God, it’s been an awful week for bloviating cnuts, hasn’t it? SHUT UP NIGEL SHUT UP ELON SHUT UP AND FCUK OFF AND SHUT UP!
Sadly, though, they won’t do either of those things, and we will continue boosting and bolstering their utterances, however untrue or unhelpful they are – that’s simply just how things work here at the fag-end of temperate civilisation.
Otherwise it’s been a good week for everyone with stocks in energy companies and air conditioning units and, on balance, a bad week for literally everyone else (and, frankly, even those people aren’t going to outrun this, however well their portfolios perform).
Still, links! Links will make it better! CLICK THE PAIN AWAY!!!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and maybe we could all club together and buy a grand hotel in Cleethorpes in preparation for the apocalypse-induced ascent of the English coast to its new status as a sweltering summer holiday destination?
***TINY AWARDS UPDATE***
The Tiny Awards are over! We have a winner!
We received over 1500 votes across the nominated sites – thanks to everyone who voted, who shared the link and who said nice things – and the winner of the inaugural Tiny Awards 2023 is….*drumroll*…ROTATING SANDWICHES by Lauren Walker!
Congratulations to Lauren (and also, ahem, to me, who had the GREAT TASTE to feature the site when it launched last year), who is the proud recipient of $500 (thanks to ZINE) and the official Tiny Awards trophy which will be winging its way to her as soon as it’s finished!
BUT, there’s more! If you click here, you can see the full list of EVERY SINGLE nominated website – over 300 fun little homemade and whimsical web projects for you to explore and enjoy, and which is, honestly, at least a full rainy day’s worth of interesting and odd and cute.
Kristoffer and I have honestly been overwhelmed by the support and interest people have shown, and will definitely be doing this again next year (barring injury or death) – til then, though, THANKYOU TO EVERYONE who participated in any way, you are all wonderful and I love you immoderately and damply.
***END OF TINY AWARDS UPDATE***
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO’S GOING TO EDINBURGH FOR FRINGE TO TRY AND CHECK OUT NATALIE PALAMIDES NEW SHOW AS IT IS EXCELLENT, PT.1:
- Hoodmaps: I have been slightly-obsessed with this all week whilst at the same time knowing that this is almost certainly SUPER-OLD NEWS for some of you (specifically, those of you younger than me – this very much feels like ‘something that was big with kids in approximately 2021). Still, as someone once told me (ERRONEOUSLY) ‘the internet is not a race’ (if it isn’t a race then, well, what have I been *doing* with my life?!), and as such we can all hopefully enjoy HoodMaps together even if we are TRAGICALLY LATE to it. But, er, what is HoodMaps? Well (glad you asked, thought you’d never get round to it) it’s MAPS! Of your (neightbour)hood! Annotated with comments from all the other people who’ve previously visited the site and seen fit to leave a little comment tagged to a specific area of a town or city which offers an often-poetic description of what the area in question is *actually* like! This is CHAOTICALLY-BRILLIANT, not least because the comments are seemingly-unmoderated which means that you get wonderfully-bitchy notes on certain areas (personal favourite: “rich gay couples looking for a third”, although I also have a soft spot for London’s Surrey Quays which simply reads ‘DECATHLON’) – I haven’t yet seen anything horrible or racist, but obviously there’s always a slight risk. As far as I can tell this is generally local kids leaving the notes – I’ve looked at various towns and cities I’ve lived in, and each time have just become mesmerised by the tapestry and texture of the city that’s revealed in the comments (yes, I know, pretentious, but, also, true!). I am currently writing this just to the West of an area charmingly-tagged as ‘knife crime central’ – find your own zone!
- Escape Plan: Have YOU ever wondered what it would be like to be trapped in a house fire, desperately fighting through your suddenly-unfamiliar, smoke-filled surroundings in attempt to reach safety and fresh air before your lungs start to burn from the inside-out? Lol just wait a few years and that will be summer lol! Until then, though, why not ‘enjoy’ this interactive EXPERIENCE brought to you by Meta in conjunction with the US Government in which you get to experience the first-person…er, experience of being stuck in a burning building – will YOU be able to get out in time, or will you become a virtual Roman candle? This is quite slick and, despite the fact that there is no jeopardy whatsoever and I was experiencing it in a slightly cold flat in North London, I felt…moderately-anxious at points during the game (is that an endorsement?) – those of you with an Oculus gathering dust on your shelf may be pleased to know that there’s a VR option too, meaning you can have a TERRYFINGLY-IMMERSIVE HOUSE FIRE EXPERIENCE which sounds, honestly, a bit much. Still, if you do try the VR version, why not ask a friend or family member to wave a pair of curling tongs around your head while you try and escape for a bit of what the Merlin Entertainment Group refer to as ‘4d immersion’? You can thank me later.
- Drake Related: I appreciate that ‘being plutocratically rich’ probably has its downsides – one of which is the fact that a near-infinite number of grifters will come to see you as an easy mark, and you will have to suffer a succession of sales pitches and propositions from people who want to charge you large sums for terrible ideas. Still, try as I might I can’t excuse Drake – or whichever entourage member has been delegated the job of ‘Drake’s Global Senior-Vice-President of eCommerce’ – for this online shop, which is…ok, how best to describe this? You remember a couple of years ago when all the dreadful metaverse consultants (WE STILL SEE YOU WE WILL NOT FORGET) were peddling ‘shopping…in the metaverse!’ solutions, and there was a spate of sad, unloved 3d worlds in which you could jerkily-navigate a poorly-rendered avatar while looking at digital representations of pairs of jeans which you could click on to be taken to an entirely-separate online storefront? OF COURSE YOU DO THEY WERE THE BEST OF TIMES! HALCYON DAYS! Anyway, this is…that, but in 2d! Yes, that’s right, someone’s convinced Drake(‘s team) that the best way of shifting the warehouses of ‘Champagne Papi’ (I pretzel myself with second-hand shame at that nickname every time)-branded tat is to create a(n admittedly nicely-rendered) selection of rooms from Drake’s mansion (and his garage, and, er, his private jet) in 2d, which contain certain objects which can be clicked on and then purchased. So, to be clear, you have to navigate across seven or so separate web pages and play ‘hunt the interactive elements’ on each, before clicking on something to be taken to a separate website to actually buy anything…oh Drake! I am personally quietly convinced that someone somewhere has charged a six-figure sum for this and, honestly, I applaud whichever enterprising crook is responsible, not least because this exact online shopping experience has been underwhelming customers for about 15 years.
- 100 Years of OBB: If you’ve spent any time working in communications, you will at some point or another have come across the classic brief format that is ‘come up with ideas to promote our corporate anniversary!’ (I know! I am tumescent at the very reminiscence!) – similarly, if you’ve ever come across such a brief, you will at one point or another have pitched ‘use your incredible archive of corporate history (so fascinating!) to create an interactive digital exhibition, one which tells the STORY (sorry) of your thrilling brand while at the same time subtly promoting the visionary strategy that will see you bestride the coming century like the BUSINESS COLOSSUS you are!’, usually safe in the knowledge that the actual budget is about a tenner and there’s no way they’ll want to spend the money to make anything good. AND YET! Amazingly, for the centenary of the Austrian state railway company OBB they have done EXACTLY THAT and created this rather nice web experience which takes you through the past 100 years of, er, trains in Austria. This is, fine, probably not of HUGE interest unless you’re an Austrian train enthusiast (works both ways), but I am genuinely charmed that someone actually did one of this in real life, and there’s some genuinely interesting social history in here. Also, LOTS OF TRAINS.
- Encounter Stories: This is a rather lovely photography portfolio site – Marion Lepretre has built it to host a bunch of pictures she’s taken of people she’s met while travelling the world, with each photo accompanied by a vignette of the person’s life, narrated by (I presume) Marion herself, and with some light doodly animation overlaid over the top of the images to create a sort of mini-documentary-style feel to each individual shot. There are about 15 on here, I think, and going through them and listening to their stories and the connection Lepretre made with them was, I found, a very pleasant way to spend ten minutes.
- The Rebel Library: Launched this week by XR, Rebel Library is a resource dedicated to compiling a reading list for the climate emergency(/apocalypse – delete depending on your current response to the weather): “Any library is always a work in progress. And with the rich landscape of climate and ecological literature evolving faster than ever, there has never been a more exciting time to build a showcase of books. This virtual library is born of our love of reading, and our joy in sharing our discoveries. Whether you are browsing for your next good read, building a book-list, or simply looking for inspiration, see this as a resource to use and share. You should be able to find most of out featured books in your local library (find your nearest library by searching your local council website, or use https://www.gov.uk/local-library-services if in England & Wales) or by ordering online from Hive.” While the site obviously can’t host any works for copyright reasons, it’s looks like being an interesting resource for anyone who wants IMPROVING BOOKS TO FUEL THE FEAR (or, alternatively, just a place to get some decent recommendations for smart work).
- The GPT Forecasting Challenge: This is an interesting little quiz/test – Nicholas Carlini has pulled together this series of 25(ish – sorry, I forget the exact number and I don’t have time to check now as it’s 745am and time’s a-wasting) questions designed to test how well you can predict ChatGPT’s ability to accurately perform a specific task. It’s not, fine, the MOST engagingly-designed web experience, but while we wait for every single thing in our lives to get the full VR treatment (HOLD ME BACK!) then I’m afraid you’ll just have to manage your expectations. Anyway, I found this super-interesting, not least as a way of assessing whether or not I in fact have any meaningful understanding of the actual, real-world capabilities of LLMs (I do, mostly, it seems) and there’s probably value in using this as a bit of a training and education exercise should you be in the invidious position of being responsible for the AI education of your professional peers.
- The History of Acid House: Much as with the 1960s, I rather suspect that if you can remember the Acid House era with pinpoint clarity then you probably weren’t really there (either that or you leaned VERY HARD into the lifestyle, haven’t come down since 1991 and now have those terrifying, ice-blue eyes possessed only by Hollywood Nazis and the most serious of pills’n’speed casualties) – still, for any of you who would like to give yourselves a FULL MUSICAL EDUCATION, or alternatively to remind yourselves of what exactly you were meant to be listening to while yomping around a field past Junction 16, this will be an invaluable resource. There are over 700 tracks compiled here, with new ones being added all the time – it’s interesting (to me at least) to remind oneself of how…*simple* the tracks are, and how relatively-gentle. The fact that the people who were into this at the time will now all be in their 50s is…confusing to me, I must confess.
- Acronymy: FABULOUSLY-GEEKY WORD FUN! Which is what *I* would have called this website, suggesting, not for the first time, that I am fcuking awful at naming things. Acronymy is a FAR better moniker, and it’s a silly/fun project to boot, seeking to create acronyms for 270,000 English words (so far they’re at just over 5,000). Type in any word you can think of and you will be invited to invent an acronym for it, as well as being shown any acronymic suggestions that previous visitors have left. So it is that I discovered that some smart person somewhere in the world has already acronymed ‘horse’ as ‘hoof owning rideable strong equine’, which, honestly, is just applause-worthy. This is basically like some massively-multiplayer word game, which is very much something I can get behind.
- LinearA:: I think this is the second time in a month or so that I have found cause to mention the ancient written script that is LinearA, suggesting…actually, no, I have literally no idea what, if anything, THE UNIVERSE is attempting to communicate with me here – if YOU have any ideas, please do share. Still, ineffable grand plan aside, this is a really interesting site (although one which really doesn’t explain itself very well), where you can look at a bunch of scans of VERY OLD ROCKS which have been inscribed with LinearA script – you can see the original sample of the writing, a transcript of it, and detail of what each individual element has been translated to mean, so you can (with a bit of patience, and thinking, and squinting) start to get an idea for how it was used to construct sentences and communicate ideas. This really is fascinating, but requires a bit of effort to get your head round.
- Diamond Journey: Welcome back to Web Curios’ LUXURY WEBSITE IDIOCY CORNER! It’s been a while, but we’ve got another excellent example of some proper high-end webwork and insane, meaningless copy for you – this time courtesy of the DEFINITELY IN NO WAY ARTIFICIALLY-INFLATED AND MORALLY DUBIOUS AT BEST diamond industry! This starts strongly – “My diamond has so much to tell me”, the site solemnly asserts, while showing you a photo of a strangely-blue-tinged woman who honestly looks like she’s just realised that the bump she just did was not, in fact, cocaine at all – before really raising the bar with some world-class examples of meaningless copy (“My diamond’s story begins with time itself” deserves some sort of a prize, I think) and an almost risibly-cheap looking image of a precious stone that tumbles down the screen as you scroll…then really hits its stride with this line, which manages to be both grandiose and oddly-gauche and childlike “Somewhere between 1bn and 3.5bn years ago” – that’s…quite some date-range there, isn’t it? – “When the Earth was still shiny and new. Before dinosaurs, before humans, before just about everything” – honestly, just click the link and revel in the very, very shiny and rich idiocy (and that’s before we get to the claims that diamonds are ethically fine actually honest guv because, honestly, I don’t necessarily think that that’s strictly true). An absolute classic of the ‘stupid websites for very rich people’ genre, this.
- Eyes on Asteroids: You might be forgiven for watching the weather reports this week and thinking ‘you know what? Maybe an asteroid strike would just be a sweet mercy compared to the likely nature of the next few decades’ – in which case, you will very much enjoy this NASA webpage which tracks the movement of asteroids around the Earth so you can see exactly how close we’re coming to total planetary annihilation on a monthly basis. There’s even a section which tells you the next five closest asteroid pass-bys (there’s one the size of a house whizzing past us tomorrow, for example), and now I sort-of want to buy a telescope.
- Listen Later: Not an entirely new idea, this, fine, but a good one and a smart use of modern text-to-speech tech; this is basically ‘Pocket, but if you wanted to turn all of those unread Curios longreads into a podcast rather than simply another overlong email you’ll eventually delete unread’. From the site’s creator: “ListenLater.fm generates a personalized podcast feed for you to listen to. You let it know about articles you’d like to read later. When you do, it adds a spoken version of the article to your feed for you to listen to whenever your ears are free…Adding new things to listen to is simple. When you’re on a computer, the easiest way to add new articles is through our browser extensions. When you’re on your phone and want to add an article, it’s simple to share an article via email. You can also use our bookmarklet to add new articles. Listening’s a breeze. You get your own custom podcast feed, that you can subscribe to in any podcast app. Anything you send to ListenLater.fm will be kept there for you to listen to on your own time.” The service is free for upto 5 articles a month, with a subscription required to do more than that (which feels fair – after all, text-to-speech at bulk costs money), and in general this strikes me as a super-useful tool.
- ChatGPT Fashion: This isn’t, fine, a hugely-groundbreaking thing on its own, but it struck me that it’s a useful proof-of-concept for how AI-assisted shopping can/might/should work – it’s a very rudimentary hack, but basically you tell the platform whether you’re looking for ‘male’ or ‘female’ style, give it a suggestion of the sort of outfit/vibe/look you might want to sport and The Machine spits out a bunch of fashion advice AND (and this is the clever bit) links to actual clothes that you can buy from actual retailers that correspond to its sartorial suggestions. As I said, not exactly earth-shattering – but simple, smart and an obvious way in which this could work in a way that feels useful to consumers rather than just an AI gimmick layer.
- Statistically-Improbable Things: A Reddit thread in which people share stories of things that happened to them that are improbable in the extreme, many of which will basically end up convincing you that the Final Destination films are in fact documentaries and that WHEN IT IS NOT YOUR TIME IT IS NOT YOUR TIME. Seriously, I can’t stress enough quite how many of these made me wince out loud (no, you’re wrong, that DOES make sense) and vow to be incredibly careful when washing up anything made of glass.
WE TRAVEL BACK IN TIME 25 YEARS NOW WITH THIS SUPERB ALBUM OF D’N’B REMIXES OF DUB WAR!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ADVISE ANYONE WHO’S GOING TO EDINBURGH FOR FRINGE TO TRY AND CHECK OUT NATALIE PALAMIDES NEW SHOW AS IT IS EXCELLENT, PT.2:
- The Loose Ends Project: I can’t pretend that this didn’t make me a *touch* emo when I discovered it this week, but it’s broadly the good sort of emo, I think – it is SO SO SO LOVELY I MIGHT CRY (again). The Loose Ends project exists to take the knitting projects left unfinished by people who’ve died mid-knit and hand them over to skilled third parties who finish the work started by the deceased and then pass the finished article back to the person’s loved ones, giving them a final memento mori in, er, wool. Honestly, it’s impossible to think about this in any meaningful way without tearing up a bit (or at least it is if you’re me) – even better, it’s an international initiative and they welcome new volunteers, so if you’re a skilled knitter and perler and you fancy doing something genuinely wonderful for someone then you might want to consider signing up. I know I always say stuff like this and that by so doing I also slightly ruin the otherwise lovely projects I feature here, but this very much feels like something that is the PERFECT charity-type partnership for the right sort of brand (I HATE MYSELF AND I AM SORRY).
- South Pole Signage: Brought to you by the South Pole’s premier website brr.fyi (one of the Tiny Awards finalists, fwiw), this is a superb collection of mundane signage employed at the planet’s southernmost pole – which, fine, probably doesn’t SOUND compelling, but there is something so so interesting about the ways in which people have to think about their environment when somewhere hostile and remote and where collaboration and having to just sort of get on with stuff is hugely-important. To quote the post’s author: “I’ve always been fascinated by routine, mundane activities and infrastructure in extraordinary contexts. It’s why I’ve gleefully written about the everyday realities of life and how they play out in Antarctica – topics such as laundry, wastewater infrastructure, credit card fraud, voting, automated teller machines, mud, and doors. In the seven months I’ve been at the South Pole so far, I’ve kept up my fascination with the day-to-day tasks involved in keeping the station going. Yes, we’re at the actual, real-life South Pole. Yes, it’s -100°F outside. Yes, we’re isolated for 8 months straight. Yes, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and an extraordinary, novel set of circumstances. But also – We live here! And living in a place means that it will develop a certain rhythm. A certain set of norms, customs, fault lines, battle scars, inside jokes, remembrances. Day-to-day reminders of the folks who have left their mark on this place over the years.” This is glorious (as is the whole site tbh).
- Forum Games: I love this in ways that I don’t think I can adequately explain. Via last week’s B3ta comes this wonderful subsection on the GiffGaff community forums (for non-Anglos, GiffGaff is a provider of mobile telephony solutions) in which various users are running (and seem to have been running for YEARS) little ‘games’ in which they invite other users to do such ostensibly-tedious things as ‘count up to 200, and back to 0 again, using only prime numbers’ or ‘let’s all write the days of the week in order over and over again’ and, honestly, there are HUNDREDS of people ‘playing’ this stuff, just logging into the thread to type ‘13’ or ‘29’ or ‘TUESDAY’, and…I don’t know what to make of this, to be honest, whether it’s something deep and pure and beautiful or whether it’s basically the equivalent of caged chimps scrawling inchoate messages on the concrete floor whilst bemerding the gawping schoolkids. There are threads here that have been going for THREE AND A HALF YEARS ffs, demonstrating an unwavering commitment to The Bit. I honestly have no clue whatsoever you should do with the knowledge that this exists, but I like to imagine one of you will be having a moment of Damascene clarity and purpose right now.
- Sonic Cartoon Frames: Ignore the ‘Are you 18?’ Imgur disclaimer that pops up when you click the link – I can assure you that this is entirely SFW in every way (unless you have some sort of deep erotic attachment to the Sonic the Hedgehog universe, in which case I suggest you might want to perhaps address that) – because this is not bongo, it is instead an unfathomably-large collection of individual animation frames from the old Sonic cartoon series – there are over 2100 cells here, which I can’t imagine for a second any of you will have a use for but which I like to think will inspire at least one of you to train a local version of Stable Diffusion on this to create the greatest Sonic cartoon creation engine EVER (a boy can but dream).
- The AI Baby Generator: This is fabulously stupid and fcuked up – well DONE everyone! The AI Baby Generator helps you answer that age-old question – “were I to have children with that person over there, what would our kids potentially look like?” – via the medium of shonky AI imagework, letting you see exactly how hot the offspring of your union with literally anyone in the world could eventually become. This is, as you have probably worked out by now, a laughable grift being run by opportunistic shysters that is patently targeted at the VERY STUPID – sorry, but I refuse to believe that anyone with an IQ in treble figures is shelling out a tenner to receive a grand total of FIVE AI-generated images in return – but which is also probably going to end up taking a lot of money from the mad and delusional too; the fact that they explicitly offer ‘see what the spawn of the union between you and the celebrity who you have an increasingly-unhealthy parasocial crush on!’ as a service suggests that they have no qualms whatsoever pandering to the lonely stalkers of the world. Perhaps my favourite thing about this, though, is that the ‘Premium’ pricing tier (a bargain $27!) secures you not only some photos but ALSO ‘A 7-Page Future Child Personality Report’! That’s right – not only will they chuck in a few extra poorly-’shopped photos of your imaginary baby, they’ll also drop in some GPT-styled rubbish about how it’s almost certainly going to be an empathetic genius! This does feel a bit…grubby, doesn’t it?
- Climate Conflict: This is a sobering read – not, frankly, that we ought to need one, based on, you know, ALL THE BURNING. Still, if you’d like to take something of a deep-dive into the areas most likely to suffer significant political and social upheaval as a result of the rise in global temperatures and general fcukery of the coming years’ weather patterns, this is a useful resource – it provides a region-by-region overview of the relative threats facing each region (climate-related, economic, political) and focuses on Nigeria as a case study of some of the likely impacts of shifting climate on the socioeconomic fabric of the country. This is obviously quite miserable reading, but, equally, it’s quite important.
- The Rochambeau Club: Thanks to Alex for sending this to me – The Rochambeau Club is a fascinating fictional brand (it reminds me a bit of both skincare brand Vacation and the equally-fictitious US football team Asbury Park) representing an old-school US country club, the sort of place that (as a non-American) I imagine being the setting for an infinity of Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger shoots, where preppy teens stalk languidly across manicure lawns whilst blitzed off their tits on Adderall and Xanax (I have, perhaps, read more American campus novels than is strictly healthy) before one of them gets murdered as part of some sort of ritualistic cult practice (I have also read too much Ellis/Tartt) – except the funny thing here is that the Rochambeau Club doesn’t in fact exist at all, but does seem to be selling a natty (and pricey) line in wine, and loafers, and a few other things. As Alex said, “I wonder if the particular genius of Rochambeau is it lets people buy into the rich & preppy fantasy, but with the plausible deniability that you’re doing it ironically so you’re not a massive tory”, which seems like a reasonable explanation tbh.
- Illustration Chronicles: This is GREAT! Compiled by Dublin illustrator Philp Kennedy, “Illustration Chronicles explores a history of illustration through the images, illustrators and events of the past 175 years. Every few months the site picks a topic to explore. These topics inspire the types of work that get selected and once a piece has been chosen, the year it was made gets marked off the project timeline. Illustration is a fascinating subject and yet its history is rarely told. This project aims to champion the medium and bring some inspiration, insight and knowledge to readers everywhere.” Honestly, this is SUCH a rich archive, and so beautifully curated and explained – if you’ve ever enjoyed a visit to the London Cartoon Museum (and if you haven’t, why not?!) then you will absolutely adore this site.
- Artemis: Another in the near-infinite series of ‘we can automate the tedious business of engaging with your kids on an imaginative/emotional level!’ companies being facilitated by AI, Artemis exists to let parents automatically create illustrated bedtime stories for their kids based on a series of prompts – as you’d expect, this is built on an API meaning there’s a need to buy tokens to build the content and as such this could get expensive quite quickly; BUT, on the plus side, you’ve not had to spend any time thinking about how to bore your kid to sleep! Obviously I jest – even the childless like me are aware that sometimes, just SOMETIMES, parents don’t have the time or the energy to come up with a Disney-standard original story to accompany bedtime – but I find something particularly-distasteful about Artemis’ insistence that using its tools will ‘help build empathy in your little one’ which, honestly, sounds like emotionally-manipulative bullsh1t. Anyway, I think that this sort of thing serves mainly to illustrate the inherent limits in generative AI as a narrative tool – everything I have made with this is so bad that I would genuinely bet on myself to do better, and I basically hate children and wish I was dead, so.
- Public Photos: Do YOU take photos? Do YOU have an Apple account on which you store them? Do YOU wish that there was a really easy way to take all those photos and turn them into a public-facing webpage with basically no work at all? If the answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘yes’ then a) wow, I know my readership significantly better than I thought; and b) YOU ARE IN LUCK! There’s a waitlist to use the service, but, honestly, this couldn’t be simpler and is a potentially lovely alternative to chucking everything on Insta.
- First Versions: SUPERB PRODUCT HISTORY WEBSITE! Per it’s strapline, “Everything had a first version: here you can find it!” Want to learn about the first ever Singer sewing machine? OH GOOD! Want to be able to go through a dizzying archive of frands and products and see how they started? YES YOU DO! If you’ve any interest in the history of brands then this is a wonderful resource – it’s a VERY old school website, so perhaps lacks some of the user-friendly gubbins that a modern user might ideally expect, but, well, there’s a history of Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and of Barbie, and of Tequila, and how many other sites can say that? NO FCUKERS, etc!
- Solar Grazing: I’ll be honest – there is one reason and one reason alone why I am featuring this website, and it’s not the subject matter. Solar Grazing, it turns out, is the practice of, er, grazing sheep near solar farms. “The American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA) was founded to promote grazing sheep on solar installations. ASGA members are developing best practices that support shepherds and solar developers to both effectively manage solar installations and create new agribusiness profits. We are a not for profit trade association founded for and managed by sheep farmers who became solar graziers. In our industry, we are facilitating research, best practices, and leading the way to co-location at solar arrays with solar grazing.” So there. Boring, isn’t it? I tell you what isn’t boring – the association’s logo, which I would honestly have on a tshirt tomorrow and which I would have on a poster, and which I genuinely and unironically love more than almost any other piece of design I’ve seen all year. TELL ME I AM WRONG, I DARE YOU.
- Faster Displays: Occasionally I stumble across website that represent industries so niche that you wonder whether you’re the only non-industry person to ever visit them (the last link being a case in point) – so it is with this INCREDIBLY nicely-designed website promoting a company that makes those cardboard Point Of Sale Units that you see erected at the end of a checkout lane (for example). And yes, I know, that’s what I thought, but, I promise, by the time you’ve finished scrolling this you’ll find yourself feeling unexpectedly-thrilled by the excellent deployment of corrugated cardboard that’s on display here.
- Recently Extinct Species: Presented without comment: “This website attempts to document the world’s many recently extinct (126ka–present), missing and rediscovered species and subspecies. An impossible task given that many of these have no doubt gone extinct without ever being recorded by science (termed “Dark extinctions”). While many others are so little known that there is scarcely anything to document now, and so in a secondary sense are lost as well. Luckily, it is possible for us to learn more about them through the discovery of (sub)fossil remains or (re)discovery of specimens in museums and private collections. This combined with increasingly sophisticated scientific methods of study, invariably driven by brilliant minds or technological advances, can help to recover these foregone species from the informational abyss. Most importantly, this ‘new’ information can hopefully help rediscover them as living populations. Different species have different life histories, and no single method of attempted capture/documentation can succeed for the entire gamut of living species which inhabit vastly different environments from snowy alps to peat bogs, and have greatly variable lifespans, life stages, traits and ecological niches. Developing idiosyncratic capture methods greatly increases our chances of success, and potentially offers us an extremely rare second chance to save them from extinction.” I recommend you go to the ‘animals’ section and just scroll down and read the topline taxonomy to get a scale of the dizzying extent of what we have done.
- Identifive: This is INFURIATING, mainly because I am so so so bad at it and I can’t quite explain why that is. Each day, your task is to find the single complete five-letter word hidden in the grid, wordsearch style – it can be forwards or backwards, vertically, horizontally or diagonally. You have a few opportunities to reduce the size of the grid to make the task easier, but know that that is CHEATING and that I think less of you as a result – honestly, I have sworn at this SO MUCH this week and you will too.
- SNES Party: Finally this week, a speculative one – I only found this this morning via Andy, and I wasn’t able to make it work for me in the cursory three minutes I spent fiddling with it at approximately 634am today; that said, Andy’s a thorough man, and if he’s linked to it then I expect it almost certainly DOES work, in which case WOW are you in luck – this site lets you load up one of an insane selection of old SNES Roms, and then share the link with upto four friends for EXCITING MULTIPLAYER FUN! So you could play Final Fight together, or Super BomberMan (I nearly failed my IB because of Super BomberMan – good times!) or any one of about 100 different titles; practically crack cocaine, this, if you can get it running.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- La Muerte De Un Perrito: Not, as far as I can tell, anything to do with the death of any small dogs whatsoever, this Tumblr instead posts a bunch of vaguely dreamy, vaporwave-inflected art which I find strangely-appealing.
- Hazel Terry: Not, in fact, a Tumblr! Still, this blog collects (as far as I can tell) nothing but Red Riding Hood-themed content, art and design and craft, and as such *feels* Tumblr-ish, and, as we have long-since decided (or at least since *I* have long-since decided), that’s what counts.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Stephanie H Shih: Excellent ceramic work which mimics non-ceramic objects – it’ll make sense when you click, I promise, and the execution’s far better than you’d expect; the used condom in particular is masterful (I am being wholly serious here).
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- The Louvre Is Rebranding: I think it’s fair to say that almost everyone alive in the Global North has probably heard far, far more about the rebranding of a largely-unused website than they might ordinarily wish, and as such I’m disinclined to give That Fcuking Man’s latest GALAXY-BRAINED business decision much by way of additional attention. That said, if you’re interested in reading the backstory about why That Fcuking Man is obsessed with the letter ‘X’ and how this is all basically a result of him getting comprehensively schooled by the big boys of the PayPal Mafia back in the day, then this link here will see you right (sorry, it’s a Twitter thread (I AM NOT CALLING IT FCUKING ‘X’ I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE) but, well, you’ll cope). The rest of you, click the main link to read a lovely bit of satire by McSweeney’s which basically nails the whole thing in typically stylish fashion. Will Twitter become WeChat? Will they ever bother changing the logo across all the various products? Will…will it go back to being Twitter in a few months when That Fcuking Man realises that you cannot create a single-letter brand (as my friend Rob points out, it didn’t work for Q Magazine and it won’t work here)? Is Elon Musk the only person alive who really, really misses that late-00s era in which every single FMCG product acquired an ‘XXXTREME’ variant to appeal exclusively to baggy-trousered teenage masturbators? ONLY TIME WILL TELL!
- A Good Prospect: I’m conscious of the fact that the past few Curios have all majored quite hard on topics around commodities extraction and their environmental impact, but, well, I’m reading quite a lot about it at the moment, and it’s interesting (to me at least) and it’s important, I think, and, well, you can always skip the first few longreads and go straight to the end where it tends to get more fictional and emo if you like. For those of you who can be bothered, though, I unreservedly recommend this superb long article in which the author visits the most recent mining industry jamboree which took place in Canada earlier this year and which featured a buoyant atmosphere as the various Rio Tintos of the world gloried in the fact that the global demand for minerals and metals engendered by the need for rapid electrification of everything means that they are QUIDS IN for the next few decades – and, because theirs is an industry now central for the GREENING OF THE PLANET, they can now basically claim environmental credits and kudos merely by dint of existing! This is, honestly, so so interesting – a picture of an industry I know nothing about, and one which is so inherently-connected to the way in which modern society is going to develop over the rest of the century and beyond.
- The GPT Revolution is a Fantasy: An indicator of how quickly AI is moving at the moment is the speed at which we’re shuffling along the Gartner hype curve – barely 10 months on from the initial ChatGPT release, we’re now firmly into ‘trough of disillusionment’ territory, with articles cropping up asking whether GPT-4 is getting dumber (to which the answer is: inconclusive, but probably not actually) and whether in fact the hype around the utility of LLMs is overblown (to which the answer is: yes, in lots of ways, but also really not at all in others and it’s the others which you need to pay attention to I think). This piece by Paris Marx is similarly disillusioned, but for slightly different reasons – they posit that the lies about its big-ticket efficacy (cf ‘IT WILL CHANGE SEARCH FOR EVER’ – er, not yet it won’t!) are effectively covering up all the way sin which it is fcuking things up already, left right and centre, and the ways in which it’s soon going to be used to fcuk up even more. I’m broadly in agreement with Marx’s overall thesis, although I think I’m probably more bullish on the long-term impact of this stuff – honestly, I do firmly believe that AI is going to be an overall boon to us as a species; I also believe, possibly more firmly, that the intervening bit of time between now and ‘it being an amazing and transformative tool that makes everything better’ is going to be incredibly fcuking messy and not a little unpleasant.
- Cnut-ing AI: My semi-regular link to Ethan Mollick’s blognewsletterthing next (although in Mr Mollick’s defence, his title is significantly better than mine); this week, he writes about the futility of attempting to keep generative AI outside of the workplace, or to control its use in any meaningful way, and instead offers a series of principles to help organisations and leaders integrate the useful bits of it into their practice and workflow to best effect. Honestly, if you’re in any way involved in the thankless and miserable task that is ‘integrating this tech into our business in a way that makes us more productive and ultimately richer whilst at the same time hopefully not resulting in us sacking 90% of the workforce’ then there will be huge swathes of this that you can effectively copy and paste.
- AI For Newsrooms: With the news last week that Google was touting an AI assistant to newsrooms to ‘help’ (lol) journalists churn the content even faster, and the constant stream of media outlets embarrassing themselves by getting caught out using GPT-generated copy without telling anyone (there was an astonishing example from London on the Inside the other week – sadly corrected within 24h, and not archived for posterity – where they did a whole ‘places to watch the women’s world cup in London’ post which it was clear had been entirely GPT-penned because NONE OF THE PUBS IT FEATURED EXISTED), it feels timely that Nieman Lab has compiled this selection of different newsrooms’ stated approaches to the use of machine-generated words in their work. I genuinely hope that none of you have to write any ‘we use AI’-type disclaimers for your businesses, but, in case you do, this might contain some useful pointers of things you should think of.
- China & Tech Momentum: More on China this week; this is long-term China watcher and author of a regular annual ‘Year in China’ roundup Dan Wang on the current state of innovation in the country and the extent to which it’s likely to be impacted by factors both economic and political. Really interesting, if a touch wonk-y: “A gradual slowdown in economic growth won’t break technological momentum. But politics might. Start with the external environment: fewer large markets are open to Chinese technology exports than ten years ago. For any Chinese product that might rise to the attention of a Congressperson, the US is fairly hostile. Europe remains open, but it too is grumbling about protection. A huge blow to Chinese tech firms in recent years was the loss of the Indian market. One of the many surprises 2020 was the deadly skirmish between Chinese and Indian troops that erupted after decades of relative calm. In the aftermath of the brawl, India’s government locked Chinese companies out of a market many staked growth plans on. India is not fully closed, and Chinese firms still have a lot of markets to export to. But that set has shrunk, and who can be sure that Beijing’s diplomatic and military posture won’t hurt markets for other entrepreneurs?”
- China’s Data Classification Class: Another of Jeffrey Ding’s translations of local Chinese reporting, once again on the phenomenon of ‘data cleaners’ – a growing professional class employed to annotate and ‘clean’ the training data used to create nascent AI models. This is SO interesting, not least as a potential glimpse into what is likely to become a not-insignificant global industry over the next few years – how do you feel about a future in which the two remaining jobs for people to do are either helping to train baby AIs or helping dying people wipe their ar$es? I feel pretty good about it, ngl.
- How Saudi is Buying the World: One of the big stories of the summer from the world of football has been the emergence of the Saudi league as an economic powerhouse, doing much what the Chinese league did 10 years or so ago and buying up a host of Europe-based star players on contracts so eye-wateringly generous that even a man of such NOTORIOUSLY HIGH moral fibre as LGBTQ+ ally Jordan ‘I’ll do anything to help (as long as ‘anything’ doesn’t mean ‘refusing to support a nakedly-homophobic regime’s international sportswashing project’)’ Henderson can’t help but be tempted. This is the rough hook for this decent New Statesman piece which looks at the many ways in which MBS is flexing the petrodollars to secure his subjects’ futures. I personally found the Black Panther stuff running through the article an irritating distraction (sorry! I just hate Marvel films!), but other than that this is a reasonable overview of the what and, to an extent, the why of the Saudi project.
- Ad Industry Losers: As a rule I try not to feature too much writing about advermarketingpr, mainly because the vast majority of it is awful tripe which says the square root of fcuk all and is written for, and by, idiots. On this occasion I’ll make an excepotion, though – this interview in Contagious with a guy called Michael Farmer is, on the one hand, a puff-piece to promote Farmer’s new business book, but on the other is a genuinely smart read which delivers a selection of what I consider to be self-evident truths about the agency model (not just advertising – PRs could learn from this too) and why it is, fundamentally, fcuked (and not getting any less fcuked). “I think creativity really is divorced from business practices generally across the industry. The focus on creativity is a bit of a cop out. It’s easier to be creative than it is to deliver growth. But if you do it [deliver growth], you get paid highly for it. The consulting firms get paid five times the cost of their people, agencies get paid two times the cost of their cheaper people. There’s a huge difference.” INJECT IT! INJECT IT INTO MY VEINS!
- How To Search: Once again I find myself linking to Gwern – sometimes there’s no choice, you know. This is SO GOOD and SO USEFUL and, honestly, every single one of you should read this because it will make your lives BETTER. Gwern is a famously massive geek – I don’t know them, but I get the impression that this is not a designation that they would argue with particularly – and this is a MASSIVELY GEEKY and also HUGE guide to being good at Google. Honestly, even now at the fag-end of the first search era when the core product is a bit broken and a lot of the cool tricks you used to know simply don’t function any more, there is SO MUCH BENFIT to be gained from getting just 5% better at ‘finding stuff on the internet’, and this, if you manage to read and digest it all, will probably improve your Googling ability by about 15% which basically makes you an informational Superman. I’m only half-joking (and I am firmly convinced that ‘being good at search’ will be a useful skill for longer than ‘prompt engineering’) (but, er, don’t come and laugh at me if that turns out to be very wrong indeed).
- Going Viral Sucks: This is, fine, not a wholly-original point of view, but it’s interesting to hear it articulated so cogently by someone who (I am pretty sure) is of a generation brought up on the TikTok virality lottery and tHe CrEaToR eCoNoMy and the idea that a few million views once every month or two can pay your grocery bills…it does make me wonder how much longer the current top-ranking social media model (to whit: put enough coins in the machine (upload enough content to our platform) and you have a chance to WIN BIG (get 10m views and earn a cut of ad revenue)) is going to fool people for.
- Modern Moderation: A WIRED article that looks at two recent moderation-led online dramas – Reddit’s ongoing meltdown around the site’s refusal to meaningfully-acknowledge the role of its hundreds of unpaid mods in making the site a broadly-functional bit of internet rather than the unusable sub-Chan basement it would otherwise have become, and BlueSky’s inexplicable failure to stop people using hatewords in their usernames which has spiralled into a not-insignificant existential crisis for the nascent Twitteralike – which, fine, are VERY ‘internet culture’ and a bit inside-baseball, but, equally, is an excellent series of examples of why content moderation is, I think, one of the most significant and significantly-underestimated fields of the modern era. No joke – am increasingly of the opinion that future versions of us will look back at the past 20-odd years and be astonished that we applied so little thought and rigour and care to administering communities that are as significant as those meatspace arenas we spend so much time legislating around.
- Internet Cafes: Possibly my favourite nonfiction read of the week, this one, and another excellent piece of reporting from Rest of World (I have said this before but it bears repeating – it is SUCH a good outlet), looking at the phenomenon of internet cafes and the different ways around the world in which they have reinvented themselves to stay relevant (or, in some places, the ways in which they haven’t and are therefore dying). This is fascinating, not least because of the national variations in the demographics of who uses them, and what for, and because of the sense of intense nostalgia the whole article will elicit in anyone who ever had to spend 30m slots checking their emails at a glacial pace while travelling (also, a special shout out to the many, many men I have observed over the years using internet cafes to unashamedly enjoy their favourite flavour of bongo – WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?).
- Expanding the Cirque Brand: I have never seen a Cirque du Soleil show, and am unlikely to ever do so – that said, the brand is internationally-ubiquitous and even though I’ve never seen the spangles up-close I could give you a vague idea of what I thought the brand ‘means’ (sorry). The people who run it, though, don’t think it ‘means’ enough, specifically not to young people and certainly not to the sort of people (ie me) who would rather eat their own faces than pony up several hundred dollars to watch people in spandex do the splits 40 feet above their head – which is why they have brought in some BRAND CONSULTANTS to help them expand Cirque’s relevance and bring new product lines to the fore, and, basically, turn it into something akin to the Hard Rock Cafe’. This is, obvjectively, very, very funny, though you get the distinct impression that the two brand consultants, whose agency Cirque is working with and who feature heavily throughout, may be…less-thrilled with the tenor of the piece. “They keep group chats with their clients going all day, sending articles, songs, videos or TikToks that relate to the work, which in Cirque’s case they call “Cirquecore.” “Has there ever been a CIRQUE Barbie?” read one recent text from Cultique. “HERMES’ new fragrance is ‘the sun as perfume,’” read another. “I also am interested to think of Cirque’s performance as religion,” Ms. Unger wrote to the group one day. “People are more spiritual than ever, esp. Gen Z.”” Just…wow:
- Messi in Miami: The New Yorker paints a lovely, if slightly sad, picture of the madness of Messimania in Miami, and the feeling of knowing that you’re watching one of the greatest humans ever to do a specific thing doing that specific thing for almost the last time.
- Planes, Trains and Souzamaphones: This is VERY OLD – 13 years old, in fact! – but it is written by my friend Timo who shared it with me this week, and it is funny and heartwarming and feels appropriate to feature in the here and now because it very much smacks of an Old Era of the web, and an Old Era of social media, when everything was a little more hopeful and open and we were still excited at the possibility of THE WEB CONNECTING US ALL rather than, as is more the case in 2023, being terrified of exactly what the people with whom we are now connected are thinking and doing and saying and poisoning the information table with. This is the story of how Timo tried to beat the ashcloud – REMEMBER THAT, EH? – and make it back to the UK for a gig. Did he make it? READ THE PIECE AND FIND OUT FFS.
- Ken’s Last Movie: Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed something of a lack of BARBENHEIMER content in Curios over the past month – this is mainly because a) I generally have no interest in cinema; b) I figure you have probably seen enough of it elsewhere not to need my EXPERT CURATORIAL INVOLVEMENT. I will, though, make an exception for this little piece, which tells the strange, slightly-sad story of the breakdancing-and-softcore flick ‘Delivery Boys’, directed by Ken Handler – the man whose mother named the ‘Ken’ doll after him, and who as a result of his parents’ insane wealth basically never had to work a day in his life. As the author describes it, this piece basically answers the following BURNING question: “How did a self-styled auteur with money to burn end up directing a raunchy sex comedy held together with breakdancing scenes? Delivery Boys is a mystery wrapped in an enigma: a turducken of a tale that stuffs race, class, and sex into the worn carcass of an absurdist plot, brines it in a little sexual harassment and trusses it up with the workaday labor of the adult film industry.” This may be the most 80s thing you will read all year.
- Overdosing on Russian Propaganda: The inimitable Gary Shteyngart (let me take this opportunity to once again recommend to each and every one of you his novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’, one of the best books I have ever read and certainly the very best about How The Web Is Fcuking Us’) recounts his experience of sitting and watching five entire days of Russian TV and What It Tells Us About The War. This is very funny in parts, but also very, very sad indeed – there’s something about the repeated underlying violence of the rhetoric and the subject matter of the shows Shteyngart describes that’s honestly very bleak, and makes me quite disinclined to want to go and live in Russia anytime soon (aside from the whole ‘warmongering dictator’ thing).
- Jungle Wedding: I don’t ordinarily include links to stuff I’d classify as a ‘hate-read’, and I don’t quite think this essay fits that exact bill, but it’s fair to say that I didn’t…wholly warm to the narrator here. That said, it also made me laugh out loud a number of times and I appreciate that I might just have a lower tolerance than some of the rest of you for the general ‘no-nonsense Lesbian who’s in touch with her spiritual side too!’ tone of the authorial voice. This is the story of how Melissa Johnson attended a wedding ceremony in the Guatemalan jungle (yes, Ms Johnson *is* from Los Angeles! How did you guess?!) and how she and her intrepid party of celebrants and attendees (and local guides, who I really hope were well-remunerated for their work because, honestly, this sounds like a LOT) conquered (or at least broadly survived) the jungle.
- Ron’s Place: I love this story and I love the pictures and I love the fact that there’s a happy ending (no spoilers) – Ron’s Place is the home of a now-deceased artist called Ron Gittens who lived in Birkenhead and whose house became, over the course of his (obsessive, ever-creating) life became a living monument to Ron’s craft and basically to whatever was going through the inside of his head at any given time. This is a wonderful, and sensitively-written, portrait of a classic outsider artist, and I now really want to visit the house and see the work (particularly the leonine fireplace which, honestly, is a masterpiece).
- The Greatest Scam Ever Written: A pretty astonishing tale of mass fraud, this – come for the incredible story of how Patrice Runner created a system that over years scammed tens of millions of dollars out of gullible, lonely and vulnerable people worldwide who would write to ask a French psychic for their fortune (it all makes sense, I promise); stay for the bit at the end where Runner goes to trial, and which features one of the most astonishing attempted defences I have ever heard deployed in law. Seriously, the chutzpah is AMAZING and I am half-tempted to see whether I can use it as justification for one or two ‘spicy’ campaign ideas I have in the locker.
- Friendship: Finally this week, Devon Gayelin in the Paris Review writes about friendships and romantic relationships and how they interrelate and how, eventually, they die, and this is beautiful, beautiful writing.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- This is such a nicely-made video – it rewards a close viewing, as there are lots of lovely little vignettes that appear as the scenes loop and replicate to increasingly-surreal effect, and the driving techno is a decent accompaniment. The track’s by Paul Kalkbrenner, and, weirdly, the video’s by Mother Berlin; still, nice work all round.