Webcurios 17/05/13

 
Anyway, as is now tradition let’s take a look back over the past week in RECORD TIME. We learnt that academia’s finally starting to take bongo seriously, that the definition of what is considered art is getting broader by the second, that the law really isn’t totally equipped for some of the ‘creative’ uses people are going to start making of new technologies, that it’s truly remarkable exactly how dreadful people can be when given the opportunity, particularly when they are reacting to NEWS on the internet, that sometimes it’s quite sad what happens to people in the aftermath of the internet turning its spotlight onto them, that we are probably more prejudiced by nature than we might like to think, and that people really are afraid of love.

There was probably more, but I need to go to Brighton this afternoon so don’t really have time for much more of this. With little further ado, then, let us undertake our very own FANTASTIC VOYAGE amongst the viscera of everything good (and, frankly, mediocre) that the web has had to offer this week. ONWARDS!

Confessional Embroidery by Iviva Olenick

Quite A Lot Of Stuff About The Internet And Social Media, For Which I Can Only Apologise And Promise That There Is Better To Come Below, Honest, Really There Is, Trust Me, Don’t Walk Away, COME BACK: 

Googlestuffs:

•  – So there were a load of announcements made about Google products and services at I/O this week. They are all interesting and worth knowing about, though as yet they probably don’t affect you too much (whether or not you work in advermarketingpr). You can read about some of the highlights here, or if you’re so inclined you can get a slightly more comprehensive rundown here, and you can read a reasonably decent bit of speculation about what it all MEANS here. In the unlikely event tht any of you give a flying one about my opinion, I think that this is all continuing the work Google’s been doing for the past few years since the advent of G+ – that is, building out its product suite so as to create an online ecosystem that means it’s increasingly hard not to be plugged in to their data gathering network. On the one hand, this has huge potential benefits – after all, Google’s ability to intimately know what you want, when you want it, and to be able to serve you stuff based on its gargantuan database of information about your travel/shopping/music/work/etc habits could be incredibly useful; on the other hand, Skynet. Hey ho. Oh, and the stuff about creating composite photos automatically is INCREDIBLY scary and weird and raises all sorts of questions about what we can and should consider ‘real’, if you care to consider them. 
•  – YouTube Is Now A Shop: No one seems to have thought this as significant as I do; maybe I’m an idiot. Who knows? Nonetheless, this strikes me as very significant. Brands on YouTube can now sell products through their YouTube channels (I’m as yet uncertain as to how it will work with embedded videos), through retail partners or through their own sales channels. Now the initial example is haircare brand Tresemme (I know it’s meant to have an accent on the end, but I’m completely flummoxed as to how one types those), which is maybe why no one appears to have given it much thought, but this is very big news. If you were Nike or Adidas, surely you’d want to give people the opportunity to buy Messi’s/LeBron’s footwear as they watch a highlights reel of your brand’s athletes? Oh I don’t know. Anyway, basically in the future everything will be a shop. GREAT!
•  – YouTube – New Channel Design: File under dull-but-practical – this is a useful primer on how to configure the new designs for YouTube channels.
•  – Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible?: An interesting thinkpiece which discusses whether only a subscription model will save us from the neverending parade of truly dreadful YouTube content (the answer, by the way, is ‘no’ – I think that the depressing truth is that we live in a world in which people will watch literally anything if given the opportunity and the apparently-inexplicable popularity of the thousands of poorly made ‘comedy’ videos and the rest is simply a result of this. This is a society in which shopping channels actually exist and make money, for God’s sake – are we really surprised?).
•  – Obligatory Google Glass-gasm: After last week’s brief respite, the hype is BACK. A few weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of a terrifying future in which face recognition tech was embedded into wearable computing – OH LOOK HERE IS THAT TERRIFYING FUTURE. I also said something about how incredible Evernote could be when integrated with Glass – OH LOOK AT MY NOSTRADAMUS-LIKE PREDICTIVE ABILITY (although in actuality the Evernote thing’s quite rudimentary as it stands). Anyway, this week we also got a users-eye video of what using Glass currently looks like, a video showing what people think it will look like in a few iterations’ time when they’ve added some bells and whistles (anyone else slightly scared by the constant focus in this video on how much money you have? This would give me the PROPER FEAR)…oh, and we got confirmation that the skinflick industry’s looking to get its mitts on a pair to make intimate, close-up bongo. Oh, technology!

Facebook Stuffs:

•  – Facebook Is Now (even more of) A Shop: See It Shop It is a Facebook thing which allows brands to sell directly from within the newsfeed. They’re trialling it with Littlewoods. Really? Was no one else interested? Seems odd. Anyway, I think that this is all very prototype-y at the moment but it will be interesting to see if it catches on.
•  – Facebook Sections: This is a bit techy, but worth knowing about. Facebook Sections allows Facebook apps to integrate better / deeper with a user’s timeline – giving people the opportunity to further customise their timeline with dedicated sections for things they like / care about, which in turn allows Facebook to do more with the data which people give it through apps. Oh, God, that’s a really horrid description – go and read this for a proper journalist’s slightly less ham-fisted take. 
• Vanity Fair on Facebook: A long but interesting look from a recent VF at Facebook, it’s culture and its ambitions. Not revelatory, but a decent read if you’re so inclined. 

A Little Bit of Twitter:

•  – Peanuts Estate Hires Vine Artist: An interesting step by the estate of Charles Schulz, who have picked a kid who’s made really good Vine shorts to make Peanuts-themed work for them. I think this is a really positive thing, and a nice change from brands expecting punters to make content for them for free, or for the chance to win an underwhelming BRANDED EXPERIENCE. If someone’s good, pay them for their work – can we make this a trend, please, content people? Thanks.
•  – Speaking Of Vine, Here Are Some Good Ones: Some of these are really impressive. PROTIP: stop-motion really, really works on Vine. 

Other Things Gathered Together In A Slightly Flabby Final Section:

•  – Social Media Is Bullshit (Again): This is a post by author of ‘Social Media is Bullsh*t’ BJ Mendelson which takes a short, smart look at why the concept of ‘going viral’ (as often understood by clients) is utter rubbish. Read it (and then go and hire a bunch of Indian workers for 21st Century sweatshop work!). 
•  – Some Quite Good Examples of Decent Work: There’s some dreadful trendwatching language in this blogpost, but there are also some very clever examples of decent online advermarketingpr work on there, which I personally hadn’t seen before. Take a look, if that’s your thing. 
•  – BuyCott App: I am glad that this exists. This app allows shoppers to scan items and learn about the ethics of their making process, which parent company eventually owns them, etc. Incredibly good idea, particularly in this age of brands, sub-brands, etc, and something I would like to see developed further and made international. So someone do it, please. 
•  – Domino’s LIVE: Domino’s has taken the final, inevitable step in the post-bogeygate world, giving customers the opportunity to watch their pizzas being made LIVE (well, not their pizzas specifically, but you get the point). Which is all well and good and stuff, and an admirable commitment to TRANSPARENCY and all that, but does rather make me feel for the poor staff who are effectively now under potential constant on-the-job surveillance. Do we realise that what Domino’s are effectively doing with this service is outsourcing – for free, might I add – their production line monitoring to us, the customer? Do we even care? Oh. 
•  – Coke Mother’s Day Thing: Another week, another bit of impressive marketing from Coke. This is one of the now-hackneyed ‘hey, interact with us on Twitter and we will make you a personalised thing, just for you!’ wossnames (pace Old Spice et al) – nicely done, though. Oh, and this one from Coke in Denmark is absolutely inspired, even if not digital. Bloody Coke *waves fist*. 
•  – Jaguar Made A Short Film: It’s 10 minutes long, and must have cost SO MUCH MONEY. I don’t imagine Damien Lewis comes cheap in this post-Homeland world. Can anyone seriously explain to me what the point of this is, really? The only reason I’m linking to it is because I am a little bit in love with Shannyn Sossamon who is LOVELY. 
•  – Puma Dance Dictionary: Nicely made website, allowing people to stitch together short messages conveyed via the medium of DANCE which they can then send to friends/people they want to sleep with (judging by the tenor of the possible messages you can send). Loses points for the relatively limited number of potential options, and the fact that you can’t seem to turn off the bloody music. 
•  – The Abercrombie Thing: So you may have Abercrombie getting all sorts of (well-deserved) flak, particularly on its Facebook page, for comments made by its (notoriously unpleasant – seriously, I know someone who worked for them in the US at head office and OH MY DAYS THE STORIES) CEO. He’s since issued a pseudo-retraction which no one in their right mind would give any credence to – not that I think it will really hurt the brand that much at all. Anyway, a video did the rounds this week of a guy giving Abercrombie clothes to homeless people as a CLEVER PIECE OF ANTI-BRAND SATIRE. It made me very uncomfortable, and remarkably the best explanation as to why comes from this rather odd Christian website. Have a read.

Untitled by Jesus Leguizamo

SOUNDTRACK THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AND INDEED THIS BLOG WITH AN ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT 5-HOUR MEGAMIX OF 90s HOUSE & GARAGE!

Things of Potential Interest Which You Are By No Means Obliged To Click On, Pt. 1:

• Algoraving: Apparently this is a thing. Procedurally-generated music in clubs, creating some sort of weirdly unreplicable organic dance experience MAN. Obviously HUGELY Nathan Barley, but also quite interesting from a mathematical / programming point of view. If this sort of thing interests you, you might like to have a bit of a play with this Turing Music Generator, which is sort of the same thing on a smaller scale. I have yet to create anything that doesn’t sound like depressed robots as imagined in 1976 having deeply sad revenge sex, but you may do better. 
• Yoko Ono, Designer: This is incredible. Yoko Ono is a famous polymath, but I had no idea her unquestionable talents stretched to clothes design. CHECK OUT THE HAND TROUSERS! I fully expect to see someone in Clapton wearing these over the Summer.
• Reclaim Your Digital Life: This is an interesting idea, but only really that at the moment. The premise is that the site collects everything you post/share across all your online profiles in one place, with a view to one day creating saved, downloadable copies of everything. Obviously almost certainly massively illegal, but I think there’s a big thing here in terms of the creation of personal archives – I know most of what we throw into the gaping maw of the internet is ephemeral and deserves to be forgotten, but I for one (narcissist that I inevitably am) would quite like to be able to go back through all my internet blatherings over the years. Maybe that’s just me though. 
• StrongBox: I think that this is hugely important. Strongbox has been launched by the New Yorker to offer whistleblowers and others a near-untraceable way of passing on information or stories. Every single news outlet in the world should have a similar system. 
• The Reddit Map: Reddit is BIG. I mean really, really big. This is an attempt to map it in some sort of way, looking a connections between the individual sub-Reddits based on cross-postings, links, etc. Interesting not only as a visualisation of an information network, but also as a navigation portal to some of the odder, murkier sections of the site. CAUTION: there are some subReddits you really, really don’t want to click on (at work or indeed anywhere else). Just saying.
• Arne Svenson is a Voyeur: And also a photographer. This photoseries consists of pictures taken from the window of his apartment into the apartments of his neighbours. His neighbours, it would appear, are less than happy about the fact that he has been doing this and that these pictures are now being sold / exhibited.  
• The Human Readable Type Font: This is an interesting idea. In a move to attempt to baffle Google and other spider/crawler-type programmes, this typeface is meant to work so as to be readable to humans but utterly confusing to machines; meaning anything written in this, in theory, can never be picked up by search and the rest. Nice idea in theory, but I’m not wholly convinced that it nails the ‘readable by actual people’ part of the equation.
• The Ultimate Masochist’s Gloves: Take a look at the close-up picture of the inside of these and try not to wince. 
• Created Equal Photos: A photo series by Mark Laita which looks at the gulf between individuals in the US through the medium of diptych photographs. There are some truly gorgeous portraits in here – take the time to have a look, it really is worth it. 
• Petswitch: You’ve probably seen this already, but in case not…you can now superimpose your features onto those of an animal. You may enjoy it, you may not. It’s not my problem. 

London Diorama Map by Sohei Nishino

Things of Potential Interest Which You Are By No Means Obliged To Click On, Pt. 2:

• Abandoned Geography: A website collecting photography of abandoned places. There are some lovely photos, and the whole site is oddly peaceful. Makes me want to go walking in one direction and not stop for about 2 months (not in any sort of suicidal way, though). 
• Post-Punk New Wave Super Friends: A series of posters depicting stars of early-80s music (Morrissey, Jon Lydon, etc) as superheroes. These are pretty cool, and also available as tshirts if that is your THING. I would love to see what Morrissey thinks of these (probably not a fat lot, to be honest). 
• Teenage Diaries Revisited: So this is a bit like our very own Up series of documentaries (but different); NPR in 1996 gave US teenagerstape recorders on which to record audio diaries. This year, they went back and did the same to see where they were in their 30s. Not a new idea, but there are some brilliant (and sad) tales in here – also I think that the audio-only aspect gives a greater degree of authenticity than on-camera interviewing, though that may just be me. 
• Being A Food Stylist On Hannibal: The truly fascinating blog of the person who does all the food for the US TV series ‘Hannibal’ (no idea if it’s any good). I am quite into food so possibly slightly overindex on how interesting this is, but I had no idea about the insane levels of detail and preparation that go into this stuff. The bit about the grapes is mind-bogglingly obsessional, for a start.
• A History of Public Transit in San Francisco: No, wait, come back! This is a lot more interesting than it has any right to be – the city’s past, as told through the tram, bus and BART network, and all delivered through a really slick web interface. As much about the design as anything else, this is an object lesson in making something ostensibly dry really quite sticky and stimulating (the end of that sentence, I’ve just realised, has ended up sounding oddly sexual. Sorry).
• The Geography of Hate: A clever-but-sad project, mapping the use of hate speech on Twitter across the US. Obviously this is a bit of a blunt-instrument study, and you can only draw so many conclusions, but it’s a bit sobering. Also shows quite how much of America really doesn’t use Twitter at all (I refuse to believe that the blank spots on the map are there because noone’s saying anything unpleasant, nice as it would be to think so). I laughed darkly looking at Idaho, given what day it is today (see opening para). 
• Live Map of Wikipedia Edits: This is oddly compelling. Does what is says in the description, by offering real-time(ish) geolocated indications of which pages on Wikipedia are being edited, and where from. What’s most interesting is seeing the slightly obsessional behaviour going on here – I now know, for example, that someone in Lytham St Anne’s woke up this morning with no greater desire than to spend their early waking moments making alterations to Cliff Richard’s Wikipedia entry. People are ODD.
• Pop Culture Maths: Slight-but-cute illustrations of superheroes and the like, in equation format. 
• A Brain Made From A Foreskin: Well, sort of. Ish. This hands-down takes the prize for oddest art/science project of the week, in any case. It’s quite hard to describe, so I’m going to defer to the artists’ description: this is “a speculative techno-scientific experiment that uses a stem cell reprogramming technique called induced pluripotent stem cell technology (iPS) to reverse engineer foreskin cells purchased from an online catalogue into embryonic (like) stem cells, which Ben-Ary and Hudson then transform into neurons”. So, er, there you have it. Feel free to make your own phallus-cranium jokes. As an aside, of all the things about this project that are marginally disturbing, the fact that you can purchase human foreskin cells online is probably the most WTF-ish. WHERE ARE THEY FROM??? Are mohels all over the world engaged in black market foreskin trades? WE MUST KNOW.
• Freakstarter: A collection of some of the oddest Kickstarter projects currently live on the site, and a wonderful testament to human ingenuity and, quite often, idiocy. Text-based strip poker? Really?
• The Running Gags of Arrested Development: There is a lot of hype (on my bit of the internet, at least) about Arrested Development’s imminent Netflix return. The marketing around it has been excellent, although this site doesn’t look official. In any case, it’s a rather nice visualisation of the series’ running gas, which are legion. If you don’t know the series, it really is worth watching (promise). You can probably find it on certain websites, should you not desire paying for DVD boxsets (NOT THAT WEB CURIOS IN ANY WAY ADVOCATES PIRACY). As a bonus, have this rather nice Tobias Funke microsite which showcases everyone’s favourite nevernude’s acting chops. Oh, and here’s something on the whole cult around the series.

Exhibitionists at Exhibitions, by Jerry Pigeon

The Circus Of Tumblrs (I may have been a little premature in declaring the whole thing ‘over’ last week…):

• 9 Film Frames: Films boiled down to 9 frames. Interesting exercise in boiling something down to its most minimal state whilst maintaining a degree of narrative integrity (or, er, something).
• Merchandising Is Forever: A Tumblr featuring animated gifs of old Star Wars merchandising. Hypnotic in a way that I don’t wholly understand. 
• Goldblumings: Jeff Goldblum’s face, superimposed onto flowers, for reasons which at present escape me. 
• I Don’t Want Your Fucking App: Shaming those websites which continually push you to download their app which, almost inevitably, is unnecessary and unhelpful and would be used a grand total of three times. CAN WE STOP WITH APPS, PLEASE? 99% of the time they really aren’t needed. Just design responsive websites. Go on, you can do it. 
• Anime Backgrounds: As you might expect, background illustrations from anime. Someone might find this of use, maybe.
• Your Logo Is Not Hardcore: A blog collecting the thousands (apparently) of logos appropriating the traditional hardcore design of the crossed-lines ‘x’. There is a LOT of commonality in design, it turns out.
• Women of Google Glass: See! It’s not just men!
• Obscure Videogames: A collection of gifs and reminiscences about obscure(ish) games of yesteryear.
• Private Eye: The Eye des Tumblr. Early days, and at the moment it’s basically just replicating magazine content in bite-size form, but there is so much they could do with this…
• Public Shaming: As linked to up *there*, this collects instances of people’s awfulness on Twitter around the issues of the day. US-centric, and guaranteed to make you feel really grubby and sad about the future of humanity if you spend too long on it. Enjoy!
• A Whole Massive List of Arty Tumblrs (& Blogs) To Waste Time On

Games!:

• Mondrianism: A very clever little puzzle game, based around the artistic style of Piet Mondrian, which is not only fun but, when you get it right, plays beautiful music. 
• Breakfast On A Wagon With Your Partner: Another week, another lovely piece of interactive fiction. This is a post-apocalyptic tale which you can take in any one of a number of directions. I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the medium or whether it’s simply a function of where I find this stuff, but much of the more interesting work in this medium seems to play with ideas of gender and sexuality (as does this, on a certain level). Anyway, it’s rather good. Have a play.
• Racer for Chrome: Part game, part tech demo, this is really, really clever. Play this excellent little racing game (with a cracking Giorgio Moroder soundtrack to boot) across mobile devices – up to five can be placed side by side to create massive tracks which several players can play on together. Really impressive tech, aside from anything else. 
• Emulator Heaven: It’s Friday, you can afford to slack off. This site contains links to a huge number of emulators which will allow you to play retro games in your browser. Command & Conquer’s there, which for some of you will be enough to ruin / enhance your weekend (delete as applicable).

Abbas Momani / AFP – Getty Images

LONG STUFF WHICH IS LONG:

• The Immortality Dreams of a Russian Billionaire: If you were mind-twistingly rich, wouldn’t you want to work towards a future in which you could exist forever? This piece about Dmitry Iskov and his frankly MENTAL 2045 initiative is fascinating and unsettling in almost equal measure. Proof positive, too, that sci-fi has so much more influence on the development of future technologies than we tend to give it credit for.
• The Making of Chicago Restaurant ‘Grace’: An excellent piece of journalism about a man’s obsessive drive to open a really, really good restaurant. Inspirational in a non-cloying sort of way. 
• What Motherhood Does to Bodies: A piece written for Mothers’ Day in the US, in which the author thanks her mother for putting her body through childbirth. Basically this is a fairly comprehensive look at all the *ahem* slightly  hardcore things which pregnancy and childbirth do to the human body. WARNING: if you are pregnant (or squeamish) I probably wouldn’t advise reading this.
• 50 Shades of Grey As An Allegory for Late-Stage Capitalism: A clever-if-not-100%-serious analysis of that bloody book as a cipher for aspirational culture and class differentiation in the Western world in 2013. 
• The Modern History of Swearing: A brilliant piece taking a look at the etymology of some of our favourite BAD WORDS, and introducing you to a whole host of others that you might not have been aware of. You will probably never talk about people ‘larking around’ again. (AN ASIDE: the best etymology of profanity stuff I’ve ever read came in Nic Kelman’s novel ‘Girls’ (not necessarily an easy or pleasant read at times, but an excellent book), in which I learnt that the word ‘cock’ was, in medieval times when the deity could not be invoked except euphemistically, once a synonym for ‘God’. Which tells you all you need to know about men, really). 
• The Young Man’s Guide to Shopping For & Wearing Girls’ Clothes for the First Time: The always-superb McSweeney’s has been running this column by male-to-female transsexual Casey Plett for a while now. This edition, about having to buy female clothes for the first time, is funny and poignant and thought-provoking and a bit sad and hopeful and and and and. Read it.
• How Saudi Arabia Is Monitoring Twitter: Come on, let’s not kid ourselves that it’s just those lovable guys in Saudi. 
• What People Mean When They Wear Onesies: A nice piece of writing about what the rise of the onesie tells us about how people in their 20s are feeling about stuff (CLUE: Not fantastic, it turns out). 
• Pitchfork on Daft Punk: I think we can agree that the marketing for the Daft Punk album has been absolutely stellar (and very, very expensive). This piece on Pitchfork is an excellent look at the band, the release, and Bangalter & De Homem Christo’s place in the popular culture pantheon (though personally I think that the real star of the piece is the page design, which is BRILLIANT). As a bonus, have this piece on why the album’s release is an excellent example of how the internet has ruined music criticism (amongst other things).
• The Town of Lottery Winners: In 2011, one small town in Spain one big on the national El Gordo lottery. This is an excellent piece of writing as to how it all worked out for them in the immediate aftermath.
• Sisa – Crisis Cocaine: Finally, a great piece of reporting by VICE on Sisa, a cheap stimulant which is doing bad things to Greece. I would love to see a wider piece of research about changing drug use in recessionary times across Europe – someone make that happen, please. 

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, a documentary. ‘Jela’ is the story of an East London resident, former drug addict and football hooligan. Slow, quiet, contemplative and sad – a brilliant portrait of the changing-and-yet-not face of the East End:

2) I hadn’t heard of Josef Salvat until about 5 minutes ago, This is his song, ‘Hustler’ – the video’s not that exciting, but the song gave me proper goosebumps and so I recommend it unreservedly (I make no allowances, as ever, for personal taste). Hell of a voice:

3) I featured Team Spirit last week as well, but make no apologies for including them here too. After the Jesus-themed clip to accompany ‘Jesus, He’s Alright’, this time they head in the opposite direction to take on Satan in ‘MRDR It’s OK’:

4) No real clue what this is about or for, but it’s a brilliantly hypnotic piece of animation from Canada called ‘The Clockmakers’:

5) I have a bit of an obsession with eyes, which oscillates between fascination and bodyhorror disgust (basically the Dario Argento film ‘Opera’ is the scariest thing I can imagine, ever). This isn’t scary at all, you will be pleased to hear – it’s simply brilliantly inventive. This is ‘To The River’ by James Wallace and the Naked Light:

6) Obligatory slightly hipsterish hiphop of the week comes from Prolyphic and Buddy Peace with their single ‘Go Green’, which is not only excellent but also features a rather cool puppet:

7) There were two videos by Young Galaxy that I had on the list this week (the one that didn’t make the cut was this one, for Blown Minded, which features beautiful glass-painted animation) – the one I went for in the end was for their song ‘Fall For You’, which song reminds me slightly unpleasantly of the execrable ‘Sunchyme’ by Dario G but has a BRILLIANT animated video:

8) Have you ever speculated as to what websites would look like if they weren’t in fact websites but were instead children’s toys of the 1980s and 1990s? Oh good, it’s not just me then. This is a brilliant concept, superbly executed – it even feels like advertising aimed at kids from the early 90s. Basically designed to appeal to anyone a little bit webmongy in their early 30s (so basically me, then), and it also reminds me of ‘We Want Your Soul’ by Adam Freedland, though I’m not totally sure why. This is Neosignal with ‘Planet Online’:

9) I can’t work out whether this is inspired or awful Lou Bega-type rubbish, which probably means it’s dreadful and I have no taste. In any case, though, it’s insanely catchy and I could imagine it getting HUGE amounts of radio play. This is Menage Quad with’Listen To The Music’:

9) Last but not least, have some fully naked people dancing! Come on, it’s Friday, why not join in at work? This is Asaf Avidan with ‘Love It Or Leave It’: