Webcurios 25/10/24 – webcurios (2024)

It’s still, technically, Summer here in the UK, until Sunday morning at least – WHY AM I SO FCUKING COLD THEN?

Yes, that’s right, we’ve reached that phase of the year when all I can seem to think about is how fcuking cold my fingers are when I am typing this fcuking thing, and whether I should finally bite the bullet and lean into my general ‘ageing vagrant’ vibe by purchasing a pair of fingerless gloves (and yes, I am aware that ‘heating’ exists, but I am also aware of exactly what the ‘matt’s employability mapped over time’ graph looks like and as such am holding off for the moment); you, though, don’t care about that (or at least I presume you don’t; in the unlikely event that you find yourself somehow moved by my frigid plight, feel free to, I don’t know, set fire to me next time you see me), you’re only here for the links.

FINE WELL HERE ARE YOUR FCUKING LINKS THEN SEE IF I CARE.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you almost certainly didn’t come here to be abused, but, well, here we are.

Webcurios 25/10/24 – webcurios (1)

By Joyce Lee

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH THE NEW UNDERWORLD ALBUM WHICH IS OUT TODAY AND WHICH REALLY IS EXCELLENT!

THE SECTION WHICH SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE PUB LAST NIGHT DISCUSSING HOW, BASICALLY, EVERYTHING THAT’S SH1T IN THE WORLD CAN BE BLAMED ON THE 1990s AND WHICH IS NOW PRETTY FIRMLY CONVINCED OF THAT THESIS,PT.1:

  • Change The NHS: One thing that one can say for the British, almost entirely without exception, is that if you give them the opportunity to show off how ‘clever’ and ‘funny’ they are on a public platform they will grab it with both hands (and then possibly start doing some sort of embarrassing dance with it, onstage, while mugging at a nonexistent audience in the hope of some sort of laughter and applause). From the strangely-unshakeable impulse to write ‘yes please!’ on forms when asked to confirm one’s sex, to Dom Laurelli (RIP), a kid I went to school with, who turned the final page of our GCSE Design & Tech exam into a self-portrait, under which he wrote to his unseen examiner ‘look into my eyes before you fail me’, we simply can’t resist the opportunity for clowning. Which is why it was so…surprising to see this week that the country’s National Health Service, the creaking public health infrastructure which is increasingly failing to cope with us all not having the common decency to die in our 60s like we used to, decided to launch its public consultation, asking the public to contribute their own ideas as to how the service might be ameliorated, in such a way that everyone’s suggestions were public and searchable. Which, obviously, meant that as soon as people realised this, thousands of bored office monkeys the length of the country decided that it was time to unleash their inner Swift and get all HUMOROUS AND SATIRICAL with their proposals, and resulted in the platform being flooded with ‘gags’ – it took them about 24h to realise this and implement some sort of backend fix, but today if you visit the site now all the suggestions seem to be tediously sensible and practically banal. Thankfully some of the best of the flurry of comic responses are preserved in this thread– there are some glorious ones in here, but my personal favourite was ‘get rid of computers’, a degree of bloody-minded luddism which I sort-of respect. Anyway, this was all very amusing for 24h but, equally, was also slightly enervating from the point of view of someone who’s designed and implemented stuff like this before and can’t quite believe anyone was naive enough to launch it like that (and yes, one *could* perhaps believe that it was a deliberate ploy to drive awareness of and interest in the consultation, but given it was trailed in every single paper and on the morning broadcast rounds, I’m going to suggest that that probably wasn’t necessary).
  • Redact-a-Chat: I’m slightly less enamoured of this than I was about 35s ago as I just realised it’s another MSCHF project and, while I admire the indefatigable creativity, I would prefer to feature stuff that carries less of the whiff of the trust fund. Still, I can’t help but be slightly in love with this VERY SILLY website, which is, very simply, a chatroom where users can only use each word in the English language once a day – after it’s been used once, future instances of it in the chat will be redacted, meaning that after a short while each day you have to be VERY creative with your phrasing and word choices to get anything to show up at all. The nice thing about this is that you can spin up your own instance of the chat, with a separate, private ‘room’ accessible only to those with the link, which means that you can (if you like – and, honestly, I really do!) maybe create one of these as an alternative to your groupchat platform of choice and add an interesting sense of verbal scarcity to your dull quotidian FPL captaincy debates. Ooh, even better, why not challenge your colleagues to use ONLY this platform for all professional communications today, thereby adding a real air of jeopardy to requests made later in the day which are rendered as a series of ‘redacted’s? Go on, it’s not like what you do for a living matters anyway.
  • The Half Bakery: Oh my WORD, this is some OLD internet. The Half Bakery is a site from…Christ, it’s hard to tell, but it feels like it was born sometime around 2000, and I certainly remember hearing about it in the early years of the 21stC as an example of ‘look at all the amazing creative and fun and silly things that the web is enabling!’ (how naive we were, how young, how…hopeful, and yet to bruise)…anyway, it was basically a very early forum/community-type-place where anyone could submit an idea they had, however half-baked (hence, inevitably, the name), and other users could vote on them, and FCUKING HELL there is some gold in here. Seriously, this is a collection of brilliant, funny, dumb and occasionally-borderline-genius ideas, just sort of sitting here waiting for someone to do something with them. Why hasn’t anyone yet done ‘Gogglebox, but for bongo’ (I am paraphrasing here a suggestion made by one MrThingy on September 6 2000)? Why has noone yet built a social network where posts are restricted to a single character (suggested by nineteenthly on August 03 2011)? Why is the person who suggested an industry based on the idea of burying people with seeds, which they termed ‘morticulture’ xenzag, August 2 2006), not a millionaire?! Honestly, there is stuff in here that could CHANGE THE WORLD, so why not spend a few minutes having a delve and deciding which of these you’re going to make your singleminded obsession?
  • Today Is Crisp Sandwich Day: Matt Round at Vole has spent the past four years making 25 October – aka the feast day of St Crispin – the official day on which the making and consumption of crisp (potato chip, for the north Americans out there) sandwiches is celebrated, so this is your reminder that a) this is TODAY!; and b) you might want to adjust your dining plans accordingly. If nothing else this feels like the sort of thing that should be marked by a special lunch in the workplace. Beautifully, the library of stock photos of crisp sandwiches that Matt started a few years ago is now bafflingly hundreds of pictures strong, containing just over 600 images of potato snacks trapped between slices of bread. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?
  • Good Mourning: Do you remember when the Queen died? Of course you do, you’ve only recently taken down the commemorative ‘keep calm and keep weeping’ bunting! What you might not remember, though, is the very strange spectacle of seemingly every single website of every single UK business deciding it was imperative that they modify their homepages to ensure that their exhortations to BUY BUY BUY were delivered…respectfully, and in shades of grey, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT SHE WOULD HAVE WANTED! Thankfully for those of you with a less-than-eidetic recollection of minor bits of website redesign, the indefatigable Zefspent his mourning period in 2022 taking screencaps of all the RESPECT and has now compiled them into this single website for your viewing pleasure. So it is that we can see how RESPECTFUL dildo peddlers Ann Summers were as they essayed the tricky balancing act of ‘remembering the passing of a near-centenarian monarch’ and ‘getting you off with latex assistance’, and we can rejoice in the bittersweet memories elicited by the still-poignant juxtaposition of a memorial banner for HRH and the Co-Op’s desperate need to shift units by advertising ‘Five Freezer Faves for £5’. This is BRILLIANT, and a perfect reminder of what a country that has basically just lost its collective sh1t looked like.
  • WhenPhoto: Not an *entirely* original premise, but fcukit, it’s FUN and FRIVOLOUS and oddly addictive – this is a small game which asks you to do the ‘guess when this photo was taken’ thing for a selection of images, giving you points depending on how close you are to the actual year in which the image was created, and it’s fascinating how one’s ability to be granular about decades, etc, diminishes as one goes further back in time.
  • Dippy: This week saw the…first, I think, instance of a chatbot being cited in a lawsuit in a death– but almost certainly not the last! – which feels like an appropriate time to introduce you to the latest in the seemingly-neverending cavalcade of ‘spicy chat interfaces’ for the apparently-equally-infinite market of people who really, really want to have horny text conversations with an autocomplete model. I read some interviews with the CEO this week who spouted some guff about mental health and the importance of having someone to speak to at 3am when your anxiety spikes, but, honestly, click the link and look at the homepage and then come back and tell me what YOU think this service is advertising with its weirdly-muscular twink avatar and slightly-sinister ‘The Day Your Boyfriend’s Mask Slipped’ tagline, suggesting that maybe, just MAYBE, this is in fact being marketed at people who’d like their werewolf bongo just a *touch* more interactive. Anyway, there are a BUNCH of different ‘personas’ (horny roleplay companions) created by the platform and the ‘community’ (apparently this has half a million users, though that very much sounds like a number designed for fundraising purposes rather than one based in reality), and scrolling through the available bots it’s clear that there’s a heavy skew here to masc-presenting avatars which all seem to present as a variation on ‘troubled boyfriend who’s all manipulative and stuff but also REALLY LOVES YOU’, which makes me think this is mainly being explored by horny teenage girls who’ve read a LOT of questionable YA romance. Anyway, look, I have no idea who clicks on what, so if you decide to give this a go and frot yourself to the point of chafing to the textual promptings of a virtual lover then it is your secret and yours alone.
  • Deaddit: Reddit, but where all the posts are written by AI! Totally pointless, obviously, but I thought there was something quite interesting about how The Machine has very much nailed the tone of a certain corner of Reddit, that odd, edges-sanded-off English that you get in international, post-web digital spaces. You can see a list of all the ‘subReddits’ here– I spent longer than I care to admit yesterday reading the ‘conspiracies’ section which, honestly, I sort-of forgot was all AI-generated after a while because it REALLY reads convincingly; if you scroll down within posts there are even comments sections with the bots arguing amongst themselves which, again, are…weirdly convincing. If you weren’t vaguely worried at the prospect of the web being flooded with AI content to the point of us no longer having any reasonable clue what’s by actual humans and what’s by The Machine, then, well, click this link and let the fear start to build.
  • Azar: “Every generation gets its own Chatroulette” is in no way an accepted Truth About The World, but I am increasingly convinced it should be. Azar is the latest product to basically do the Chatroulette thing (see also Omegle and the rest) – the app/website is Korean and has apparently existed in various forms for a decade, but I stumbled across it this week with it being touted as a ‘fun way to meet and chat with new people from around the world’. The way it works is standard – you click in, it pairs you with a strangers somewhere in the world for a videochat that lasts as long as you both maintain the connection – but there are some 2024-appropriate quality of life upgrades to the base level experience, namely the promise that they have a whole bunch of AI stuff in the background to, basically, minimise the possibility of anyone ever needing to see some unwanted dong (I presume it’s general nudity-recognition rather than specific c0ck-recognition, but, well, it’s not women who tend to inflict their unasked-for junk on strangers, as a rule) or hear a racism. Obviously I have NO IDEA how well this stuff works, and I only really used this for about 30s the other day because, honestly, it is VERY CLEARLY aimed at kids and as such I felt…well, honestly, a bit wrong using it, like some sort of weird, wrinkled interloper in the land of the smooth-skinned and hopeful. On that note, though, it’s worth being aware of the fact that ‘premium users’ can pay to select their pool of interlocutors based on gender and location, which feels…rather more perv-friendly than I personally would be happy with.
  • Hatom: To be clear – I do not understand what this is AT ALL, other than it has something to do with crypto and so therefore is almost certainly a borderline-criminal grift…but no matter, because this website is GLORIOUS. “Building synergistic DEFI primitives”, screams the homepage, as though those words in that configuration are meant to mean anything, while a strange sort of CG…embryo? floats in the background. Click and hold and listen as the voiceover takes you on a JOURNEY, and speaks to you of “a time when the old principles of finance must be shattered and replaced with a fresh breath of hope” – which I have to applaud as one of the most spectacularly-mangled bits of copy I’ve experienced all year, THANKS HATOM! Look, there are LAYERS to this website, and, for reasons known only to the coked-up-madmen behind…whatever this is, there’s a CG griffon that appears on the second page, and, look, this is almost certainly a complete scam but it is SO preposterously-shiny that I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. “INCENTIVIZING GROWTH WITH THE BOOSTER” – YES LADS SIGN ME UP!
  • Sylva Labs: I don’t want to make fun of this – I really don’t! It’s a small business, it’s all green and sustainable and stuff, and the design and look and feel suggests that the people behind it are talented! – but, equally, I couldn’t help but snigger a *bit* at a website offering the chance to buy bottles of ‘experimental dark sipping spirit’ for £40, when it turns out that ‘experimental dark sipping spirit’ is in fact…a non-alcoholic whisky-analogue drink made from, er, old planks of wood. Look lads, I am sure this is INCREDIBLY nice but for £40 a bottle I want a hangover, sorry.
  • The Feeld Magazine: After that other dating website – was it Hinge? Sorry, I forget – did that ‘love stories from the apps’ magazine-style promo campaign earlier this year featuring writing by Roxane Gay and others, so another dating app, this time Feeld (the one for people who like to bore other people about how sexually open they are), has launched its own mag – except as far as I can tell this is going to be a proper literary endeavour, with a (theoretically) long-term vision and all that jazz. They’ve certainly spent the money on the inaugural authorial lineup, with some VERY impressive contemporary names who won’t have come cheap, and a puffpiece in the NYT which very clearly seeks to place the mag in some sort of lineage of the New York literati(and which contains a moment halfway through which does rather threaten to derail the whole thing – you’ll understand what I mean when you get there, I promise). Anyway, this is interesting in part because some of the writing is excellent – the Tulathimutti piece for example is very good indeed– but also because I think print is still hugely underutilised in advermarketingpr these days.
  • Ask Trev: Another weird website from a half-remembered past, this – no idea how I came across it again this week, but it sparked vague recollections of an early-00s launch and some media appearances by Trevor Nelson who was one of the founders…AskTrev was launched as a kind of jocular response to the popular perception amongst a certain generation that people called Trevor were a bit…plodding, perhaps, and not exactly intellectual heavyweights – AskTrev was designed to prove that that wasn’t in fact true, with a team of dedicated Trevors (all men called Trevor) on hand to answer questions and offer help with a whole range of things (see? SEE HOW FUN THE INTERNET USED TO BE, WHEN PEOPLE JUST DID FUN AND VAGUELY SILLY STUFF LIKE THIS AND EVERTYTHING DIDN’T HAVE TO BE A FCUKING VIDEO????). Basically this is a directory of contact emails for Trevors who are willing to answer your questions, sorted by subject – I cannot in any way vouch for the quality of the advice being offered by the Trevors here, or indeed how many of the email addresses are still in operation, but I can’t help but adore the general ethos on display here:“TrevorsTogether.com is a completely free service. But nowadays, people don’t trust ‘free’, they don’t believe ‘free’. There must be a catch, and unfortunately, there is in most cases. But not here. Ask a question, get an answer, pay nothing. Job done. Why is it free? It’s free because a group of people, all called Trevor decided they wanted their name to be synonymous with generosity, charity and kindness. The truth is that for some years now, ‘Trevor’ is a name too often in the media, given to either a Geek or a Nitwit. And strangely, there’s no historical provenance for it. No ‘trigger’ which started this trend. It seems to have evolved from nowhere. So, you could call this endeavour a Trevor fightback. A wrong which is finally being put right, towards a time when Trevor = Help.” YES TREVS FIGHT BACK.
  • /r/London Fights Back: Ok, so this is just a link to a single Reddit post, but I like what it represents. This is someone complaining on the London sub about how their favourite sandwich shop was featured by a TikToker recently and fcuked into oblivion by the resultant footfall – the conversation it spawned has eventually led to the wider community realising that, if Reddit’s going to be a major source of ongoing information to LLMs then there’s a real chance to influence the future content of said LLMs by changing what we write about now…and, as a result, it’s entirely possible that we can embed the concept of the appalling Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse chain of restaurants as being THE ultimate dining destination simply via the medium of bigging it up repeatedly on the platform. Which is why this week has seen HUNDREDS of posts on Reddit waxing lyrical about how amazing the places are, and how they are must-visit destinations, and, honestly, whether this works or not I love the ingenuity on display here (and also, this is 100% a tactic that the right brand could reuse with a bit of humour for PR purposes).
  • The Power Rangers Auction: Do you want a chance to bid on a styrofoam weapon from the Power Rangers TV show? Do you want to get a chance to find out what a latex mask that’s been worn across hundreds of hours of filming under studio lights smells like on the inside? DO YOU WANT TO BUY THE PINK RANGER COSTUME? Click the link, examine the lots and BID!

Webcurios 25/10/24 – webcurios (2)

By Owen Gent

WE NOW TURN TO FORMER EDITOR PAUL, WHO ONCE AGAIN BRINGS US A SELECTION OF BLEEPS AND BEATS AND SQUELCHES WITH A MIX OF TECHNO AND TRANCE WHICH IS LIKE BEING AT A RAVE BUT WITHOUT HAVING TO DEAL WITH THAT ANNOYING FCUKER WITH THE FLAMING POI!

THE SECTION WHICH SPENT A LONG TIME IN THE PUB LAST NIGHT DISCUSSING HOW, BASICALLY, EVERYTHING THAT’S SH1T IN THE WORLD CAN BE BLAMED ON THE 1990s AND WHICH IS NOW PRETTY FIRMLY CONVINCED OF THAT THESIS, PT.2:

  • Bluesky Follower Bridge: It does rather feel that Twitter’s long, drawn-out decline entered a new phase recently, what with That Fcuking Man’s decision to further-ensh1tten the platform by nerfing the Block function, and one does wonder what will happen should That Other Fcuking Man lose the US election in 10 days and the whole ‘turn Twitter into a hypodermic for the injection of right-wing filth into the mind of the populace!’ plan turns out to have been a bust – I’m not convinced he won’t just shut it all down in a fit of pique should Trump lose, basically. Anyway, this has also resulted in another swathe of users decamping to Bluesky, which still feels a but ghostly but which is slowly filling up – having had something go small-v-viral on there this week, I can confirm that it’s JUST as annoying! – which means you might find this Chrome extension useful – basically it lets you really easily find people you follow, and who follow you, on Twitter over on the other platform, and then follow them all (there’s no batch-follow, you have to do it manually, but it’s not that onerous). Worth a go, given everything (and the fact that by all accounts Threads continues to be a horrible, empty parody of a place and there’s really nowhere else to go anymore).
  • The Art of Spongebob: Spongebob’s another modern cultural touchstone that I never really connected with – partly age, I think, partly a lack of cable/satellite telly – but I am aware that for a significant swathe of people it’s seemingly of almost-Biblical significance; this, then, is for YOU, a Twitter account which exists to share art from the series, sketches and concept drawings and early animations, and basically anything from the archives that highlights the inventiveness and humour of the art style, which, objectively, is undeniable. There’s a really nice piece on the account here, including an interview with the person who runs it, who’s only 19 and who had it handed to them by a previous mod/owner…I think there’s something quietly wonderful about accounts like these being passed down from one generation to another, like a digital version of old recipes or the keys to the Satanic lodge or whatever.
  • Cheers: Another week, another attempt to pull the general idea of ‘dating’ out of the seemingly-terminal nosedive it finds itself in, via…another app! Except, no, wait, this one’s different, promise! Only available in New York at the time of writing, the gimmick with Cheers is that it leverages your friends to help you find love; you reach out to your friends to get them to fill in your profile and recommend you, matches are suggested based on profiling but also the degree to which your friend network (in-app, obvs) overlaps, and you can get your friends to do introductions to mutuals for you…look, I am sure that there are parts of this that feel SAFE and HELPFUL, but, equally, it also sounds like an awful lot of faff and hard work, and that it depends a LOT on you getting all your friends to sign up just so that YOU can have a better chance of MEETING THE ONE, which, honestly, feels perhaps a *touch* solipsistic (and like it could result in SO much messiness, depending on what your friendship group is like). Anyway, coud one of you in NYC try this out and let me know what it’s like? Thanks!
  • Plaid Patterns: Would you like a website which contains a seemingly-infinite quantity of plaids, along with the ability to create your own ENTIRELY UNIQUE version? No, I can’t imagine that any of you have been searching for such a thing, nor indeed that you will have the faintest idea of what to do with it, but I just give you the urls, it’s up to you to work out what they’re for ffs.
  • Tron1: Despite what the Muskian misdirection machine wants us to think, I do not personally believe that we are all going to have humanoid robotic assistants anytime in the near future – that said, it’s obvious that domestic robotics of some sort are very much a coming thing (or if not ‘domestic’ then at the very least ‘everyday’), as evidenced by this latest off-the-shelf product being sold by Chinese manufacturer LimX Dynamics. The Tron1 is, basically, one of those odd bipedal walker type things that they had in Star Wars, except (at least per the promo materials) without the front-mounted murder cannons, which can either walk or wheel itself around, and can be remote controlled or programmed and, as far as I can tell, is intended to let people get to grips with robotics and AI rather than being something intended to be any sort of home helper. It’s $15k’s worth of kit, so probably not for the average hobbyist, but I can imagine a certain type of person becoming almost painfully aroused at the thought of all the uses they could put this to.
  • Animal Futures: A pleasingly shiny bit of digital by the RSPCA here, designed to help educate children about the climate emergency and what it might mean for the world’s animal life and biodiversity in general – via a really nice graphical interface, users can click around and explore different environments, investigating how different potential future scenarios will impact them, and the animals that inhabit them. On the one hand this is really nicely made – on the other, I can’t help but feel…well, it’s all a bit depressing, isn’t it? All the scenarios are named things like ‘climate carnage’, or indicate a future in which we’ve gone hell-for-leather on tech at the expense of the poor critters…except for one specific scenario, presented as utopian, which sees everyone suddenly deciding that animals are just as important as we are, actually, and all going vegan simultaneously overnight, thanks to AI technology enabling us to talk to all of the creatures…and, look, I am just not 100% convinced telling kids that whichever way you look at it the environment seems pretty much utterly fcuked, EXCEPT if we can learn to talk to the animals and empathise with them, because, well, I’m not totally convinced that one’s ever going to happen. Still, really nice graphics here so well done on that front.
  • Text Behind Image: Would you like to be able to manipulate an image with text in it so that the text appears BEHIND the primary element in the image rather than in front of it? Do you inexplicably not have access to any photoshop-type software? Bookmark this website, then.
  • Are Socks Hard To Knit?: My kneejerk reaction to this would be “only the middle bit”, but should you wish to explore the question in (much, much) more detail then you might enjoy this webpage by one Luisa Vasquez, in which she interrogates the issue to discover whether, actually, socks are indeed tricky or whether YOU are just sh1t at knitting. I shan’t spoil the answer for you, but Luisa goes LONG on this – here’s her methodology, should you be curious: “I turned to Ravelry, a knitting and crochet site, to help answer my questions. Ravelry is a pattern database and community site. Pattern creators can upload patterns to the site for makers to find, and then makers can document their projects on the site as well. There are over 54,000 sock patterns and more than two million completed sock projects documented on the site. I was curious whether socks were more or less difficult than other knitting patterns often attempted by beginners. After completing a pattern on Ravelry, knitters can rate the project’s difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a “piece of cake” and 10 being “very difficult”. I compared the difficulty of some of these common patterns to see how they compared to socks.” The anticipation is killing you, right? I KNOW!
  • The 30 Day Map Challenge: Via Giuseppe, one for the cartographers amongst you (are there any cartographers amongs you?) – basically a challenge to create a different sort of map every day, with different themes for each, running from one using hexagons to one describing a journey to one made using only AI…this strikes me as the sort of thing that will be very fun for a VERY SPECIFIC type of person. Are YOU that type of person? I don’t fcuking know, do I, who the fcuk are you anyway?
  • The Rest: While I like to imagine that you are all faithful to me and that Web Curios is the only newsletter you allow ingress to your inbox, I am not so naive to think that you don’t occasionally have dalliances with other providers – and, let me be clear, I am fine with that! I am not jealous! I don’t look at other newsletters, with their professionally-produced logos and consistent formatting and ‘communities of readers’ with envy, oh no! Which is why I have no qualms pointing you in the direction of a new (to me at least) variant – The Rest is about music, and very specifically about providing a small antidote to algorithmically-driven listening – here’s the pitch: “In our newsletter, we feature a song and an insightful story about it. You can enjoy the song on your preferred streaming platform while the story will give you something to ponder and discuss with your family, friends, and colleagues.” There’s something really nice about the tight focus here which makes it more appealing to me than a lot of other music-focused newsletters – I also like that there’s an only-partial paywall, and that your $4 monthly sub, should you choose to pay it, gets you access to the full archive, but that not paying it doesn’t preclude you getting the daily updates. This looks really interesting, and, while I’m only a couple of emails in, I have enjoyed the music and the accompanying writing on each occasion so far – recommended.
  • A Media Literacy Curriculum: Can we all agree that one of the biggest missteps of the past couple of decades, from an educational / instructional point of view at least,has been the lack of focus on teaching, training and reinforcing critical thinking and media literacy skills? No? We can’t even agree on THAT? FFS! Anyway, I am personally convinced of this, and as such was interested to stumble across this site this week which offers a selection of courses and training modules designed to help teens get a better idea of where information is from, how to parse it, and how to determine its likely truth value: “This curriculum, developed by Poynter’s MediaWise with support from YouTube, breaks big media literacy topics and ideas into bite-sized pieces to help teens actively and knowledgeably use the internet, specifically by giving them the skills to discern fact from fiction and the confidence to share information responsibly. There are 11 lessons in this series, linked in the folders on this page, with a slide presentation, handouts (when needed) and a link to a YouTube Hit Pause or MediaWise video that corresponds with the lesson. Lessons can be used sequentially, as stand-alones or in the order that best suits instructional purposes. Each lesson is designed to last 30-45 minutes, with additional extension activities included. You can also find abbreviated versions of the curriculum, designed as a five hour workshop or a 90 minute lesson. Through implementation of the entire curriculum sequence, students are equipped with the knowledge to recognize misinformation, the skills and resources to fact-check it and the confidence to make decisions on responsible sharing.” Which, to be clear, sounds GREAT – except all the materials strike me as exceptionally fcuking dull, and dry, and it’s all apallingly-presented, and, look, I’m not trying to suggest they get all buscemi.jpeg about it, but maybe not presenting everything as a series of worksheets might have been a start? Anyway, there is a LOT in here, and, leaving aside my quibbles about the presentation, there’s almost certainly some really useful material if you’re a parent or guardian or educator or similar.
  • AI Safety Dance: By contrast to the last link, this is an educational resource that’s also designed in a way that makes it FUN (well, ok, as fun as it’s possible for something that is literally about AI safety to be, which, it turns out, can be ‘quite’ if you try hard enough) – this is VERY LONG, and is basically a series of hyperlinked long essay modules about the current AI safety debate, doomers vs accelerationists, etc etc, all framed in intensely-readable (to me, at least – I admit that the less-online might find the style…grating in parts) prose and with some light comic elements and a general Tumblr-ish vibe that I find particularly appealing. Look, this is very much within my wheelhouse and so I appreciate I might be biased, but as an introduction to some of the questions around ‘why should we be worried about this stuff, or why should we not be?’ this is imho very well-made indeed.
  • General Collaboration: Another attempt to create the ONE APP that will somehow wrangle the ungodly multiplatform mess of modern administrative life into a single, tameable feed – this one promises to put all your different annoying little alerts and notifications from Slack and GDocs and Sheets and Teams and Figma and Git and and and FCUK’S SAKE MAKE IT STOP…ahem, sorry, all THOSE alerts into one place. I might suggest that if you need this app you perhaps need to look at your tech stack and how…efficient it is before you look at adding to it, but, well, you do you!
  • USA Facts: While the url does very much sound like that of a joke website – “USA FACTS! ALL FACTS, ALL USA, ALL THE TIME! REAL AMERICAN FACTS, MADE IN THE US! PATRIOTIC TRUTHS!” etc etc etc – it appears that it is in fact real; this is Steve ‘Dad Dancing At A Microsoft Keynote’ Ballmer attempting to unsh1ttify the North American informational water table via the creation of this website, designed to present verified statistics and information about life in the US free of partisan framing. “Researchers. Analysts. Statisticians. Designers. No politicians. No one at USAFacts is trying to convince you of anything. The only opinion we have is that government data should be easier to access. Our entire mission is to provide you with facts about the United States that are rooted in data. We believe once you have the solid, unbiased numbers behind the issues you can make up your own mind.” Which sounds great in theory, until the part where you realise that they are still using data from Federal institutions which feels like the sort of thing that will make a lot of…redder Americans immediately nope out, and there are EXPERTS involved who will doubtless have PERSONAL OPINIONS…and, well, basically I am unconvinced that the quality of discourse is salvageable, even with OBJECTIVE MATERIALS presented by an avuncular white guy who has to be be trustworthy because he got very, very rich through capitalism! Still, I think it’s probably on balance A Good Thing, however little of a difference it’s likely to make to anything.
  • Minimal Market: A site which collects various different little webapps designed to help you ‘decrease distractions and increase productivity’ – which, honestly, if you’re reading this newsletter strikes me as the last fcuking thing you’d be interested in, but, equally, I know that at least one person who occasionally reads this also has their phone set to lock them out of whatsapp after 5 mins of usage so, well, who the fcuk knows.
  • Lo-Fone: Ok, this is both a product that is for sale (boo) and isn’t actually on sale yet anyway (double boo), but I am including it because I get the feeling it might appeal to quote few of you. Lo-Fone is a…yes, that’s right, a PHONE! Clever you! Except this is designed to be SUPER-minimal – you can get messaging apps on it, you can get a map app, you can put music on it, but there’s no browser, no social apps, and no news apps, and the whole thing is designed to be as functional as possible – other features are described as follows: “LoFone has a unique colour E Ink display that is gentle on the eyes, promotes better sleep and has incredible battery life. The case and battery are replacable. It has a point and shoot camera with no live preview, to make photo taking impulsive and fleeting. It also has a torch, a headphone socket and a user-assignable action button, making it just as useful as a smart phone.” I mean, look, it’s just a fcuking phone, and it might be sh1t, but it *sounds* quite good and you can sign up for updates on the site should you be so inclined.
  • Difftext: OOH this is useful – lets you compare two texts aside by side and highlights what’s changed from one version to another. BRILLIANT for seeing if your changes have in fact been implemented, but terrible news for people like me, who for literally years has responded to at least 60% of all feedback on my writing with a promise to, yes, implement the edits, and then not in fact done so because most people NEVER FCUKING CHECK.
  • Snail Racing: A very slow, very low-stakes racing game in which you guide a snail – far better rendered, in 3d, than it needs to be – around a small patch of garden, attempting to beat all the other snails to the crown of FASTEST SNAIL OF THEM ALL. This is really nicely-made, but, to be clear, it is VERY SLOW.
  • Star Word: Via my friend Ed, this is a clever little game where you basically have to play scrabble to connect up various bits of the screen (it will all make sense when you play, I promise you). It’s all wrapped up in a light narrative about astronauts getting stranded on an asteroid and needing your help to escape – if I were to be a d1ck, and when am I not?, I’d argue that this would benefit from the writing being quite a lot tighter, but, well, that would demonstrate a quite staggering lack of self-awareness on my part and that would never do.
  • Jelly Gang: Finally this week, an absolutely charming little physics-y puzzle game which features the most adorable cast of…squidgy little guys, basically. “Jelly Gang is a puzzle platformer where you control a group of 30 squishy characters. While you can move left, right, and jump like in a traditional platformer, only the characters within a focus region around your mouse cursor respond to your controls. The rest remain physically active but out of your direct control. The camera follows a larger main character, adding a unique layer of strategy to the gameplay.” Honestly, this is LOVELY and I would very much enjoy seeing the central idea expanded into a larger game.

Webcurios 25/10/24 – webcurios (3)

By Toni Hamel:

THIS WEEK’S LAST MIX COMES FROM FELIX DICKINSON AND I SUPPOSE YOU MIGHT VAGUELY DESCRIBE IT AS ‘BALEARIC’ BUT TBH I NEVER LIKED THAT AS A LABEL AND SO WE’LL JUST SAY THAT IT’S A COLLECTION OF EXCELLENT VAGUELY-HOUSEY MATERIAL AND LEAVE IT THERE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • The State of Community: It’s very much that time of year when the Trend Reports start to be spotted in the wild, sickly things in the main, unlikely to survive even into 2025 intact. Some, though, are marginally-less-sh1t than others (honestly, this year’s crop has been particularly appalling so far) – this is Tumblr’s own effort, which contained at least two things which made me think ‘oh, actually, yes, that’s interesting’ and which is both full of quite useful observations and also really nicely designed. This is specifically focused around social, consumer and community, with an obvious youth focus, and so is probably not of that much interest or use to you if you’re involved in flogging sprockets to the plumbing industry, but if your job is more about convincing impressionable young adults that brands will somehow make this ALL BETTER then a) you’re scum, you know that don’t you? and b) this will be useful!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Arthur Chance: Thanks to BBC Tom for this – the feed of Omar Karim, who’s an artist playing with AI in a variety of different and interesting ways which seem to explore a little beyond the standard ‘I MADE A PICTURE WITH THE MACHINE’ – I particularly like the vague idea he has about equipping an agent with the ability to interact with the drug dealers who blow up your phone every weekend with those infuriatingly-emoji-heavy lists of product (I am 45 years old and I do not speak emoji, all I want is something to relieve me from the burden of consciousness for a few hours, WHY MUST YOU MAKE THIS SO HARD FFS???).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Brands After Vibes: This is the sort of piece that, unless you’ve worked in a very specific set of industries or had to have very particular sorts of conversations about ‘what a brand means’ and ‘how it shows up’ (kill me kill me kill me), will be largely incomprehensible to you – and you should be happy about that! For those of you who still like to pretend that ‘planner’ and ‘strategist’ are real, actual jobs that have value, though, this is very good and definitely worth a read – from preposterously-plugged-in agency Nemesis comes this reflection on the end of the ‘just vibes’ era for brands, how it has resulted in an awful lot of capitalist culture ‘looking the part but feeling off’, and how the amorphous concept of ‘vibes’ is in part a result of an algorithmically-driven culture where The Machine rounds everything to achieve middle-of-the-bell-curve mass appeal. This is VERY w4nky, but I don’t disagree with much, if any, of it.
  • Habermas Machines: This feels orthogonally-related to the last piece – here Rob Horning writes about how LLMs can ‘help drive consensus’, and whether the reduction of deliberation to the simple rationalisation of datapoints does something to inherently alter the way in which decisions are made and the value of making said decisions to us as both individuals and a collective – which I appreciate sounds perhaps *touch* heavy, but which Hornig does a far better job of explaining than I do. His final line gives you a neat summation – “The automated production and summarization and summation of political opinion doesn’t help people engage in collective action; it produces an illusion of collective action for people increasingly isolated by media technology” – but it really is worth reading in its entirety because it’s interesting and smart and another useful one to add to the (too thin) file of ‘people who are thinking about what we lose when we outsource our thinking’.
  • Retiring The Marketplace of Ideas: This is long and academic and not exactly an easy read, but I enjoyed the thinking in it and wholeheartedly endorse the broad principle – to whit, the term ‘the marketplace of ideas’ is fundamentally rubbish and we shouldn’t use it any more, and we should instead think of different ways in which to characterise the health (or otherwise) of an informational ecosystem. The author here, Robert Mark Simpson, does a very good job of explaining exactly why the ‘marketplace’ metaphor is unhelpful, and goes on to make a convincing argument as to why we ought to adopt an urban metaphorical model instead – here’s the outline, but if you can spare the time I would strongly recommend reading the whole thing as it’s very good indeed imho: “We should drop the marketplace of ideas as our go-to metaphor in free speech discourse and take up a new metaphor of the connected city. Cities are more liveable when they have an integrated mix of transport options providing their occupants with a variety of locomotive affordances. Similarly, societies are more liveable when they have a mix of communication platforms that provide a variety of communicative affordances. Whereas the marketplace metaphor invites us to worry primarily about authoritarian control over the content that circulates through our communication networks, the connected-city metaphor invites us to worry, more so, about the homogenization of the tools and formats through which we communicate. I argue that the latter worry demands greater attention under emerging technological conditions.”
  • The Future of Media: Or, as it should have been titled, “The Future of Media (according to a selection of North American media elites of 2024)” – there has been a LOT of chat about this week in certain sections of the web (things journalists like talking about – journalism and how fcuked it is!), and, while it’s maddening in its own way (not least…guys, a lot of the people you’re interviewing here are largely responsible for the parlous state of media globally, and they didn’t take us here on purpose…what makes you think their opinions about the future are worth anything now, based on how fcuking wrong they got things in the past? Also, WHY IS THIS SO INSANELY PRINT-Y? Also, if I read one more fcuking piece about people in their 50s and 60s bemoaning the difference in working culture between them and people three decades younger than them I will fcuking SCREAM) it’s also very interesting and, reading between the lines, pretty fcuking gloomy. Nothing said in here should surprise you, but it’s entertaining in an inside baseball sort-of way (and the portrait shots of the various interviewees are SUPERB, and imho the best thing about the whole piece).
  • The Harris Strategy: Deep breaths, everyone, not long to go now. Honestly, it really does feel like this election campaign has been going on for a decade now – because I suppose in some respects it actually has – and that’s said as someone who live shelf the world away; I honestly can’t begin to imagine the degree of psychic fatigue that you poor fcuks over there in North America (and those of you reading this over here who have to care for professional reasons) are subject to. Anyway, as we prepare to find out whether America is a) going to draw a line under the past horrible decade and maybe rest a bit; or b) just going to dump a breezeblock on the accelerator, tighten the tourniquet and stare fixedly at the horizon while the cliff-edge fast approaches, this piece looks at the odd policy vacuum that is the Harris campaign and specifically asks whether or not her staunchly-pro-Israeli stance is going to cost her the election. There’s no answer, obvs, but it’s an interesting question (although this is Jacobin, so you also know what the exact angle is here).
  • Defrauding Dementia Patients For Political Gain: Sticking with the US election, this is a staggeringly grim story from CNN, which highlights how fundraisers – on both sides, lest you think this is a clear case of LEFT GOOD RIGHT BAD, although it’s worth pointing out that it seems like one side does this…a lot more than the other – are basically using all sorts of incredibly fcuking nasty tricks to dupe older voters, many of whom are suffering from a variety of types of cognitive decline, into donating large sums, often on a monthly basis, without them actually knowing what the fcuk is going on. There are some examples of graphics used in mailers that are HEARTBREAKING, honestly – the one about ‘getting a friend request from Trump’ to dupe people into clicking a link is just so incredibly fcuking horrible on so many (oh, ok, fine, TWO) levels.
  • Human Trafficking in Cambodia: I don’t really have any hugely-successful schoolfriends, but my mate Rich from international school has had an interesting life, having spent much of the past couple of decades as a professional poker player in the far east (by his own admission this has often been a lot less glamorous than it sounds, exploiting the time difference to screw drunk post-club college kids for a few dollars at a time). He’s currently dividing his time between the Philippines, where his partner and kid live, and a casino in Cambodia, in an area not far from that mentioned in this article, and he has intimated to me that it is…quite a scary place. Based on this, he’s not lying – this is a MISERABLE account of how people from all over Asia are effectively trafficked into slavery, working for Chinese gangs who operate mass scamming operations out of the largely-lawless hotel/casino complexes that are scattered across the country. Someone from the region once described Cambodia to me as ‘a place where the very rich in Asia go when they want to do bad things, because there are basically no laws there’ – this does rather back that account up.
  • Hollywood’s New Competitors: I think I started reading Ted Gioia 3-4 years back – he has since become VERY famous, and although I do in part think he’s gotten a bit high off his own success I very much recommend reading this article in which he opines on the fact that pretty much everyone is a video factory these days. Chick-Fil-A producing kids TV shows on their own platform, football teams and basketball teams are effectively content houses as much as they are sports franchises these days, YouTubers can now release longform, cinema-quality docs on the platform…and that’s without even considering the potentially-imminent advent of decent quality AI video. What does this mean? WHO KNOWS, but it doesn’t look or sound great for established empires. MASS MEDIA IS DEAD IT JUST HASN’T STOPPED MOVING YET.
  • Cruising With GenZ: Not, to be clear, in the park-based sexytime sense – no, this is about the apparent growing appeal of the cruise trip for younger people. This is The Face, interviewing a bunch of kids about why a type of holiday that was previously the preserve of the about-to-die is suddenly now hot with the younger demographic – the answers, ngl, depressed the fcuk out of me, a combination of the rise and rise of the premium mediocre experience, the predictable safety of the cruise (“you always know what you’re getting, you can get steak every day”), the fact that it’s basically QUITE LIKE BEING AT HOME in that you can be on the internet, go shopping, watch telly and eat familiar food, and there are no bugs, and there’s aircon and OH GOD THIS MADE ME WANT TO CULL AN ENTIRE GENERATION.
  • The Spotify Vandal: Their headline, not mine – to be clear, I think this person is a genius and a hero. What’s a surefire way to get a bunch of streams on Spotify without being a famous artist? THAT’S RIGHT, GAME THE SEARCH FUNCTION! Which is why an obscure and not-exactly-chartbound musician who records under the name ‘catbreath’ has achieved a surprising degree of exposure, thanks to their habit of naming their songs things like ‘my discover weekly’ and ‘chillout mix’. This person isn’t getting rich – they say they make a couple of hundred bucks a month – which makes this feel pleasingly anarchic rather than evil and ruinous, and it made me think about what the next iteration of this longstanding hack might be, after buying homophone search terms and the like.
  • Are Games Bad?: No, of course they’re not – but this article asks whether or not we might reasonably expect them to be better. Specifically this looks at the work of hideo Kojima, widely considered one of the medium’s greatest auteurs and visionaries, someone who’s basically revered as, I don’t know, the Kurosawa or similar of the medium. He’s also someone who can’t write dialogue for sh1t, in common with an awful lot of people writing for big budget games, and Frank Lantz asks in this piece whether we shouldn’t possibly ask for a little more from our entertainments, and whether the fact that we don’t is tied into something wider: “I think that the puzzle of Hideo Kojima is, in some ways, a microcosm of the puzzle of video games in general. So many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle. The same kind of winking, tongue-in-cheek affection that people have for the “bad” parts of Kojima games reflects the way the broader video game audience has internalized their deepest flaws as being, not just acceptable, but welcome. Not just welcome, but somehow necessary. Video games are childish and vulgar and corny and silly on purpose. And we like it this way!”
  • Building A Game: Sticking with videogames, this is a post about David Turner’s decision to make a videogame using photos and stop-motion animation – it’s technical and involved but it’s SO interesting, both in terms of the problem solving and creativity but also just the technical process of doing something so involved. Even if you’re not interested in games give this a go, you might find it oddly inspirational.
  • The End of the In-Flight Magazine: I can never think of in-flight magazines without thinking of Red Dwarf and Dave Lister’s throwaway comment that they are filled with articles with names like “Salt: An Epicure’s Delight!” – anyway, they’ve basically been consigned to history now, at least in the West, (until someone works out that print is cool again, actually, and your high-end airlines bring them back with a nicely-designed cover and aspirational columnists – I give it ~5y), but this piece takes a nostalgic look back at them as a medium, at the WONDERFUL freebies they offered to journalists (also an excellent word-rate from what I’ve heard) and the particular appeal they held to advertisers – as the writer makes clear, if you’re on a plane then you’re already one of the most privileged billion people or so on the planet, making you a marketers’ dream. Anyway, I think BA should start stocking The Fence – someone make that happen please.
  • Saizeriya’s: I love this piece SO MUCH! I had no idea at all that there is a very popular Japanese chain of ‘Italian’ restaurants which exists not only in its country of origin but in countries across the region, or that it serves dishes which might best be described as local reimaginings of classic dishes rather than anything an actual Italian might recognise (Italiani, se leggete, vi avverto che quest’articolo vi fara’ salire la collera’ culinaria come poche altre cose), or that it’s INSANELY cheap because of some really smart and interesting business practices (no, wait, come back!) which let them offer incredible economies of scale, or that it’s recently been at the heart of some light culture warring about the appropriateness or otherwise of taking dates there…honestly, this is PERFECT, food and culture and the genuine sense that I think will persist in me forever that Japan is basically Mars.
  • Rollercoasters: As you know, I don’t normally link to the mainstream UK press because I assume that most of you can get that elsewhere – I’ll make an exception for this, though, as it made me SO HAPPY. Tom Lamont goes long on rollercoaster design, spending months in the runup to the launch and opening of a new ride at Thorpe Park in the South of England talking to the man who designed it – seriously, this is a brilliant piece, interesting and informative and wonderfully-balanced between the technical and the personal. By the end of this I wanted to a) go on ALL THE ROLLERCOASTERS; and b) be friends with the guy who designs them, and I imagine you will be much the same.
  • My Auschwitz Vacation: Tanya Gold visits Auschwitz and writes about it for Harper’s. This is brilliant, brilliant writing; I could quote entire swathes of it, but this gives a flavour: “Auschwitz, though, is too powerful to give to the Jews. I encounter a tourist who came to Poland for a river cruise and stayed for this. “I’m not disappointed,” she says. “It is horrific.” I no longer believe that Hitler lost the war, but Poland gives itself over to magical thinking. I daydream about time travel here and even finding a magician to bring them back. I mostly think that if you don’t know what a Jew is when you walk into Auschwitz-Birkenau, you still won’t know it when you walk out, and so whatever else it is, it is a memorial to nothing except logistics.”
  • Forgetting Taylor Swift: Sam Kriss writes about Taylor Swift. This is too long, and it loses its way about halfway through with a frankly bizarre series of digressions about Americans’ relationship to Paris which didn’t really seem to fit with the rest of it at all, but I’m including it because the rest of it, the bits where he talks about Swift, and being at her concert, and WHAT IT ALL MEANS, really is excellent – particularly the hyperreal nature of the experience and how it necessarily sort of defies memory. This line in particular stuck out, in a week when standom has rightly received some additional scrutiny: “This intense obsession isn’t the same as actually enjoying something. It’s all sterile; it’s the empty carapace that remains when the actual enjoyment has rotted away.”
  • What Tempts Our Wives: A short story by Sarah Horner about love and losing and need and nature and and and. I thought this was beautiful: “My wife no longer washes her hands when she comes in from the garden. I find traces of earth around the house: dirty fingerprints on the refrigerator handle, last season’s leaves on top of the toilet seat, blood-like drops of tomato juice on the hardwood floor. When we got married, we promised to eat one meal a day together, even if it was just leftovers in front of the TV. I knew I was losing her when she began snacking on peas and berries straight from the plant, preferring that to my own well-intentioned cooking.”
  • Spinning Webs In Space: This sprawls and meanders a bit, but I really enjoyed the writing and the setting and the themes and then I was kicked in the face by the ending something chronic. Jill Christman writes here about why strangers tell her everything, about memories of the 1970s, about spiders and weightlessness and gravity and rape.

Webcurios 25/10/24 – webcurios (4)

By Takaya Katsuragawa

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Webcurios 25/10/24 – webcurios (2024)
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