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CurioBot

@curiobot.bsky.social

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A bot posting links from the Web Curios newsletter (www.webcurios.co.uk), because, weirdly, not everyone wants to read 10,000 words at a time. Unlikely to reply to you.

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CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 9h

A Short Note on Racism

https://samkriss.com/2015/02/24/a-short-note-on-racism/

A Short Note on Racism: This, by Sam Kriss, is 10 years old; I can’t remember how it floated across my timeline this week, but it’s a very good piece of analysis of how ‘racism’ has become something so unconscionable that noone will admit to being it anymore, but which is still very much prevalent as part of society; “It’s strange. For a long time anti-racists have been trying to show that racism isn’t just an overt expression of hatred towards one racialised group or another, that it’s an unvoiced hierarchy structurally embedded in the fabric of society, that the construction of race itself is mutually inextricable from racism – and yet after all that, when someone performs the most basic, crude, open expression of racism, she’s unable to recognise it as such. In a way we’re the victims of our own success. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine a slightly more literate racist-apologist defence of Ms Duncan: of course, what she said was unacceptable, but it wasn’t really racist; after all, racism is a structural relation, and what’s one person’s simple prejudice next to the large-scale bigotry of an impersonal system?” Slightly (slightly!) depressing that a decade on it’s still perfectly-resonant, but, well, hey ho!

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 11h

How Many Cigarettes

https://howmanycigarettes.com/

How Many Cigarettes: Also probably not a Tumblr! Still, if you’ve ever wanted a site that keeps track of exactly how many tabs get smoked during the course of a variety of popular films then WELL aren’t you in luck! This is GREAT; the current prize for smokiest film currently goes to ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ (no, me neither), but you will be unsurprised to learn that Casablanca is right up there. Why not make it your aim to smoke along with a few of these? EMPHYSEMA FOR CHRISTMAS!!

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 13h

Blind & Stumbling

https://sickpleaseohno.itch.io/blind-and-stumbling

Blind & Stumbling: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this…what is this? A visual novel, I guess, except it’s all pink and pixellated and a bit hard to read, and it’s basically about having a very, very bad trip, and to be honest it’s just sort of unsettling and quite horrible and I can’t in all honesty say I *liked* it, but, equally, I really did love it rather a lot. Can these feelings exist simultaneously? CLICK THE LINK AND FIND OUT!

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 15h

Bopmatch

https://bopmatch.com/

Bopmatch: Ooh, this is fun – a quiz where you’re asked to match artists based on their relative popularity on Spotify. You’re presented with a singer, and your job is to guess another artist who you think will basically have a similar degree of appeal on Daniel Ek’s munitions fundraising platform. Thanks to this I just discovered the slightly-surprising fact that Lana Del Rey is apparently more popular than Beyonce – WHO KNEW?

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 17h

Clues By Sam

https://cluesbysam.com/

Clues By Sam: A daily online version of one of those ‘every sister has a dog; how many uncles does it take to remove the fencepost?’-style logic puzzles, this is actually really nicely-designed and I like the fact that it explicitly prevents you from guessing as you move through the questions.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 19h

Idle Game Maker

https://orteil.dashnet.org/igm/

Idle Game Maker: SUCH a fun resource, this, if you have the time and the inclination. You know those ‘clicker’-type games, right? Well this lets you make your own – it’s surprisingly flexible, if a little technical, but if you can stomach the idea of basically ‘having to write the whole thing out as a txt file’ then you could create something potentially rather fun; in particular I love the idea of creating very personal, very bespoke clicker games as presents for people, as a small thankyou or tribute or acknwoledgement, or, and this is, I concede, VERY unlikely to appeal to any of you but, well, just in case, there is 100% at least ONE person out there right now for whom a proposal via the medium of idle clicker game would be the key to their heart and loins forevermore. IS THAT PERSON YOU????? Honestly, I now want nothing more than to hear of someone popping the question with one of these, can one of you weirdos make that happen please? FOR ME???

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 1d

Yawaraka Jazz

https://www.youtube.com/@yawarakajazz
https://kottke.org/

Yawaraka Jazz: A YouTube channel featuring some EXCELLENT crackly vinyl mixes – these are seemingly all just done by one person from what I think is their house, God love them, and are WONDERFUL; seriously, bookmark this, it’s a wonderful selection of relaxing, beautifully-selected records and a generally soothing autumnal vibe, should you be in the market for such a thing (and look, it’s mid-September ffs, IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN???). Via Kottke.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 1d

Pin2Saved

https://pin2saved.vercel.app/

Pin2Saved: It’s been fun watching Bluesky take up a specific and slightly-weird position in the media consciousness, simultaneously a DYING NETWORK but, also, a DANGEROUS HOTBED OF VILE LEFTIST HATE – should you be one of the decreasing numbers of people persisting with the site (I am too, I NEED MY INFOFIX FFS) then you might find this cobbled-together feature useful. Bluesky recently launched a proper ‘favourites’ function, letting users bookmark posts for later; previously there had been a vague etiquette trend that you would reply to a post with a ‘pin’ emoji to indicate that you wanted to be able to find it again later, and with this little webtool you can connect your account and automatically get the posts you pin-replied to reclassified as bookmarks. Which is a neat and useful little solution that I imagine will be germane to, at most, one of you, but, as you know by now, I LOVE YOU ALL AND WANT EACH OF YOU TO BE HAPPY, HOWEVER FCUKING NICHE YOUR INTERESTS ARE!

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 1d

The Story Arc Engine

https://aistudio.google.com/apps/drive/1C3lSDqxnZlHkYlOdxW60sGiqmgm5KYC6?fullscreenApplet=true&showPreview=true&showAssistant=true
https://arnicas.substack.com/
https://aistudio.google.com/apps

The Story Arc Engine: An interesting little Google AI toy – again via Lynn – which lets you type in the name of any book or film you care to mention and which will, in seconds, offer you a plot-point breakdown of said book or film, showing you the various stages of story and plot development across five major narrative pillars; this is a neat little proof-of-concept showing what you can build with Gemini, but, equally, feels like something that might be useful if you’re studying screen or scriptwriting or if you’re FINALLY thinking of embarking on that novel at long fcuking last (stop talking about it, just write). If you’re curious you can find a bunch of other AI-enabled tools and toys built on top of the Google stack here – there’s a lot of interesting usecases here should you care to explore.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 1d

Dole/Kemp 96

https://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm

Dole/Kemp 96: I don’t imagine for a second that any of you have a particularly strong desire to remind yourself of Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign for the US Presidency, but, in case you do, it turns out that the campaign website is still online, preserved as though in amber, with all of the early-web stylings and design quirks you might expect (you can even download Bob Dole wallpaper, which, ngl, I am weirdly-tempted by) – I am linking to it here because of how incredibly, almost impossibly, quaint it all seems – not just the tech and aesthetic but the messaging, the complete absence of scare tactics or attack lines, no mention whatsoever of who they were running against, no apocalyptic predictions of the terrible events that would befall the world if you made the mistake of voting the wrong way…look, let’s be clear, the world was terrible in many ways in 1996 too, but fcuk me was it appreciably less shouty.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 1d

100 Lost Species

https://www.100lostspecies.com/

100 Lost Species: A site seeking to draw attention to species being lost through extinction – it presents you with artists’ portraits of 100 different species which we have already lost, with information about each (where it lived, when we finally killed the last one, etc etc), with the additional gimmick that you can only spend 100 seconds on the site before it kicks you off because DO YOU SEE TIME IS RUNNING OUT DO YOU SEE?? Which is fine but, well, it does rather mean that you just fcuk off and go elsewhere at that point and stop thinking about the site entirely; oh, and the ‘artists’ portraits’ are in fact AI generated, which, well, does rather feel ironic given the whole ‘environmental impact of the machine’ thing. Hey ho.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 1d

The Straight Acting Brotherhood

https://straightactingbrotherhood.com/

The Straight Acting Brotherhood: I feel I need to caveat this with a big NO JUDGEMENT tag – but, also, it made me laugh a LOT. The Straight Acting Brotherhood is a membership organisation, apparently international, which is designed to foster connections between men who like men…but only ‘straight-acting men’. If you join – and it’s $150 a month, or a one-time fee of $2500, a BARGAIN!! – you get access to, er, a network of other straight-acting men, all of whom apparently have GOALS and AMBITIONS and who want to CRUSH IT just like you; there’s a degree of confusion here as to whether what you’re buying into is, to put it impolitely, some sort of an international fcuk club of BROS (but, you know, also gay) or whether this is some sort of HIGH-PERFORMANCE ACHIEVEMENT RETREAT, or whether it’s both (not sure how the high performance achievement squares with the whole ‘meeting other guys for judgement-free boning’ bit, but webs), but you will apparently meet all sorts of other LIKEMINDED GUYS who are all CRUSHING IT. I think the reason that this made me laugh so much was in part the obviously-bullsh1t nature of the offering, and in part the utter HORROR of the accompanying images; seriously, just click the link and look how SAD all the pictures look, the lonely existences depicted, the poorly-lit pics, the apartments so sparse and spartan that, honestly, no gay man I have ever met would ever consider living in them… this is one of the more ridiculously-depressing things I have seen all year, and I think you will enjoy it a lot.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 2d

I’m Not A Robot

https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/

I’m Not A Robot: Friend of Curios (and Tiny Award 2025 judge) Neal Agarwal knows a thing or two about making Fun Internet Stuff – this is his latest MASSIVE HIT GAME, which sees you attempting to defeat a series of increasingly-involved and deranged CAPTCHAs to prove your humanity in the face of a skeptical web browser. This gets very silly very quickly and is FAR smarter and better-designed than it needs to be.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 2d

A Wall of Gifs

https://gifs.alex.works/
https://rotatingsandwiches.com/

A Wall of Gifs: A fullscreen scrolling canvas animation of old Gifs, pulled from the Internet Archives’ old Geocities collection, scrolling randomly from right to left and presenting a pleasingly-hypnotic visual slideshow of a very specific aesthetic. I like this a LOT, and would quite like someone to supply code to create something similar with different source imagery – I would LOVE to see this with nothing but, say, rotating sandwiches, for example.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 2d

The Audubon Photo Awards Winners 2025

https://www.audubon.org/magazine/2025-audubon-photography-awards-winners

The Audubon Photo Awards Winners 2025: One of the more pleasing of the annual photo contests I feature in here, the Audubon Society, as you all OBVIOUSLY know, is the US bird enthusiasts’ club and this is their annual celebration of pictures of overevolved dinosaurs. My personal favourite here is the shot of the Savanna Hawk because, basically, it feels quite OF THE NOW, but, as ever, I invite you to pick your own.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 2d

Meteora

https://sites.dddoss.eu/meteora/

Meteora: Ooh, this is fun! Pick different cities, MAKE MUSIC FROM THEIR DATA! It’s…very minimal and won’t win any awards for its aesthetic presentation, but the basic gimmick – “This website uses openly available meteorological data (openmeteo API) to generate sounds depending on the weather of the location typed” – is a nice one, and there’s something pleasing about trying to make some sort of symphonic composition out of the fact that it’s going to be 80% humidity in Jakarta today. It’s fair to say that making anything…good out of this is proving challenging, but if you really like atonal drone music then WOW are you going to have yourself a fun time.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 2d

Pendulum

https://bigjobby.com/pendulum/

Pendulum: It’s a pendulum simulator. Ok, fine, a DOUBLE pendulum simulator. Basically this is maths at its most hypnotic.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 2d

Chrono Trains

https://www.chronotrains.com/en?city=London%2CGB

Chrono Trains: I LOVE THIS! Plug in any train station in Europe (those of you on other, less-good continents will have to go without, I’m afraid) and this website will show you exactly how far you can travel on the continent’s rail networks within a set period of time. Useful for those of you looking to see how easy it will be to flee the scene of a murder using environmentally-friendly means, or, er, just looking to plan a travel itinerary. Oh, AND it gives you links to buy tickets for the journeys it plans out, which is just perfect. I COULD GET TO MARSEILLES IN 8 HOURS FFS. What am I *doing* with my life? Why am I sitting in my pants in Vauxhall typing words about the internet when I could instead be about to visit Southern France and drink pastis and throw fireworks in the streets with wild Mediterranean abandon? I am TERRIBLE at being alive.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 3d

Random

https://vasilis.nl/random/
https://vasilis.nl/random/works/cowards-heroes-salads/

Random: A selection of digital design and computation expermients by one Vasilis Van Gemert, which, per the explanation, “explore the visual effects of random numbers on colour, form and time.” These are divided into categories and subcategories – daily works, specific technical studies, etc – and then further within those; there is a LOT of work in here, it’s presented in a very minimal and unshowy-manner, and, if you’re interested in colour and digital design and specifically-constrained visual arts projects, along with automated creation based on code and algorithms, then I think you will find a lot to love here. Although I am utterly baffled by what is going on with the mini carrots and the peeled cucumbers here.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 3d

Orifice

https://orifice.heirloom.co/

Orifice: Regular readers will recall that one of the occasional annual highlights of the web calendar is the end-of-year roundup by Defector of ‘things we got stuck inside ourselves this year’, drawn from US medical reports – this is, sadly, not that (WAIT A FEW MONTHS MY IMPATIENT PRETTIES!), but it *is* a tribute to, well, people putting things inside themselves, put together by a design company called Heirloom. It is very pretty and it made me laugh. To be clear, this is entirely safe for work, but I can’t promise it won’t give you ideas.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 3d

Clyx

https://clyx.com/

Clyx: It feels like we are very much in peak ‘APPS TO FOSTER CONNECTION LIKE WHAT WE USED TO HAVE BACK IN THE OLD DAYS’ season – Clyx is *very* buzzy at the moment, but it’s essentially another in the ‘communities based on your interests that you can take offline’ family of apps; per the strapline, “We’re bringing online communities together IRL through themed moments inspired by their favorite internet obsessions” (which, let’s be honest, is SPECTACULARLY clunky even by the standards of this sort of terrible positional marketingw4nk). What this practically means is that it’s a combined events/map service which shows things that are happening, filterable by interest/event type (gigs! Talks! Knitting circles! You get the gist), which also acts as a ticketing and lowkey social portal? Basically like DICE but with better local discovery and more of a social layer, as far as I can tell – oh, and it’s very much aimed at WOMEN (it says so on the app page and everything) so I presume the hope is that it doesn’t get clogged up by gross men attempting to share pictures of their erections in a space very much not designed for that sort of thing. Is this good? Is it useful? Will it take off and revolutionise the whole process of going out and deciding what to do? I have literally no idea, why don’t YOU decide?

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 3d

Elitist Britain

https://elitistbritain.suttontrust.com/

Elitist Britain: Those of you reading this from the UK may be SHOCKED to learn that there is a strong, longstanding correlation between ‘having gone to public school’ and ‘being in charge of stuff’ – I KNOW!! This is a newly-launched website presenting data from the Sutton Trust which breaks down, sector by sector, the percentages of people in senior positions who were either public school educated or went to Oxbridge, giving you a neat breakdown of exactly which of the UK’s main industries are most riddled with oldschool elitist bias. There is, perhaps depressingly, nothing in here that’s likely to shock you – most MPs and members of the judiciary and members of the media classes were educated at elite institutions, which is something you have probably noticed if you’ve paid even a passing iota of attention to How Stuff Works here – and if I’m going to be critical (and why the fcuk shouldn’t I? What’s that? Because I’m a useless no-mark who doesn’t actually make or achieve anything? I mean, it’s a fair point but, well, I’ve started, so) I might suggest that the website’s, well, a bit dry, and not very compelling, and does rather present WALLS OF TEXT and quite a lot of very similar-looking/sounding data without quite making it shiny or interactive enough to capture the interest of the casual browser (to which the Sutton trust might reasonably respond that this is a serious piece of work and they didn’t have either the time or money to waste on emblazoning it with all sorts of unnecessary digital distractions, which, well, fair enough really. Two things stood out to me, in passing: a) the ‘creative industries’ here are restricted to ‘tv and film’ and ‘pop stars’, which feels…well, a bit reductive to be honest; and b) ‘influencer’ is the most-democratic category of all when it comes to educational background, which is…both sort-of good and also interesting from the point of view of the idea of the creation of a new small business/entrepreneurial class and how that might track politically (back to the ‘we are all small business owners now’ chat from the past few elections, if that rings any bells). Anyway, there’s a bunch of potentially useful and interesting information in here if you either want to MAKE SOME POINTS about a specific industry and its closed shopness or if you just want to feel a bit impotently sad about the extent to which life outcomes continue to be determined by stuff like this.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 3d

A Clock

https://www.aclock.live/index.html
https://theclock.fandom.com/wiki/The_Clock_Wiki

A Clock: We begin with something WONDERFUL. You may – or you may not be, what do I know, who the fcuk are you, etc – be aware of an artwork from 2010 called ‘The Clock’ by artist Christian Markley; in case you’re not, it’s a 24h piece of video art which is composed entirely of clips from films which are about the time, all cut together to create a whole day/night cycle from these moments in fiction, with the passage of time being marked by either the hour being mentioned in dialogue or shown on a clock on-screen. For both practical and art world reasons, the work is a touring piece which is only available to see in galleries, meaning your chance of seeing it is entirely dependent on it and you sharing a hemisphere at the same time (and your having the time and inclination to go and check it out) – which is why, to DEMOCRATISE THE ART, a mysterious person known only as THE CLOCKMAKER (look, if that’s what the want to be called) has seen fit to remake the whole thing, ish, based on this shotlist compiled by fans. To access the whole thing you have to pony up a fee – which, honestly, feels reasonable, this is a frankly-insane amount of work – but you also get access to a 10m snippet just by logging in as a free-tier Patreon member and I can’t stress enough how much I recommend it; this really is quite quite wonderful, and I am genuinely quite tempted to chuck THE CLOCKMAKER a few quid so I can return to this at various points during the day to see how it progresses. This is BEAUTIFUL and visually compelling, and despite there being no central narrative thread whatsoever it’s impossible not to start creating your own internally-coherent set of explanations for how the vignettes link, which in itself is its own nested act of storytelling…SO GOOD, click the link and enjoy.

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 3d

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5UaTIndo30

Finally this week (it was a slow week for vids, what can I say? STOP COMPLAINING), this is the new one from Iona Zajac who I think might be my favoutrite musical find of the year. This is called ‘Dilute’ and it is once again melodic and beautiful and sad, and I think this person ought to be a LOT more famous than they are, so, well, tell your friends. Or don’t, I will never know. Anyway, THAT IS IT I AM OFF I HOPE YOU ARE OK AND ABLE TO KEEP YOUR FACE OUT OF THE NEWS THIS WEEKEND I LOVE YOU BYE!

CurioBot @curiobot.bsky.social · 4d

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsSFytc7_8g

TURN THIS UP LOUD. This is Ho99o9 with ‘Target Practice’, which is just over a minute of EXCELLENT shouty rap/hardcore.