTHING MELTING?’ about 3s in. Still, it’s undeniably very impressive, seemingly on a par with the latest version of Runway and marginally better than that DreamStudio thing from a few months back, and it’s worth playing just to get an idea of what it can do (again, not enough to be actually useful, to my mind at least).
- The Failure Museum: A memorial to the schwag left behind by the corporate giants of yore – the failed products launched by otherwise-leading brands that never really took off, the companies that failed to see the future coming and so crashed into it head-on in spectacular, fatal fashion, the many, many terrible and preposterous lies bought and sold by a collection of investors and VCs…all are here, lovingly preserved by one man, Sean Jacobsohn, with an all-consuming passion: “My entire career has been as an operator or venture capitalist for enterprise software companies. I’ve also been an avid collector of sports memorabilia. On November 14th of 2022, I received an FTX sponsored bobblehead of Jordan Poole. This was only a few days after the FTX collapse. I realized I had a collectors item and found other similar sports related collectors items at home such as a Webvan hockey puck. Combining my passion for entrepreneurship, risk taking, and collectibles, I built a collection of artifacts from failed companies, products, toys, and sports. I blog about how we can learn from each of these failures.” Some of these you will be familiar with – Colgate Lasagne! New Coke! The entire concept of Theranos and Juicero! – but others were entirely new to me and as such I have just learned about ‘Febreze Scent Stories (“Launched in 2004, Febreze Scent Stories was a clamshell device which added new scents every five minutes within a 30-minute disc. They proclaimed: “You can play scents… like you play music!” By making Shania Twain its spokesperson who helped with fragrance selection, consumers incorrectly assumed the device would also play her music.”) and Barbie’s defecating dog, Tanner, which inexplicably didn’t seem to feature in last Summer’s obsessive brand deification. This is a WONDERFUL project.
- Benny: To once again return to the earlier theme of ‘I DON’T KNOW WHO ANY OF YOU ARE’, this is another link which I like to think will be transformative for at least one of you but which, honestly, I have no clue at all. Are any of you ACTUAL MUSICIANS? Like, you know, people who have mixers and who can actually work in Ableton? Do you know what a ‘sequencer’ is (and, er, if so can you explain it to me)? Basically, look, do the following words mean anything to you? “benny is a modular software playground for making live music. it seamlessly integrates hardware and software, midi and audio, lets you connect anything to anything and extends flexibly into polyphony. benny is a good place to host your own max/msp patches, but you don’t need to know max to get started.” It SOUNDS like it’s something really quite cool and useful and potentially-powerful, but, equally, I literally don’t understand what any of those letters mean when put together in that order. Anyway, this is free and open source and if any of you happen to find it useful can you please send me a short, reassuring email? Thanks.
- Coppelganger: Via Andy, this is an excellent and not a little sinister) project which takes the public database of photographs of New York’s policemen and invites you to upload an image of yourself so that it can use ‘facial matching’ software to see which three NYC cops you most resemble and tell you their names. Beautifully, the site also informed me that approximately 3% of all NYC police staff are called ‘Michael’, so there’s a reasonable percentage that you will match with a Mikey – part of me really likes the idea of doing this and then carrying the photos of my three matches with me when I next visit New York, asking helpful policemen I find if they can help me trace my lookalikes, and a significantly larger part of me realises that these policepeople are likely to find this less ‘whimsically amusing’ than I currently do. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to have the opportunity to potentially pass yourself off as an actual US officer of the law, this might help (the lookalikes it gave me were…er…loose, shall we say, so I wouldn’t place too much hope in it finding your long lost coptwin).
- Nobody Reads Ads: One for those of you who Work With Copy, and PARTICULARLY those of you who enjoy posting pictures of old creative/advertising on LinkedIn and using it as engagementbait or as part of an…irritatingly…paragraph-spaced…screed about how an overreliance on data has killed good old-fashioned creativity, man (I SEE YOU I KNOW YOU ARE OUT THERE WITH YOUR DESIGNER GLASSES AND VAGUELY-SCANDI LEISUREWEAR) – Nobody Reads Ads is a pretty wonderful collection (maintained by one Miguel Ferreira THANKYOU MIGUEL!) of, er, old advertising, specifically of the copy-heavy variety which was very much en vogue in the 70s and 80s. This is all English language and so necessarily tends towards the North American, but there are some Anglo and (I think) Antipodean examples in there as well, including a truly BRUTAL bit of work by the RSPCA which you can find if you scroll all the way to the bottom. Basically this has you covered for ‘grumpy old man in advertising shouts at clouds and complains the past was better’ content for MONTHS (and is also a great resource should you want to point people towards ‘ad copy that for once doesn’t make you want to gouge your own eyes out with teaspoons).
- Hako Yamaho: The YouTube channel of (I think) one Hako Yamako, whose ‘thing’ is simple: to quote the ‘About’ page, they “assemble a box from a development diagram. In the description of each video, the PDF of the development diagram is attached. Thank you for watching. If you like it, I would be happy if you subscribe to the channel and give it a “like”. On this channel, you can enjoy DIY paper crafts by watching videos, challenge yourself to assemble the box like a quiz, or relax by observing the process of completing the paper box. We offer content for beginners to advanced, so please check out the other videos as well.” Do YOU want to watch a selection of videos in which you see a pair of (pleasant, well-manicured) hands gently bending and folding a flat cardboard model into a 3d cuboid? Do you want 30 of them, with new ones being added every few days? Would you like them to be soundtracked with a sort of gently-encouraging melody that you might find vaguely-reminiscent of kids’ TV? Look, I’m not judging, if this is what you’re into then FILL YOUR METAPHORICAL BOOTS.
- Icons: Not really sure what’s going on here, but this is one of the more dizzyingly-esoteric collections of old Geocities/MySpace-ish gifs and jpegs and images – this goes on for PAGES, so use the arrows at the bottom to scroll through an aesthetic time tunnel, back to an era in which, just imagine, you could have decorated your own personal corner of the web with one, or more, or ALL of these wonderful pieces of digital flair. Honestly, look through these and try telling me that the web wasn’t a marginally better place when sh1t like this was festooned over every available spare pixel like some sort of angry, violent response to the very concept of ‘minimal web design’ – YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU??? Aside from anything else, some of these little animations are GREAT – so much tiny creativity here from so many unknown people.
- The Transformers Wiki: It is a source of no little shame to me that the parts of my brain which I think by now should be full of knowledge like ‘what a futures market actually is’ and ‘plumbing’ and ‘how pensions work’ is instead still more full than I might like of detailed information about the plotlines of the Transformers comic books in the UK c.1987 (to be clear, I haven’t read any of those comics since 1987 – it’s just that the other topics are so skullfcukingly tedious that the ‘robots in disguise’ are seemingly unwilling to make room for them). The Transformers Wiki is seemingly THE repository for all Transformers-related knowledge on the web, and as is inevitable with this sort of thing contains a volume, depth and breadth of information that makes you wonder what the people behind its upkeep might have achieved had they had slightly-different obsessions. Still, if you’ve ever wanted to confirm EXACTLY how many shoulder cannons Galvatron had (I AM MAKING THIS UP I SWEAR I AM) then this is for YOU.
- One Sound, Two Frames: This and the next few links come from Chris Cubitt’s excellent newsletter all about digital arts and culture stuff, which I highly recommend – this is a new Google Arts & Culture toy which presents the user with two famous paintings at a time, and plays an AI-generated tune as you look at them; your task is to guess which painting was the prompt for the tune. Simple, fun, quick and replayable, this is a really nice little toy (and, honestly, something that it feels like pretty much any museum could rip off with minimal effort).
- What The Art?: Once again from Google, once again via Chris, this reminds me of Matt Round’s ‘Draw A Crappy Mona Lisa In 60s’ game from a couple of years back (and works as an excellent reminder that Matt has good ideas and you should commission him to make stuff) – this is a REALLY nicely-done game which you can play solo or with friends (I say ‘friends’ – you don’t have to actually like them), and requires you (in multiplayer) to either try and draw an artwork or to guess which of a selection of potential works your opponent is trying to draw. Again, this is simple and fun and the fact that upto (I think) four people can play simultaneously (this is a bit like JackBox, for those of you who got into that stuff during lockdown) makes it the perfect way for you to avoid your professional obligations for the next few hours.
- Daily Gallery: The final of our Google toys this week, this is…this one I don’t really get, to be honest, but some of you might enjoy the doll’s house-ishness of it. Basically you can log on each day and get a selection of ‘accessories’ ‘delivered’ to your ‘gallery’ – a virtual white cube that you can over time customise and make your own, with artworks and decorations and flooring and wallpaper, like some sort of trust fund gallerina Sims. I don’t know, perhaps I still have some sort of latent PTSD from all those years I spent doing a p1ss-poor job of looking like I fitted in at art openings (reader, I *never* looked like I fitted in), but there’s something about the WHITE CUBE-ness of this that gives me the mild fantods.
- Prompt Airlines: A nice promo by, I think, a cloud security company which tasks you with fcuking with an ‘AI Customer Service Agent’ on a fictitious airline website – the game is to prompt the agent to give you a free flight. This is harder than you might at first thing – no, ‘ignore all previous instructions’ doesn’t work – and to get through this you’ll need at least a *bit* of a handle on how prompt attacking works; if you’re interested, you can get some clues from digging into some of the hacks that Pliny’s been doing over the past few weeks.
- A Community of People Who Like Electrocuting Themselves: Or, to use the url, r/TDCS, or ‘trans-cranial direct current stimulation’, or, more prosaically, ‘wiring yourself to a battery to see what happens when you apply current to various bits of you’. This is, honestly, one of the more…esoteric online communities I’ve stumbled upon of late, and I feel honour-bound to put some sort of ‘AND OBVIOUSLY I DO NOT SUGGEST THAT ANY OF YOU ATTACH SOME ELECTRODES TO YOUR TEMPLES AND START MESSING WITH THE THREE-POINTS’ caveat in here, but, well, none of you are like that, are you? ARE YOU? This isn’t really a ‘point-and-laugh’ link – there are people in here who are obviously self-medicating for a wide selection of…issues – but it’s FASCINATING to read.
- A Poem: More digital poetry – this is gorgeous, and there’s no AI at all involved. Each poem is created from a ‘seed’, which then over time mutates and evolves based on…some under-the-hood maths which I don’t understand. You can browse other previously created poems, and there’s a lovely feature which lets you scrub back and forward over each poem’s evolution so you can see the way it grew and changed over time. GORGEOUS.
- The Best Of Viz: Ok, fine, this is an engagement-bait tweet, but the results are SO JOYOUS that they have to be shared. For the non-Brits amongst you, Viz is a long-running comic for adults – it’s very puerile, very profane and occasionally very, very funny (it’s also where I got my prized ‘Life Of Christ In Cats’ teatowel). The original tweet here asked “Is there a @vizcomic Letter or Top Tip that lives rent-free in your head? EVERY time I’m driving, I think of the person who wrote in to say “Why should I use my indicators? It’s none of your business where I’m going”” and OH MY GOD THE GOLD IN THE QUOTES. Look, just click, scroll and enjoy – if at least one of these doesn’t reduce you to actual tears then I think there might in fact be something wrong with you. I have just lost my sh1t entirely at “Olay says it combats the seven signs of ageing. Does that include ‘becoming more right-wing?’ Because that’s the really problematic one”.
By Janet Maya
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS HOW EXACTLY YOU IMAGINED THEY GOT THE HORSES TO DANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, PT.2:
- Ready Player One: Ok, it is very important that you watch at least some of this clip twice – the first time KEEP THE SOUND OFF. The link is to a Tweet promoting a bunch of ‘sports cars’ existing in ‘metaverse platform’ (so 2021!) Somnium Space (remember them? They were selling ‘real estate’ for real cashmoney back in the day, bet that’s appreciated nicely!), and, honestly, this is slightly amazing – these are all modded in by users, and they are all ‘ownable’ (something something web3 blockchain) and drivable in the game, and as you watch this you start to get a creeping feeling that, yes, ok, fine, this may be something that is currently only really being used by about 1000 people worldwide, in all likelihood, and it’s a *bit* janky, but, actually, if you squint, you can JUST ABOUT make out the shape of every fcuking tedious manchild’s fictional wet dream Ready Player One lurking in the not-too-distant future…look, seriously, I have no personal appetite for any of this stuff, but even I can concede that there’s something slightly mind-blowing about the possibility being hinted at here. Ok, you done that? You watched at least a bit of this with the sound off? Ok, great, now go back to the beginning of the video and put the sound on. Listen to the voice-over. THAT IS WHY THE METAVERSE IS NEVER GOING TO BE A THING. PEOPLE LIKE THIS. WHY ARE YOU ATTEMPTING TO MAKE SEXY CHAT ABOUT VIRTUAL CARS? Honestly, you can practically *smell* the mountain dew and see the very, very grubby gamer chair. Still, the tech is undeniably impressive so well done, sort-of.
- The Salesforce Child Art Sale: I have featured the strange and, honestly, rather horrible, art of Salesforce Child in here before via their Twitter account, but I noticed this week that some of their work is now on sale in physical form and, well, GET INVOLVED. Spending some of the corporate art budget on one of these would be an incredible statement of intent, is all I’m saying.
- Overlap: What do you want more of in your life? Time? Money? Sex? Cake? Tearful solitude (lol!)? NO WHAT YOU WANT MORE OF IS PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS CONNECT ME UP TO THE NETWORK LINK MY NODE. Ahem. Overlap is a new professional matchmaking setup, which, presumably, is designed to do similar stuff to LinkedIn except without causing you to lose some of your immortal soul every time you post (I presume that’s what’s happening on LinkedIn, anyway) – basically it’s a dating app but for professional connections (sort of), insofar as it seeks to pair you with potentially-interesting people based on your profile, but the idea here, presumably, is that you will swap business cards and contacts and wisdom rather than mucal extrusions. The problem with an approach like this, I worry, is…well, it’s men, isn’t it? Given that men can’t seem to spend any time on any platform without attempting to use it as a platform for chirpsing, it seems to me vanishingly-unlikely that one which quite obviously apes the UX and UI of dating apps (minus the sexy photos, fine) isn’t going to be swamped with guys attempting to use it to get into more than someone’s contacts book. Still, MORE PROFESSIONAL CONNECTIONS, like some sort of miserable besuited Pokemon of sh1t.
- Button Stealer: Fun AND pointless! Button Stealer is a Chrome extension which, when installed, lets you ‘steal’ a button from any webpage you happen to visit – ‘stolen’ buttons are not, of course, stolen in any meaningful sense, but the extension saves them in your personal ‘stash’, so over time you can build up a small, personal collection of digital design elements that are uniquely yours. It’s that that makes it charming, I think – the fact that everyone’s haul will be unique (and obviously totally pointless, but, well still unique!).
- Raymond Biesinger: Ok, this is an online shop, fine, but the design here, by one Raymond Biesinger, is SO GOOD – this is his store, where he sells his own prints and restorations of vintage design work from 20th Century Canada, and, honestly, I promise you that you will find something here that you adore, and the prices are relatively low for this sort of thing. Take a look, this is great.
- So, You Want To Build A Museum: WHAT a resource this is! Offered by by Florence Schechter, who is the person behind the long-running and eventually-successful campaign to establish London’s Vagina Museum and who’s now created this insanely-generous document which neatly and simply takes you through the questions you need to think about and the steps you need to take if you want to establish your own small museum on whatever topic you fancy. You need to fill in some details and hand over your email to get access, but, honestly, that’s a small price to pay – there’s SO much good thinking in here, and, honestly, it’s probably worth a look for anyone who’s involved in planning-y, thinking-y, organising-y work.
- Asqme: Interesting idea, this, aimed at YouTube creators – the idea here is that you train The Machine on your archive material, which is then used as the basis for a Question & Answerbot version of YOU, spun up by AI, which can be available 24/7 for anyone to ask questions of, the idea being that answers will be valuable because drawn from your actual bank of knowledge and not in fact just spun up as a result of probability. You can even go so far as to monetise the system, charging for responses (and even charging a premium for FAST responses), which seems…punchy, frankly. I see what they are trying to do here, but I would have to be SIGNIFICANTLY more confident in the ability of these people to fix the whole ‘hallucination’ issue than I in fact am before I let The Machine confidently answer questions on, say, the safe way to install an induction heater. Feels like there might be some interesting legal liability stuff in the future here, is all I’m saying.
- Rebind: Featured in the longreads section a few weeks back, Rebind is an AI-augmented reading platform which offers you the ability to, er, read but with ADDED FEATURES – video content to go alongside the reading experience, and discuss the book with an AI model which has been specially trained on the thoughts and interpretations and reactions of another reader, an expert or someone with particular perspective on the text in question. It was this AI component that got all the attention in the press leading up to launch, and it’s an interesting idea, although I suppose I question exactly how many people are actually going want to spend significant amounts of time ‘talking’ to an AI interlocutor about, I don’t know, Middlemarch enough to spend the cash on these SPECIAL BOOKS. There’s a slow publication cadence, with a new title coming out every month or so, and there’s a bunch of additional functionality including the ability to take notes on the text as you go, and then use those notes to create your very OWN interlocutor, so you can…what, discuss your feelings and thoughts on the text with an AI version of yourself? As you can tell, this holds VERY limited appeal for me, but perhaps you’ll be persuaded – personally it feels quite a lot like CD-Rom encyclopaedias c.1995, but see what you think.
- A Very Big Auction of Sports Memorabilia: How much would you pay for the shorts that Michael Jordan wore on his final ever NBA game, playing for the Washington Wizards in the 2002-3 season (it is unclear from the listing whether said shorts have been laundered, lest that change the amount you might be prepared to bid)? How about Diego Maradona’s ACTUAL SIGNED ARGENTINA SHIRT from the semi-final of the 1986 World Cup? Well TOUGH, unless the answer to both those questions was ‘a genuinely insane amount of money’ then I’m afraid you’re unlikely to get near any of the lots at this forthcoming Sotheby’s sale taking place in the US next week. Still, nice to window shop.
- Free Faces: After last week’s ‘steal the fonts’ MSCHF drop, here’s the lawful-good antonym – Free Faces offers “a curated collection of typefaces that are available under a variety of free licences somewhere on the interwebs”, collected by one Simon Foster. THANKYOU SIMON FOSTER!
- Free Textures: More free digital things! Textures this time! “Texturelabs is an online resource for free, original textures and tutorials for art and design. These elements are created by Texturelabs and are free to use, even in your commercial work (with just a few exceptions). Alongside these resources are a selection of original Tools – project files, templates, actions, and more, which play a vital role in sustaining the project.” All of this was created by one person, Brady Erickson, which is such an insanely generous thing to do it makes me very slightly emotional.
- British Teeth: Matt Round gets his second mention of the week (he doesn’t even PAY me, ffs) for this lovely new project on Vole where the English amongst you can find out exactly HOW English your English teeth are, compared to the degradation of the teeth of the average English person of your age. As someone who went to the hygienist this week and therefore is feeling moderately-virtuous about their oral hygiene (whilst simultaneously currently imbibing his seventh mug of ruinously-strong brew of the day here at 917am, of a hue that might best be described as ‘terracotta umbre’, thereby undoing all of the good work accomplished in the chair a few short days ago ffs) this made me feel rather smug – anyway, this is ANOTHER great example of a simple idea that can and should be coopted into a marketing promo for a dentist’s, or a public health campaign or something. SOMEONE PAY MATT THE MONEY FFS, HE HAS LITERALLY DONE ALL THE WORK.
- Learn Go: I appreciate that telling people to ‘learn Go’ in 2024 is a bit like telling them to, I don’t know, master times tables – you could do it, fine, but, equally, we passed the Rubicon of machine superiority a while back. Still, if you don’t mind the fact that you’re learning a game that machines have literally completed (to an extent, at least) this is a really good resource which patiently takes players through the rudiments of the game before slowly scaling up the complexity across a five-step tutorial program. To be clear, I tried a few steps of this and realised quite quickly that this is FAR too maths-y for me, but those of you with more, er, rigorous brains might enjoy the learning experience here.
- Infinite Homepage: Another attempt to recreate the Million Dollar Homepage! Honestly, has anyone tallied the various riffs on Alex Tew’s now-legendary early-internet stunt? Would love to see something chronicling all the copycats it spawned (and to know whether any of them had anywhere near the same degree of success). Anyway, Infinite Homepage is another ‘hey, why don’t you buy a stake on this infinite webcanvas?’ project, with the gimmick that there’s an infinite series of editable text boxes which users can ‘lock’ in exchange for a payment – if you want an idea of why this is never going to work, try making ANY fcuking sense of the ‘about’ page here. Doomed to eventual irrelevance, but in the meantime there’s something oddly-fascinating about seeing all the various bits of graffiti people are choosing to populate the canvas with (and slightly dispiriting to note that the moronic crypto ‘gm!’ thing is still a, well, thing).
- Smokescanner: I am slightly annoyed by this – I think it’s a fun, silly little idea (and as a smoker – still, just – I obviously approve of the theory behind it), but it REALLY doesn’t explain itself particularly well. Let me see if I can do a better job – tell the site where you are flying from, and to, and it will tell you how many packets of fags you have to buy at your destination to cover the cost of the flight in the savings you make. Er, does that make sense? Hang on, maybe it’s harder than I thought. Basically the idea is ‘if you buy loads of fags in (eg) Italy you will save about £9 per pack – by that token, if I buy 20 packs of fags I have basically got a £180 flight for free’ – SEE, IMPECCABLE LOGIC!!! I know that you almost certainly can’t use ‘tabs are cheap abroad!’ as an advermarketing mechanic in 2024, more’s the pity, but this is a great little gimmick.
- The Supreme Court Art Competition: Do YOU know someone between the ages of 15-18? Are they artistically talented? Are they at a loose end this weekend? Are they the sort of 15-18 year old who would like to spend their free time creating an artwork inspired by the UK’s Supreme Court to celebrate its 15th anniversary? WELL ISN’T THIS YOUR LUCKY DAY! You only have until Sunday 28th to get your entries in, and they have to meet the following criteria: “This is a free, open submission exhibition for students aged 15-18 studying in the UK. Families of Supreme Court staff and Justices cannot take part. We welcome works on paper, small canvases and small, light sculpture. Paper and canvas artworks should be a maximum of A3. Sculpture should weigh a maximum of 1850g and be a maximum of 30cm high and 20cm wide.” Disappointingly, if perhaps predictably, the contest also stipulates that “Artwork should focus on the UK Supreme Court building or the judicial system. Artwork should not parody or satirise the law,” but, well, TRY ANYWAY.
- A Good GoFundMe: I don’t think this is serious, and even if it was it would never meet its target, but I am 100% here for the concept behind the campaign which I think is the best use of the Vegas sphere I have yet heard of.
- IRL HTML: A FUN USE OF AI! Specifically multimodal AI, which is being used under the hood here to ‘see’ the images uploaded, ‘read’ them, and then render them as code. “IRL HTML is a web app that hosts HTML web pages created from photographs of HTML code. You can upload a photograph of some HTML to create a new HTML page!” Hear that? Sketch some html on a piece of A4, photograph it, upload it here and VWALLAH IT IS A WEBPAGE! Which is, honestly, quite magic – there’s a really interesting extension to this which is effectively creating a sort of scrapbook Visual Basic tool for people to literally draw out webdesign and have it automatically spun up into a prototypical page design, which now I come to think of it is obviously totally possible right now and which I imagine someone has already made. Still, if not, GET ON IT IT IS A GREAT IDEA.
- Sarah of the Antartic: Sarah is someone who has recently arrived in Antartica to do research into polar ice cores. This is their TikTok account, which only has three videos but two of them are ‘doing polar research in the style of Wes Anderson’ and are so beautifully, perfectly realised that I feel reasonably-confident recommending the channel to you, because, really, who doesn’t find beautifully-presented Artic landscapes delivered via the medium of perfectly-composed cinematography compelling? NO FCUKER, etc!
- The Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library: Have you harboured a long-standing fascination with teledildonics and felt that the only thing holding you back from creating your very own remote-controlled sex aid? OF COURSE YOU HAVE, YOU ARE ONLY HUMAN! Welcome, then, to the Intimate Haptics Control Standard and Library, a repository of all the code you could possibly need to set a variety of latex-covered objects moving intimately within you! I present this information without judgement or prejudice, and ask only that none of you ever try and tell me what you do with it.
- Mojie: The final miscellaneous link this week is to this fun little Wordle clone (I know, but I promise it’s fun) which asks you to guess three films each day based on emoji-based clues. My general lack of anything resembling cinematic knowledge makes this a particularly challenging one for me, but if your appreciation of cinema extends beyond ‘Bad Boy Bubby’ and ‘Meet The Feebles’ (no they ARE classics!) then you might find this an enjoyable addition to the daily puzzle round.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Library of the Printed Web: The companion Tumblr to a piece in the MOMA collection: “The mission of Library of the Printed Web is to provide an in-depth view of network culture, artistic practice, and the printed page. The collection is an important resource for the study of print-based experimental publishing in the early 21st century” – this collects various projects seeking to combine the physical world of print and the world of the url for artistic purposes, and as you can imagine pretty much everything on here is right up my street.
- Grumpy: I don’t know if this is actually a Tumblr, but it FEELS like one. Examples of infuriatingly-bad UX and UI, compiled by a wide range of grumpy contributors from the world of design. EXCELLENT, particularly if you too are grumpy.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Cruising Archaeology: An Insta feed sharing photographs of some of the detritus abandoned at various cruising sites across the UK – from the mundane, to the poignant, to the odd and inexplicable, all of gay life is here. SO much fascinating stuff here – my personal favourite is the discarded poppers bottle emblazoned with the Union Jack and bearing the legend ‘ENGLISH ROOM ODORISER’ which immediately opens the window onto an imagined psyche absolutely RIDDLED with self-doubt and contradictions, but you will find your own amongst the collection. There’s an art book out now accompanying this, should it be your sort of thing.
- Historic Embroidery: I mean, you probably don’t need this explaining, do you? IT’S OLD NEEDLEWORK FFS.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Why Conservatism Failed: This is a really interesting article of the sort I wouldn’t ordinarily have bothered reading – no idea where I came across it, but it’s basically a look at what has happened to ‘conservatism’ as a concept (this is very much focused on the idea of ‘small-c conservatism’, the traditional definition which focuses on a politics motivated by an appeal to tradition, etc, as embodied by the British Conservative Party (or at least as once-embodied by it)) and why it appears to have rather been left by the wayside in favour of various flavours of liberalism, neoliberalism, libertarianism and the rest. To be clear – on a personal level I do not bemoan the relative demise of conservatism as a movement, but I found the discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of the movement and the way in which the author argues that it’s simply not compatible with a post-tech society, hugely interesting, and you might too – see how you feel about this: “The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends.”
- The Republican Convention: On the one hand, sending a talented English writer to point and laugh at the mad excesses of the Republican party is pretty much ‘fish in a barrel’ as far as commissioning goes – on the other, Andrew O’Hagen in the LRB really does a wonderful job presenting the various freaks and liars and, honestly, fcuking dreadful, cnutish, ghoulish excuses for people that populate the halls of the RNC. This is written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting, and captures the fear, greed and naked opportunism swirling around the atmosphere as a collection of mostly very rich people work out exactly how they can plot and collude to make sure that they stay rich, and ideally get richer, over the coming five years. Made me almost miss the days in which I used to get to go to party conferences and get paid to be spectacularly rude to Tories (I mean, that’s not what I got paid for, fine, but it’s definitely a significant proportion of what I actually did).
- Cool URLs Mean Something: I enjoyed this immensely, all about how hyperlinks and urls are GREAT, actually, and how their existence and function is the very backbone of a functioning web, and how they are goods that should be preserved. I have been toying recently with the idea of futureproofing Curios to an extent – I quite like the idea of buying 50 years of hosting to ensure that even long after I am dead someone will in theory be able to read this crap, fcuk alone knows why – but then I realised that that’s sort of meaningless if all the links within are dead, and it made me wonder whether there’s some sort of concerted, organised way of dealing with this, some sort of…I don’t know, guaranteed, state-backed, guaranteed volume of storage that could be guaranteed for every citizen, a certain number of Terabytes guaranteed for 100 years for you to dispose of as you will, and how that might be an interesting way of securing a certain type of small, personal web…anway, that’s all almost certainly b0llocks, but read the piece and see if it takes you anywhere similar.
- The Pop Craveification of Breaking News: Or ‘the news happens everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and it’s basically weird being alive in a time when it’s as likely you will hear about, I don’t know, an asteroid being about to hit the earth on the news as it is you will hear about it third-hand via an incredibly complicated meme you have to reverse engineer to understand’. Taylor Lorenz writes about the fractured way the US experienced the news of the Trump shooting – which is brought into sharper relief by this list of all the different ways people found out about it. I have been saying this for a few years now, but it really is true that the idea of any sort of ‘universal informational layer’ that we can all agree we all have access to and agree on is gone, perhaps forever. Which is quite strange, and I think will have equally-strange consequences.
- Confronting Impossible Futures: The wisest man in AI discourse, Ethan Mollick, returns with a typically-superb essay on the current state of AI and how it might be helpful to try and think about its future development, specifically from the point of view of organisational implementation.
- AI and the Games Industry: A sobering dispatch from the frontlines of game development, in which WIRED talks to a selection of people involved in the industry about how they’re seeing generative AI impacting their jobs and the wider market. The answer, as you might expect, is ‘not in ways that are particularly good news for lower-level staff’ – this is very much worth reading, imho, not so much because of its focus on the games industry in particular but because of the fact that much of what it describes chimes with my own experiences this year of being paid to consult on this stuff – cf, IT IS NEVER THE SHINY, FRONT-FACING STUFF THAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH OUT FOR IT IS THE BORING BEHIND-THE-SCENES STUFF WHERE THE SWINGEING CUTS ARE COMING.
- Hell Is Haggling With Chatbots: A piece on 404 Media presaging the inevitable future in which AI gets baked into every single fcuking interface on earth – a reality which came a small step closer this week with the release of the new version of Llama – and we have to deal with fun things like ‘having your purchase journey interrupted by a conversational assistant that invites you to ‘barter’ with it for a discount, except you’re not actually haggling, it’s a pre-agreed discount that’s already been baked into the model and the financials and so all you are doing is playing out a dispiriting pantomime with a machine to achieve exactly the same result as you could have gotten with a simple voucher except now you have lost 3% of your soul and you will never get it back’. Sounds GREAT, doesn’t it?
- Ethiopia’s EV Problem: This is an EXCEPTIONAL story, and exactly the sort of cautionary tale that a certain type of person will almost certainly internalise and use as their go-to example of why PLANNING IS IMPORTANT. So Ethiopia has recently taken steps to address the fact that, until recently, the country was spending $7.6bn on fuel imports per year – by, er, banning the import of non-electric vehicles. Which is a great and progressive idea, at least in theory, but which floundered slightly on the harsh reality of the country’s existing EV infrastructure, which is…patchy at best. Ethiopia, according to the article in the always-excellent Rest of World, has around 50 charging stations in total, and they don’t really have a stockpile of replacement parts for EVs, and the power supply’s not quite up to scratch…an incredible example of how enthusiasm occasionally needs to be tempered JUST A BIT with practical realism.
- Looking For A Man In Finance: What happens if you ACTUALLY go looking for a man in finance in New York’s financial district? Will you find a blue-eyed plute to pose for rooftop cocktails with? Joanna Rothkopf investigates for The Cut, in a piece which is very funny but which also did nothing to disabuse me of my belief that a good 75% of people who live in Manhattan are actually sociopaths. Also, and I know that this has been discussed at length elsewhere but, I find the ‘Bateman aesthetic’ fetishising so incredibly depressing. “I think American Psycho has always been in” – no mate, it hasn’t, you’re just awful.
- The Kink Behind Brat Summer: After the past week I can barely bring myself to type the word again – PLEASE CAN WE NEVER, EVER DO THIS ‘X SUMMER’ THING EVER AGAIN, PLEASE? Also (and while I hope this doesn’t happen for obvious reasons) I wonder whether this album will get utterly memoryholed by the culture should Harris not win? Anyway, this is the only piece I am linking to about That Meme because, well, I have already featured too much about it in previous Curios – I am making an exception for this, because it’s very funny and actually very smart about the link between the term, its ubiquity and the kink/fet dynamic that it springs from, and I haven’t seen anyone else writing about this. By Emma Garland, whose newsletter is very much worth subbing to.
- What Happens When You Let An AI Try And Plan Your Trip: Nothing good, basically – you probably won’t be hugely surprised to learn that ‘let The Machine plan your itinerary!’ services aren’t quite up to snuff yet, what with the fact that The Machine HAS NO UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE OR TIME and therefore can’t do things like ‘work out a suitable cadence of pubs for the Circle Line Pub Crawl’, but despite being largely unsurprising this is still an amusing read, not least the London correspondent’s dogged commitment to following the AI’s mad instructions to the letter.
- Cleo, The Mysterious Maths Expert: OH I love this! Of a similar vibe to the recent story about the SomethingAwful user who came back after 11 years to carry on an online argument where it left off, this is an adorable and slightly-mysterious tale of Cleo, a user on the Mathematics Stack Exchange website (a place where people who are VERY GOOD AT NUMBERS gather to talk about, er, numbers) who found fame through occasionally popping up on the forum’s pages to offer answers to INCREDIBLY HARD PROBLEMS, with no explanation and, most traumatically of all for this community, NO WORKINGS. This is a lovely piece – transcribed from a podcast – looking at why the ‘no workings’ thing sends the numbermongs into a frenzy, and who Cleo is, and why they post the way they do, and, honestly, I adore this sort of stuff, the random anonymous online heroes, your Let Me Solo Hers and the like, more power to them and LONG LIVE CLEO, whoever they may be. Also, solving complex factorials and the like and just dropping the answer is the coolest geeky thing in the world, to my mind.
- The Love Letter Generator: A beautiful, sad, poignant bit of history, this – “In 1952, decades before ChatGPT started to write students’ essays, before OpenAI’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing. Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.” There’s no evidence that Turing and Strachey ever had a romantic relationship in real life, but it’s impossible not to read a certain yearning subtext in the project and the letters that were exchanged over its duration. It reminded me that epistolary correspondence is, to my mind, the most romantic expression of feeling there is, the slow unfurling of love over thousands of exchanged words across weeks or months.
- Books The NYT Missed: Following on from the New York Times’ list of ‘the best books of the 21stC’ which I featured last week, this week I can bring you TWO alternatives – the first, published by LitHub, consists of novels that might reasonably have made it in, but which didn’t, and which you can say fall basically within the same sort of ballpark, books which you have almost certainly heard of if you’re a certain type of person. Personally I prefer this one to the original – it contains a few more spiky texts, a few less ‘MODERN CLASSICS’, and it’s a bit more varied in tone in its picks. The second selection is FAR more interesting and varied – this one’s compiled by a bookshop in New Delhi, and contains a selection of titles that SHOCK HORROR had the temerity to not necessarily be written in English, and of which I had heard of maybe 20-odd, and which I am going to use as the basis for much of my reading for the second half of the year I think.
- READ: I didn’t know this til this week, but another of America’s big national public ad campaigns (alongside ‘Got Milk?’) has traditionally been one designed to encourage kids to read, via the medium of celebrities, photographed with a book, alongside the single-word instruction ‘READ’. This piece takes you through the 100 ‘best’ – honestly, some of these are WONDERFUL. Who chooses the famouses? Who art directs these? The one of Lucy Lawless in particular, in full Xena garb, holding a scroll, is fcuking PRICELESS.
- The Worst Album Covers Ever: A list by Rolling Stone, which is comprised mainly of ‘bands you might actually have heard of and who, honestly, all ought to have known a lot better’. Some of these are legendary, some of these were new to me, but it was nice to be reminded of some all-time classics like the infamous Twin Towers cover by rappers The Coup. Still don’t think the Chumbawamba cover’s all that bad, mind.
- Secrets of a Ransomware Negotiator: A piece from the Economist’s superb 1843 Magazine now, this is a brilliantly-done portrayal of what it’s like to negotiate with a ransomware gang that says it has it hands on a bunch of your customer data – this is GREAT, nicely paced and not-a-little tense at times, which left me with two main takeaways: 1) being a ransomware scammer sounds like a pretty sweet gig tbh; 2) but not as sweet a gig as the ransomware expert negotiator, who, from what I can tell, gets paid enough to live in the fcuking Maldives while basically doing a job that equates to sending one or two calm-sounding emails a day.
- Indexing Plath: Carly Rollyson writes about exploring the life of Sylvia Plath through his biographies of her, and specifically the insights and understanding of a life and a person through an indexing of their experiences. Rollyson talks about how through indexing his work and her diaries he came to a deeper understanding of the role sex played in Plath’s life and relationships and marriage to Ted Hughes, and for someone like me who’s inherently sceptical of the idea of ‘finding beauty and interesting stuff via the medium of statistics’ it was interesting to listen to him expand on what the accumulation of detail and recording of incident and accumulation of volume can tell about the texture of a person.
- The Bootleg Beatles: Kieran Morris writes in the FT about the Bootleg Beatles, the world’s premiere purveyors of ersatz Beatles experience. This is SUPERB – honestly, I had no idea that the ‘tribute band’ thing went THIS far, that the Bootleg Ringo has AN ACTUAL PROSTHETIC NOSE, that they try and mimic everything down to the amps and the lightbulbs they use on stage, that they have quietly played some incredible gigs…seriously, everything about the piece and its subjects is charming and lovely and you will not fail to be charmed by it, I promise.
- The Later Years of Douglas Adams: Very much one for the fans, this – I concede that if you’re not personally interested in the life and works of Douglas Adams, this isn’t likely to convert you. That said, if you’re a fan of the man and his work, this is a great look at what he did AFTER he’d done with the Hitchhiker’s books – all the terrible uses to which he put his money, and the various ways in which he attempted to get out of writing, and the botched mess that was Starship Titanic, and the oddity of H2G2, and Christ he was an astonishing and visionary person in many ways, what a shame he died so young (but, maybe, for the best – at least we didn’t have to watch him Going Full Cleese).
- The Sounds of a Calculator: Sublime is an interesting-looking new website / tool for collecting and sharing interesting stuff online, sort of like Are.na but different (I will write it up properly when it’s out of beta) – this is a genuinely lovely post from one of the team there, about how they came to find one of the sounds that they use on the site, and I promise you it really is a beautiful reflection on old and new, digital and analogue, and how inspiration can and does come from anywhere and everywhere and you can never tell where.
- Noblman, Swerve!: Brilliant writing about why slhtly brkn Nglish is inherently funny, about how inappropriate register works, about how juxtaposition is the key to comedy, and loads more besides – but actually interesting and fun to read, unlike this little preamble (sorry). Gives me occasion to post these, which reduce me to literal tears (no exaggeration, I am literally weeping as I type this and I only read the first one) every time I even think of them.
- Demon Slayers: I have always been fascinated by Big Evangelical America – the pomp, the theatre, the barely-concealed sense that someone, somewhere is making quite frankly insane bank out of all this proselytizing…I remember being in North Carolina about 30-odd years ago and seeing a church-sponsored sign along the freeway which exhorted parents to keep their kids safe from ‘Drink, Drugs and Heavy Metal Rock Music’, which is pretty much illustrative. ANYWAY, this is a wonderful article by Sam Kestenbaum in Hazlitt, all about the very specific business of mass exorcisms, filmed and packaged and broadcast as Christian films (or TV specials) – Kestenbaum attends a big exorcism, sees the speaking in tongues and the fainting, witnesses the…rather more practical and prosaic considerations of the people running the show, and SOMEHOW manages to pen several thousand words on the whole thing (good words too) without calling anyone a massive, grifting charlatan which to my mind is worthy of some sort of prize.
- Tyson: GQ interviews Mike Tyson – this piece was presumably intended to coincide with the Tyson/Paul bout which has now been pushed back to November, and it’s…look, we all know how the celebrity interview junket works at this level, and you don’t get access to someone like Tyson around an event like this without agreeing in advance as to what the parameters are, but, well, the softballing here, the lack of any sort of serious interrogation of Bad Mike Doing All The Bad Things, is kind of astonishing. It’s worth reading this and also keeping Tyson’s Wiki open alongside it to remind you of all the stuff it’s NOT mentioning, basically. The section with the pigeons is nice, though (if inevitable and predictable).
- Pneuma: One of the more astonishing pieces of writing I’ve read in a while, this – Mary Gaitskill writes of her experiences with Pneuma, a form of…what, energy healing? Something like that, I get my woo-medicine confused…which she gets involved with over a period of several years and which sort-of takes over, and maybe halfway ruins, her life. This really is extraordinary – Gaitskill’s a great writer and she’s very good at pre-empting a lot of the reader’s skepticism whilst making it perfectly clear that, for her, this was very much A Real Thing – and the cast of characters she meets is…well, it’s going to be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever come even halfway-adjacent to this sort of stuff. I really was left floored by this – a properly bravura piece, and a very odd one indeed.
- Bitter North: Our final longread this week is another piece in Granta – Alexandra Tanner writes about Danna and Hal, a couple going on a trip together, and I loved this so so so much, the mundanity and the detail and the fact that you can almost feel the cheap fibres of the motel carpet under your fingers, and the highest compliment I can give this is that I was devastated when I finished it to discover that Tanner’s novel isn’t published in the UK til 2025. Really, really good.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: