Webcurios 07/02/20 – webcurios

Reading Time: 32 minutes

It…it doesn’t feel hugely different, does it? Almost like there was no control to take back!

Hello everyone! Happy Friday! It’s been another long, unpleasant week at the coalface – and I don’t even work full-time FFS, I have no idea how you lot do it – but it’s now OVER. How have you celebrated our first full week free from the SHACKLES OF EUROSLAVERY? Have you CRUSHED IT and KILLED IT and SEIZED and WON and TASTED THE BLOOD OF YOUR FALLEN ENEMIES?

Sorry, that came out of nowhere; it’s just that it’s hard not to get caught up in the exciting machismo of NEW, UNFETTERED BRITAIN, poised as we are to once again take the lead on the global stage. I’m feeling so macho that as soon as I’ve stopped typing this and gotten round to washing some of the filth off, I’m going to make sausage rolls – THAT IS HOW WE DO IT HERE AT WEB CURIOS TOWERS!

Before I crack right on with the links and associated prose gubbins, though, there is an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT to make – WELCOME TO THE WORLD IMPERICA MAGAZINE VOLUME 2!! For a mere three quid, you can get your hands on LOADS of excellent and interesting words (none of which, let me guarantee you, are by me) by several excellent writers; not only that, but I am absolutely in love with the cover art and indeed the artist, with whom there’s an excellent interview. It’s a lovely project, and Editor Paul’s done a fantastic job, and, I repeat, none of it will sound like me AT ALL. It’s ace, honest.

Right, gentle plugging done with, now it’s time for the REAL stuff – this isn’t a magazine, there’s no editing (PAH! EDITING!), there’s just me and you and some links, and some pictures, and the unspoken knowledge that neither of us really understands why we do this anymore but that there’s something deeply, darkly ritualised about the whole experience which is doing neither of us any good.

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you should be grateful.

By Shae Detar

LET’S KICK THE MIXES OFF WITH THIS NEW HIPHOP SELECTION BY TIFFANY CALVER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THE OCCASION OF TWITTER’S LATEST EARNINGS STATEMENT TO REMIND EVERYONE OF THE VANISHINGLY-SMALL NUMBER OF REAL PEOPLE WHO USE THE PLATFORM AND CONSEQUENTLY WOULD APPRECIATE THE MEDIA PLAYING SLIGHTLY LESS ATTENTION TO IT AND WHAT PEOPLE SAY ON IT BECAUSE IT IS ABOUT AS REPRESENTATIVE OF ACTUAL PUBLIC OPINION AS LONDON IS OF THE UK:

Facebook Will Shut Down Its Audience Network’s Mobile Arm: An irritating week in s*c**l m*d** news, this one, in the main because there’s stuff which has happened and which I probably ought to write up in my capacity as a…as a…actually, hang on, why do I have to write this up? DAMN MY STAKHANOVITE DEDICATION. Anyway, this is the news that Facebook’s audience network – which shows Facebook ads on non-Facebook properties, basically – is shutting down it’s mobile arm, which means FB ads will, in time, run across a more limited range of third-party mobile sites. I can’t imagine why you’d care about this – I mean, as long as we hit those magical, arbitrary KPIs, who gives one iota of a fcuk where they come from? It’s this sort of attention to detail and deep pride in my work that you can expect when you hire me as a consultant, should you be tempted.
New FB Streaming Tools For Gamers: There’s been a semi-interesting degree of rumbling this year about Twitch looking like it’s in for something of a tricky year, with YouTube and Facebook and Microsoft’s platform whose name I can never remember all luring big-name streamers away with cash and new features and stuff. Facebook’s latest feature update is designed primarily to protect streamers from harassment: “With the new toolkit, creators and moderators will be able to remove comments, mute viewers for a short period of time or ban people from their Page or stream. Once someone is banned they will still be able to watch the stream but won’t be able to comment or react to the stream or other people, and their previous comments will be removed.” So there.
Better Parental Controls for Messenger Kids: This all seems good and sensible from a child safety point of view – “parents will be able to see who a child is chatting with and how often, view recent photos and videos sent through chat, access the child’s reported and block list, remotely log out of the app on other devices and download the child’s chats, images and videos, both sent and received. The company is also introducing a new blocking mechanism and has updated the app’s Privacy Policy to include additional information about data collection, use and deletion practices.” It does, though, equally read rather like a laundry list of features which I, even as a non-parent, would sort-of have imagined might have been included in a piece of messaging software aimed at kids right from the start; I’m slightly astonished that this update was needed.
You Can Now See Which Accounts Insta Thinks You Care About Most: There’s literally no practical purpose to this whatsoever – at least not professionally – but Insta users can now get info from the app as to which of their friends they’re most likely to see content from first; you can view both ‘most shown in feed’ and ‘least interacted with’ lists. There’s nothing you can obviously do to materially affect the former, but you’d imagine that there will be a host of people attempting to use this information to work out additional details as to how THE ALGORITHM determines is most likely to light up your synapses at any given moment. Expect this to cause not insignificant arguments in certain types of households – “WHY IS YOUR MOST-SHOWN LIST ALL INSTATHOTS???” “IT’S THE ALGO, BBZ!”, etc etc.
Twitter’s Q419 Earnings: On the one hand, revenue surpassed $1bn for the first time, which continues the broadly-positive trajectory of recent earnings reports; on the other, let’s just focus again on the fact that the Daily Active Users number is 150million, which is literally 10% of Facebook’s and which once again should be a reminder that, aside from in specific instances, attempting to extrapolate anything significant about the majority of people in the real world based on what people say on Twitter is a very, very iffy business indeed.
Twitter’s Deepfakes Policy: It’s here, and it’s not bad. Basically, it boils down to “You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm”; this focus on aims and motives is an interesting one, and seems like a decent start. As with a lot of stuff on Twitter, there’s also going to be an awful lot of reliance on the wider community to pick up the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and reporting; it also remains to be seen how a platform with a…questionable track record of interpreting intention when it comes to things like hatespeech, Nazis, deaththreats and the like does when it comes up against some of the inevitably-tricky questions policies like this will throw up, but it’s a decent opening position imho.
YouTube’s Anti-Misinformation Policies: These are also quite good, and basically focus on banning material that’s been edited to explicitly mislead about facts or practices in and around elections, and banning accounts that impersonate others or artifically inflate or boost their views. Again, the devil will be in the implementation; equally, again, one wonders what exactly it is about Facebook as a business that makes it so spectacularly bad at this stuff.
Demand by Google: This is really interesting. If you’re in the music business you’ll want to keep an eye on this; just launched in the US, Demand is Google making available an absolute fcuktonne of data about music and artists, intended to help the music industry make better, smarter decisions about things like tour schedules and ticket pricing and things; you might, say, want to be able to access search and streaming data on a city-by-city basis and use that to recalculate the tour schedule to tap into perhaps hidden fanbases, say, or find out exactly which brands resonate best with your artists so as to ink the most appropriate sponsorship deals and…it all sounds a bit, well, soulless, doesn’t it? Still, it’s almost certainly THE FUTURE – given that the music we’re fed is increasingly algoinfluenced, why oughtn’t the rest of the business? I look forward to all the various stan groups attempting to game this by organising 24h ‘Google Rallies’ to persuade Ariana Grande to visit Skegness via the power of data manipulation.
Pinterest Launches AR Lenses: Launching with a bunch of makeup brands but apparently available to all advertisers in the US, Pinterest’s effectively opening up its own version of Insta’s SparkAR platform. If I worked for Farrow & Ball I would be FEVERISH with excitement about this (I would also be a very, very different person).
Superbowl Ads: I’m presenting these here not because I think any of them are particularly good but more because each and every one of these could have been scripted by AdWeek’s Twitter bot. Honestly, these are ALL basically “Famous people X & Y do something vaguely nostalgic/surreal – and there’s a payoff at the end!” – look, let’s just let the machines take over the whole of the industry, please. The ads will be a bit rubbish for a while, fine, but they will also be weird, and frankly ‘weird’ is literally the only currency of the attention economy and so they’ll do fine and perhaps those of us currently working in it or adjacent industries can all just lie down and go to sleep for a long, long time.
Gucci Pinball: Have to say, I was a bit disappointed by this, but I am honour-bound to include it as a) it’s by Gucci and I tend to love their webwork (to be clear, I have no interest at all in anything they sell; PLEASE MARK THIS AS ‘SENTIMENT NEUTRAL’, SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT MONKEY!); and b) it’s pinball, and who doesn’t love a game of online pinball?! NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Sadly it’s not a very good game of pinball – certainly not a patch on the high-watermark of all promotional digital pinball games, this masterful effort from a French rail company from about three years ago) – but it’s mildly diverting for three minutes or so, and the instruction to resize your browser window if you try it on desktop is a rather nice piece of design.

By Adam Priester

NEXT, ENJOY THE LATEST SUPERB MIX FROM JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WORKING IN AN OFFICE WITH FANCY MEETING ROOMS WITH SILLY NAMES TO COMMANDEER THE LARGEST OF THOSE THIS AFTERNOON AND INSTALL THE COLD WAR STEVE EXHIBITION IN IT AS IT WILL MAKE A NICE CHANGE FROM THE WALLS BEING COVERED IN PRINTOUTS OF SLIDES THAT YOU SPEND ALL DAY REARRANGING LIKE THE PROVERBIAL DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC, PT.1:

Flashpoint: I have no idea whatsoever if anyone ever pays attention to this sort of thing, but I tend to chuck the games at the end of the miscellania each week, mainly to act as some sort of reward for having ploughed through the preceding several thousand words of rubbish. This week, though, this really does need to be presented front-and-centre; Flashpoint is an INCREDIBLE project, which seeks to preserve seemingly EVERY SINGLE FLASH GAME EVER MADE in this downloadable launcher. Be warned, the full collection’s 241GB; there is, though, a pared-down selection of some of the best games for a fraction of that size. This is…this is EVERYTHING, I promise; if you ever spent any time in the 00s clicking through thousands of random titles on Newgrounds as you waited for the agonisingly slow hands on the office clock to tick round to 6pm so you could go to the pub (or, er, if you were a child in the 00s and this sort of thing is what you did after school) then you’ll be instantly-transported by the titles in here; aside from anything else, there are some SUPERB games in here, classic RPGs and prototypical versions of things like Angry Birds and OH GOD I WONDER IF THEY HAVE YETI SPORTS? Frankly it’s a miracle you’re getting a Curios at all this week, is what I’m saying.
You, Me & Cold War Steve: Such a wonderful idea by, were the position to exist, the person who would almost certainly be granted the position of ‘Artist Laureate’ – Cold War Steve, ‘he’ of the surreal collages depicting Phil Mitchell navigating a surreal, blasted modern Britain alongside a motley crue of a vaguely-noncey cultural icons from Blighty past and present, is launching a new show; the twist here is that anyone can display it. “The follow up to the hit debut ’A Brief History of the World (1953-2018)’ is a high resolution, free to download and display exhibition for the people. The entire exhibition will be hosted on a public link for anyone to download and put up anywhere they choose. The exhibition could run in your local library, a pub, front room, back garden, doctors surgery, music venue . . or even a gallery…The exhibition pack will include a poster template to promote your exhibition, some basic guidelines for print but no set rules. Curate your own exhibition in any order and any size, print locally and spread the word!” I’m not joking in the section heading, by the way, I would like ALL of you to do this in your offices and please share your pictures of it with Imperica on Twitter or via email; we could maybe make a nice gallery of them. Come on, FFS, unless you work somewhere genuinely rich it’s guaranteed to be better than the anodyne crap currently adorning the walls.
Text For Humanity: I came across this because Stephen Fry of all people was RT’d into my timeline – it was almost quaint to see his name, like 2009 Twitter was making a strange, whimsical, hopeful return only to get kicked to death by its jaded, disillusioned, battle-scarred 2020 future self – so apologies if this has already been all over the normie web. Still, benefit of the doubt and all that – Text for Humanity, grandiose title aside, is an initiative by Mental Health America but available worldwide; it aims to connect strangers around the world via the medium of sending anonymous, vaguely-anodyne positive messages to…well, to anyone really. The idea is that you send the sort of text that you’d like to get from a stranger to a number; it then gets forwarded on (after, one presumes, being lightly checked to ensure it’s not an exhortation to suicide) to someone else, who gets to feel momentarily warm and fuzzy about the fact that another person somewhere has felt compelled to say something platitudinous about a non-specific idea of a human being. Oh, dear, no, I can’t give it the benefit of the doubt, turns out. Look, obviously this isn’t a bad idea at all; it’s more that I personally find the completely random and unconnected nature of it a bit dispiriting. I don’t know, for example, that I’d find a message saying ‘I don’t know you but I bet you’re AWESOME!’ anything other than a reminder of my own fundamental solitude in a cold and uncaring universe, but I concede that it’s entirely possible this is my problem rather than the project’s. Still, that’s not prevented me from firing off a quick “Dance like noone’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt!” to someone, somewhere – I mean, I’m not a total cnut.
Coronavirus Charts: This Twitter account’s a weird sort-of microcosm of ‘life and the internet in 2020’ imho. Its bio states “Your number #1 source on charts and “news” for #Coronavirus”, and those inverted commas around ‘news’ are quite important here; this is basically coronavirus-themed sh1tposting, and it is ART. I particularly like the chat around the virus’ ‘ranking’ in the CDC’s virality charts, with all these Doomer kids in the replies saying things like “INFECT ME DADDY GET TO NUMBER 1 FOR THE CHILDREN” – what could be more 2020 than “something strange and potentially awful and terrifying is happening; let’s cheer it on and pretend we are actively seeking the sweet release of death and let us also sort of weirdly anthropomorphise and fetishise it!”? Expect to see a LOT of ‘Sexy Coronavirus’ costumes come October, is all.
Column: Column is…mysterious. “Column is a new social network dedicated to fixing information incentives online”, backed by Peter Thiel amongst others and recipient of quite a lot of curious chat online as to exactly what that will practically entail. At the moment Column’s recruiting expressions of interest before accepting people into a proper alpha launch, and it’s not entirely clear how it will function, but coverage so far suggests there’s going to be a strong emphasis on guided conversations and discussions, with users choosing to ‘follow’ conversations and groups convened and effectively run by high-value (intellectual or, inevitably, financial) individuals. “The plan is for these luminaries to buy in to the service: the document suggests that Column could raise $50 million from “500 equity holders that are public intellectuals,” each paying $100,000 to invest in the site and lead their own private community (or “column”). The network itself, however, although it’s subscriber-only, is not intended to be exclusive. Anyone can join; the goal is to scale, and the hope is that a paid service will nurture high-quality content instead of the toxic morass most social networks give rise to.” Which feels a bit like a platform designed to foster cults imho, but frankly if the future is all about a bunch of people paying money to access the online Church of DiCaprio then who am I to argue?
Guild: What’s holding YOU back from business success? What’s the main thing that’s stopping you from reading this on one of those mental rich person’s mobile phones made out of diamond and ocelot perinea? Let me guess – IT’S THE ABSENCE OF A DEDICATED MESSAGING APP FOR BUSINESS, RIGHT?! I thought as much – thank GOD, then, for Guild, which bills itself as ‘the world’s best messaging app for business’, and which describes itself as “as easy to use as a consumer messaging app but with the privacy, control, sophistication and service you’d expect for business.” Basically it’s a halfway house between LinkedIn and WhastApp, because that’s exactly what you’ve been crying out for, right? There is literally no conceivable reason that I can think of as to why this is necessary or indeed better than any number of existing platforms and services out there – look, I know we all hate LinkedIn, right, but how about we just stop using it rather than replacing it with something parallel? WE DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS STUFF! WE CAN MAKE S*C**L M*D** STOP IF WE TRY! Please?
Mydora: Oh God, this is dizzying. Another project by the amazing team at Restorativland – whose Geocities archiving project I featured a few weeks back – this is Mydora, an incredible resource which they actually built last year and which I totally failed to see at the time. Basically they managed to save nearly 500,000 songs from the old MySpace archive and turn them into this, an infinite streaming service which you can tweak by genre but which otherwise just serves up a near-infinite stream of entirely random, mostly obscure musical odds and ends from the 00s. Depending on the sort of decade you had back then, this may send you spiralling back to some sort of Nu-Rave, Klaxons-y fever dream; seriously, this is SOOOO deep.
Oscar The Bin: I have literally just realised as I typed that why this device is named ‘Oscar’. I am an idiot. Still, this is a smart-sounding idea; Oscar is technology developed by Inuitive AI which is designed to be installed in places where there’s differentiated refuse disposal; the idea is that Oscar uses image recognition to determine what someone is depositing into the bin, and admonishes them gently if they’re putting, say, bacon fat in the glass recycling. Doubtless based on some nudge-type principles, this apparently has a significant positive impact on the quality of refuse division and lessens the wastage in stuff being taken to recycling; it’s a really interesting idea, although obviously does lead one to image a classically-dystopian Judge Dredd-style future in which the bins are always malfunctioning and swearing at you, and in which eventually they’ll be equipped with low-level electroshock capabilities because we always, always need a stick.
Amazon Dating: This isn’t a real site – it’s a very well-made spoof by Ani Acopian and Suzy Shinn – but I feel reasonably-confident in predicting we’ll have some sort of Amazon dating product before the decade is out; after all, what better indicator could there possibly be as to your likely compatibility with a potential partner than your shopping history? Still, while we wait for ever-munificent MechaBezos to grant us another boon – stick me with your arrow, skin-domed cupid! – we can enjoy the painstakingly written profiles of the various singles available for your perusal on Amazon Dating (which reads quite a lot like Amazon Pimp, which is another potential area for expansion; I’d imagine this would probably be a sub-brand, though). Do check the reviews too; I think these are real ones culled from elsewhere, but they work wonderfully.
All The Basketball: Non-football people in the UK are often known to quite-justifiably complain that the football IS ALWAYS HAPPENING; spare a thought for the sports refuseniks in the US, though, who have not only their own version of football (the one with the pituitary meatheads and the concussion) but also baseball and, worst of all, basketball, a sport so preposterously constant that each team in the NBA plays every two or three days for basically 10 months of the year (this might be an exaggeration, but it’s only a very slight one) and that therefore produces SO MUCH BASKETBALL that it’s literally impossible to see it all. Unless, of course, you use this site – Clips is quite amazing, and seemingly legal (or at least it is in the UK), and presents EVERY SINGLE IMPORTANT BIT of EVERY SINGLE BASKETBALL GAME on one website. You can see every point as an individual 10-second clip should you so desire; if you like basketball then you will possibly never do anything else ever again.
Synesthesia Me: A nice little art project in which artist Bernadette Sheridan has built a little online tool which lets you see how she ‘sees’ your name, chromatically. In common with some other synesthetes,Sheridan sees specific letters as stark blocks of colour; type in your name and you can see what combination it creates for her. You can browse galleries of the visualisations of others’ names, or create your own and buy your own print of it from Etsy; this is potentially a lovely present for a kid, I think (or adult; there’s nothing inherently childish about synesthesia, Matt, you wanker).
Zyl: This is quite a cool idea in theory, but a terrible one in practice. I think there’s a general understanding that there’s nothing good about Facebook amongst most people, but the one feature that stills seems to elicit some shred of affection is the timehop thing, showing you memories from a past in which you were thin and still had fun; Zyl is basically that, but for your camera roll; the app will pull out a random photo from your phone’s memory each day (presumably it’s got some sort of software to prevent it from pulling anything too…er…fleshy), and exhort you to share it with others – IN THE APP!! Yes, that’s right, it’s ANOTHER FCUKING S*C**L N*TW*RK! Were it not for the insistance on becoming a community, I quite like the idea of mining your phone’s memory for stuff like that and wonder how else it could be applied.
A Thread of Awesome Birds: You might not think you care about mad avian plumage, but I promise you that you really, really do.
Audio Canterbury Tales: Oh this is so wonderful! You can get this either as an app or use it in-browser; it’s the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, presented simultaneously as its original manuscript, as a textual translation, and with an audio file of the original version being read overlaid on top, and it’s FASCINATING. Even better, this is an entirely self-made project by a bunch of academics who’ve cobbled it all together themselves, and it was even championed by the late Terry Jones who aside from being a Python was also a Chaucerian scholar of some renown. So, so lovely, and genuinely happymaking (especially if you’re any sort of history geek).
Pokemon of the Year: I don’t really understand why Google is running a poll to determine the popular choice for ‘Pokemon of the Year’ but, well, it is! You can vote for another week or so, so CHOOSE WISELY.

By Deborah Paauwe

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS SLIGHTLY FRANTIC BREAKS MIX BY YOROBI!

Amiibots on Twitch: I only partially understand this, if I’m honest – there are a few things here that are largely a mystery to me, such as Amiibos which I have since learned are little collectibles produced by Nintendo that come in the form of cards or figurines and which can be used to affect in-game play via RFID or something like that. Still, the overall premise is really interesting – this is another 24/7 autoplaying stream of videogame fighting, all running entirely autonomously, with the game in this case consisting of Super Smash Bros with a roster of fighters comprising the Amiibos uploaded by users. Which, fine, all sounds totally arcane and baffling, I appreciate, but the basic premise is that this is infinitely-streaming, computer-controlled videogame play based on characters created out-of-game by actual people. So one could imagine a situation in which, say, FIFA players could train and improve their teams in FUT before uploading them to something like this to play computer-controlled ranking matches against other users’ teams in exchange for currency, etc. DO YOU SEE? Fine, this is all VERY niche and VERY geeky, but I genuinely think there’s the beginning of a very, very big entertainment movement here.
Go Dogo: Do you love your dog? Of course you do! He or she is a GOOD BOY OR GIRL! It’s fair to say, though, that unless you’re a very particular type of delusional you probably don’t think of your dog as being particularly smart (apologies, obviously, if your dog’s one of those ‘open the door, use a flushing toilet, rescue kid down the well-type animals); perhaps the reason is that is that you’re not giving it enough stimulating mental challenges! Enter Go Dogo, a pre-release product which is designed to address that exact lacuna in your pet’s life – “The Go Dogo game consists of two physical units that connect to your home TV through an HDMI cable. The main unit includes a computer, a treat dispenser, and a camera. A small side camera provides a side view of the dog. You control the system through an app, available for iOS and Android. It will allow you to set up the system, schedule trainings and follow your dog’s progress. Once you’ve started a session, the instructor on the screen will call your dog over and ask it to perform a task. The two cameras ensure that the dog’s response is captured, and if the task is performed correctly, a treat is released.” So, basically, you’re outsourcing ‘playing with an interacting with your dog’ to a machine. Get a fcuking hamster, you don’t deserve a dog.
The Hair Freezing Contest: You might have seen the photos of this annual event at Takhini Hot Springs doing the rounds online for a few years now, but i didn’t realise that it had its own website with its own excellent online photogallery of very, very cold-looking people with hair straight out of anime. You still have until 1 April to enter the 2020 contest, should you be able to get yourself to the Yukon between now and then.
Check Republic: Online collaborative art projects aren’t new, but I’ve not seen one that uses this particular conceit; Leon Eckert’s built what’s basically a massive, multiplayer piece of pixel art out of little tick dialogue boxes, which anyone can check or uncheck to create…something. At the time of writing, there’s a slightly-Japanese-looking cutesy design on there, but who knows what it will be when you click? Web Curios accepts no responsibility should the answer to that question be ‘swastikas’, but genuinely hopes that it isn’t.
Google Maps Hacks: You will, I’m sure, have seen this this week – artist Simon Weckert who manipulated Google Maps into falsely displaying a traffic jam by taking a small trailerload of Android phones over a bridge very slowly, thereby making Google think that there were a bunch of people stuck in very heavy gridlock and thereby causing a red traffic overlay to appear on the live Google Maps display of Berlin. Fascinating project, not least for the ideas it sparked about what else you could do with this sort of thinking / hacking, but also because it shows quite how cobbled together much of the seemingly-shiny modern web infrastructure is; stuff like this is why so many companies are so keen on the idea of smart cities, so as to eliminate the possibility for person-led fcukery and error (the two things that I imagine will render living in the future maybe halfway tolerable).
This Cat Hopefully Does Not Exist: A Twitter feed publishing GAN-imagined cats. Cats which can at best be described as ‘approximations’ and at worst as ‘hairy nightmares’. HORRIBLE.
The Art of Building 2019: The 2019 finalists of the Chartered Institute of Building’s ‘Art of Building’ photography prize. The website’s a bit horrible (sorry, but it is), but you can see the various pics by using the selector in the top-right of the page; it’s actually really nice to see a selection of photos that doesn’t focus on people, I must say, which is a new level of misanthropy even for me.
Little-Known But Obvious Facts: I guarantee you will do a proper “OH WHAT?!” at at least three of these. A classic-of-the-genre Reddit thread which taught me LOADS (including that I simply don’t think hard enough about anything); personal favourite findings include the fact that “Words that are spelled the same but pronounced with emphasis on different syllables is actually indicative of the part of speech it is. Stress on the first syllable is a noun. Stress on the last syllable is a verb. Examples: CON-tract and con-TRACT. The former is a noun ( sign this contract) whereas the latter is a verb (the muscles contract). Same with record, address, impact, object, and a few others”, and that cats and dogs literally cannot see what’s under their noses. I promise you, this will teach you more than ANYTHING that has happened at work this year.
UK Govt Organograms: Ok, fine, I appreciate that that’s not the most compelling link headline I’ve ever penned BUT I promise you that this selection of designs, using the departmental structure of various UK Governmental bodies in 2014 as the starting point, are sort of soberly-beautiful. I particularly like the way they’re kept unannotated, lending them a pleasingly abstract quality; I can imagine that there’s a parallel universe in which the civil service is much, much cooler than it is in real life and young departmental hotshots get designs like these inked on their perfectly-sculpted torsos to mark their first classified assignment or something like that (having worked, briefly, at DWP, I can categorically confirm that this is a very far parallel indeed).
Masterworks: After last week’s site which let you bid for the rights to a musical artist’s back catalogue, another online service which very much fits into the ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ bracket; Masterworks lets anyone (well, anyone with a reasonable amount of liquidity at least) invest in the purchase of actual, genuine bona fide art, PROPER art, by people you’ve heard of and maybe even quickly rushed past on your way to see the Mona Lisa or one of the Van Goghs you’ recognise (sorry, I know that that is horribly snobbish, but this sort of thing rather brings out the worst in me). Like the potential returns you can get from a Monet but don’t quite have the seven figures to drop on one? NO WORRIES JOIN A SYNDICATE!! Yes, that’s right, you can become part of a collective to own 1% of a Monet, or a Manet, or a Magritte (painters not beginning with an ‘M’ are also available, I believe), with the eventual hope that it will resell at a profit and you’ll trouser a tidy sum. Leaving aside the utter, utter misery of conceiving of art in this way, it also strikes me as wildly optimistic; I mean, these big ticket lads don’t move that often, and I’d be interested to see exactly what their presumed vesting period is for these shares. Still, if you have all the artistic soul and emotional depth of a blobfish then FILL YOUR BOOTS.
Write With Parkinsons: This is lovely. The creator’s mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and so they created this – a font designed to record her writing as it currently is, which will change over time as her writing does. It’s a beautiful and sad expression of what’s lost with Parkinson’s, and the way it’s been open sourced to allow anyone to create their own version with their own or a relative’s handwriting is lovely. I am very, very bored of ‘we are going to use a tech thing to highlight issue X’ stunts, but even my miserable cynicism was won over by this (that said, please, no more fonts as campaigns, please).
Take Care: This is an interesting idea; as far as I can see, Take Care is designed to be an online retailer which carries only products which it determines to meet certain criteria around environmental impact, etc (they use the term ‘sustainability’, but I have decided to boycott it in 2020 as it’s fcuking meaningless and seemingly used only by people who want to obfuscate what they are actually doing for the environment with vaguery); if you’re interested in keeping track of what’s new in the world of environmentally-friendly (ish – it’s all relative, because, as it’s important to keep reiterating, WE NEED TO STOP WANTING AND BUYING THINGS ALL THE TIME) retail then this is a must-bookmark. It’s a Dutch company but obviously has international ambitions, and I think it’s a really interesting site; worth keeping an eye on, I think.
Bongoquotes: I found this Reddit thread so much funnier than I wanted to; I am a base person. Still, I can convince myself that I am better than all the people responding in here – HOW MUCH BONGO DO YOU HAVE TO WATCH TO HAVE A ‘FAVOURITE’ QUOTE FFS?!? The question being asked is ‘what’s the best quote from a pr0n film that you remember?’ and some of the answers…just wow. But seriously though, if you recognise any of these then I sort of pity you. I am genuinely curious about the context for some of these – particularly “In front of my salad?” – but not to the extent that I’m about to go searching for them. There’s no pictures in here, but there’s quite a lot of NSFW words. Still, HILARIOUS.
Spaghetti Hentai: A brand new one for the Rule 34 encyclopedia, this. Who was the first person to think ‘Hm, I wonder what would happen if I took Hentai imagery [for those of you fortunate enough not to be immediately familiar with what that word means, it’s basically the generic for anime bongo] and then used a Neural Net to style transfer it so that it looked like that it was made of spaghetti?’? Sadly it appears that we will never know, but that special man’s (going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty confident I’m right here) legacy is going to be preserved forever thanks to this subReddit. Is it NSFW? Hm, on the one hand, it’s spaghetti; on the other, it’s pictures of preposterously-proportioned cartoon people, fcuking, albeit rendered in cooked pasta. I don’t know, kids, this one’s up to you – I think you could make a convincing defence if confronted by HR, though, as there’s no way in hell anyone could possibly w4nk to this (please, please, don’t feel the need to prove me wrong).
iSpy Waipoua: This is Where’s Wally? (But obviously not for copyright reasons!), except rather than looking for a lanky, speccy kid in a stripey top you’re instead looking for a bunch of creatures and characters from Waipoua National Park in New Zealand. Soothing fun, and the sort of thing that might shut a kid with an ipad up for a good 40 minutes if you’re lucky.
The Snake Mother: Finally this week, a choose your own adventure-type text game with very simple graphics that goes weirdly deep – there are a LOT of branches here, and despite the simple 8-bit graphics there’s quite a haunting, creepy vibe to the whole thing (and the sountrack’s really very good); give this a play, it’s a really fun way to spend 10-20 mins).

By Casey Weldon

LAST THIS WEEK, THIS IS A SUPER-CHILLED AMBIENTY SORT OF LOUNGE JOB BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED GEOFFREY LARUE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

It’s Just A Question of Style: Just the one Tumblr this week, but it’s a good one; old cars, classic 50s and 60s designs, a proper retro-vehicular timewarp.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

Playtronica: Thanks Rina for pointing me at this, the Insta feed of sound/art collective-type people Playtronica – an excellent selection of musical toys and experiments with, aside from anything else, a really nicely-defined aesthetic to their posts (aesthetic consistency and theme development like this in Insta is underappreciated imho).
Virtual Superland: The coolest use of greenscreen you’ll ever see. I really, really want to mess around with this stuff.
Puzzle Pastime: One woman and her puzzles. There is nothing – NOTHING – purer than puzzle Instagram.
Bauzeitgeist: Subtitled ‘All The Buildings of the World’, the feed’s owner is seemingly in Mozambique; this is a wide-ranging and hugely varied eye on the world’s architecture.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle-Classes: This is a great article, although I might broaden the title to instead read ‘destroyed everything’ (love me some hyperbole); this is a superb piece of analysis of how the ideas, themes and tropes common to the management consultant have, though their promotion to the very top of the Church of Business (McKinzie’s, Accenture, these lads, they’re High Priests of Commerce, gutting your bloated corporate carcass and worrying through the viscera to find the One True Path of Mammon), somehow ended up infecting every aspect of our culture, particularly politically. As we saw this week another Management Consultancy alumnus take a step closer to taking a step closer to the White House (a man whose tilt at the Presidency I dismissed outright in 2018, demonstrating once again my unerring ability to back a winner), this feels timely – I honestly think we don’t pay enough attention to the impact of specific, idiotic elements of business orthodoxy on wider society.
The 2020 Disinformation War: Another piece in the Atlantic, this time looking at Trump’s Facebook campaigning in advance of the elections this year and taking a more general ‘state of the digital truth/politics waltz’ look at where we’ve gotten to since the last US election and the subsequent Cambridge Analytica furore. I found this piece interesting-but-frustrating; it gives a mouthpiece again to Chris Wylie, who’s never had anything interesting to say about any of this that doesn’t involve…Chris Wylie, and, to my mind at least, doesn’t make enough of the fact that the main scary thing here, based on all the available information, is less microtargeting and more the fact that Trump is legitimately entitled to spend $1billion promoting actual lies to people on Facebook. Personally speaking I’m nowhere near as uncomfortable with microtargeting as I am with the ability for someone to tell untruths for personal political gain without sanction, but maybe I’m odd.
Crazy Government Twitter: A look at how, in the US at least, several Government Departments have decided to take a leaf out of the book of every single fcuking fast food chain in the Western World and adopt ‘world weary millennial fear and angst’ as a tone of voice in 2020. The article suggests that this is a ‘strategic’ move as it gets them occasional big-number RTs and amplifies their existence to a far wider audience, thereby raising base awareness of their role and necessity; I’d argue that the National Body for Water Conservation getting 32k RTs on a Tweet calling the spray from a burst fire hydrant ‘a real chonky boi’ demonstrates nothing more than their ability to blend into the background and become part of the ambient noise of latterday capitalism, but then again I fcuking hate social media.
The World of Vaping: A brilliant piece of reporting by California on Sunday, investigating the murky world of vaping to try and see what effect the past 6 months health scares have had on it as an industry. This is great, and takes in all sorts – your Juuls, the very iffy trade in semi-regulated cannabis oils for weed vaping, the fact that this is yet another example of something being invented and aggressively marketed waaaaay before anyone had worked out whether it might have one or two negative externalities…so, so good, and so interesting – and, actually, reasonably reassuring on the subject of the side-effects of vaping, unless you’re getting through a whole bunch of dodgy under-the-counter THC-infused vaping oils a week, in which case rip your lungs mate.
The Rise of Smart Camera Networks: Given the fact that those of us in London can enjoy an almost-constant close up from the hundreds of CCTV cams we’re blessed with, and given that those will shortly be able to track who we are and where we are and who we’re with and what we’re doing, it’s not a bad time to look back at the history of smart cameras and facial recognition; this article traces the development and implementation of these and adjacent technologies, and offers some thoughts on likely developments over the next few years. If you think that data is a complex and occasionally-iffy issue here in 2020, read this and take a moment to imagine the dazzling, dizzying implications of a world in which everything that happens anywhere is filmed and analysable at scale by massive networks, cross-referencing and tracking and listening and thinking. Either scary or inspirational, depending on how much of a witless Polyanna you are.
Ethics in the Valley: I seem to recall mentioning the likely rise of the ethicist as an actual serious role in Silicon Valley at points last year; this article’s the first serious exploration of how that’s working out that I’ve read. In short, so-so; it’s clear that there’s a pretty fundamental tension here that a lot of these ethicists are butting up against; to whit that VC DOESN’T FCUKING CARE ABOUT ETHICS. I mean, look, it’s all well and good saying that you want to take reasoned and thought-through decisions about the way in which you use and implement tech, but, equally, YOU NEED TO DELIVER 10X GROWTH BY Q32020 OR YOU’RE A DEAD UNICORN! Which, do you think, is going to get sacrificed? The ethicist or the growth hacker? HMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Messing With The Algo: One of those occasional stories that make you think that maybe the kids are alright after all; this piece explains how kids are sharing Insta logins so as to confuse the algorithm, flooding it with wildly divergent and conflicting signals to render its user(s) unknowable. Lovely, brilliant, and there’s an art project in this just waiting to be discovered.
MSCHF: I think I’ve mentioned these people three times so far in Curios in 2020; seems fitting then to feature this profile of HOTTEST COLLECTIVE IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW MSCHF, based in New York and churning out random, seemingly-unrelated webarttoyexperimentthings every fortnight to the general bafflement and delight of the wider world of the Extremely Online. This is quite the story; they don’t make anything tangible, they don’t make any money, and yet there are people throwing money at them. SO IT FCUKING GOES. Go on, read this and then try and explain it to your parents next time you speak with them.
Tiktok and Bongo: It is a truth universally-acknowledged that any social media platform will eventually develop a bongo-related subculture; so it is with TikTok, which whilst technically banning nudity and sexual content, has nonetheless managed to establish a thriving community of thirst-trap ‘creators’; this content gets ripped and posted to appreciative subReddits for a community of creepy masturbators to ‘enjoy’, whilst one imagines that, per Insta and the rest there’s a thriving backchannel economy of nudes, etc, going on. Which is fine – no interest in judging sex workers, etc – but at the same time I do find there’s something a bit…icky about this in the context of TikTok, a platform which not only is all about performance but which is already having a significant effect on the manner in which kids conceive of and present themselves. Oh, and there’s a line in here which is perfect in its poignancy: “After years of Instagram’s emphasis on staged polish, Gen Z is demanding unfiltered authenticity — no stage lights, no airbrushing and no expensive cameras. They want content that mirrors their own lives, spent largely on an iPhone in their bedrooms. Is it any surprise, then, that they want the same from their porn?” That…that is not a happy sentence.
An Oral History of Prince’s Halftime Superbowl Show: Regardless of whether or not you give any sort of a fcuk about the Superb Owl, this piece is a delight – basically ANY piece about Prince is a delight, as he seemingly really was as much of a magical, odd little eccentric genius as he was always painted and mythologised. Honestly, the section in which he previews his proposed set to the rest of the band whilst gliding around his house on custom fcuking light-up Heelies is worth the click alone.
WeWork is a Scam: I know, I know, you don’t need to read another piece about WeWork, that’s SO 2019! And whilst this won’t tell you anything you don’t know about that company’s demise, what it does do very well is explain exactly how damaging this sort of business is to so many people; the impact on workers far, far down the employment food chain of the collapse of a business like WeWork is significant, and often overlooked in these pieces; read this and then think about what happens when all the mattress companies die and the delivery businesses fold and all the associated jobs that potentially go with them.
The Edison of Slot Machines: Oh I love stories like this! Tommy Glenn Carmichael was for years the man who struck fear into the heart of slot machine developers, inventor of several devices which for a decade or so contributed to massive theft from the slots via ingenious mechanical manipulation. Carmichael was obviously a mechanical genius, and the kicker at the end of this story suggests that there might be not insignificant benefit to continuing his studies should you fancy a bit of massive fraud.
The Inside Story of ‘Wild Wild West’: I don’t think I ever saw this steampunk/Western Will Smith vehicle that this piece refers to, but I’m certainly aware of it because of that fcuking song and my girlfriend’s charming ability to rap it. I might have to see if i can find it online somewhere, though, as based on this article about the history of its making it sounds WILD. Kenneth Branagh? MECHANICAL SPIDERS?! So many killer lines in here, like this insouciant beauty: “One of Maddock and Wilson’s story ideas was that there should be that aforementioned giant mechanical spider at the end of the film. Peters’ office rejected it, however, suggesting a stealth bomber instead. The writers thought that this was inconceivable for 1868, and a 100-foot-long armor-plated “flying machine” with gun turrets was the compromise.”
Stormzy: A superb profile of Man of the Year Stormzy in GQ, by Gary Younge. Pleasingly unhagiographic, Younge’s always an excellent writer and Stormzy comes across as he always does, smart and ambitious and like this year and next might be his too.
A Partial List of Rome: This is quite simply an account of the author’s eatings over the course of a visit to Rome, but if you know the city or love the food or, ideally, both, then this will be the best and tastiest thing you read all day, and will leave you salivating. Oh, and if you’re planning a trip there are some superb recommendations buried in here too. I love this and I can practically taste it.
Comedy Written for the Machines: On TikTok virality and its pursuit, and the weirdness of people performing tricks to satisfy an unknowable desire and an unknowable algorithm. When you read the piece and stop to think of what it’s effectively saying – that there’s a whole load of people whose current primary motivation in life is to make a video that will get seen by loads of people but it is literally impossible for them to know how to make that happen consistently and so they try and try and try and try in the dark, making small variations on infinite themes in pursuit of the virality-chimera – then, well, it’s quite mad, isn’t it? “Maybe that’s why millions of internet users keep watching, sometimes, and other times do not. Or maybe none of that is right. Maybe there is some other arbitrary system governing us all. Maybe the story of Angelmamii7 is not one woman and her family trying to hit the jackpot by doing what even they do not understand but a whole culture responding to incentives we can’t articulate but are being trained to follow, moment to moment, by a dopamine-drip system we carry in our pockets.”
Kidzania: A year ago I had to visit Kidzania because my girlfriend was working on something there – it is a DEEPLY surreal place, but the most surreal thing was when I was walking past one of the empty units and the staff member I was with told me that it was going to be filled later that year…by Nike! I don’t know about you, but the idea of a company known in part for its use of child labour setting up shop in a theme park designed to teach kids about the glory of capitalist endeavour is…well…a bit iffy. This essay in Granta perfectly captures the oddity of Kidzania and the weirdness of training kids to festishize work, and in so doing makes some pointed parallels to the way in which access to opportunities are curtailed in society depending on social status, race, etc.
100 Ways To Live Better: I could not give less of a fcuk about improving my life, and as such I generally hate anything designed to motivate me to make changes for the better – LOOK SOMETHING HAS TO KILL ME SO WHY SHOULDN’T IT BE CANCER AND CIRRHOSIS FFS? – but this list of 100 ways in which to live marginally better made me laugh a lot, and so I present them here for anyone less fundamentally-nihilistic than me to benefit from. I would strongly advise you against #93, though, unless they have VERY understanding parents (or unless you *are* their parents).
Normal Novels: I never ordinarily include things I don’t like in the longreads, but I’ll make an exception for this – it’s a review of Sally Rooney’s writing, and it made me SO ANGRY, so I want to share it with you so you can tell me if that’s fair. The author is obviously smart, and writes well, but the criticisms she levels at Rooney, her style, her characters and, frankly, herself seem born out of a weird…jealousy? It’s hard to pinpoint. Katie Moffat, with who I discussed this, pointed out that she’s an academic and this is obviously part of her dissertation and perhaps she’s just gotten lost in the forests of academe, but this was just such an odd read. Given the fact that everyone in the world has now read Rooney’s novels and seemingly adored them, I would love to know what you think of this.
A Scandal in Bohemia: Last up this week, a WHOLE SHERLOCK HOLMES! All in lovely multimedia fancy presentational style, by the kind folk at Texas-based digital design studio Paravel. Thanks, Paravel!