I got to go to a GALLERY OPENING this week, like an IMPORTANT PERSON (I am not an important person, I simply still have friends who work in arts PR), and as such I would like to use the limited real estate available to me at the top of Curios to strongly recommend the Electric Dreams show at the Tate Modern – if you’ve any interest in the history of how art and electronics have intersected from the mid-20thC onwards then it really is superb, and, even if you don’t, IT WILL FCUKING EDUCATE YOU.
Otherwise, this week has largely been characterised by my having to turn off the radio every time they decide to talk about the assisted dying bill – look, you’re all entitled to your opinions, but when you’ve watched someone die slowly, painfully, cruelly and helplessly over the course of a couple of years I’m going to suggest that it rather changes your perspective on the whole question, and if you all think I haven’t already banked my Switzerland cash in preparation then, well, you’re wrong.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t get this sort of mix of light artistic recommendation and vaguely-nihilistic thanatophilia ANYWHERE else!
By Keita Morimoto (links this week once again via TIH, for which thanks)
THE SECTION WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO SEEING ALL THE EXCITING, INNOVATIVE AND FAR-WORSE-MODERATED PLATFORMS AUSTRALIA’S KIDS WILL FLOCK TO NOW, PT.1:
- Sill: This is perhaps a touch more, well, functional than many of the links with which I often like to kick off a Curios – what can I say, it’s not all marshmallows and hundreds and thousands, and sometimes you just need to CHOKE DOWN YOUR ROUGHAGE. So, with that in mind, Sill is a not-particularly-’fun’-but-genuinely-useful addon to Bluesky which does one simple thing – in this instance, collecting all the links that are currently being shared most widely amongst the people you follow on the network, theoretically giving you a quick and easy way of what stories are trending RIGHT NOW in your own personal filterbubbleechochamber, helpful both for knowing exactly what issues you might be expected to have an opinion on RIGHT NOW and, more generally, as a topline ‘BREAKING’ ticker. Obviously the contents of this will depend on the sort of people you’re following and the things that they share, so don’t come crying to me if it’s wall-to-wall Daily Mail (lol, it’s Bluesky, every single fcuking link’s going to be the Guardian or The Atlantic).
- Afloat: THIS, though, this *is* frivolous – it’s not been a vintage year for ‘websites as music video’ projects (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, MUSICIANS, WHY WILL YOU NOT PRODUCE THE LABOUR-INTENSIVE WORKS I DEMAND???), and in fact it does slightly feel like it’s only going to be a few short years until the whole concept of the ‘music video’ per se is consigned to the dusty oubliette of the past (or maybe the introduction of Spotify video is going to reinvigorate the medium…but, somehow, I doubt it), but, while we wait for an entire medium to sort of slide apathetically into obsolescence we can still enjoy excellent projects like this one. This is a track called ‘Afloat’ by an artist called ‘Sounds of System Breakdown’, and the video is rather nicely done – as far as I can tell it’s at least in-part procedurally-generated, meaning that each of you will experience it slightly differently, but the basic premise is that you are on a raft, drifting through a semi-submerged cityscape, as the track (dance-ish) plays – you can use the mouse to move your field of vision, and there are various different elements (videoscreens, buildings and the like) that you pass as you drift along, there’s a day and night cycle, and, in general, there’s something rather pleasing about this, to the extent that I’ve let it play through on three occasions now because it’s just…nice to just drift through the vaguely-post-apocalyptic cityscape. This was made by one Rob Costello, so, er, THANKS, ROB COSTELLO!
- A UK Cinema Guide: One of the small (and actually sort-of pleasant in a weird way if you don’t think about it too hard) side-effects of the general ensh1ttification of so many digital services (let’s not talk about the analogue ones, it’s too painful) is the occasional projects that spring up to fill in the gaps where stuff just…doesn’t really work any more. Sadly these sorts of projects tend not to be able to do anything to fix the big issues – the health service, say, or the rubbish collection – but, occasionally, they do manage to make small improvements to minor areas of irritation and LO! This is very much such a thing. Have you tried to go to the cinema recently? Have you found yourself frustrated by the sub-optimal experience of working out what’s on where and at what time? Did you think to yourself ‘fcuk’s sake, I wish there was a simple website that let me select the cinemas I was interested in going to and would then just show me all the potential films I could watch at said cinemas along with showtimes? WELCOME TO EARLY CHRISTMAS! Look, this is…not exciting, it’s not shiny (but, to be clear, it works perfectly well)…but it’s potentially useful, and it’s a nice example of a UX/UI solution that shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man for your favourite monopolistic search provider to mimic and, frankly, the nice person who made it (one Tom Benbow – THANKYOU, MYSTERIOUS TOM BENBOW!) deserves a small round of applause. No, I’m not joking. CLAP FFS.
- Train Times: LOOK, WE’LL GET TO THE FRIVOLOUS STUFF IN DUE COURSE OK? Very much in a similar vein to the previous link, this is an attempt to deliver some sort of small degree of clarity and simplicity to the currently-unpleasant business of trying to work out how to get from A to B on the train in the UK; it is, very simply, a super-stripped down, accessible way of working out train times and routes, which, somehow, seems to work faster than any other official portal offering ostensibly the same information. Honestly, this is both really impressive and something of an horrific indictment of the websites, apps and general IT chops of the UK’s existing rail providers – given a significant portion of you reading this in the UK are likely to be attempting to travel via train in the next month or so, it might be worth bookmarking this so that, when you’re developing light hypothermia as you huddle in a banking snowdrift on platform 3 at Newport Parkway Station at 21:42 on Christmas eve awaiting the long-delayed train to Swansea that you know in your heart of hearts will never come, you can at least look at when the trains are *meant* to be turning up. It’s ugly, but it is fast and, seemingly, it works. It won’t, though, stop every third train from being cancelled.
- GenChess: A little AI project from Google which invites you to design your own chess set based on generative AI prompts – you give it short stylistic cues and it will invent you a selection of designs for a chess set based on, I don’t know, your favourite football team or novel series or mathematical principal or bodily fluid (I haven’t tried the full gamut, but, surprisingly, it didn’t demur when I asked it to imagine a chess set inspired by ‘arterial blood’). You can also invent an opponent’s set which you can then play against in a slightly-clunky browserchess battle, should you so desire – it’s a nice, lightweight little toy, but it’s a real shame that there’s no option to send your imagined sets for 3d printing (or at least to download CAD files of them) as some of the designs this throws up are actually rather fun.
- Josh Lafayette’s Best Albums of the Year: These are EXCELLENT – Josh Lafayette has designed posters for each of his favourite albums of the year, and these are SO GOOD; honestly, if these were available for sale as prints I have a feeling they would sell like hot-cakes. Apparently he’s been doing this since 2007 and now I feel genuinely ashamed and not a little disappointed in myself that I’ve not featured it before now – some fcuking webmong I am. Anyway, he also posts them on his Insta which looks worth a follow should you enjoy these (and you really should, they are ace).
- Bluesky Mosaic: OH GOD THIS IS TERRIFYINGLY ADDICTIVE. The cavalcade of ‘stuff built on the Bluesky API’ continues apace (this week’s offerings have also included this and this), but the undisputed chamption of the past seven days’ offerings has to be this one, which pulls a selection of images from the Bluesky firehose as they are posted and displays them on a webpage, with the pictures swapping out every second or so. This is…this is DIZZYING and slightly mad and – to be entirely clear – FULL of c0ck (and, somewhat more troublingly, the adult diaper community of bluesky, which is very active at the time of typing), and it’s just a brilliant, strange, terrifying, nonsensical, mad, whimsical muddled snapshot of Life Online. Seriously, this really is utterly hypnotic and really should be on display on a massive screen somewhere (and yes, I know I say things like this all the time, but it really is true in this case). Seriously though, I am very much not joking about the c0ck – this is definitely NSFW, or at least it is if you have the sort of employer who for some reason might get ‘funny’ about you having a selection of engorged glans gaily appearing across your monitor – as an aside, I would be absolutely fascinated to see what the relative image feeds of a bunch of different networks looked like; this vs X or Reddit would be a really interesting head-to-head. BONUS BLUESKY THING: here’s a map of everyone on it, via Andy.
- The Private School Labeler: I’m including this more as a ‘this thing exists’ heads-up rather than an ‘I think this is good’ endorsement, fyi – this is an interesting wrinkle of Bluesky’s featureset, being used in ways it’s not hard to see becoming…quite toxic quite quickly. So users on BS can subscribe to ‘labelling’ accounts – which, should you subscribe to them, will apply labels to other accounts based on certain criteria. So, for example, there’s this one, which will, should you sub to it, apply visible labels to official brand and sporting accounts to make it easier to spot them – which, you know, seems good! But then there are other uses, like the one at the main link which exists to highlight people on the network who have been to public school – or this one, which is designed to highlight ‘nepo babies’ (a term which, along with ‘brat’, needs to be taken out back and shot at the end of 2024 please), and which you don’t need to be a genius to work out can perhaps be construed as…a bit mean, maybe? The fact that the labelees can’t opt out, for one, the fact that these things can be anonymous…it doesn’t seem like a fully-thought-through design decision to effectively create a system that would let me start to label people as ‘MATT-CERTIFIED CNUTS’, say, and you do rather get the impression that things like this are going to start becoming a touch problematic should Bluesky ever get to a critical mass of users.
- The Public Radio: A rare link to something to buy now – but this is lovely, and cute, and sort-of old internet, and it’s nearly Christmas so, well, it’s probably fine to do a SMALL capitalism. The Public Radio is a gorgeous project which first started on Kickstarter years ago and which has just been put back on sale again – the gimmick is that it’s a small FM radio which comes pre-tuned to a single station, and that is the only station it will ever play. No choice, no tuner, just an on/off switch and a small radio and speaker housed in a jar. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT??? Honestly, this really is very cute indeed, and if you’re interested in the logistics of making something like this there’s a genuinely-fascinating post by Spencer Wright, whose idea it originally was, about the early years of putting together thousands of these things by hand and mailing them all over the world. A genuinely-nice internet thing, this, and a very cute gift for the right person.
- Gentle Rain: Today’s vaguely-dystopian intersection of AI and HR comes in the form of this new service which purports to offer training for managers in art of, er, managing via the medium of A SELECTION OF AI PERSONAS! Basically, as far as I can tell, this lets you roleplay specific HR/management-type scenarios with variously-inept virtual employees, with your cajoling, wheedling attempts to get them to DELIVER MORE VALUE assessed by another AI to determine how good a boss you REALLY are. Exactly how ‘bullying an LLM’ is expected to translate to ‘dealing with an actual, proper meatsack full of complex emotions and motivated by infinite unpredictable variables’ is…unclear, and a cursory glance at the software here and some of the snippets of ‘training dialogue’ make it clear that at no point have the people behind this managed to de-LLMify the tone of voice of the virtual employees, meaning that unless your colleagues all speak in nothing but breathless LinkedIn-ese then this is unlikely to offer a particularly 1:1 experience. Still, it’s better than the one from a few years ago which made you sack a crying man in VR I suppose.
- ContentIn: It was, I suppose, bound to happen – a bunch of awful cnuts were already using LLMs to spin up their appalling bromides on LinkedIn, so inevitably a bunch of EVEN MORE APPALLING CNUTS have found a way to monetise it. Are you sick and tired of having to spend, ooh, a whole three minutes each day coming up with some cripplingly-banal parable that you can translate into prose-cruft for your slavering audience of doublefigureIQ LinkedIn mediocrities? Well it’s your LUCKY DAY! ContentIn will, for a fee, help you with EVERY step of the process – coming up with ideas for ‘thought leadership’, helping you ‘build out your ideas’ and even write you a post in classic, line-break heavy, portentous LinkedIn style! The main gimmick here is that this promises to ‘write like you’ – which, to be clear, is fcuking bullshit, unless of course by ‘write like you’ what you actually mean is ‘write like every single other fcuking cnut on the platform with the same cadence and cliches’ – and, while you may be able to tell I am not wholly positive about this as a concept it does rather look like the testimonials on the site are genuine and that people are actually using this and…and…I am actually slightly spun out with the sheer, mad idiocy of a website purporting to be a place for people to demonstrate and share professional expertise is being overrun with automated content written by spicy autocomplete, which is then being read by bored office monkeys who will then respond with their own automated rubbish…it’s morons all the way down, a teetering, tottering pyramid of fcuking stupid. Come, armageddon, because, honestly, we deserve every single thing we get at this stage. Fcuk me I hate LinkedIn SO MUCH.
- Stippler: Upload an image, get a nicely-stippled version of it back. That’s it! Nothing more, nothing less. Who doesn’t want to see themselves as a weirdly-abstract dot-image? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Rovr: Ooh, this is interesting and another one I’m slightly amazed I’ve not seen before – Rovr is basically an online radio station with a BRILLIANT collection of curators putting together hour-long shows of whatever they fancy which are then streamed to a worldwide audience. It’s just music – no ads, no algorithm, it’s scheduled and tied to timezones so there’s a sort of ‘mood’ to the day wherever you are in the world, and there really are some great names on there including, from the UK alone, DJ Food, DJ Vadim, Joe Muggs and a whole bunch of other people who are catnip to people of my sort of middle-aged ears.
- TinyIdeaStuff: One of the weird things about TikTok is that it’s sort-of impossible to tell how ‘famous’ any creators on it are – like, are they FAMOUS-famous, or are they just famous in their particular corner of the app (“hi, my name’s Matt, I’m actually a pretty big deal on linktok as it happens”)? Anyway, lots of these videos have like 8m views, so I am going to assume that they are…pretty famous, so apologies if this is OLD NEWS to those of you who are more likely to Do Video than me. Anyway, TinyIdeaStuff is a channel that does short, surreal sketches – I can’t really say much more than that because, well, there’s not much else to say; they’re funny, in that very ‘now’ register of internet humour which is (basically) a post-memetic evolution of ‘omg so random lolz!’ from 2005 (don’t @ me, there’s a clear cultural throughline here) but which I concede to finding pretty funny despite myself. Also, there’s something intensely-charismatic about these kids – actually, that’s something that’s been puzzling me recently…do we need a new term for people who are particularly compelling *but only on tiny screens*? That feels like a thing. Is it a thing?
NEXT UP, SOME PLEASINGLY-HARD TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY JENTEN!
THE SECTION WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO SEEING ALL THE EXCITING, INNOVATIVE AND FAR-WORSE-MODERATED PLATFORMS AUSTRALIA’S KIDS WILL FLOCK TO NOW, PT.2:
- Fugatto: While a lot of focus this year has been on the leaps and bounds made by AI video, I’ve personally been most impressed with the advances made in audio generation – the latest versions of stuff like Suno really are astonishing, and while the programs aren’t quite composing chart toppers yet they are definitely good enough that stock audio libraries ought soon to be entirely-redundant. Potentially more interesting, though, is stuff going on at the weird edges of sound generation – which brings us neatly to Fugatto, which is actually ‘a framework for audio synthesis and transformation’ and which is only really a proof-of-concept idea thing, and which is here presented as…quite a dense paper, but which I am sharing with you because some of the examples of what they’re trying to do here are genuinely interesting. Rather than getting the machine to imagine sounds that we could make ourselves, wouldn’t it be more interesting to get it to imagine sounds that have never previously existed? Sounds that we can’t even begin to conceptualise? Sounds so odd that even language doesn’t seem to be able to adequately describe them? YES IT WOULD! So click the link, scroll down, and hear the first rudimentary attempts to get a machine to generate the sound of ‘a cello barking’ or ‘a saxophone screaming’ or ‘an oral delivery of a violin playing a beautiful solo in English saying the words “I need to know; Who let the dogs out?”, sounding like a violin playing a beautiful solo.’ Seriously, this is VERY ODD, but also super-interesting in terms of pushing the boundaries of what we can imagine and conceive of. We’re going to start needing new words, aren’t we?
- Woznim: Via my friend Ged comes this potentially-helpful little app – do YOU struggle to remember who the fcuk people are and what they are called? In that case it’s entirely possible that this app will save your life (or, more accurately, from momentary, low-level embarrassment). Basically this lets you make notes of people’s names based on where you met them, thereby associating person with place – which, apparently, helps one remember someone else’s name. Per the blurb, “Easily save the names of people you meet and the exact locations where you met them. Whether it’s a coffee shop, a conference, or a random encounter on the street, Woznim helps you keep track. Add personalized notes to each entry. Keep track of important details, like the conversation you had, mutual interests, or future plans.” One the one hand, I can imagine this being useful for a particular type of person; on the other, it probably doesn’t help if the main reason you can’t remember anyone’s name is that, at heart, you simply don’t give a fcuk if they live or die, so possibly worth bearing that in mind.
- Pearls: WELCOME BACK TO THE WORLD OF LUXE BRAND BROWSERGAMES! This is designed to promote the overpriced gewgaws of Van Cleef & Arpel – you’ll need to open it on your phone, but when you do you’ll get access to a pleasingly-gentle little game in which your sole task is to bounce a pearl from one pillar to another by tapping your phone’s screen (it’s…low-octane entertainment, fair to say). Depending on the score you achieve, you can attain REWARDS – admittedly my performance was so poor that all I was offered by way of recompense was, er, some branded wallpaper for my phone, but I like to imagine that if you really rack up the points you get the chance to win a cubic zirconia the size of your face.
- Leonardo’s Inventions: On the one hand, Da Vinci was doubtless one of the world’s great polymaths with a near-genius level grasp of a range of disciplines; on the other, he gets an awful lot of credit for being an inventor when, to be honest, most of his ‘inventions’ were bullsh1t. Yeah, ok Leo, you ‘invented the helicopter’ – except you didn’t really, you did a (very impressive, admittedly) sketch of a prototype which, thanks to MODERN KNOWLEDGE, we now know wouldn’t have worked at all. Your flying machine? Wouldn’t have gotten off the ground mate. That tank? Ever see active service, did it? I am merely trying to point out that calling Da Vinci (fuck, for some reason my brain has just remembered those two viral twins from Covid-times and is now insisting on pronouncing this ‘Da Vinky’ – thanks brain, you cnut) a great inventor based on his sketches is like calling me a great inventor based on that period I went through aged c.4 when I was obsessed with building multi-part transformer cars out of LEGO. Anyway, that extended and wildly-unfair rant about one of history’s great minds out of the way, this is a nice selection of 3d models of said inventions which you can peruse at your leisure.
- Kortex: I realised many years ago that I simply have no interest at all in OPTIMISING MY LIFE, or developing EFFICIENT WAYS OF BEING AND THINKING – I simply don’t care, turns out. That said, if YOU are the sort of person who’s always liked the idea of having some sort of digitally-assisted filing system to help you arrange your thoughts and your work and your ideas in some sort of cogent, coherent and useful way then you might find Kortex useful – I think it’s still in beta, but it looks like a reasonably-useful set of tools, particularly for people whose practice involves lots of research and note-taking across different fields and areas of interest.
- Routeshuffle: Not an entirely original concept – I think I saw something like this during Lockdown 1 – but I am generally a fan of things that encourage you to explore your local area in different or unusual ways. Routeshuffle basically lets you choose your starting point, whether you’re walking, running or cycling, asks how long you want to go for, and then plots you a random route – helpfully these are circular so you’ll end up back where you started. Nice, simple and useful – there’s a premium version for some reason, but I will forgive the poor student who built this for attempting to scrub together a few pennies because, well, times are hard and we all need to eat.
- Treasure Inside: FINALLY! After predicting for YEARS that treasure hunt/puzzle books – a la Masquerade – are going to make a comeback, FINALLY THEY HAVE (turns out if you keep repeating something at regular intervals for long enough you will eventually be proved right). Treasure Inside follows a spate of more homegrown treasurehunt projects with a rather more large-scale and shiny variant – Jon Collins-Black has hidden five treasure boxes across North America, packed with goodies, and has written a book packed with clues to help eager hunters work out where they are and track them down. Per the blurb, “There’s Treasure Inside is the culmination of close to five years of work. The author worked with experts in several fields to put together a treasure both unique and valuable. Worth millions of dollars and growing more valuable each day, the pieces in the treasure are as varied as they are unique. Chosen to appeal to as many different tastes and interests as possible, items include Bitcoin, antiquities, shipwreck bounty, rare Pokémon cards, sports memorabilia, gold, precious metals and rare gems. Other objects have historical significance, including ones made or owned by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andrew Carnegie, George Washington, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Onassis, Henry David Thoreau, and Louis Comfort Tiffany.” I can’t help it, I fcuking LOVE stuff like this – I still remember with genuine pleasure working on Perplex City back in the day, and I really would love someone to do something large-scale like this in the UK please thankyou.
- Productivity Blocker: A reader writes! I have no idea who this person is, but they emailed me with this project, described thusly: “While there are plenty of Chrome extensions for helping you focus, this is the first one that blocks productive websites so you can relax. It currently blocks over 80 productive websites including: Slack, Fiverr, Duolingo, Linkedin and Dropbox. All blocked sites are redirected to this block page https://www.productivityblocker.com/blocked, with fun (and stupid) recreational links people can enjoy. The extension is free and exists mostly as a joke/parody of our glamorization of always working, hustle culture. But as an added plus, it does promote wellness and not burning out.” I rather like this, and should any of you currently be working for Nestle, then a) your employer’s a cnut; and b) you can totally rip this off as a simple brand activation for KitKat, that will be one million pounds in consultancy fees please.
- Salaryman Synthfun: Ok, I don’t usually link to single Insta posts without context but, well, I can’t find any additional context and this is simply too much fun to exclude. Just click the link and enjoy the video of a Japanese man absolutely wigging out as he plays a cacophonous mess on synths using a videogame controller as input. The accompanying caption just reads: “Many Japanese salarymen spend their Friday nights playing synthesizers like crazy using game controllers”, which makes me think that perhaps the word ‘many’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Do any of you live in Japan? Can any of you confirm or deny that this is in fact a thing that people do rather than something that one bloke does?
- Saapato: Via Kris at Naive, this is a beautiful little site built by sound artist Brendan Principato – I don’t really quite know how to describe it, but it’s…a sort of patchwork mosaic of works and photos and fragments of music, and if you click around on the various patchwork squares each generates a sound, meaning you can create a light audio tapestry as you navigate which will be different for each of you. Beautifully, whatever I seem to press manages to combine to create something vaguely-beautiful, which is no mean feat of programming – this really is rather gorgeous.
- Intro: This was introduced to me this week by James Whatley, who described it as ‘LinkedIn meets Cameo’, a combination of words so singularly-unappealing that I nearly voided myself in immediate protest upon hearing them. Still, if you’re the sort of dreadful, dead-behind-the-eyes fcuk who likes to think of themselves as a ‘thought leader’ then you can rent yourself out for meetings using this platform/app – it’s basically like an escort service but for cnuts on LinkedIn, so you have various startup/tech people offering the benefits of their hard-earned wisdom for a mere $2k a session, or various multiply-jointed yoga influencers or clean eating gurus and DEAR GOD everyone here is a vision of alphaness in taupe. Still, if you’d like to pay four figures to have some sort of Stephen Bartlettalike spaff out some rubbish about the vital importance of HUSTLE AND GRIND MENTALITY then, well, you’re a fcuking idiot, frankly. Although now I come to think of it I am not so proud that I’m not partly tempted to put myself up on there for ‘demotivational chats’ just to see if there are any takers.
- Net Elevation: Want to know what the net elevation of someone’s life was – that is, what the net difference in the height above sea level of their place of birth and place of death was? WELL LUCKY YOU!
- Travel In Times: Would you like to be able to quickly and easily find out how long it would have taken you to travel from, say, Sevenoaks to Bury in the 17th Century? GREAT NOW YOU CAN! This is really interesting, promise – it estimates travel times based on the road network that was in place across Europe at the time (and, presumably, making generous assumptions about the likelihood of your drowning in any sea crossings you might need to make), and as such you can learn that it would have taken a day and a half to get to Cambridge from London 500 years ago, but that that time was slashed to 4h just a hundred or so years later. Insert your own gags here about how unfavourably your travel times back home this christmas compare to those from an era before electricity.
- Surveillance Self-Defence: Are YOU an incredibly paranoid person who is increasingly convinced that THEY are watching your every move online? Well you’re probably right tbh, they almost certainly are – and why wouldn’t they be, you PERVERT? Anyway, should you feel the beady eyes of surveillance upon you – or at least *think* that you do – you might find this collection of tips and tools and remaining unmonitored online of use. They’re…they’re a TOUCH on the paranoid side, but I suppose that’s kind of the point. My snark aside, it’s obviously true that for a variety of people, for a variety of reasons, this sort of thing is hugely important – per the blurb, “Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) is a guide to protecting yourself from electronic surveillance for people all over the world. Some aspects of this guide will be useful to people with very little technical knowledge, while others are aimed at an audience with considerable technical expertise and privacy/security trainers. We believe that everyone’s threat model is unique—from activists in China to journalists in Europe to the LGBTQ community in Uganda. We believe that everyone has something to protect, whether it’s from the government or parents or prying employers, stalkers, data-mining corporations, or an abusive partner.”
- Smoke and Fire: A page of gifs of smoke and fire from cartoons. No more, no less. There’s something sort of wonderful about the way these are collected, and it’s really worth scrolling all the way through to get the full effect.
- Let’s Party: On the one hand, part of me thinks that this is a really great idea; on the other, part of me also thinks that this is the sort of thing that cause some quite INCREDIBLE ruptures in the more complicated and messy types of friendship group. Let’s Party is a an app for your phone that attempts to bring back the UNFETTERED FUN of the pre-digital age – the idea is that you take photos through the app, which doesn’t then ‘unlock’ them until the morning afterwards – so you only get the full dump in the morning when you’ve forgotten all about what you may or may not have snapped. Which, yes, I can totally see as being fun! But the wrinkle here is that you can let multiple phones have a shared account – which means you’ll also get everyone ELSE’S photos at the same time too, which is obviously fine if you’ve all been good but is potentially…less fine depending on how the night panned out and exactly what your relationship is with these people and, look, I’m not suggesting you’re all messy b1tches who love drama but, equally, this feels…dangerous.
- Pierret’s Dream House: I LOVE THIS! Pierret is, apparently, a French business that sells glazing (doors and windows) – they’re currently running a promo where you are in with the chance of winning 20 grand’s worth of, er, doors and windows (is that a lot of doors and windows? I’m not really up on how much stuff costs beyond weed and casillero del diablo these days), based on your ability to DESIGN YOUR OWN DREAM HOUSE! Yes, that’s right, presumably riffing on the recent popularity of similarly ‘cosy’ (sorry, HATEFUL word) villagebuilding games, this is a surprisingly-full-featured little browsergame where you can spin up your own maison or chateau, personalise the…yes, DOORS AND WINDOWS to your heart’s content, and then presumably have your creation judged by Monsieur Pierret at the end of it. Honestly, I adore this, mainly for the fact that it’s a lot deeper and more fully-featured than it probably needed to be – for one or two of you (the one or two of you who still hanker after a doll’s house, probably) this will possibly prove mesmerising.
- Solitomb: A fun fantasy-roguelike cardgame based (loosely) on Solitaire – this is FUN, simple to learn but surprisingly-complex, and can comfortably eat away a few of those hours standing between you and a date with the muscle-relaxant of your choice.
- Known Mysteries: Our final miscellaneous link of the week is, honestly, one of my favourite things of the year. Known Mysteries is, per the blurb, “about the desire to escape Earth. Using a mix of video and text, Sorrow’s story unfolds with the help of the player to solve the mysteries in her town.” But honestly, that doesn’t even begin to describe all the reasons why I adore this. It’s the first game to be built and hosted on the Solar Server, which is, as the name suggests, a solar-powered server in Alberta, Canada, maintained by Kara Stone who also wrote the game – per the blurb on the site, “Solar Server is an autonomous solar powered web server run from my apartment balcony in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It will host a series of videogames designed to be low-carbon and have environmental themes in the games. My goal with this project is to not only represent environmentalist themes and have people think about the future of the planet and what needs to change, but also put principles of sustainability into actual practice. Because I am an artist, I want people to see and interact with my work, yet my previous work demands you interact with fossil fuels in order to engage with it—on Steam’s servers, Apple’s, Androids, and itch.io’s. With Solar Server, consuming fossil fuels is no longer a necessity when playing my work.” So, to start with, that’s just really cool – but also, the game is GREAT. Seriously, it’s brilliant – it’s more a visual novel, fine, but it’s brilliantly-written and well-paced and the treatment of photos and imagery and video to make it all work as a lightweight website on a small server actually works in service of the narrative, and the music is GORGEOUS and I promise you this is worth every single one of the 60 minutes or so it will take you to play through all three parts of the story (and if for whatever reason parts two or three aren’t working, try again later – the sun might have gone behind a cloud). I can’t tell you how much I love this, honestly, it is very special imho.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Magical Trash: Oh, fine, not in fact a Tumblr (I do fear I am going to have to retire this section in 2025 as, bluntly, Tumblrs aren’t what they used to be – sic transit gloria mundi and all that jazz), but, as you all know by now, like even I give a fcuk anymore about Curios’ internal taxonomy! Magic Trash is dedicated to, er, the bins of the Disney Magic Kingdom, where even the refuse is branded to within an inch of Mickey’s life. SO MANY BINS. Nicely-decorated bins, fine, but very much still, well, bins.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Pretty Little Patriot: Ok, this is quite far from my normal wheelhouse and not normally my sort of thing, but some of the images on this Insta feed really are quite something. Via Caitlin’s excellent ‘Links’, Pretty Little Patriot is a MAGA-friendly line of clothes for women and…fcuk, just so much of this is baffling to me – the aesthetic, the general ENERGY of the whole thing, the continued insanity of the apparently-entirely-contradictory loves of Jesus, The Donald and high-ordnance firearms managing to coexist in the minds of these people with no apparent cognitive dissonance…there’s a lot to take in here, but I am 100% serious when, were it not for their politics, I would buy the FCUK out of the first sweatshirt in this carousel (and, frankly, quite a few of the others too).
- Susan Collins:I was lucky enough to be introduced to this artist earlier this week, and not only is she lovely but her work is ACE. Susan Collins does multi-camera, multi-installation videowork (or at least that’s what her recent practice has focused on) and there’s something both conceptually-fascinating but also visually compelling about the results. See what you think – you can read a bit more about the work and her practice here.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Against The Dark Forest: This is very ‘the web writing about the very concept of the web’ and so your appetite for it will largely be dependent on the extent to which you find long, discursive pieces about ‘the digital commons’ and ‘online spaces’ and what both of these things are, can and could be, interesting and worthwhile. Presuming that that opening description hasn’t caused you to shut this tab in disgust, then you will very much enjoy this essay by Erin Kissane, where she (gently, it has to be said) pushes back against some of the prevailing ways of thinking that have spun up around the web in the past couple of years – the way she gets there is interesting, but the fundamental conclusion is worth mentioning here. “So the necessary counterpart to understanding that the Dark Forest Internet complex obscures the arbitrary and temporary nature of the current situation might be accepting that there is no moral arc of the world. Our systems bend toward justice when we bend them, and keep on bending them, forever. I think our failure to remember that the mega-platforms are just intentionally extractive constructs run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a failure of accountability, but our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.” This feels particularly relevant as the rise in popularity of Bluesky is suddenly making more mainstream commentators think about ‘the nature of the web’ for a second, because once again this week there’s another one of those fcuking ‘why does noone make websites anymore?’ articles doing the rounds (GYAC mate they are you’re just too fcuking lazy and bovine to go looking for them you algofattened tw4t), and that we appear to be once again at one of those periods in digital cultural history where people are briefly inclined to think ‘hang on, how did we get here and how might we make sure that we end up somewhere better next?’. Anyway, this is interesting and intelligent and closes with an excellent analogy based on The Wind in the Willows, which is something I don’t get to type often enough.
- Who’s The Real Cnut?: Kudos to the LRB here for neither censoring the title of this piece or the URL – this is Andrew O’Hagan writing about Paul Dacre and the newspaper he has edited for the past 32 years, the Daily Mail. The swear in the title refers to Dacre’s famous predilection for using the word – often multiple times within the same sentence – but it’s one that significant swathes of the British public would happily use to describe a man who’s presided over an organ of the press (which organ, though? The spleen? The bile duct? The sphincter? So hard to pick!) which has had a role unsurpassed in the coarsening of public discourse and the spreading of hate since he took the helm. I tend not to wish death on anyone – death is EASY, after all, it lets you off the hook – but there are a few people who I would cheerfully see introduced to the rack and the pinion for an afternoon, and this man is very much on that list.
- That Mental Interview With Elon’s Dad: So this links to a long thread on Bluesky – sorry, I can’t be fcuked to look up whatever the platform equivalent of threadunroller is, you can deal with threads, you’ve grown-ups – about Elon Musk’s father’s recent appearance on a podcast in which, variously, he a) outs Elon for lying about the emerald mines; b) suggests Elon and his ‘hollywood friends’ all laughed at him for backing Trump in 2016; c) implies very strongly that Elon’s mum’s family are actual Nazis; d) also quite strongly implies that, despite his claims to ‘not be a racist’ that he in fact very much sort-of is one; e) reveals that he was so close to apartheid-era President of South Africa PW Botha that said President’s wife and kid regular stayed at the Musk compound in the 80s…look, this is a WILD RIDE and frankly I think you probably can’t take any of it 100% seriously because papa Musk is…not exactly what you might term a reliable narrator, and certainly has his own interests at play when discussing his son, but if even SOME of this stuff is true then it does rather explain one or two things. Oh, also there is some INTENSELY-creepy stuff about getting his stepdaughter pregnant, so, er, be warned.
- AI Is About Power: This piece in Jacobin will not, if you’ve been paying attention, contain anything that will surprise you, but I thought it a decent overview of the ways in which AI is inevitably going to be used in order to concentrate power in the hands of the boss class and will equally-inevitably have impacts on the dignity and quality of labour that are unlikely to be positive. I know I keep banging on about this – SORRY I KNOW IT IS BORING – but I find it quietly astonishing that senior businesspeople like the bloke who runs Salesforce can say things like this, out loud, and noone seems to realise how…bad it is for people. I mean, seriously, DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT “WE’RE ABLE TO EXPAND OUR LABOR FORCE WITHOUT HIRING MORE PEOPLE” IMPLIES FFS?????
- The AI Art Turing Test: After poetry last week, this week it’s the turn of art – can YOU tell which of these images is AI-generated? And what does that mean about AI art, and people, and what we like, and what we produce? You will get a lot of these wrong – but I think that what that implies is less ‘wow, AI is really good at creating amazing artworks!’ and more ‘wow, we’re used to seeing a lot of really mediocre art!’.
- Substack in 2024: An interesting piece looking at Substack at the end of 2024, likely motivated by the recent revelations that Elon Musk made apparent enquiries about buying the platform and its increasing status as ‘the home of political writing online’ (or at least, a certain sort of liberal-ish writing. And Nazis). What this told me is that THE CREATOR ECONOMY DOESN’T FCUKING SCALE (one day, one day, everyone will realise I am right about this), that while there are some people out there making absolute bank on Substack there are plenty of people who…aren’t, and that my personal prediction that we’re going to get a GenZ/A reimagining of the concept of ‘the magazine’ (“what if…what if…some of your favourite substackers bundled some of their work into a package that you could buy for less than the cost of subscribing to them all individually?”) in 2025 is still looking like a reasonable bet.
- The Rise of the Brocasters: Yes, yes, PODCASTS WON THE ELECTION (they didn’t win the election) and they are THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDIUM IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW (I don’t know about that but they are certainly the most fcuking annoying – can all you cnuts with fcuking podcasts PLEASE at least have the common decency to provide accurate transcripts so that those of us who don’t have the appetite to listen to your HILARIOUS MATEY BANTER can just scan your words in case you occasionally say something worthwhile? Please?), but the thing I found most interesting about this was the implied vacuum that exists in male-focused media, and it made me think, in a week in which the UK saw yet another documentary about the lads’ mag era (non-UK readers – google ‘Front Magazine’ for a reasonable approximation of ‘the 00s for young English men’), about how, for better or worse, after the demise of FHM, Loaded and the like, nothing really emerged to take their place and the rise of bloke-ish podcasts feels like it’s filling that gap somehow. Basically ‘a mixture of aliens, extreme sport stuff, fringe-y science, fitness and money advice’ is EXACTLY the sort of thing a modern-day FHM would probably cover (I maintain, though, that the absence of sex from the male-focused podcast world is…weird. Maybe it’s all the steroids or something).
- The Queue Is The Thing: The Face, on the very 2024 phenomenon of ‘queuing for the drop (or the waffle, or the sneaker, or the slice, or whatever the fcuk the fcuking algo has dangled in front of your dopamine-starved eyes this week), and What It Means. A couple of thoughts – a) there’s some neat little GUERILLA ACTIVATIONS that the right brands could do with stuff like this, serving the queue in various ways; and b) I wonder a bit whether this is another reaction to the lack of viable third spaces – a queue like these, after all, is also an excuse just to hang out for free (ok, eventually you spend, but you get what I mean) with other people who are interested in the same things as you. Christ, that’s sad isn’t it? “Why are you here?” “I JUST WANT TO FEEL SOME SORT OF BASIC HUMAN CONNECTION FFS”.
- Guns To Mexico: Our second LRB piece of the week is this excellent essay about the *other* smuggling route across the US-Mexico border – the steady stream of firearms making it from America to the increasingly-insanely-criminal streets of Mexico. This is so so so so good, and rather a neat counterpoint to the prevailing Republican narrative suggesting that the traffic is all murderers coming south to north rather than murder weapons going north to south; there are some wonderful human stories throughout too.
- AI In The Philippines: The Philippines is very much my canary in the coalmine when it comes to the impact of AI on work, given so many of its people are employed doing relatively-low-skill white collar work for Western companies. This is a fascinating piece in Rest of World looking at the way in which call centre staff across the country are being impacted by AI technologies, and how they are having to work faster and with less agency for the same amount of money – more efficient, but less autonomous, tools guided by machine hands so-to-speak. That’s not to mention all the people who have been screwed by data such as this, demonstrating that the number of listings for jobs in copywriting and graphic design and low-level coding have fallen vertiginously since the advent of generative AI, and that that drop in listings now looks permanent. I don’t know how often I can keep saying this before I bore even myself to death, but THIS ISN’T LOOKING GOOD EVERYONE.
- Olive Oil:A history of how it was made, how it is now made, and how the flavour of what we now think of as olive oil is intimately linked to the changing methods by which it’s produced. Honestly, if you ever get the opportunity to go and do an olive harvest and then a pressing then you really must – it’s fun, going to a frantoio is just generally cool, and I promise you that the stuff you get back when you’ve picked and pressed your own bears about as much relation to Filippo Berio as I do to Paul Mescal.
- The Promise of Duolingo: I enjoyed this, about how Duolingo doesn’t in fact teach you how to speak a language at all, but as long as you’re clear about that then it probably doesn’t matter. Per my friend Alex, who’s been using it for years, “I feel like people have overcorrected from “Duolingo will make you fluent” to “Duolingo is a waste of time”. It’s not, it’s very good for vocab and reading comprehension. You just need to do something else for speaking, listening and possibly grammar. But *nothing* is good for all aspects of language learning.” I am also recommending this because it makes no mention whatsoever of Duolingo’s increasingly fcuking annoying, attention-seeking and try-hard marketing campaign (NOONE IS HORNY FOR THE DUOLINGO OWL STOP PRETENDING).
- What Is A Khia?: New internet slang just dropped! On the one hand, this is a fun little explainer on a new term born out of the queer internet; on the other, can we all possibly maybe agree to…maybe just leave it there? Just let it remain a niche concern, a community bit, something small and private, maybe? Can we basically just agree that if a brand attempts to drop this into its comms we will all collectively spit and shun? Good! Also, I specifically love this piece for the light Rita Ora shade it throws – I still maintain that there is noone, not one person in this world, who would self-describe as a Rita Ora ‘fan’ and that her presence in the pop cultural canon is some sort of elaborate psyop.
- The Year In Fiction 2024: This year’s nominees for the annual Tournament of Books is out – I don’t normally include this but am making an exception this year because it’s SUCH an interesting list and I wanted to read pretty much every single one of the novels on here (of the ones I’ve not already picked up) – in part this is just a factor of the synopsis-blurbs all being so well-written, in part because of some truly superb cover design on display (US publishers have had a very good year from an aesthetic point of view, it seems). I will 100% be using this as a way of killing entire weeks of the holiday season and I suggest you do the same. BONUS LITERARY RECOMMENDATIONS: this is a really interesting selection of Booker-nominated novels from the 1970s, a decade whose fiction has fallen out of fashion to an extent – John Self presents a list of 10 novels you may not have heard of (I certainly hadn’t heard of most of them) and each of these sounds WONDERFUL and worth reading.
- Stalker 2: Another bit of videogame writing – per last week, even if you don’t play games this is very much worth reading. Stalker 2 is a new game, a first-person shooter set in an irradiated, postapocalyptic wasteland (so far, so videogame) – the development team is Ukrainian, and so releasing the game has been an incredible logistical achievement, with half the team working out of Prague as refugees and the others contending with life in a warzone. This piece, by Dia Lacina, is a beautiful piece of writing about the emergent stories that happen in the best games, about the atmosphere that Stalker 2 creates, about making art in war…honestly, this really is excellent and recommended to even the most game-averse of you.
- Derek Parfit: This isn’t the first essay I’ve featured about philosopher Derek Parfit in Curios – that was in 2020, and you can read it here – but it’s possibly the funniest. I know, I know, you don’t immediately understand how a biographical essay about the life of one of the 20thC’s most…obtuse English philosophers can be described as ‘funny’, but I promise you that I laughed out loud on at least five occasions while reading this. OK, fine, so it may feel like you are laughing AT Parfit, but, equally, how can you not? This is an incredible picture of a brilliant, maddening, impossible, flawed genius whose life was seemingly quite utterly ruined by his mind. I mean, just read this – it gives you a flavour, certainly, but also just *imagine* this being your life: “Despite Edmond’s declared sympathy, his biography still has farcical elements. The book is largely an entertaining, and highly revealing, exercise in psychological portraiture by means of anecdote. Parfit, Edmonds tells us, would peddle in the nude on his exercise bike, reading philosophy; he would brush his teeth for hours, reading philosophy; every day he would eat the same breakfast of muesli and yoghurt and the same dinner of carrots, cheese, lettuce, and celery, to maximise his time for philosophy; he would make coffee using water straight out of the tap, to maximise his time for philosophy; he would take a mixture of vodka and pills every night to help him sleep, since he couldn’t stop thinking about philosophy.” Astonishing.
- New Flesh: I think this is the third or fourth time I’ve linked Emma Garland this year – her writing about sex and relationships is superb, and this is another excellent essay about The Substance, sex and death and decay and the necessary link between all three concepts and some of the reasons why, despite everything, this feels rather like a sexless era.
- Wing Yip: Absolutely brilliant piece by Jonathan Nunn in Vittles about Wing Yip, the massive Chinese supermarket in North West London, and eating in the cafe there – it’s about the food, a bit, but it’s also about place and people and the changing shape and face of the city, and urban development and memory and and and and fcuk this is EXCELLENT.
- The X-Files: Our final longread of the week is another LRB link – this is Patricia Lockwood writing about the X Files, about moments that change us, about my favourite neuroscientific case study Phineas Gage, about EM Forster…on a sentence-by-sentence level this is almost offensively good, and, beyond that, I found myself crying by the end and I couldn’t quite tell you why. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- Finally this week, this song is by Big Dog, it’s called ‘Peace Song’ and it’s not only a cracking track but also a SUPER video which tells its own little story and which features an excellent central performance by Alien Barman. You’ll enjoy this, promise OK THAT’S IT THAT’S YOUR LOT I LOVE YOU I HOPE YOU LOVE ME BACK BYE.