The best links of 2024, part 1
Featuring Matt Muir of Web Curios
It is decisively the most wonderful time of the year: the season of rapacious gift guides, viral Spotify memes and ubiquitous retrospectives. Here at Links, I am not immune from the backwards pull of a year-end round-up. Also, candidly, I’ll be traveling for much of the next two-and-a-half weeks … which wreaks HAVOC on our regularly scheduled editorial calendar.
So! From now until the end of the year, Saturday editions will look a bit different: I’m bringing you the very best links of the year, as (arbitrarily and subjectively) chosen by me and three very special guests. We’re kicking things off the best way I know how — namely, with the author of my long-time single favorite newsletter, Web Curios. Curios is a weekly treasure trove of eclectic, obscure, bizarre and wonderful internet finds, written by the hilarious writer and digital consultant Matt Muir; Matt’s finds never, ever fail to surprise and delight me, and I have been reading for centuries1 now.
Last week, I asked Matt to specify how many links he thinks he reviewed last year; he estimates it’s something “really, really troubling,” in the neighborhood of 15 to 20,000. Matt’s trouble is our gain, though: He’s a truly gifted curator. So, without further ado, here are Matt’s favorite links of the year, from surreal short-form skits to solar-powered games to “evanescent windows” on humanity.
Plz check out Web Curios if you’d like more of these!
Matt Muir’s favorite links of 2024
Over the course of the year I probably look at … oh God, I don’t actually want to type the number as it’s genuinely embarrassing and suggests I am wasting my life entirely. Let’s leave it at “over the course of the year, I look at a LOT of links” — and as such, choosing a selection as “the best” is, frankly, impossible. Still, I think each of these is, for different reasons, good and worth your time, and hopefully you will maybe agree. Good fcuking riddance 2024.
One Minute Park: For the past couple of years, my friend Kris and I have been running the Tiny Awards, celebrating the best of the small, independent, handmade web. This year’s winner of the public vote was One Minute Park by Elliott Cost, and it is LOVELY — click the link and you get presented with a full-screen video, in landscape, which lasts for exactly 60 seconds and which presents a delightfully, perfectly mundane scene filmed in a local park somewhere in the world. That’s it — after 60 seconds, the scene shifts to another park somewhere else on the planet. No more, no less, just small, evanescent windows into slices of quiet humanity.
The HTML Review: The HTML Review is now in its third edition (the fourth comes out soon). It features a beautiful selection of digital projects that can best be described as … er … hang on … look, they call it “literature made to exist on the web,” but I might go a bit further and characterize it as “essays and poems that do interesting things at the intersection of prose and code, and which as a result make you think about language, meaning, context, syntax and all sorts of mechanical/symbolic things that you might not ordinarily think about when looking at stuff on the internet.” (On reflection, their description was better.)
The HTML Review collects 17 different works by a variety of writers, artists and coders, each of which is both a poem or an essay AND a piece of interactive digital art. There’s “Game of Hope,” which is both an allegorical essay about Pandora’s Box and an expiration of Conway’s Game of Life and the math that underpins it; “Monodrift,” a sci-fi story told in fragments of journal text and recordings that speak to the fragmented, decaying nature of digital records and the ephemerality of The Online Now (and AI, and personhood, and and and); “Dumpling Love,” which invites you to go on a digital walk with the artist; or my personal favorite, “Paramecium Dinner,” in which bacteria eat and digest and excrete your words to make new, slow, random poetry from scraps of language.
This stuff really is gorgeous and pretty much the antithesis of livvy, baby gronk and the drip king, if you want some sort of “sliding scale of digital modernity” to go by. (And if those words meant nothing to you, congratulations on having achieved a significantly better web/life balance than I have.)
Known Mysteries: This is a … how do you describe this? 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, “an autonomous solar-powered web server run from [an] apartment balcony in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.” It’s maintained by Kara Stone, who also wrote Known Mysteries, for the purpose of hosting low-carbon and environmentally themed games. So, to start with, that’s just really cool.
But also, the game is GREAT. Seriously, it’s superb — it’s more a visual novel, fine, but it’s brilliantly written and well-paced and the treatment of photos and imagery and video that make it all work as a lightweight website on a small server actually works in service of the narrative. 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.
Sudden Death: This is effectively a short story/novella, about 40-50 minutes long, but it is VERY good. Sudden Death tells the story of an Aussie Rules football team trying to break into the big time, of queer love, of success and sacrifice, etc. … and it’s all presented in a hyper-stylized, multi-window, multi-format fashion with vaguely CGA graphics and a cracking soundtrack. (The technoish music accompanying the football games in particular is excellent.) Generally, this is a really good example of how to do a relatively “straight” (if you’ll pardon the pun) linear narrative in a way that makes the most of the browser window as a delivery mechanism. Really very good indeed, and very much worth your time — I am both boringly straight and understand NOTHING about Aussie Rules, but I still thought this was fcuking great.
Horse Master: This is actually a link from a decade or so ago, but I only found it this year and so we will pretend it is fresh and new and exciting. Horse Master is a … game? One that, per the blurb, “challenges players to grow, train and nurture their own horse from birth in the hopes of earning the most coveted tenured position in the world: Horse Master.” Except it’s also a very, very good — and very twisted — short story. Again, this is a brilliantly inventive exploration of what you can do with narrative and storytelling using the tricks of gameplay and interactive fiction that web interfaces afford. It’s also worth pointing out that it’s … quite unsettling, and a bit unpleasant and body-horrorish at times but, well, that’s part of the “fun”!
Trisha Code: Every now and again I find something on the web and I am struck by a) how amazing it is and how wonderful people are and how boundless and weird human creativity is; and b) why the fcuk no one else seems to be anywhere near as enthused about it as I am. Trisha Code is, honestly, one of the most exciting things I have seen in ages, but — with apologies in advance — I am probably going to have to try and explain why.
So … Trisha Code is a YouTube channel, on which the creator posts a series of short (30 to 60 second) sketch-type vignettes done using various AI tools. The channel’s been going for just under a year, and there are a bunch of videos on there, including three compilation “episodes” (Trishasodes!) which, for my money, is where this really shines. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how much it is worth your time to take AT LEAST 15 minutes to watch the first compilation (… and then another 15 to watch the second, and then another 15 to watch the third).
“So, Matt,” I hear you ask. (Worryingly, I DO actually hear you ask that — the voices, they get louder and however hard I type I cannot drown them out.) “What exactly is it that makes these things so ‘great’ then?” WELL LET ME TELL YOU! To be clear, the AI production techniques are in many respects the least interesting thing about these videos — they’re made using (I think) a combination of Midjourney/Flux, Runway and a few other tools, and they are pretty slick by the standards of this sort of tech … but that’s not what makes me excited. Rather, this is the first AI thing I’ve seen where the medium and the format just sort of work perfectly — the surreality of AI video and how it warps when you attempt to sustain it too long lends itself perfectly to short, quick-cut editing, which in turn informs these sketches and the songs.
Trisha’s sketches are all short-form skits: either rapping/singing (again, I LOVE the style of this — both sort-of-almost-good and actually quite bad, which I know doesn’t sound like a recommendation but really is one) or spoof adverts or trailers for imagined films or TV shows or odd little kitchen sink vignettes featuring odd monsters or aliens. They also feature an occasionally recurring cast of supporting characters and callback gags. I think what I like most about this is that the person making them really *gets* the format — like, not everything here works and there’s no guarantee that you will find it all (or indeed any of it) funny, but it has a flow and a feel to it that is a million times more coherent than any other AI-led video project I’ve seen. The writing is also, in the main, genuinely quite good, and it feels like a nice, Centaur-y combination of human and machine.
Basically this is what I think is GOOD about AI — someone with clear ideas being able to use these tools to make something that simply wouldn’t be possible without them. And yes, I know: the planet! The burning! The artists! The copyright! But, equally, I also have no time for the (to my mind) lazy “oh well, if it’s AI then it’s automatically evil” argument. This is interesting creative work using interesting creative new tools, and if you can’t see that then, well, sorry, but you’re wrong.
100s of Beavers: I am the sort of weirdo who genuinely has no interest in films or TV shows. (I don’t have any streaming subs and my television is used solely for video games.) This isn’t some sort of pathetic brag so much as an admission that films have to be either REALLY ODD or ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT for me to care. Fortunately, 100s of Beavers is both — a truly incredible film, free to watch on YouTube for those of you in North America (or with access to a VPN), about one man’s quest to secure hundreds of beaver pelts in the wilderness. Except he’s basically trapped in a Looney Tunes cartoon. And the beavers are all played by people in obvious beaver costumes. And it’s a bit like a video game. Honestly, this is the funniest, most creative piece of film-making I have seen in YEARS and possibly the perfect family film for your festive season — it really is spectacular and I recommend it to you unreservedly.
“Don’t Bleed On The Artwork”: When I originally read this essay by Wendy Brenner back in March, I thought it was likely to end up on many people’s “best of the year” lists. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s still very much on mine: This is a beautiful piece of writing about working at a picture framers, except of course it’s not really about that at all (… apart from when it very much is).
“Behind The F1 Velvet Curtain”: This article attracted a lot of attention earlier in the year for being commissioned, published and then very quickly pulled by Road & Track magazine, who perhaps weren’t expecting its author to bite the PR hand that was feeding it quite so hard. I think, though, that it should have attracted far more attention because of how superbly it’s written, and how wonderfully Kate Wagner manipulates, skewers and subverts the very idea of a press junket puff piece.
“It’s Not What The World Needs Right Now”: Andrew Norman Wilson published this essay in April about his experience of Being An Artist, and its cold, slightly affectless, Easton-Ellis-tinged prose (no, wait — that’s a compliment, I promise!) has stayed with me in the months since. I think this is utterly superb writing, and a near-perfect distillation of what the international fine art world looks and feels like from the hinterlands.
“The Last Swinger”: My final pick of the year is actually one from 1996 — a truly astonishing profile of the late Tony Curtis by Tom Junod for GQ. Really, they don’t make stars like that any more (perhaps for the best), and they don’t tend to let people write profiles like this anymore either. (Or, when they do, the writers often tend not to quite have the chops to land them.) This is louche, garish, loud, flamboyant, elegiac, sad, terrible and brilliant all at the same time, often within the same sentence, and it’s a pleasure from first word to final phrase. Enjoy.
In case you missed it
… wasn’t that weird and fun and wonderful?! Again, I really recommend Web Curios. And while you’re checking that out, perhaps you’d also like to revisit last year’s most popular Links Originals. For the next four weeks, I’m using this section to count down the 12 posts that you all read most in 2024. Here’s the first bundle!
12. An essay on grief, miscarriage and the unsettling ministrations of an AI app.
11. I interviewed the designer and writer Jarrett Fuller about the “aesthetic consolidation” of the internet.
10. For our very first reading guide, I trawled all kinds of women’s sites and online archives to find the most (in)famous viral essays of the 2010s. Honestly, this post should’ve been more popular. EVERY entry is a gem.
Thank you, as always, to the paid subscribers who make this work possible. It takes many, many hours to produce both the weekly link round-up and the dozens of pieces of original reporting and analysis that I’ve published this year. If you appreciate this work and would like to contribute directly to the sustainability and success of this little project, you can do so here.
That’s it for this week! Stay tuned for another guest next weekend. I’ll be back with my favorite links of the year later in December.
Warmest virtual AND holiday regards,
Caitlin
In internet years, to be clear.
As a coda to the Behind the F1 velvet curtain story it got republished here https://escapecollective.com/behind-f1s-velvet-curtain/
Big fan of Web Curios