Webcurios 06/05/16

SHALL WE KICK OF THE MIXES WITH A WOOZY SELECTION OF HIPHOP BY DRAE DA SKIMASK? WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS IS REALLY GRATEFUL FOR THE LACK OF BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS IN THE WORLD OF S*C**L M*D** THIS WEEK AND WHICH WOULD QUITE THIS TO CONTINUE FOR THE REST OF 2016 THANKS:

• Instagram Business Profiles IN THE WILD: SUCH a slow news week. We knew these were coming, but they are now beginning to be visible – profiles for businesses which feature all sorts of EXCITING business-related gimmicks such as the ability to email a business directly from its Instagram profile, access to maps, and the ability to categorise your business by type (which means, as ever, that at some point in the future you will inevitably be able to pay money to ensure that you rank highly in the coveted ‘London Haberdashery’ Instagram category. Not available in the UK yet, to my knowledge, so probably best not to get too ‘excited’ about this just yet.

• Instagram Launches Video Carousel Ads: You know those multi-image carousel ads you can do on Instagram? You can now do them with videos, too – the format supports 3-5 units, letting buyers mix and match video and stills. There’s probably a cute gimmick or two in here that you could play with in terms of the creative – telling a STORY (sorry) across the panels, maybe, although whether anyone outside of advermarketingprwankerdom will notice or care about your brilliance is, as ever, questionable.

• You Can Now Save Periscopes: Twitter once again plays catch-up to Facebook on functionality; now that EVERYONE can use Facebook Live to not only stream to the world but also to create a replayable permanent record of said stream, Periscope too is abandoning its 24h lifespan for its streams – users can simply include #save in the streams title and it will be available in perpetuity. Useful and inevitable. By the way, the reason I’m linking to a TechCrunch piece rather than the announcement itself is that they announced this as a live stream which you can now rewatch – a staggeringly inefficient way of delivering what’s a 2-sentence concept which made me really quite annoyed. VIDEO IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER FFS.

• Snapchat Launches First eCommerce Tie-ins: Inevitable, really. Ads for Lancome and Target (interesting polar opposites there on the luxury spectrum) running in Spachat Discover, with a simple ‘Swipe To Shop’ action which takes users to a ‘BUY THIS THING’ page. Almost certainly only available in the US to eye-wateringly high-spending brands, but if you sell stuff to THE KIDS then this should be very much on your radar as a THING for the future.

• What Is Snapchat?: ‘A terrifyingly vivid and confusing symbol of everything which is wrong and frightening about the future’ may well be your default position, but this short TechCrunch piece contains a couple of interesting lines from founder Evan Spiegel on how its cameracentric focus defines the platforms role; might be useful if you’re thinking ‘BUT HOW DO WE, BRAND WITH A DESPERATE THIRST FOR MILLENNIAL RECOGNITION AND VALIDATION, MAKE USE OF THIS STRANGE AND TERRIFYING NEW SET OF TOOLS?’. Might not, mind.

• Soundcloud Ads Go Live In The UK: Oh, and they’re also launching the premium subscription service and Spotify competitor ‘Soundcloud Go’ over here too, but really the ads are the thing. ‘What sort of ads?’, I hear you cry, feverish with anticipation: “these will include audio spots; in-stream “native” ads; promoted profiles; and creator partnerships”, comes the frankly underwhelming answer. Speak to your Soundcloud rep TODAY for details – again, for the right brand I think this is a worthwhile platform to explore.

• Soundtrack Your Brand Expands To US: Sticking with audio – and remember, David Shing once said that audio was going to be ‘really big in the future’, so PAY ATTENTION! – Spotify is launching its ‘Soundtrack Your Brand’ service, running streaming in retail outlets, to the US from the Nordics. Worth keeping an eye on how it works, as should it do OK it’ll be over here pretty soon too.

• YouTube Working On TV Subscription Service: Pretty speculative this one, to be honest, and it’s been bubbling about for a while now, but if you work in TV you should be halfway aware of the fact that this is potentially a THING happening next year in the US.

• Google Slides Q&A: Pretty tedious, this, but possibly actually quite useful – Google Slides is Google’s PowerPoint clone, which this week announced that you can now use the free software to get live questions and feedback to any talk as you give it. Simply give a url to the audience – they can submit questions and comments, as well as voting on other audience members interactions, which seems like a brilliant (and, crucially, free) way of adding interactivity to events. Still really dull, mind.

• Diadora Make It Bright: As Cannes approaches, so we start to see those campaigns which seemingly exist solely to win a Lion. In this case, Diadora have put together a LOVELY site to accompany a stunt they did in which the first person to pre-order a new line of shoes got theirs delivered to them by hand as a result of a relay which took the footwear from their place of origin in Italy to his flat in Barcelona. You can see all the people who participated in the relay on the site, there are HEROES and STORIES and stuff, but, well, this is an awful lot of work (and money) to spend on what is basically an award entry. Hope you win, guys!

• Instagram Escape The Room Game: Look, well done, you get a pat on the back for being clever and using the format in INTERESTING WAYS. Just, er, take a look at the numbers on these videos, though. I would be FASCINATED to know how many people have actually interacted with this in any meaningful fashion, although I suspect that whoever’s behind this would probably prefer to keep that number secret…

• KHOLE Talk Sleep: A welcome return to Web Curios for brand consultancy / modern performance artists KHOLE, the Brooklyn trend analysts who, you will doubtless recall, brought us the glorious Normcore a few years back and who have since continued to churn out reports about YOUTH CULTURE which are so brilliantly oblique as to be utterly meaningless. This time they tackle SLEEP, commissioned by TRENDY MATTRESS STARTUP Casper – if you find sentences such as “If Buzzfeed’s modus operandi is OMG, a connected mattress’ is ZZZ. In 2016, our über elites’ obsession with ROI has backwashed into every aspect of our lives. Both laughter and luxury are expected to perform” as wonderfully awful as I do, or you need to sell mattresses to THE KIDS, then you will like this a lot.

• The Douchebag Strategist: The Douchebag Strategist is a bot built by Roberto Estreitinho. The Douchebag Strategist is EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US. This is so good – go through the timeline and see how many are plausible enough to be dropped into any agency conversation or strategy without a pause (clue: most of them). “The idea is to leverage millennials through un-branded content” – yes, Douchebag Strategist, yes it is.

LET’S KICK ON WITH THE HIPHOP AND CHECK OUT MEYHEM LAUREN’S LATEST EP ‘PIATTO D’ORO’!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PROUD TO NOW SAY WHAT WEB CURIOS HAS OUTLIVED A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER – THANKYOU, 17 LOYAL READERS! (PT.1):

• Gifs.com: This is so, so good. Really, I properly mean this – SUCH a useful tool if you need / want to make gifs quickly and easily. Plug in any url from YouTube (other sites are also supported, OBVS) and it quickly brings up a video editor which lets you isolate your gifable moment from the clip, add effects and a caption, and gives you a unique URL for it, all with a simple interface. I made this BEAUTY in less than a minute, and if I had to do this sort of stuff semi-regularly I would make this my default free online tool for gifcreation. They have not paid me ANY money for this endorsement, but if they would like to I am open to offers. Oh, and they embed nicely on Twitter too.

• Shine: Are YOU an insecure wreck of a human being who needs daily validation just to get out of bed in the morning? Are YOU in the (actually on reflection really quite sad and not at all the sort of thing which should be glibly mocked in a niche newsletter about the internet) sad position of not having anyone to give you said validation on a regular basis? Well FEAR NOT, as Shine is here to help – launching earlier this week, the app will send you a platitudinous message about, you know, BEING AWESOME or somesuch trite crap, every morning, complete with the occasional gif because LOLS, to help you escape from your malodorous-yet-comforting duvet prison. Look, if this works for you I’m not going to judge, but there’s something coldly awful about needing software for this I think.

• Fullest House: Full House is an old, long-running and (from what I can infer) much-loved US sitcom; this site collects scripts for the show generated by a neural network which is going back over the show’s old scripts and using them to churn out its own. This will go on FOREVER, so potentially we’ll have something which sort of vaguely makes sense by the mid-2200s. Dip into these and take a look – they’re broadly nonsensical, but there’s just enough of a shadow of coherence to give them a slightly creepy and desperately broken air which I quite enjoy. You can read more about the project here if you’d like.  

• Pictofit: As far as I can tell, this is witchcraft. Pictofit is, if it does what it says it does and looks halfway decent, a supersmart piece of tech. Basically it’s a clothestryingon app – you upload photo of yourself to it, and then snap photos of clothes you like as you see them (either in the real world or by importing pictures seen when browsing online). The app then – and this is the clever bit – warps the clothing so as to fit on the photo of yourself you supplied it with, meaning you basically have a virtual shop’s dummy of yourself to try clothes on with. You can then share these mockups with others to get their approval of your sartorial choices, but frankly that’s the least interesting thing about this – if it manages to avoid looking hugely shonky I could see this doing rather well.

• When To Leave: If you’re a ceaseless travel optimiser, incapable of doing ANY travelling without obsessing about how best to shave off a few seconds from your journey time because EFFICIENCY (you know who you are) then this might appeal; you tell it where you’re driving from and it tells you the average and current traffic times based on Google Maps traffic data – AND lets you set an alert to tell you to leave once the projected journey time drops below a certain threshold. Gimmicky on its own, but there’s something in this which is pretty thievable I think.

• Franz: Slack, Facebook, Whatsapp, Gchat, Skype, Wechat, Telegram, and the sodding rest; I think it’s pretty clear that WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE FCUKING MESSAGING ALTERNATIVES PLEASE. Franz is a Windows download which integrates all your chats from the above platforms, and more, into one place, which is hugely useful if you ‘do’ chat (I try not to, the format gives me the fantods tbh).

• Billshark: Another concierge service outsourcing the more tedious aspects of quotidian mundanity, this is US-only but I reckon could happily be exported over here (or, er, copied). Billshark works on a simple premise – you send them a photo of your bill(s), they run off and see if they can get you discounts on said bills by exploiting offers, loopholes, etc, you pay them a 25% commission on any savings which they accrue on your behalf. Do MoneySupermarket have a concierge service? Maybe they ought to?

• The Star Wars Galaxy Map: Given that this week saw the annual ‘tedious franchise related pun day’ it seems only fitting to feature this Google Maps-style depiction of the Star Wars universe. Is it canonical? I DON’T CARE.

• A Hot Viking: If you are the sort of person who would really, really appreciate a bunch of pictures of a strapping, bearded, 6’6” Norseman, often with his top off, shot in a variety of Athena Poster-friendly poses, this will be RIGHT up your street.

• RetroMinder TV: Don’t really know why this exists, but perhaps there IS no reason; this is a retro-themed site which posts a whole bunch of clips from old VHS films and invites you to name the actor or character in the clip. Totally pointless, but worth sending to younger colleagues to make yourself feel old.

• Toilet Guru: There may well be other, more comprehensive websites out there about public conveniences all over the world, but if so then I’m yet to find them. This has been around for AGES, but is no less brilliantly weird for it. I particularly like the ‘about’ page, in which the site’s admin Bob Cromwell rather prissily suggests that it’s not he who is obsessed with toilets, it is the visitors to the site; well, yes, but mate, let’s be clear, YOU PUT THIS TOGETHER AND IT IS FCUKING ENCYCLOPAEDIC ON THE SUBJECT OF SANITATION FACILITIES. You have to accept that it looks a touch obsessional.

• Seenapse: Seenapse describes itself as an ‘Inspiration Engine’ – you type in a ‘thing’ and it spits out a bunch of stuff vaguely related to that thing which it hopes will provide you the user with some sort of creative inspiration. Basically what I have long been saying to anyone kind enough to listen that I would like to build from the Curios archive, and which ONE DAY will become a reality to the sound of crushing global indifference.

• Duograph: If you like Spirographs (and WHO DOESN’T? No fcuker, that’s who) then you might want to back this Kickstarter, already funded, which is going to put a SUPERLUXURY SPIROGRAPH FOR GROWNUPS into production. You don’t need it, but you might want it.

• Nixie: “The First Wearable Camera That Can Fly”, proclaims the website, breathlessly, which is an incredibly future statement when you think about it. It’s a little wrist-mounted drone, with a camera attached, which can fly on command and film you while you do your thing, and which (and this is the fun bit) will return to you on command like a technocameraboomerang. Obviously this doesn’t actually exist yet – the future is very good at promoting itself in advance, it turns out – but the videos on the site make it look really cool. When do you think we’re going to get to the point where kids can have wrist-mounted toy fighter planes which take off and fly and zap each other with lasers? Can it be soon, please?

• Tastemates: I think this is a nice idea – then again, I would as it’s an idea I have been banging on about for about 5 years (without, OBVIOUSLY, doing anything about it at all). Tastemates is effectively a dating app which works based on shared interests in films, TV, music, etc – it also lets you watch and listen to stuff directly from the app. Using a Tinder-style interface you can swipe to select what you’re into (and what you’re not), see who else is around nearby with similar tastes…you get the idea. You can also see to what degree people’s tastes match yours, which is where I think it gets interesting; I like the idea of being able to select matches with people who share, say, 60-70% of your tastes – enough to know you’re sort of similar, not too much to be boring. Always thought there was something in this type of mechanic for Time Out, personally. ARE YOU READING THIS, TIME OUT? Eh? Oh.

• Quiet Time: Politely, secretly and temporarily mute people on Twitter. Useful, particularly on post-election or post-football days.

• Open Library: I just checked, and remarkably I haven’t featured this before. Over 1million free ebooks – SO MUCH READING HERE.

• What Were You Wearing: Unsurprisingly very affecting photo project by artist Katherine Cambareri, in which she photographs the clothing worn by victims of sexual assault at the time the attack took place. Highlighting the preposterousness of the (sadly ubiquitous) “what were you wearing at the time of the attack?” question, this is starkly awful but also a smart project which I think has interesting applications for the right charity.

• Videorama: Powerful phone/tablet video editing tool for iOS – text overlays, Nollywood-style SFX, you can do the lot with this.

• Trump Against Humanity: Cards Against Humanity, except with all the standard copy replaced by Donald Trump quotes. Produced by ‘creative incubator’ Sid Lee Collective, these are currently only available by application on the website – like they won’t get a full production run, though, once the emails start flooding in. The sort of thing that will only be funny if America doesn’t do the stupid thing (it won’t, will it? Any sort of reassurance here would be helpful, as I’m getting a *touch* scared now).

• Relay Maps: Simple, custom maps for travel – create routes, itineraries and the like, with the ability to make multiple maps for multiple trips. Pretty sure that there are other solutions that do this already, but the interface is nice and I liked their launch video.

• Joel Dongsteen: Utterly childish, but, I’m ashamed to say, it made me laugh a lot. Joel Dongsteen is a Twitter account which tweets out inspirational messages about God, but replacing ‘God’ with…er…’your dick’. Yes, yes, I know. If it makes you feel better you can argue that it’s actually some smart satirical commentary on how men feel about their genitalia (did you know that, back in the day, the word ‘cock’ was a term used to refer to God? WEB CURIOS TRUFACT, there).

• National Geographic Travel Photos of the Year: It’s still accepting entries, but this is a selection of some of the more spectacular entries to date, courtesy of The Atlantic. Glorious, as you’d expect.

• The Wayback Pack: Script which lets you download the entire Wayback Machine archive of any given site’s history, should you so desire. Interesting should you be doing some journalising around, say, how a political party/brand has changed its site over time (for example).

HOW ABOUT SOME BREAKS AND BASS FROM SAM BINGA’S AUSTRALIAN TOUR? HERE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PROUD TO NOW SAY WHAT WEB CURIOS HAS OUTLIVED A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER – THANKYOU, 17 LOYAL READERS! (PT.2):

• 2016 Is The International Year Of Pulses: I am shocked and appalled that it has taken me nearly half of 2016 to wake up to this momentous fact, but I encourage you to spread this far and wide. CELEBRATE THE PULSE! WORSHIP THE LEGUME!

• Watch Videos in Fast Forward: You know how annoying it is to sit through videos at normal speed when you’re just trying to find the weird bits? Well consider that problem SOLVED, with this rather helpful Chrome extension which lets you watch YouTube and Netflix and Facebook videos in fast forward at the push of a button. I have JUST realised that it’s a promo by MINI, which is REALLY rather clever I have to say. Anyway, useful.

• People & Crosses: Photographs of crucifixes in Romania. Read the statement at the top for the HIGH CONCEPT – I personally just quite like the pleasingly shonky nature of most of the Jesuses on display here.

• The Whimsical Woodsman 2017 Calendar: I know it’s early, but if you know someone who likes their men BEARY then this may well be the best Christmas present you could get them.

• Glossy: Glossy is a brand new online magazine which operates at the intersection of technology, luxury and culture – if you work in and around clothing and digital, there’s probably enough stuff of relevance to your job here to make this worth bookmarking.

• The Evolution: Wonderful collection of illustrated gifs by the very talented Prasad Bhat, depicting different famoses in different roles over the course of their career. Brilliantly done.

• The Sales Call Abyss: If this is real, it is BRILLIANT. Allegedly what gets played to nuisance sales callers by some unnamed individual, I challenge you to make it more than a few minutes through this. Another in the long list of things I encourage you to set up to play on a loop before leaving the office for a very long lunch.

• Adaptoys: This is such a lovely project, seeking to raise funding for a range of toys designed to allow children (and in fact anyone) suffering from varying degrees of paralysis to experience play in a normalised fashion. The headset-controlled RC cars are a GREAT idea – if you know anyone who’s got kids who are wheelchair bound, this might be worth sending to them.

• Agnelli Bikes: Half hipster, half steampunk, these bicycles are made in Italy from the reconditioned chassis of old motorbikes. I can’t work out whether they’re brilliant or sort of horrid, but they’re definitely eyecatching. Coming to Deptford ASAP.

• PocketChip: A weird cross between a Raspberry Pi and a retro console, the Pocket Chip Pico8 console lets you build and refine your own, simple 8-bit handheld games which you can then play on the console or share with others. If you or your kids are into game design and programming and are slightly retrofetishistic then you will love this, I think.

• The Woman Cards: One of the few positive things about Trump is that he’s prompted quite a few little projects like this – taking the preposterous suggestion by Trump that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is based on ‘the woman card’ (that well-known…er…trump card in US politics, amirite?), this is a now-funded Kickstarter for a nicely illustrated deck of playing cards celebrating American women. A Good Thing.

• Face Makers Mascots: Upon seeing this site, I realised that not enough agencies have mascots. This company will help you address that – order a corporate mascot costume from them TODAY, and use it as a shaming mechanism to incentivise underperforming account teams to SELL MORE DIGISPAFF, else they be forced to don the suit of humiliation. I mean, LOOK AT WHAT YOU COULD GET.

• Project Include: Oh-so-well-meaning project aimed at creating a framework for tech companies to improve their diversity, offering “perspectives, recommendations, materials, and tools to help CEOs and their teams build meaningful inclusion.” Should it be this hard? Should you need a framework to, you know, just not hire people who are all white men? I’m not 100% convinced that this is going to make ANY difference to anything, but maybe I’m just a miserable cynic (I’m just a miserable cynic).

• Geocities FOREVER: Procedurally generated Geocities homepages, brilliantly capturing the aesthetic and just general wonky weirdness of the pre-MySpace virtual community of choice. As pointed out on the homepage, the Turner Prize has been won for less than this.

• Audobon Photo Awards: EXCELLENT photography of birds, which I promise you is about 300% better than you think it’s going to be before you click.

• My Trans Health: Excellent US initiative collecting information for trans people at all stages of the journey on medical matters – you tell it how you identify, genderwise, and where you live and what you need help with, and it pulls from a database of medical providers who have experience dealing with trans issues. Helpful, and the sort of thing which would be worth establishing in the UK also.

• Scifi London 48h Challenge: Once again Scifi London this year ran it’s 48h film challenge, in which anyone could submit a short film inspired by a particulr brief and completed in 48h total – this site collects the 10 shortlisted entries, which if you’re into scifi and/or filmmaking are pretty interesting, and are worth checking out even if you couldn’t give two figs about scifi because frankly anything cobbled together in 48h tends to be at the very least interesting.

• Graphtreon: A site collecting information and data about people on Patreon (the site which lets people who make stuff source subscriptions to pay for their output). Mainly of interest for its ranking of the top-ranked artists on Patreon – there are some SIGNIFICANT monthly sums being raked in, and some really, really weird and niche things being funded. Bottom line – if you’ve ever thought ‘Hm, I wonder if I could actually make a living out of selling mygraphic illustrations of slashfic scenarios  to Tumblr fandoms’ then the answer, based on this list, is an emphatic, spunky yes.

• Hermicity: I don’t understand this at ALL, but I was partly convinced that it was part of a new Radiohead thingy when I saw it on Monday. Read this and see what you make of it “A hermit colony ran as a decentralised autonomous organisation on the ethereum blockchain. We now have the technology to allow people to live completely alone. Drones will airlift soylent packets and water to the members of the hermit colony. Membership is paid with ether to a smart contract. The smart contract sends drone from a solar powered docking station to the members.” YEAH, OK.

• ReTech: Interesting art / maker project which takes old tech and repurposes it to create working arttech sculptures with a heavy steampunk/junk art aesthetic. Which, I’ve just realised, is a hideous and near-meaningless jumble of WORDS; you should probably just click the link and check it out. Sorry, having a bit of a 10am flag here.

• 3 Words For Paris: Cute project, this, which feels like it should be an official touristpromo thing but which doesn’t seem to be. You plug in three words of your choosing to the site, and it presents you with a video of Paris stitched together from clips tagged with your chosen terms. Not sure how flexible it is, or how big the vocabulary is, but it’s an interesting and nicely-presented take on the neverending Subservient Chicken knockoff conveyorbelt.

• The Lyttle Lytton Winners: Another year, another collection of wonderful examples of the art of the dreadful first line of a novel. As ever, this page collects a selection of the best entries, of which my absolute favourite is this masterpiece: “Call me Bastardo Medio, for my costume is black, my skin is pasty white, and I am one muy malo hombre.” I would read the fcuk out of this book, no question.

• Visuwords: I featured a visual thesaurus last week, but this one knocks it into a cocked hat. Type in any word and get synonyms, use cases, information on sentence construction…all presented in a really rather nice floating bubble visual interface. Wordy people, you will find a lot to love here.

• Find Face: This is currently only in Russia, and currently only works on VK (their local popular social network), but as a ‘scary harbinger of future doom’ it’s a doozy. Find Face lets users input a photo of anyone, whether taken from the web or from a cameraphone snap, and uses said photo to find the subject on VK. Which means, let’s be clear, that you could surreptitiously take a photo of a stranger on the tube and then track them down online for IN NO WAY STALKY fun. Or, as is currently happening in Russia, use it to take photos of adult performers to find their social profiles and send them abuse. Ah, WHAT LARKS!

• Stroovy: Despite the much-documented furore of Peeple (see Curios passim), it seems we’ve not got over our desire to apply arbitrary ratings to people online. Welcome to the party, then, Stroovy, whose appalling tagline ‘Stroove Before You Groove’ (I really hope noone got paid for that) fails in any way to explain what it actually does – to whit, let people post reviews of people they have gone on online dates with, to let OTHER people check out what past…er…’users’(?) of a date thought about the experience. This will OBVIOUSLY not lead to a whole load of needless unpleasantness, oh no siree.

• iAnimal: Smart use of 360 video/pseudo-VR for campaigning purposes, this site by PETA-esque organisation Animal Equality uses 360 video to explore the condition suffered by livestock in intensive farming; it features all the sort of footage you’d expect of pigs in cramped conditions and the like, and is as good an argument for eating free range as you’ll ever see – plus there’s a BONUS ENDORSEMENT from Peter Egan, so, you know, GREAT.

• Snapshorts: Let it be known that I don’t endorse this AT ALL. Ahem. Have you ever wanted to own a pair of swimming shorts which are decorated with a print of one of your photos off Instagram? Would you pay close to £400 for such a pair of swimming shorts? If the answer to those questions is ‘yes’, I’d politely invite you to stop reading and go and take a long, hard look at yourself (but then to come back, because frankly I could do with the numbers). Also, they are called Snapshorts. SNAPSHORTS. What are we become?

• Creatures Of Yes: I don’t really know what to make of this. It’s like the Muppets – I mean, really like the Muppets, but the old, 70s Muppets, where everything was a bit brown and faded. It purports to be done on 70s equipment and in a replica 70s studio, and the look and feel is just PERFECT; the short videos on display here are less overtly odd than, say, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”, but there’s something off about each of them, and the more you watch the odder they get – sort of like Muppet Scarfolk, but less obviously a parody. Basically you should watch a few of these, possibly when stoned, and see if they grab you.

• Radzyn Stories: Finally this week, this is a WONDERFUL collection of stories and interactives, all centred around the fictional town of Radzyn, a place of safety for the Jewish diaspora for centuries. Obviously, you know, really Jewish, but the goyim will enjoy the stories and the gently explanatory nature of the project with regard to Jewish history and terminology (or at least this one did). Gorgeous artwork in the stories, also.

FINALLY, WHY NOT TRY SOME UK R’N’B-TYPE STUFF FROM THE EXCELLENT OLIVIA LOUISE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Craigslist Plates: Documenting all those instances where people putting a car on Craigslist can’t work photoshop to blur their license plate and so try to obscure it in the listing photo with a poorly-placed fingertip. Obviously a DEEPLY IMPORTANT site, this.

• Bosch Work Memes: Characters from the paintings of notorious weirdo Hieronymous Bosch, accompanying world-weary “WORK SUCKS” memecaptions to surprisingly excellent effect.

• Profound Insights: Criminals captured on CCTV, captioned with the sort of motivational insights which, if you’re anything like me, inspire you to commit grievous acts of physical harm on those sharing them.

• Hattie Stewart: Hattie Stewart draws on photos and her work is STRONG. Commission her now.

• Parliament Fights: Not in fact a Tumblr, but what does that matter? Everyone loves watching videos of politicians from around the world lumping seven shades of each other – the volume of entries here is sort of depressing, though, on reflection.

• Are There Lesbians?: Analysing popular culture for its depiction of lesbian characters. Not, let’s be very clear, the sort of ‘yes, there are lesbians, and they get naked at 13:32” website you may be hoping for.

• Once Upon A Town: Photos of 19/early-20 Century towns, mainly in America. GOD THINGS WERE BETTER AND SIMPLER THEN (apart from the disease, the oppression of minorities, the grinding poverty and the lack of distraction from the base-level horror of existence, obviously)

• Bad Flags: Collecting BAD FLAGS from around the world, and offering helpful suggestions as to how they could be improved. Which is nice.

• Trumphole: If you, like many, are convinced that the words of The Donald are equivalent to excreta, then this will be right up your street. I first found this almost a year ago, but it seems a good time to repost it – be warned, though, this really is a collection of pictures of Trump in which his mouth has been replaced by an actual anus. Some of the animations here are…upsetting.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Uncanny Valley: Another excellent piece on the unpleasant reality of life in a Silicon Valley startup, this piece is brilliantly written and so close to The Circle in many respects that it reads almost like a companion piece; the chutzpah, the bragaddoccio, the relentless pursuit of investment dollars, the rictus grins designed to communicate all the FUN that’s being had. It sounds, as I’ve previously said, horrible.

• Gigging with Hatsune Miku: Such a shame that this is a Kotaku piece and as such is a touch pedestrian (sorry, author, I’m sure you’re being hamstrung by house style here), because the subject matter – going to a US gig by Japanese virtual pop sensation Hatsune Miku and looking at what the appeal is – is really rather interesting. The concept of a ‘vocaloid’ alone is a fascinating one – are we going to need to create new idengtifying terms for subcategories of bots?

• Cocaineomics: Nicely put together large-scale interactive by the Wall Street Journal to house their big invetsigative report on the history, growth and evolution of the global cocaine trade, from Escobar to the Sinaloa cartels and beyond. As pointed out by Simon, the little interactive ‘chop the powder’ section at the top of the piece really does look like it was designed by someone who was taking their research for this piece VERY SERIOUSLY.

• Robot Carers of the Future: Investigating how a future might look in which we are all accompanied into our senile dotage by robot companions to help and distract and feed us and prevent us from dying (WHY, THOUGH? CAN WE NOT JUST DIE, PLEASE? I JUST WANT TO DIE. LEAVE ME ALONE, ROBOT COMPANION, I AM 126 AND I NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF AND I AM SO TIRED). Chilling and comforting at the same time; if you have ever enjoyed the excellent film ‘Robot & Frank’ (and if you haven’t, you should) you will get this.

• Choking Victim: An excellent piece of fiction by Alexandra Kleeman in the New Yorker, from a new mother’s perspective. Obviously I’m not, never have been and never will be a mother, but I enjoyed this immensely. Reminded me of AM Homes, stylistically, though I couldn’t possibly explain to you why.

• Giphy Wants All The Gifs: Profile of gif search engine company Giphy, which is less interesting in terms of them and their story than it is in terms of how large organisations can and should approach the ownership of their content in 2016 and beyond. This is a semiserious question – why don’t TV channels employ a rolling bunch of junior staff to make gifs on the fly from all their shows for release into social media? You could pay children PENNIES (ahem living wage obvs) and you’d get some great, timely stuff which you would own. DO IT.

• The Death of the Greatest Hit Album: Slightly Canute-ish from Pitchfork here, but raises an interesting point about what happens to musical curation now that anyone can do it, and where the entrypoint to music comes if you can’t serve people a ‘Best Of…’ selection. Also made me think about how you could algorithmically automate these things – Spotify could very easily create a ‘Teach me about [artist x]’ feature, playing you their ‘best’ tracks based on streaming / sharing numbers, say. Hang on, do they do that already? Ignore me, if so, I’m SHATTERED.

• Making Movies In VR: Profiling a variety of filmmakers experimenting with 360 video and VR to MOVE THE MEDIUM FORWARD or something. One shouldn’t (meaning: I shouldn’t) be cynical about this; this is obviously going to be a huge technical shift in time, however clunky the current output is. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff here about how you create a narrative when a viewer isn’t being directed quite so closely by the auteur – lots of potential for clue-dropping, nuance and misdirection in storytelling. Probably.

• The Madness of the Trump Tweets: Joe Keohane of Politico Magazine goes where noone else has dared – deep into the Trump firehose. He read all of Trump’s Tweets (ALL OF THEM – just imagine what that would feel like) and presents this analysis of what it tells us about the man, his campaign and us (well, them). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry (really, it’s pretty depressing), you’ll wonder whether it will ever be possible to visit the alternate universe in which this man wins the Presidency as it would be a pretty unique vision of Hell (remember, he CAN’T WIN. If I keep saying this it becomes true, right?).

• Inside Meow Wolf: Did you know that George RR Martin of Game of Thrones fame also owns a theme park/immersive theatre/art collective THING in Santa Fe? Well he does, it’s called Meow Wolf, and it sounds like a Punchdrunk show but without all the crap bits (ie the whole thing turning into a bunch of drunk Londoners legging it around a nicely decked–out set chasing performers to a mutually unsatisfying conclusion). I WANT TO GO – can someone bring this to London? Thanks.

• Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’: Brilliant piece arguing for an end to, or at least a reining in of, the habit of making all reviews and in fact just about all journalism an exercise in personal framing. Whilst the author of this newsletter is in no position to rail against people using the personal pronoun, this is an excellent article exploring how that changes the critical eye and in turn the culture informed by it.

• The Last Phonecall: Excellent US big paper interactive of the day #2, this is a lovely and heartbreaking series of comics telling the stories of Death Row inmates in the US, presented by the New York Times. Simple and effective and beautifully illustrated, these will stay with you after reading.

• Safety Rope: Beautiful writing about growing up a young gay man in the US, first sexual experiences under cover of secrecy, and generally the whole horrible feeling of fear and alienation and almost irrepressible sexual frustration that comes of being a young bloke dealing with STUFF. Lovely prose.

• My Dinner With Rasputin: (In my notes this was called ‘Raspu-dins’, which is a FAR better title – SEE I AM A REAL WRITER, I AM I AM I AM). Anyway, this is a translation of a piece by a Russian writer in the 20s and it is BRILLIANT, all about the mad cult around Rasputin and what it was like meeting him (creepy, is the short answer). So, so good, not least because the writing is so fresh it could have been written 90 years later.

• Flesh Interface: Remember last week when I told you about the weird Reddit comment storytelling of 9Mother9Horse9Eyes? Well this is more of it, presented in a slightly easier-to-digest linear format but no less brilliantly twisted. This is one of my favourite things on the web right now – it’s really rather special, I think.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is (to my mind) a legitimately terrible song, but the video has been created solely using Snapchat filters and as such it earns its place here by dint of being both SO INTERNET IT HURTS and an actual WORLD FIRST (I think). There’s going to be an ad campaign using this schtick within months, guaranteed:

2) Next, this is small animation called ‘Totally Normal’ which is creepy and cute and wonderfully drawn. ENJOY:

3) I chucked PartyBaby on here a few weeks ago – they have a NEW SONG, which is once again great, and the video, whilst being the least compelling thing you’ll watch this week, is sort of ballsy in it’s “yes, and?” indifference. This is called ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’, and it has nothing to do with this:

4) This is called ‘Companion’; it’s by a band called ‘Braids’ and the vocal here rather blew me away::

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Skepta this week with a new track – this one’s called ‘Man’, and, like the Stormzy vid last week, this is a great slice of UK grime which really is going through a period of HIGH QUALITY CONTENT right now:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! These, though, are some global big boys. French Montana featuring Kanye and Nas, with Figure It Out. Hook-laden, radio friendly and sadly Autotuned to fcuk, this is going to have MILLIONS of views by the time the Curiobot gets round to it in 10 days time but which as of the now is HOT OFF THE PRESSES. Tick off the hiphop cliches in the video while you watch:

7) I featured Yllis the other week – this is another of their wonderful, seapunky internettumblrvisualculturestyle vids, this one for the track ‘Parade’:

8) I don’t want to explain this two much. It’s 3 minutes of ODD, and it’s worth your time. Meet the Tom Scouts (thanks, Wilson):

9) Finally this week, the song is pretty dreadful (it sounds a LOT like ‘Hey Mickey’ in the verse, to my mind) and yet STRANGELY COMPELLING. Is this what it feels like to be THE YOUTH in 2016? Christ alive, I hope not. In any case, this is featured more for the video which includes enough preposterous tongue-on-tongue action to see you through the weekend and beyond. Enjoy the VERY OVERT KISSING in ‘Symptom of Youth’ by Rena, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks – BYE! BYE! BYE!

Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter by becoming a member of the Imperica community.