Webcurios 21/07/17

Two men, inexplicably staring at a wall of packing crates, at a Dutch techno festival (photo by Fat Bob)

LET’S START THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS LOVELY SET FROM NICK INTERCHILL AT NOISILY FESTIVAL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOKE UP TO LEARN THAT, SEEMINGLY, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WERE LAST NIGHT WATCHING THIS ‘LIVE’ STREAM OF A THUNDERSTORM ON A FAKE NEWS PAGE – A THUNDERSTORM WHICH IS SO EVIDENTLY A PHOTOSHOPPED IMAGE, GIF’D AND SOUNDTRACKED AND SET TO LOOP, THAT IT MAKES ME THINK THAT WE MIGHT IN FACT HAVE CROSSED A RUBICON OF IDIOCY AND PERHAPS THIS IS THE POINT WHERE WE OUGHT TO JUST ADMIT DEFEAT AND SIT IN OUR PANTS, SCRATCHING AND BEMERDING OURSELVES AND NOT TRYING TO FIGHT THE INEXORABLE MARCH OF THE STUPID AND WRONG:

• So, That Google Newsfeed Thing: Let’s be clear and open with each other at this stage – I don’t really know how this is going to work, or what the doubtless MASSIVE implications for content discovery and SEO and publishing and stuff are, vis a vis the importance of your own domain vs FB vs whatever else. Sorry about that. Still, let’s not let that small detail stand in the way of a little bit of good, old-fashioned speculation! What Google has revealed is that, in the coming weeks, the Google homepage is going to be redesigned so as to contain newsfeed elements, with stories presented to logged-in users based on what Google perceives their interests to be in a scrolling manner NOT A MILLION MILES REMOVED from Facebook’s iconic product. The Guardian’s writeup is pretty clear in terms of how it will look/feel for users, and the Google blogposts explains how customisation will function, broadly, but obviously there is no concrete information on how the personalisation and ranking will work – obviously from all the graphics and illustrative gifs, it’s pretty clear that this is going to work in a broadly similar way to search, promoting links from trusted sources (NYT and others feature prominently); what’s very much less clear is the extent to which signals from within one’s own network will be included in the mix, how Google determines that network, and how brands are going to be encouraged to behave to maximise their opportunities to crop up. That, of course, is without even touching upon the advertising opportunities to gain top-of-feed placement for specific types / brackets of people. So, EXCITING TIMES and an excellent chance for you to dust off your SEO snakeoil in preparation for LOTS of slightly iffy selling! 
• Ads Coming To Facebook Messenger Homescreen: You may not have realised that there were parts of the Facebook ecosystem that were as yet unsullied by the commercal taint of advertising; don’t worry, though, soon there won’t be! Brands can now start to target ads at people as they open the Messenger app, with exactly the same sort of products as you can use elsewhere on the platform – you can imagine the sort of CTAs here, right, as you capture users in the part of the FUNNEL where they are about to have a MEANINGFUL BRAND-RELATED CONVERSATION with a ‘FRIEND OR POTENTIAL NEW CUSTOMER’. “Hey, why not tell YOUR friend how much you love Belvita? Why not come and chat to our bot together?’ COMPELLING, isn’t it? 
• Ads Also Coming To Facebook Marketplace: What’s that, Cnut? The sea’s up over your knees now? Yes, per the above, the tide of FB ads continues to rise inexorably towards the point about a foot over our metaphorical heads at which point we will be consuming nothing but branded messages. This is still mooted rather than an ACTUALTHING, and I’m not 100% convinced that the Marketplace product will persist as is, but anyhow – if you’ve dreamed of a world whereby you can target people in Facebook based on the sort of stuff they might be shopping for on Facebook’s own, crappy version of Craigslist then…well, you are almost certainly beyond help, frankly.
• Subscriptions Coming To FB Instant Articles:  Noone I know who works in publishing seems to lik FB Instant Articles very much, but, due to the fact that it’s largely Zuck’s (and Jeff’s, and Sergei’s, and Larry’s) web, people seem to equally have grudgingly accepted that they have to tolerate them, at least from a publishers’ point of view. Anyhow, publishers will at some point in the future be able to apply subscription-gating to the content they deliver through Instant Articles, enabling them to do the same ‘you’re only getting 10 free articles a month’ stuff they do on the web, but presumably without the hugely helpful ‘Chrome Incognito’ workaround which we all use to screw another 10 pieces a month out of the NYT. Oh, and if you care, here’s some information about how Instant Articles perform. You don’t, though, do you? 
• Good Luck Posting That FAKE NEWS: To quote, “Starting today non-publisher Pages will no longer be able to overwrite link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) in the Graph API or in Page composer. This will help eliminate a channel that has been abused to post false news.” Basically, you used to be able to post a link on FB and tweak the copy, image, etc it pulled through into the feed as a preview, meaning anyone could (charitably) A/B test stuff with ease or (less charitably) make the image/headline something totally unrelated to the content you’d be clicking through to. Anyway, those days are GONE. So there. 
• You Might Be Able To Target Ads At People Based On Their Engagement With Your Instagram Business Profile, But Then Again Maybe You Might Not: ‘Technology’ ‘journalism’ here at its very,very finest. 
• Groups For Pages Now Available To All: Yes! Something previously announced is now available to everyone! In case you’ve unaccountably forgotten, “If you are an artist, a business, a brand, or a newspaper, you can now create fan clubs and groups centered around your super-fans.” Yes, YOU! This is, I think, actually a really big and useful idea – motoring’s an obvious category where this would work (Groups for owners of different models, say), as is fashion, beauty, DIY and interiors…there’s even a B2B thing here, and if you’ve spent any time recently having to deal with the nightmarish horror that is LinkedIn Groups you’ll see that there’s an awful lot of mileage in this, potentially. Anyway, you should KEEP AN EYE on this and maybe have a play, is all I’m saying. 
• You Can Now Share Your Facebook VR Experience As A Live: Are any of you using Facebook VR? Are you? No, you’re not, but still, here’s something to throw into a brainstorm to make everyone know that you’re really UP ON THE TRENDS. Tell you what, if you do mention this why not throw in a special codephrase, like, I don’t know, “it really bridges the gap into phygitality” – that way if anyone else in the room reads Curios you can share a small moment of mutual recognition before realising that you must never, ever speak of your shared shame. 
• Better Harassment Filters On Twitter: And yet, still, not good enough!
• Record Longer Snapchat Videos!: Well, not quite, but this is actually a really useful feature; now if you record a minute of video it will break it up into 6 individual 10-second Snaps, each of which can be individually used as a standalone or combined into a story, with each being editable, discardable, etc. Just makes the whole difficult job of being a CONTENT CREATOR that little bit easier, for which we all sitting here on the content farms can only be grateful. 
• Amazon Basically Doing Pinterest: US-only at present, and there’s no guarantee that it will ever become a PROPER THING, but I think the omens are good (for Amazon, let’s be clear; for us, the viscera present their usual bleak portrait of a shopping basket slamming into your teeth over and over and over and over and over again) – this is basically a service they’re making available to Prime customers only (an engaged audience with a propensity to spend, which is nothing to be sniffed at), letting them do all the usual things you’d expect; share content! chat! SHOP SHOP SHOP SHOP! Just a watching brief on this one at the moment as there’s little in the way of detail as to what the brand opportunities are, but just you WAIT as I bet they will be brilliant (deadening). 
• Meet Gout: There are very few things in life I love more than an over-elaborate piece of web design for an ostensibly tedious topic. Step forward, then, Gunenthal Group, whose website ‘Change Gout’ (one of those lovely pharma ones where you KNOW it’s a pill-peddler behind it but you have to do quite a lot of looking/clicking to find out who) is the most pointlessly lovely piece of webwork I’ve seen in ages. From the crystalline design of the figure, doubtless referencing the buildup of waste materials around the joints which makes gout such a painful condition, to the animations and transitions, you sort of get the impression that the only way that the web shop would take the work was if they could spunk an incredible amount of the budget on overelaborate UX. I would LOVE to know the traffic figures on this, but imagine that they are a closely guarded secret, possibly even from the client. On a similar tip, shout out the mad people doing web design at Bloomberg who have once again delivered in spades with this GREAT page on increasingly-lunatic-and-not-very-nice-seeming-billionaire Elon Musk.

By Marta Bevacqua

NEXT, WHY NOT PERUSE THE MOTHERLODE OF APHEX TWIN BACK CATALOGUE HE’S JUST PUT UP ONLINE?

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT NONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ALPHABAY THING BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REASSURE YOU IF YOU HAVE THAT, YOU KNOW, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS, AND WHICH IN SEMI-RELATED FASHION IS REALLY ENJOYING THE TODAY PROGRAMME’S ATTEMPT TO ‘DO’ THE DARK WEB IN 45s THIS MORNING, PT.1:

• Beautiful In English: One a spate of recent sites using Google data to present niche-but-interesting findings in beautifully-designed fashion, this one looks at the mos translated words into English from other languages on Google Translate. What are the similarities and the differences, and are there commonalities based on other languages’ shared linguistic roots? If you’re in any way a linguist this will be catnip to you, and even if not it’s interesting and well-presented and WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T LIKE WORDS? GO ON FCUK OFF OUT OF IT. 
• Twine: No, not the IF programme; this is A N Other of the occasional series of platforms which purport to put brands desirious of CHEAP CONTENT in touch with content creators willing to provide some of that said HOT CONTENT for a fee. Effectively a marketplace in the vein of Fiverr or similar except, one would hope, less nakedly exploitative. If you make stuff, or need stuff making, it might be worth taking a look at. There seem to be quite a few UK-based creators using it already, which seems like a decent sign if you care about timezones and stuff like that.
• Filibuster: Not ACTUALLY a web thing, this, but a really interesting project which a few of you might possibly be interested in applying for. Filibuster is a theatrical performance set to take place at Somerset House  – in fact, I’ll let the artist, Deborah Pearson, explain it: “A series of women will consecutively spend one hour each speaking at a podium, improvised stream of consciousness. They will be responding to a question that is provided on the day and so unable to pre-prepare. The pieces asks what it means for women to be given a platform, what will be said by women who are permitted and required to speak and be listened to, and what happens when women lose their filters and the ability to self-censor or think before they speak? We welcome a broad range of applicants between 12 and 90 years old or older, from all backgrounds, ethnicities, especially women between 12 and 25 and women over 50, and women who identify as differently abled.” I think I know half-a-dozen people who’d be perfect for this; maybe you do too?
• Google Space View: Who DOESN’T want to use Google Street View to have a wander around the ISS and look out of the windows and look at all the buttons and imagine themselves in some sort of infinitely lonelier remake of Silent Runnings and look out at the Earth and cry and cry and cry at the home we are slowly killing? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Look, whatever your thoughts about Google, you can now wonder round a massive space village from your phone whilst on the bus, which – and I know that this is exactly what they want, this, confusing my monkney brain with the space magic so I don’t think about the other stuff, the marketing equivalent of someone going “LOOK! A DRAGON!” whilst simultaneously mugging you – is pretty amazing. 
• Ago Reblink: A nice project by this Ontario Museum, using AR to bring old paintings to life in modern fashion. Visitors looking at the works through the app will see them animate, take self-portraits with virtual phones (yes, yes, I KNOW), that sort of thing – not 100% original, fine, but the execution’s really rather good and shows what you can do with what I am going to start calling AR 2.0 and there’s NOTHING you can do about it. 
• Browser-based AR: Seeing as we’re on AR, this is a cute gimmick demonstrating how much heavy lifting in AR terms can now be done in Chrome. OK, fine, so to play with this you still have to print out an AR marker, but the fact that you can create reasonable effects without the need for a download makes the potential here fairly easy to spot. 
• Women’s Fashion, 1780s-1970s: I have absolutely no idea at all where this Imgur album was sourced from, but this is a fascinating collection of illustrations of representative fashions in womenswear in (most) years over a near 200-year period. So much to look at whether or not you’re a sartorialist, and so many interesting changes; what happened to skirts/bustles at the tail-end of the 19C, for example, is fascinating – why did they suddenly shrink? No, really, does anyone know? Genuinely curious her, and whilst I could Google it I would be immensely gratified for a little bit of human connection here please thanks. 
• The Taxonomy of Humans (According to Twitter): Wonderful, this. Based on Twitter’s famously awful interest categorisation of users for ad-targeting purposes, this webart(? it’s not presented as art, but that’s what I’m going to say it is (just call me Duchamp)) project basically creates a near-infinite stream of Twitter ads based on its interest categories. To whit, “The script randomly selects two behavior categories and one interest category from the ad creation page. It rephrases the descriptions of the categories, putting the statements in the second person. The Infinite Campaign then overlays those statements on top of automatically selected stock footage. Finally, it logs me in to Twitter, uploads the video, and auto-generates a new ad campaign, targeting the same behavior and interest categories used to generate the video. (I’ve limited each campaign budget to $1.)” So good, so bleak, so very much of the now. Ever wanted to feel like you’re nothing more than a series of algorithmically-determined datapoints waiting to be sold to? GREAT!
• Google Expeditions: If you;’re a teacher or ‘just’ have kids, this is potentially GREAT. Google Expeditions was until this week only available to teachers in the US; now, as far as I can tell, it’s open to all. “Google Expeditions is a virtual-reality teaching tool that allows you lead or join immersive virtual trips all over the world – get up close to historical landmarks, dive underwater with sharks and even visit outer space! Built for the classroom and small group use, Google Expeditions allows a teacher acting as a “guide” to lead classroom-sized groups of “explorers” through collections of 360° and 3D images while pointing out interesting sights along the way.” How much fun does that sound? Strap on a few cardboards and spend a rainy morning taking the kids to the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon, or the Grand Canyon, show them stuff…this is an interesting precursor to how the real ‘Ready Player One’-style VR education will end up working, so give it a go so you can at least pretend to understand what your grandkids do at school in 2052.
• Dictionary Farm: There’s literally no way in hell I can make a dictionary and spellchecking API sound interesting, but it may be useful to a couple of you. 
• White Spots: An interesting art project which is seeking to map ‘White Spots’ around the world; places where there’s no phone or wifi reception, places at the edges of connectivity. Download the app and it presents you in the first instance with a weirdly scary Neuromancer-style view of all the phone coverage points around you, which in London looks like some sory of terrifying jadded horrorshow JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE EH KIDS oh god I am even bored of the ennui. You can then navigate around the world looking at ‘white spots’ all over the world, some with their own text/photo/video stories, and, if you like, upload your own (though obviously not from the exact place as, you know, no reception). Worth looking at now before we reach 100% coverage and you have to actually die to escape.
• Skating Visualisations:  I really want these to be copied and used as public installations outside of areas where people skate – come on, South Bank, this is on you. This is a simple idea, but I love the concept behind it – tracking the movement of a skate deck as it flips mid-trick, and then using that movement to create a 3d printed sculpture which can then be cast in whatever material deemed suitable. If you don’t look at these and think ‘Yes, we need one outside the RFH please’ then you are WRONG, frankly. 
• Computed Curation: What do you think a photography book entirely curated by ‘AI’ (not AI) would look like? It would look like this; I’m not sure whether it says more about my lack of appreciation of ART and photography or the curatorial standards oft-applied in the arts that this to me look likes an entirely plausible photobook for which Taschen would scalp you in the region of £90. 
• The Best Book Covers of 2016: Yes, I know what month / year it is, but it’s not my fault that for reasons known only to them the judges of this particular list choose to take 7 months every year to release it. Anyway, for those of you in design/publishing, this is a collection of the best-designed book covers of the previous year; some great work here (even if tardy). 
• Do You Consider Yourself A Feminist?: I appreciate I am obviously not in a position to chat about feminism because privilege and all that jazz, so I will limit myself to saying how odd I find it that so many women I meet will happily self-describe as not being one (yes, I am talking about YOU). Anyway, this is an instagram feed which (mostly) collects screencaps of conversations between its female curator and the men with whom she interacts online, to whom she asks the simple question ‘Do you consider yourself a feminist?’. The answers range from the…er…revealing to the miserable to the frankly hilarious, but the whole is a fascinating portrait of what’s obviously not becoming any less of a fractured concept. 
• Heterotopias: A really interesting website which collects thinking and writing around ideas of space and place in videogame worlds. Obviously of interest for those of you in the industry, but also for anyone interested in how virtual space informs and constrains thinking and behaviour (/pseud) – there’s some great writing in here. 
• Sarina Brewer Taxidermy: It’s fair to say that Ms Brewer’s taxidermy is…unconventional. Whether it’s the blood-red carcasses of skinned cats presented as screaming laminated monstrosities, or a chimera constructed from cat, snake, goat and, seemingly, wombat, there’s somethingin here for every taste (as long as that taste tends towards the toothily macabre).
• ESPN Body Issue (Redux): Yes, I know that this featured last time but that was just an Imgur rip – this is the OFFICIAL SITE, which is beautifully mobile-optimised and means that it’s now even easier to gawp in slack-jawed admiration at the honed, muscular perfection of people who are, by almost any objective measure, simply better than us. 
• Galaxy Magazine Archives: You want 350+ issues of golden-era scifi mags, spanning the 50s and 60s and complete with exactly the sort of Robbie the Robot/Fallout-esque artwork which is always a pleasure to browse? OF COURSE YOU DO! Aside from anything, if you’re a student of genre fiction this is a hell of a resource for classic scifi tropes and themes. 
• My Subscription Addiction: A brilliant site which collects examples of the burgeoning industry providing monthly subscriptions to…stuff. You want to sign up to spend $15 a month on a new collar for your pet? No, of course you don’t, and yet here we are. If you want any proof that the tech/startup bubble is real, the proliferation of stuff-as-a-service services surely ought to serve as one. Look – here’s one selling STICKERS. WHO NEEDS A SUBSCRIPTION TO RECEIVE STICKERS FFS?!? No, you DON’T. Stop it. 

By Maria Ponce

HERE, HAVE A NEW MUSIC SOTIFY PLAYLIST FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT ‘HUH’ MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT NONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ALPHABAY THING BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REASSURE YOU IF YOU HAVE THAT, YOU KNOW, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS, AND WHICH IN SEMI-RELATED FASHION IS REALLY ENJOYING THE TODAY PROGRAMME’S ATTEMPT TO ‘DO’ THE DARK WEB IN 45s THIS MORNING, PT.2:

• Explorable Explanations: A brilliant site collecting all sorts of different interactives designed to communicate tricky or hard-to-explain concepts and theories to normies like us. It’s part a repository of good design, and part a call to mae others create more sites / projects like this – whether or not you want something explained at you, there are some really good examples of UX/UI here, particularly in relation to showing off some knotty problems. 
• You Map: A nice idea which I don’t think will go anywhere, You Map is designed to be a lightweight location-based social platform whereby users can share their location and their thoughts/requests/etc, all through a largely map-based interface. I can see the idea, and frankly I can even imagine use-cases for this, but the fact remains that noone’s ever going to use it which means that it’s going to die a sad and lonely death whilst all the cool kids just keep using Snap Maps. 
• About Colours: Yes, fine, this is actually marketing content for online design tool Canva – but it’s quite interesting, so fine, it passes. You type in any colour you can think of, and this gives you some history about the shade, a few matching palettes, and some examples of webdesign in that particular tone; it’s not hugely sophisticated, fine, but it’s actually sort of useful and pleasant enough to spend a few minutes fiddling with, and, to be honest, that’s pretty much all I want from branded content (aside, of course, from LESS OF IT). 
• Likely AI: I think we’re getting to a point where we need a symbol or a punctuation mark which denotes something which claims to be AI which isn’t really any sort of AI at all. Like this, for example, which is a…tool, which will analyse your phone pictures and cross-correlate them with its own database of popular photos to tell you whether it’s one for the public gallery or not. It’s, er, a pretty blunt set of qualities it will be mapping against here, but if you fancy outsourcing your narcissism to a machine then go right ahead and give the free trial a go. 
• Mumbai Run Finder: I was going to say that this is going to be of no use to any of you but then remembered that a couple of you do ACTUALLY live in Mumbai (*waves*) so if nothing else this week, this is for YOU – for everyone else, this is just quite a smart piece of digital work which is quite easy to rip off; the idea is that you plug in your starting place and the distance you want to travel and the site will map you our a looped route covering your chosen distance and depositing you back at the start again come the end of the run. If you could add in a few other variables – degree of prettiness you want, for example, or ‘make sure you take me past at least three coffeeshops because I’m a tedious caffeine bore’, that sort of thing – this could be SUPER-useful. Yet more great digital work from the Hindustan Times, by the way, who are consistently really great at the web so well done them. 
• Folding Houses: I can’t stress enough how much you ought to watch this. This is AMAZING. LOOK! ACTUAL FOLDING HOUSES!
• Pix3lface: You want an Instagram feed of some really rather excellent glitch art, which will make you feel just a touch uncomfortable but which is also, you know, good? YES YOU DO. 
• AI Movie Posters: You know that ‘not actually AI’ symbol I referred to a couple of links ago?Yes, well, that. Still, though, it churns out really quite brilliantly-realised fake film posters – fake image, fake stars, fake tagline, the whole deal, many of which are slightly Scarfolk-ish in tone and others which are just ODD. Have a play. 
• Spooler: Is there a word on Twitter more likely to make you think ‘Oh Christ, what an insufferable self-important tool this person is’ than ‘THREAD’? Look, just to clarify, lots of good and sensible and smart and funny stuff gets written every day on Twitter, and, yes, making blanket condemnations is A Bad Thing, but, come on, I’m presuming you know that Web Curios is ALL ABOUT blanket categorisations and lazy connections, and also I refuse to believe that you don’t know at least one narcissistic jizzrag who thinks their opinions are so VITAL that they can eschew all standards of readability in favour of spazzing out their HOT TAKE on Twitter dot com. Ahem. Anyway, that slightly rantier-than-expected preamble is all to say that this is a tool which pulls the dreaded THREAD into a single-page post so you can actually read it (and then realise that you really oughtn’t have bothered). 
• Serial Killer Calendar: There are a surprising number of bookshops in London which seemingly sell ONLY books about Denis Neilen and The Krays to middle-aged men in scurf-shouldered mackintoshes (guys, guys, hanging out in these places ISN’T HELPING); this is basically the website equivalent of that, seeking to flog copies of SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE (self-explanatory) and assorted books and trading cards…aside from anything else, it’s the slightly cartoonish style of the magazine covers which got me here; the juxtaposition between the slightly amateurish art style and the screaming headline “JOHN WAYNE GACY ATE THEIR LIVERS!” is, er, well quite unpleasant actually if I’m honest with you. 
• /r/Solipsism: This is one of my favourite subtle gags on the web. 
• Send Me SFMoma: I love this – simple, smart use of the digital archive of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Text them a word, and they will automatically reply with an artwork linked to or inspired by that word. As they say on the explainer page, it’s a way of making the overwhelming catalogue more accessible to more people; everyone else, nick this idea. 
• Spike The Beetle: Depending on how you’re feeling, this is either idiotic or SO KAWAII! Spike is a Stag Beetle who, his owner discovered, wasable to hold a pen and make rudimentary scribbles on a piece of paper. And lo, it came to pass that Spike became a minor Twitter celebrity and that his drawing are now available for purchase and it’s interesting, isn’t it, how in the course of writing these lines I’ve gone from ‘oh, whimsy!’ to ‘ffs make it all stop’? Eh? Oh. 
• Welcome To My Neighborhood: What would a traditionlly-illustrated children’s book look like if, rather than featuring improving stories of anthropomorphised animals learning lessons about sharing and play, it instead featured stories of anthropomorphised animals which are based on the life experiences of young people in the care of the urban scial services. It would, it turns out, look INCREDIBLY FCUKING BLEAK and quite upsetting. Not sure what I think of this – it’s affecting, but I’m also not sure that it’s talking to anyone other than awful internet hipsters like me. Still, made me go and chuck money at Barnardo’s this week so I suppose there’s that. Caveat emptor – this is really not very cheering stuff AT ALL. 
• Fetlife: If YOU were going to set up a social network for the kink/fetish community, what would you call it? Come on, I’ll give you a second, you’ll get there. You would call it KINKEDIN, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. Christ alone knows what the founders of Fetlife were thinking (possibly, sensibly, of the lawsuits), but nonetheless here we have “the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community”, on the offchance that’s something you;’ve been missing in your life. 
• Moodmix: I can’t speak for you, but I find London Gramm,ar unspeakably dull; still, whatever your opinion of their musical output, this promo site for their new…thing is a nice conceit; plug in your Spotify, tell it how you’re feeling on an exciting-looking (but probably nowhere near as nuanced as it would like you to think) shaded interface, and watch as it spits out a specially-curated mood-led playlist JUST FOR YOU. Contains, annoyingly, about 100% more London Grammar than I want from a musical selection, but you may like it more. 
• Voluptuous: SIGNIFICANTLY NSFW KLAXON! Not really sure what this is for – I think, though I can’t be certain, that it’s a site promoting a new imprint of erotic classics by some publisher or another, but regardless, it’s a slick piece of webwork which is all heavy breathing and ‘erotica’ – meaning, of course, black-and-white semi-bongo shots, always of women (why are these things never gender-mixed, eh? Particularly as literary erotica is famously the least-masculine of all the bongoforms), interspersed with excerpts from the texts – Lady Chatterly, The Story of ‘O’, you know the canon I’m sure. Pretty much entirely ridiculous, but I rather enjoyed it for all that. 
• Hungry: You wait ages for a new piece of interactive storytelling from NFB Canada and then you get two in one week. First up, this is called ‘Hunger’ and it is SO BEAUTIFUL. All about food, cookery, foraging and survival in Newfoundland, one of the remotest inhabited areas of the planet, this is a wonderful exploration of seasonality in food, about surviving against the elements and how eating permeates culture through history in a peculiar, emotional way. I got a bitteary at points during this, it’s that beautiful – I promise you, if you’re a foodie this is GLORIOUS. 
• Seances: This, though, wins this week. Seances is another NFB project which pulls together a copmletely bespoke 10-minute film for each person who visits the site, assembled from clips and archive footage and words and I know you’ve seen this done before, in music videos and the like, but I promise you that nothing that I’ve seen to date using this technique has been able to produce work with this degree of weight (yes, I know, PSEUD, but wevs mate this is GREAT) that these do; they are CREEPY as you like, and having tried a few times I can also confirm that they are always different. Do give this a try – it’s VERY good indeed. 
   
  

By Alexandra Rubenstein

LAST IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS EXCELLENT LITTLE SCIFI-THEMED HIPHOP ALBUM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Brittle: “This is the work of motion/graphic designer Constantinos Chaidalis”, so the explainer says, and what good work it is. If you like art which features slightly wrong/messed-up faces then this will tickle your fancy. 
• Letters & Liquor: A blog which may or may not be a Tumblr, but really shall I just drop this tired insistence on mentioning the platform? Yeah? Ok. A blog which illustrates the history of lettering associated with cocktails. Which, if you work in a design agency, strikes me as an excellent excuse to start doing Friday afternoon cocktail sessions based on these blogposts if you ask me.
• Toby Mcguire Looking Constipated: I’ll let you decide whether or not that look is in fact ‘constipation’.
• Medieval Spanish Chef: Not actually a Tumbl…oh balls. Hm, what do you call a running gag which only the author ever really noticed in the first place and which now even they are sick of but which they can’t let go of? Anyhow. This is a collection of medieval Spanish recipes, which if you are a culinary historian or, you know, just like cooking odd stuff, you might really like. 
• Graphic Pr0n: Not actually bongo at all, this, but instead a collection of decent examples of graphic design, collected for your pleasure. 
• Weird Sh1t From Memegenerator: Some of these are just GREAT, and I encourage you to start using as many of these as possible on Facebook and indeed in general email chat right away. 
• Posing DJs: Fine, this is old, but it alsmo reminded me of the ner-ending majesty of DJ CHEF (dot com), so, you know, wind your necks in. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Kafka’s Jokebook: You don’t need to know Kafka to get these, just to have a vague sense of familiarity with the all-pervading sense of existential fear we’re expected to put up with day-in, day-out. Sample: “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? Nothing after Albert’s inexplicable transformation. Every breath was agony.” See? It’s ACE.
• Shkreli and the Campus Memes: Of all the things in the longreads this week, this is probably the one which would make least sense to your mum; taking in the multifaceted web phenomena that are memes, Facebook groups, wokeness, depression, safe spaces and, most bizarrely of all, the internet’s favourite hatebro Martin Shkreli, this is so horrifically of the now that it might well be obsolete by the time I finish this writeup. It’s a look at how the expolosion in meme-based Facebook Groups in colleges in the US are fulfilling a weird support network role for students, how meme culture can work as a surprisingly emo language for teens and…no, actually, on reflection I still don’t understand what Shkreli has to do with any of this whatsoever. 
• Remembering Minitel: I think I have featured Minitel-related pieces here before, but this is a really interesting look back at the history of France’s hugely ahead-of-its time domestic terminal system, which made our Ceefax look like exactly what it was (a shonky but lovable mess). Minitel was the closest thing to the web that anyone had before the web existed, and was used for everything from public information services to (you guessed it) BONGO! If you’ve ever reead Atomised and been slightly puzzled by a few of the Minitel refs in there this will help – failing that, this is fascinating about a very of-its-time and very French service. 
• Meet The Atlas Twins: This did read quite a lot like a parody, but it appears to be entirely legitimate; meet the Atlas Twins, perennial outsiders and truth-seekers and, as far as I can tell, appalling spoilt rich kids who have glommed on to every trend going with limited success and whose latest scheme appears to have been scamming a ‘digital nomad’ existence in Asia, peddling a load of inspirational startup claptrap to gullible idiots who believe that they can get rich from a hammock in Indonesia. Quite startling, not least when you ask yourself ‘BUT WHERE DOES ALL THE MONEY COME FROM?!’.
• Beggars and Choosers:  An excellent piece featuring interviews with a variety of himeless people in Paris, mainly focused on the articles of clothing which they need most and why, but going far beyond that to paint a detailed, and sad, picture of the lives of the marginalised. The bit about the social workers did, I have to say, take me aback a bit. 
• Don’t Sext Me In The Present Tense: As someone old and whose experience of this sort of thing is minimal at best, I confess to never having given any thought at all to the tense in which one should send messages about the state of one’s mucus membranes. Yet, like all aspects of life in Our Lord’s glorious year of 2017, it turns out that this is something that should be analysed and raked over. Is it ok to type “I am worrying my slack, gamey bunghole’? Should it be ‘I want to worry’? So many questions!
• Louise Mensch and the Conspiracies: It’s funny to think that Mensch was once just a comedy footnote in an old relationship, a woman who an ex of mine had gone to University with and whose ‘novels’ were given away free with Grazia and which we would read, giggling, on holidays. Or to think back to Meshn, the fabulously wrong-headed Twitter clone she launched 7-odd years ago with teen-bothering No10 aide Luke Bozier – whatever happened to him? When now she’s attained a weird degree of mad-person fame with her rants about, er, well seemingly EVERYONE being in Putin’s pocket and Bannon being on a deathlist and – Christ, look, if you’re not familiar with it then just read this piece which is not only a window into a world of crazy but also a beautifully written takedown of an idiot. 
• The Greatest Movie Props of All Time: Each with its own anecdote – cinephiles rejoice, this is GOLDEN. 
• The Greatest Horse: Chances are you’ve not spent much time this week thinking about horse-based sports in Kazakhstan. Remedy that by reading this great piece of writing about the ancient Kazakh sport of kokpar (goat grabbing – come on, that alone should be worth the click), and the horse bestriding the game like a stumpy-legged quadrupedic colossus, the Messi of the sport, one particular horse called Lazer. This is legitimately wonderful writing; you can almost smell the goat. 
   
  
• Who Is The Toriest Tory?: It’s Golby, again, it’s brilliant, again. STOP BEING SO FCUKING GOOD IT IS STARTING TO BECOME ANNOYING. I mean, look at this: “Phillip Hammond, half-hard in the gauzy early AM sun, alone in the bathroom mirror, tumescent at the sheer idea of stealing milk from nursery children. Phillip Hammond is so Tory it is creating bone spurs on him, his skeleton is slowly creaking into a more Conservative shape, if he thinks about dismantling the NHS any more and any harder his body might clench and then explode—” What a BSTARD. 
• Wash You’re Mitts: Curios is, I know, famously typo-ridden, but I promise you that that one’s a [sic]. This is kilometric but brilliant, a reminiscence about working in a run-down, semi-criminal second-hand games shop in a poor part of a poor town in the 90s/00s. I grew up in Swindon (stop it, I WAS BORN IN LONON OK?) and I could almost SMELL the chipfat and disappointment, so other children of mid-size sink towns will probably empathise quite hard here. 
• The Metaphysics of the Hangover: This is great writing about being hungover, and about being drunk, and it contains some truly excellent lines – many of them borrowed, fine, but collected wonderfully – about the extent to which the hangover is less a physical reaction than a psychic one to the rearranging of mental blocks and barriers back to their natural placement after being rearranged during a night on the sauce. Apropos nothing, my favourie hangover line (aside from Amis the elder quoted in the piece) is this by his son, from Dead Babies: “Alcohol-crapulence clogs perception, but drug crapulence flays it”- well, innit though. 
• Necessary Driving Skills: This, though, is just brilliant and my one must-read of the week. It does, I admit, channel early Self to the point of near reverance, but it’s done SO WELL that I will forgive it the tonal similarities to My Idea of Fun or Cock & Bull. The story of a man who works in the model car industry, this is so coldly, bleakly good on LIFE that it will leave you feeling dreadful by the time you finish it; I can think of no greater compliment. Hats off to Nat Segnit whose work it is. 

By Jonathan Wateridge

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (NEWSLETTER PEOPLE, VIDS ARE IN THE LINKS)

• First up, this is called ‘Perspective’ and it is just WAITING to be stolen for an ad: 

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• Next, Gaslamp Killer’s latest opus, a 7-minute, VERY STRANGE video described as ‘The Instrumentalepathy Album Film’. Not really sure what to make of this, but the aesthetic is STRONG and I rather like the overall effect over the course of the clip.

•  You want 10 hours of footage from Planet Earth 2, all relaxing mountain sounds and visuals in HD? HERE YOU GO THEN!

• This is by Alvvays, it’s called ‘In Undertow’, and it’s another female vocal in 2016/17 that I am sort of slightly mesmerised by

• UK HIPHOP CORNER! Well, sort-of hiphop – this is Mt Kimbie featuring Curios favourite King Krule and it’s hiphopish and the video is PURE artschool perfect. Track’s called ‘Blue Train Lines’:

• MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new video from Run The Jewels -the song’s ace as you’d expect, and I’m a sucker for stop-motion skeletons so the video gets my vote too. Watch, enjoy, relax, have fun, be nice SEE YOU SOON BYE I LOVE YOU BYE: