Webcurios 21/02/14

By Witchoria

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY HAS RELISHED READING A HOST OF QUICKLY-SCRIBBLED AND LARGELY WORTHLESS OP-ED PIECES BY A BUNCH OF MID-RANKING GENERIC MEDIA WANKERS ABOUT WHAT FACEBOOK’S ACQUISITION OF WHATSAPP? MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA / MARKETING / ADVERTISING / EVERYTHING:

• Facebook ‘Core Audiences’ Coming Imminently: Facebook ads will have a bit of a tweak in the next few weeks as the money-spaffing lunatics simplify the ad-targeting interface slightly for all users. The change basically just makes the demographic targeting options a bit simpler and does some clever autocollating of audiences meaning you’ll only have to select, say, ‘fridges’ from the interest targeting menu to target users who’ve ‘Liked’ fridges and also those who mention fridges as an interest. The ‘behaviours’ stuff is quite interesting too, as is the opportunity to now target based on people’s life events which have occurred within a certain timeframe – ie people who’ve gotten engaged in the past six months, etc. Good news for advermarketingpr types – everyone else, though, has another set of compelling reasons to never tell Facebook anything about their actual lives ever again. 
• Pinterest Brings Gifs To Mobile: Pinterest mobile apps now play nicely with gifs. Erm, that’s it. 
• LinkedIn Is Now A Blogging Platform: LinkedIn has let ‘INFLUENCERS’ write longform stuff on the platform for a while now, but now they’re extending the option to all users. This is actually a reasonably big deal, particularly for more business-oriented clients / brands; now you can put that incredibly tedious blog about corporate issues which is totally anodyne and contains nothing insightful or interesting whatsoever on LinkedIn rather than on your company website! And, obviously, then advertise the everliving fcuk out of it, because that’s how these things work. 
• Twitter Launches ‘Amplify’ Service In The UK at BRIT Awards: Which brand did YOU think was most synonymous with the BRITs this year? Aside, obviously, from the headline sponsor whose embarrassment this week really needs no further analysis (and to all those who work in PR crowing about the poor buggers at House and their MASSIVE FAIL, if any of you have ever rolled over in front of a client’s preposterous demands, if any of you have sat silently while your client demanded that you sell-in some crap infographic that you know in your heart of hearts could not possibly be of interest to anyone but which you are too scared of losing fee revenue to disagree with, then you are JUST AS BAD), it was obviously VO5, no? Erm, hm. Anyway, VO5 was the first brand in the UK to make use of Twitter’s amplify service, which allows sponsoring brands to run pre- and post-roll ads on video of an event shared through the platform, a service which will now be available to anyone willing to pony up the cash. 
• Mapping Twitter Conversations: A very academic but nonetheless interesting look at the different types of debates / conversations which people have on Twitter and how they work – and how to map and visualise them using NodeXL. Useful mainly for planner-y types, but worth a read in a general interest sense too.
• Flickr Enables Photo Comments: You can now embed images in comments on Flickr. Which may be useful to some of you, but then again may be of no interest at all. 
• There Is No Definite Correlation Between Social Media Sharing And Readership: Data from Chartbeat released this week shows that just because people Tweet a link to something it doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone actually reads whatever said Tweets link to. SHOCKER. In semi-related news, this is a rather interesting look at the sort of information which tends to get most traction on Twitter and Facebook respectively – as any SOCIAL MEDIA GURU worth their salt will tell you, TAILOR YOUR CONTENT TO THE PLATFORM YOU’RE USING, KIDS! *sighs*
• You Can’t Make A Video Go Viralzzzzz: The fact that this still needs to be said in 2014 would be funny were it not depressing. Anyway, the latest in the long line of ‘things to say to your client when they ask for a viral video’ (and if you don’t, see the above remark about House PR) points out that BIG video campaigns include a HUGE amount of paid-for seeding, to the tune of millions of views. EYEBALLS COST MONEY. 
• Pepsi Uses Vine On Outdoor Ads: The new hotness in terms of ‘getting people to make your ads for you for free’ is evidently this – Pepsi is getting people to make Vines (although what sort of Vines is sort of unclear – we can probably safely assume that they don’t want short films featuring people happily drinking Coke, though) and then using the best ones on billboards. Will be interesting to see how this works and what the quality is like.
• A Beginner’s Guide To SEO: If you know about SEO, this is proper kids’ stuff and should be skipped; if you don’t and want a reasonable 101 tutorial, this is a decent place to start. 
• Moon By ING: This is rather lovely. A website promoting a charity initiative by ING in, I think, Spain, which features a story whose outcome you can alter by playing with your phone (sorry, that’s a really poor explanation, but in my defence it’s quite a hard concept to explain) – basically it syncs with your phone and lets you influence how the story plays out on your big computer screen by moving your mobile device. It’s just beautifully made and very clever. 
• A Lovely Thing By Samsung: An excellent idea this, taking the concept of those ‘harness the processing power of your computer when it’s idle and use it for good’ projects like SETI@Home (which has existed for 15 years, which is quite mental really and makes me feel very old); an app from Samsung which works overnight whilst one’s phone is plugged in and charging, and analyses data from cancer research for a medical programme at the University of Vienna. Really nicely done. 
• The Power of Hair: Another week, another Old Spice megaslickwebcampaign – this time based around the concept of a wig which can play the songs of Huey Lewis and the News. As ever with these, the writing is excellent and the execution pretty-much flawless from a technical point of view; I do question, though, who this is talking to aside from ad creatives in their 30s – I mean, Huey Lewis? Really? Also I find the lack of any Patrick Bateman references (at least that I’ve been able to find) saddening in the extreme.
• WHY DOES THIS EXIST????: ASDA apparently have a gnome fronting some ad campaign or another. Someone, somewhere, sat in a meeting room and said ‘You know what we need to really ENGAGE people with this ad campaign? THAT’S RIGHT, A TWITTER FEED FOR THE GNOME’. I mean, for Christ’s sake. WHY? WHAT CONCEIVABLE PURPOSE CAN THIS SERVE? Can you imagine the existential despair faced by the poor Account Executive whose job it is to put together the 6-month content calendar for A SODDING GNOME ON TWITTER?!?!? I know all this stuff is pointless and ridiculous at the best of times, but this may well be a nadir for the whole fcuking industry. NB – if anyone involved in this campaign happens to read this, I would genuinely love you to tell me what YOU think the point of this is (and if the answer is ‘engagement’, I wish you nothing but ill). 

By Alec Huxley

YOU WANT A LOVELY SOLID STEEL MIX TO GO WITH THIS BIT? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPEFULLY CONTAINS ENOUGH INTERESTING AND DIVERTING STUFF THIS WEEK TO DISTRACT YOU FROM THAT SODDING ASDA GNOME WHICH FRANKLY IS STILL MAKING ME ANNOYED AS I TYPE THIS BUT WHICH I WILL HOPEFULLY HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT IN 3 HOURS’ TIME WHEN I GET TO THE LONG READS BIT, PT.1:

• Telegram: Now that Whatsapp? is basically just another way for Facebook to learn about what and who you like so it can sell more information about you to advertisers, you may want to check out some alternatives. Telegram is onesuch app, which does the same stuff as Whatsapp? but with encryption and destructibility and stuff. And it’s free. 
• Google Launches Project Tango: This is potentially very cool indeed, although as with all Google stuff of late there’s a slight air of sinister all-powerfulness about it too. Project Tango is (and this is a really dumbed-down explanation, so apologies in advance) basically a project to get Kinect-style depth and environmental awareness from a mobile’s camera, which would let you do all sorts of things with your handset like getting a 3d map of your living room, or allowing actual depth-perception in AR programmes, or magically creating 3d scans of anything so that you can then take them home and rip them off on your inevitable 3d printer. Will be very interesting to see how this develops.
• Gifff.fr: A hugely useful website which lets you plug in any YouTube url of your choice and, via a very simple and well-designed interface – select a clip of it to convert into an animated gif. It’s obviously not perfect – it hangs annoyingly often, and the filesizes it churns out are often huge (though that’s more of an issue with the .gif format than anything else), but it’s a godsend to people who are…er…a bit crap at making gifs. 
• Make Gifs From Your Webcam: As is this, actually – another gifmaking toy, this one using your webcam to record a clip which it then turns into…er…a gif. Sorry, this probably doesn’t need any additional exposition. Maybe a fun one to play with next time you have a BRAND AMBASSADOR doing an online Q&A or something (or maybe not, who knows?).
• The Brief Brief: Hot on the heels of the Snapchat Pitch the other week comes another ad agency asking aspirant adpeople to complete a challenge using social media to demonstrate their smarts. This time it’s BBDO San Francisco who are inviting people to respond to three challenges over the next few weeks, involving boiling down a brief to 140 characters or less (actually significantly less when you factor in the hashtag, he said pedantically) for the chance to get a job interview with the agency. Gimmicky, obviously, but may give one of you the chance to get a job in San Francisco which isn’t bad. 
• Playlist Poetry: This should maybe have gone *up there*, but frankly it’s not like any of you care about the taxonomy of this bloody thing anyway – the reason it didn’t is that I’m not 100% sure whether it’s by Spotify or not. Anyway, that’s not important; this is a really lovely toy which lets users make ‘poetry’ from song titles in Spotify and which then generates a playlist based on said poetry. Thinking about it, this was probably Spotify’s Valentine’s thing which I totally missed last week. I’m an idiot, sorry. I’ll move on now. 
• Google Street View Now Does Taj Mahal (And 29 Other Indian Monuments): One day I will go to India and see some of these things for myself – until then, though, this selection of Street View tours of some of India’s most impressive monuments, including the Red Fort at Agra and the AMAZING looking Qutub Minar are beautiful and the best way of distracting yourself from the office you will find all day.
• An Incredibly Creepy Email Tracking System: You know that feeling when you get an email to which the sender has requested a read receipt and you get that little notification popup and you simultaneously laugh at the fact that anyone thinks that you will submit to their weird little power fantasy by letting them know you’ve read the damn thing and develop small but very intense feelings of hatred at the bizarre powertrippyness of the whole thing? Well this is a Chrome plugin for Gmail which apparently will let you know whether anyone’s opened your email – AND WHERE THEY WERE WHEN THEY DID SO – without them consenting to you knowing. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t 100% ok from a privacy point of view, and I don’t think it will exist in its current form for much longer, but it’s quite an unsettling idea. 
• Forever¦Not: A charming little app which gives users the ability to place bets on the longevity of their friends’ (and famouses) relationships on Facebook. Ah, gamification!
• Meditation Aiding Website: If the concept behind the last link made you a little angry, take 5 minutes on this website to calm down. Very simply, this just gives you a ‘breathe in, breathe out’ timer – I did this for 10 minutes first thing and got so relaxed that I actually fell asleep again at my laptop, which may or may not be a selling point for you. 
• A Side Table Made of Lamb: Or, more accurately, made of a lamb. Taking inspiration from one of Dali’s dreadful paintings, this is a side table made of a taxidermised lamb. I guarantee you that at least 5 people reading this are thinking ‘WE MUST GET THAT FOR THE OFFICE’, and that each and every one of those people works in advertising. I’m not judging, just observing. 
• A Lovely 404 Page: I don’t really understand the maths, but I like the concept.
• Match Student Coders With Businesses: This is a great idea. Coding Cupboard is a service which launched last week and which aims to put students who code in touch with businesses who could use their skills – thereby giving the students practical experience and giving the companies, who might not have the budget to pay for an agency, some assistance with programming. Obviously it’s only a good idea if businesses are prepared to pay fair rates for the work offered, and it will live or die on that basis, but the initiative is laudable. 
• Seemove: The latest iteration of the ‘we’ve made an interface like the cool gesture-y ones in Minority Report and Iron Man!’ thing, Seemove is a very impressive tech demo which will in no way benefit from my hamfisted description of its functionality; click the link and watch their video and get all ‘OOH FUTURE’ about it – it’s very cool-looking stuff. 
• OMG Who Stole My Ads: French street artist Etienne Lavie has been going round Paris replacing billboard ads with copies of fine art. His website shows off some pictures of his actions – there’s something lovely about reclaiming these public spaces, leaving aside how impressive some of these are in terms of execution (seriously, do you reckon that anyone would stop you if you turned up at a billboard in overalls and a white van and a ladder and just got on with it? I reckon not. Come on, let’s try it in London! No, you first). 
• The Urban Prisoner: We’ve featured Matt Webber’s photos on here before – I think it was his previous series ‘Urban Romance’ – but this is a new series called ‘Urban Prisoner’ and is an amazing selection of photos of people and scenes in New York from the 80s, 90s and 00s. The one taken mid-fight is particularly impressive, but the general eye and technique he displays is exemplary throughout. 
• Top Gun Frame-by-Frame: This week Twitter account @555µHz has been tweeting still frames from Top Gun, two per hour. Scrolling through the feed presents the film in silent, thumbnailed, zoetropic fashion – there is, I don’t doubt, some sort of high concept here somewhere about the deconstruction of a filmic experience into its constituent elements and fragmented narratives and and and oh god, the pseudery; it’s just a thing, make of it what you will. 
• Mindbending Optical Illusion Font: This makes my eyes and my head hurt slightly, but is also nicely made. A font called Frustro, which is designed based on the old optical illusion of the Penrose Triangle. Technically impressive, but if you’re hungover it might be a little ‘challenging’.
• ShotKit: If you’re into photography in a semi-serious fashion, this will probably be right up your street. ShotKit is a site which asks pro photographers to illustrate what’s in their camera bag – so effectively go through the kit they use to achieve their signature effects, but in a nice visual fashion. Clever, and were I a camera brand I would be looking at this quite closely (but I’m not, I’m a REAL BOY). 
• Fake A Baby!: Without a doubt the wrongest thing on here this week. Fake a Baby is an HILARIOUS service which lets people order custom faked pregnancy scans of various types, as well as fake ‘positive’ pregnancy tests. Can you think of ANY scenario in which someone using one of these products wouldn’t end dreadfully? Although as my friend ‘Dr’ Phil pointed out, it’s just perfect as a plot device EastEnders/Corrie screenwriters. So, er, that’s ok then. 
• Celebrate Design: A very nice website and indeed project by the AIGA, an American organisation whose name I *think* stands for American Institute of Graphic Arts (it really shouldn’t be as har as it appears to be to find this out) which turns 100 this year. As part of their centenary, they created this website which looks at the past 100 years of graphic design in the US, with interviews with designers, analysis of trends and developments, and lots of rather beautiful examples of excellent work. Design/visual creatives will find a lot to love in here. 
• Devin Townsend Has An Odd Website: Devin Townsend is an American metal musician whose website is a work of wonderful WTFish beauty.
• The Well-Sorted Version: I like this. Peter Harkins has taken the text of the Bible, run it through a programme which deconstructs it, and rearranged it as an alphabetically constructed series of chapters, verses, etc. Again, this is a horrible description of a very elegant concept – take a look. 
• Vizicities: Open source city datamapping software, Vizicities is a very clever tool which lets users overlay datasets onto a 3d visualisation of a city. It’s going to work with live data, which opens up a whole host of possibilities about what you’ll be able to map in realtime; anyone with BIG geographical data could have some fun with this, I think. 
• Feed Real Fish Online: I don’t really understand why this exists, but I’m sort of glad it does. A website which gives you a realtime feed of an actual fishtank somewhere in the US and occasionally lets whoever’s watching it press a button to feed the fish and watch them eat. Obviously there’s a limit on the amount of feeding that can go on, as nothing would ruin the experience more than a bunch of dead fish floating belly-up with burst stomachs. It only works in US daytime hours, so try it from about 3pm onwards in the UK. 

By Antoine Cordet

YOU WANT A LOVELY NIGHTMARES ON WAX MIX TO GO WITH THIS BIT? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPEFULLY CONTAINS ENOUGH INTERESTING AND DIVERTING STUFF THIS WEEK TO DISTRACT YOU FROM THAT SODDING ASDA GNOME WHICH FRANKLY IS STILL MAKING ME ANNOYED AS I TYPE THIS BUT WHICH I WILL HOPEFULLY HAVE FORGOTTEN ABOUT IN 3 HOURS’ TIME WHEN I GET TO THE LONG READS BIT, PT.2:

• Selfie 360: An app which lets you take a 360-degree selfie and which gifs it for endless looped viewing pleasure. No, I have no idea at all why anyone would need or want this, and yet it exists. 
• 3nder – Threesomes Made Easy: God only knows how anyone’s meant to pronounce this damn thing, but anyway. 3nder (seriously, whose idea was the name?) is an app which helps people find partners for threesomes. It purports to work for singles and couples, but I think we can all guess who the primary users of this inevitably short-lived service will be (clue: probably not incredibly attractive polyamorous couples). I would LOVE to get some information on the profile of the average user of this, but I don’t imagine it would be pretty. 
• No Seconds: Henry Hargreaves has taken details of the last meals of death row prisoners from across the US and recreated their final repasts in photographic form. About as heartwarming a collection of shots as you’d expect, really, and some of them are genuinely chilling – I don’t know why, but I’m naturally inclined to presume guilt of anyone whose final meal request involves the single word ‘meat’.
• Little Sketches Of Tokyo People: The Instagram feed of Hama-House is a beautiful collection of the Japanese illustrator’s speed-sketches of random people they’ve seen and sketched across Tokyo. Stylistically gorgeous and just lovely and calming really.
• A Database Of Wearable Tech: Erm, that – a website which lists current wearable tech products which are available, searchable by component, functionality, etc etc etc. Useful to see whether or not anyone’s already had your bullsht-but-so-zeitgeisty idea already. 
• We Were Evergreen’s Interactive Music Video: Another week, another interactive music video, this time from French(?) indipopsters We Were Evergreen. This one presents an interesting behind-the-scenes look at their one-take video for the rather lovely song ‘Daughters’; I think the ‘behind-the-curtain’ stuff here is rather nice and could be *cough* appropriated for other things if you so chose. Aside from anything else, it’s an excellent tutorial should you wish to make a one-take vid yourself. 
• Things To Make And Do With Kids: This would have been a lot more useful the week before half term, wouldn’t it? Sorry about that. Anyway, this is a charming website which has LOADS of ideas for things that practically-minded parents can make/do with their children. Much of it’s a bit sciencegeeky, but there’s loads which just looks FUN, and the whole thing in general almost makes me think that having kids could nearly be fun. Almost, nearly. 
• The History of Grand Central Station: Grand Central is probably my favourite BIG, FAMOUS place in NYC; the architecture’s amazing, and the food hall beneath it is an awesome place for people watching. This website takes a look at the history and heritage of the building in beautiful fashion; LOADS of info here, and the sort of thing it would be lovely to see done for some of London’s industrial-era landmarks (King’s Cross?).
• Photos From An 1890s Bicycle Factory: It’s ridiculous just how much these pictures could be from Shoreditch/Brooklyn. LOOK AT THE ANTIQUE HIPSTERS! Who obviously aren’t hipsters, just ordinary blokes. Somewhere in East London are people working on a bike shop which looks JUST LIKE THIS. 
• 4’33 – The App: John Cage’s 4’33 is probably the most famous modern classical composition in the world, and is the sort of go-to example for people who want to decry the wankery of much which falls within the broad purview of contemporary art. This is the official app of the piece, and it is BRILLIANT – users can record/playback their own personal 4’33 composition (the conceit behind Cage’s piece is that each performance of the ostensibly silent work is unique, as the ambient sounds which make up its only constituent parts will by definition be singular and impossible to replicate), which then gets uploaded to Cage’s website, creating a collection of singular, never-to-be-repeated performances of the piece from people across the world. I have so much love for this concept – it’s everything that’s good about the intersection between art and modern technology (/pseud). 
• Imagine Being A Bit Messed Up At A Festival And Falling Into This Tent: JUST IMAGINE IT. 
• A Hyperdetailed Zoomable Map of London in 1746: Erm, that.
• NYC Gentrification, In Gifs: A lot of gifs this week. This is a nice project by New York artist Justin Blinder which documents the changing face of the city’s boroughs as they get developed and spruced up; taking before and after pics of urban development and turning them into gifs highlights the transformational effect which major scale redevelopment of urban areas can have; it’s worth reading the artist’s statement about the project which is all sorts of interesting in terms of the ephemerality of this sort of work. 
• Secretly Meet: I think we can safely call anonymous activity online a Big Trend in 2014 now. This is yet ANOTHER service to let people do things on the sly, this time one which allows people to create temporary website which can act as a chatroom, coworking space, etc…but which is single-serving and which disappears once you’ve used it. This is totally going to be used by people having affairs, isn’t it?
• Truly Incredible Photos of (I Think) China: This is the portfolio of photographer Weerapong Chaipuck whose photographs of various places in Asia (I think most of them are in China, but it’s quite hard to tell – apologies if I’ve got this totally wrong) really are jaw-dropping.
• One Playlist: Clever-sounding service which is still very much in Beta but which purports to let users create single playlists pulling together music from across a variety of different sites (YouTube, Deezzer, Last.fm, etc). 
• Hack The Menu: All of the ‘Secret Menu’ items from fast food joints, listed in one place. Obviously this is a US site and so lots of the chains don’t exist over here, but it’s interesting in a sort of ‘oh, wow, you want to eat THAT?’ sort of way. If you’re into Starbucks, though, there are a LOT of weird things you can apparently do with their drinks which you may want to explore (before diabetes inevitably kicks in). 
• TL;DR Legal: A very useful website indeed, which outlines the legal Ts&Cs of a variety of websites in simple, reasonably easy to understand English. Its explanation of the Creative Commons stuff alone is worth bookmarking if you’re not 100% sure of all the categorisations. 
• Pictures of People In Love: A beautiful collection of different people in love from the New Yorker. Oh, and while we’re on love photography, this is National Geographic’s current photocompetition, asking people to submit their own love-themed photos – open til 7 March, in case you fancy it. 
• Selfie City: A project investigating and quantifying the manner in which people take self-portrait photos in 5 cities around the world. Aside from anything else, the interface of the ‘Explore’ part of the collection is so beautifully done – go and have a play, you will be impressed. 
• Asciibongo: If you’ve ever wanted to have a website where you can stream popular videos from notorious bongorepository PornHub in Ascii form, then this is for you. A sort of brilliant curiosity, this – I don’t really know why it exists, but am sort of impressed that it does. Pretty SFW, overall, as it’s quite hard to make out what’s going on, but be warned that there is audio and that audio is often fairly unambiguous. 
• The HomePages Of Big Websites Then And Now: A look back at what the homepages of Google, MySpace, Facebook etc looked like back in the day compared to now. Twitter made the right decision, I think, in ditching the HIDEOUS graffiti-style font that they had going back in the mid-2000s.
• Album Covers Recreated In Pie Crusts On Twitter: Erm, that.
• OpenKnit: Sort of like the 3d printing movement but for knitting, this website contains directions and 3dprinting models for the creation of your very own autimated knitting machine, as well as some designs which you can programme it with. Like etsy crossed with makerbot, sort of. 
• Old People Wearing Young People’s Clothes: A photoseries by an artist who goes by the name of Qozop, depicting people of different generations wearing each others’ clothes. There are some VERY cool looking old people in this – suggest you do it with your parents. Come on, let’s start a THING. 
• Unhung Hero: If you publicly proposed to your girlfriend and she said no, sparking a small viral internet sensation, and then she subsequently explained to you that one of the motivating factors behind her decision not to spend the rest of her life with you was the fact that you had an unusually small penis, what would YOU do? Yes, that’s right, you’d make a documentary about the whole experience and your quest to come to terms with your condition. I am slightly in awe of this man’s chutzpah, although – let’s be honest – this is basically a really expensive and high-effort attempt to get laid, isn’t it? I mean, he’ll probably get a few offers out of pure curiosity.
• Poems In Snow: Shelley Jackson writes poems in snow, word-by-word. This is her Instagram feed – read from the bottom-up. 
• Play & Listen To Gifs: More gifs! This is superclever, though – a website which collects gifs in a grid shape and plays them in sequence with audio, to create a sort of gifcollagemusicvideo sort of effect. I had this idea for Vines last year which I never got around to doing anything about because, at heart, I am a fundamentally ineffectual man whose willpower and motivation has been eroded through years of persistent marijuana abuse (JOKES!) – if anyone fancies hearing about it / building it, though, do get in touch. 
• The Commodore 64 Synthesiser In Your Browser: A 5-minute nostalgia kick for men in their mid-30s. 
• Gorgeous Custom Wooden Computer Mods: I’m not particularly interested in computer modding, but these custom cases in wood are genuinely beautiful looking. 
• Minimalist Packaging Redesigns: A neat little design project by Mehmet Gozetlik, a London-based designer who’s reimagined the packaging of big brands in minimalist fashion. It’s interesting to see which work and which really don’t; Duracell’s wonderfully effective, whereas Red Bull really loses something. He’s done some other ones here, if you’d like to see those too. 
• Play The Blues On Your Desktop: This works a lot better than it ought to, and should probably be used to underpin at least one conversation you have with a colleague in the near future. 
• The Last Time I Am Ever Going To Mention Flappy Bird (Probably): I know, I know, but this is GOOD – the Flappy Bird Space Academy is a very nice twist on the origina’s game mechanic, and will wipe out about 20 minutes of your day if you let it. 

By Alexandra Badea

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Cat Up Lines: This SHOULD have been in last week’s, but the git who made it didn’t put it live til late last Friday. Anyway, of no use whatsoever for the Hallmark Holiday but still mildly diverting, this site collects crap chatup lines juxtaposed with cute cat pictures. 
• Where I See Fashion: Really interesting page collecting examples of patterns/visuals from all over the place seen in catwalk fashion. Better to look at than it is to read me write about (God, sorry, even that sentence was dreadful; not quite on it this morning). 
• Rap Music And The Simpsons: Clips of those times when hiphop and Springfield have collided.
• Let’s Draw Sherlock: A great collection of Holmesian fan art, all of it basically inspired by the internet’s collective Cumberbatchgasm. There are some quite weird things in here, as you’d expect, though none quite as odd as the Sherlock manga, for which there’s obviously also a Tumblr. 
• Snapchat Case Studies: A collection of examples of brands doing stuff on Snapchat, which might be useful to some of you, maybe (by James Whatley). 
• Shaqzine: You want a Tumblr full of seemingly random pictures and musings about Shaquille O’Neill? OH GOOD!
• Cooksuck: Brilliantly vitriolic observations about poor-quality food photography. 
• Socially Awkward Cards: A selection of cards for the socially awkward to express themselves with, by Mike Philips. 
• One Ad To Rule Them All: What do you get if you mix quotes from The Lord of the Rings with brands? You get this, apparently, a selection of mocked-up ads for big brands using text from the most boring trilogy of films in the world. 
• Jeopardy Hotties: Screencaps of hot contestants from US gameshow ‘Jeopardy’. Please, please someone do this for Jeremy Kyle or Deal or No Deal or similar. PLEASE. 
• My Talking Tinder: Probably the creepiest thing I’ve seen all week, this takes actual images found on Tinder and does this weird mouth animation thing to make them talk at you. It’s skincrawly in the extreme, but the audio’s pretty funny. 
• 1989 Batman: This isn’t actually a Tumblr, but it ought to be. Tim Burton’s Batman is 25 years old this year (I KNOW), and remains the first film that I was denied entry to by overzealous security staff wanting to protect the moral integrity and innocence of a 9 year old boy in the face of the UK’s first 12-certificate (YEAH, AND LOOK HOW THAT WORKED OUT MY MIND IS NOW A SEWER). Anyway, this is a blog which should be a tumblr which celebrates the film and all things relating to it. 
• Pina Colliding: Brilliantly silly and very funny indeed, this takes the initial premise that there is no dramatic moment in any film which cannot be improved by the addition of the Pina Colada song as a backing track, and runs with it. I laughed like a drain at the Lion King one – enjoy. 

YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO A STREAM OF BECK’S NEW ALBUM? OH GOOD!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND THIS WEEK CONTAIN A REALLY LOVELY COUPLE OF PIECES OF WRITING ABOUT BEING OLD WHICH I AM GOING TO IMPLORE YOU TO BOTHER READING – THIS IS ME IMPLORING YOU, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW:

• On Pokemon Twitch and Anarchy and Democracy: This week’s internet cultural phenomenon has been Pokemon Twitch, the attempt by a group of people using game-watching website Twitch to collaborate to complete the original Gameboy version of Pokemon Red-  the catch being that it’s being controlled through bots which respond to commands typed into the chat window, which means when there are several thousand people all entering commands at the same time it becomes very, very hard to coordinate. Which in and of itself isn’t THAT interesting, until you start to look at the sort of narratives which people have developed around the random things which crowdsourced agency has made happen. It’s very internetgeeky, but it is worth reading the original piece at the top of this – there’s all sorts of sociological analysis you can apply to this if you so choose. 
• American Promise: American Promise is a hell of a documentary – spanning 13 years in the lives of two African American kids as they make their way through the sorts of privilaged educational establishments which don’t ordinarily tend to be full of black people. Sort of like Hoop Dreams but about academia and race and society and privilege and STUFF, this is all sorts of good and is worth watching if the weather’s crap this weekend (and even if not, frankly). 
• The Death Of The Pool Hustler: A brilliant piece on modern-day pool hustlers in the States, and the sport’s recent decline. I really, really fancy a game of pool now – THAT is what I’m doing this afternoon. 
• The Unglamorous Truth About The Brits: A great piece from musician Little Boots about what it’s actually like attending the Brits as a moderately famous popstar. Clue: not actually very much fun at all, by the sounds of things, although as with many of these things it’s probably worse as a woman than it would be as a man. 
• Cruising With Paula Deen: Paula Deen, for those of you who don’t know, is an American celebrity chef person who was relaively recently pretty much ruined by a row about racist comments she made many years ago. Frankly, though, you really don’t need to know who Deen is (apart from bearing in mind that she’s probably not in any way related to James) to enjoy this stellar piece of writing about the author’s experience as a passenger on one of Deen’s branded cruises. The highest compliment I can pay this piece is that it reminded me a lot of the greatest thing ever written about being on a cruise, which is all you really need to know. Highly recommended.
• Fresh Off The Boat On Ellis Island: Half essay, half photoproject, this is a beautiful piece collecting portraits of immigrants arrived on Ellis Island in the early 20th Century. Amazing faces here – makes you want to follow each and every one of the people pictured to find what happened to them.
• Bill Murray’s Career Analysed In A Film-by-Film Breakdown: The internet’s obsession with Bill Murray is sort of played out now, but this piece is genuinely remarkable in terms of the amount of evident love and reverence for the man’s career which it displays. Going through EVERY SINGLE FILM Murray has ever appeared in, it charts the development of his career and as it does so analyses exactly what makes him so popular with directors and audiences alike. 2 things – 1) he was in SPACE JAM? (also, as an aside, it’s genuinely odd how much Space Jam comes up in 2014); 2) Broken Flowers is by far and away my favourite of his films and is criminally underrated, I think.
• Rolling Stone Hangs Out With Drake: Worth it if only for the descriptions of his frankly INSANE-sounding house. Taste? Restraint? HAH.
• The Imminent Horror of Mainstreamish Teledildonics: I say ‘ish’ – let’s hope this never really catches on in any serious way. I’ve featured the tech on here before, or at least a horrifying video demonstration of it, but this is a slightly longer piece looking at how it works, why it exists and the people who made it. Literally the least sexy thing you will ever have read / seen, ever, and I really do mean that. 
• The Frat Boys Of Wall Street: There’s a Wall Street Fraternity, apparently. This is what happens at its annual get-togethers. WARNING: this will not make you feel well-disposed towards the 1%, or whatever we’re calling them this week. 
• Mining For Memes On Instagram: Really interesting piece about culture, memes, reportage and ownership. No, really, it is. 
• An Interview With Miley Cyrus: Interviewed by Ronan Farrow, no less, which makes this some sort of pop-cultural supernova. Anyway, this is included mainly for reasons of ZEITGEIST than anything else, but it’s occasionally quite an interesting look at a woman who really does sound quite incredibly childlike and a little bit broken at times, which is all sorts of sad if you think about it too hard. 
• Punk Is Dead, Long Live Neknominate: Web Curios’ journalistic webcrush Clive Martin once again on rather excellent form, talking about the death of the subculture in British youth culture and how idiotbaiting crazes like Neknominate are one of the few avenues left for young people to self-define and rail against STUFF. Sort of unrelated, but it reminded me rather of this passage from Self’s ‘My Idea Of Fun: “We’re like coke heads or chronic masturbators, aren’t we? Attempting to crank the last iota of abandonment out of an intrinsically empty and mechanical existence. We push the plunger home, we abrade the clitoris, we yank the penis and we feel nothing. Not exactly nothing, worse than nothing, we feel a flicker or a prickle, the sensual equivalent of a retinal after-image. That’s our fun now – not fun itself, only a tired allusion to it. Nevertheless, we feel certain that if we can allude to fun one more time, make a firm statement about it, it will return like the birds after winter“. HAPPY FRIDAY!
• Roger Angell On Being Old: Finally, a gorgeous piece from the New Yorker by Roger Angell who is in his 90s and has some lovely thoughts about what it is like to be old. READ THEM. And then, when you’re done, read this too, which is from Quora and in my opinion is just as good if not better and will make you want to dance and sing and travel and fall in love, and is something of a mental palate-cleanser after what I’ve just realised is a REALLY bleak quote I just copied out. 

By Joey L

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up this week is this VERY EMOTIONAL track by Angel Haze (who, in a relatively brief moment of self-aggrandisement, I would like to say that Web Curios has been heartily endorsing since 2012) – the video’s not an easy watch, and I’m quite ambivalent about the swooping Sande-like chorus vocal supplied by perennial guest vocalist to the hiphop world Sia, but her rapping is SO, SO GOOD. This is called ‘Battlecry’, and it gives me goosebumps:

2) On the one hand this is very funny, and as somebody who (and this may shock you, dear reader – you may want to sit down) WASN’T one of the cool kids at school feels pleasing and true; on the other hand it’s sort of heartbreaking – is there anything sadder than a life which peaks in one’s early teens and will NEVER be as good? Well, yes, lots of things obviously, but still – this is a very nice spoof of the (excellent) It Gets Better Project, called It Doesn’t Get Better:

3) Pussy Riot weren’t going to make music any more, and then they got beaten up by the state in Sochi and made this. Getting smacked down and taken in by the police following acts of political protest and using the whole thing as material for your work – THAT’s punk, Miley, with all due respect:

4) This feels like it ought to have lots more views. A stellar song/video combination, this takes the twin irritants of Happy by Pharrell and Get Lucky by Daft Punk, throws them together with a one-take video involving seom very impressive low-fi 3d projections and spits out this lovely piece of work by Pomplamoose:

5) Wonderfully louche and sleazy vibe to this whole thing – the band are ‘The Hawk In Paris’, the song is called ‘Freaks’, and it’s wonderfully skuzzy from start to finish:

6) Spherical Harmonies is, it says here, about the strange power of the CGI image. It’s a very hypnotic collection of CGI animations from start to finish, which if you’re interested in webart you should probably take a look at as it features quite a lot of interesting tropes from all areas of digital creativity:

7) Those of you of a certain age will remember the ‘Better Than Life’ stuff from Red Dwarf; maybe others will recall the visual drug setup in Karthyn Bigelow’s criminally underrated millennial dystopian fantasy Strange Days (seriously, it’s flawed but worth revisiting). Anyway, this video mines the same sort of territory – basically Google Taken to the nth extrapolation. The song’s tedious housey pap, I think, but I got quite interested in the concept of the tech in the vid. Also, will REALLY make you want a holiday. I Got U, by Duke Dumont:

8) Women reading out posts from gay dating apps. Obviously NSFW audio, but this had me absolutely CRYING at times. In fact the audio’s playing again as I type and I am literally LOLing. Please, please watch/listen:

9) Finally this week, there’s this oddity which is a sort of sexy morphsuit erotica vid to accompany a downtempo tiphoppy sort of track. The visuals are really very striking indeed, but it’s possibly a LITTLE NSFW – no overt nudity, but you might get some funny looks. Or maybe you won’t – WHY NOT JUST PLAY IT FULLSCREEN AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS? Let me know how that works out for you – HAPPY FRIDAY AND SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

 

That’s it for now