YOU HAVE TO LAUGH, DON’T YOU, EH? EH???
You know what? Fcuk it, neither you nor I want to read anything about the news or the state of the world right now. It’s almost Christmas, and I am tired. I imagine you are too.
This is the last Web Curios of 2018 – in a rare moment of genuine sincerity, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who subscribes and reads and shares it, to everyone who sends me tips, and to everyone who’s work I’ve featured on here in the past 12 months and without which there wouldn’t really be much on which to hang this appalling prose.
It’s been an incredibly long and jagged and grinding year, and the likelihood is that it’s now always going to be like this, til we all die. Still, while you’re all waiting to fall victim to the terminal illness that is MODERN LIFE, get right into the festive spirit with this, THE FINAL WEB CURIOS OF 2019!
(happy christmas, everyone)
By Tim Schutsky
LET’S KICK OFF WITH A CELEBRATION OF 30 YEARS OF NINJA TUNES’ SOLID STEEL SESSIONS!
THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO VERY MUCH ENJOY IGNORING ANYTHING TO DO WITH S*CI**L FCUKING M*D** UNTIL JANUARY:
- Instagram Testing ‘Creator’ Accounts: Facebook wants Instagram to be YouTube. It’s not going to be YouTube, at least not anytime soon, but that’s sort of immaterial – MARK WANT! So it is that it continues in its almost certainly doomed attempt to persuade all those floppy-haired, blindingly-toothed children to migrate from Google’s platform to its own. Basically this is the introduction of the sort of simple features for serious ‘creators’ (honestly, I don’t know how many times I can keep typing that word in this context) that YouTube’s offered them forever – “growth insights such as data around follows and unfollows; direct messaging tools that allow users to filter notes from, for example, brand partners and friends; and flexible labels that allow users to designate how they want to be contacted.” Thrilling, eh?
- Insta Introduces Voice Messaging: You know how there’s nothing worse than someone sending you a voicenote on Whatsapp? Yes, well, those deviants will now be able to ruin your life on Instagram as well. Another reason to stop using this stuff, frankly.
- Google + Now Shutting Down Even Earlier: I know, I’m upset too, but it turns out that G+ is even more of a security nightmare than was previously thought – thank GOD noone’s ever used it, eh? – and as such is going to be shutting its virtual doors in April of next year. I will, honestly, be sad when it finally dies; it’s never served any purpose to me whatsoever, but I will always fondly remember my abortive attempts to troll pseudo-fancy pizza chain Firezza into giving me free food in exchange for boosting their engagement numbers on G+. Raise a toast in its memory this festive season.
- 360 iFly: On the one hand, this is a really nice and shiny website by KLM which presents a series of travelogues (or it will when the campaign’s done – there’s only one live at the moment) hosted by…er…some bloke who I presume is an ‘influencer’, in which he goes to interesting and picturesque places around the world to EXPERIENCE THINGS, which experiences are captured in 360 video for the edification and entertainment of viewers. On the other hand, let’s be realistic, there is no way in hell that any actual, real people are going to spend 6-10 minutes of their lives watching a slightly banal piece of travel journalism which is pretty much identical in tone, style and feel to the sort of thing you might see on BBC2 at 8pm. I mean, look, this obviously cost an reasonable amount, what with the location shoots and the talent and the webdev and the 360 gubbins and yet there is no discernible reason for it to exist whatsoever, other than to give the production team and the marketing people and the presenter an income. Look, can we make a pact? Can we agree something together? Can we MAKE CONTENT STOP in 2019? THERE IS TOO MUCH STUFF AND NEARLY ALL OF IT IS MEDIOCRE.
- Gift Rapper: Having said all that, of course, this is a totally frivolous piece of disposable non-culture and I think it’s ace. Ticketing company StubHub have partnered with (excellent) rapper Murs to produce this site which encourages you to buy tickets to an event for a friend or loved one and then accompany it with a ‘bespoke’ (not actually bespoke) rap song. It’s a slick piece of digital sleight of hand – you go through a series of questions about the type of tickets you’re giving, who you’re giving them to, etc, and at the end you get a personalised rap track which reflects your choices, frankensteined together in pretty seamless fashion, to send to the recipient. Cute.
- The Year in Bongo: We’ll close out the ‘professional’ section of Curios for 2018 with the now-traditional look at the globe’s bongo consumption over the past year, which gets a nod in this section due to the fact that they just do this sort of thing really, really well. You can scoff and titter all you want, but the level of detail and granularity they go into with this information is why it always does so well for them; from the point of view of data-led comms, this is sort of an object lesson in how to do it. Of course, it’s also a whole bunch of statistics about what people like to wank to, and as such is utterly compelling – there’s nothing in here to rival the sheer weirdness of Giantess Porn being the big breakout hit of 2016 (please tell me I’m not the only person who remembers that), but it’s still a fascinating read. Shame on the 34million+ of you who searched for ‘Bowsette’-related smut (if that means nothing to you then I envy you) and all of you who attempted to crack one off to ‘Sexy Fortnite’); you could spend an eternity attempting to derive some sort of significant insight from all of this, but my main takeaways are: 1) the fetishisation of Asian bodies is a genuinely global phenomenon; and 2) there was an essay I linked to a few weeks back about how we’re all having less sex and how there’s an argument to suggest that porn consumption backs that up, based on the increased interest in non-human (videogame/cartoon) bongo, and this data absolutely backs that up; honestly, there’s something genuinely interesting about the near-global rise in the popularity of videogame-themed smut, hentai, futanari and all the rest although I’ve no idea what it all means. Anyway, have a read – if nothing else it will give you ample fodder for Christmas lunch conversation.
NEXT, HAVE A SEEMINGLY INFINITE MIX OF AMBIENT NOODLINGS BY SIGUR ROS!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD HONESTLY LIKE TO SAY THANKS FOR READING ALL OF THIS AND WHICH HOPES YOU ALL HAVE NICE HOLIDAYS AND STUFF, PT.1:
- The Most Future Thing I Have Ever Seen: It’s fitting, I think, that the final Curios of 2018 opens with something that left me honestly agog when I saw it last night. I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but I seem to recall that way back in January I made some sort of prediction about fake video becoming a problematic thing by the end of the year in terms of our ability to discern truth from fiction; whilst we’ve not yet seen the first ‘world’s media fooled by GAN-generated footage’, the pace of technological improvement over the past 12 months has been spectacular, and this is the most impressive implementation of ‘imagined’ video I’ve seen. Honestly, just click the link; I’ll wait here *waits* OK good, you back? OH MY GOD WASN’T THAT AMAZING?!?! Fine, Christ only knows what sort of computational power it’s using to generate all that stuff, but you take this and multiply it by Moore’s Law and you’ve got tech which will let anyone create near-photorealistic video of fake people and things, outputting at a quality good enough to easily fool a cursory glance. You remember last week there was a longread about some of the ways you can spot GAN-generated faces? Yeah, well this tech has already outpaced that. This honestly feels watershed-ish, like the first talkie or colour film, and like it’s going to presage a very, very interesting time indeed (perhaps in the Chinese sense, fine, but still).
- Fake Face Recognition Test: You think you can tell real from fake? You reckon you know what a real person looks like? GREAT! Take this test, being run by MIT researchers, which assesses one’s ability to identify fake faces generated by GAN software; there are a series of different ‘games’ which ask you to determine whether the face you’ve just been shown belongs to a real person or whether it’s a computer-generated fizzog. Each round of the quiz asks you to make the call after being shown the faces for less time – what’s immediately apparent is that it’s already very, very hard to tell the real humans from the CG renders when you’re only exposed to them for half a second or so. Welcome to the future, in which we’re simply not biologically equipped to distinguish fact from fiction any more!
- Christmas Experiments: A sort of advent calendar of WebGL toys, each vaguely Christmas-themed. I am pretty sure I’ve featured this in previous years, but the work for 2018 is generally great and in a few specific instances honestly incredible; there are a couple of these that are truly beautiful, and if you only play with one of them can I recommend ‘Plume’? Thanks.
- Towwwwwwwwwer: Utterly frivolous websitetoything, which lets you take a photo of yourself and turns it into an image which it adds to the INFINITE TOWER OF SCROLL on the site; the ‘about’ section suggests it’s a meditation or reflection on the disposable nature of online content and ART, but to my mind it’s just a pleasingly-designed Geocities-ish piece of webwork. See what you think.
- The AI Art Gallery: A curated collection of AI-generated artworks, collated by Luba Elliott. This is a genuinely great site if you’re interested in the intersection of computation and art; the works featured are collected by general theme, so there are standard (ha! The very fact I can refer to machine-imagined artworks as ‘standard’ in any way is honestly boggling to me) GAN pictures but there are also AI music experiments and design experiments, and there’s a whole host of stuff collected here that I’d never seen before. If you’re looking for a convenient primer on who’s doing what with all this tech this is a decent place to start finding out.
- Lensa: I’m featuring this with a very heavy caveat that it is A Bad Thing and you oughtn’t use it, but, well, who am I kidding? Lensa is made by the same people who developed Prisma, that style transfer app that was all the rage a couple of years ago and led to a weird spate of people having Picasso-tinged interpretations of themselves as their avatar; this new app, though, is basically an incredibly powerful auto-Photoshop analogue which can do frankly incredible things to your face with a couple of taps. You want an instant unblemishing? You got it! You want to make your eyes stand out more, or give yourself a contoured face without the need to paint weird panda stripes all over your actual countenance? All yours! We’ve seen auto-retouching apps before, but nothing quite this impressive – it’s honestly staggering how good the finish is on the effects, which on the one hand is just an impressive technical achievement but on the other is yet another nail in the coffin of our ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Yet another reason to never, ever believe that someone looks anything like the photos they put on the internet.
- The Worst Things On The Internet in 2018: Buzzfeed have been running these for 6 years now, and looking back through the 2012 edition just now gave me a genuinely warm sense of nostalgia for a time in which ‘echidna penis’ had even a chance of being named one of the 50 most cursed online things of the year. 2018 has, it’s fair to say, been another year that’s felt not unlike being placed in a tumble drier with a load of rocks – relive some of the best (really not the best) things that have done a bit of a viral, and try and unsee the mousemat (you will never, ever be able to unsee it).
- Eyezon: Bafflingly described as an “Аll-new on-demand LIVE streaming tool for tailor made peer-to-peer reviews for shopping and lifestyle decisions in real-time” (catchy, eh?), Eyezon is the sort of thing which you can sort of half-see the point of but which you know is literally never going to take off (sorry, but). The idea – based on my interpretation of the slightly garbled descriptions onsite – is that it’s a platform which connects people who want to know about a place with people who are in that place, so that the physically present can share their view with others who want to see it. That’s an AWFUL description, I know, but you click on that link and try and see if you can make head or tail of it. Basically, imagine a situation when you’re in a restaurant; you take a photo of said restaurant and upload it to the app; the backend tech analyses what’s in the photo and adds searchable tags to it, along with your location, etc, meaning anyone who’s looking for information on restaurants of a particular type or in a particular area can in theory find your pic and (and here’s the gimmick) request that you share a livestream of the place so you can see it. You can interact with the person streaming (and they with you) with text, voice or on-screen scrawls, and you earn virtual currency for interacting with others, which currency can be redeemed for…er…no, there’s no indication of that. It’s not a terrible idea, but it does rather seem to have forgotten that there’s a really very good visual search engine called Google Images, and that literally the least efficient way possible to find out about a place is to ask a stranger to stream you grainy footage of it over an iffy 4g connection.
- Moodify: A nice little Spotify hack which lets you login to your account and then generate a mood-based playlist simply by moving a few sliders around to denote what sort of vibe you’re after. Simple, but nicely made.
- The NYT Year in Review 2018: Want to remember all the GREAT THINGS that happened in the news over the past 12 months? Of course not, it was mostly terrible! Still, the New York Times has put together this cheery jaunt down memory lane, so the least you ingrates can do is click on the link. This site presents a succession of news stories, presented in pairs, which does an excellent job of showcasing exactly how mad and schizophrenic 2018 has been. Someone on Twitter this week observed that this is the first December in a few years which hasn’t been characterised by people giving a general ‘well thank God that one’s over’ sigh of relief, and that’s because we’ve all come to the realisation that this is just what it’s going to be like all the time. Merry Christmas!
- Make Your Own Die-Hard Christmas Ornament: Is it a Christmas film? I don’t care! It can be if you like! Anyway, if you want instructions on how to make your own tediously pomo pop-culture-referencing John McClane bauble then consider this my gift to you.
- Mikhail Larionov: Larionov, I learned this week, was a Russian artist born in the late-19th Century and who is credited with founding Russia’s avant garde movement in the early 1900s. I’d never heard of him before, but I very much like the style of his work and the site, which accompanies an exhibition of his work in Moscow, is lovely and a beautiful showcase for his paintings.
- Old Apps: This is a fascinating time machine – Old Apps is a site that collects old Windows software for download, so if you want to fiddle around with an antediluvian version of Firefox then, well, you’re a strange and lonely-sounding person but you’re also one of us and you are welcome here.
- HTTPBey: Beyonce gifs representing HTTP status codes. Unless you’re a developer there’s a large chance that the only part of that that made any sense to you is ‘Beyonce gifs’, but there’s no shame in that. Those of you who do get it, though, please can you start employing these on every site you build from hereon in, please? Thanks.
- Rocky Bergen: The fabulously-named Mx Bergen makes very, very impressive papercraft models of stuff like ghetto blasters and old computers, and if you’re likely to need some sort of simple, meditative pursuit to help you get through the coming weeks of familial ‘joy’ then this may well be the thing that keeps you from murder.
By Xuebing Du