New toys & tools from the internet!

For Fun Friday: Find anything cool lately on the world wide web?

Today’s Fun Friday may well be the simplest one of all time. I was going to say laziest, but that would imply that I am lazy, whereas I am the hardest working man in Substack business. Who else dishes out five (5) editions a week for such a ridiculously low price? Well, OK, Heather Cox Richardson. Yes, I know she has 2.7 million subscribers. Listen, with the kind of money she has coming in I bet she has assistants who do a lot of the work, like Alexandre Dumas. Besides, it’s easy when you’re doing straight politics — I also do funny stuff, and I’m a dab hand at arts criticism too, so I’m using whole big areas on my brain that Heather Cox Richardson doesn’t even touch with her newsletter, how dare you fling her in my face. Yes, I know about Tangle, everyone knows about Tangle, look, buddy, you wanna prompt or you wanna get out of here?

Sorry. I am a little worn out. When was my vacation? Six weeks ago? Oh my God. I barely remember it, I barely remember feeling rested from it, I feel like I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the 20th Century, maybe before that. I’m disintegrating. I’d say I’m disintegrating before my own eyes, which is a suitably grisly image, but not quite right because I barely go around mirrors anymore since my face began to sag and buckle like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. The end is near. I’m finished. Substack is a young man’s game. I’m just too —

Wait, what am I saying? Based on the volume standards of the trade I’ve been writing for the equivalent of a hundred and fifty years. I’m a master of English prose like Faulkner or Conrad or Ken Follett. I may not have millions of subscribers but the ones I have are choice. They are intelligent people of many parts with lively interests, men and women of the world, and they look forward to my ravings each day because they know quality when they see it. Maybe there aren’t 2.7 million people of such discernment in this whole sad and sorry world but, like God, I know my own and they and I will serve as Substack’s saving remnant if it’s the last thing I do and it probably will be.

This week’s prompt is really simple, though. Remember when we talked about how the internet was once a world of wonders where you would often discover, not just pornography and hate groups, but also and mainly delights that had once been faint hopes which technology now made real?

This is sort of like that but less sweeping. In truth it’s hard for the internet to surprise us as it used to, mainly for reasons of enshittification; it may be that the new wave of tech advances that would make such innovations possible would require serious backing by our tech overlords and their donors, but they instead devote their cash and energy to greed, stupidity, and fascism.

But! New apps and sites sometime pop up that are fun, and maybe even useful. We all run into these from time to time. So tell us about one of your discoveries.

Me, I’m currently delighting in Radiooooo. It’s an app to which I was introduced by another of my recent discoveries, @gabbie of New Music for Old Heads. Her music curation is very good, though little of it adheres to my desiccated memory banks, but she recently promoted an Offline Crush post with a bunch of music tech in it, and Radiooooo set my head on fire.

You can tell at a glance what it does; you spin the globe, pick a country and a decade, and it will start playing you tunes from that time and place. You may be surprised at how widely the musics vary even in the present era — though modern Western pop influences have infiltrated everywhere, you will notice that, like the Romanian radio junk the gig worker protagonist listens to as she speeds around Bucharest in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, each one still carries a local lilt. And as you go back in time — and some of the nations have playlists that go back to the early 1900s — you enter distinctly different worlds. (BTW “Lezghinka” by Organez, recorded in Armenia by the Gramophone Company in 1909, is not on YouTube but it’s on Spotify.)

I’m currently mesmerized by crazy 70s beats from West (Super Mama Djombo) and East Africa (Iftin), but there’s plenty to get lost in — not only a world of music but more than a century of it.

What have you got?