Webcurios 29/04/16

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE EXCELLENT NEW ‘ENGLISTAN’ MIXTAPE BY RIZ MC!

THE SECTION WHICH IN PART THINKS WE SHOULD JUST GIVE ZUCKERBERG THEY KEYS TO THE WORLD NOW AND BE DONE WITH IT:

• Those Massive Facebook Numbers: Massively increased profits beating expectations! More ads being sold! Mobile is massive! 1.65billion registered users! The inevitability of Facebook as a part of human communications infrastructure for the rest of the decade at the very least! Yes, that’s right, EXCELLENT NUMBERS for the big blue misery factory this week, meaning you’re not going to stop throwing cash at it any time soon. In terms of reach, targeting, etc, it really is the biggest game in town.

• Facebook Small Business Store: As previously hinted at (see Curios passim), everyone who bothers to read this top section is OBVIOUSLY a complete expert on all aspects of social media (just like its author, natch) and so would have no need of a series of simple, step-by-step guides on how to maximise Facebook utility if you’re a small business. You might know someone who does, though, in which case point them at this newly collated selection of resources which are really very helpful indeed, taking you through advertising, targeting, Page optimisation, remarketing and all sorts.

• Twitter Numbers: It’s sort of unfair that company law forces all these results to come out at broadly the same time, as Twitter once again suffers not only absolutely but also by contrast with Facebook. Main takeout from the opening paragraphs of the shareholder letter are that user numbers are once again up, but brand spend was lower than expected – well what do you expect when your audience segmentation and targeting is so ropey? It’s OK, though, because Twitter has rebranded as a news app – oh, Twitter!

• Better Abuse Reporting On Twitter: This is a good move, though why it’s taken so long is something of a mystery; rather than having to file multiple complaint tickets to report a single user for multiple abusive Tweets, users getting harassed on the platform can now report a bunch of Tweets in one complaint. About time really.

• Twitter Adds Ad Groups: This should have been in last week, but…er…I totally forgot to write it up. Sorry. Seriously, though, it’s pretty dull, so don’t feel like you missed anything; it’s basically a marginally better way of running multitargeted campaigns. To quote them, “one campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives”. So there.

• Yelp Geotags Now Integrated Into Tweets: If you want them to, at least – newly launched in the UK, you now have the option to add a Yelp! tag to your Tweets, pulling in venue info, Yelp! Reviews, etc, into the Tweet. So if you’re a venue, a reason to care marginally more about Yelp! than you might otherwise have done.

• The Twitter Mobile App Playbook: All the hints and tips you might ever want should you be a developer of mobile apps wishing to integrate with Twitter in any way. Useful for people who build stuff, probably less so for the rest of you.

• LinkedIn Numbers: No, I don’t care either, but we are nothing but thorough here at Imperica.

• YouTube Launching Unskippable Bumper Ads: You can now put unskippable six-second ads at the front of YouTube videos, basically. These are designed specifically for delivery on mobile, and are capped at six seconds; the idea being that it will perhaps force advertisers to get to the point faster. Smart idea, seeing as it’s only a second longer than the standard ‘you can skip this now’ time limit on pre-roll; if you’re quick, you can probably do something quite nice and creative and FIRST with the time limit – maybe some sort of “We have you for six seconds – THIS IS OUR BRAND” superhighintensityhighspeedvideodump which has to be paused to catch the Easter eggs, or something. Yes, I know your ideas are all better than that, THIS IS WHY I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO CANNES.

• Snapchat Users Watch 10billion Videos A Day: Or at least so says Snapchat. I would love to know, just out of interest, what percentage of those views are of brand-created content.

• Smart Use of Snapchat Geofilters by Macmillan: Really, really nice, this – Macmillan Cancer set up a bunch of Snapchat geofilters at certain bits of the London Marathon course last weekend, letting people add a Macmillan skin to their snaps of the runners. Simple and effective – other brands, especially the standard sporting ones, also had filters in place around the course, but this one’s my favourite execution because, you know, charity and all that.

• Jelly Is Back!: Do you remember Jelly, Twitter founder Biz Stone’s attempt a couple of years back to out-Quora Quora with a Q&A service? Well having been mothballed it’s now BACK, with a slightly more pleasing interface and the ability to submit questions to the community anonymously without creating an account. I thought this might be quite a useful place for certain specific brands BITD, and I was SO WRONG, so I’m just going to leave this here and walk away whistling nonchalantly before I embarrass myself again.

• Adult Digital Media Usage 2016: That time of year again when OFCOM kindly publish a load of numbers which yet again suggests unsurprisingly that, whodathunkit, lots of people in the UK go online for information, many of them do so using mobile technology, and this number continues to grow year-on-year across all demographics. If you’re in the invidious position of still having to persuade clients that, you know, this web thing might actually catch on a bit (you may scoff, but YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT’S LIKE), then this contains everything you need to beat them to death with (metaphorically. Obviously).

• Hold Your Breath: Right, so this is all in Dutch and whilst I am sure that, like all Dutch websites, they have probably had the common decency to have an English translation built I am buggered if I can find the button to switch to it and so I am sort of guessing a bit here as to what it’s actually about. BUT, you don’t need to read Dutch to work out that a) it’s to raise awareness of a Dutch charity for…er…lungs(?) and b) that the gimmick is that it’s raising awareness of lung problems and c) that it invites you to film yourself holding your breath for as long as you can and then share the video to your networks so they might do the same. Whilst the obvious answer to “we want an icebucket challenge!” is “ahahahahafuckoffmate”, this at the very least is smart enough to do EVERYTHING it can to reduce barriers to participation. Smart, and a nice site to boot – plus watching people go all red in the face from autoasphyxiation is WELL EROTIC…no, hang on funny. Funny. Yes, that was the word.

• INRA At 70: Whereas this French website made it REALLY EASY to turn on the English version, for which THANKS. This is a 70th anniversary celebration site for the French Institut Nationale de Researche Agronomique, showcasing its achievements over its lifespan. A really nicely made timeline, this, which might provide some design inspiration.

• Taglin3r: A Twitter bot which punts out a new autogenerated tagline every hour. Some of these are genuinely usable, so worth following and sprinkling your next presentation with. Why not? Noone will ever know, and to be honest most of these are better than actual brand taglines.

• Strategy Maker: In a similar vein, this churns out some bullsh1t copy about ‘strategy’ every time you refresh. Again, terrifyingly plausible. I mean, read this and tell me that it’s not press release ready: “Our strategy is agile. We will lead a digital first effort of the market through our use of culture and data leaders to build a competitive advantage. By being both collaborative and customer focused, our sustainable approach will drive internet of things throughout the organization. Synergies between our digital business and platform will enable us to capture the upside by becoming open in a disruptive world. These transformations combined with ecosystem due to our social media will create a learning organization through value and leaders.” Well, yes, QUITE.

• The Best Email Capture Page Ever: At least it’s honest.

• Monopoly Does Facebook Live Video: One of the big selling points of Facebook LIve Video is that it lasts in perpetuity, which is why I am able to bring you this absolute car crash of a show from Monopoly who last week decided for reasons known only to themselves to film their Mr Monopoly character playing Hungry Hippos with the Potato Heads. No, me neither. Watch this video. Then watch it again, keeping the knowledge that these are real, adult human beings doing a job at the front of your mind. You can’t see their faces, but you know that behind the masks there are the tear-streaked faces of people for whom the childhood dreams of career fulfilment are but a distant, poignant memory.

• Imperica Commercial Services: Serious point – if you would like to speak to Imperica about bringing our ‘unique’ brand of knowledge of the web, digital, social media, culture, etc to bear on YOUR agency or brand, then click on the link and see about getting in touch. From bespoke newsletters to trend papers, creative ideation and all the rest of this bollocks, we’re yours to do with as you please for a few pennies (we’ll pretty much do anything).

NEXT UP, THIS HIGH QUALITY RINSE FM MIX FROM A COUPLE OF WEEKS BACK!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T REALLY CARE WHO BECKY IS, AND IS GENERALLY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED THAT NOONE SEEMS TO BE CONSIDERING THAT THE WHOLE LEMONADE THING MIGHT JUST, YOU KNOW, BE AN ARTISTIC FICTION RATHER THAN ANYTHING TO DO WITH REAL LIFE, PT.1:

• Talkshow: This week’s HOT NEW THING is Talkshow, an iOS-only app which basically does for messaging what Twitch did for gaming (sort of). Effectively it lets users stream a messaging conversation between x number of participants, live; so other users can watch the conversation in realtime. Not 100% unlike Twitter if you removed all the noise and just focused it on individual chat threads, this has a lot of potential, I think, for interviews and brand ambassador work, as well as for anyone who thinks of themselves as a comedian (although the inevitable horror of all the aspirant comic writers on here makes me shudder slightly, I confess). I could imagine the roast format doing quite well here, for example. No idea if it will take off properly, but it’s a fun idea.

• Procedurally Generated Baby Names: I confess that I have no recollection where I found this, but the URL suggests it’s a Stanford University project; it’s a seemingly-infinite list of baby names generated by…er…some program somewhere. Sorry, this is a pretty poor show even by my standards. Included mainly because I really like the idea of setting up a script which emails each and every one of your pregnant friends with one of these at random on the hour: “How about Wynther?” “How about Luchine?” “How about Gerfand?”. ONE OF THEM HAS TO BE GOOD ENOUGH.

• The Visualised Thesaurus: A nice project which is, now I look more closely, a promo for some company which promises to help you write better emails (not possible, mate, my emails are AMAZING), this is a visual thesaurus which displays results based on their affinity with the source work and lets you simply click through them to refine what you’re looking for. Not a bad resource, this.

• Social Capital: Newish regular column from the New York Times which analyses a famouses social media profile from a semi-professional point of view, looking at the brand their profiles create and how that relates to their public persona. Actually really interesting if you’re in the business of managing brands through social media, and frankly even if you’re not; you might not have heard of the famouses in question, what with it being all American and stuff, but the principle’s a good one. Come on, The Guardian, don’t pretend that this isn’t going to be in G2 ASAP.

• I Really Don’t Know What These Are: I mean, I sort of know what they are – they’re seemingly language instruction cards from Japan, showing situations with English language captions and Japanese translations, but the captions are all wrong and this has to be a joke but it’s all in Japanese and frankly I am pretty much incapable of distinguishing ‘comedy’ from ‘just odd stuff on the web’ after all these years exposed to the radiation of ODD emanating from all this stuff I am forced to consume for YOU oh God I have been doing this for so long and for what no don’t answer that maybe I just need to take a break and look at some trees or something.

• Fresh Team: You know when you make up a meeting at work because you just can’t face it any more, and instead of working what you actually go and do is sit in the park eating pastries and crying until the crumbs form a buttery mulch in the bunched crotch of your slacks? Imagine how rubbish it would be if you couldn’t do that because your boss knew where you were ALL THE TIME – well that’s the premise of Fresh Team, a co-working facilitation app which is chat, conference calling and stuff for teams but which ALSO lets you share your location – meaning that your employer can know where you are (or where your phone is, at least) at ALL TIMES. Hideous, and not even the creepiest location tracking thing on here this week (foreshadowing).

• I am bnb: I’m sure this isn’t the first variant of this I’ve seen, but I’m buggered if I can remember. Anyway, if you’re so lazy that you can’t even be bothered to administer your own Airbnb listing, this Dutch service does it all for you for a nominal fee – they set up the listing, email prospective tenants, arrange cleaning, etc etc. Not yet in the UK, from what I can tell, should you want to set up a quick ripoff.

• The World Economy, Visualised: Sent to me by Josh (thanks Josh!), this is a BRILLIANT-if-overwhelming site by Harvard which visualises the global economy based on the exports of each country in the world, graded by sector. It’s hypnotic to see the sheer volume of global trade here and to play around tracking where exports go (CLUE: EUROPE, YOU FCUKING IDIOTS). Brilliant and fascinating and you should have a fiddle with it.

• The Fanfic Maker: Pick a fandom., pick some characters, pick your desired levels of sex and violence and press a button to get your very own piece of Harry/Draco smut (or, er, whatever you want; not suggesting anything, honest) stitched together to order from a whole host of actual fanfic sentences culled from around the web. The outputs are obviously in large part nonsensical, but that only adds to the authenticity.

• Bard Jam: HAPPY DEATHMONTH, WILLIAM! Leaving aside the horror of the term ‘The Bard’ (there’s something horribly miladyish about people referring to Shakespeare as such, isn’t there?), this is a nice project inviting people to submit works of IF (sorry, interactive fiction) and the like to celebrate the anniversary. There’s 24h or so left to submit something, in case you have a bit of Shakespearean code lying down the back of the sofa or something. Also, er, there are only three submissions so far, so you might even WIN A THING! They’re quite fun, in a lightweight sort of way, even for non-IF enthusiasts.

• Perfect Ear Training: Want to test how good you are at determining frequency and pitch? This is for you, then. Proved to me beyond doubt that I am utterly cloth-eared.

• Hover: If you’ve always wanted a drone camera but have been slightly freaked out by the prospect of those exposed propellers, Hover is for you. Designed to be safe for indoor and close-up use, the gimmick with this is that the rotors are all safely encased, meaning that it can bounce off walls, pets, people, etc, with minimal damage, and won’t get caught on the curtains. Obviously like everything vaguely cool looking on the web at the moment it doesn’t in fact exist yet, but you can register for updates and cross your fingers that it might one day actually come to market.

• No Logo Is Original: Apparent proof that Airbnb, Beats, Tripadvisor, etc. have, in an INCREDIBLE COINCIDENCE, lifted their logo design almost exactly from those of a bunch of old, forgotten organisations as illustrated in an obscure design book from the 80s. Worth scrolling down and expanding the comments on this Twitter thread, not only for some other great examples of design *ahem* inspiration, but also to see all the people saying “yes, and?” as though wholesale theft is an accepted part of the graphic design proce…oh.

• The Snake Artist: This man paints snakes. Lots and lots of snakes. The term ‘artist’ is a pretty elastic one, but he’s definitely not messing around with the snakes here. Definitely lots of snakes.

• Seenote: You know those notes that families stick on the fridge with reminders, shopping lists, little nods of affection, and passive-aggressive exhortations to DO THE FCUKING WASHING UP YOU LAZY BASTARD I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER? This is like those, but digital – with an e-Paper display and internet connectivity. A nice idea in a lot of ways, although I am immediately drawn to the hacking potential for this – imagine the dark, dark things you could do to people if you managed to get into this and leave your own messages. “3 pints of blood (cow’s); cable ties; DO NOT OPEN THE BASEMENT”, that sort of thing. FUN TIMES!

• Round: The worst conversation in the world. Round is a website which lets anyone anonymously post a message to it, marking where they are from on the globe. You can just sit and watch strangers typing rubbish at you, and it’s weirdly compelling although I couldn’t tell you why. At the moment people are talking about what foods they like, which is sort of heartwarming (although your ETA to something foul is about 2 seconds, just so you know).

• Zero Minutes Of Fame: A Chrome extension which automatically removes the names and pictures of people guilty of mass shootings from your browsing experience. There are a couple of interesting extensions to this I can think of – there are a few charity ones, obviously; maybe a domestic violence charity could do the same thing for famouses who’ve been convicted of offences to highlight the problem, or you could create a Trigger Warning version which censors anything potentially upsetting from the web and leaves you with simple, empty swathes of blank space – oh I don’t know, you think of something.

• The Steve Buscemi Galaxy Onesie: Presented without comment here.

• Chris Moss Acid: You like wibbly-wobbly acid-style tunes? You can get literally EVERYTHING you could ever want here, then, and it will take you RIGHT back if you’re an old raver.

• Imzy: Like Reddit, but, er, cute and nice, this is by an ex-Reddit staffer and is invite-only at the moment, but the idea is that it’s another community-based site but designed to be more welcoming and user-friendly than Reddit, both aesthetically an in terms of tone. There’s some quite interesting stuff in here about payments integration and the like – you can read a bit more about it here, should you wish. Could be worth keeping an eye on, though unlikely to trouble Reddit’s numbers any time soon.

• Pol Clarissou: A selection of small-but-gorgeous digital art projects collected in one place. Many require a small download, but some of the art style here is very beautiful indeed.

• Diversity Tickets: Want to get your conference out to a more diverse audience but don’t, er, know any people who aren’t EXACTLY LIKE YOU to invite? This service lets conference organisers specify a set number of tickets they wish to assign to audience members of a certain gender or ethnic classification; it then seeks to find people to take those tickers. You can offer to help with transport costs, etc, to encourage attendance, and the idea overall is well-meaning, but you can’t help thinking that it doesn’t really address the root cause of the problem here; if you need to use this, maybe you need to actually broaden your circles IN REAL LIFE rather than farming out the work of making a cosmetic nod towards diversity to a website. Just a thought.

• Microsculpture: The most incredible hi-res photographs of beautiful insects you will see all week. Look at their glorious iridescent carapaces!

• Show Score: IMDB for theatre, effectively – as far as I can tell this is NYC-only, but I really like the premise; you can filter in all sorts of ways, and it presents shows classed by their popularity or price or divisiveness, and the interface is pretty easy to use. Something like this for London would be genuinely great, given that I am yet to find a decent all-theatre site which aggregates this sort of stuff (if anyone knows of one, please do send it my way).

• Things Work: This is OLD, for which apologies, but I only found it this week – mesmerising animations explaining how everyday things actually function, Tweeted at a rate of one-per-day. These are just lovely.

• Beachy: Clever idea, this, currently only available on a few beaches in Florida – the idea being that it’s a beach-specific delivery and concierge service, where users can reserve a spot on the beach which will be claimed for them by one of the app’s attendants, order snacks and drinks, etc etc. There is a GREAT and massively casually racist anglo spin on this all about GETTING TO THE BEST SPOTS BEFORE THE GERMANS, but I am sure none of you would be so crass as to suggest or execute that.

• The Wayback Explorer: A tool by the Wayback Machine which lets you quickly see an overview of a site’s edit history – major and minor edits, redirects and 404s. Potentially useful, I’m sure, though I confess that at the precise time of writing I am sort of baffled as to how.

• Littergram: Excellent Streisand Effect-ing by Instagram here, who only alerted me to the existence of this app by dint of their legal battle to get it to change its name. Littergram is a nice idea – it lets users take photos of litter in their local area and share them with the council via a public sector portal for eventual cleaning. Smart and simple and effective, and Instagram (well, Facebook) are being dicks about it.

• Gone For Good: ANOTHER nice, fluffy, friendly app from the UK (well done US!), this time which lets people who are too lazy to take stuff to charity shops (or, more charitably, who can’t for whatever reason get to one) arrange for their unwanted goods to be collected by the charity of their choice. You share details and a photo of the unwanted stuff, let the charity know, and they can (if they want to take it off your hands) come by and pick it up. Simple and useful and exactly the sort of thing that if Uber or Amazon wanted some quick CSR points they could contribute to (covering the cost of / assisting with pickup / delivery, etc).

• Landmark Play Houses: Following the heartwarming examples of two apps for GOOD, let’s come right back down to earth with a crushing bang – LOOK! IT’S A KICKSTARTER FOR LAVISH CAT HOUSES IN THE SHAPE OF GLOBAL LANDMARKS! 3 weeks to go and only 9k off the total, these are destined to be funded – SERIOUSLY, THEY ARE CATS, THEY DO NOT FOR A SECOND CARE ABOUT THE ABILITY TO ‘PLAY’ ON A SMALL SCALE MODEL OF ST BASIL’S FCUKING CATHEDRAL. Madness.

• Misplaced Design: Iconic (sorry) buildings from New York, picked up and moved out of context; through this de/recontextualisation one is better able to appreciate the unique qualities of each structure. Or, er, something. I really like the project, the photos are great, and actually the whole site’s a pleasure to navigate.

• Rich Parents Of Instagram: Because we’re all bored of hating on the children.

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE FULL STREAM OF THE NEW AESOP ROCK LP ACCOMPANIED BY A VERY ODD PUPPET VERSION OF THE SHINING!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T REALLY CARE WHO BECKY IS, AND IS GENERALLY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED THAT NOONE SEEMS TO BE CONSIDERING THAT THE WHOLE LEMONADE THING MIGHT JUST, YOU KNOW, BE AN ARTISTIC FICTION RATHER THAN ANYTHING TO DO WITH REAL LIFE, PT.2:

• Volte Face: A new online magazine, launched a couple of weeks ago, which collects writings in support of a liberalisation of drug policy in the UK and beyond. Obviously entirely one-sided, but if you’re of this persuasion already you’ll find a lot of interesting stuff here to reinforce what you already think. There are some good articles here, regardless of your perspective.

• Top Pitch: Topshop are the latest company to decide that they want a piece of this entrepreneurial action, and are inviting anyone with an idea for some wearable tech that they might produce to submit an application to join what is effectively a Topshop accelerator. As far as I can tell the terms are actually pretty reasonable – they will help you develop the idea and teach you about pitching a product to a major global fashion house, and contrary to many of these projects they’re not demanding any equity. Worth a look if you have an idea for a tshirt which automatically displays Instagrams from a certain hashtag on a 3-minute rotation (for example) (you can have that for free).

• Google Maps Font: Comprised of satellite view images, in case you’ve ever wanted to compose vaguely threatening messages composed of major geographic or architectural features.

• Britain’s Diet In Data: Nice datavizing from the ODI, showing how trends in British food consumption have changed over the past 20+ years. Lots of interesting information in here should you choose to dig; we are LOADS healthier than we used to be, diet-wise (stop the presses).

• Game Of Thrones Spoiler Blocker: For those of you for whom your weekly dose of death, nipples and dragons is sacrosanct.

• Gender Equality in US Media: Interesting data from US organisation Prognosis, which analyses US news media for its coverage of gender and reports on trends therein; there are three mentions of men for every mention of a woman, although obviously this is raw and presented free of context. The breakdown by outlet is interesting – I would love to see a similar study run in the UK.

• All Prior Art: Algorithmically generated digital art concepts. Very good indeed, if you’re into this sort of thing which if you’re reading this or following Imperica I sort of assume you are (AUDIENCE INSIGHTS!).

• Sanders Vs Trump in Second Life: Bernie Sanders supporters clashing with Donald Trump supporters in amazingly-still-going-mid-00s-virtual-world-sensation Second Life. This is so, so bizarre and yet due to the overall bizarreness of the US election marathon to date is sort of weirdly unsurprising.

• Food Photographer of the Year: In case you’re searching for the next person to hire for that photoshoot. These are EXCELLENT.

• Wolf Boxers: I really want to make a joke about damp noses, but I’m not going to because that would be beneath me.

• The Semantic Brain Map: Fascinating project by scientists at the University of Berkely, who plugged a bunch of people into an MRI scanner and then had them listen to stories; they have created a 3d scan of the brain which shows which areas of the organ responded to which words / themes from the stories. It all looks quite random until you start clicking on brain bits, and then you get this sort of weird jolt of realisation about the clustering and realise that you’ve just found out which bit of the brain pertains to words and phrases about, say, measurement and weight, and if you’re me you feel a bit ‘funny’. SEMI-RELATED: the lovely Katie Moffat recently lent me her copy of the beautiful and sad book ‘The Iceberg’ by Marion Coutts, which you should read if you haven’t but which if you HAVE will mean that this site will resonate with you a lot more.

• Chatty Door: Instructions on how to set up a door to send you messages letting you know when it was opened and for how long, using just a Raspberry Pi and a bit of simple coding. If you want to get a teenager into coding, this is an EXCELLENT place to start imho.

• Prevo: Absolutely THE creepiest location, etc, tracking app of the week is this one, which promises to keep ‘your closest friends and family at your fingertips’. Get them all to install the app and you (and, in fairness, they) will be able to see at any given moment where they are, whether they have any battery left on their phone, whether their phone is reachable…I am sure that there are good reasons as to why this is useful, but all I can think of is how insanely paranoid it would make you anytime someone went off-grid for a while.

• Affdex: Emotion tracking software for video, which if you want to do one of those big experiential mall-style installations in which you get 6 actors to caper in front of an interactive screen for free product, film the whole thing and then send it to Cannes for a Lion (because we all know that that’s what this is mostly going to be used for) might be of use / interest.

• Members Only Colouring Books: A whole book full of penises for you to colour in however you want. Currently seeking funding, so if you want to be able to experience cock-based mindfulness later in the year then DIG DEEP.

• Shmupulations: A ridiculously comprehensive archive of translated videogame developer interviews from Japan. If you worship at the altar of Kojima and his ilk then you will find much to appeal to you here.

• Laura Catherine Soto: The Instagram account of the artist, which features a selection of videos of her brilliant, kinetic, glittery, unsettling melty sculptures. No I couldn’t have explained that better, SHUT UP.

• Drop Drake: With Drake’s latest album ‘The Views’ dropping overnight, and hot takes being penned across the country AS I TYPE, here’s a chance to drop the titular rapper off the tower which features on the album cover. Because why not. BONUS DRAKE: you can also use this site to create your own album cover with a mini-Drake sitting and looking emo on the photo of your choice.

• Sebastian Lyserena: The best ‘website as business card’ I have seen so far in 2016, this is (I am presuming quite a lot here) a Danish webdev’s personal site which he’s turned into one-page Rube Goldberg machine, ending in an ‘email me’ button. Really rather brilliant.

• Prepare for Impact: Do you know anyone who’s scared of flying? If so, why not encourage them to download this app before they next get on a plane, being as it is a simulation of what it would be like if your plane actually blew up in mid-air, or started plummeting out of control towards the sea, or something similarly palm-moisteningly awful. I’m going to quote the full blurb here: “This 3D game has been developed in the context of an international, aviation safety research project, aimed at exploring possible new approaches to safety education.The game reproduces the experience of real-world aircraft emergencies from the passenger’s viewpoint, with the highest fidelity allowed by today’s mobile devices. In each virtual emergency experience, the player can try first-hand right and wrong actions that a passenger can take, and see the positive or negative consequences those actions have.” YOU COULD DOOM THE PLANE BY YOUR ACTIONS! So much fun.

• 6×9: The Guardian does a 360 cardboard-ready experience, illustrating the particular horror of being in solitary confinement via 360 degree video. Nicely made, although I’m slightly disappointed that they didn’t make the experience a potential 24h long for the full immersive horror experience; there’s an interesting charity endurance angle there for someone to explore if they really feel like having an unfun time.

• Heat Street: You may have forgotten, or blocked from your memory, the fact that the Murdoch empire was going to launch a new news site with the input of Louise ‘Terrifying Female Piers Morgan-analogue’ Mensch, focusing on attracting clicks from the same sort of abhorrent nu-right knuckleheads who hoover up the Breitbard word like so many shitvacuums. Anyway, it’s launched and it’s as hateful as you’d expect. Head on over if you want to make yourself all angry and righteously lefty.  

• Your Boy Black Trump: A website from US ‘comedy’ staple The Daily Show, showcasing their Black Trump characters and promoting a hiphop track and video they’ve made comprised entirely of entirely real Trump quotes from the campaign trail. Let me reiterate that – THESE ARE ALL ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE MAN. Astounding.

• The Ecosexual Bathhouse: I don’t understand what this is at all, so if one of you who lives in Melbourne could possibly go and check it out that would be great, thanks. I think it involves wanking on flowers, but I might be wrong.

• Handjob: This is included solely for the childish reason of its name. Handwritten letters for the Canadian market, which obviously has different terminology for certain sexual acts than we do.

• 4 Human Species: Another in the occasional series of ‘Truly mad people we found on the internet’, this comes courtesy of the internet’s very own Weird Scott (who I can’t link to since he stopped doing social media last year) who dug this out of the YouTube comments. This is a truly bizarre and wholly mental and pretty racist take on the human race and how we are in fact constituted of 4 separate species – reds, yellows, whites and blacks. I say ‘racist’ – I mean it is, obviously, but in a sort of weirdly benign, mental and even-handed way, so it’s impossible to get offended by. Go on, click through and take a gambol through the mind of a madman.

• Andy2016: Amidst all the Trump furore it’s been easy to overlook some of the other lunatics running for office in the US at the moment – let’s quickly rectify that with a visit to the website of Andrew D Basiago, American, Patriot, Mars visitor and time traveller, who went back in time with Barack Obama as part of a secret services operation and is now committed to revealing the TRUTH about this to the American people. I suggest you go and read the ‘Proposals’ section right away, for some deep, Icke-level truths about THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS. Wake up, sheeple, etc!

• Cyrano: Finally! The long-awaited digital scent compiler is here! Cyrano is a little box which you can control with your phone to mix a bespoke scent out of its various components; scents which can be shared with anyone else with one of these gadgets too. I would imagine that one of the home scent manufacturers is working on this already, but again my main thought on seeing this was around how pleasingly evil it would be to hack someone’s home scentbox and make them smell burnt toast all the time to convince them that they were at permanent, imminent risk of a stroke.

• Iceberg Songs: A project drawing attention to the melting icecaps by letting users listen to the sounds they make as the creak and crack and slowly disappear, all messed with and reconfigured by a bunch of electronic music composers. Beautifully made and visualised, though the UI is a *touch* ropey in places, and you can also download and remix the sounds – REMIX THE ICEBERGS NOW!

• Run Tomorrow: A Japanese site promoting running and exercise as a hedge against dementia for the country’s famously methuselan population, this is just beautifully made. The stories are all rather poignant, so you might want a hanky at the ready.

• The Modular Body: I rather like this. A scifi story about genetic engineering and vat-grown people and (sort of) vampirism, all told through a series of short videos which you, the user, can watch in whichever order you prefer to build up your own picture of what is (or might be) going on. Nice STORYTELLING (sorry) technique here.

• Lexlydia: Well this is the oddest thing I found all week. Part theatrical performance, part web 1.0 horror experience, Lexlydia is an…art(?) thing happening in Austria for the next few weeks, which is a full-scale single-site full-immersion S&M art horror play thing, which has its corresponding website at the URL above. There are livestreams and things hidden within, through which you can see some of the VERY ODD things that are going down within the performance – this is simultaneously hugely compelling and a little too creepy for me; you can read more about it here, should you wish to attempt to understand exactly what it is that you are seeing (you still won’t, really, though).

• Ghost: Finally this week, one of the best interactive music video website thingies I have seen all year. This is called ‘Ghost’, by With You ft. Vince Staples, and the song is good and the experience is really rather like getting really, really messed up of an evening. Excellent tech here too with the graphical / interactive overlay on the video – check it out, this is GREAT.

LAST UP, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS SPOTIFY MIX SELECTED BY PRINCE HIMSELF!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Weddings and Lesbians: Photos from f/f same-sex marriages. No jokes here about lesbians getting married on the second date, just some really nice photos of happy couples.

• Drag Queens Trying To Use Straws: The struggle is real.

• I Dropped My Phone The Screen Cracked: Odd, this one. Coders may understand this more than I do: “I Dropped My Phone The Screen Cracked is a web audio library that uses method chaining and CSS-style selectors to simplify creating, configuring and connecting audio nodes in the browser.”  Either way, there are some ODD audio clips on here, generated by said code.

• Mid-Century Modern Design: Compiling the aesthetic in one place.

• Is Ken Livingstone Still In The Loo: A joke which was funny for approximately 20 minutes yesterday.

• The High Life World Series: Collecting collaborations between UK-based Brian d’Souza aka Auntie Flo and Esa Williams working with young musicians and traditional instruments around the globe. If you’re interested in world music this is worth bookmarking, I think, as more updates should be coming soon.

• Unflattering Cat Selfies: Did the cats themselves take these photos? DID THEY???? Christ.

• Natural Colour Palettes: Creating colour palettes from photos of nature.

• Reverse OCR: To quote, “a bot that grabs a random word and draws semi-random lines until the OCRad.js library recognizes it as the word.” The library, judging by the results here, has a VERY elastic point of recognition.

• The Overlook Hotel: Collecting ALL SORTS of Shining-related digital ephemera in one place for all you Kubrick/Nicholson enthusiasts out there.

• Headless Women of Hollywood: Turns out there are a LOT of fiml posters which don’t seem to want to feature women’s heads of faces. GREAT!

• Ruggadah: HAPPY PASSOVER WEEK, JEWISH READERS OF CURIOS!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind: You may have seen this one already as it did the rounds on The Social Network over the weekend; in case not, though, it’s a pretty astonishing account of what it’s like to live with the condition Aphantasia – that is, the inability to visualise images. You know when someone says ‘picture a dog’? Yeah, well this bloke can’t. Really, really interesting, not least from the whole ‘the impossibility of knowing what it would be like to be a bat’ point of view – you want a deep insight into the inherent subjectivity of human experience, click on this link.

• Here Are The Times I Am Free To Meet: McSweeney’s as ever nailing something absolutely perfectly – in this case,the horror or trying to arrange a mutually convenient meeting time in the workplace.

• Writing For Reality TV: An exploration of what it is actually like writing for reality television and being the person who has to go and find the people to fit the desired narrative the production company wants to project (it should come as no surprise to you that these shows tend to start with a title – say, “Amputee Lesbian Chocolatiers” – and then work to see whether the people exist to populate the title. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here about the constructed nature of the self – also, the fact that we will inevitably scoff at the ‘reality’ label is interesting when in 2016 we are all engaged in our own personal reality social media vanity projects. As an aside, my friend Shannon used to have the job title “Senior VP of Reality” at MTV USA, which I always thought was brilliant (although she did get tired of my occasional “Shannon, can you confirm whether this is in fact real?” emails).

• An Exegesis on Spanking Fetishists: Really interesting exploration of this particular side of kink. Really in no way titillating, and pretty much totally SFW, this is fascinating on exactly what it is that draws people to this peculiarly English fetish.

• The Passion of Hobo Hank: One of those great occasional pieces about niche amatuer sports, this is the tale of Hobo Hank, a minor player in a very minor smalltime wrestling league; containing all the drama and posturing of the WWE, but with literally none of the money. If you like wrestling at all, you will really enjoy this – it’s like looking at the nuts and bolts of the whole thing.

• I Am Your Conscious: Of all the outpourings about Prince, none come close to matching the brilliance of this 2012 piece from Harpers, featuring meditations on his sexuality and his relationship to black men and gender and women and art and business. This is just SO well written that I was compelled to read it all, despite having no real affinity to the man’s music. Brilliant writing.

• The Ken Livingstone Row: Included almost entirely because I really like the way in which this is presented. Nice work, HuffPo.

• Playboy Meets Kurzweil: A good interview with singularity-peddler Ray Kurzweil, giving a decent overview of his position with regard to the terrifying, robot-controlled future and our place in it, and also giving him an opportunity to respond to some of the charges leveled at him (namely, that he’s a complete fantasist who’s making a living off the intellectual equivalent of vaporware). Whether or not you believe in the schtick, he’s always an interesting read.

• Welcome To The Post-writing Web: A depressing look at the fact that we’re all about video now, and that’s only become more prevalent. If the advent of mass global literacy in the 20th Century made the word the prevalent means of communication, it’s pretty clear that video’s what’s going to dominate at least the next couple of decades. Maybe I should do Curios as a video. God, that would be awful, can you imagine? Just me, SHOUTING urls into a camera.

• A Protocol For Dying: To quote, “Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities”. He is also dying of cancer; this is what he wrote about it last week – it’s one of the clearest, least-sentimental pieces about end of life management you will ever read, and I can only hope that I’m this sanguine about it when it comes to my turn to shuffle off.

• The World Beyond Storytelling: I’ve long railed against the advermarketingpr world’s insistence on describing itself as one whose primary aim is ‘storytelling’ (look, lads, your job is to sell stuff, OK? Also, if this is storytelling then stories are shite), and now comes this GREAT piece which articulates using far more literary examples than I could ever muster exactly why the use of that term is an absolute load of balls. If you work in the industry, I really do encourage you to read this.

• It’s Not The Dark That Kills You: On suicides in Greenland, and the Danish government’s decidedly un-Hygge policies vis-a-vis the territory and its native inhabitants which have contributed to this. This is really good, honest, though I concede it’s not quite a laugh riot.

• The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality: Absolutely the most brain-meltingly hard thing in here this week, this is a whole host of arguments as to why that which we perceive may in fact have no real bearing on what is actually around us, and why there may in fact be strong and compelling evolutionary reasons as to why that is the case. I can’t pretend to understand all of this, but that which I do understand weirded me out a LOT and made me remember the very peculiar experience of attempting to get my head around The Argument from Supervenience while very stoned all those years ago.

• The Day The Cities Stood Still: Scifi short #1 of 2: this imagines what might happen when all our cities are networked, and then what might happen if they just sort of stop. Lovely writing, totally plausible and fascinating if you’re interested in AI, IoT and general city planning and stuff. Don’t let the scifi tag put you off, it’s more just general smart futurology with a cautionary note.

• The Mika Model: Scifi short #2 of 2: this one really is scifi, though. Chandler-esque noir, featuring a sentient sexbot and a murder and a world-weary cop who’s SEEN TOO MUCH, there’s cliche and genre-trope running through this like a stick of rock, but it’s a good yarn, well-spun, and you can see the Hollywood potential – this is totally going to be a film, right?

• The Odd Reddit Comments Of 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYE9: This is BIZARRE. About a week ago, this hitherto unnoticed Reddit poster started writing long and bizarre comments all over the site at the rate of about one a day – if you look at the comments page and read from the bottom up it seems to be a slowly unfolding scifitimetravelbodyhorrormetafictionthing, which is actually really rather nicely written and utterly baffling in its purpose. Worth bookmarking and seeing where this goes.

• The Whole Time Though: The best, and only, thing that you need read about Beyonce, Jaz-Z, Lemonade and, er, a whole load of other stuff. This is so, so good and had me properly LOLing like little else this week. ENJOY!

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, I couldn’t really tell you why I like this but I do. It’s by Tom Prior and it’s called ‘Voicemail’:

2) Next, this is called ‘Balance’, and I guarantee that if you are having a hard day at the end of a long week then watching this will soothe you and make it all feel marginally better. Your problems will still be there, obviously, but that’s just LIFE so deal with it:

3) This is a GREAT song – I mean really, surprisingly and wonderfully brilliant in ways I wasn’t expecting, with touches of early PJ Harvey – and, not that this should matter, one of the most beautiful bunches of musicians I’ve seen in years. This gets better and better on each listen – it’s called ‘Blood’ and it’s by Starbenders:

4) If you reminisce fondly about the days when shoegaze was a thing, I think you’ll enjoy this. Shades of Mazzy Star and others, this is “South Collins” by Beverly:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Big new one from Stormzy, this – called ‘Scary’. He really is VERY good indeed:

6) MORE UK HIPHOP CORNER! Very different to the Stormzy track, this is less hiphop then it is spoken word to a beat. SBTV Warmup session from the very talented Big Zuu – worth taking the time to properly listen to, imho:

7) As I get old I am getting WELL into modern classical music; this week, I discovered the work of Japanese composer Kashiwa Daisuke – this is called ‘Meteor’, and it’s just beautiful (even the drum patterns are sublime) and so is the accompanying video:

8) More simple beauty in this – kung fu movements, visualised. Hypnotic and glorious:

9) Finally this week, a video for a song I was expecting to absolutely despise, and which oddly reminds me of the execrable Chelsea Dagger, and yet which I sort of love. This is by the exceedingly camp Yoko Oh Noes, and it’s called ‘Love U’, and it is EXCELLENT. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!