HELLO! HI! Christ, er, writing this newsletter is HARD WORK, turns out, My tendons are all aflame and I feel like…well, like I’ve just spent the past six and half hours typing near-solidly with only occasional breaks for tea (oh, and urine; it’s not like I catheterise, I’m not that dedicated), which is about as delightful as you can probably imagine.
Still, it’s ALL WORTH IT, eh? Who knows, maybe this will be the decade in which some plutocrat or another finally realises that the missing piece in the ineffable, unknowable puzzle that is ‘the future of content’ (a puzzle in which all the pieces are blank, many of them are missing, and you’re blindfolded whilst playing) is paying me a comfortable annual salary to produce Curios. Maybe. The alternative of course is that I continue to eke out an existence in the consultancy mines until the point at which my attitude renders me genuinely unemployable (current ETA: Q2 2021) at which point WHO KNOWS! Still, early signs are that we might all have been nuked into nonexistance by then anyway, so WHO CARES!
Yes, that’s right, Christmas has put me in a GREAT frame of mind for the year ahead – any of you hoping that Web Curios was going to return full of vim and positivity in the new year will be sadly disappointed, but probably should have known to lower your expectations. Still, if you’re still game then step forward, step forward – welcome to another year of words, of links, of some truly wonderful examples of creativity and endeavour and love and pride, as well as an awful lot of things that might make you hope for the end to come sooner rather than later. Which. probably, it will. HAPPY JANUARY EVERYONE!
I’m still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I still haven’t found anything better to do with my time.
THE SECTION WHICH FEELS A WHOLE LOT BETTER ABOUT 2030 NOW THAT IT KNOWS MARK ZUCKERBERG’S ON THE CASE!:
- The Zuckerfesto: We begin 2020 with an ending of sorts; no more will Mark Zuckerberg embark upon one of his much-loved annual challenges, throwing himself headlong into a new ameliorative endeavour each year to the increasing bemusement of the rest of us meatsacks. It’s a shame really; I’d rather enjoyed the annual frothy speculation about what it all meant each January, whether it be the tour of the US meeting ‘ordinary folk’ which we were all convinced was the precursor to an eventual Presidential run (I can’t work out if that flight of fancy seems more or less ridiculous after three years of Trump), the slightly-embarrassingly-curtailed project to build himself a robot butler called ‘Jarvis’ (I mean, I’m not a regular visitor to Mr Z’s house, but I’m reasonably confident that he’s not singlehandedly pushed back the frontiers of servile AI in the past couple of years), or, my personal favourite, the bizarrely-bloodthirsty commitment to killing all the meat he ate with his own hands (it really is worth remembering this one – you sort of get the impression that most people might maybe cut back on the steak and sausages if they were the ones having to exsanguinate the beasts each time, but I can’t help but imagine that Zuckerberg, by contrast, now counts a distressingly-well-stocked mammalian ossuary in a crepuscular corner of his McMansion). Anyway, he’s done with that – this year, by contrast, he’s published a 10-year vision, outlining what he sees as the priorities that he and Facebook will focus on, and, well, it’s worth a read. Look – I’m not denying that Zuckerberg is smarter than me by a very, very large multiplier, and that he’s literally changed the world and at that, but reading this once again makes me wonder about his suitability to be at the vanguard of future human endeavour. So much of this is either blindly utopian, wilfully miopic, or, well, just a bit banal and obvious; ‘Generational Change’ will be a marker of the coming decade, says Mark, with millennials increasingly coming into positions of power across the globe – WELL YES, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A GENERATION GROWS OLDER AND STARTS TO HIT ITS LATE-30s/EARLY-40s, IT ALWAYS HAS FFS! We’re going to focus more on smaller, more private online communities – YES, AND NO THANKS TO YOU MARK, AND WE KNOW THEY’LL STILL BE MONETISED TO FCUK BY ADS, WE’RE NOT FCUKING STUPID! The one that really got my goat, though, was the final bit about increased global governance of the web and related areas – it’s not the principle, with which I broadly agree, that I have a problem with, it’s the high-handed tone that somehow suggests that Mark’s run out of patience with the heel-dragging of legislators which is causing, and this line in particular: “I don’t think private companies should be making so many important decisions that touch on fundamental democratic values.” OH SO YOU DON’T THINK A COMPANY WHOSE MISSION IS, AND HAS BEEN, ‘CONNECT THE ENTIRE WORLD’ WITH NARY A CARE FOR EXACTLY HOW THAT MIGHT WORK IN PRACTICE OR WHAT THE CONSEQUENCES MIGHT BE HAS BASICALLY BEEN ENGAGED IN EXACTLY THE PRACTICE OF ‘MAKING IMPORTANT DECISIONS THAT TOUCH ON FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC VALUES’ FOR ITS ENTIRE MATURE LIFESPAN?!?! You disingenuous fcuk, Mark. God, it’s nice to start the year with a momentary flash of the good, old-fashioned impotent rage.
- Facebook Doesn’t Really Change Its Political Ad Rules: The headline here is that if you’re a politician you can literally pay to promote almost any old cobblers. There are a few interesting tweaks in here, though, which will be rolled out ‘in the future’ (regular readers will be aware of Facebook’s less-than-stellar track record of actually delivering much of what it promises in these announcements, though, so perhaps don’t start holding your breath just yet. Significant tweaks include: the ability to see rough audience size for political ads, presumably to help unmask the sort of INTENSE MICROTARGETING of small communities and interest groups that everyone always gets very excited about but which is increasingly being debunked as an effective mechanic; the ability for users to exclude themselves from Custom Audience targeting; and the chance for users see political ads even if the advertiser has sought to exclude them from targeting based on Custom Audiences. The second of these is the most significant, but the percentage of Facebook users likely to a) be aware of the fact that they can opt-out of Custom Audiences; and b) then go ahead and do something about it can conservatively be estimated at
- Facebook Launches More Ad Reporting Metrics: I don’t make new year’s resolutions – it’s not because I’m in any way superior to those who do, you understand, it’s more because I simply can’t imagine having that degree of volition or motivation about anything – but, if I did, I think that mine this year would be to make 2020 the year in which I finally stop having to do anything to do with social media for my jobs (I’m about 80% there fwiw). The reason? Stuff like this. YOU CAN NOW REPORT MORE DIFFERENT STUFF ABOUT HOW ACE YOUR FACEBOOK ADS ARE AND HOW WELL THEY ARE DOING AND OH GOD I CAN’T DO THIS FOR ANOTHER TEN YEARS.
- The Facebook Deepfakes Policy: Another example of how, for a company of its size and wealth and scale, Facebook is in many ways so, so bad at everything to do with its announcements about platform regulation; this week it published what was meant to be a clarifying update on its policy on Deepfake content, designed to help limit the potential of the platform to be used for malicious purposes as the technology continues to improve. The outcome? A mess of a statement that will basically do nothing at all to enforce the removal of deliberately-misleading fake content on the Facebook ecosystem. Look, just read the significant elements of the statement – video will be removed if “It has been edited or synthesized – beyond adjustments for clarity or quality – in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say; and if It is the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic. This policy does not extend to content that is parody or satire, or video that has been edited solely to omit or change the order of words.” Can someone please, please explain to me the meaningful difference between a video that has been edited or synthesised by AI or ML to ‘mislead someone into thinking the subject of the video said words that they did not actually say’ and one where someone’s manually edited it to rearrange the words of a speech or statement and thereby change the meaning? NO BECAUSE THERE IS NO PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE. Honestly, whoever’s working on this stuff in Menlo Park ought to be applauded for their chutzpah in drawing a salary, because this is staggeringly badly-considered. If you want a contrast, look at Reddit’s policy, also released this week, which whilst imperfect is a million times more useful than Facebook’s.
- New Business Tools For Instagram: Basically it’s a bunch of analytics stuff – account growth, aggregated updates of your mentions in Insta Stories on a daily basis, and, usefully for all your booze/gambling brand needs, AGE-GATING IS FINALLY HERE! There’s your excuse to break with dry January and celebrate with some lovely January meths.
- Insta Introducing Collaborative Group Stories: This is interesting and quite cool – the idea is that people who are in an Insta Group Chat together will be able to collaborate on creating Stories together, with upto 32 people working together to upload different elements to a collaboratively-collated Story. Whilst the practical mechanics are a bit iffy (ie unkown), and you’d obviously need some sort of controls to stop That Person in the chat (there is always one, and sometimes it’s you) ruining the vibe by chucking in rogue elements, the potential is huge – and for brands (and particularly those in the entertainment / experience space) this is a really interesting way of sourcing UGC and doing competitions, etc; I think that the barriers to entry for creating a Group Story of an event you were at with your mates for a competition would be far lower than doing it on your own, for example. Anyway, this is still lurking around in beta somewhere but expect it to roll out soon(er than any of the Facebook stuff up there about political ads because where do we really think their priorities lie? Exactly).
- Instagram Is Testing Its Own Brand Collaborations Manager: Do YOU work for any agency that manages the relationships between ‘influencers’ and brands on Insta? Do you long for the sweet release of death (or, perhaps more soberly, just maybe to not have to do it any more)? Well, rejoice – there’s possibly light at the end of the tunnel (although, er, it might be the oncoming train of unemployment), as Instagram’s testing its own-platform version of the already-extant Facebook Brand Collaborations manager, which seeks to match brands to creators without any pesky agency middlemen. Again, no word on a global rollout schedule, but I’d imagine by Q2 this should be reasonably widespread.
- Twitter Rolls Out ‘Promoted Spotlight’ To All: Do you want to spend a violent amount of money buying a trend on Twitter? Would you like to spend even more money by attached a 6-second piece of looping video to that ad buy, so you can have YOUR VERY OWN MOVING IMAGES at the top of the ‘trending’ page for as long as you like? GREAT! I don’t know the pricing on this stuff, but previous experience suggests that Twitter’s rate card is MENTAL at launch for these sorts of things, so perhaps wait a few months before exploring whether it’s right for Rymans or Dynofit or whoever you represent.
- Twitter for Academic Researchers: I don’t think that all this stuff is necessarily new, but it’s been given a nice shiny facelift and a dedicated section on Twitter and it might be useful to the more academically-inclined of you; this page links out to all the various tools and features and APIs and stuff that academic researchers can leverage to build Twitter data into their research. If you’re an academic with a conceivable use for this sort of thing in your work, you should probably take a look (though you may well be aware of it already, in which case sorry to bother you).
- New YouTube Kids’ Content Rules Come Into Force: Look, this is mainly a thing for ‘creators’ rather than brands, but it’s worth being aware of in case you or your clients make stuff that could conceivably be considered as having kids as its primary audience – videos with that designation will now be subject to specific restrictions, blocking comments, preventing them being added to playlists, and stopping them from being monetisable through personalised ads. This has been the subject of yet another backlash from a community that doesn’t seem to have quite realised that this is what happens when you don’t own the platform you’re producing for – for most of you, this will be of no concern whatsoever, but it’s worth knowing about for the sake of completeness if nothing else.
- Bitmoji TV Coming Soon: This is on Snapchat, and so by definition it’s aimed at children, but read this and try not to think of it as some sort of event horizon of stupid coming towards us: “Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV…With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceships to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies.” Click the link, please, and watch the 90s ‘trailer’ – done that? Good! DOESN’T IT LOOK AWFUL??? There are literally no details at all beyond this, and the rest of the piece is mostly speculation, but I could imagine this being quite big (or at least the precursor to something quite big), and if I were in any way involved with any sort of entertainment property I’d probably be calling Bitmoji up right now for some informal chats (though not if said ‘entertainment property’ was scat bongo, obvs).
- Giphy Launches Giphy Video: Basically they’ve added the ability to include sound in uploads, meaning it’s now gifs AND videos! It’s not self-serve, meaning only official media partners will be able to upload videoclips at present but, again, if you have any meme-y telly/film/sports/etc-type content that would benefit from the inclusion of its audio then this is worth a chat (and Giphy have always been lovely to deal with in my experience).
- Taglines: As per usual I was in Italy over Christmas, and as per usual I was struck with the almost quaint nature of Italian advertising and marketing (obviously ‘quaint’ here is synonymous with ‘displays attitudes towards society and gender norms that appear unchanged since the late-70s); no ‘VERB MORE ADJECTIVE/NOUN!’ three-word slogan trends for them, no, just a steady parade of beautiful people and women who can only ever fit into one of four archetypes (child/teen, mother, grandmother, seductress, since you asked). It was nice to spot this on my return, then – a Twitter post by Jeremy Webb collecting 61 slogans or taglines he noticed whilst visiting the UK over the same period. What’s noticeable here is the wildly varying quality of the copy, and the extent to which many of the recent work sticks out a mile by dint of being, comparatively, very, very stupid. Oh, and NOONE is ever allowed to use ‘X Lives Here’ for anything, ever again. It’s the law.
By Yo Az
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER I MIGHT GET TO SEE HOW THIS ALL ENDS AFTER ALL, PT.1:
- MarsCat: Just over 20 years since Sony debuted its original Aibo (decided, by the way – when I am waiting to die and have fully embraced heroin, I am absolutely buying one of these to keep me a vague sort of company as a gouch in and out), we welcome to the world MarsCat, an already-funded Kickstarter project which offers you the chance to purchase your VERY OWN ROBOT CAT! O MAOW! MarsCat operates on, seemingly, exactly the same principles as the Aibo – fully articulated limbs and tail, sensors all over the place, and a rudimentary degree of AI which will enable the machine to ‘develop’ based on inputs it receives from its owner (if you talk to the cat more, it’s more likely to be more vocal, etc etc). This looks sort of terrible, but also sort-of amazing; as ever with these things, only the curious, the tinkers or the stupid ought ever to buy the first ever version of stuff like this, as inevitably it will be superseded within 12m by something better, cheaper and less likely to go rogue and suffocate your family with its tiny plastic paws as you all sleep (NB – Web Curios in no way believes that MarsCat would or could do such a thing). It also, though, looks weirdly sad in a way that Aibo never did; not sure whether it’s just that Sony have some truly world-class designers, but this cat looks…like it was designed by Tomy, basically, and not in a good way. Still, if you’re in the market for a prototypical virtual pet that will purr, arch its back, play with a toy fish and even pretend to clean up its own crap (really?!) then MarsCat is…well, it’s the only option, but it’s also a potentially attractive one. Don’t worry, Lebowski, you’re not about to be replaced.
- BBreaking News: This is fascinating. BBreaking News is a really clever, simple project that uses people’s requests to use footage in news broadcasts or on news websites as a reasonably strong signal to suggest that a video is newsworthy or interesting, and collates them on that basis – all the videos on the page have been flagged as of interest to news media as one stripe or another (although exactly which outlet it was looking to make use of the video contained in this Tweet I have no idea). It’s a compelling stream of news – right now there’s a lot of footage about protests in Sydney against climate change, a couple of traffic incidents, some sports stuff…depending on how you use it, it’s either an interesting snapshot of broadcast news worldwide, or an excellent way of keeping track of breaking stories.
- This Foot Does Not Exist: Christ, it’s a whole year since the explosion of GAN-imagination sites, peddling everything from imaginary humans to imaginary anime figures. 2020 sees a BRAND NEW GANSITE, though, and this one’s my favourite yet, mainly as whoever’s behind it has really leaned in hard to the artistic side of it and provided a proper, in-depth, serious exploration about the project and its aim (to whit, to ask questions about the market for foot fetish pics online) – “Because foot pics* can operate in two discrete modes of content consumption simultaneously (i.e. they can be memes and nudes simultaneously, in the same public sphere), their perception depends entirely upon the viewer and the context in which the image appears. Thus the foot pic is both highly valuable and almost worthless at the same time – and this creates a highly intriguing supply & demand dynamic when creators/consumers fall on different ends of this valuation scale.”. The site itself doesn’t show you the feet, but you can sign up for text alerts so you can get new, computer-imagined toes and soles sent to you on the daily should you so desire (and should you be willing to jump through the hoops of accessing a US phone number).
- Open Streetmap Haiku: Oh well isn’t this just lovely! This site lets you either specify any location in the world on a map, or uses your location, and generates a brand-new, machine-created haiku about the place, based on data contained within the Open Streetmap (there’s a lot of data – take a look here); it looks for landmarks, features, etc, and then pulls lines of relevant length together to make your very own bespoke tiny poem. Honestly, these are SO GOOD; the only way this could be improved would be to add some sort of Google image search-based visual collage to the output, but, honestly, I’m quibbling. Honestly, try this out, I promise you will be charmed (and then you will spend a bit of time, if you’re anything like me, seeing what it creates for everywhere you’ve ever lived, and every place you’ve ever worked, and then worldwide landmarks, and before you know it it’s 823 and FFS MATT STOP WASTING TIME).
- Canals of Amsterdam: Ok, it’s fair to say that to enjoy this site to the fullest you’re likely to need to be quite a big fan of canals and, specifically, the canals of Amsterdam. That said, if that sounds like you then WOW are you in for a treat, not just for the not-insignificant amount of Dutch waterway-related intel contained herein, but also because of the webdesign, which is genuinely lovely; I don’t tend to ,like side-scrolling websites, on the whole, but this really feels like it works to deliver a high-quality magazine-type feel to the information, and the look / feel has a wonderful 70s Eurodesign-type vibe to it whilst simultaneously feeling very stylish and oddly modern (to me, at least – feel free to explain to me what’s actually going on here in stylistic terms as I’m probably talking rubbish). Regardless of your feelings about canals, though, this is worth checking out from a design point of view.
- Huginn: I get the impression that this is a really, really useful piece of code that I am sadly in no position to properly make the most of – you, though, might be different, or might have made ‘become less of a useless coding refusenik’ a goal for the new decade, in which case, well, enjoy! Huginn is basically ‘If This Then That, but infinitely customisable if you know your way around a bit of html; I’m sure that the promises are a bit hyperbolic, but the theory here – that you can set up events and triggers and dependencies across anything you like, given the imagination, the API and the coding chops – is impressive. I especially like the examples they give, from setting up your own, free, ‘if volume spikes by x% in y time, perform action n’ rules on Twitter, to this (which, if you’re anything like me, will give you a brief moment of truly evil inspiration): “Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the “HumanTaskAgent”). For example: “Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog.” SO MUCH POTENTIAL.
- Postcode Finder: This is REALLY REALLY BORING, but if you do geotargeting of ads then it’s also super-useful. Draw a shape over any bit of the UK and it will tell you what postcodes are contained within it – which obviously doesn’t sound like much but crikey is this potentially helpful for campaigning and the like.
- Display Land: I’m quietly curious about where exactly we’re at as a species with the creation of the (inevitable) digital twin of the earth’s surface; it’s inevitable that at some point or another we’ll have enough video / photo coverage of the planet’s surface to be able to create reasonably high-fidelity digital representations of topography which can then be used and manipulated for a wide variety of purposes, from research to planning to games. It’s obviously most likely that one of the big tech companies will end up being the owner of this data, at least in the first instance, but projects like this one make me hopeful that there will be a parallel open source virtual Earth to play with too. Display Land is an app, available for Android and iOS, which…oh, here: “generates 3D captures of physical spaces using the everyday smartphone camera, empowering anyone to create shared digital spaces for self-expression and creativity”. Basically, anyone can create a navigable Street View-style area which, I presume, can then be uploaded to your 3d engine of choice for further manipulation and experimentation. Whether you’re a game developer looking to shortcut environments into Unreal, say, or an architect looking to imagine a redevelopment, or an urban planner imagining new transportation systems, the potential is vast and slightly-thrilling. Of course, what will actually happen is there will soon be a burgeoning market in bespoke 3d VR POV bongo in which you can have whichever adult star takes your fancy disposing of themselves in your very own house, but there may well be other things too eventually. Quite amazing, this.
- The Dril Turing Test: Actual dril Tweet, or the imaginings of a GPT-2 net trained on his corpus? YOU DECIDE! This is far, far harder than I expected, which suggests either that dril’s honed his schtick to the point where it’s so stylistically pure that it really can be learned by a machine, or alternatively that we’ve been lauding a fcuking neural net for its ‘weird’ humour for the past decade.
- Jupiter: You thought that the end of the 2010s would see an end to the preposterous trend for VC-backed startups doomed to fail because the model is so fundamentally flawed as to be borderline-commercially suicidal? THINK AGAIN! The first, but doubtless not the last, ‘really? REALLY? THIS is what you chose to invest in?’ startup of the 2020s is Jupiter, a service for the wealthy, busy, grocery shopping-averse 1%, whereby you pull together a list of what you need from your weekly shop and some poor peon goes and does it all for you, even going so far as to pop into your house while you’re out and putting everything away for you so you’d never know that an actual, real human being has been working on your behalf to smooth all the rough edges off your life til there’s no texture to it any more. Beautifully, they even offer a ‘stretch’ service where for an additional fee they will organise your pantry for you – WHO HAS A FCUKING PANTRY???? WHO?????? ESPECIALLY IN URBAN AMERICA?!?!?!?!?!?!?! This is pretty much everything that’s awful about VC-funded startups – pandering to people’s laziness, and reducing actual living others to the status of invisible elves, working tirelessly for less-than-minimum-wage in order to provide you, the customer, with the seamless, luxury futurelife you deserve. Please, please let this fail.
- Driver Album: In the intervening month or so I’ve been away, Adam Driver has inexplicably become the subject of seemingly ALL OF THE THIRST. Why is this? Anyway, if you want a Twitter feed which offers nothing but photos of Mr Driver holding a selection of different classic LPs then this is very much the late Christmas present you will have been dreaming of.
- Face The Music: This is VERY SILLY, but equally very fun. Enable your webcam and let the site track the shape of your mouth and its movements, and produce appropriate sounds that sort-of track the types of vocalisations you look like you should be making. Which is the first truly godawful Web Curios description of 2020 – YOU’RE WELCOME! Look, this basically lets you mime being an opera singer, is the upshot – which, actually, is EXACTLY the sort of thing that the Royal Opera House could consider doing as an Insta /Snap build to turn the kids onto Turandot or similar (and this is why I don’t work for the ROH).
- Colour Palette Inspiration: Colour palettes drawn from classic / famous album covers, just in case you ever wanted to decorate your home in the exact shades used on Momus’ seminal 1988 album ‘Tender Pervert’ (for example; I don’t suggest that you actually do that, it would be terribly monochromatic and it’s possibly a hard one to explain away).
- Tonaly: If your goal for 2020 involves ‘write the global smash hit I know I’m capable of, and leave this life of tedium and penury behind forever’ then, well, good luck to you – you might find this app of use. Tonaly basically uses the circle of fifths (here) to help you come up with chords for songs; basically like one of those colour palette matching tools, where you give it one colour and it suggests any and all that would be complementary to it. I don’t think you’ll necessarily end up composing anything revolutionary or groundbreaking, but it’s probably good enough for an Ivor Novello if you persevere with it.
- Greggs and Pret: I’m not quite sure exactly how Greggs and Pret became the retail avatars of the two opposing poles of the British class spectrum, but somehow this is where we’re at (as an aside, seeing as we’ve now had coffee chains on every street in every town in this country for an entire decade-plus now, can we draw a line under people referring to ‘metropolitan elites with their frothy coffees’? THEY SELL CAPPUCCINO IN GREGGS FFS. Anyway, this is a potentially-useful and freely-available dataset of the location of every single Greggs and Pret in the UK, which anyone can use to map them against any other dataset one might want, to see exactly what sort of odd correlations and inferences can be drawn. Personally speaking I think vape and betting retailers are a more interesting and useful indicator of social conditions, but there’s DEFINITELY some gentle clickbait you can make out of this with a bit of thought).
- VJ For Your Home: I mean, that’s maybe a touch grandiose – this is just a browser toy that you can set up to display an infinite, ever-changing sort of glitchy digital art stream, but it’s pretty cool looking thing and the sort of thing that you might want to stare at, slack-jawed, while stoned on the tranqs you told yourself you were DEFINITELY knocking on the head this year, honest.
- IsoCity: I normally keep the games to the end of the miscellany, but this is more of a sort of gentle toy – IsoCity lets you create a small, beautiful-looking 3d isometric cityscape, with roads and buildings and ramps and trees and stuff, all in a lovely Sim City-esque graphical style. You’re limited by the tile types available and the 7×7 size of the grid, but otherwise you can noodle around to your heart’s content to create your perfect mini-utopia. There’s no saving your creations and you can’t export them, but I promise you it’s genuinely soothing and a wonderful antidote to whatever stupid, pointless, mildly demeaning work you’re currently being forced to do by people you neither like nor respect.
By Hayden Clay
NEXT, TRY THIS SORT-OF FUNKY NEO-DISCO-ISH MIX BY HOTTHOBO!
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER I MIGHT GET TO SEE HOW THIS ALL ENDS AFTER ALL, PT.2:
- Climate Simulator: So, er, what looks like it might be something of a significant decade in our attempts as a species to save ourselves from climate catastrophe has gotten off to a good start, eh? I FOR ONE AM FEELING PRETTY POSITIVE! Still, if you’d like to take a more scientific look at what the prognosis is for us and the rest of life on earth (leaving aside the tardigrades and the cockroaches who’ll be here til the sun engulfs us), why not try this fascinating little webtoy which draws on MIT research to offer the ability to see what sort of projected effect on emissions, etc, various shifts in policy will make. Want to see what will happen if we drop taxes on nuclear, slow population growth and increase investment in renewables? What about if we say ‘fcukit’ and try and consume our way to Mars? This is SO interesting, and, my tedious apocalyptic yelping aside, made me feel marginally better about things, insofar as it appears there really is material change that can be affected by us changing our collective behaviour. Obviously it depends on things like ‘undertaking a massive problem of afforestation’ (no, not YOU Jeremy, sit down), and ‘taxing the fcuk out of everything that is nuclear and renewables’, and a whole bunch of willing endeavour from a whole load of actors who, it’s fair to say, don’t seem massively inclined to do what they ought, but let’s not let that stop is from trying to feel a bit more hopeful about stuff!
- Cards Lacking Originality: As far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to have any official link to Cards Against Humanity whatsover, which makes it slightly surprising that this is still online – still, while it lasts, here’s a way of playing CAH in-browser, at work. There’s a theoretical game-matching system in place, but noone’s playing at the moment – instead, set up your own ‘room’ and share it with your colleagues and spend the rest of Friday afternoon having some low-effort lols about incest and murder and stuff. Your mileage will vary – after all, this is still basically CAH except, as far as I can tell, without the quality control – but, as ever, it’s probably better than writing client updates about things that don’t matter at all.
- Canned Emails: There’s the germ of something good in here – this site offers a selection of template emails for a number of specific situations, like being owed money or responding to a request for help or ending a relationship (well, yes, quite), which anyone can access and use as they see fit. Which is fine, but minimally useful or interesting unless you’re very lazy / stupid / illiterate. What would elevate this would be the ability for anyone to add their own templates – I’d LOVE to see people’s creative ideas about how best to construct a job rejection email, or maybe their go-to draft for ‘sorry, I’ve given you the clap’. PLEASE can the creators add an ‘upload template’ function? GO ON.
- Bello: I can’t quite work out whether this device – produced by a Korean company as far as I can tell, and currently 5x funded with a month to go – is named ‘Bello’ after the Italian word for ‘beautiful’ (masculine) or because it sounds like ‘belly’; regardless, if you’re in the market for a piece of kit that will make you feel miserable and fat then, well, here you go! Bello promises that it will use revolutionary technology to measure the exact amount of belly fat you have, so you can feel bad about yourself and your fitness on a daily basis based on ACTUAL DATA! Aside from the fact that body fat is not necessarily a universally-helpful or useful indicator of health, wellbeing and fitness (says the alcoholic anorexic writing this, who OBVIOUSLY knows), HOW OFTEN DO YOU NEED TO CHECK?! If you’re the sort of person who feels that they need to be apprised of their fat levels on a regular basis like this then perhaps you might want to consider investing the money in a few therapy sessions before considering shelling out for this.
- Dwitter: The art-tech crowd among you probably know this one already (for which apologies), but this was new to me – “Dwitter.net is a challenge to see what awesomeness you can create when limited to only 140 characters of javascript and a canvas.” The results are some lovely little minimal art animations, which are impressive not only in terms of composition and minimal style, but also in terms of what can be done with code operating within such tight parameters; sort by ‘hot’ to see some of the most-popular creations currently onsite.
- Family Archive: I love this, whilst acknowledging that it feels a little voyeuristic (but in a really good way). A project by artist / photographer Daniela Spector, which she describes as an ongoing project to digitize her family’s archive. Here collected are family photos from the past six decades, spanning people and places and events, the banal and the remarkable, all presented in chronological slices. What I love about this is the novel’s worth of stories you immediately find yourself beginning to create to stitch the photos and the faces together into some sort of coherent narrative (a narrative that no family would ever create for itself, being by their nature utterly incoherent entities with no ominscient narrator pulling the strings). Honestly, if you’ve done any reading of BIG NOVELS over the past few years – you know, the sort of generation-and-continent-spanning familial sagas that tend to bother the best-of lists – then this will basically feel like the outline for one of those, which is, I promise, a compliment.
- Emoji Simulator: Simple-but-flexible tool/toy/thing that lets you set up simple simulators using basic rules and emoji. So, for example, you can create a model of Conway’s Game of Life, or a simple simulation of how fire might spread in a forest, or disease in a community, or traffic in a traffic system, all presented with CUTE LITTLE EMOJI! No idea at all what you might want to do with this, but I like to think one of you will do something.
- Joy Division Maps: I mean, that’s not technically what the site’s called, but it’s what it should be called – navigate to any place in the world on this map, hit a button, and get said map rendered topographically as a series of jagged lines in the manner of the cover of Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Fine, if you’re in London or Norfolk there’s little geographical interest to be found, but if you’d like a monochromatically geometrical representation of your favourite part of the Peak District, say, then this will be catnip to you. You can even get your selected graphic printed on a mug, which is a very niche gift idea but one which your Joy Division-obsessed, hiking mad uncle might quite like.
- YAP: This describes itself as ‘an ephemeral chatroom’, and is designed to provide a free, simple and easy way to spin up a chat interface for a bunch of people to use in seconds, with no need for any sort of signup or registration, even by email. Not only is the chatroom itself ephemeral, but the messages you post within it are too – each will fade away after they’ve been typed, meaning that a) everyone has to pay attention to what’s being said; and b) you can in theory get away with posting anything with no paper trail whatsoever. I…I can’t help but think that the only possible realistic applications for this are for BAD THINGS – honestly, the most benign application is as a place for coworkers to put all their mean gossip so as not to run HR risks, and that’s a horrible use case. This is terrorism and porn, basically, and I won’t be persuaded otherwise.
- Roam: This is going to be unpleasant to describe, but bear with me. Roam is…a sort of note-taking application which basically seeks to act as a seamless, frictionless version of Evernote, effectively linking related documents and materials based on shared concepts and themes. It’s a LOT to take in, but if you’ve any interest at all in digital taxonomy and information gathering / sorting (and WHO DOESN’T? I know that it’s what I for one live for) then this is very much worth looking at and signing up for. It’s free, and whilst it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get your head around it looks, even to my relatively cursory exploration, to be incredibly powerful. If you’ve ever struggled with how best to organise and arrange your online research and your thinking around it, this is absolutely worth investigating.
- Flow State: A newsletter! Except instead of 8,000 words of crap about the internet you can instead get a weekly musical selection emailed to you, designed to provide you with a two-hour soundtrack to work to each day. If you’re the sort of person who needs headphones on to function in the workplace (I tend to achieve the same sort of isolating effect by being unpleasant and surly, but whatever works best for you), then the prospect of daily, fresh non-intrusive sounds to accompany you may well be appealing.
- 8-bit Katamari: If you know Katamari Damacy, then you will be SO EXCITED at the prospect of a pixellated version you can play in-browser; if you don’t, then I promise you that you will love this. Roll around, collect everything, GROW, repeat – this is SO gently soothing and oddly meditative. Enjoy!
- Snow: Finally in this week’s miscellaneous links, this is a smol skiing game, pixelart-style, all in first person. Ski, avoid trees, hit jumps, wipe out, imagine yourself in Verbiers with a boozy hot chocolate and some raclette rather than at work. Go on, imagine.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:
- World Wide What: Tumblr’s started the year off with its own attempt to help address the generally problematic nature of social media for teens, presenting a variety of helpful guides and q&as and bits and pieces of content all focused on issues such as online safety, bullying, sex and the like, aimed at the younger people who form Tumblr’s core demographic. Or at least that used to – I’m not 100% convinced that Tumblr’s actually got any actual kids on it any more, or indeed that the peculiarities of the platform won’t render all this stuff a bit invisible, but there seems to be some useful stuff in here should you know people of an age where they might find it helpful / instructive.
- Caitlyn Cold: Artist’s website, presenting Cold’s gorgeous paintings, mostly in acrylic, whose style weirdly brings to mind an odd combinations of Schiele and Shirley Hughes (which I know is a somewhat esoteric combination, but I promise you you’ll see it if you squint).
- WTF Fanfiction: The whole tumblr is wonderful – celebrating, as you’d imagine from the name., some of the…odder elements of fan fiction found on the platform – but this link is specifically to a recent post in which its curator compiles all the best (worst) euphemisms for genitals found in fan fiction. There’s a…worrying focus on the penis here, with 3x as many terms for cocks as for vaginas, but overall these are just JOYFUL (and very, very awful) – could you be aroused by a ‘woman tomato’, for example? Have you ever heard the male member described as a “beef slinky”? I hope the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, fyi.
- Camgirl BRB: Shots from camgirl streams in which the performer in question has stepped out of frame. Unquestionably, this is ART.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Toraya Wagashi: Toraya is, I believe, the name of the seller; Wagashi is a type of traditional Japanese sweet. These are SO PRETTY.
- Dog With Sign: A single dog, protesting about various different things with hand-written signs. Gently funny, and given it’s only about 15 posts in you can totally get away with stealing this for a petfood campaign if you’re quick about it.
- Shaina McCoy: Beautiful, textured oil paintings. I adore these.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:
- The 2010s: I know, I know, we’re DONE with the old year and the old decade; we’ve got rid of all that 2010s stuff, it’s all about the FUTURE and the NEW! Still, though, this interactive timeline archive thing by Dazed, looking back through what they consider to be some of the milestones of the past decade, is too nice to leave out – it’s a lovely way of scrolling back through the years, and provides a genuinely great reminder of one or two minor cultural moments that might have faded from your memory; who could forget that moment in 2012 (December 12, in fact) when Kanye wore a Givenchy kilt? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Leaving aside the somewhat…er…inconsequential nature of many of their picks, this is actually quite a neat way of tracking certain trends emergence and acceptance into the mainstream, and a useful reminder of quite how new some things are.
- What You’ll Need To Know In 2020: Predictions for now, as written 20 years ago – this is superb, not least for how much it got absolutely spot-on. Facial recognition as a means of speeding up security checks; the need to clean up one’s data trails; the death, or at least the serious revision, of the concept of ‘privacy’; the rise in false information and uncertainty over the truth…honestly, this is fcuking astonishingly prescient and makes me wonder which of this year’s current crop of ‘next decade’ futurethinkpieces will be its equivalent. Seriously, THIS: “Even in 2020 you will always need to know if the facts you’ve dredged up are accurate and truthful. With so many sources doling out information, you will need to know: What is he selling, and why is he selling it? Most unsettling is the fact that these precious touchstones are not permanent. They never will find their way to the library stacks. Instead we are moving closer to Orwell’s nightmare: the truth ceaselessly modified, altered, edited, or altogether obliterated. Here today, gone tomorrow, with nothing but a bewildering ERROR 404 FILE NOT FOUND left in its place.”
- A Sick Giant: OK, first a warning. You know how Web Curios is…long, right? Really, really long. Well, this piece is…longer. I think it took me about an hour to read, and I read pretty fast – don’t embark upon it lightly. But, er, don’t let that put you off! Honest! This is a SUPERB essay, taking in polarisation, politics, discourse, the overton window, concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’, social media, filter bubbles and so much more. This is about the US specifically, but is honestly applicable to any post-Internet country in the global West – honestly, I can’t recommend it enough if you’ve any interest at all in modern politics and discourse. It’s part of a long-running series of reflections on related questions on Wait But Why, and if you’re inclined you can go far deeper into the arguments presented by dint of a pretty comprehensive list of sources and companion reading at the end – I know you probably don’t want to think too much this month, but bookmark this for when you feel up to it, it really is that good.
- America Vs China: Another LONG piece (though not as long as the last one, don’t worry), presenting what seems to this uneducated eye a pretty well-balanced look at the current and future conflict/confluence of interest between the past and future global superpowers, as well as a degree of cultural and historical context as to how we’ve arrived at the status quo and what might come to pass in the coming decade or so. This covers politics, economics, technology, culture and all the bits inbetween, and whilst I wouldn’t suggest it as a substitute for actually knowing anything real about Sino-American relations, as a primer on ‘where we are now and why’ it struck me as being pretty exceptional.
- Location Tracking: This came out over the Christmas period, and many you may already have read it – if not, though, then this is a bit of a must-read, at least if you or anyone you know is still naive enough to believe that the magical glass-and-metal box in your pocket isn’t just a personal surveillance and tracking device. The piece takes a look at exactly how easy it is to track the individual movements and actions of a bunch of individuals in New York over a defined period, going so far as to identify individuals and track them down based solely on data they were able to access through brokerage firms and the like – as ever, seriously, if you think Facebook and SOCIAL MEDIA is the problem with the web then, well, sorry kids but this will BLOW YOUR MIND. This is a US investigation so it’s important to point out that there are various legal reasons why this is less terrifying in the UK and Europe – but only a bit less terrifying, and only at the moment.
- Friend of a Friend: I love things like this. Friend of a Friend was an old web standard that, briefly, looked as though it had the chance to become the ‘relationship graph’ of the web. It’s a bit techy, but basically it was a system whereby the relationships between different nodes on the web could be mapped and tracked and searched and used, all based on markup language that could be used on any website and read by any search engine, browser, etc. The reasons it never worked out are myriad, but this piece presents and interesting vision of a parallel version of the web in which we all had our own web pages that interrelated and coexisted based on a semantic graph framework, rather than just outsourcing all the hard, fiddly stuff to Facebook in exchange for them being able to sell us mattresses forever.
- The New Midlife Crisis: I don’t think I’ve ever linked to anything from Oprah dot com on here before – NEW DECADE NEW RULES, MOTHERFCUKERS! This is a piece about what its author terms ‘the new midlife crisis’ taking place amongst women in the US (but which, I imagine, might feel relatable to women or indeed men in the UK or indeed elsewhere). It’s not a new story – burnout, precariety, uncertainty, overload, all combining to leave people in middle-age frazzled and mad – but it’s part of a growing trend I’ve noticed over the past year or so of women of 40ish very much not seeming ok, at all, any of the time, and becoming increasingly open about it. A couple of caveats – surprisingly given it’s Oprah Magazine, this read very much as a white experience (though of course that might just be my own readers’ inherent prejudice); regardless, what it definitely is is a middle-class account rather than one that also factors in things like, I don’t know, multiple jobs or grinding poverty. Still, if you want a ‘state of modern, middle-aged, middle-class womanhood at the turn of a new decade’ piece then this is a pretty interesting one, to my mind at least.
- Google, Help Me Quit Skag: Or, more accurately, a really interesting look at how search ads can be used to target vulnerable groups, with either positive or negative messaging. I would quite like to take this quoted section and force everyone in the NHS and elsewhere to read: “Ad click data is a microscope. It allows the viewer a way to see society’s maladies in a way that is completely hidden to epidemiologists and psychologists and politicians and economists. But as long as Google’s ad system has been around, the microscope has been pointing at the wrong things. If marketers seem perfectly willing and capable to use ad click data to their own ends, why can’t doctors and teachers and governments use it to help people who are suffering; people who need help but don’t know where to turn to find it except Google?”
- The Boom In Insta Filters: Look, if you don’t work in advermarketingpr then you don’t need to read this; if you DO, though, then this piece on the booming trend in custom Insta filters as a means of gaining reach is exactly the sort of thing you can pick up and drop into your next client update meeting knowing that nothing will ever come of it but that you’ll get some reflected kudos for being vaguely on the pulse of something. AND THAT’S WHAT COUNTS, ISN’T IT??? *cries*
- Quibi Coming Soon: I think I first put a piece about Quibi in here about 6 months ago – now that it’s more imminent (well, a few months away), it’s worth looking at again, particularly in the context of everyone wanging on about 2020 being THE YEAR OF THE STREAMING WARS (although Quibi is positioning itself as a TikTok competitor rather than a Netflix competitor, from what I can tell). The article’s a general overview of the platform (which, as I’m sure you know, is a subscription-based mobile platform offering high-budget content from name creators designed to be consumed first and exclusively on the small screen) and is light on specifics – apart from the slightly jawropping revelation that EVERYTHING on the platform will be shot in both vertical and horizontal, and that viewers will be able to switch between the two versions on the fly by tilting their phones, and that, in certain cases, the orientation of the device will materially affect the narrative experience the viewer has. Which, let’s be clear, is MADLY ambitious and a hugely clever creative opportunity, and an idea which I now really, really, really want to steal for something.
- The Hype House: There is nothing new under the sun. A decade since YouTubers first started moving into mansions together in Hollywood to form content-production / influencer powerhouses (cf Jake Paul and Team10, etc), so the cycle repeats itself with the invasion of the TikTok teens, all following the same template as they attempt to squeeze their (and the platform’s) 15 minutes as hard as is humanly possible. As ever with these pieces there’s a slight air of unreality about the whole thing, as well as a really overwhelming sense of utter joylessness about the whole thing – notice that at no point do any of these kids, when speaking in interviews, sound like they are having any fun at all. Dead-eyed predators in the content ocean, all of them. Also, depressingly for a medium that grew directly out of Vine, all of this is SO WHITE. Still, if you want to see how some of your favourite content-sausage is made, step inside the factory!
- The Cost of Being a Woman Who Covers Games: If you play games and are interested in the industry, this account of what it’s been like being a female games journalist over the past decade is an unsurprising and admirably dispassionate account of quite how horrible much of the 2010s was. If you’re not au fait with Gamergate, doxxing, SWATTing and the rest, and if you’ve never spent any time examining the discourse and media around the most profitable entertainment medium in history, then dive in (but be aware you’ll want a shower afterwards).
- What Adults Are Missing About Technology: From MIT Technology Review: “We asked teenagers what adults are missing about technology. This was the best response”. Touching on identity, self-expression and freedom of thought, this is required reading for any and all of us who’ve ever looked at a teenager on their phone and done a small headshake of disapproval.
- Interracial Love Confessions: Buzzfeed has created a section on its website where users can submit their anonymous thoughts and feelings about their experiences of being in interracial relationships; they can choose to have their submissions publicly visible, and this page collects them for others to read. These are fascinating, sad, hopeful, heartwarming, confusing, upsetting and utterly, utterly brilliant as a collection; this is a TV series’ worth of writing prompts, a short story collection waiting to happen, testament to a world that’s hopefully changing but which definitely isn’t doing so quickly enough.
- London CCTV: A night in the company of the men and women who monitor the CCTV feeds of Hackney, keeping an eye on the drug deals and the beefs and the fights and the traffic and the accidents and the drunks and the fcuking and the crying. This is POETRY, and I will be hugely disappointed if this doesn’t prove the inspiration for a piece of theatre (tbh I reckon you could make a cracking opera out of this premise).
- A World Without Pain: SUCH a good essay by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker, profilingh a 70+ Scottish woman called Joanne Cameron whose unique genetic makeup means that she has never experienced pain in her life – not only this, but she’s also predisposed towards happiness, and evidences a sunny disposition which someone like me, whose personal raincloud has its own personal raincloud, boggle somewhat in disbelief. This is a gorgeous portrait of a remarkable person, as well as being an interesting look into whether this should be considered a genetic anomaly to be marvelled at or a utopian amelioration for all that ought to be pursued. Regardless, Joanne sounds wonderful and I wish her all the very best.
- The Year of Pivoting to Video: David Roth writes a beautiful account of the madness of working modern media, chasing the video views and becoming, momentarily, a slightly gentle meme as a result of his paymasters’ insistence on autoplaying video ads. It’s superbly-written, unusually for pieces on media trends, but more than that it reads incredibly surreally – you sort of hope that in 30 years time someone will unearth this and boggle at the madness (and stupidity) described. There’s a vague sort of ‘And Then We Came To The End’-type vibe about it, if that means anything to you (and if it doesn’t, learn).
- Alan Bennett’s 2019 Diary: I am going to miss this so, so much when Bennett eventually dies – it’s an annual treat. This year, Alan has unexpected surgery and continues to reflect on being old. I could read this forever and ever and ever.
- Journey by Pizza Toast: This is a brilliant piece of travel writing, in which the author tours old-style Japanese inns, called kissaten, in search of pizza toast, an uninspiring dish of thick-sliced Japanese white bread topped with pizza-ish toppings and toasted. Except it’s not about pizza toast, really, at all; like all the best travel writing it’s about senses of place and time, and how memory and place intersect with those to colour personal experience. Honestly, this is sublime and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
- Elizabeth Wurtzel: Finally this week, in memory of Elizabeth Wurtzel who died this week. I read Prozac Nation as a 15 year-old and it floored me – none of her books ever quite grabbed me in the same way, but her writing elsewhere was always superb, and a wonderful counterargument to the oft-held wisdom that the role of the author was to minimise the ‘I’ (though it’s equally fair to say that few of the past few years’ glut of confessional self-centric writers quite match her prose). The piece here linked is from 2013, but it’s timeless; I am genuinely sad she’s dead.
AND NOW, ONE MOVING PICTURE WHAT WITH ME NOT HAVING HAD A CHANCE TO DO THIS BIT THIS WEEK!
- Excellent GANwork from Shardcore to close the first Curios of 2020 – “Godley & Greme’s seminal 1985 video, back-projected through stylegan FFHQ network, and slightly pushed along the ‘age’ vector.” This is ‘Cry, but everyone’s a little bit older’, this was Web Curios, I was and still am Matt, and THIS IS THE END BUT IN TRUTH IT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OH ME OH MY WHAT LINKS AND FUN WE SHALL EXPLORE TOGETHER I HAVE MISSED YOU AND I HOPE YOU HAVE MISSED ME A BIT AND I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A GENTLE START TO THE YEAR AND THAT YOU ARE GENERALLY OK AND THAT YOU ARE COPING AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!: